So What Are We Going To Do About It?

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Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer sounds a painfully loud alarm some don’t seem to hear:

. . . It sounded more like a plot twist from a really bad self-published political thriller than real life: A 38-page plan for President T____ to declare a “National Security Emergency” and seize ballots as part of a wider effort around Jan. 6 to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as [his] successor.

According to one slide from the presentation that T____’s top aide, then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, viewed and later turned over to congressional investigators, the president would endorse a bat guano-crazy conspiracy about Chinese interference in the 2020 presidential election as a pretext to declare all electronic votes invalid.

It’s the kind of transparently fake and utterly corrupt coup that you’d only expect to see in the type of less-developed country we used to call a banana republic. But as the Washington Post and other outlets reported this week, the wackadoodle plan for T____ to stay in office after losing an election, thus ending American democracy, was circulated on Capitol Hill just two days before 147 Republicans indeed voted against certifying Biden’s wins in key states.

I know, it seems kind of funny — this nerdy tech tool that Bill Gates and his Microsoft monolith acquired to propel regional sales meetings in Duluth instead being used in the plot to end the American Experiment after 245 years. But the quickening flow of leaks and new discoveries from the House committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection is no laughing matter.

Even though it should have been obvious in real time — an angry mob, urged by T____ himself first to come to Washington on Jan. 6 and then to march on the U.S. Capitol, where there was a violent clash with police, injuring some 150 officers and killing five, thus disrupting Congress and the certification of Biden’s victory for hours — the new disclosures have brought into sharper focus what the president’s men knew and when they knew it. Jan. 6 was a far greater threat to American democracy than Watergate, or anything else that’s happened since the first shots at Fort Sumter. Now, the questions are becoming less about what we know, and more about … what are we going to do about this?

Last week saw a cluster of news stories — some coming from the slowly forward-moving House select committee — that continue to confirm greater White House involvement in Jan. 6 planning. This clearer picture also shows an escalating, increasingly desperate T____-led effort to block the fair and legitimate counting of the 2020 votes, from the courts to the corridors of Congress to, finally, the bloody barricades.

For example, a report that two of the Jan. 6 event organizers met privately with T____ in a White House dining room just two days before the insurrection should cement the idea that the events leading up to the fateful day were closely coordinated with the president and his inner circle — a point that was arguably already driven home by recent confirmation of a Jan. 6 “war room” run by close T____ associates at the Willard Hotel.

But other new what-the-heck disclosures about the events leading up to Jan. 6 are a reminder that there are still things we don’t know or fully understand. . . . 

The sum impact of these disclosures should pressure the House committee to both speed up the pace of its methodical investigation and also to hold more public hearings — the arena where the average voter is more likely to watch and understand the threat to the peaceful transfer of power that was posed on Jan. 6. In a perfect world, both the new bombshell revelations and high-profile hearings in the mode of 1973′s Watergate Summer would light a match under the Justice Department and deer-in-the-headlights Attorney General Merrick Garland.

High-stakes public hearings might also shake the Beltway inertia that the threat to democracy posed by the insurrection should take a backseat to other matters having more impact on voters’ day-to-day lives, including the never-ending pandemic and the economic aftershocks, good and bad. Many in the elite Washington media seem to have adopted the mantra that it’s time to move on from Jan. 6, especially since any coup ambitions were seemingly thwarted with President Biden’s inauguration. Some tried to tamp down the disclosure of the coup-plotting PowerPoint circulating among T____’s highest aides and congressional allies, arguing that the existence of the document isn’t “a hair-on-fire moment” for the American system.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that the originator of the PowerPoint plan appears to be a Texas-based retired Army colonel (who, interestingly, specialized in psyops) named Phil Waldron, who’d managed to first get his ideas and then himself woven into T____’s inner circle, including a close relationship with the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. . . . He told the Post he visited the White House multiple times in the days after the November 2020 election, met personally with Meadows and was part of those critical pre-Jan. 6 briefings on Capitol Hill. Waldron also said he met personally with T____ and “several Pennsylvania legislators” in the Oval Office last Nov. 25 . . . 

As crazy as Waldron’s claims of Chinese-led election tampering or his remedies of seizing paper ballots under a “national security emergency” might sound, it’s important to understand how close this plot came to succeeding. If days of hounding and pressuring then-Vice President Mike Pence to go along with the plan had worked, or if the subsequent violence had created a pathway for T____ to send in Army troops to seize control of the Capitol before Biden’s certification, America would have been plunged into . . . chaos.

The unsavory cast of characters that Team T____ was dealing with prior to Jan. 6 were the political equivalent of walking into a mobbed-up bar and trying to hire a hitman — to whack U.S. democracy. Hiring a hitman is considered a felony, even when no one is ultimately killed, and so is a plot to overthrow the American government, even if it fell short. It’s past time for Congress, Garland, the media and other key players to see this.

But there’s an even more important reason for the Jan. 6 disclosures to be seen and understood as the most important story in America right now: Bolstered by the lack of consequences so far for T____ and his inner circle, the coup attempt is ongoing. As the unpunished leader of a Republican Party that this antidemocracy ex-president has now spent six years bending to his will, T____ is currently leading an effort to change laws and remove any balky GOP officials who thwarted him in 2020 — to make sure he will be declared the winner in 2024, regardless of the reality-based vote count.

The New York Times reported this weekend that many believers in T____’s stolen-election conspiracy theories or even people who traveled to Washington on Jan. 6 are winning or the early favorites for a number of key vote-counting positions for 2022 and 2024, from the new judge of elections in the small town of Mt. Joy, Pa., to the powerful secretaries of state in the battlegrounds that cost T____ the presidency last year.

“This is a five-alarm fire,” Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, told the Times, adding: “If people in general, leaders and citizens, aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in ‘24.”

Unfortunately, not enough people are acting accordingly. Any student of the last century of world history knows the seriousness of underestimating the rise of authoritarianism in far-flung precincts, that while the media is obsessing on the petty squabbles among, say, the Social Democrats, or the delusions of a decrepit ruling class, a madman who failed but learned from one aborted putsch is busy perfecting the second assault.

The only thing wrong with describing the PowerPoint for an all-American coup as a “hair-on-fire moment” is that the term is way too small to describe the existential threat that’s smoldering, unextinguished, in the rotting foundation of the United States and its increasingly haywire experiment. It’s been said before, but whatever you would have done in 1933 Germany or 1963 Alabama is what you are doing in 2021 America. We can speed up the hearings, put the biggest story on the front page, and arrest the coup plotters, or we can let the fire burn. The choice is ours.

Good News, Yes, Good News

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There might be good news coming from Washington. The obvious good news should be the passage of the Build Back Better Act in some form or other. Last month, Reuters used seven categories to summarize what’s in the bill (the details of which are all subject to change):

  1. Climate
  2. Education
  3. Family Benefits
  4. Healthcare
  5. Housing
  6. Immigration
  7. Taxes
  8. Other

Its passage after months of negotiation between the best and worst Democrats in Congress will be a very good thing (Republicans are opposed to progress and fairness so will all vote against it).

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are working on changes to the filibuster. That would allow them to pass some kind of voting rights legislation over the usual Republican opposition. From Politico:

The latest attempt is taking place among a group of Senate Democrats who have gone back to the drawing board. Rather than the draconian step of tossing out the filibuster, they’re debating other possible rule changes to the chamber that could pave the way for election reform bills that are viewed by Democrats as paramount to combatting restrictive new voting laws and preserving democracy.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who is a member of the group drafting the reforms, said it would be “premature” to share specifics of the possible rule changes at this stage because “there’s no handshake deal yet.” But he did express a level of cautious optimism, stressing that abolishing the filibuster, which requires 60 Senate votes to advance legislation, is not under consideration this time.

“We’re not going to abolish the filibuster. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has made [it] very plain we’re not abolishing the filibuster,” Kaine said in an interview. “We’re looking at a number of complaints that Democrats and Republicans have had about the way the place operates to see if we can restore it to operating better and do it in a way that would facilitate passage of voting rights.”

Kaine said the group is “analyzing potential rule reforms” by “putting the shoe on the other foot” and asking “If we’re in the minority, how would we feel about this? Can we live under this? Would this make the Senate work better for either party under a president of either party?”

The latest conversations come after four failed attempts by Democrats to pass voting or election reform bills in the Senate due to a [Republican] blockade. The hope within the party is that once President Joe Biden’s social spending plan is passed, they can prioritize voting rights and present a pathway to get it through the Senate. . . . 

The effort is expected to come to a head as early as January, according to multiple senators involved. . . . 

Ideas being floated . . . include changes to the amendment process and how the Senate debates legislation and nominations. . . . Other options raised by Democrats — and Manchin himself — include a standing filibuster which would require senators to continue debating on the floor rather than needing 60 votes to end debate on a bill. . . . 

Biden has urged Congress to pass legislation that expands ballot access, ends partisan gerrymandering and would restore the pre-clearance authority of the 1965 Voting Rights Act gutted by the Supreme Court. . . . Biden has characterized the moment as an inflection point that poses the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War”, as civil rights advocates press the administration to match the president’s rhetoric with urgent action . . .

For months, Democrats have repeatedly run into a brick wall as every GOP senator but one has refused to offer votes for even a restoration of key sections of the Voting Rights Act, a reform Democrats see as a modest step. Republicans have voted for such reauthorizations in the past but their opposition has led an increasing number of Democrats to either endorse a carveout to the filibuster, if not an outright elimination. . .

But Democrats will need buy-in from Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — who both oppose nixing the legislative filibuster — if they want to change the chambers’ rules. . . .

Tester said Tuesday that he thinks Manchin and Sinema are “absolutely” open to some of the changes being considered. . . .

Unquote.

On another front, the five most reactionary Republicans on the Supreme Court decided it’s fine to let states ignore the Supreme Court and the Constitution. This is how Chief Justice Roberts, the least reactionary Republican, described the majority’s ruling on Texas’s anti-abortion bounty hunter law:

The clear purpose and actual effect of [the Texas law] has been to nullify this Court’s rulings. It is, however, a basic principle that the Constitution is the “fundamental and paramount law of the nation,” and “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison (1803). Indeed, “[i]f the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.” United States v. Peters (1809). The nature of the federal right infringed does not matter; it is the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system that is at stake.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote:

The Court should have put an end to this madness months ago, before [the law] first went into effect. It failed to do so then, and it fails again today. . . . The Court thus betrays not only the citizens of Texas, but also our constitutional system of government.

Given that a Supreme Court majority has gone renegade, reform is clearly necessary. A former federal judge and a law professor published a column in The Washington Post explaining why they now favor a major change:

We now believe that Congress must expand the size of the Supreme Court and do so as soon as possible. We did not come to this conclusion lightly. . . . We started out leaning toward term limits for Supreme Court justices but against court expansion and ended up doubtful about term limits but in favor of expanding the size of the court. . . . 

Sadly, we no longer have [confidence in the Court], given three things: first, the dubious legitimacy of the way some justices were appointed; second, what Justice Sonia Sotomayor rightly called the “stench” of politics hovering over this court’s deliberations about the most contentious issues; and third, the anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian direction of this court’s decisions about matters such as voting rights, gerrymandering and the corrupting effects of dark money.

Those judicial decisions haven’t been just wrong; they put the court — and, more important, our entire system of government — on a one-way trip from a defective but still hopeful democracy toward a system in which the few corruptly govern the many, something between autocracy and oligarchy. Instead of serving as a guardrail against going over that cliff, our Supreme Court has become an all-too-willing accomplice in that disaster . . . [We cannot look] other way when the court seeks to undo decades of precedent relied on by half the population to shape their lives just because, given the new majority, it has the votes.

Unquote.

Republicans go too far when they have power. Their overreach invites a Democratic response. Perhaps they’ve done it this time as well. I sure hope so.

Making the Republican Agenda Public

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America’s political journalism needs an intervention. Dan Froomkin, formerly an editor for the Washington Post, has a site called Press Watch: An Intervention for political journalism. His latest:

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has decided that the best way for Republicans to win back Congress in the 2022 midterms is to not tell voters what they stand for.

He has made no secret of his plan to make the elections a referendum on President Biden and the Democrats — and not to complicate things with anything remotely like a Republican legislative agenda.

It’s a brilliant strategy, if he can get away with it. And so far, all the signs are good. Pretty much every prognosticator inside the Beltway is predicting significant GOP advances, certainly enough to take back the House, if not the Senate.

But I’m old-fashioned. I think voters should know what they’re voting for, not just what they’re voting against. And if Republicans themselves won’t tell the voters about their agenda, then it’s incumbent on political journalists to do it for them.

THREE SCENARIOS

First we have to ask: Is there a Republican agenda — and they just don’t want voters to know what it is? Or is there really no agenda at all? And where does Donald Trump fit into all of this?

Scenario 1: The Republican Party really has no agenda. It’s a post-policy party. Or maybe it’s not really a political party at all, it’s just a rage cult. Supporting that theory is the absence of any attempt to solve any actual problem for several years running now. The party’s MO has been pure obstruction. Its role: agents of chaos. It has no goal but to stay in power. If this is true, it is probably worth making that clear to the voters.

Scenario 2:  The only operative Republican agenda is whatever T____ says it is, whenever he says it, although that might change at any point. For now, the one and only agenda item is the Big Lie: refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election, making baseless accusations of fraud, purging anyone who doesn’t agree, and making sure it doesn’t happen again. If this is true, it is probably worth making that clear to the voters.

Scenario 3: Of course the Republican Party has an agenda! It is largely the same agenda it has had for decades, just a bit more extremist, considerably less keen on free trade,  and way less tethered to reality. The agenda’s goal is simple: to serve the party’s rich and corporate patrons. McConnell, the nearly-human embodiment of the party, has no principles other than raising enough money from those patrons to seize and maintain power, so keeping them happy is his top priority bar none. The problem here is that a pro-corporate, pro-billionaire agenda does not poll well with actual voters. This is the flip side of how Biden’s agenda is polling well but Biden himself is not. So the last thing Republicans want to do is advertise their agenda. Nevertheless, if this is true, it is probably worth making that clear to the voters.

ALL OF THE ABOVE?

All three of these scenarios have some truth to them.

All of them, I think it is reasonable for journalists to state with confidence, would lead to continued obstruction of any significant legislative attempt to address the existential threats facing the country. Any way you cut it, the Republican agenda is essentially a surrender to climate change, income inequality, and disparate access to healthcare.

And these agenda items probably don’t begin to encompass all the possible outcomes of a Republican takeover of the three branches. Without restraints, one can easily imagine they would embrace an even more nationalist, authoritarian, aggressively Christian and misogynistic agenda. These attempt to fill in the blanks left by Mitch McConnell are based on things we’ve already seen, or things they’ve already said.

In Scenario 1, although there is no agenda per se, one could reasonably assume that the party would put a great deal of effort into undermining pluralism in an effort to stoke and stroke White Christian grievance. For instance, by:

  • demonizing immigrants
  • reducing immigration
  • engaging in cruelty at the border
  • encouraging Islamophobia
  • institutionalizing evangelical Christian values
  • restricting reproductive rights
  • turning schools into conservative indoctrination centers
  • prosecuting teachers who resist

The political discourse would inevitably become even more degraded, political violence would become normalized; there would essentially no longer be any red line beyond which violent, inciteful and racist rhetoric is considered disqualifying from public life. Instead of legislating, the courts – increasingly dominated by right-wing extremists – would expand or rescind constitutional rights as needed.

In Scenario 2, since it seems unlikely that T____ will ever let go of the Big Lie, a top priority will likely be ensuring that Republicans remain in power even if that requires permanent minority rule. That means

  • more extreme gerrymandering
  • discriminatory limits on ballot access
  • voter intimidation
  • overturning election results that don’t’ go their way, either by having loyalist Republicans in place to do so, or through violence

Other things to expect:

  • military parades
  • government dysfunctionality
  • self-dealing
  • transactional and mercurial foreign policy
  • loyalty oaths required from political appointees and government workers
  • violent crackdown on antigovernment protests
  • militarization of police
  • politicization of law enforcement

Scenario 3, the “secret” agenda, can be reasonably extrapolated from historical observation. It would most assuredly involve:

  • lower taxes, especially on corporations and the rich
  • steep reductions in social safety-net programs, especially Social Security
  • ending Obamacare
  • significant deregulation, including the rolling back of key environmental and workplace protections
  • increased fossil fuel extraction
  • weaker gun laws

The debate that’s currently raging about whether corporate media coverage of Biden is overly negative takes on even greater significance when you consider how the entire Republican strategy in the coming years will be to throw brickbats at him from behind a tree.

Biden’s shortcomings are certainly newsworthy. But paying a little more attention to who’s behind the tree, and what their intentions really are, is essential journalism.

Voting Republican, in this day and age, is not a simple protest vote. It’s a vote that carries unprecedented consequences. Political reporters should be telling voters about those consequences, and then asking if that’s what they really want.

Neuroscientific Mind Reading Is Becoming Surprisingly Easy

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Unrelated to the Republican Party’s attack on democracy (it truly is a crisis), the New Yorker has a somewhat unbelievable article about the progress being made using machines and artificial intelligence to read people’s minds. Some excerpts:

During the past few decades, the state of neuroscientific mind reading has advanced substantially. Cognitive psychologists armed with an Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine can tell whether a person is having depressive thoughts; they can see which concepts a student has mastered by comparing his brain patterns with those of his teacher. By analyzing brain scans, a computer system can edit together crude reconstructions of movie clips you’ve watched. One research group has used similar technology to accurately describe the dreams of sleeping subjects. In another lab, scientists have scanned the brains of people who are reading the J. D. Salinger short story “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” in which it is unclear until the end whether or not a character is having an affair. From brain scans alone, the researchers can tell which interpretation readers are leaning toward, and watch as they change their minds.

fMRI machines [haven’t] advanced that much; instead, artificial intelligence had transformed how scientists read neural data. 

[Ken Norman of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute explains that] researchers . . . developed a mathematical way of understanding thoughts. Drawing on insights from machine learning, they conceived of thoughts as collections of points in a dense “meaning space.” They could see how these points were interrelated and encoded by neurons. By cracking the code, they were beginning to produce an inventory of the mind. “The space of possible thoughts that people can think is big—but it’s not infinitely big,” Norman said. A detailed map of the concepts in our minds might soon be within reach.

Norman invited me to watch an experiment in thought decoding. [In] a locked basement lab at P.N.I., a young woman was lying in the tube of an fMRI scanner. A screen mounted a few inches above her face played a slide show of stock images: an empty beach, a cave, a forest.

“We want to get the brain patterns that are associated with different subclasses of scenes,” Norman said.

As the woman watched the slide show, the scanner tracked patterns of activation among her neurons. These patterns would be analyzed in terms of “voxels”—areas of activation that are roughly a cubic millimetre in size. In some ways, the fMRI data was extremely coarse: each voxel represented the oxygen consumption of about a million neurons, and could be updated only every few seconds, significantly more slowly than neurons fire. But, Norman said, “it turned out that that information was in the data we were collecting—we just weren’t being as smart as we possibly could about how we’d churn through that data.” The breakthrough came when researchers figured out how to track patterns playing out across tens of thousands of voxels at a time, as though each were a key on a piano, and thoughts were chords.

The origins of this approach, I learned, dated back nearly seventy years, to the work of a psychologist named Charles Osgood. When he was a kid, Osgood received a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus as a gift. Poring over the book, Osgood recalled, he formed a “vivid image of words as clusters of starlike points in an immense space.” In his postgraduate days, when his colleagues were debating how cognition could be shaped by culture, Osgood thought back on this image. He wondered if, using the idea of “semantic space,” it might be possible to map the differences among various styles of thinking.

Osgood became known not for the results of his surveys but for the method he invented to analyze them. He began by arranging his data in an imaginary space with fifty dimensions—one for fair-unfair, a second for hot-cold, a third for fragrant-foul, and so on. Any given concept, like tornado, had a rating on each dimension—and, therefore, was situated in what was known as high-dimensional space. Many concepts had similar locations on multiple axes: kind-cruel and honest-dishonest, for instance. Osgood combined these dimensions. Then he looked for new similarities, and combined dimensions again, in a process called “factor analysis.”

When you reduce a sauce, you meld and deepen the essential flavors. Osgood did something similar with factor analysis. Eventually, he was able to map all the concepts onto a space with just three dimensions. The first dimension was “evaluative”—a blend of scales like good-bad, beautiful-ugly, and kind-cruel. The second had to do with “potency”: it consolidated scales like large-small and strong-weak. The third measured how “active” or “passive” a concept was. Osgood could use these three key factors to locate any concept in an abstract space. Ideas with similar coördinates, he argued, were neighbors in meaning.

[Researchers at Bell Labs] used computers to analyze the words in about two thousand technical reports. The reports themselves—on topics ranging from graph theory to user-interface design—suggested the dimensions of the space; when multiple reports used similar groups of words, their dimensions could be combined. In the end, the Bell Labs researchers made a space that was more complex than Osgood’s. It had a few hundred dimensions. Many of these dimensions described abstract or “latent” qualities that the words had in common—connections that wouldn’t be apparent to most English speakers. The researchers called their technique “latent semantic analysis,” or L.S.A.

In the following years, scientists applied L.S.A. to ever-larger data sets. In 2013, researchers at Google unleashed a descendant of it onto the text of the whole World Wide Web. Google’s algorithm turned each word into a “vector,” or point, in high-dimensional space. The vectors generated by the researchers’ program, word2vec, are eerily accurate: if you take the vector for “king” and subtract the vector for “man,” then add the vector for “woman,” the closest nearby vector is “queen.” Word vectors became the basis of a much improved Google Translate, and enabled the auto-completion of sentences in Gmail.

Other companies, including Apple and Amazon, built similar systems. Eventually, researchers realized that the “vectorization” made popular by L.S.A. and word2vec could be used to map all sorts of things. Today’s facial-recognition systems have dimensions that represent the length of the nose and the curl of the lips, and faces are described using a string of coördinates in “face space.” Chess A.I.s use a similar trick to “vectorize” positions on the board. The technique has become so central to the field of artificial intelligence that, in 2017, a new, hundred-and-thirty-five-million-dollar A.I. research center in Toronto was named the Vector Institute. Matthew Botvinick, a professor at Princeton whose lab was across the hall from Norman’s, and who is now the head of neuroscience at DeepMind, Alphabet’s A.I. subsidiary, told me that distilling relevant similarities and differences into vectors was “the secret sauce underlying all of these A.I. Advances”. . . .

In 2001, a scientist named Jim Haxby brought machine learning to brain imaging: he realized that voxels of neural activity could serve as dimensions in a kind of thought space. Haxby went on to work at Princeton, where he collaborated with Norman. The two scientists, together with other researchers, concluded that just a few hundred dimensions were sufficient to capture the shades of similarity and difference in most fMRI data. At the Princeton lab, the young woman watched the slide show in the scanner. With each new image—beach, cave, forest—her neurons fired in a new pattern. These patterns would be recorded as voxels, then processed by software and transformed into vectors. The images had been chosen because their vectors would end up far apart from one another: they were good landmarks for making a map. Watching the images, my mind was taking a trip through thought space, too.

The larger goal of thought decoding is to understand how our brains mirror the world. To this end, researchers have sought to watch as the same experiences affect many people’s minds simultaneously. Norman told me that his Princeton colleague Uri Hasson has found movies especially useful in this regard. They “pull people’s brains through thought space in synch,” Norman said. “What makes Alfred Hitchcock the master of suspense is that all the people who are watching the movie are having their brains yanked in unison. It’s like mind control in the literal sense”. . . .

Norman described another study, by Asieh Zadbood, in which subjects were asked to narrate “Sherlock” scenes—which they had watched earlier—aloud. The audio was played to a second group, who’d never seen the show. It turned out that no matter whether someone watched a scene, described it, or heard about it, the same voxel patterns recurred. The scenes existed independently of the show, as concepts in people’s minds. . . .

Recently, I asked [neuroscientist David Owen] what the new thought-decoding technology means for locked-in patients [who are alive but unable to move or even blink]. [A “bare-bones protocol” is used: for example, the patient is asked to think about tennis, and when the patient does so, it means “yes”, while thinking about walking around the house equals “no”. Then the patient can answer yes-no questions like “Is the pain in the lower half of your body? On the left side?”] Owen said “I have no doubt that, some point down the line, we will be able to read minds. People will be able to articulate, ‘My name is Adrian, and I’m British,’ and we’ll be able to decode that from their brain. I don’t think it’s going to happen in probably less than twenty years.”

In some ways, the story of thought decoding is reminiscent of the history of our understanding of the gene. For about a hundred years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” in 1859, the gene was an abstraction, understood only as something through which traits passed from parent to child. As late as the nineteen-fifties, biologists were still asking what, exactly, a gene was made of. When James Watson and Francis Crick finally found the double helix, in 1953, it became clear how genes took physical form. Fifty years later, we could sequence the human genome; today, we can edit it.

Thoughts have been an abstraction for far longer. But now we know what they really are: patterns of neural activation that correspond to points in meaning space. The mind—the only truly private place—has become inspectable from the outside.

Unquote.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others, argued strenuously that the mind isn’t private at all. We’re all very good at understanding what other people are thinking and talking about. But he’d be amazed at what neuroscientists are able to do.

Three Voices on the Current Crisis

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First, Greg Sargent of The Washington Post summarizes the danger we face. Then, what President Biden could be doing about it. Finally, a look at America from an outsider’s perspective:

Right now, much of the [Republican Party] has decided that an effort by its own leader, D____ T____, to overthrow U.S. democracy through corrupt pressure on many government actors, and then through mob violence, doesn’t require a national response.

Many Republicans are vying for positions of control over our election machinery for the all-but-openly declared purpose of subverting future losses. Republicans calling on the GOP to stand down from this madness, and who resisted the last coup effort, face primaries and censure.

And Republicans are entrenching voter suppression everywhere. They are justifying all this by feeding GOP voters lies about the integrity of our election system, inviting them to tell themselves antidemocratic tactics — or even subverting election losses — are their appropriate recourse.

We could be protecting the system from these threats. But we are not.

Next, Brett Edkins of Talking Points Memo on what President Biden needs to do:

If President Biden wants to lead on strengthening democracies around the world, and restore America’s credibility and soft power globally, he must do more to get our house in order. He can begin by leveraging his 36 years of Senate experience and the enormous influence he wields as the President of the United States to push for change here at home and deliver on his campaign promise to “defend democracy” and “guarantee that every American’s vote is protected.” 

President Biden must publicly call on the Senate to end the outdated filibuster that has allowed Senate Republicans to block legislation that the vast majority of Americans support—from establishing an independent January 6th Commission to passing critical voting rights legislation. The White House teased that the President would soon outline his stance on “fundamentally altering” the filibuster, but the issue has taken a backseat to other legislative pursuits. This is a missed opportunity.

The President of the United States has the largest soapbox on the planet, and President Biden has unique credibility to push recalcitrant Senate Democrats to reform the filibuster and restore the Senate to a genuinely deliberative body capable of passing legislation by majority vote (though it goes without saying, there are a couple of Democrats in particular who are hamstringing not just filibuster-nixing efforts but also much of his legislative agenda, too). Then, Senate Democrats would be able to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the D.C. Statehood Act to ensure that every eligible citizen can access the ballot box. 

President Biden should also rally Congress behind the Protecting Our Democracy Act (PODA), which includes provisions that have garnered bipartisan support in the past. This legislation would restore our constitutional checks and balances to ensure that no future president, regardless of party, is able to undermine our democracy by abusing the power of their office. PODA is expected to clear the House of Representatives this week, but its path through the Senate is uncertain. Surely, the endorsement of the President of the United States would highlight the critical importance of its passage into law. [Someone at the White House would like to hear from you.]

Finally, Fahrad Manjoo of The New York Times on “The Year America Lost Its Democracy”:

The foreign-policy journalist Joshua Keating used to write a series for Slate called “If It Happened There,” in which he reported on political and cultural developments in the United States in the tone of an American foreign correspondent sending dispatches from a nation on the other side of the globe.

Keating’s series was partly a joke about Western paternalism. But by illuminating the terrifying fragility of our own glass house, the trope also offered Americans the powerful gift of perspective. For instance, see how Keating’s headline on the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — “Death of Hard-Line Jurist Throws Regime Into Chaos” — neatly underlined the quaint capriciousness of a political system in which one unelected judge’s sudden demise can call into question fundamental rights across the land.

As an immigrant to the United States from one of the world’s long-troubled regions, I’ve found myself thinking of Keating’s series quite a lot this year. Adopting an outsider’s point of view has helped to clarify the terrible stakes of the political game now playing out across the country — and has filled me with a sense of deep despair and foreboding.

Because if the assaults on democracy that occurred in America in 2021 had happened in another country, academics, diplomats and activists from around the world would be tearing their hair out over the nation’s apparent unraveling. If you were a reporter summing up this American moment for readers back home in Mumbai, Johannesburg or Jakarta, you’d have to ask whether the country is on the brink: A decade from now, will the world say that 2021 was the year the United States squandered its democracy?

If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the year’s many lowlights. Begin, of course, on Jan. 6: “Followers of Ousted President Storm National Legislature.” Then, when Republicans in Congress turned against an independent inquiry into the Capitol attack and punished the few in their party who supported it: “Bowing to Former Strongman, Opposition Blocks Coup Investigation, Expels Dissenters.” Or when, despite turning up no evidence of significant electoral mischief in the 2020 presidential election, Republican-led legislatures in more than a dozen states began pushing new laws to restrict voting rights, including several that put partisan officials in charge of election administration: “Provincial Lawmakers Alter Election Rules to Favor Deposed Premier.”

And then last month, when more than 150 academic scholars of democracy put out a letter urging Congress to pass legislation to protect American elections from partisan takeover. Headline: “Experts Sound Alarm Over Democratic Backsliding in Nuclear-Armed Superpower.” Pull quote: “This is no ordinary moment in the course of our democracy,” the scholars wrote. “It is a moment of great peril and risk.”