The beginning of the End of Days

The importance of what has just happened in the USA cannot be overstated. The Supreme Court struck down separation of church and state, made gun control impossible, and restored slavery. Over the course of a week.

Historians look back and pick out the inflection points of history. Sometimes this is difficult. Sometimes it is not. Like the Riechstag fire or crossing the Rubicon, this will be identified as the termination point of American democracy.

As I tell Australians, my short lecture on American politics is this: no matter how bad you think it is, it's worse. The idea that the state can seize a woman's body for the use of a random citizen is obviously, blatantly bad; but the truth is worse.

Update: my brother pointed out the case of McFall v. Shimp, where a man sued his cousin for a bone marrow transplant to save his life. Judge Flaherty ruled against the dying man, stating that forcing a person to submit to an intrusion of his body in order to donate bone marrow "would defeat the sanctity of the individual and would impose a rule which would know no limits, and one could not imagine where the line would be drawn."

 Apparently the line is drawn at "woman."

 

Why Politico is the worst: Reason #395

 Today Politico says:

Senior U.S. lawmakers are stressing out about mounting government debt as they resist President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan to boost the economy

How is this not journalistic malpractice? How is this not pure propaganda? The only people freaking out about the debt are Republicans.

Politico deliberately and intentionally smeared all lawmakers with the fringe beliefs of Republicans so as to normalize those beliefs (the rest of the article is about how economic experts including debt investors themselves also support Joe Biden's plan).

This is how fascism wins: one lie at a time.

Why you can't argue with a Republican

Arguing across partisan divides is never easy, but you may have noticed that it now seems impossible. Shared facts - the basis of any rational discussion - no longer exist; basic existential claims like "Trump said one thing on Tuesday and a different thing on Wednesday" are as ineffective as complex arguments about moral theory. Literally nothing you can say seems to penetrate; no words seem to make any impact on your opponent's position or fervor.

The reason is because Republicans are now post-language. Words have become merely a sequence of sounds that one uses to establish dominance; they no longer have semantic content. When a gorilla bangs its chest and roars, the only intended meaning is a display of power and a demand for submission. If you were to ask the gorilla what ideas his roar was trying to convey, he would be mystified at your cluelessness.

If this surprises you, it shouldn't. This is the natural and inevitable destination of fascism, as made clear by history and the novel 1984. The raw exercise of power does not depend on ideas; indeed, it can only be challenged by ideas.

There are only two ways to achieve a goal: force and reason. And reason is merely the special application of force by an entity upon itself. To reason with a man is to convince him to use the power at his disposal to constrain himself, rather than to compel another.

Republicans, unable to convince a majority of other people that their goals are desirable, have given up on reason. They now operate solely in the realm  of force. Trump has made this clear many times; perhaps his most obvious tell was at a recent rally when smugly pointed out that he, and no one else, occupied the White House. Power, presented as its own justification.

This is why you cannot argue with a Republican. All you can do is deploy word-sounds that would make you dominant over them, to be countered by their word-sounds that reclaim dominance over you. To do anything else - to consider the concepts you advance - would be to deal in reason, and they have already conceded that is a losing battle.

This is why no Trump supporter cares about Trump's contradictions, or policy failures, or treasonous acts. Whenever you mention those, they are merely plays at dominance, to be refuted by displays of their side's power. Trump's position as head of the government is the only message they can hear.

The good news is, without power, the Republican project collapses. There will be no armed revolution on the part of the Right if their currently ongoing violent coup fails. They are bullies, and like all bullies, cowards once deprived of power. Without power, they have no organizing principle, and no language to communicate with each other.

The bad news is that the desire, no, the psychological need for racial and gender superiority, is so strong in so many of our citizens that it seems altogether unlikely that democracy can survive. A house  divided cannot stand, and 40% of our citizens want the illusion of white male supremacy more than they want reality.

The defeat of Trump in November is necessary to the survival of the republic; but not at all sufficient.

Richard Falconer's thesis confirmed

In my series Sword of the Bright Lady, the rate of expansion of the universe is revealed to be tied to morality: good acts slow it down, and evil acts speed it up.

Which is why the news that the universe is too thin and expanding too rapidly for our current models to explain does not surprise me at all.

The punditry finally catches up to me

Many GOP Voters Value America’s Whiteness More Than Its Democracy

I've been saying that for years. Where's my newspaper column?

On the other hand New York Magazine probably doesn't need an Australian correspondent...

The Death of a Republic

Here's the plot of a political thriller I'm not writing:

On election day social media is flooded with concerns that Antifa is stuffing ballot boxes in urban polling stations. Armed militias (i.e. white men with guns) drive in from the countryside to "protect" the sanctity of the election. At some point, inevitably, someone gets shot. Again, social media is inundated with images and video. All across the nation polling places become deserted as people who were willing to risk COVID flee in fear of guns and white male rage.

Police either refuse to respond, or show up in SWAT gear and contribute to the atmosphere of fear. Perhaps the governors close the polling stations "to protect the people." By the end of the day the victors are declared. Mail-in votes are ignored, lost, or destroyed. The minority wins by suppressing the voice of the majority.

And if it doesn't work? If people vote in such numbers that even the suppression tactics fail? Then the Republican states declare that they cannot certify their vote tallies because of the violence.

The election goes to the House, where each state gets one vote. The Republican states vote for Trump. And there you go: a completely legal and Constitutional coup. The only legal response is through the courts, and we all already know how that one ends. The Republic dies by suicide - as everyone from Cicero to Lincoln told us it would.

The story works because the author has cleverly foreshadowed the conclusion with a series of events like Malhuer National Wildlife Refuge, Charleston, Charlottsville, Albuquerque, and of course the on-going national police riot. There is no unbelievable conspiracy of secret actors, merely the collusion of like-minded people acting in public and doing what they've been practicing all along.

But like I said, I'm not writing it, because I work in SF&F, not horror.

Politico goes all-in with fascism

Just look at this:

"Democrats heap most of the blame for these failures on Trump and congressional Republicans. But they also failed to secure in the latest rescue bill many of their major priorities..."

Politico

This is Politico at its fascist best. This is the ultimate bothsiderism. They faithfully note that Democrats are blaming Republicans for the political gridlock, and yet somehow still make it Democrats fault. They assert that Democrats have failed too, while simply erasing the fact that Democrats failed because of Republicans.

 

Any logical reader would wonder why the Democrats failed to achieve their priorities. Any trained journalist would know to explain that the Democrat's failure was proof of the validity of their complaint. Any competent English speaker would not start that second sentence with "But."

 

This is not a simple editing mistake or clumsy bow to fairness; it is outright deceit. It is a lie.

Ian Kullgren, Jason Millman and David Lim, your names will go down in history. You have put your names against a lie designed to serve fascism.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 

Why Politico is the worst: Reason #394

"The thing is, Democratic leaders genuinely seem to believe all the critical things they said about Republican obstructionism under Obama. They don’t seem interested in taking political hostages or extracting a policy ransom. But Republicans understand the power of no, and the weakness of a party that isn’t really willing to say no. As long as Democrats are terrified of looking like obstructionists, Trump won’t have to worry about obstruction."

Politico being its usual self

Here is Politico, a long-standing and widely read political magazine, being utterly bemused by the idea that Democrats actually believe in public service, good governance, and the well-being of the country.

As long as Democrats are terrified of letting the country burn, Trump won't have to worry about playing with matches. And the article presents this not as laudatory for the Democrats, not even as diminishing to the Republicans, but with utter bewilderment that any party would confuse the game they play with real life.

I've said it before, but this deserves saying it again: when the obituary of democracy is written, Politico will feature prominently.

Trump is not the enemy

I watched the 2008 Wolf Blitzer interview with Trump and came to a horrifying conclusion: Trump did not corrupt the GOP. The GOP corrupted Trump.

Back then Trump was talking about how amazing Nancy Pelosi was, how Clinton’s impeachment was over nothing important, and how Bush deserved to be impeached for lying us into a war. All of these statements are objectively true. That 2008 Trump was a narcissistic blow-hard, but he was still connected to reality. How did he get replaced with this Fox-News zombie?

To ask the question is to answer it. Fox News ate Trump’s brain the same way it has eaten so many of our parents and uncles and aunts brain’s; with a steady diet of outrage, fear, hate, entitlement, and empty flattery. Trump watches Fox News all the time, and like any other person who only watches Fox News, Trump has become a monster of the id, a creature entirely driven by irrational fears and imagined dangers and an overwhelming sense of lost status.

This should have been obvious all along. Trump was the least consequential figure on that stage of seventeen Republican candidates. Trump played to the crowd and was rewarded with poll numbers; so he played harder and got more. But Trump’s ability to completely re-invent himself as a conservative fire-breather (after having been associated with liberals to the point where the Clintons attended one of his weddings) was not merely a sign of his shallowness; it as a signifier of his willingness to serve the cause. The reason the Republican electorate chose Trump over all those other men was not in spite of his malleability but because of it.

I have long argued that Trump’s unfitness was a crucial attraction to the Republican electorate, because it demonstrated the power of white male privilege. I argued that they selected him because he had no other assets than white maleness, and thus his power could only be derived from it. Ted Cruz has a brain; Jeb Bush has a name; John Kasich and all the others have hard work and experience. Only Trump was devoid of any other positive attributes that could justify his rulership. Thus, I argued, they chose Trump to be the avatar of privilege, and cheered every time he did something horrible because his ability to be both stupid and criminal and yet still retain power was daily proof that white maleness was both necessary and sufficient to wield authority. But now I think I was giving them too much credit.

Trump’s unfitness as captain of the ship of state was his most important attribute, because they want to steer the ship onto the rocks. Their goal is not merely to demonstrate the power of privilege; their goal is to demonstrate the unfitness of democracy itself. The Republican argument is that democracy is too weak to survive because it cannot defend itself against vandals. That the Republicans themselves are playing the part of the vandals is no objection to a people steeped in hypocrisy.

The Evangelicals have repeatedly told us that God works through imperfect tools. They have repeatedly framed their support of Trump as a support of God’s agenda, not Trump himself. They have not merely excused but practically celebrated Trump’s many un-Christian attributes from profanity to adultery, which I interpreted as hypocrisy. I now realize those negative qualities are the point. They cheer when Trump does something terrible, when he wrecks the economy or weakens our alliances or diminishes the prestige and honor of the office, because all of those things are necessary steps on the way to the death of democracy.

When democracy is finished, when the country is in such dire straits that even liberals cry out for a strongman to restore law and order, then the conservatives will toss Trump aside like used toilet paper. His fate is as likely to be found on the end of a lamppost as not, and conservatives are more than likely to be the ones to put him there. Once God is done with his imperfect vessel, it is merely clay again.

In his place conservatives will offer an actual strongman, someone both intelligent and competent and wholly willing to create a new order. This is why none of the other Republican candidates had a chance; for all of their faults, none of them are traitors. None of those other men would willingly preside over the collapse of American democracy.

They will, however, stand aside and watch it fall, as helpless in the face of the fury of a demographic losing its traditional stranglehold on power as they were in the face of a man who could throw out childish insults on national television. Hypocrisy, and the lack of shame that goes with it, has long been their stock in trade; Trump simply abandoned hypocrisy and all concept of shame with it.

The electorate sensed this emptiness in Trump, this need to be flattered regardless of the cost to others or even to himself, and they chose him to be their sacrificial lamb. He will bring down the state around him, like Samson in the temple of Dagon. He will usher in the kingdom of God, even though he will not be permitted to join it. They will use him up and cast him aside and the future will record Trump not as Hitler, but merely as Marinus van der Lubbe.

It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for him.

The New Aristocracy

The new aristocracy is the 9.9%. They have convinced themselves that they deserve to be at the top because of their superior intelligence, talent, and work ethic. And yet, somehow, those traits get passed on to their kids... but not through genetics. More through legacy college admissions and other mechanisms of privilege.

Here in Australia college really is meritocratic. You need good scores to get into good schools, and all the schools are free (you have to pay them back after you graduate, but only if you earn enough money. The point is if you are accepted to a good school you can afford to go). So what's a wealthy family to do? Private high school. Many of which charge over $12,000 a year.

Elite colleges don't have better instruction, they have better research projects. Go to an elite college and your Teaching Assistant is doing Nobel prize work as his day job. That has obvious advantages, but the point is that the advantage isn't so much from teaching skill as other factors. Factors that don't apply to high schools. The education isn't that much better at a private high school than at a public one.

What does apply, though, is sending your children to school with the children of the rich. Not just because all of the kids there are studying all of the time (so your kid does it through peer pressure) but because the connections they make will keep them in the aristocratic class more than any education they get.

“Our new multiracial, gender-neutral meritocracy has figured out a way to make itself hereditary.” - The Birth of the New American Aristocracy

And in one of the enduring absurdities that always makes me crazy:

You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market. It’s thuggish and anti-modern. Imagine if workers hired consultants and “compensation committees,” consisting of their peers at other companies, to recommend how much they should be paid. The result would be—well, we know what it would be, because that’s what CEOs do.

The origins of invisible racism

Another great article in the Atlantic. Not liquid gold like Coates, but comprehensive and compelling.

The Nationalist's Delusion

The basic point is that America is defined by two things: 1) racism, and 2) a commitment to not being labeled racist. This bizarre dynamic apparently started immediately after half of America fought a war to defend toxic racism. The money quote:

As the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, in his 1861 “Cornerstone Speech,” articulated that the principle on which the Confederate States had been founded was the “great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” That principle was echoed by the declarations of secession from almost all of the Southern states.

Sitting in his cell at Fort Warren years later, the rebels defeated and the Confederacy vanquished, Stephens had second thoughts. He insisted in his diary, “The reporter's notes, which were very imperfect, were hastily corrected by me; and were published without further revision and with several glaring errors.” In fact, Stephens wrote, he didn’t like slavery at all.

“My own opinion of slavery, as often expressed, was that if the institution was not the best, or could not be made the best, for both races, looking to the advancement and progress of both, physically and morally, it ought to be abolished,” Stephens wrote. “Great improvements were, however, going on in the condition of blacks in the South … Much greater would have been made, I verily believe, but for outside agitation.”

Stephens had become first in line to the presidency of the Confederacy, an entity founded to defend white people’s right to own black people as chattel. But that didn’t mean he possessed any hostility toward black people, for whom he truly wanted only the best. The real problem was the crooked media, which had taken him out of context.

And we've been hearing that whine for 150+ years.

The First White President

Ta-Nehisi Coates is on fire here. Epic in scope, eloquence, and truth.

But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.
The First White President

I only wish I could use the word "eldritch" with such potency.

There is a scene in 12 Angry Men where one of the jurors goes off on a racist rant. The other men freeze him out: they turn away, cross their arms, frown, and refuse to speak to him. That was a model of racial awareness for its day, but the problem is it remained the model.

We passive beneficiaries of white maleness can no longer follow that model. We have to stand up and engage; we have to confront; we have to actively combat. The men in that room should have spoken back. They should have argued, condemned, shouted, and then had the racist thrown off the jury.

We can't tolerate Uncle Bob saying racist things at the Thanksgiving table anymore. We have to speak up: "You're wrong, you're racist, and you have to leave now. And you can't come back until you understand the most important thing of all: you are wrong."

Crazy Conspiracy Theory Day

So, on the face of it, Trump's threat to bomb North Korea if it so much as looks at us crosswise seems... weak. A rational person would have put out an obvious and hard deadline, such as actually launching a missile or test, rather than merely looking like you might. A smart person would never have boxed themselves in on a bluff they didn't want to be called on. A mildly competent person would not have promised to start a war over imaginary weapons of mass destruction, particularly after having spent so many years complaining about the last one.

Despite all that, is mere incompetence and narcissistic nilhism really sufficient to explain this latest move? Particularly as it comes on the heels of President Xi of China's visit with Trump, which apparently included an education on Asian geo-politics. (So nice of China to educated our President for free! I'm sure they did it entirely out of the goodness of their hearts, with no ulterior motives at all.) And following the impulsive attack on Syria, it looks doubly suspicious.

Here's my idiot conspiracy theory for the day: Xi put Trump up to it. Now Xi is sending more diplomats to NK to tell them, "The Americans are insane - they might do it! You need our help to defuse the situation." They are playing good cop/bad cop, and they tricked Trump into being the bad cop.

If it works - great! The Chinese get to squeeze NK a little more, peace gets restored, and things go on as before but with China in a better position. If it fails - it is entirely on the USA. Trump either backs down from his empty threat or worse, carries it out. We get either massive collapse of international prestige or an actual war that will kill millions. Either way the USA is made a fool; in all cases China's position is only improved.

This, my friends, is the work of a Great Negotiator.

A pundit who gets it

Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues

I've been saying this since the election. Nice to see it backed up by numbers.

The South shall rise again... and it has.

Why do Republicans persist in this idea that poverty is a function of laziness? They seem unable to perceive the institutional structure of the modern economy. All ideology aside, this seems odd.

In 1861, a Louisiana journalist wrote an article [Edit: more complete text here - complete article] explaining 10 reasons why non-slaveholding whites would nonetheless fight for slavery . His most salient point, of course, is #4:

The poor white laborer at the North is at the bottom of the social ladder, while his brother here has ascended several steps, and can look down upon those who are beneath him at an infinite remove!

wherein he explains that the class differences between rich and poor whites are masked by having a class below the poor.

But what finally struck me was #5:

The non-slaveholder knows that as soon as his savings will admit, he can become a slaveholder, and thus relieve his wife from the necessities of the kitchen and the laundry, and his children from the labors of the field. . . . 

In the antebellum South, poverty really was a function of character, because any man who worked hard could eventually afford a slave. And once you had a female slave, you could literally breed yourself a fortune. This is the Libertarian dream writ large; that the privileged can profit by exploiting the vulnerable with the full force of the law to support them. (Libertarians have no problem with slavery as long as it's "voluntary," meaning once you can starve a man into submission, you can own him for the rest of his life - and his children as well.)

As I have written before, Republicans focus so much on gun ownership and the need for any man to defend himself and his loved ones at a moment's notice because of the threat of a slave revolt. The honor culture was a response to a slave-state, just like it was for the Spartans.

Thus, to understand Republican ideology is quite literally the same task as understanding Confederate culture. That's all it is; the entire Conservative movement in America is merely the extension of the Confederacy. It is only a matter of time before the official Republican party platform calls for the return of chattel slavery - solely to solve the budget crisis, of course.

On the Milo tour bus

A fantastic article, proving that some journalists can still write:

On the milo bus with the lost boys

The best paragraph (out of many):

What happens to the Lost Boys in that story [Peter Pan] if they ever start to build memories and change, if they ever started to become adults?

They skipped this bit in the Disney movie, but, in the books, Peter kills them.

How Climate Change elected Donald Trump

Morality is not a set of abstract rules handed down from on high, or intuited from the structure of the universe. It is a utility function that maximizes genetic fitness. We evolved morality as a response to the evolutionary pressures of social living. This means that as the environment changes, so do our intuitions of morality.

In other words, what people perceive to be moral depends on what what they perceive to benefit their chance of passing on their genes.

Climate change is an undeniable fact; sea levels will rise, and billions of people will be displaced. This is properly terrifying. Humans respond to fear by becoming more authoritarian. Donald Trump won on one and only one policy: anti-immigration. Racism and sexism were relevant, but only as expressions of this fear. Trump’s true allure was his authoritarianism, his promise to close the borders, and his sociopathy.

Because those are the qualities required to close the gates to a horde of refugees. To stand back and watch a billion people drown requires it. They voted for the most horrible person they could find, because they want him to do something horrible.

Around the world, racism, nativism, and tribalism are on the rise. People are girding themselves for the battle to come. Their real concern is not that refugees are brown or Muslim; those are useful categories but not necessary. It is their mere status as refugees that is frightening.

Climate change is mostly caused by rich nations; its pain will be borne most heavily by poor nations. We have already demonstrated that we will not give up our luxuries for their dying; how much less likely are we to suffer the real and measurable privation that would come with both reducing climate change and caring for the people it displaces.

Hillary Clinton (and for that matter, Bernie Sanders) represented inclusiveness. Their leadership would have steered the lifeboat closer, to rescue as many people as possible, even at the risk of capsizing. Trump represents the opposite: the boats that left the Titanic early, only half-full.

To leave the sinking ship in an orderly fashion saves the most lives, but it also requires trust. The Republicans dedicated the last thirty years to destroying trust in government and largely succeeded. Now we unpack the dog-whistles and see that Clinton was not “trustworthy,” because Clinton could not be trusted to row away from the drowning innocents.

Despite all their talk of Christian faith and climate skepticism, their actions reveal their fear. Not just buying guns, but hardening hearts, quelling empathy, embracing strength, celebrating savagery.

It is, in their perception, the best way to survive the coming flood.