Following is my reply to a left-wing blogger ranting about a right-wing author's claim that liberals are fascists:
I swear, it's like watching two teenaged boys, both straight, arguing about which one is gayer.
Both
of you appear to be having a knee-jerk reaction against the word
"fascist" because it's been reduced to a snarl word that generally means
"stuff I oppose" rather than referring to an Italian political movement
in the 1930s.
Being a 21st-century American leftist, you equate
"fascism" principally with racism and also, to a lesser degree perhaps,
with vigilantism. Your opponent, Goldberg, being a 21st-century American
right-winger, equates the word with socialism and totalitarianism.
In
that much, you're both right. The problem is that you each appear to
think it means exclusively the definition you've assigned to it, so
when he calls your ideological camp "fascist," meaning collectivist and
favoring a domineering government, you hear "racist vigilante" and say,
"Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the fascist!" He hears that as "Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the
radical, nanny-state socialist!" and denies it right back at you. This
could go on forever, and neither of you would benefit.
Let's
clear up a couple things that should move this debate forward. In early
20th-century European politics, the term "conservative" referred to
aristocratic landowners who favored protectionist policies and an
agrarian-based economy. "Liberal" referred to their political
opponents--the wealthy urban factory owners, bankers, etc. who favored
free trade, military growth, and imperialism, and a system in which
power and status went to the rich rather than to the well-born.
These
were the two political camps in power at the time. As we see in our
bicameral system today, they were only able to work together on things
they agreed on. Where they opposed each other, there was gridlock.
Neither group represented the common people, though.
The people
had their own political movements--socialism, distributism, and various
other schemes for giving common workers a voice, and there was
disagreement within these movements. One of the socialist sects was the
Bolsheviks, which grew to become the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union. Centered in Moscow, they wanted all other European socialists to
pledge fealty to the Communists. The Fascists (in Italy) and the German
Workers' Party (later the National Socialist German Workers' Party,
a.k.a. "Nazis") resisted Moscow.
It was this division, not
anti-socialist sentiments, that led to the Nazis persecuting German
Bolsheviks. The Nazis didn't rise to power telling people they were
going to murder millions of Jews. They promised--and delivered--a slew
of social welfare programs like government-paid health care, education,
and retirement, all to be funded by heavily taxing the rich.
Who have we heard promoting that kind of policy lately? The Republicans? The Tea Party?
"But
the Nazis were racist, and the Republicans are racist, therefore
Republicans, not Democrats, are Nazis! And fascist is just another word
for Nazi, so Republicans are fascists! Q.E.D."
In Weimar
Germany, antisemitism was at least as commonplace as animosity toward
Wall Street bankers and one-percenters in general is in America
today--and for similar reasons. It wasn't considered a shameful or taboo
topic the way racism is seen in America today. The popular view in
Germany (among gentiles, anyway) was that Jewish financiers were largely
responsible for destroying Germany's economy. The actual Fascists (in
Italy) weren't really all that troubled by Jews. It was at the
insistence of their larger, more powerful ally, Nazi Germany, that they
started persecuting Jews.
In America, we on the left enjoy this
tale of Nixon's "Southern strategy" whereby all the Southern bigots used
to be Democrats (Dixiecrats) and then moved en masse to the Republican
Party in the 1960s. But do we also claim that all the previously
non-racist Republicans likewise left the GOP for the Democrats, to get
away from the racist newcomers? In truth, both parties were full of
racists up until the mid-20th century when attitudes started to
change--not unlike attitudes toward LGBT folk have been changing in
recent years. Like antisemitism in the Weimar Republic, white racism
against blacks was accepted as normal and proper among whites of both
parties for a very long time.
So while American racists today
are pretty heavily concentrated among the party of the right-wing, that
doesn't make racism an inherently and exclusively right-wing trait. Was
Kennedy a right-winger when the racists were Dixiecrats? Was FDR? What
I'm saying is that today's Republicans are both right-wing AND racist,
but that fact alone doesn't make racism a necessarily right-wing trait.
Whether one is racist or not has nothing to do with being left- or
right-wing. One can be a racist socialist...as Hitler demonstrated.
At
best, then, neither of you are fascists. At worst, you're both capable
of becoming such. If a third-party candidate came along addressing
exactly the issues that mattered to you, ones that both Republicans and
Democrats routinely ignored, and that candidate had such massive support
that it looked like he had a good chance at winning and delivering on
his promises, it wouldn't be easy to say, "No, I can't vote for this guy
because he might be unkind to the people I don't like."
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Saturday, May 10, 2014
On Suppressing Dissent
It just occurred to me when reading about Sophie Scholl: governments that suppress dissenting speech are making a huge strategic error. I can see why they would have an interest in silencing people who want to publicize shameful things that the government prefers to keep secret, but making an example out of the person who says, "The Supreme Leader sucks! Down with the Supreme Leader!" is counterproductive.
Chilling everyone into silence isn't the same thing as gaining support. It just creates the illusion of a supportive populace, an illusion that fools no one but the leader himself. The people still resent the leader; they just do it silently. The leader doesn't really know who his true supporters are except by their deeds of valor and voluntary sacrifice, because they sound exactly the same as his opponents.
In a society that allows free (or mostly free) speech, the leader knows who his enemies are. The more overt you allow them to be, the easier they are to monitor and, if necessary, to locate. Also, by allowing people to speak their complaints freely (so long as the words don't lead to actions of consequence), you immediately dull the edge of those complaints. "The leader can't be as horrible a tyrant as that, or you wouldn't be allowed to speak those words. REAL tyrants kill people for saying stuff like you just said."
It's for this reason that a tyrant who wishes to be effective must maintain a distinction between the military and the police, unless the populace has long been accustomed to being policed by their army. Concentration camps and other military detention facilities are for enemies of the leader. But civilian prisons and jails are for bad people. Nobody wants to be seen as a bad person. Few are sympathetic to criminals. People will protest for the release of a political prisoner from a place like Guantanamo, but a person convicted in a court of law on charges of attempted murder and conspiring with terrorists will have few friends. In this way, a tyrant can dispose of huge numbers of people. Thousands die in American prisons and jails every year, but we don't call them death camps. Thinking of the American criminal justice system as a form of genocide is considered radical, despite the fact that the poor and minorities--African-American men, especially--are incarcerated at such a higher rate than everyone else. Does anyone doubt that when you're in prison, you're twice as likely to die as when you're free?
We can learn something from Milgram's experiment here. If an armored troop transport rolled down the street with loudspeakers blaring an announcement that all [choose a minority group] are being rounded up and should immediately surrender themselves for a merciful execution, there'd be a battle. Even people who aren't members of the group would be shooting from their windows. The soldiers or police would be regarded as invaders in that instance. But if it's done under the pretense that those people have done something wrong, it suddenly becomes more acceptable. That is, if a few police officers show up at the homes of all the members of a particular religion to arrest them on warrants of violating tax laws or some obscure ordinance about moral turpitude, nobody will interfere.
Likewise, if armed government agents went into a slum and ordered everyone to vacate their homes so the government could bulldoze them and build expensive homes for rich people who would pay more in taxes, there would be resistance. People would fight to keep from being removed. But if the government just raised the taxes on the slum properties enough, a lot of the residents would leave because they couldn't pay. Their homes would fail to sell, and eventually the government would seize the abandoned properties. Those who remained would fall behind in their tax payments. Nobody's going to bat an eye at a bunch of "tax protesters" or "deadbeats" or "slumlords" who were millions of dollars behind on their property taxes having their homes foreclosed on by the county. And then when those people are out on the street, nobody's going to bat an eye at them being arrested for vagrancy.
As such, the successful tyrant is one who can not only convince his people that they are free, but can convince his victims (or at least all witnesses to the victimization) that they got what they deserved. A successful tyrant convinces his people that tyranny is justice.
Chilling everyone into silence isn't the same thing as gaining support. It just creates the illusion of a supportive populace, an illusion that fools no one but the leader himself. The people still resent the leader; they just do it silently. The leader doesn't really know who his true supporters are except by their deeds of valor and voluntary sacrifice, because they sound exactly the same as his opponents.
In a society that allows free (or mostly free) speech, the leader knows who his enemies are. The more overt you allow them to be, the easier they are to monitor and, if necessary, to locate. Also, by allowing people to speak their complaints freely (so long as the words don't lead to actions of consequence), you immediately dull the edge of those complaints. "The leader can't be as horrible a tyrant as that, or you wouldn't be allowed to speak those words. REAL tyrants kill people for saying stuff like you just said."
It's for this reason that a tyrant who wishes to be effective must maintain a distinction between the military and the police, unless the populace has long been accustomed to being policed by their army. Concentration camps and other military detention facilities are for enemies of the leader. But civilian prisons and jails are for bad people. Nobody wants to be seen as a bad person. Few are sympathetic to criminals. People will protest for the release of a political prisoner from a place like Guantanamo, but a person convicted in a court of law on charges of attempted murder and conspiring with terrorists will have few friends. In this way, a tyrant can dispose of huge numbers of people. Thousands die in American prisons and jails every year, but we don't call them death camps. Thinking of the American criminal justice system as a form of genocide is considered radical, despite the fact that the poor and minorities--African-American men, especially--are incarcerated at such a higher rate than everyone else. Does anyone doubt that when you're in prison, you're twice as likely to die as when you're free?
We can learn something from Milgram's experiment here. If an armored troop transport rolled down the street with loudspeakers blaring an announcement that all [choose a minority group] are being rounded up and should immediately surrender themselves for a merciful execution, there'd be a battle. Even people who aren't members of the group would be shooting from their windows. The soldiers or police would be regarded as invaders in that instance. But if it's done under the pretense that those people have done something wrong, it suddenly becomes more acceptable. That is, if a few police officers show up at the homes of all the members of a particular religion to arrest them on warrants of violating tax laws or some obscure ordinance about moral turpitude, nobody will interfere.
Likewise, if armed government agents went into a slum and ordered everyone to vacate their homes so the government could bulldoze them and build expensive homes for rich people who would pay more in taxes, there would be resistance. People would fight to keep from being removed. But if the government just raised the taxes on the slum properties enough, a lot of the residents would leave because they couldn't pay. Their homes would fail to sell, and eventually the government would seize the abandoned properties. Those who remained would fall behind in their tax payments. Nobody's going to bat an eye at a bunch of "tax protesters" or "deadbeats" or "slumlords" who were millions of dollars behind on their property taxes having their homes foreclosed on by the county. And then when those people are out on the street, nobody's going to bat an eye at them being arrested for vagrancy.
As such, the successful tyrant is one who can not only convince his people that they are free, but can convince his victims (or at least all witnesses to the victimization) that they got what they deserved. A successful tyrant convinces his people that tyranny is justice.
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Getting Money Out of Politics
In McCutcheon v. FEC, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its opinion first stated in Citizens United v. FEC that campaign contributions are speech, and protected under the First Amendment. People call this "buying elections." Bernie Sanders called it "buying the political process."
I think we need to untangle this. I don't like the quid pro quo relationship established when politicians are allowed to accept money; that's bribery. That's purchasing policy. As long as that's allowed to continue, it doesn't matter who gets elected, so long as they have a price that some special interest will pay. Everyone who's elected will be for sale, and that's a problem.
Of course, doing that overtly IS illegal, so they get around it by taking advantage of the loophole that says you can make campaign donations. It's still bribery. It's still purchasing policy.
What bothers me in the discussion surrounding this is the oft-repeated claim that campaign contributors are "buying elections." And a lot of people--probably a lot of you reading this--believe it.
Can I point out the elephant in the room here? Commercials are not purchases. I've seen ads for LOTS of candidates I never voted for. There have been times that I was considering a candidate until I saw one of their ads, and it turned me against them. NEVER have I been persuaded to cast a vote for somebody based on how much they spend on commercials.
I'm not saying advertising doesn't influence people's opinions. Look at Coke and Pepsi. They're both fizzy brown sugar water and they cost about the same. They don't taste identical, but which one is better is entirely a matter of personal preference. There is no selling point for one over the other. It's not like one is more nutritious, or is manufactured in a more ecologically or socially responsible way. The only distinguishing factor is your own opinion about which one you like more. In that case, commercials that attempt to manipulate your emotional associations with the product are effective. If they can plant in your brain, even subconsciously, messages like, "All the cool people drink Coke, only dweebs and losers drink that lame other brand," then they can affect your behavior when you go to make a selection.
In the case of judges, specifically, I can see that working. A judge isn't supposed to have an agenda beyond interpreting the law correctly. They're not supposed to be pushing a political ideology in the courtroom. So what we're presented are these people in black robes who are supposed to be impartial and knowledgeable, but otherwise indistinct. The cola branding works in this case. Maybe the commercials make you think of one candidate as being more folksy and likeable, or tougher on crime, or more compassionate, or whatever it is that speaks to you.
But beyond that, when we get into the executive and legislative branches, it's a whole other ballgame. It's Coke vs. Orange Crush. Now, maybe you're in the mood for milk, or wine, or spring water, and you don't see a lot of difference between them because they're not speaking to your concerns. But the ways they distinguish themselves from each other are more tangible, less subjective.
Say the issue they're talking about is abortion. Jones says he wants to outlaw it. Smith says she wants it to be legal. If you think abortion should be illegal, no amount of money Smith spends to drive home her message that it should be legal is going to change your mind. To the contrary, each dollar she throws at the issue is just going to further entrench you in your decision to vote against her. And if you agree with her position, she's reached the point of diminishing returns as soon as she's made you aware of her position. You're not going to vote for her five more times if she spends five times as much money on ads.
And if you don't care about abortion one way or the other, all that noise is going to go in one ear and out the other. The more of it there is, the more bothersome it will become, and the more likely the ads are going to have the effect of making you irritable and causing you to associate that feeling with the candidates.
Republicans get this. They're masters at it. They have to be--they represent the interests of the fewest number of people, but generally have more money to throw at advertising. So how do they work around this dilemma? They don't push their issues. You have never once seen an ad by a Republican candidate saying, "Let's give away your hard-earned money to big businesses that already have billions of dollars in profits, and then let's take food away from starving children to give those big businesses even more." They'd never win that way. Instead, they do two things: 1) they sidestep the issues altogether and try cola branding to appeal to apathetic and low-information voters ("I'm the patriotic candidate"), and 2) they obfuscate issues to trick people into voting against their interests.
The first technique doesn't work on people who have an opinion, and the latter doesn't work on people who understand the issues.
That first one is just cola branding, and while it does have a measurable effect, its power is not limitless. While more people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests, more people buy Coke. But if Coke quit running all TV, radio, and print ads for two weeks, and Pepsi doubled spending on theirs, you wouldn't see all those Coke drinkers abandon Coke and start buying Pepsi. It doesn't work that way. Likewise, there are only so many votes a candidate can win with cola branding commercials--images of the candidate fishing, hanging out with grandchildren, shaking hands with disabled veterans, etc. You hit a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly on that. Once you spend enough to win over the kind of voters who can be won over that way, you don't gain anything by spending more on the same kind of ad.
The second kind works, but only if there's no counter-message at all. We saw that in Ohio over the creation of a humane livestock care standards board. The point was to create a board to rule over issues of humane livestock care instead of letting the voters decide such matters for themselves. For example, instead of the general electorate voting to ban the caging of laying hens, the governor would appoint a board (mostly consisting of industry professionals), and that board would decide whether it would be legal to put hens in cages. Not creating the board would have given voters more power. Creating the board took the power out of voters' hands and gave it to the very people who were being regulated. In the election where this was decided, the factory farms and their organizations funded a massive campaign, even drawing in contributions from out of state, to send the message that if you care about animals, you should vote for the creation of the board--that is, vote to allow the industry to do whatever it wants to animals. They made it sound like a vote for the board was a vote for humane treatment of animals, when the opposite was the case.
If the opposition had put out one ad countering that message, it would have created confusion, and that confusion would have started discussions. But there was no opposition in a lot of areas. In all the population centers across the state, the only message people got was, "If you care about animals, vote YES." In the rural areas, the only message people got was, "If you don't want animal rights organizations telling you how to run your farm, vote YES." Sustainable, humane farmers were mostly telling folks at the farmers markets to vote NO, but there was no money to spread that message, so no ads.
But that was over an issue, not a candidate. Both parties had been bought in that case. Races between candidates are rarely so one-sided. So if Jones, who wants to penalize polluters, says "Vote for me if you care about clean air," and Smith, who wants to allow pollution, also says, "Vote for me if you care about clean air," that's not going to sway voters one way or the other. The tactic doesn't work when there's opposition.
A lot of people say the answer is to get private money out of politics by requiring campaigns to be publicly financed. That alone doesn't fix it. If you prevent private entities from donating to a candidate, they'll just run their own ads. A private entity can run a political ad as long as they're transparent about who's funding it. "Hi, this is Bob from Bob's Used Cars. We care about saving you money, and that means tax money, too. I'm voting for Jones to lower our taxes, and I hope you will, too." Instead of sending Jones a check, Bob just sends him a letter of support informing him that spent X number of dollars on and ad encouraging people to vote for Jones. It creates the same quid pro quo relationship as a campaign contribution. It just cuts out the middle man. We still have the corruption, and it has little impact on the results of the election.
What I think would help keep the elections fair would be if, when people went to vote, they were briefed on the candidates' platforms. On issues and tax levies, the text is available to read at the polls. I think we should allow for something similar with candidates. Each candidate could summarize their positions and ambitions in a couple hundred words or so. There'd be no framing, as when the League of Women Voters selects questions to ask. It would basically be a free text ad each candidate gets to run at the polls. No images, all the same font. Candidates who may not have had enough money to campaign in every area would have just as much chance to reach voters as candidates who had plastered the whole state with billboards for the past year. Candidates who base their campaigns on misinformation would have their allegations challenged. It would really level the playing field, and it would do it when it counts most: the moment before the voter casts his vote. With voters getting this kind of information right there at the polls, and with it not costing the candidate anything, I think we could drastically diminish the power that money has in deciding who gets elected.
To look at the effect this would have, let's return to our race between Jones and Smith. Bob's Used Autos alienated a lot of Smith supporters by running the pro-Jones ad. If anyone other than Jones wins, Bob screwed himself. (For that matter, even if Jones wins, if Bob's gains under the Jones administration aren't greater than his losses from alienating Smith supporters, Bob still loses.) Jones ran an ad saying if you care about freedom, vote for him. Smith said if you care about freedom of choice, vote for her. Then our voter gets to the polls and finds out three other people he'd never heard of are running. He gets to read an outline of each candidate's platform, and decides he likes Brown the best. All Smith's, Jones', and Bob's money has been wasted. Brown wins. Who owns him? Nobody. And how can anyone legally corrupt him now that he's in office? By donating money to his campaign? He won without a dime last time, and having money did his competitors no good. There's no motivation to accept the money, and a good deal of motivation to refuse it, if he wants to present a clean image.
I think we need to untangle this. I don't like the quid pro quo relationship established when politicians are allowed to accept money; that's bribery. That's purchasing policy. As long as that's allowed to continue, it doesn't matter who gets elected, so long as they have a price that some special interest will pay. Everyone who's elected will be for sale, and that's a problem.
Of course, doing that overtly IS illegal, so they get around it by taking advantage of the loophole that says you can make campaign donations. It's still bribery. It's still purchasing policy.
What bothers me in the discussion surrounding this is the oft-repeated claim that campaign contributors are "buying elections." And a lot of people--probably a lot of you reading this--believe it.
Can I point out the elephant in the room here? Commercials are not purchases. I've seen ads for LOTS of candidates I never voted for. There have been times that I was considering a candidate until I saw one of their ads, and it turned me against them. NEVER have I been persuaded to cast a vote for somebody based on how much they spend on commercials.
I'm not saying advertising doesn't influence people's opinions. Look at Coke and Pepsi. They're both fizzy brown sugar water and they cost about the same. They don't taste identical, but which one is better is entirely a matter of personal preference. There is no selling point for one over the other. It's not like one is more nutritious, or is manufactured in a more ecologically or socially responsible way. The only distinguishing factor is your own opinion about which one you like more. In that case, commercials that attempt to manipulate your emotional associations with the product are effective. If they can plant in your brain, even subconsciously, messages like, "All the cool people drink Coke, only dweebs and losers drink that lame other brand," then they can affect your behavior when you go to make a selection.
In the case of judges, specifically, I can see that working. A judge isn't supposed to have an agenda beyond interpreting the law correctly. They're not supposed to be pushing a political ideology in the courtroom. So what we're presented are these people in black robes who are supposed to be impartial and knowledgeable, but otherwise indistinct. The cola branding works in this case. Maybe the commercials make you think of one candidate as being more folksy and likeable, or tougher on crime, or more compassionate, or whatever it is that speaks to you.
But beyond that, when we get into the executive and legislative branches, it's a whole other ballgame. It's Coke vs. Orange Crush. Now, maybe you're in the mood for milk, or wine, or spring water, and you don't see a lot of difference between them because they're not speaking to your concerns. But the ways they distinguish themselves from each other are more tangible, less subjective.
Say the issue they're talking about is abortion. Jones says he wants to outlaw it. Smith says she wants it to be legal. If you think abortion should be illegal, no amount of money Smith spends to drive home her message that it should be legal is going to change your mind. To the contrary, each dollar she throws at the issue is just going to further entrench you in your decision to vote against her. And if you agree with her position, she's reached the point of diminishing returns as soon as she's made you aware of her position. You're not going to vote for her five more times if she spends five times as much money on ads.
And if you don't care about abortion one way or the other, all that noise is going to go in one ear and out the other. The more of it there is, the more bothersome it will become, and the more likely the ads are going to have the effect of making you irritable and causing you to associate that feeling with the candidates.
Republicans get this. They're masters at it. They have to be--they represent the interests of the fewest number of people, but generally have more money to throw at advertising. So how do they work around this dilemma? They don't push their issues. You have never once seen an ad by a Republican candidate saying, "Let's give away your hard-earned money to big businesses that already have billions of dollars in profits, and then let's take food away from starving children to give those big businesses even more." They'd never win that way. Instead, they do two things: 1) they sidestep the issues altogether and try cola branding to appeal to apathetic and low-information voters ("I'm the patriotic candidate"), and 2) they obfuscate issues to trick people into voting against their interests.
The first technique doesn't work on people who have an opinion, and the latter doesn't work on people who understand the issues.
That first one is just cola branding, and while it does have a measurable effect, its power is not limitless. While more people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests, more people buy Coke. But if Coke quit running all TV, radio, and print ads for two weeks, and Pepsi doubled spending on theirs, you wouldn't see all those Coke drinkers abandon Coke and start buying Pepsi. It doesn't work that way. Likewise, there are only so many votes a candidate can win with cola branding commercials--images of the candidate fishing, hanging out with grandchildren, shaking hands with disabled veterans, etc. You hit a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly on that. Once you spend enough to win over the kind of voters who can be won over that way, you don't gain anything by spending more on the same kind of ad.
The second kind works, but only if there's no counter-message at all. We saw that in Ohio over the creation of a humane livestock care standards board. The point was to create a board to rule over issues of humane livestock care instead of letting the voters decide such matters for themselves. For example, instead of the general electorate voting to ban the caging of laying hens, the governor would appoint a board (mostly consisting of industry professionals), and that board would decide whether it would be legal to put hens in cages. Not creating the board would have given voters more power. Creating the board took the power out of voters' hands and gave it to the very people who were being regulated. In the election where this was decided, the factory farms and their organizations funded a massive campaign, even drawing in contributions from out of state, to send the message that if you care about animals, you should vote for the creation of the board--that is, vote to allow the industry to do whatever it wants to animals. They made it sound like a vote for the board was a vote for humane treatment of animals, when the opposite was the case.
If the opposition had put out one ad countering that message, it would have created confusion, and that confusion would have started discussions. But there was no opposition in a lot of areas. In all the population centers across the state, the only message people got was, "If you care about animals, vote YES." In the rural areas, the only message people got was, "If you don't want animal rights organizations telling you how to run your farm, vote YES." Sustainable, humane farmers were mostly telling folks at the farmers markets to vote NO, but there was no money to spread that message, so no ads.
But that was over an issue, not a candidate. Both parties had been bought in that case. Races between candidates are rarely so one-sided. So if Jones, who wants to penalize polluters, says "Vote for me if you care about clean air," and Smith, who wants to allow pollution, also says, "Vote for me if you care about clean air," that's not going to sway voters one way or the other. The tactic doesn't work when there's opposition.
A lot of people say the answer is to get private money out of politics by requiring campaigns to be publicly financed. That alone doesn't fix it. If you prevent private entities from donating to a candidate, they'll just run their own ads. A private entity can run a political ad as long as they're transparent about who's funding it. "Hi, this is Bob from Bob's Used Cars. We care about saving you money, and that means tax money, too. I'm voting for Jones to lower our taxes, and I hope you will, too." Instead of sending Jones a check, Bob just sends him a letter of support informing him that spent X number of dollars on and ad encouraging people to vote for Jones. It creates the same quid pro quo relationship as a campaign contribution. It just cuts out the middle man. We still have the corruption, and it has little impact on the results of the election.
What I think would help keep the elections fair would be if, when people went to vote, they were briefed on the candidates' platforms. On issues and tax levies, the text is available to read at the polls. I think we should allow for something similar with candidates. Each candidate could summarize their positions and ambitions in a couple hundred words or so. There'd be no framing, as when the League of Women Voters selects questions to ask. It would basically be a free text ad each candidate gets to run at the polls. No images, all the same font. Candidates who may not have had enough money to campaign in every area would have just as much chance to reach voters as candidates who had plastered the whole state with billboards for the past year. Candidates who base their campaigns on misinformation would have their allegations challenged. It would really level the playing field, and it would do it when it counts most: the moment before the voter casts his vote. With voters getting this kind of information right there at the polls, and with it not costing the candidate anything, I think we could drastically diminish the power that money has in deciding who gets elected.
To look at the effect this would have, let's return to our race between Jones and Smith. Bob's Used Autos alienated a lot of Smith supporters by running the pro-Jones ad. If anyone other than Jones wins, Bob screwed himself. (For that matter, even if Jones wins, if Bob's gains under the Jones administration aren't greater than his losses from alienating Smith supporters, Bob still loses.) Jones ran an ad saying if you care about freedom, vote for him. Smith said if you care about freedom of choice, vote for her. Then our voter gets to the polls and finds out three other people he'd never heard of are running. He gets to read an outline of each candidate's platform, and decides he likes Brown the best. All Smith's, Jones', and Bob's money has been wasted. Brown wins. Who owns him? Nobody. And how can anyone legally corrupt him now that he's in office? By donating money to his campaign? He won without a dime last time, and having money did his competitors no good. There's no motivation to accept the money, and a good deal of motivation to refuse it, if he wants to present a clean image.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
The Inherent Cultural Imperialism of Talking About What Poor People Eat
Wow, I was so hopeful reading "Chitlins, Tradition and Food Justice" by Carolyn Wysinger. When she started talking about tragedy-turned-tradition and how her aunt reacted to the news that she didn't like chitlins ("she informed me that 'I was a citified California kid who could eat
weird stuff like hummus but not chitlins.' Then she 'told' on me to the
rest of the family." ) I really thought I had finally found someone else who gets it...but she didn't.
The reason the Northern Lights Kroger has chitlins while the ones in richer, whiter neighborhoods have organic hummus isn't because "the man" is trying to keep us Northern Lights shoppers down and eating scraps. It's because the neighborhood is populated by people like her aunt. Stores want to make money, and you do that by selling the chitlins to people who demand chitlins, and organic hummus to people who demand organic hummus. You absolutely don't make money by trying to force food onto people that is so far removed from their cultural traditions and identity that they take offense. So Kroger isn't going to put goat meat or pig guts in Worthington or Bexley, and they're not gonna put any hoity-toity, zen yoga, California crap in the hood. There just aren't enough people who shop here regularly who want it--not because they're being forced, but because it's part of how they've come to see themselves.
You want to solve the obesity epidemic in food deserts? Then you need to change the very essence of the people who live there. Turn back the clock and make kale a comfort food for them instead of mac-and-cheese. Go back to the point in their childhood when a hamburger became an object of desire and replace it with steamed asparagus. Find the time when they learned to think of a cookie as a treat, and teach them instead to feel rewarded by a two-mile run.
We learn from older generations what to value, what feels good, what's worth pursuing and avoiding. Those communally-shared aspirations and aversions and the narrative we use to organize them into something coherent form our cultures. Culture is the matrix of our social bonding, and we are social creatures who need that bonding as much as we need anything. There's a reason people eat together when they gather for special occasions or to have fun. When you ask someone with a lifelong sweet tooth to stop liking sweets, you might as well be asking her to disown her family and change her name. It's not about "bad choices" so much as ranking other things like camaraderie and enjoyment as being more important than nutrition and fitness.
We can make apologies and say that the poor are obese because carbs are cheap--and we can point to a conspiracy between Big Ag and government to get us whipped up into a righteous indignation over this, with the likes of Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver leading the charge--but you know what's even cheaper than high-calorie processed foods? Cabbage and dry beans. Nobody's going to get fat eating boiled beans and cabbage. But when's the last time anyone invited you to go watch the game and eat boiled cabbage at a sports bar? How many people are going to take a date out to eat beans? Who goes to a carnival looking forward to eating a cabbage leaf stuffed with lima beans unless it's also deep fried and covered with powdered sugar?
I like cabbage. I also like beans. And I can point to various cultures that value them as staples. I cannot, however, think of one culture that treats those two foods (without additional fats or carbs) as "fun" foods that serve as the center for social bonding. They're not. And if you tried to make cabbage and beans your mainstay because that's all you could afford, I bet you'd be miserable pretty quickly.
So what do we poor people, food desert or not, have to stave off the misery? Food stamps. We don't have vacations and concerts. We can't afford cruises and road trips. We don't go to music festivals or science fiction conventions. We don't hang out at gyms or craft shows or martial arts competitions. We don't do any of those spendy things middle-class people do outside of work that they think of as making their lives worth living.
What we do have--the only boon in our lives other than a once-a-year tax refund--is a balance at the beginning of every month saying we can buy several hundred dollars' worth of food. You can't pay your rent with food stamps. You can't use them to keep the electricity or gas turned on. You can't use them to get your car fixed or fueled or insured or registered. You can't use them to buy toothpaste or deodorant or toilet paper. You can't even use them to buy food if it's hot or served to eat on the spot. What you can do is buy groceries to take home and cook. Inevitably, you'll learn that cats will eat store-brand canned tuna and you can clean your house with vinegar or lemon juice. You might even fool around with trying to use baking soda as toothpaste and deodorant, or making Play-Doh and finger paint out of flour and food coloring. I remember one year for Christmas, I made ornaments out of dried apple slices and made braided breads to give people as gifts.
But most of that food is going to be eaten. You might not even have enough (with recent cuts, that's even more likely), but once a month, you can walk into a grocery store with the knowledge that you can have almost anything you want. You can fill an entire cart to overflowing, and as long as it's not all meat, you'll probably have enough to cover it all. You don't need to tally it in your head as you do with literally every single other expense in your life. For one day a month, you get to live and think and shop like a wealthy person. I mean, not really. It's still in the back of your mind that you've got to make this last all month, so you're going to be frugal, but if you want an apple or a pack of cookies, you can just grab it without thinking about how much it costs which is something you never get to do otherwise when you're poor. It's the only glut you know.
You've seen shoppers line up after Thanksgiving to get all those amazing discounts, right? The way they camp out and then battle each other for a half-price TV? Well, people on food stamps can't afford a new TV even at half-price, so that's an alien world. A sale means nothing when you're broke. But take that same sense of frenzy, that sense of being overwhelmed with rare, sudden, and momentary bounty, and you have some sense of what it's like to see your food stamp balance replenished at the beginning of the month.
When my family borrows a car to go on a big grocery shopping trip, the first thing we do when we get back to the car is start opening things up to eat them. The kids want a cookie or some candy. I want a soda. We might pass around some chips. It's a craving we've been feeling and unable to feed for maybe a week or two...or longer. For some people, it's heroine or weed or pills or alcohol that brings them relief. For us, it's a long-anticipated glucose rush. When the kids have a birthday party or we celebrate a holiday, there's nothing elegant about it. The meal isn't about exotic ingredients or preparation methods with French names. It's about whatever gets us that rush. (I prefer meat over sweets, myself, but price is a constraint, so you find work-arounds. I've eaten two packs of beef-flavored ramen noodles just while writing this.)
My point is that at the very root of it, we're dealing with strong, biological urges. Satisfying those urges feels good, so we make that satisfaction something we share with people we care about. It's something we do together. If you've ever gone out for sushi, think how you'd feel if a friend who came along with you brought a burger and fries along to eat while you have sushi. Or the other way--you and some friends grill burgers outside or go to a hamburger joint, but one of them packs a little bento box. By not joining in eating the same thing as the others, you're missing a major social aspect of the gathering. For this reason, when we eat with others as a form of social bonding, we eat what they're eating. When you buck the trend, you isolate yourself socially. This means we're talking about not just biological cravings, but psychological ones, too. We need acceptance.
What happens, then, when tragedy becomes tradition, as Carolyn Wysinger wrote about? What happens when the slave master throws the scraps of the pig carcass to his slaves, and the slaves' children grow up with that as their fond memory of childhood? What happens when that slop becomes a part of your cultural identity? I'll tell you: it becomes a source of pride, because it's part of your identity as a member of a community that has survived hardship. When someone outside that community tries to exert their supremacy by devaluing the things that define you, you either let them, or you fight back, as Wysinger's aunt did. You devalue whatever they're holding up as supreme and declare your own thing to be supreme. That's how you assert your equality. "I don't want your fruity ol' couscous anyway. I got venison!"
In that situation, what would happen if Wysinger got her way...if the grocery store where her aunt shops stopped carrying chitlins and replaced them with hummus? Would her aunt feel liberated and empowered, now that the man is no longer forcing those slave scraps on her? Or is she more apt, as I think she would, to feel like an outsider was imposing his culture on her against her wishes? If she couldn't get what she wanted because a grocery store executive or public official made the decision that she should give it up her tradition and adopt a way he deems to be better, why on Earth would anybody think she'd be eager to embrace that?
It's an insult. When affluent white people decide that their taste in food is superior to the that of the poor brown people on the other side of town, and task themselves with the "merciful" mission of making those poor brown people give up their wretched ways and eat the way the affluent white people say is proper, that's the very definition of cultural imperialism. There are bigger hurdles here than just diabetes.
The reason the Northern Lights Kroger has chitlins while the ones in richer, whiter neighborhoods have organic hummus isn't because "the man" is trying to keep us Northern Lights shoppers down and eating scraps. It's because the neighborhood is populated by people like her aunt. Stores want to make money, and you do that by selling the chitlins to people who demand chitlins, and organic hummus to people who demand organic hummus. You absolutely don't make money by trying to force food onto people that is so far removed from their cultural traditions and identity that they take offense. So Kroger isn't going to put goat meat or pig guts in Worthington or Bexley, and they're not gonna put any hoity-toity, zen yoga, California crap in the hood. There just aren't enough people who shop here regularly who want it--not because they're being forced, but because it's part of how they've come to see themselves.
You want to solve the obesity epidemic in food deserts? Then you need to change the very essence of the people who live there. Turn back the clock and make kale a comfort food for them instead of mac-and-cheese. Go back to the point in their childhood when a hamburger became an object of desire and replace it with steamed asparagus. Find the time when they learned to think of a cookie as a treat, and teach them instead to feel rewarded by a two-mile run.
We learn from older generations what to value, what feels good, what's worth pursuing and avoiding. Those communally-shared aspirations and aversions and the narrative we use to organize them into something coherent form our cultures. Culture is the matrix of our social bonding, and we are social creatures who need that bonding as much as we need anything. There's a reason people eat together when they gather for special occasions or to have fun. When you ask someone with a lifelong sweet tooth to stop liking sweets, you might as well be asking her to disown her family and change her name. It's not about "bad choices" so much as ranking other things like camaraderie and enjoyment as being more important than nutrition and fitness.
We can make apologies and say that the poor are obese because carbs are cheap--and we can point to a conspiracy between Big Ag and government to get us whipped up into a righteous indignation over this, with the likes of Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver leading the charge--but you know what's even cheaper than high-calorie processed foods? Cabbage and dry beans. Nobody's going to get fat eating boiled beans and cabbage. But when's the last time anyone invited you to go watch the game and eat boiled cabbage at a sports bar? How many people are going to take a date out to eat beans? Who goes to a carnival looking forward to eating a cabbage leaf stuffed with lima beans unless it's also deep fried and covered with powdered sugar?
I like cabbage. I also like beans. And I can point to various cultures that value them as staples. I cannot, however, think of one culture that treats those two foods (without additional fats or carbs) as "fun" foods that serve as the center for social bonding. They're not. And if you tried to make cabbage and beans your mainstay because that's all you could afford, I bet you'd be miserable pretty quickly.
So what do we poor people, food desert or not, have to stave off the misery? Food stamps. We don't have vacations and concerts. We can't afford cruises and road trips. We don't go to music festivals or science fiction conventions. We don't hang out at gyms or craft shows or martial arts competitions. We don't do any of those spendy things middle-class people do outside of work that they think of as making their lives worth living.
What we do have--the only boon in our lives other than a once-a-year tax refund--is a balance at the beginning of every month saying we can buy several hundred dollars' worth of food. You can't pay your rent with food stamps. You can't use them to keep the electricity or gas turned on. You can't use them to get your car fixed or fueled or insured or registered. You can't use them to buy toothpaste or deodorant or toilet paper. You can't even use them to buy food if it's hot or served to eat on the spot. What you can do is buy groceries to take home and cook. Inevitably, you'll learn that cats will eat store-brand canned tuna and you can clean your house with vinegar or lemon juice. You might even fool around with trying to use baking soda as toothpaste and deodorant, or making Play-Doh and finger paint out of flour and food coloring. I remember one year for Christmas, I made ornaments out of dried apple slices and made braided breads to give people as gifts.
But most of that food is going to be eaten. You might not even have enough (with recent cuts, that's even more likely), but once a month, you can walk into a grocery store with the knowledge that you can have almost anything you want. You can fill an entire cart to overflowing, and as long as it's not all meat, you'll probably have enough to cover it all. You don't need to tally it in your head as you do with literally every single other expense in your life. For one day a month, you get to live and think and shop like a wealthy person. I mean, not really. It's still in the back of your mind that you've got to make this last all month, so you're going to be frugal, but if you want an apple or a pack of cookies, you can just grab it without thinking about how much it costs which is something you never get to do otherwise when you're poor. It's the only glut you know.
You've seen shoppers line up after Thanksgiving to get all those amazing discounts, right? The way they camp out and then battle each other for a half-price TV? Well, people on food stamps can't afford a new TV even at half-price, so that's an alien world. A sale means nothing when you're broke. But take that same sense of frenzy, that sense of being overwhelmed with rare, sudden, and momentary bounty, and you have some sense of what it's like to see your food stamp balance replenished at the beginning of the month.
When my family borrows a car to go on a big grocery shopping trip, the first thing we do when we get back to the car is start opening things up to eat them. The kids want a cookie or some candy. I want a soda. We might pass around some chips. It's a craving we've been feeling and unable to feed for maybe a week or two...or longer. For some people, it's heroine or weed or pills or alcohol that brings them relief. For us, it's a long-anticipated glucose rush. When the kids have a birthday party or we celebrate a holiday, there's nothing elegant about it. The meal isn't about exotic ingredients or preparation methods with French names. It's about whatever gets us that rush. (I prefer meat over sweets, myself, but price is a constraint, so you find work-arounds. I've eaten two packs of beef-flavored ramen noodles just while writing this.)
My point is that at the very root of it, we're dealing with strong, biological urges. Satisfying those urges feels good, so we make that satisfaction something we share with people we care about. It's something we do together. If you've ever gone out for sushi, think how you'd feel if a friend who came along with you brought a burger and fries along to eat while you have sushi. Or the other way--you and some friends grill burgers outside or go to a hamburger joint, but one of them packs a little bento box. By not joining in eating the same thing as the others, you're missing a major social aspect of the gathering. For this reason, when we eat with others as a form of social bonding, we eat what they're eating. When you buck the trend, you isolate yourself socially. This means we're talking about not just biological cravings, but psychological ones, too. We need acceptance.
What happens, then, when tragedy becomes tradition, as Carolyn Wysinger wrote about? What happens when the slave master throws the scraps of the pig carcass to his slaves, and the slaves' children grow up with that as their fond memory of childhood? What happens when that slop becomes a part of your cultural identity? I'll tell you: it becomes a source of pride, because it's part of your identity as a member of a community that has survived hardship. When someone outside that community tries to exert their supremacy by devaluing the things that define you, you either let them, or you fight back, as Wysinger's aunt did. You devalue whatever they're holding up as supreme and declare your own thing to be supreme. That's how you assert your equality. "I don't want your fruity ol' couscous anyway. I got venison!"
In that situation, what would happen if Wysinger got her way...if the grocery store where her aunt shops stopped carrying chitlins and replaced them with hummus? Would her aunt feel liberated and empowered, now that the man is no longer forcing those slave scraps on her? Or is she more apt, as I think she would, to feel like an outsider was imposing his culture on her against her wishes? If she couldn't get what she wanted because a grocery store executive or public official made the decision that she should give it up her tradition and adopt a way he deems to be better, why on Earth would anybody think she'd be eager to embrace that?
It's an insult. When affluent white people decide that their taste in food is superior to the that of the poor brown people on the other side of town, and task themselves with the "merciful" mission of making those poor brown people give up their wretched ways and eat the way the affluent white people say is proper, that's the very definition of cultural imperialism. There are bigger hurdles here than just diabetes.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
What's good for the goose...
I saw a post on a liberal page on Facebook criticizing Republicans for thinking the nation would be better off if everyone had guns and nobody had health care. The
Republicans don't have a monopoly on idiocy, though. To their credit, they
haven't been applying anti-gun arguments to health care coverage.
Imagine if they did:
"Nobody needs that!"
"What do you want it for? What kind of injury or disease are you planning to get?"
"You're paranoid! People only get sick in the movies."
"If you want to be in a hospital, go work in one."
"Have you been properly trained to handle this health care? You should have to take a class so you don't do something stupid like running out and getting your limbs amputated as soon as you get your health insurance."
"You shouldn't be allowed to have health insurance, because someone might steal it and use it illegally."
"You should have to go through intensive screening first to prove to society that you're not going to abuse this privilege: a criminal background check, a psychological test, character references, and a signed letter from the director of your local health department certifying you to use health insurance."
"Health insurance doesn't keep you from getting sick! It just puts more people in the hospital."
"Studies show that you're more likely to die in a hospital if you have health insurance than if you don't. You're safer not having it."
"You're a coward. Only pussies sit around worrying about getting sick."
"If you avoid risky behaviors and don't do things you're not supposed to, you won't get sick or injured in the first place."
"You think having health insurance will make you immortal. It won't!"
"I can see having insurance to cover sports injuries, but covering injuries from violence will just encourage more violence."
"Studies show that doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are more likely than the general population to abuse prescription drugs. That just proves they're not safe for anybody. We should end prescription drug coverage."
"I've got an idea: we let people go to the doctor, but we charge 'em $5,000 for an aspirin. That way, nobody will go unless they REALLY NEED to!"
"Nobody needs that!"
"What do you want it for? What kind of injury or disease are you planning to get?"
"You're paranoid! People only get sick in the movies."
"If you want to be in a hospital, go work in one."
"Have you been properly trained to handle this health care? You should have to take a class so you don't do something stupid like running out and getting your limbs amputated as soon as you get your health insurance."
"You shouldn't be allowed to have health insurance, because someone might steal it and use it illegally."
"You should have to go through intensive screening first to prove to society that you're not going to abuse this privilege: a criminal background check, a psychological test, character references, and a signed letter from the director of your local health department certifying you to use health insurance."
"Health insurance doesn't keep you from getting sick! It just puts more people in the hospital."
"Studies show that you're more likely to die in a hospital if you have health insurance than if you don't. You're safer not having it."
"You're a coward. Only pussies sit around worrying about getting sick."
"If you avoid risky behaviors and don't do things you're not supposed to, you won't get sick or injured in the first place."
"You think having health insurance will make you immortal. It won't!"
"I can see having insurance to cover sports injuries, but covering injuries from violence will just encourage more violence."
"Studies show that doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are more likely than the general population to abuse prescription drugs. That just proves they're not safe for anybody. We should end prescription drug coverage."
"I've got an idea: we let people go to the doctor, but we charge 'em $5,000 for an aspirin. That way, nobody will go unless they REALLY NEED to!"
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Goosebump Politics: Warriors and Worriers
My kids were watching "Goosebumps" for the first time tonight. For those not familiar, it was a TV show in the '90s made from a popular line of horror books for children. Watching a few episodes with them, I noted a heavy reliance on a standard
trope in horror, a fear we all learn as children: being dependent on
someone else to protect you, and then having that person dismiss or
disbelieve in immediate threats to your safety. There's a monster
under your bed, and only Mom or Dad can protect you from it, but they
refuse to even come look under the bed because they don't believe there's
anything there.
It occurred to me that there's a
similar thing going on in the gun control debate, and that this is why it becomes such an
emotional conflict. Observant people see that in instances
of interpersonal violence, the police typically don't show up until after the fact.
They're not there to head off the attack. They just snap the pictures
and interview witnesses after the damage is done. Some folks react to
this by preparing to fend off attacks themselves until the police
arrive: arming themselves, training in martial arts, buying stronger
locks, etc. Others simply call for better prevention—more police,
more cameras, block watches, training in anger management and
conflict resolution, etc. The first group doesn't necessarily rule out the methods of the second group, but the second group wants nothing to do with the methods of the first.
The first group is convinced of the
inevitability of violence. They don't trust any prevention
method to be 100% effective. When they ready themselves for
an attack and other people dismiss their concerns or try to outlaw their solutions, they're experiencing what our monster-under-the-bed kid is
experiencing when he screams for his parents to investigate the
growling under his bed, only to be told he's going to be punished if he doesn't go to sleep.
The second group of people, who prefer preventative solutions rather than tackling threats head-on, feel that attackers cannot be defeated, only outwitted. To them, the
only way to stay safe is to scour from their lives all potential for danger. It's
like they're in a zombie movie where the zombies are unstoppable, so
the only way to be safe is to prevent people from becoming zombies in
the first place...and just to be safe, they chain up anyone who's at
risk of becoming a zombie. Common rabble with guns are what are scaring
these folks in the first
place, so they see letting even more civilians have guns as being like
trying to protect yourself from zombies by making more zombies.
These are both visceral fears, and people
who are viscerally afraid tend not to think clearly. That's a bad
engine for politics.We can never reach consensus if the only agreement possible looks to at least half the people like letting the zombies eat us.
As any thriller fan knows, there's
another character who regularly appears in survival-horror flicks: the one who's paralyzed with fear. They either
panic or go immediately into deep denial, and they invariably do
something incredibly stupid that endangers all the other characters.
These people exist in the real world, too. In the movies, they often act as a stand-in for the protector who won't do anything. In the real world, they tend to
align themselves politically with the people who say prevention is enough. If you want to pretend a problem doesn't exist, you'll be able to maintain that illusion longer if you hide from the problem rather than locking horns with it.
Some stories will have a pivotal moment where the panicker gets it together and turns into a warrior. Other times, he just get killed off--usually fairly early on--and viewers from the first group celebrate. Of course, these movies are made for them. I'm not sure what a movie made for the second group would look like, but you can be sure it wouldn't be at all exciting. The conflict would have to all be in the backstory. The film would open in Utopia, and we might hear a tale of how a noble visionary crafted an elegant solution that enabled her society to evolve into something like a cross between Pandora and Lothlórien...but without all the monsters and scary weapons.
Saturday, January 11, 2014
Such things occur to me throughout the day
I've had a number of random thoughts bumping around in my head that may or may not open some interesting discussion:
I've long felt that the positions of the Democratic and Republican parties on gun control are the opposite of what they ought to be if they were being ideologically consistent. Democrats claim to champion minorities, the oppressed, the underdog, democracy, everybody getting a vote, equal rights, and so on. You'd think they would be against giving the powerful elite a monopoly on violence. You'd think they'd want to empower the oppressed instead of the oppressors. You'd think they'd try to equip the downtrodden to resist tyranny.
The Republicans, on the other hand, hold that the elite--the innovators, the gifted, the achievers--are more competent and deserving of leadership and privilege. They're of the opinion that rich people deserve to be richer than the rest of us, and that the world just works better when we get out of the way and let those natural-born leaders run everything. It would stand to reason that those Chosen Few would have a much easier time running things if the common rabble were powerless to interfere. It makes no sense, then, that they want guns to be plentiful, legal, and easy to get, so that every ignorant yahoo is capable of mounting an insurrection.
Likewise, their positions on abortion should be switched. If Democrats belong to the party of compassion, they should be the ones whose hearts are bleeding for a little bundle of cells that has the potential to one day grow into a baby. The Republicans, you would think, would be mandating abortions for...well, basically anyone who's not one of them. Anyone who's even suspected of not being a rich, white, able-bodied, English-speaking, heterosexual, cisgendered, Protestant Republican would be snuffed out before they could draw their first breath.
I've recently developed a hypothesis to account for this inconsistency. The parties aren't formed along ideological lines, as I'd first thought. Instead, they conform to gender stereotypes. The Republicans are the men and the Democrats are the women.
Think about this. The Democrats envision a world of sugar and spice where everyone's nice, where everyone settles conflicts by talking about their feelings, where aggression and machismo are shunned, and where we judge the rightness or wrongness of a person's actions by how sorry we feel for them because of unrelated circumstances. The Republicans, on the other hand, favor institutions like the military, law enforcement, big corporations, and contact sports, where domination, aggression, penetration, and insensitivity rule. Democrats think Republicans are dicks; Republicans think Democrats are pussies.
If there's anything to this, then there's really no hope of overcoming the political polarization in this country unless our value systems become a lot more androgynous.
In discussions of race relations, gender issues, and the like, one often hears it said that "you can't know what it's like" or "you can't possibly understand" some other person's experiences. I think this idea insults both parties. It presumes that one person can't articulate his experiences in a way that's easy for others to understand, and it presumes that the other person lacks empathy and basic listening comprehension skills. I wouldn't argue that one person can know intuitively what it's like to walk in someone else's shoes, but there's no reason they can't be taught. It seems to me that the purpose of these statements is to shut down communication and to elevate the status of the person claiming to have "unknowable" experience above that of the person who's allegedly too dim to understand.
In discussions of privilege, I think it would be helpful to distinguish among three different types of privilege.
1. Freedom from externally-imposed oppression
2. Freedom from natural obstacles
3. Freedom from self-repression
Let's say, for example, that a privilege you have that I don't is that you're the kind of a person who can go to a gym to lift weights and I'm not. What does that really mean? Well, we have to ask why I can't. If the gym has a policy of only approving memberships for serious bodybuilders like you and not for fat guys like me, then that's an example of externally-imposed oppression. If I'm paralyzed from the nose down, or if I'm stranded on an island where there is no gym, then I'm physically incapable of going to a gym to lift weights. That would be an example of a natural obstacle. If it turns out there is a gym nearby that I can get to and afford, and they'd be happy to have me, but I don't go because I feel self-conscious about working out in front of other people because I imagine they're judging me, then that's an example of self-repression.
Dividing obstacles into these three categories would help us to better identify whom, if anyone, is to blame for a particular problem and what, if anything, can be done about it. Despite all reassurances to the contrary, the label of privilege has been weaponized. It's used to shame others into silence, or to invalidate their opinions. We need tools for determining whether that's ever actually justified, and for demonstrating when it's not.
People consider reading books to be a virtue, but watching TV and movies to be a vice. Even reading on the internet gets trashed while books are sanctified. Why is that? Why don't we refer to people who lay around on the couch reading books all day as lazy or addicted, rather than studious? If you're talking about great books and trashy TV programs, then of course, you're comparing the best to the worst, but it's about content, not medium. I don't see how reading trashy romance novels is superior to watching, say, a documentary or a TED talk. What is the particular virtue of taking in printed-on-paper words through your eyeballs instead of taking in spoken words through your ears? Personally, I find instructive videos to be of far greater educational value than written instructions. I like to see a thing demonstrated.
I've long felt that the positions of the Democratic and Republican parties on gun control are the opposite of what they ought to be if they were being ideologically consistent. Democrats claim to champion minorities, the oppressed, the underdog, democracy, everybody getting a vote, equal rights, and so on. You'd think they would be against giving the powerful elite a monopoly on violence. You'd think they'd want to empower the oppressed instead of the oppressors. You'd think they'd try to equip the downtrodden to resist tyranny.
The Republicans, on the other hand, hold that the elite--the innovators, the gifted, the achievers--are more competent and deserving of leadership and privilege. They're of the opinion that rich people deserve to be richer than the rest of us, and that the world just works better when we get out of the way and let those natural-born leaders run everything. It would stand to reason that those Chosen Few would have a much easier time running things if the common rabble were powerless to interfere. It makes no sense, then, that they want guns to be plentiful, legal, and easy to get, so that every ignorant yahoo is capable of mounting an insurrection.
Likewise, their positions on abortion should be switched. If Democrats belong to the party of compassion, they should be the ones whose hearts are bleeding for a little bundle of cells that has the potential to one day grow into a baby. The Republicans, you would think, would be mandating abortions for...well, basically anyone who's not one of them. Anyone who's even suspected of not being a rich, white, able-bodied, English-speaking, heterosexual, cisgendered, Protestant Republican would be snuffed out before they could draw their first breath.
I've recently developed a hypothesis to account for this inconsistency. The parties aren't formed along ideological lines, as I'd first thought. Instead, they conform to gender stereotypes. The Republicans are the men and the Democrats are the women.
Think about this. The Democrats envision a world of sugar and spice where everyone's nice, where everyone settles conflicts by talking about their feelings, where aggression and machismo are shunned, and where we judge the rightness or wrongness of a person's actions by how sorry we feel for them because of unrelated circumstances. The Republicans, on the other hand, favor institutions like the military, law enforcement, big corporations, and contact sports, where domination, aggression, penetration, and insensitivity rule. Democrats think Republicans are dicks; Republicans think Democrats are pussies.
If there's anything to this, then there's really no hope of overcoming the political polarization in this country unless our value systems become a lot more androgynous.
In discussions of race relations, gender issues, and the like, one often hears it said that "you can't know what it's like" or "you can't possibly understand" some other person's experiences. I think this idea insults both parties. It presumes that one person can't articulate his experiences in a way that's easy for others to understand, and it presumes that the other person lacks empathy and basic listening comprehension skills. I wouldn't argue that one person can know intuitively what it's like to walk in someone else's shoes, but there's no reason they can't be taught. It seems to me that the purpose of these statements is to shut down communication and to elevate the status of the person claiming to have "unknowable" experience above that of the person who's allegedly too dim to understand.
In discussions of privilege, I think it would be helpful to distinguish among three different types of privilege.
1. Freedom from externally-imposed oppression
2. Freedom from natural obstacles
3. Freedom from self-repression
Let's say, for example, that a privilege you have that I don't is that you're the kind of a person who can go to a gym to lift weights and I'm not. What does that really mean? Well, we have to ask why I can't. If the gym has a policy of only approving memberships for serious bodybuilders like you and not for fat guys like me, then that's an example of externally-imposed oppression. If I'm paralyzed from the nose down, or if I'm stranded on an island where there is no gym, then I'm physically incapable of going to a gym to lift weights. That would be an example of a natural obstacle. If it turns out there is a gym nearby that I can get to and afford, and they'd be happy to have me, but I don't go because I feel self-conscious about working out in front of other people because I imagine they're judging me, then that's an example of self-repression.
Dividing obstacles into these three categories would help us to better identify whom, if anyone, is to blame for a particular problem and what, if anything, can be done about it. Despite all reassurances to the contrary, the label of privilege has been weaponized. It's used to shame others into silence, or to invalidate their opinions. We need tools for determining whether that's ever actually justified, and for demonstrating when it's not.
People consider reading books to be a virtue, but watching TV and movies to be a vice. Even reading on the internet gets trashed while books are sanctified. Why is that? Why don't we refer to people who lay around on the couch reading books all day as lazy or addicted, rather than studious? If you're talking about great books and trashy TV programs, then of course, you're comparing the best to the worst, but it's about content, not medium. I don't see how reading trashy romance novels is superior to watching, say, a documentary or a TED talk. What is the particular virtue of taking in printed-on-paper words through your eyeballs instead of taking in spoken words through your ears? Personally, I find instructive videos to be of far greater educational value than written instructions. I like to see a thing demonstrated.
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