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.


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(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.)

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(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."