The Class Warfare Logic of a Baltimore Protester

In June Steve Inskeep recorded an interview with Kwame Rose, who was one of the protesters against the death of Freddie Gray, a black man being transported in a police van. Excerpts:

KWAME ROSE: He called us thugs and criminals. And you don't know the story behind each one of those individuals. I was one of the people he called a thug and a criminal because I was out there. ...
ROSE: Yeah, but even in a notion to differentiate peaceful - when I was there, firsthand experiences, watching people run in the stores, I didn't interpret it as violence. I interpreted it as a survival skills - as a survival tactic. ...
ROSE: No. I've - I don't think the president has done enough for black people.

This shows some of the Baltimore street hustler logic also found in Ta-Nehisi Coates' white supremacy articles. For example, skid logic: "I was ... called a thug and a criminal because I was out there." (Below, there will be excerpts from Inskeep's interview in which President Obama responds to Rose's accusations.)

Kwame Rose's argument has the class warfare characteristics of:

1. Justified by an overriding emergency
2. Rejection of the rule of law
3. Double standard — the plight of the oppressed trumps the principle of equality — see "moral primitivism" (1)
4. Specific rejection of pluralism (that is, unconcern for anyone not like us)
5. Disregard for the public good (those who loot and destroy a drug store in the name of racial affirmation force sick people of that same race to travel farther for medicine they need to survive)
6. Rejection of the powerful just tools of liberal democracy (Obama: "You have situations in which, suddenly, friends of mine in Baltimore - their mothers, who are elderly, have to now travel across town to get their medicines because the local drug store got torn up. And making excuses for them, I think, is a mistake. There are ways of bringing about social change that are powerful and that have the ability to pull the country together and maintain the moral high ground. And there are approaches where I may understand the frustrations, but they're counterproductive. And tearing up your own neighborhood and stealing is counterproductive." (Emphasis added.)
7. Specious justification of violence ("survival skills")
8. Rejection of universalism ("I don't think the president has done enough for black people"; that is, a black president should show favoritism toward black people in preference to serving all equally.)
9. Implied the-end-justifies-the-means logic

Steve Inskeep's follow up interview with Obama ("What I would also say, though, is that if somebody is looting, they're looting."):

Let me ask about a passionate young person that we met along the way. His name is Kwame Rose.

Yeah.

He is an activist now in Baltimore. He was active in the protests after the death of Freddie Gray ...

Right.

... who was in a police van, and died later, as you know.

And he was unhappy with a statement that you made at the time, when you were supportive of peaceful protests but also criticized what you called criminals and thugs who had looted stores.

He felt that you were being too harsh and went on to say in our interview that you were speaking from a position of privilege, his suggestion being that maybe you didn't quite get what was going on in the streets.

What would you say to him?

[Obama] Well, obviously, I don't know him personally, so we would have to have a longer conversation.

What I would say is that the Black Lives Matter movement has been hugely important in getting all of America to — to see the challenges in the criminal justice system differently. And I could not be prouder of the activism that has been involved. And it's making a difference.

You're seeing it at state and local levels, and the task force that we pulled together in the wake of Ferguson has put forward recommendations that were shaped both by the people who organized the Ferguson protests as well as police officers. And it turns out that there's common ground there, in terms of how we can be smart about crime, smart about policing, respectful to all communities and try to wring some of the racial bias that exists in the criminal justice system out of it.

What I would also say, though, is that if somebody is looting, they're looting.

-*--
 
(1) Moral Primitivism: An earlier post concerning Coates' fallacies argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress." (Emphasis added)

Ten Points Against the Class Warfare Ideology (Repost)

This is a repost of an article posted last November under another title.

Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. - Justice Harlan, Plessy v. Ferguson

Class Warfare: 

1. Against political democracy, which by definition includes all the people. Proposes rule by the oppressed rather than government (not rule) by the people.
2. Rejects equality. The oppressed class and the oppressor class do not consist of people who are equal but, in the latter case, are in error and need to be corrected. Class warfare considers the wrongness of the oppressor class to be existential, and in that sense, a wickedness which is incorrigible and cannot be corrected.
3. Rejects the rule of law. Class warfare regards the supposed protections and rights of the existing body of law as hypocritical, benefiting only members of the oppressor class. After all, the justice system and its laws allow the existing system of oppression, don't they?
4. Arrogates to itself two things belonging to the justice system in civilized societies: Determination of guilt; and administration of punishment (Example: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”).*
5. Is inherently ad hominem. The narratives produced by members of oppressed groups are considered true because to recognize the true state of things—one is oppressed and not a member of a free democratic society—confers authenticity lacked by membership in an oppressor group.**
6. Employs a double standard in many areas. For example, members of oppressor groups do not have the same rights as the oppressed. Discrimination by the oppressed against oppressors is approved, but oppressors are accused of discriminatory attitude and conduct.
7. Is anti-intellectual (see 5). There are no "neutral" intellectual positions, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to pure intellectual matters. There is no justification for socially constructed intellectual propositions which are blithely ignorant of the plight of the oppressed (see "state of emergency," below). It is the duty of faculty members to use their platform to unmask oppression and advocate change.
8. Rejects normative concepts of civility, decency, and nonviolence as contributing to structural oppression. (Cf. "repressive tolerance") When modern democratic states give the police and the National Guard a monopoly on legitimate violence, they seek to render the oppressed powerless to fight for justice.
9. Can only achieve its objective through revolution, not by leveraging the structures (elected representatives, the justice system) of the existing oppressive society.
10. State of emergency which overrides all other considerations. Until the present existing state of monstrous injustice is rectified, no one has the right to pursue their own selfish interests. Everyone must be involved in the struggle. "Your silence will not save you."

Remarks by Kate W. to The Atlantic's Chris Bodenner illustrate class warfare influences in current publications. He begins:

Next is a blistering critique from Kate W., who doesn’t want to use her last name “because I work in professional circles (the arts and news media) where anti-Coatesism is frowned upon big time”

What she means is that Ta-Nehisi Coates, who began playing the race card when he leveled the charge of "white supremacy" against the mainstream, is the beneficiary of the oppressor group member double standard. Who he is, according to class warfare dogma, trumps [her] critique of his articles. (5 and 6, above)

She says,

2. Mr. Coates claims that the death of Prince Jones is his political “origin story.” He writes, “After Prince, I fully accepted the laws of gravity.” You see, Mr. Coates is the Reluctant Warrior. This as a very old gimmick but apparently still packs a rhetorical punch for some people. Mr. Coates didn’t want to be in a rage with “White America”! He was just minding his own business when Prince Jones (a friendly acquaintance) was killed by a racist policeman (who happens to be black, but that fact is irrelevant for his purposes) and then Mr. Coates found his worldview rocked. He was now radicalized and fully awake to the horrors of the racist country he lived in.

I’m sorry, but given the fact that Mr. Coates was raised by two political activists—one of whom is a former Black Panther—I am not buying this. Mr. Coates comes by his “radicalness” honestly. It did not take the death of Prince Jones to turn Mr. Coates into a Black Nationalist author. He was raised with these ideas, and based on what I have heard him say in current interviews, he is also raising his son the same way (this is a shame).

But let’s take him at his word that this one event changed him. Please allow me a point of personal privilege here: I have a good friend (a white person) who is a quadriplegic as a result of being shot during a robbery by black men. I was also personally robbed at gunpoint by black men (in a separate incident) but was more lucky than my friend and lost only money. 

If I were to follow Mr. Coates’s example, I would paint all black Americans with this brush. I would become “radicalized” and henceforth say that all black people are dangerous criminals. Does this make any sense, intellectually or morally? I hope not. 

But when Mr. Coates tells this story, Charlie Rose, David Brooks, David Remnick and Jon Stewart fall over each other to fawn over him. Why are the two examples different? Why is bigotry against white people acceptable when bigotry against blacks is anything but?

As K.W. describes Coates' narrative, he is using anecdotal argument. One bad experience justifies global guilt and punishment. A larger issue is that our democracy asks us to exhibit what the Founders called toleration. The double standard (6) and the emergency (10) allow Coates to violate standards of decency (8).

It's actually worse than that As a commentator relates:

He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings [the twin towers on 911] in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” (Emphasis added)

Generalizing from one black policeman to the firefighters who lost their lives trying to save strangers in burning skyscrapers is beyond excuse. Firefighters don't carry guns, carry out arrests, or in any other way commit violence. Coates' extremism should have resulted in a national uproar. The fact that it didn't shows how completely class warfare dogma has corrupted our thinking and eroded our sense of human decency.

 K.W. describes ways in which the double standard (6) even applies to cause and effect:

4. The book’s thesis is perhaps the most troubling part but certainly the most hyperbolic: “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Here is where the circular logic comes into play. When it is pointed out that the vast majority of black people who are murdered are murdered at the hands of other black people, Mr. Coates conveniently blames even this on White Supremacy. 
For him, it’s as simple as this: there is literally nothing a black person can do wrong that is their fault, in a cosmic sense. Every moral, ethical or legal crime is caused by the effects of White Supremacy. Some people, including myself, characterize this as racism. Denying that black people are capable of being agents of their own life or destiny is the ultimate kind of bigotry.

K.W. describes Coates' abundant false accusation:

5. The white-shaming throughout the book. Mr. Coates seems to think it’s OK to insult all white people in the gravest ways possible. All white people exist on a spectrum that has “benign neglect” and “free rider” on one end and “violent torture murderer” and “slave master” on the other end. All white Americans are guilty; it is only a matter of determining where they fit on that guilt spectrum. 
In Mr. Coates’ world, to wake up white is to wake up a guilty person. This acts as a kind of mirror image to his view of black people, who have no responsibility for anything in Mr. Coates' world.

In a free, democratic society, it is a very serious thing to bear false witness and level false accusations. To repeat, in our politics the determination of guilt, let alone punishment, belongs to the justice system and to the justice system alone (3, 4). Historically, the class warfare ideology has played fast and loose in applying the label, class enemy. For Marx, it was the commercial culture of the emerging modern world. In our contemporary class warfare culture, who is guilty is dependent on your vested interest. If you're a feminist, the oppressor is men. All of them. If you're a minority, it is white folks. All of them. Rules of evidence, due process, and the constraint of applicable law are nowhere on the horizon.



(*) As such, class warfare veers toward mob rule. Here are the constraints which proper justice has and class warfare lacks:

1. Due process
2. Rules of evidence
3. A controlling body of law developed over centuries, which the court must not violate

(**) We're employing an expanded conception of the argumentum ad hominem. Ad hominem usually refers to a demonstration or argument which purports to discredit a proposition by discrediting its author, as in Hitler's dismissal of theories of relativity as "Jewish science." In the larger sense, ad hominem is held to be a fallacy because a person cannot be an argument, either to discredit or to validate. For example, the belief that political democracy is discredited because a great thinker such as Plato said so, is a form of ad hominem. A person is not an argument.

The Left Itself Does Not Actually Consider Itself Liberal

"Liberal" has often been equated with "left." Thus it is a significant change in our political rhetoric that the left itself has begun to impugn liberalism. Last August this blog noted that the radical protesters who disrupted a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle condemned liberalism as such:

Marissa Johnson, one of the protesters, shot back, “I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you did it for me,” accusing the audience of “white supremacist liberalism.” (Emphasis added) - Seattle Times

Likewise some members of the mainstream media have begin to speak of "the illiberal left." That's Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine. Chait describes the left as assailing liberalism, and implies that this radical movement prefers a destructive revolution to democratic gradualism:(1)

It is the expression of a backlash on the left against liberalism — with all its maddening compromises and deference to the rights of the enemy — which fetishizes success as the by-product of cataclysmic struggle.

Chait rejects class warfare's assumption that citizens in "oppressed groups" have greater civil rights than citizens who are not, for example, minorities:(2)(3)

Liberalism sees political rights as a positive good — rights for one are rights for all. “Democracy” means political rights for every citizen. The far left defines democracy as the triumph of the subordinate class over the privileged class. Political rights only matter insofar as they are exercised by the oppressed. The oppressor has no rights.

Chait exposes the left's implicit justification of undemocratic violence. His article supports the conjecture that illiberal "progressive" class warfare leftism, despite its shrill proclamations, is a marginal movement existing mainly on some campuses and in the writings of the misguided "progressive" journalists who failed to notice that Ta-Nehisi Coates White Supremacist series constituted a wholesale condemnation of the liberal democratic principles of the Founding. Chait:(4)

Such a “victory” would actually constitute the blow to democracy it purports to stop, eroding the long-standing norm that elections should be settled at the ballot box rather than through street fighting. ...
But the campus was merely the staging ground for most displays of left-wing ideological repression because it is one of the few places the illiberal left has the power to block speakers and writers deemed oppressive.

Another fundamental difference: "A liberal sees Trump’s ability to deliver a speech before supporters as a fundamental political right worth defending. A radical sees this “right” as coming at the expense of subordinate classes, and thus not worth protecting."(5)

The conclusion to be drawn from Chait's article is, Always remind yourself, when you hear someone using the term "liberal" or the term "left," that you need to determine which is being referred to. They have nothing in common. There is, Chait argues, an "irreparable contradiction between two styles of politics. Does the future of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement lie in building a revolution, or in the continued work of (small-d) democratic liberalism?"

Finally, as argued in our article The Atlantic Revives Radical Chic: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the English Language, and several months later in Carlos Lozada's The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates, leftism, in contrast to liberalism, is essentially radical chic. It is not practiced by working politicians of either American political party (with the exception of a vanishingly small fringe). How often do you hear a Democratic politician, let alone a Republican, advocate public policy in terms of protecting the oppressed from the oppressor? As radical chic, class warfare leftism is about pretense. A privileged elite pretends solidarity with people they don't socialize with in order to grant themselves absolution for benefiting from conditions whose solution is liberal democracy, not double standards, the denial of civil rights to people you don't approve of, violent censorship of opinions you're afraid to debate, an end run around the rule of law, and mob rule.

Michelle Goldberg notes the phenomenon of Leftists for Trump. "Increasingly, a vocal part of the left is marked by its contempt for liberalism."

This romantic-fantasy left functions mainly as a remedy for its practitioners' own psychological problems:

I recoil from a personality type—not uncommon in radical movements—that treats politics as a realm in which to enact revenge on society for its own alienation and to claim a starring role in history. (Emphasis added)

Because demolitionist left pretense has lost its earthly moorings, its wilful ignorance of its harmful effect is hardhearted:

There’s not a word in [Christopher Ketcham's] piece about the immigrants who would be rounded up and put into detention camps under Trump’s plan, or the people of color who would be terrorized by a total breakdown in the norms that make even an imperfect multiethnic democracy possible. This is not surprising. What is surprising is that Ketcham, as well as the likeminded people he quotes, are so forthright about seeing politics purely in terms of personal catharsis. (Emphasis added)

As we noted in You Say You Want a Revolution, 

One of the problems of "progressive" politics' underlying class warfare ideology, ... is that it can only work through revolution, not the "incremental reform" which is democracy's methodology. And the too-rapid change of revolution, as serious thinkers since Burke have concluded, wreaks catastrophic damage on society, particularly on its weakest members. ... Limousine liberals such as [Susan] Sarandon promote a "progressive" ideology whose hidden premise is "a populace that needs to suffer more in order to reach Sarandon’s superlative level of wokeness." Since democracy's tender-minded methods haven't worked, increasing the sufferings of the wretched of the Earth will produce an aroused angry mob which will sweep all the evil and corruption away, allowing a wonderful, paradisal world to flower in the ruins.

Such magical thinking is scary. The actual result of totalist revolution is, typically, real social harm. The revolution Burke meditated on eventuated in the Terror.

-*--

(1) Point 9: Can only achieve its objective through revolution, not by leveraging the structures (elected representatives, the justice system) of the existing oppressive society. - Ten Points Against the Class Warfare Ideology

(2) See Point 1: Against political democracy, which by definition includes all the people. Proposes rule by the oppressed rather than government (not rule) by the people.

(3) See Point 6: [Class warfare] employs a double standard in many areas. For example, members of oppressor groups do not have the same rights as the oppressed. Discrimination by the oppressed against oppressors is approved, but oppressors are accused of discriminatory attitude and conduct.

(4) See Point 4: [Class warfare] arrogates to itself two things belonging to the justice system in civilized societies: Determination of guilt; and administration of punishment (Example: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”).

Re Ta-Nehisi Coates on "white supremacy":

White Supremacy is foundational to America. White Supremacy is not a bump on the road toward a better America. It is the road itself, the means by which America justified the taking of land and enslaving of humans, which is to say the means by which America came to be. - in Chris Bodenner's In the Wake of Baltimore: Your Thoughts

(5) See Point 3: [Class warfare] rejects the rule of law. Class warfare regards the supposed protections and rights of the existing body of law as hypocritical, benefiting only members of the oppressor class.

The Shaking of the Foundations

On May 31 conservative David Frum wrote, in Donald Trump and the Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy:

One guardrail that Trump’s opponents all assumed would hold fast was the fourth: the guardrail of ideology. Hardline conservatives would surely reject a candidate who barely understood what a principle was! ... Trump may not be much of a conservative by conviction. But he functions as a conservative in silhouette, defined by the animosity of all the groups that revile him. ...

As conservatism’s positive program has fallen ever more badly out of date, as it has delivered ever fewer benefits to its supporters and constituents, those supporters have increasingly defined their conservatism not by their beliefs, but by their adversaries.

Recently William Saletan: wrote, "What caused Trump was the GOP’s decision to negate Obama in every way, and thereby become the party of Trump."

We remarked on this in an article about F.A. Hayek:

The reason may be found in a fundamental characteristic of conservatism: its tropism toward wholesale obstructionism, derived from a fundamental lack of political ideas and a resulting tendency to define itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas and practices. Half a century ago F. A. Hayek, in his landmark "Why I Am Not a Conservative," [PDF] wrote:

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. ... Conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them. (Emphasis added)

"Why I Am Not A Conservative" argues that conservatism has no "distinctive principles" of its own, and seems to imply that at any given moment it defines itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas. (Even though this leaves conservatives with an incoherent outlook.)

News articles about Candidate Trump have remarked on his indifference the underlying norms of democracy, let alone those of elementary decency. From an article we published in 2013, various aphorisms about norms as such: 

Those who violate the bounds of propriety counting on the reluctance of more decent people to stoop to their level to protect them.

A willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

David Frum - Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.

James Fallows: Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms -- on the assumption that you'll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends. The norms imply some loyalty to the system as a whole that outweighs your immediate partisan interest.

Epigraphs from the same article:

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment" - "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

[They're] capable of anything. - Very Hard Choices, Spider Robinson

A country once guided by exalted principles is now tainted by cruel ones. - Dahlia Lithwick

Thus came the era of Trump Chaos. Civilization, "the benign influence of good laws under a free government," as the first president's Farewell Address said, arose from thousands of years of the slow accumulation of the norms of decency and civility. Stuffy things. It's cool to mock them.

Such "habits of the heart"(1) are the very bedrock of all we value.

We, the public, drove Nixon from the presidency for attempting to politicize aspects of the justice system managed by his office, for violating the principle of "a government of laws, not men," (see the firing of Archibald Cox(2) ) in ways that were far less extreme than emerge in Trump's boasting, blustering proclamations every day. Racial bigotry is supposedly not acceptable, yet as William Saletan writes, Trump is a serial exploiter of prejudice. "He has no compunction about using race, ethnicity, or religion for advantage. ... This is the man Ryan, McConnell, Priebus, and other Republicans have endorsed for president. Banning Muslims, smearing Latinos, blaming blacks, mocking disabilities—none of it is disqualifying in today’s GOP."

The guardrails of democracy are endangered by the Trump Chaos which, for the moment, appears to be increasingly legitimized with every newscast.

The fourth guardrail appears at the beginning of this post. Frum's other six appear in the notes below.(3)


-*--

(1) De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

(2) In May 1973, Nixon's Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, appointed Archibald Cox to the position of special prosecutor, charged with investigating the break-in. In October 1973, Nixon arranged to have Cox fired in the Saturday Night Massacre. However, public outrage forced Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who was charged with conducting the Watergate investigation for the government.

(3) The first guardrail to go missing was the old set of expectations about how a candidate for president of the United States should speak and act. ...

The second broken guardrail is the expectation of some measure of trustworthiness in politicians. ...

A third broken guardrail is the expectation that a potential president should possess deep—or at least adequate—knowledge of public affairs. ...

[Fourth, see above]

Donald Trump would have been hemmed in a generation ago by a fifth guardrail: the primacy of national security concerns. Trump has no relevant experience, no military record, scant interest in the topic—and a long history of casual expressions of sympathy for authoritarian rulers. He famously explained that he gets his military advice from TV talk shows. The most recent Republican secretary of defense, Bob Gates, told Yahoo’s Katie Couric that he would not, at present, feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear button. ...

[Sixth guardrail:]

A deep belief in tolerance and non-discrimination for Americans of all faiths, creeds, and origins also once functioned as a guardrail against destructive politics. In the words of the 1980 Republican platform: “The truths we hold and the values we share affirm that no individual should be victimized by unfair discrimination because of race, sex, advanced age, physical handicap, difference of national origin or religion, or economic circumstance.”

Disrespect for targeted groups—including the very biggest of them all, women—has been the recurring theme of the Trump candidacy. ...

[Seventh guardrail:]

Once you’ve convinced yourself that a president of the other party is the very worst possible thing that could befall America, then any nominee of your party—literally no matter who—becomes a lesser evil. And with that, the last of the guardrails is smashed.

 

Many conservatives and Republicans recognize Trump as a disaster for their institutions and their ideals. Yet they have found it impossible to protect things they hold dear—in large part because they have continued to fix all blame outward and elsewhere. ...

Policy, however, is not the first or second or third impetus of the Trump campaign. It’s driven by something else—and the source of that something is found inside the conservative and Republican world, not outside. The Trump phenomenon is the effect of many causes. Yet overhanging all the causes is the central question: Why did Republicans and conservatives react to those causes as they did? There were alternatives. Of all the alternatives for their post-Obama future, Republicans and conservatives selected the most self-destructive of the options before them. Why? What went wrong?

"Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate"

"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson

Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom" argued that our "news" covers hurricanes, shootings, and other sensational events while ignoring matters which would inform us how to vote wisely.(1) Once, Sorkin's show argues, national TV news anchors took a stand when called for:

Charlie joins in, encouraging Will to shed his safe centrist camouflage. "Anchors having an opinion isn't a new phenomenon," he says. "Murrow had one, and that was the end of McCarthy. Cronkite had one, and that was the end of Vietnam."

A recent article(2) by Dahlia Lithwick reveals a situation the news ought to be covering: The acts of the courts — including the Supreme Court — are often not about justice. Instead they are about corrupt, cynical partisan advantage. (Lithwick: "The 2016 term was meant to be the Supreme Court’s year to destroy Obama.") They usurp the function of those the people elect: the president and the members of Congress. (Emphasis added)

The unexpected strength of fringe candidates — Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump — testifies to massive public dissatisfaction with a political and economic sphere which has been hijacked by the obscenely rich. The news could be pointing out that while these extreme candidates don't represent a workable solution, popular action rising up against a corrupt politicized Court is one area where our democratic tradition could be effective.

Jamelle Bouie recently identified another area where the American people are being betrayed by their media and by the Democratic politicians they elected: the widespread disenfranchising "voter ID" movement. Why, Bouie asked, is there no Democratic uproar about this cynical subversion of democracy? Sorkin's TV series also asked, Why is the news silent about this travesty of the democratic process?(3) Here's how the august Court dismantled the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act which prevented certain benighted states from enacting voter suppression laws:

 

On June 25, 2013, in Shelby v. Holder, the Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that Section 4(b), requiring preclearance of historically discriminatory states' changes in voting laws, is unconstitutional. Wikipedia:

The Court held that Section 4(b) exceeded Congress's power to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, reasoning that the coverage formula conflicts with the constitutional principles of federalism and "equal sovereignty of the states" because the disparate treatment of the states is "based on 40 year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day" and thus is not responsive to current needs. (Emphasis added)

Since the ruling, several states once covered under preclearance have passed voter ID laws that removed provisions such as online voting registration, early voting, “Souls to the Polls” Sunday voting, same-day registration, and pre-registration for teens about to turn 18, which had expanded means of voter registration. The ruling has also resulted in some states implementing voter identification laws and becoming more aggressive in expunging ineligible voters from registration rolls. States that have changed their voting policies post-Shelby include both jurisdictions that were previously required to undergo federal preclearance, as well as some that were not covered, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin and Texas. (Emphasis added)

If this red-handed anti-democratic conduct of the Court received the publicity which, for example, the latest rainstorm receives, the public would at least have a chance to know where its true interest lies.

And neither Bouie or Sorkin have so far addressed another unmistakable — and easily remedied — derailing of democracy: the pervasive gerrymandering which, in a majority-Democratic nation, inflicts on us a dangerously irrational Republican house. As Sorkin's Will McAvoy asked, "how come [liberals] lose so g** d*** always?"

Well, what was the last time the nightly news led with a gerrymander report rather than the latest flood or tornado? Or a voter suppression tally? Or an "Erosion of liberty: Supreme Court" documentary?

 

Imagine plain talk about the Religious Right:

It’s ironic because the biggest enemy of the phony Republican isn’t Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama. It’s this man. [image of Jesus Christ displays]. He said "Heal the sick. Feed the hungry. Care for the weakest among us. And always pray in private." (Emphasis added)

Or the courage to take down rabid ideological purity:

Compromise as weakness
A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism
Denying science
Unmoved by facts
Undeterred by new information
A hostile fear of progress
A demonization of education
A need to control women’s bodies
Severe xenophobia
Tribal mentality
Intolerance of dissent
A pathological hatred of the US government

[Will McAvoy]
They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call themselves Conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans. Though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are: The American Taliban. And the American Taliban cannot survive if Dorothy Cooper is allowed to vote.

-*--

(1) Newsroom Anchor Will McAvoy: I'm a leader in an industry that miscalled election results, hyped up terror scares, ginned up controversy, and failed to report on tectonic shifts in our country. From the collapse of the financial system to the truths about how strong we are to the dangers we actually face. I'm a leader in an industry that misdirected your attention with the dexterity of Harry Houdini while sending hundreds of thousands of our bravest young men and women off to war without due diligence. The reason we failed isn't a mystery. We took a dive for the ratings. ... Congress forgot to add that under no circumstances could there be paid advertising during informational broadcasting. They forgot to say that taxpayers will give you the airwaves for free and for 23 hours a day you should make a profit, but for one hour a night you work for us. ... From this moment on, we'll be deciding what goes on our air and how it's presented to you based on the simple truth that nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate. ... We'll be the champion of facts and the mortal enemy of innuendo, speculation, hyperbole, and nonsense. We're not waiters in a restaurant serving you the stories you asked for just the way you like them prepared. ... I'm News Night's managing editor and make the final decision on everything seen and heard on this program. Who are we to make these decisions? We're the media elite. (Emphasis added)

(2) Lithwick: "The Supreme Court’s look at Obama’s executive action perfectly explains the Merrick Garland fight": One of the lessons of the new HBO film Confirmation, starring Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce as Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, is the extent to which fights about the Supreme Court are not simply about what is or what may be, but also about what could have been. Confirmation thus opens with the borking of Robert Bork for a seat at the high court, and the GOP outrage that engendered. This is important, because it explains the extent to which seating Judge Thomas—even if it meant destroying Professor Hill—became a Republican priority. In the party’s view, that seat belonged to Bork and it was stolen.

 

This same coulda, shoulda imperative is crucial for understanding the derangement that simmers beneath the GOP obstruction of hearings for Merrick Garland. You may think we are at war over what the court might become. But we are in fact at war over what should have been. And what should have been, for Senate Republicans, is quite simple: The 2016 term was meant to be the Supreme Court’s year to destroy Obama.

(3) Sorkin Anchor McAvoy: Tonight’s top story is a woman named Dorothy Cooper.

Dorothy Cooper is a 96 year old resident of Chattanooga Tennessee and has been voting for the last 75 years. This year, she has been told she can’t. A new law in Tennessee requires residents to show a government issued photo ID in order to vote. Dorothy Cooper doesn’t have a driver’s license, because Dorothy Cooper doesn’t have a car. Dorothy Cooper doesn’t have a passport; a vacation abroad was never in her future.

Tennessee isn’t alone. At this moment, 33 states have proposed or already adopted the same voter I.D. laws that have disqualified Dorothy Cooper from the one fundamental thing that we all do as Americans. It’s estimated that 11% or roughly 20 million people don’t have government issued voter I.D.’s and will be disenfranchised this November. Why? To crack down on the terrible problem of voter fraud. ... Because voter fraud is such a huge problem that during a five year period in the Bush Administration, when 196 million votes were cast, the number of cases of voter fraud reached 86. Not 86,000. 86. Here’s what that number looks like as a percentage of votes cast. .00004%. Four one hundred thousandths of a percent. This would be called a solution without a problem, but it’s not. It’s just a solution to a different problem.

Republican’s have a hard time getting certain people to vote for them. So life would be a lot easier if certain people just weren’t allowed to vote at all. I’m ashamed to say that 32 out of the 33 voter I.D. laws were proposed by Republican legislators, and passed by Republican controlled statehouses. And signed into law by Republican governors. 

Pseudo-Conservatism and Tonight's News

Writing during the presidency of George W. Bush, Ethan Fishman recalled Richard Hofstadter's article on “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” It was "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." "A politics," Fishman continued, "that emphasized unarticulated psychological impulses over reasonable analysis—a politics of the gut, in other words, rather than of the mind." Pseudo-Conservatives were "those who discount reason to practice a politics of largely inchoate sentiments." 

Fishman added:

Pseudo-conservatives are suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rely on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions.

Fishman saw a resemblance between today's pseudo-conservatives and the ideologues of the French Revolution:

In the context of Iraqi history, therefore, the administration’s vision of a democratic Iraq is reminiscent of the mistakes made by the French revolutionaries. Both acted as if dreams can easily be translated into political reality. Both upheld the ideal of freedom, but neither was able to adapt that ideal to the specific circumstances they encountered. Both were unable to appreciate the staggering costs in human lives and property that are unavoidable when radical change is pursued over a very short period of time.

Donald Trump's politics are those of W. taken to an extreme. He is "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." We gave an example in a recent article:

Trump, in his recent interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times, showed that he does not comprehend the system of global alliances the United States has developed, does not understand international trade, is unaware of the importance of the military bases the US has around the world, and is ignorant of nuclear protocols.

The pseudo-conservative as the person who is "suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rel[ies] on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions" is exemplified in another recent article:

Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders.

Pseudo-conservatism is thus a form of romanticism. "Romanticism," as Professor Ian Johnston argued [PDF]:

celebrated, above all, the figure of the heroic visionary artist, struggling over time against a hostile or uncaring world, never giving up until death, living life as an unending series of self-affirmations, moments of collision in which the power of the individual's mind and his or her faith in the imagination, imposed a sense of order and gave value to his or her life against insuperable odds.

Such heroic vitalism, characteristic of Central European thought in the first half of the last century, contributed to the aura of such authoritarian figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as it now constitutes part of the charisma of Donald Trump. Such icons, symptomatically, are believed to represent "the power of the will."

The attractiveness of such wilful political figures as Trump to youth is part of the pattern. The glamor of the romantic, larger-than-life authoritarian politician has an appeal, Johnston continues, to an anarchic youthful spirit:

At this level the Romantic spirit is a relatively uncomplicated celebration of the anarchic, optimistic, youthful spirit of sheer potentiality, an unfocussed affirmation of energy, motion, and good feelings. And if this were all there was to the Romantic ethic, it would never be much more than a pleasant but ultimately rather adolescent yearning for a spirit of total freedom (a good deal of popular Romanticism is little more than that).

"What happens," Johnston asks, "to this youthful creative spirit when it encounters the real world?" As we noted in Trump Reveals What's Wrong with Conservatism, it could "result in the selection of a dissimulating, bigoted, immature, bully":

In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurns not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities, accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. ... Republicans are [at risk of] nominating a child.

Writing during the previous Republican administration, Fishman accurately predicted:

Just as McCarthyism was followed by the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” the Reagan presidency, and the current administration, it is inevitable that another version of pseudo-conservatism will appear on the American political scene.

The current state of the Republican party is a catastrophe decades in the making. Since at least the Goldwater era, Republicans have leveraged cheap, doctrinaire, simplistic politics to distort the deliberative character of American democracy. They sowed the wind, and now reap the whirlwind. We are all the losers.