Spencer Critchley

democracy

The State of Democracy: An Online Discussion

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I thought I’d try having an “Ask Anything” discussion on Zoom, focused on what’s happened to our democracy and what we might be coming next. I think it worked out really well, with great questions and ideas from the participants, and plan to do it again. Here it is:

Excerpt:

[The behavior of Republican elected officials] is a massive failure of character, is the short answer.

And politics is always different from ordinary life because these people are elected to represent their districts, and sometimes that means they go along with things that they don’t personally agree with. But if you think about it, there’s a legitimate way for that to happen, because they are supposed to be representatives of the voters who put them there — not just doing what they personally think is the right thing — and the challenge of being an ethical politician is balancing those two things. So you have to represent your voters.

But you have to do it without betraying your core principles. Where I think this crosses the line is actually, I think, fairly clear. It’s just that we’ve lost the ability to talk about morality with clarity.

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Limbaugh’s Inferno

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If a thing is wrong, but profitable and legal, someone will do it. Rush Limbaugh has gotten very rich by exploiting his listeners’ ignorance and fear, leaving them knowing less and hating more every day. And he’s doing it even now, no matter the cost to the democracy whose freedoms make it possible — as you can see in this excerpt from his Inauguration Day show, via Media Matters for America.

Gustave Doré: Hoarders and wasters with money bags in the 4th circle of Hell.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But what must it be like for him? Imagine being condemned to spend every moment of your life with someone who would do what he does for money. In other words, for him to be trapped with himself. And when he looks around, to see only the kind of people who want to be with someone like him.

No wonder he seems to have such a low opinion of humanity.

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A Good Man

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Joe Biden smiling broadly and warmly while greeting people
Joe Biden photo by Spencer Critchley

With his experience, knowledge, and skills, Joe Biden will be one of the most qualified presidents in history. He will also be one of the best-liked by virtually everyone who has encountered him.

He is a thoroughly good man.

And by itself that will make a transformational difference. Leadership isn’t about what you impose on people, it’s about what you summon from them.

The Revolution Reenacters

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The Capitol rioters and their supporters seem to think they’re reenacting the American Revolution. They’re about as close to the real thing as Civil War reenacters are.

The Gadsden Flag: "Don't tread on me."
Christopher Gadsden (1724–1805), Lexicon, Vikrum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Actually, strike that. I understand many Civil War reenacters are careful students of American history.

The Revolution reenacters don’t seem to know much of anything about American history, beyond what fits on the Gadsden flag. And even that they misunderstand. The “me” in “Don’t tread on me” meant the united colonies, not the lone “me” at the center of the narcissist’s universe.

Neither do they show much understanding of the conservatism they claim to believe in. Conservatism advocates individual liberty, but it must be “ordered,” so as to protect the other individuals who make up a society. As conservative forefather John Stuart Mill prescribed in his classic On Liberty: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

That’s very different from unbounded selfishness.

And so with the Constitution they supposedly revere. It was designed to promote both private and public freedom, both the “Blessings of Liberty” and the “General Welfare.” Getting that point only requires reading the first paragraph:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And the Second Amendment to that Constitution? While gun control advocates may be disappointed to hear that the Founders did recognize the right to bear arms as a crucial guarantor of liberty, the Second Amendment’s phrase “well-regulated militia” was crucial. In no way did the Founders think everyone had an unregulated right to guns. An excellent, unbiased source on this is A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origin of Gun Control in America, by Saul Cornell — as is any open-minded study of primary sources. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 29:

If a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation and at the disposal of that body which is constituted the guardian of the national security.

But no, the reenacters don’t understand such things, or simply don’t believe in them.

The real Revolutionaries fought a monarch to establish a democracy. The Revolution reenacters fight democracy to establish a monarch.

The democracy born of the real Revolution was based on equality, and it defeated an uprising by slave-owners.

The Revolution reenacters wave the Confederate flag with their Gadsen flag.

It’s time for them to take off their “patriotic” costumes.

They aren’t reenacting the Revolution, they’re attacking it.

How You Can Both Love and Hate the Police: Trumpism as Dream Logic

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One of the most confounding things about Trump supporters, never more than now, is their comfort with mutually contradictory beliefs.

  • They love and hate the police (some will even beat a cop with a Thin Blue Line flag).
  • They’re committed to moral values and to an immoral leader.
  • They believe the election was rigged, since Trump lost, and that it wasn’t, since other Republicans won.

And so on.

Alice and the Red Queen, in Through the Looking Glass
In “Through the Looking Glass,” the Red Queen tells Alice “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Image by John Tenniel via Wikimedia Commons

Of course, Trumpists aren’t alone in being inconsistent. Think of the widespread belief in homeopathic medicine among people who also believe in facts and logic.

But in Trumpism, the self-contradictions are so radical that they seem to be of a different order. And I think they are.

We tend to assume that people with irrational beliefs are simply mistaken, or have been tricked.

But what if irrationality is what they want? What if they want to live in a dream?

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