If money is speech, my taxes' supporting Trump violates my First Amendment rights

Let me say at the outset that the argument here is a full-throated objection to the oligarchic notion that money is speech, not an advocacy of designating how one's taxes may be used.(1) If money was speech, then the slave-holding landholders of Socrates' time would have had more "speech" than the nearly penniless philosopher.

If taxes to the "president" is supportive "speech," then that violates the First Amendment principle that communicative freedom includes not only the right to think and speak freely, but to refuse to utter anything abhorrent to one's thought and principles.

Another point is that we are in the position of a hypothetical young German liberal, Hildetrude Weineck, born in Jena in 1910. Hildetrude was as opposed to Nazism as any of us, and voted against Hitler (just as we voted against Trump last year) when he was elected Chancellor on January 30, 1933. She was 23.

Hildetrude was powerless to stop Hitler's barbarous policies—Kristallnacht, the Gleichschaltung, the Endlösung, and the suicidal initiation of a war against both the Soviet Union and the United States—just as we are unable, at least at present, to stop the cruel and unspeakable barbarities of the witless liar now usurping the Oval Office. But she suffered right along with the guilty.

We liberals who support the Enlightenment ideals of the Founding find ourselves in what Andrew Sullivan calls the "Caligula phase of the collapse of the American republic." Sullivan recounts a conversation with a retiree on a recent flight.

At one point, I gingerly indicated that I didn’t exactly share the views of his neighbors. “Oh I understand,” he said. “My wife is always telling me never to talk about religion or politics with strangers, but I can’t help myself.” No problem, I told him. I do it all the time too. Then he leaned in, pushed his wire eyeglasses up his nose, and looked straight into my eyes. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “This president will be the greatest president we have ever had in our entire history.”

We are involuntarily complicit. Our "speech" supports a bigot who slanders fellow North Americans by saying, "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." We're subject to the indignity of having our representative before the world degrade and demean an international religious leader who criticized him: “For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful.” We are all too aware that the rest of the world is witnessing the cruelty of an alt-right government doing its very best to condemn millions of its citizens to lives of illness, disability, incapacity, and agonizing premature death by stealing their health care funds in order to aggrandize the obscenely rich.

As Sullivan added, "I have a hard time figuring out how this ends, even though it must end."

But please do not forget, This is not all we are. When the immigration executive order placed "the leader of the free world" in the third world position of refusing to honor its own visas, and the "president" mocked the leader who wept at the utterly pointless suffering of families and children, at airports all over the country hundreds of lawyers came and volunteered their assistance.

This is a crisis of the Republic. The more the laws and the norms and the guardrails fail, the more it is up to us. We are the people.


*-**

(1)  While it would be nice if each taxpayer could slice and dice their taxes so as to pay only for public enterprises they approve, it's unworkable. The objection of pacifists to funding the army, and of people who are not into sports to public funding of stadiums, does not make sequestering taxes for actions one does not support practicable.

On Fresh Air: A founding principle of Enlightenment liberalism

Monday's transcript of Terry Gross' Fresh Air, interviewing Tom Hicks on his new book Churchill And Orwell: The Fight For Freedom, quoted his conclusion: "The fundamental driver of Western civilization is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter." (Emphasis added)

Remember the central problem of our current politics—that conservatism in its current form, in Congress, is driven by a rigid ideology and won't listen to the American majority? Instead of a Republican party which constitutes the loyal opposition characteristic of democracy, we have a totalitarian mindset which is "alien to any dialogue":

The tragedy of Marxist teaching is that it is alien to any dialogue. Marxism only conducted a monologue and never listened. It was always right...always claiming to know everything and to be able to do everything, thus proving its totalitarian essence. - Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia, p. 8.

"I alone can fix it," Trump declared in his nomination acceptance speech, "claiming to know everything and to be able to do everything."

"People of goodwill can perceive [reality] ... other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter." The foundation of democracy is our common experience of the world. The foundation of democratic prudence is that all citizens, no matter what their "beliefs," will honor evidence by changing their views when those views are shown not to comport with reality.

This is one of Enlightenment liberalism's most fundamental principles. It is echoed when the Declaration (a representative Enlightenment document) proclaims, "let facts be submitted to a candid world." But it is one of the ways the illiberal left disagrees with democratic principle. A tendency toward radical skepticism is shown in a recent post which noted rejection of the rule of law; privileging narratives on ad hominem rather than factual grounds; and claiming there are no neutral, objective claims about the world. On campus, postmodernism denied the relation between reality and language in Derrida's "There is nothing outside the text." (A scholar joked that a postmodernist is someone who spends the day telling students that language cannot refer to reality, then leaves a message on his wife's answering machine asking if he should pick up a pizza on the way home.)

This is not a separate problem of left politics and right politics, but prior. It stems from the ideological cast both have assumed. Ideology privileges belief over reality and, lacking any true principles, will opportunistically assert either omniscient knowledge—Trump claiming to be able to fix everything above—or deny the possibility of knowledge—Trump recently suggested that “nobody really knows” if climate change exists.

Foundation on cognitive prudence—objective reality exists and tends to make it possible for people of good will to agree and work together—is not just a principle of Enlightenment liberalism. The Enlightenment was the birth of "our universal civilization." Mr. Ricks concludes by arguing that holding that objective reality tops the dogmas of ideology. Right ideology and left ideology have no legitimate claim whatsoever, because ideology is inherently unprincipled:

If there's anything I have to say I learned from this experience of reading and re-reading thousands upon thousands of words by Churchill and Orwell over the last three and half years, it's that. That's my conclusion - that this is the essence of Western society and, at its best, how Western society operates.

And it's - you can really reduce it to a formula. First of all, you need to have principles. You need to stand by those principles and remember them. Second, you need to look at reality to observe facts and not just have opinions and to say, what are the facts of the matter? Third, you need to act upon those facts according to your principles.

The Filipino Bunkhouse

In  “My Family’s Slave,” which appeared in The Atlantic a few days ago, Alex Tizon described how "Lola" immigrated to America with his family as a de facto slave and remained in that status for the rest of her life. "It took Tizon a while to realize his family had a slave," Jesse Singal reports in New York Magazine, "and he then spent the rest of his life grappling with what that meant about him and his parents." Singal continues, "One category of response, though, seems to have picked up a bunch of steam online — that the story is simply bad because it “normalizes” or “apologizes for” slavery."

Singal argues below that "all of us" could have found ourselves in a circumstance resembling Tizon's situation. I did.

I spent a portion of my K-12 years wintering in a fishing village in the Alaskan bush, and attending a one-room school with a dozen pupils. There was a salmon cannery, closed except for a caretaker during the winter, a long walk from one end of the village. One spring a classmate told me, laughing, how a Filipino from the cannery had drawn his attention to a "McPie," that is, a magpie as pronounced in a Tagalog accent.

Decades later I had a Filipino supervisor, who told me he had campaigned against the segregation of Filipinos in Alaskan salmon canneries. I knew about them — the "Filipino bunkhouse" in most Kodiak Island canneries — and never realized the ethical problem. Nor did my classmate, himself an Alaska native. "We do what the people around us are doing, what our culture is doing."

 

When one realizes that what Arendt called "the banality of evil"(1) can touch any of us, Singal's humane objection to the knee-jerk ideological condemnation of Tizon's courageous last work, below, stands as corrective to the present climate. Singal:

All of us — I really mean this; I really mean you and your family and everyone you love — could, in a different historical context, have been a slaver or a Holocaust-perpetrator or at the very least decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to contest these grotesque crimes. Because that’s the human condition: We don’t have easy access to a zoomed-out view of morality and empathy. We do what the people around us are doing, what our culture is doing.

I don't know about you, but the idealistic teenager I was lived comfortably with the Filipino bunkhouse, because everybody around me did.

 

(Excerpts (2) and (3) from Singal below.)

-*--

(1) In Eichmann in Jerusalem: "One doctor remarked that his overall attitude towards other people, especially his family and friends, was "highly desirable", while another remarked that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more "normal" in his habits and speech than the average person."

(2) "One of the key themes of Tizons’ article is that his family was, in many senses, almost a caricature of the striving, American-dream-seeking immigrant experience. They were normal. They were normal and yet they had a slave. To which one could respond, “Well, no, they’re not normal — they are deranged psychopaths to have managed to simply live for decades and decades with a slave under their roof. That is not something normal people do, and it’s wrong to portray it as such.”"

(3) "But the entire brutal weight of human history contradicts this view. Normal people — people who otherwise have no signs of derangement or a lack of a grip on basic human moral principles — do evil stuff all the time. One could write millions of pages detailing all the times when evil acts were perpetrated, abetted, or not resisted by people who were, in every other respect, perfectly normal. It’s safe to say, to a certain approximation, that all of us — I really mean this; I really mean you and your family and everyone you love — could, in a different historical context, have been a slaver or a Holocaust-perpetrator or at the very least decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to contest these grotesque crimes. Because that’s the human condition: We don’t have easy access to a zoomed-out view of morality and empathy. We do what the people around us are doing, what our culture is doing."

Was "Newsroom"s portrayal of the social system its real offense?

In two previous articles on Sorkin's "The Newsroom," Why did "The Newsroom" offend progressives? and "Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate", we noted that this parody of television news aroused considerable opposition, partly for criticizing news-as-entertainment rather than news-as-information. Although the overt theme was the undemocratic nature of movement conservatism and particularly the Tea Party ("The American Taliban"), most of the criticism found in Google searches seemed to be by an outraged left. The subtext of TNR's criticism of the present's domineering right was an implicit something which hit "the illiberal left" (Jonathan Chait) right where it lives. 

That something may have been a tectonic shift in the American social system. Social systems are no better than the public and civil culture under which they operate. Under the norms of civility, "actions in public" operate in a warm, tolerant, convivial climate. They honor the third right mentioned in the Declaration: the pursuit of happiness. Under the progressive norm of "struggle" against polymorphic wickedness, you have a fear society.

Tocqueville spoke of the "habits of the heart" (that shape our daily unconscious choices and actions) which made Democracy in America work in his time. In The Ordeal of Civility John Murray Cuddihy said that a society's true values are revealed in those manners we call civility. In a liberal society social customs are humane; have a sense of justice; are benignly tolerant. College students can have bull sessions—free-ranging discussions in which just about anything goes—without fear of being accused of microaggressions.

That tectonic shift may be shown in the change in popular music. The lyrics of our more civil past may look "sentimental" to the tough-minded mind-set of our bleak and ever more fearful present. The "warm, tolerant, convivial climate" strikes both the progressive and the alt-right as inauthentic, even nauseating.

"Moonlight Bay" resonated with the people we once were:

We were sailing along
On Moonlight Bay.
We could hear the voices ringing;
They seemed to say,
"You have stolen her heart"
"Now don't go 'way!"
As we sang Love's Old Sweet Song
On Moonlight Bay.

Imagine a song today which implies our human responsibility for those we attract. But just think of it—it implies a connection. Maybe it would lessen our desperate need for safe spaces.

Or a song having the range of "Silver threads among the gold":

Darling, I am growing old,
Silver threads among the gold,
Shine upon my brow today,
Life is fading fast away.
But, my darling, you will be,
Always young and fair to me,
Yes, my darling, you will be
Always young and fair to me.

The lyrics benignly encompass both youth and age, which they seem to calmly accept, as they seem to accept the prospect that the narrator will soon "go the way of all the earth."(1)

The Lawrence Welk show's Larry Hooper, a lanky, homely, likable feller, once gave a rueful rendition of "Somebody Stole My Gal":

Gee, but I'm lonesome, lonesome and blue.
I've found out something I never knew.
I know now what it means to be sad,
For I've lost the best gal I ever had;
She only left yesterday, Somebody stole her away.

Somebody stole my gal,
Somebody made off with my pal, ...
And gee, I know that she,
Would come to me
If she could see,
Her broken hearted lonesome pal,
Somebody stole my gal! ...

My old love
Sure is an angel, take it from me
And she's all the angel I want to see
Maybe she'll come back some day
All I can do now is pray.

That's what the prevailing voice once was, before the "me" generation. He doesn't blame her, or her new guy. His soul is large enough to encompass her, her "somebody," and the very human situation in which they find themselves. The whole situation, under the aspect of magnanimity of soul, is graced with meaning. He is not damaged, but yearning, and yearning is an affirmation of hope.

Reviewing "American Graffiti," the late film critic Roger Ebert noted the change in our music, as we discussed awhile back:

What characterizes a liberal society is yearning, because yearning is the entryway to ideals and aspirations; and because the dream is for all (see meliorism, above) it is pure and untainted. “The music was as innocent as the time,” Ebert wrote:

Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later.

The founding liberals thought in terms of a transformation of the whole world (see universalism, above). Thomas Paine proclaimed, “I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness.” The music of yearning had been replaced by a music of decadence and aggression, folly and baseness. For example, by the Rolling Stones:

You can't come back and think you are still mine / You're out of touch, my baby / My poor discarded baby / I said, baby, baby, baby, you're out of time.

“My solemn belief of your cause,” Paine added, “is, that it is hellish and damnable, and, under that conviction, every thinking man's heart must fail him.”

In January 2015, Jonathan Chait described aspects of our changed social culture. Elements include the belief of some progressives that speech may be censored if it creates a “hostile environment,” or constitutes a thought-crime. It is hard to imagine the above music able to survive alongside "the culture of taking offense" reported:

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the fuck up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs.

This might appear to be the sort of episode that would stoke the moral conscience of students on a progressive campus like Ann Arbor, and it was quickly agreed that an act of biased intimidation had taken place. But Mahmood was widely seen as the perpetrator rather than the victim. His column, published in the school’s conservative newspaper, had spoofed the culture of taking offense that pervades the campus. Mahmood satirically pretended to denounce “a white cis-gendered hetero upper-class man” who offered to help him up when he slipped, leading him to denounce “our barbaric attitude toward people of left-handydnyss.” The gentle tone of his mockery was closer to Charlie Brown than to Charlie Hebdo.

The Michigan Daily, where Mahmood also worked as a columnist and film critic, objected to the placement of his column in the conservative paper but hardly wanted his satirical column in its own pages. Mahmood later said that he was told by the editor that his column had created a “hostile environment,” in which at least one Daily staffer felt threatened, and that he must write a letter of apology to the staff. When he refused, the Daily fired him, and the subsequent vandalism of his apartment served to confirm his status as thought-criminal.

Chait's recent The ‘Shut It Down!’ Left and the War on the Liberal Mind is also recommended for further reading.


-*--

(1) 1 Kings 2:2 KJV: I go the way of all the earth: be thou strong therefore ...

The wisdom of the Oath of Office: It places a spotlight on those who swear falsely

Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic recently asked, in LawFareBlog.com, What happens when the judiciary doesn't trust the president's oath?

This weblog, in late February, described the Oath of Office recently taken by the present occupant of the White House as perjurious, The acceptance of the president-elect's supposedly solemn affirmation, the argument asserted, revealed that we have come to regard an important constitutional safeguard as a meaningless ritual:

The oath of office was meant to screen out anyone who had no intention of maintaining the order(1) of a constitutional democracy:

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

The inadequacy of this provision is that it assumes that the Electoral College would not make an unprincipled scoundrel president of the United States. As Bruce Schneier reported earlier in this post, the honorable Mr. Trump made "purposeless, false and inflammatory statements before Congress." Newsmax noted yesterday, "New York Times Headline Once Again Calls Trump a Liar." Add to this the disrespect for the law involved in denigrating any judge who places the Constitution above the diktat of a government official; and the disrespect for the First Amendment revealed by the practice of declaring the media the enemy of the American people, and it should be clear that the charlatan in the Oval Office swore perjuriously.
The problem isn't that these guardrails failed. The problem is us. If we had believed in the values of liberal democracy, we wouldn't have voted for a known unfit by the millions. If we believed in our values, we would not have treated the oath of office as a meaningless ritual.

Wittes and Jurecic's discussion suggests that the Oath, far from meaningless, is having significant effect down the line. In so doing, they took the question to a deeper level. The Oath of Office is an affirmation of "civic virtue." "We think," they reasoned, "the answer lies in judicial suspicion of Trump’s oath." (Emphasis added) Then the condition of the Republic requires us to:

Imagine a world in which other actors have no expectation of civic virtue from the President and thus no concept of deference to him. Imagine a world in which the words of the President are not presumed to carry any weight.

In this situation, the "legal debate, ... about both the propriety of the President’s [immigration] order and the propriety of the judicial responses to it," reflects the problem of his ethics and his credibility:

It goes, not to put too fine a point on it, to the question of whether the judiciary means to actually treat Trump as a real president or, conversely, as some kind of accident—a person who somehow ended up in the office but is not quite the President of the United States in the sense that we would previously have recognized.

Wittes and Jurecic have thus moved the debate over the crisis of the Presidency from politics to principle. Presidency is a matter of deference; and deference cannot be accorded if the person behind the desk is manifestly lacking in civic virtue.

"What happens when people—including judges—don’t take the President’s oath of office seriously?" The perjurious presidential oath of office may have been recognized as disqualifying the "President." His lack of civic virtue means that there is "thus no concept of deference to him" ... [and] "the words of the President are not presumed to carry any weight." If so, Trump is not the strongest, but the weakest president in history.


 -*--

(1) Lincoln believed that he could not allow the South to secede, thus depriving the U.S. citizens living there of the protection of the Constitution, and yet be faithful to the Oath of Office: "You have no oath in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it."

Imagine an uplifting presence in the Oval Office

[Note captured ten years ago]: A passage from Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity illustrates the intellectual sensibility in action. He and his researchers had (because of failure to check the literature) appeared to claim credit for originating methods actually developed by others:

  One of our students, Bernd Bruegmann, had come to my office
  with a very disturbed look on his face. [...] There was no
  avoiding the fact that the method we had developed was quite
  close to the one that Gambini and Trias had already been
  using for several years in their work on QCD. [...]

  With a heavy heart we did the only thing we could, which was
  to sit down and write them a very apologetic letter. We
  heard nothing from them until one afternoon in Trento, when
  Carlo got a phone call from Barcelona. [...] They [...] asked
  if we would still be there tomorrow. The next morning they
  arrived, having driven most of the night across France and
  northern Italy. We spent a wonderful day showing each other
  our work, which was thankfully complementary. [Gambini ...]
  in the next few months [...] invented a new approach to doing
  calculations in loop quantum gravity.

This illustrates the liberal virtues of selflessness, candidness, love of knowledge, and passionate desire for optimum outcomes. This is the idealism implied in George Washington's concern for the "public good" (see his inaugural address and his farewell address).

It's related to what Olivia Judson wrote a year later:

The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence — or indeed, evidence of any kind — has permeated the Bush administration’s policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.
Moreover, since the science classroom is where a contempt for evidence is often first encountered, it is also arguably where it first begins to be cultivated. A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry. [...]
But for me, the most important thing about studying evolution is something less tangible. It’s that the endeavor contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment.

"An attitude toward evidence" is liberating and can contain "a profound optimism." There were people in our culture who objected to "The Martian" because it was a narrative of the capacity of human intelligence to master nature through problem solving (much as Robinson Crusoe did). The politics of anti-science, which has antecedents in Plato's rejection of the empirical, and of treating truth as "problematic," is a failure of nerve regarding evidence, and its fruits are pessimism and, carried to an extreme, nihilism. "A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry." A society where the Chief Executive has a snowballing credibility problem can destabilize the public order and delegitimize its own government.

Also ten years ago, Stephen Pinker noted the tendency to regard propositional statements (such as "all people are created equal") as loyalty oaths: "People have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally depraved."

Intellectual intimidation, whether by sword or by pen, inevitably shapes the ideas that are taken seriously in a given era, and the rear-view mirror of history presents us with a warning.
Time and again, people have invested factual claims with ethical implications that today look ludicrous. [...] The foisting of "intelligent design" on biology students is a contemporary one. These travesties should lead us to ask whether the contemporary intellectual mainstream might be entertaining similar moral delusions. Are we enraged by our own infidels and heretics whom history may some day vindicate? [...] When done right, science (together with other truth-seeking institutions, such as history and journalism) characterizes the world as it is, without regard to whose feelings get hurt. [...] the intellectual blinkers that humans tend to don when they split into factions. People have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally depraved. Debates between members of the coalitions can make things even worse, because when the other side fails to capitulate to one's devastating arguments, it only proves they are immune to reason. In this regard, it's disconcerting to see the two institutions that ought to have the greatest stake in ascertaining the truth -- academia and government -- often blinkered by morally tinged ideologies. [...] It's hard to imagine any aspect of public life where ignorance or delusion is better than an awareness of the truth, even an unpleasant one. Only children and madmen engage in "magical thinking," the fallacy that good things can come true by believing in them or bad things will disappear by ignoring them or wishing them away. (Emphasis added)

When the Oval Office is under the Babylonian captivity of an incompetent pretender obsessively engaged in "magical thinking," where news articles are beginning to use "unhinged" as a reasonable description, the ability to rise to a reasonable response to real crises is increasingly in doubt. Imagine the vulgar disgusting person who now represents our nation to the world driving "most of the night across France and northern Italy" because of idealism and the love of knowledge. Imagine "a wonderful day" devoted to what is inspiring. Imagine that our government once again included someone who could say, "We choose [to do these] things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

A Lifetime Underminer of the National Order Is Now Charged with Maintaining It

As Bruce Schneier wrote four years ago, we have a trust-based society. "In today’s society, we need to trust not only people, but institutions and systems. ... All complex ecosystems require cooperation." As illustration of this principle, "When I used an ATM this morning ... I trusted the national banking system to debit the proper amount from my bank account back home." You can put a VISA card from a west coast credit union in a Berlin ATM and extract the expected number of Euros.

Schneier added that societies contain unscrupulous individuals—parasites—who predate on the cooperative structure of our worldwide civilization:

In any cooperative system, there also exists an alternative parasitical strategy. Examples include tapeworms in your digestive tract, thieves in a market, spammers on e-mail, and people who refuse to pay their taxes. These parasites can only survive if they’re not too successful. That is, if their number gets too large or too powerful, the underlying system collapses.

The essential role of the national government, and particularly its presiding official, is to oversee the ethical order delineated in the Constitution, and thus, to administer(1) a rule of law within which we can enjoy “the benign influence of good laws under a free government.”

Donald Trump's lifetime record is that of a con artist who successfully subverted the public order for his own profit. He stiffed employees, subcontractors, minorities, and regulators, and lied about it. His actions were contrary to the public good, and by implication detrimental to our government. He profited from the order by undermining it, and now he has acceded to the office meant to uphold it—a task for which he is calamitously unfit.

Last August, Kurt Eichenwald wrote:

... Trump was denigrating Native Americans before Congress, ... (In 2000, Trump won a contract to manage the casino for the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, but after Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts declared bankruptcy in 2004, the tribe paid Trump $6 million to go away.) ... His purposeless, false and inflammatory statements before Congress, ... alienated politicians from around the country, ... Lost contracts, bankruptcies, defaults, deceptions and indifference to investors—Trump’s business career is a long, long list of such troubles, according to regulatory, corporate and court records, as well as sworn testimony and government investigative reports. ... Trump is willing to claim success even when it is not there, according to his own statements. “I’m just telling you, you wouldn’t say that you're failing,” he said in a 2007 deposition when asked to explain why he would give an upbeat assessment of his business even if it was in trouble. “If somebody said, ‘How you doing?’ you're going to say you're doing good.” Perhaps such dissembling is fine in polite cocktail party conversation, but in the business world it’s called lying. ... Trump’s many misrepresentations of his successes and his failures matter—a lot. As a man who has never held so much as a city council seat, there is little voters can examine to determine if he is competent to hold office. ... He sells himself as qualified to run the country because he is a businessman who knows how to get things done, ... And while Trump has had a few successes in business, most of his ventures have been disasters. (Emphasis added)

As for the way businessman Trump stiffed the public before he became our so-called president:

USA TODAY exclusive: Hundreds allege Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills—Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will "protect your job." But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.

At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.

Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages.

In addition to the lawsuits, the review found more than 200 mechanic’s liens — filed by contractors and employees against Trump, his companies or his properties claiming they were owed money for their work — since the 1980s. The liens range from a $75,000 claim by a Plainview, N.Y., air conditioning and heating company to a $1 million claim from the president of a New York City real estate banking firm. On just one project, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, records released by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1990 show that at least 253 subcontractors weren’t paid in full or on time, including workers who installed walls, chandeliers and plumbing.

“Let’s say that they do a job that’s not good, or a job that they didn’t finish, or a job that was way late. I’ll deduct from their contract, absolutely. That’s what the country should be doing.”

The Framers of the Constitution instituted measures intended to prevent an unfit person from ascending to the presidency. First, one of the checks and balances was the provision that the Congress could impeach an unfit president. Article II of the United States Constitution states in Section 4 that "The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors." They failed to anticipate that both Houses of Congress should be under the domination of a faction which places party over country.

Second, the oath of office was meant to screen out anyone who had no intention of maintaining the order(2) of a constitutional democracy:

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

The inadequacy of this provision is that it assumes that the Electoral College would not make an unprincipled scoundrel president of the United States. As Bruce Schneier reported earlier in this post, the honorable Mr. Trump made "purposeless, false and inflammatory statements before Congress." Newsmax noted yesterday, "New York Times Headline Once Again Calls Trump a Liar." Add to this the disrespect for the law involved in denigrating any judge who places the Constitution above the diktat of a government official; and the disrespect for the First Amendment revealed by the practice of declaring the media the enemy of the American people, and it should be clear that the charlatan in the Oval Office swore perjuriously.

The problem isn't that these guardrails failed. The problem is us. If we had believed in the values of liberal democracy, we wouldn't have voted for a known unfit by the millions. If we believed in our values, we would not have treated the oath of office as a meaningless ritual.

***
(1) Steve Bannon at CPAC: Trump Will Pursue “Deconstruction of the Administrative State”

(2) Lincoln believed that he could not allow the South to secede, thus depriving the U.S. citizens living there of the protection of the Constitution, and yet be faithful to the Oath of Office: "You have no oath in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it."

Why did "The Newsroom" offend progressives?

Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom,"(1) in three seasons beginning in 2012, took on reality TV, explicitly denounced the tea party as an enormous danger to American democracy,(2) and argued that the news should be "information that's needed in the voting booth." Episode 3 of the first season in several ways forecast a degeneration of movement conservatism which could lead to a so-called president Trump.

Yet Google search, of "The Newsroom review" and "The Newsroom criticism," finds intense criticism mainly from "progressives," including references to "hate watching." "The Newsroom," by the criteria which separate Enlightenment liberalism from the outlook of the left, is one of the most liberal television presentations in recent memory. It is idealistic, concerned for the public good, supports the humanitarian safety net, exemplifies the long range power of ideas (and love of language), supports the intentional moral order delineated by the Constitution, honors the dignity and privacy of the citizen, and speaks freely and without fear.

You would think that a series which includes a number of devastating indictments of today's Republicans, and exemplifies Jeffersonian democracy, would appeal to the progressive left. Why didn't it? Perhaps some of the progressive critiques provide a clue. Verne Gay says "The Newsroom" "actually cares passionately and deeply," but also critiques it for daring to laud an old fashioned moral order:

It's shot through with a 1930s-'40s screwball love-will-conquer-all zest, with rat-a-tat dialogue that zips along at 75 mph. There are distant echoes of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" ... Frank Capra could've written this, and, in a sense, already has. "The Newsroom" is very old-fashioned -- which may be its chief appeal.
Yet at moments it can also be a proxy for Sorkin's politics. He is the off-screen Lord High executioner, who dispatches his enemies -- like the Koch brothers or the Tea Party -- scene by scene, or speech by windy speech.

Other critiques are often vague. The real issue, which is evaded, is cynical objection to pre-60s American idealism. "The Newsroom" has specific references to Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" liberal idealism and public-spiritedness. The aura of tribute to forgotten grandeur lingers over it, complemented by references to the noble futility of Don Quixote.

"The Newsroom" has the most devastating savaging of the sullenly bigoted idiocies of the Tea Party and movement conservatism to be found on mass media, yet its left derogators focus on silly arguments against presenting the news as it should be rather than as it is. Why the total surrender to conformism?

"The Newsroom" nailed the reactionary nature of the tea party in its discussion of  "The American Taliban." Its discussion of "America is the Greatest Nation" placed the meme in its rightful context: Manifest Destiny; and The White Man's Burden. "The Newsroom" gave MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) an early scene in which she owned Will McAvoy. Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn) is the smartest person in the organization.
 
The critics went with male dominance. There are far more criticisms, of conduct by male Republicans that is harmful to the public good, than of mean social standards in which women may play a part; but the fact that Sorkin dares to criticize, for example, soap opera gossip, is treated as proof of sexism. Margaret Lyons:

Within the Aaron Sorkin world, there's no insult more grave than being a woman. "I'm concerned about the rest of us being turned into a bunch of old ladies with hair-dryers on our heads," Will snapped at one of his dates on Sunday's episode. That's his nightmare, his fear: that our culture has become too invested in gossip or reality TV, which are feminine concerns. ... [as is] the nightmarish senselessness of a fashion TV show.
... Will's boss and mentor Charlie scolds him in "Fix" for dating women "he'd never want to spend daylight hours with." Because it's degrading? Disrespectful? Objectifying? Because it's patronizing? Cruel? Selfish? No, no: Because Will deserves better. Will can be petty, nasty, and immature, but the show insists that he's still worthy of an enormous amount of respect. But that inherent dignity doesn't extend to any of the female characters.
"Fix" seemed to be about how fashion is dumb and news is smart, how gossip is a social cancer and cable news is noble, ... Will's dates all know about one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, but Will can't be bothered because he's too busy covering stories from many months before. ...

"The Newsroom" took on:

• The entertainment media takedown.
• The immediate appearance of a wrathful self-righteous witch hunt mob at any act or utterance which deviates in the slightest from identity politics/class warfare orthodoxy.
• A media site which prefers rating worst movies to rating best movies.
• News-as-entertainment (lurid hurricane reports; "what's going on with the McRib"; Angelina vows revenge after Brad dalliance; Tot Mom's secret beau; love child dumped on star's mother; you won't believe what child actor looks like now).
• Mean, petty, uncivilized practices.
• Reductivism, as when a gossip columnist tells a journalist, "After all, we're in the same business."
• Disrespect for dignity and privacy, as in the readiness to call out others, particularly if they're guilty of being prominent or wealthy.

It was fashionable to denigrate "The Newsroom" as moralistic and self-righteous. (One is reminded of those whose hopefully inquired, after the cleansing shock of 9/11, "Is this the end of irony?") "The Newsroom" foretold the lizard-brained era of Trump's alternative truth. It's true that truth is disrespectful of the Liar-In-Chief who has usurped the Oval Office; still, truth is the most valuable resource of Homo sapiens ("Thinking human"). (If you think that truth is political, you have greater problems than can be resolved by reading an article that dissents from the Received Wisdom.)

Newsroom's Charlie Skinner dares to say, "I'm too old to be governed by fear of dumb people." As Bill Brioux writes:

Sorkin’s complaint about America is that intelligence is in a semi-apologetic retreat, while emotionalism and stupidity are on the rise—in public policy and in the media. He’s setting up an ideal. He is an ethical writer—a moralist, if you like. He’s neither ironic nor self-deprecating; he dislikes that part of our derisive culture which undercuts, as a ritual form of defense, any kind of seriousness. He’s a very witty entertainer who believes that there’s a social value in truth. I don’t think this belief should be confused, as it has been recently, with self-righteousness.

The Writer's Almanac for February 14 reported on something Carl Bernstein, of Woodward and Bernstein, wrote in 1992:

“For, next to race, the story of the contemporary American media is the great uncovered story in America today. We need to start asking the same fundamental questions about the press that we do of the other powerful institutions in this society — about who is served, about standards, about self-interest and its eclipse of the public interest and the interest of truth. For the reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today; and they are squandering their power and ignoring their obligation. They — or more precisely, we — have abdicated our responsibility, and the consequence of our abdication is the spectacle, and the triumph, of the idiot culture.” (Emphasis added)

"The Newsroom" promoted Frank Capra/Don Quixote idealism; naive, sentimental public-spiritedness; thinking (and writing) fearlessly; the vital importance of truth and good information to a democracy; respect for dignity, privacy, and autonomy; and indifference to orthodoxy. It criticized gossip columns and TV shows dedicated to gossip; the associated glee for the "takedown" of prominent or successful public figures; news-as-entertainment; and mean, petty, uncivilized social practices.

It is telling that the progressive left responded with indignation. Their blindness to "tectonic shifts" was a large part of changes in American character which made possible the elevation of a totally unfit charlatan to the presidency.


(1) See "Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate", April 2016
(2) See "The American Taliban"

Gorsuch's shifty, deceptive logic on "cultural" issues

Jeffrey Rosen recently evaluated Neil Gorsuch's qualifications for the Supreme Court.

As discussed in Rosen's article, Attorney Gorsuch's logic about a human taking a human life contradicts itself:

His approach to the issue is ... “premised on the idea that all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

But:

Gorsuch stresses that “my argument, based on secular moral theory, is consistent with the common law and long-standing medical ethics” and he emphasizes that “I do not seek to address publicly authorized forms of killing like capital punishment and war.”

There is a hidden shift in the attorney's reasoning from "private persons" to public agents such as executioners and soldiers. But the physician operating under public physician-assisted suicide laws is no longer acting as a "private person."

Physician-assisted suicide laws "publicly authorize" the physician just as death penalty law publicly authorizes the hangman. Physician-assisted suicide laws are not conceptually different from the "long-standing" laws and ethics the attorney cites. They're just newer. Gorsuch's problem is the familiar conservative "cultural" hang up concerning change and the new.

Attorney Gorsuch's equivocation in secretly shifting between "private persons" and "publicly authorized" acts reveals either deductive incompetence or intentionally deceptive argument. If the constitutional sacredness of human life is not infringed by execution under color of law, it is not infringed by merciful assisted suicide under color of law. In either case, he does not meet the standards expected of a Supreme Court Justice. 

The candidate for Supreme Court Justice engaged in further misleading argument:

Gorsuch emphasizes, however, that “it remains to be seen whether [the Court might] … recognize a constitutional right that trumps at least some state legislation against assisted suicide.” And he suggests that he might be inclined to recognize such a right.

“Oregon’s decision to make a legal discrimination based on physical health (the terminally ill versus everyone else) seems a candidate for heightened review,” he argues, just like distinctions based on race or gender. “This [is] especially so given that Oregon’s law expressly implicates a fundamental right—that is, the scope of the right to life.”

Wouldn't such a constitutional right logically trump the death penalty as well?

 

Moreover, assisted suicide laws don't just "make a legal discrimination based on physical health." They further the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the patient by honoring their choice to end further pointless suffering. Here again, Gorsuch's argument is cleverly misleading. Does he have so little regard for the freedom of American citizens?

Spiritual Wickedness in High Places

Priest to Oedipus, who sits upon the throne of Thebes having killed his father and married his mother:

For, as thou seest thyself, our ship of State, 
Sore buffeted, can no more lift her head, 
Foundered beneath a weltering surge of blood. 
A blight is on our harvest in the ear, 
A blight upon the grazing flocks and herds, 
A blight on wives in travail; and withal 
Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague 
Hath swooped upon our city emptying 
The house of Cadmus, and the murky realm 
Of Pluto is full fed with groans and tears.

 

Ecclesiastes 12 KJV, freely rendered:

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.
And the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men bow themselves, and the workers cease because they are few, and the mourners go about the streets.
And they be afraid of that which is high, and desire fail.

Man goeth to his long home.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit return unto God who gave it.

The Defeat of Thought and the Crisis of Democracy

Slate's Mark Joseph Stern describes the way the American electorate has become an irrational factor making possible calamitous politics:

McConnell ... brought the Senate to a grinding halt, then blamed Obama and the Democrats for his handiwork. This gambit was wildly successful, sowing anger and [frustration] toward Democrats . . .

He adds:

A huge chunk of the electorate does not care whether politicians hold regular press conferences or release financial disclosures or refrain from saying horribly bigoted things on TV. It doesn’t matter if a presidential candidate mocks or vilifies disabled people and women and immigrants. It doesn’t matter if he releases coherent policy papers and adheres to clear positions on important issues.

M. J. Stern's analysis leaves out the underlying reason behind the symptoms he describes: the failure of the American electorate to think about the liberal principles without which democracy is a house of cards: universalism, egalitarianism, civility, altruism, public spiritedness, desire for optimum outcomes, pluralism, toleration, respect for each person's dignity and autonomy, commitment to representative deliberation rather than mob rule. As Obama said, We need a government of evidence and reason rather than ideology.

Historian Fritz Stern, describing the calamity his native Germany drew down on itself in the last century, called it "The Failure of Illiberalism." He cited the OED's definition of "illiberal": Not worthy of a [free citizen]; not generous in respect to the opinions, rights and liberties of others; narrow minded.

Dr. Stern also quoted the prophet Jeremiah 5:31: The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means, and my people love to have it so, and what will ye do in the end thereof?

Both camps of the electorate, left and right, subscribe to a vicious epistemic closure in which thought, as contrasted with rote repetition of dogma, is a sin. It breaks ranks. It offends the community. When, as in this case, any propositional assertion is treated as a de facto loyalty oath, we have lost our ability to use our minds to avoid catastrophic decisions, such as we Americans made in the last election. We have substituted ideology for evidence and reason, and ideology is the deformation of language and truth in the service of power.

Intellectual thought can never be ideological, because intellect always goes beyond foregone conclusions — that is its very reason for being — thus always in disagreement with dogma. As Orwell wrote, "If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox."

The dogma that liberal and left are pretty much the same thing — tacitly assented to by both left and right in the recent election — prevented informed discussion of the way the illiberal choice made would drive a dagger in the heart of a civilized society. Thus we, to paraphrase Thomas Paine, sacrificed a world to folly and baseness.(1)

-*--

(1) Thomas Paine: "I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness."

How Fares the "Republic?"

In Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom," Producer MacKenzie McHale said, A well-informed electorate is essential to the proper functioning of a healthy democracy. Inadequate information, or worse, wrong information, can lead to catastrophic decisions and impede vigorous debate.

In the national election four years ago, this blog posted "How Fares the Republic?" articles. Current answer: We made a catastrophic decision.

Looking for clues, we might first note that in the vast majority of cases in which the word "liberalism" appeared in our public discourse, what followed was utter nonsense, because our assumptions mix the "we're all in this together" outlook of liberalism with the class warfare, oppressor vs. oppressed outlook of the left. America was founded on the liberal ideas of the Declaration and Constitution, and can no more function with the agonistic assumptions of the left (or right) than a gasoline engine can run on diesel oil.

It is impossible to discuss liberalism and leftism as if they were the same without being intellectually incoherent. To do so is to pretend to be two incompatible things at the same time: Seeking win-win situations and having a zero-sum-game outlook; seeking what Washington called "the public good" and taking pride in being "oppositional," "adversarial," and "subversive"; holding slavery's negation of human equality deeply against American principles and "in course of ultimate peaceable extinction," as Lincoln argued, and holding, as Ta-Nehisi does, that "white supremacy" underlies all America does yesterday, today, and forever. ("The certain sins of the future.")

Being unable to discuss the principles of our liberal Founding in any coherent manner, we elected the most illiberal president possible: Authoritarian, bullying, vindictive, narcissistic, and childish. See pre-election posts on president-elect Trump here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.