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Tag Archives: Freedom

As Long As You Live the Way They Want You To

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The idea that the Republican Party is in favor of “small government” has never made sense. Consider the billions of dollars spent on our armed forces and the budgets of the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Republicans have never claimed we spend too much on those parts of the federal government (at least until their cult leader became the target of criminal investigations). Consider Republican-backed government surveillance of the civil rights and anti-war movements. And massive subsidies toward favored industries, like oil and gas. Do Republican governors refuse to accept assistance from the federal government after natural disasters?

Two of the best political columnists working today recently wrote about the “small government” myth. First, from Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times:

In the conventional view, American politics is a contest between a party of “big” government and a party of “small” government.

You know the clichés. Democrats want a larger role for the state; Republicans want to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

But a glance at the historical record shows that, at least in the postwar period, the size of government was never really the issue. A modern state needs a large, active government. The real political question revolves around the activity itself. It’s about both the scope of government — to whom and for what it should provide — and its reach. Will the state take a light touch, or will it intrude on and control the lives of its citizens?

… The Republican Party has a clear, well-articulated agenda. It just falls outside the usual categories. It’s not that today’s Republicans have a vision for “big” government or “small” government; it’s that Republicans have a vision for intrusive government, aimed at the most vulnerable people in our society.

Of course, the crown jewel of the Republican effort to build a more intrusive, domineering government is the set of laws passed to ban or sharply limit abortion, regulate gender expression and otherwise restrict bodily autonomy. These laws, by their very nature, create a web of state surveillance that brings the government into the most private reaches of an adult’s life, or a child’s.

From Paul Waldman of The Washington Post:

Let’s take one example that [congressional] Republicans are getting ready to propose: the imposition of “work requirements” for the tens of millions of Americans who rely on Medicaid for health insurance or food stamps to feed their families. If you’re looking for big government, work requirements are it.

The idea has intuitive appeal: It’s good for people to work, right? But in practice, requiring “work” means forcing people to continually document their work hours to the government. Imagine getting your boss to sign time sheets once a month to prove you were working, then uploading them to the state using a buggy website. Now, imagine you didn’t have a computer at home. And if you didn’t follow all the complicated instructions, you could lose health coverage, a constant threat keeping you up at night.

You might feel as though the government was looming awfully large in your life even as it was being stingy with benefits. Which is happening now around the country; just read this article about how Iowa is spending millions to create a new bureaucratic maze for food-stamp recipients to navigate. If they fail to jump over all the hurdles, they’ll lose their benefits.

That is how work requirements have always functioned: They’re a tool to kick lots of people off their health coverage or their food assistance…. They’re the opposite of small government; they create more bureaucracy as a means of making the lives of poor people, who have less of a voice to begin with, even more difficult.

Now, let’s consider some of the other things Republicans have been doing lately:

  • Making it illegal for women to get abortions in Republican-run states, including trying to ban minors from traveling to another state to get an abortion
  • Trying to stop women in every state from accessing medication abortions
  • Outlawing medical care for transgender youth that their parents want for them
  • Outlawing medical care for transgender adults
  • Banning drag performances
  • Banning websites Republican legislators don’t like
  • Banning books from schools and public libraries
  • Forbidding discussions of systemic racism in schools and universities
  • Banning diversity efforts in higher education
  • Attempting to make it illegal for fund managers to consider environmental, social and governance goals in some investment decisions
  • Making it unlawful for liberal cities in conservative states to pass their own laws according to their residents’ wishes
  • Going after individual companies that don’t toe the conservative line

… A party that actually believes in “limited government” doesn’t tell you what you can read, what you can say, what clothes you can wear or what medical care you can get.

There’s a good case to be made that the [Republican Party] never really favored limited government; it has always been an idea Republicans apply only to goals and purposes they don’t like in the first place, just as they only begin complaining about the deficit and debt when Democrats are in power….

Spending money isn’t the only thing that makes government “big”. Today’s Republicans have a vision of a government that provides fewer social services but is vastly more invasive in everyone’s lives. You can call it many things; just don’t be fooled into thinking it’s small.

Back to Mr. Bouie:

Not everyone is subject to the Republican vision of intrusive government. There are vanishingly few limits in most Republican-led states on the ability to buy, sell, own and carry firearms. And working on behalf of some employers and other business interests, Republicans in at least 11 states have taken steps to loosen limits on the ability of children to work in factories, meatpacking facilities and other such places.

When it comes to the demands of capital or the prerogatives of the “right” kind of Americans, Republicans believe, absolutely, in the light touch of a “small” government that stays out of the way. But when it comes to Americans deemed deviant for their poverty or their transgressions against a traditional code of patriarchal morality, Republicans believe, just as fervently, that the only answer is the heaviest and most meddlesome hand of the state.

This gets to one of the most important truths of political life. At times, the state will treat different groups in different ways. For those of us with more egalitarian sentiments, the goal is to make that treatment as fair and as equal as possible. For those whose sentiments run in the other direction, the task is to say who gets the worst and most degrading aspects of the state’s attention and who gets its [respect].

… There is limited government in these conservative states, as long as you live the way Republicans want you to live.

It’s Been Coming. It’s Why Elections Truly Matter

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Two Washington Post columnists react. First, Monica Hesse:

This is for the girl right now hiding in the bathroom stall with two pink lines on a pregnancy test and the rest of her life in front of her.

On Monday evening, Politico published a leaked document that seemed to signal that the Supreme Court may soon overturn Roe v. Wade. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a draft opinion that would end federal protection of abortion access. The official decision won’t be announced until later this summer, and meanwhile, it’s time to think of the girl in the bathroom stall and everyone else who has been or ever will be in her position, and of everyone who put her there.

. . . Conservative voters elected conservative politicians who appointed conservative judges. A machine decades in the making, . . . a decision that cleanly establishes a divide in America: men, who will have control over the most intimate parts of their bodies, and women, who will have control over their bodies only in some states, at the whim of some legislators.

“A right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito wrote in the draft opinion. He makes no mention of the things that are rooted in the nation’s history and traditions: slavery, disenfranchisement, discrimination. . . .Bodily autonomy should not be granted to women because of history and traditions; it should be recognized because of their innate dignity as human beings. . . .

There were always abortions, after all. They happened with Mason jars, and they happened with knitting needles, and they happened in bedrooms, and they happened without painkillers, and they happened with women squeezing one another’s hands so tightly their knuckles were white, and they happened, and they happened, and they happened. The overturning of Roe would not mean the end of abortions. It would just mean the end, in certain states, of safe, legal abortions.

Alito’s opinion is barbarous and cruel. It is broad where it could have been narrow. It is scathing where it could have been compassionate. It is, as discussions about abortion often are, so preoccupied with scrambling for the moral high ground that it pays no attention to the women being trampled underfoot.

This is for the girl right now hiding in the bathroom stall with two pink lines on a pregnancy test. The girl who is going to find a way to not be pregnant anyway, no matter what the Supreme Court ends up saying in June. . . . 

Next, Paul Waldman:

. . .  Many have noted that this decision [assuming it holds] will be extremely unpopular; polls show that between 60 and 65 percent of Americans say Roe should remain. The draconian laws Republicans are already proposing at the state level could be even more unpopular.

But if those facts allowed [anybody to think] this day would not come, they were clearly misguided. The coming nightmare for reproductive rights is in large part a product of minority rule. It’s what Republicans have painstakingly constructed over the course of decades, and it might take just as long to dismantle it — if Democrats can do that at all.

Opinions on abortion have been remarkably resistant to change for the past 50 years. The antiabortion movement’s attempt to convince the public that abortion is murder was a failure, and that likely won’t change in the post-Roe world.

Conservatives know that perfectly well. But the whole point of building the apparatus of minority rule was for moments like this. To do popular things, you don’t have to twist the system in knots and eliminate democratic accountability. You do it to stop popular things you don’t like, enable yourself to do things the public doesn’t want, and hold on to power no matter what.

The details should be familiar by now. The Senate gives two votes to every state, so 40 million Americans in California, most of them Democrats, get the same representation as 580,000 Americans in Wyoming, most of them Republicans. That is then levered into the electoral college, which is why the past two Republican presidents took office despite having lost the popular vote.

That (plus unprecedented ruthlessness in refusing to allow a Democratic president to fill an open seat) gets you a conservative Supreme Court supermajority — appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, confirmed by GOP senators who represent a national minority — enacting a conservative legal revolution the public never asked for.

That court then validates nearly every effort by state Republicans to insulate their own power through voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering. That will enable them to outlaw abortion over the objections of their own state populations, knowing that district lines have been drawn in a way that predetermines the outcome of elections.

It’s a closed loop, an interlocking system that insulates Republicans from accountability.

There are times when Democrats can overcome it, for example by electing governors in swing states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina. But because it’s almost impossible for Republicans to lose their hold on state legislatures, they can hamstring and undermine the governor much as congressional Republicans . . . will to President Biden if they take control of Congress in this fall’s elections.

Now consider where they’re going now that Roe is apparently dead. Forget about 15-week bans and six-week bans; a couple dozen Republican-run states will probably outlaw abortion entirely, perhaps with a grudging exception to save the life of the pregnant woman . . . 

But even that will not be enough. GOP state legislators are working to ban abortion in other states; in Missouri, one Republican state legislator has introduced a bill to allow anyone to sue over an abortion that occurred anywhere if “sexual intercourse occurred within this state and the child may have been conceived by that act of intercourse”. . . .

And it isn’t just abortions. In the antiabortion movement, most forms of birth control — including birth control pills, Plan B and even IUDs — are widely and wrongly considered “abortifacients,” the moral equivalent of abortion. Once laws outlawing abortion are passed, this is where the movement will likely turn its attention — and Republican legislators who worry only about primary challenges from the right will face pressure to go after birth control.

Meanwhile, the next time Republicans have complete control in D.C., they’ll push for a nationwide ban on abortion. The planning is already underway.

If your response is to say, “That would never happen — it would be too unpopular,” remember, that’s exactly what some said about overturning Roe. The whole point of minority rule is that you don’t have to worry about what’s unpopular.

Part of the sinister genius of minority rule is that if it is constructed with enough care and comprehensiveness, it can be demoralizing to the majority, which sees no way around it, at least in the short term. . . .

Overcoming that demoralization will require a psychological fortitude on the part of Democrats, and a commitment to do what Republicans did: to work not just for the next election but for a project that will unfold over decades. Even if you don’t get what you want from one president or one Congress, you have to take small steps until you reach your ultimate goal, knowing victory is never assured and will be a long time in coming.

That’s what the people who wanted to outlaw abortion committed themselves to, and now their victory is here. It can be reversed, but it will not be easy. . . .

Unquote.

Americans, mainly women, fought for years to make abortion legal so women would have more control over their bodies and thus their lives. The court decisions talk a lot about whether there’s a right to privacy, but it’s always been a contest between individual freedom and religious dogma. Here in America, unlike most places, freedom is losing:

The story of abortion rights in the 21st century can be seen in two world-shaking developments this past week [this is from the New York Times in September].

In the first, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively upheld drastic new abortion restrictions in Texas. A few days later, Mexico’s high court paved the way for nationwide legalization.

It may be tempting to see Mexico’s ruling as the more surprising, catapulting the world’s second most populous Catholic country on a deeply contentious social matter.

But experts say it is the United States that stands out. Since 2000, 31 countries, many just as pious as Mexico, have expanded access to abortion. Only three have rolled it back: Nicaragua, Poland and the United States.

Elections matter.

America the Extraordinary

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“Reddit shut down its popular but controversial forum devoted to supporting President Txxxx on Monday, following years in which the social media company tried but often failed to control the racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, glorification of violence and conspiracy theories that flourished there” (The Washington Post).

“The US is ‘unlikely’ to achieve herd immunity to the coronavirus even with a vaccine, according to the country’s leading public health expert, who warned that a ‘general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling’ is likely to thwart vaccination efforts. In an interview with CNN, Dr Anthony Fauci also said people not wearing masks was ‘a recipe for disaster’”… (The Guardian).

“The videos are now showing up in your social media feed every hour or two, each one more over-the-top than the one before — viral missives from a world that seems to have gone mad and yet somehow exists right in our backyard. These ‘forgotten Americans’ are at the lectern at your county commission meeting if they’re not yelling at you in the produce aisle — screaming that the elected officials and their so-called scientific experts demanding they wear a mask to prevent the spread of coronavirus are really part of a vast conspiracy to take away their freedoms” (Will Bunch for The Philadelphia Inquirer).

Mr. Bunch continues:

It was another great day for liberty — and yet a horrible one for tens of thousands of Americans who now may die needlessly because so many cling to a warped idea of freedom that apparently means not caring whether others in your community get sick.

The reality is that those devil-worshiping elected officials and their mad scientists are trying to mandate masks in public for the same reasons they don’t let 12-year-olds drive and they close bars at 2 a.m.: They actually want to keep their constituents alive.

There’s a plethora of reasons why countries across Europe — even Boris Johnson’s United Kingdom, for God’s sake — crushed their coronavirus curve while the United States didn’t. Their shutdowns were somewhat longer, their reopenings came with better testing and contact tracing, their leaders set good examples, and their people showed common sense about social distancing and masks. But especially masks.

The most comprehensive study published in the journal Lancet found mask-wearing could reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission from 17% to 3%. No wonder the University of Washington says universal mask-wearing in the United States would reduce the coronavirus death toll between now and October by a whopping 33,000 human beings.

Just think of all the restrictions on freedom and liberty — from the government seeing what you checked out at the library to invasive searches at the airport — to prevent another attack like 9/11 that killed 3,000 people, or less than one-tenth the toll from not wearing masks. But for millions of Americans — not a majority, mind you, but enough to cause a public-health hazard in a pandemic — the idea of masks has been launched into a different orbit where freedom talk is injected with the uniquely American viruses of free-market capitalism and media manipulation, maybe with a dollop of white supremacy….

But … too much of the warped notion of freedom promoted by the aggressively not-mask-wearing President Txxxx and his No. 2, Mike Pence, and their prophets like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity won’t just get you high — to continue with the Sweet analogy — but could also kill you by an overdose. What the radio hucksters, and the wannabe dictators they installed, won’t tell you is that freedom without any social responsibility or empathy for others is ultimately hollow.

But let’s remember that American people — even the damaged souls that you’re laughing at on Twitter today — didn’t pervert the meaning of freedom on their own. The warped modern version of liberty was sold to them, first by right-wing public intellectuals like Ayn Rand, who killed thousands of trees to wrap unbridled selfishness in her endless tomes about freedom, and later by the salesmen of Big Capitalism.

Protecting your freedom became the ideal branding for what these pitchmen really wanted, which was political cover to dramatically lower taxes on millionaires (who, thanks to that, would become billionaires) and to crush unions and their demands for higher pay, freeing up profits to now pay CEOs 350 times what the average worker makes. Talk about finding the cost of freedom! With the help of academics like the Nobel economist James McGill Buchanan, backed by billionaires like the Koch brothers, warped freedom capitalism got a fancy name — free-market libertarianism…..

Confronted with scientific realities like man-made climate change, the forces of conservative libertarianism turned their guns toward expertise, with the goals of thwarting environmentalism and keeping corporate profits high. The bills for global warming are starting to come due, but that has been superseded for the time being by the COVID-19 crisis; the lack of trust for medical expertise from Main Street all the way to an ignorant president whom 62 million Main Streeters installed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has proved lethal.

No other nation has botched its coronavirus response so badly because no other nation holds science in such low esteem. “Who made you perpetrators over my life?” the self-proclaimed Txxxx Girl demanded of the experts at the Palm Beach County meeting. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Stanford psychiatry prof Keith Humphreys noted that the United States simply can’t impose a coronavirus testing regimen like South Korea or Singapore because we don’t trust the government on public health. “Clusters of gun-toting protesters opposing public health measures are a real — and uniquely American — problem,” he wrote, “but it’s the much more prevalent distrust in government’s role in public health that would curtail the success of any test, trace and isolate program.”

In a functioning society, freedom can flourish when it’s part of a broader social compact, when liberty is not abused because its practitioners also see themselves as part of a community, where they care about others — even, or especially, when it comes to wearing a mask and not spreading germs to your neighbor. But has there ever been a branding campaign as successful as America repackaging selfishness, self-interest, and extreme inequality as personal freedom?

That’s even true of the freedom that’s so central to my work life: the free press that exists under the First Amendment. I’ve seen how that only works well when publishers fuel their press freedom with common sense and an understanding of responsibility to the readers. In the internet age, the promise of an even greater media freedom has been polluted by billionaires from Fox’s Rupert Murdoch to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who made bigger profits off lies and unchecked conspiracy theories than off fact-checking in the public interest. The filth of Zuckerberg’s Facebook is what’s spewing, unmasked, from the self-styled “patriots” of Palm Beach County….

As the global pandemic advanced and as evidence mounted that COVID-19 is most lethal not just for the elderly but also for Black and brown Americans, it seems clear that for some white people, not wearing a mask isn’t just a freedom song but a defiant proclamation of their superiority. That’s validated every day by America’s white-supremacist-in-chief, whose refusal to wear a mask in public is in fact a different kind of mask, one of his deep insecurity. This toxic blend of narcissism and white privilege is Dxxxx Txxxx’s idea of leadership — even as he leads some of his voters to an early grave.

The flip side is that the millions who’ve marched in America’s streets after George Floyd’s murder — many, although not all, from the under-35 generation — are making the case that a better world, built around empathy and compassion for people who don’t look like ourselves, is coming. They are using their freedom of speech and assembly to forge a more perfect union, and I fervently wish that the 33,000 Americans who may be doomed by a lethal injection of phony liberty can somehow live to see it.

Something They Don’t Tell You About Retirement

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They didn’t tell me anyway.

After years of meeting or trying to meet deadlines, you suddenly have very few reasons to do anything at any particular time. No more “status reports are due by 3 pm” or “performance reviews must be submitted by November 15”. No more “close of business on Friday”.

Not that anybody ever dies by failing to meet a deadline, but when you’re retired, almost everything can wait. The most onerous deadline I have these days is getting a book back to the library on time (and they make it so easy to renew – they probably feel as silly asking for ten or twenty cents as you do paying it).

Of course, on the assumption that having a deadline can lead to beneficial activity, you can give yourself deadlines. That sounds funny at first, like the all-powerful Queen who makes a law she supposedly has to obey. But some serious people, Immanuel Kant, for example, have argued that freedom and autonomy don’t “consist in being bound by no law, but by laws that are in some sense of one’s own making” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). 

You figure out what’s right and then you do it for that reason. You use one of those great calendar applications to set your deadline, pick a nice color and set up an appropriate reminder. I haven’t done this much yet, but it sounds like a really good way to add some urgency to retired life.

Plus, when it looks like you won’t meet your deadline, you can simply drag it to some future, more agreeable date. That’s freedom and autonomy in spades!

Which reminds me of what the comedian Rita Rudner once said, something like:

“It’s great being single. There’s so much freedom. If you want, you can buy a chocolate cake, eat a big slice of it for dinner and then throw the rest in the trash. Then, the next morning, you can take something out of the trash and have it for breakfast.”