What Do You Want?

Every democracy, ideally, is based on an ongoing conversation among the people to determine what the greatest number of us want, without infringing on the rights and dignity of the minority. Those larger goals are pursued through more clearcut policies that can be routinely assessed for efficacy and judged against the costs of the action itself. Or at least that’s how things happen in an imagined, functional democracy. In this country we are often unable to distinguish between a goal and a policy and even when we do make the distinction too often the goals we make are incorrect when you consider the underlying values. For instance on the small scale, many people want to be wealthy so they can be more autonomous, so they can protect their loved ones from the harshness of the world, etc. That is a goal with it’s underlying values and one can imagine any number of policies that might make that goal a reality from being careful to save and invest money to simply being thrifty in daily affairs. However, the goal should never be to get a million dollars for example, because that goal could be accomplished simply be devaluing currency such that everyone of even the most modest income could be a millionaire overnight. Nor should one think of the pursuit of wealth as the policy itself because that’s not at all helpful in actually getting anything done.

This may seem like an overly simplistic and obvious example, yet I’m unconvinced that a great many Americans actually understand this, given the level of support certain politicians enjoy. And no, I’m not just talking about the fascist elephant in the room, but his supporters certainly fall under the umbrella. Any politician that says one of their goals is to lower taxes or to eliminate taxes has completely missed the mark, because that is a means to an end and not an end in itself. What does simply lowering taxes give you in the abstract? You might think it gives you more money in your pocket, but if that is coming at the expense of public services that make your money go further, then you might be worse off. No, the goal that this is implicitly aiming toward is greater individual control over money specifically and potentially greater personal wealth as the ultimate goal. And those are goals that we can debate the merits of and discuss what policies are most effective in bringing them about.

America does indeed have a famous independent streak running through it and I fear that it occasionally obstructs other values we all have, not least of all is the prosperity and security of the people. It is at this point I can already hear some libertarians and conservatives claiming that liberty and independence are the values that matter most, and must never be secondary to other goals such as security. This is a fatuous claim, even if Benjamin Franklin did say something to this effect. We all accept that your liberty does not extend so far as to hurt another person, which would seem to me a question of individual security if nothing else. And though we have historically had many fights over this, usually we do find an appropriate balance that serves the interest of the greatest number of people. The reason why car companies are no longer free to sell cars without seatbelts, in general, is because we recognize that the small cost pales in comparison to the value of safety they afford. The reason we have the FDA is in response to the liberty of food companies that were using truly disgusting practices to sell people unsafe products. And you can claim that the FDA goes too far in its regulations here and there, but it’s damn near impossible to find a sane person arguing that there should be no oversight over food producers to make sure they don’t go back to the horrific conditions of “The Jungle.”

And the same thing applies to tax policy. I don’t think people would actually claim they favor lower taxes as a goal if they actually paused to consider what they want. People tend to want a society where your hard word is rewarded, where there is a real chance at upward social mobility, where putting in an honest day’s work puts bread on the table both for your own sake and to support your children. In all these cases lower taxes could theoretically be policies to enact those goals, but not necessarily so and could in fact be deleterious to that end. If you look at the countries with the greatest social mobility, you’re looking at countries like the Norse nations, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany. These are countries with comparably high taxes, and indeed if you continue down the list you find that America falls behind such socialist nations as France and Spain. However I quite frankly wouldn’t advocate for even that high of taxation, nor high taxes as a goal, because high taxes can indeed get in the way of real wealth. Again we’re talking about how to balance different costs and benefits to reach the larger goals of increased prosperity with greater social mobility, and simply saying that the goal is to lower taxes does nothing to actually get us closer to where we’d like to be.

Perhaps I should make it clear that, as just one person, I can’t claim to speak for all Americans or even many Americans. I can claim only to know what my own personal and political goals are. Personally I want to do right by my fellow man and I’d rather do so without ending up in the poor house. Politically I want to live in a society that gives people the liberty to achieve their own personal goals. To achieve the former I work in a job that, I believe, makes this a better country and is rewarding enough to cover my own expenses with a bit left over to help others more directly. To achieve the latter I advocate for policies that lead to increased prosperity for as many Americans as possible, that lead to greater access to public goods like education and healthcare, that keep people reasonably safe, and that do so without putting the country on a path toward insolvency. But these are my goals and general policies, they make sense to me and though I do my best to express why I think other people should find them compelling, I do not expect, nor would I want, every person to see the world exactly as I do.

As a country we need to be able to have the conversations that help us discover what are our shared goals and when we discover them to fairly discuss what means we are willing to take to reach those ends. If we can’t even make that most basic first step then we are setting ourselves up for a failed democracy. I don’t discount the possibility that a people can just accidentally fall into a chaotic but functional government, but it seems to me far more likely that we will be able to have a government that works in the interest of the people if the people are informed enough to participate. The current situation makes it seem like many Americans no longer value intellect or even sufficient intelligence to participate in meaningful discussions and practical policy assessments. We feel entitled to express our opinion because of an unfounded, underlying assumption that all opinions are created equal. Again it’s possible to pick the right answer at random, but it seems far more likely that having a well thought out and justified reason for your opinion will steer you toward a correct answer, or even a more correct answer.

So it behooves me to end this essay with more questions than answers for the reader, because ultimately as just one person that well may be the most useful thing I can offer. What do you want for yourself and for our country? What policies have been effective in bringing those goals about and at what cost? Are those goals being expressed by any politicians or political parties and what can be done to put them in effect? In any case these aren’t static questions as people change, your goals change, more data becomes available and that can shape what policies you think are the most effective or worthwhile. More than anything, though, I would just like to see my country coming together in a somewhat intelligent way to start addressing what it is we actually want so we can get past this stunted phase we’re going through.

Is the Constitution Outdated?

Allusions to the founders are incredibly common in American political discourse. I myself make more than a few passing references to things that the founders said and wrote. But I make a clear distinction, at least to myself, that any reference I make to the founders is done out of respect to well constructed thoughts and good policies, as can certainly be found, but not out of deference to the extent that merely finding a quote, from say Jefferson, immediately wins my argument. The founders were fallible people, just as we are today. They made mistakes, at the same time they laid down an historically important legal framework, after their first attempt went South in short order. There are many today who seem to make the fallacy of believing that if the founders said it, it must be the case, an argument Ad Patrium if you will. And the ultimate expression of this is the movement, which sometimes goes by the title “Strict Constructionism,” that declares the Constitution to be unchangeably final.

One of the standby arguments that so many conservatives have just waiting in their back pocket is the claim that we need to adhere strictly to the letter of the Constitution. See, the problem we face in the modern world is the influence of activist judges who stretch the Constitution into whatever the liberals want. Never mind the fact that the Constitution doesn’t say a damn thing about a marriage being between a man and a woman, it’s the conservatives who want to pretend like they are the ones who strictly adhere to the original document and that invalidates any other criticism. Well what if we were to cede that point? The underlying premise is that the Constitution is and always should be the ultimate and unchanging law of the land. Does that premise hold up? To be blunt, no it does not.

The Constitution is outdated, and before I continue I should point out that the Constitution was outdated at the time of its signing, let alone its ratification. The Bill of Rights is composed of ten Amendments to the Constitution, which is to say ten changes that were made to clarify language, enumerate rights, and set straight certain potential misunderstandings that could have happened from a strict reading of the original Constitution. Even if you think of the Bill of Rights as just a continuation of the original Constitution, you have to contend with the Eleventh Amendment, which was ratified less than four years after the Bill of Rights. Many of the Amendments to the Constitution are direct and explicit rewrites of the Constitution to fix problems of apportioning representatives or the voting age or the date of inauguration, etc. These are all because the Constitution was outdated and was intended to be outdated from its inception.

Here’s where I have to ironically appeal to the words of one of the aforementioned founders, Jefferson, to assert that even they would have found the Strict Constructionism movement to be laughable at best. In a letter to James Madison he wrote on the subject of the authority, or lack thereof, of previous generations on future ones. “On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law… Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.” His determination of the figure 19 years comes from the approximation of a generation. Just as many conservatives like to point out Jefferson opposed inter-generational debt, a prospect that is interesting to consider, he also opposed inter-generational law. Now none of this means he was right in any case, just to point out that the belief that a piece of paper signed by fallible men as so divinely inspired to merit unflinching and unchanging deference is fatuous.

And all of this has been to avoid the quite glaring reality that this was a product of its time, and it shows. It shows in the construction of the 3/5 clause that calculates the difference between a free man and a slave. It shows in the lack of any representation of women. It shows in the language that is specifically crafted to ensure that only land owners were actually afforded the vote. It shows in so many ways that it now bears twenty eight amendments, not to mention the unratified amendments that are in various stages of implementation regardless. The Constitution is outdated, and that’s fine.

Our duty as rational, thinking people is not to cling to a document as if its authors were infallible and all knowing of what would come in the future. The world did not stop turning in the late Eighteenth Century, which is why we continually fight over the Constitution: what it means, what context is required, what it should mean, and what needs to be changed. Hell, the gun rights lobby should be the first to make this claim because it was only in 2008 that the Supreme Court decided that the 2nd Amendment should be interpreted as an individual right to keep and bear arms, in the face of countless judgements before that point. And I’m certainly not going to sit here further defending the position of the gun rights lobby, but it is pretty rich to hear its supporters ignorantly pretend that theirs is the unalterable and original interpretation of the Constitution.

The world changes, people change, peoples change, the nation changes and with it our Constitution must also change because the Constitution serves us and not the other way around. The Constitution exists to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” It does not exist to be used as a cudgel for the Scalias of the world. If it cannot be a living document then it cannot be a working piece of law for every successive generation. Appeals to the past and to tradition do nothing to make a point more or less valid, though for some people it undoubtedly stirs something a little stronger than indigestion.

The Constitution is outdated and at the same time functional and imperfect, but it doesn’t have to be perfect for the fundamental fact that people are not perfect. This is not an excuse to settle for less, but a call to do more and expect more as a people. If we want the Constitution to remain the important document it is then we need to be able to examine it with inquisitive eyes, thinking minds, and beating hearts. We need to be willing to take on the big challenges, because by lowering expectations and accepting the Constitution as infallible we’ve reached a bit of a rut with uninformed, ill-equipped politicians who can barely plan for tomorrow, let alone for the next generation. We’ve come to expect no better from our politicians and so we allow them to meet our unreasonably low expectations, and this leaves us with a large debt and a largely dysfunctional Congress.

For too long we’ve simply taken it for granted that in a democracy like ours anyone can become a politician, without ever taking the moment’s pause to ponder whether just anyone should be our representative. This is how we get Senators throwing snowballs as an attack on climate science, this is how we get representatives reading Bible passages into the Congressional record, this is how we get presidential candidates claiming that the earth is a few thousand years old, just long enough for Joseph to build pyramids for grain storage. And if it seems like I am coyly putting most of my attention on one party, let me remedy the situation, yes the Republican Party shoulders the bulk of the blame. I’m not going to pretend like the Democrats are without sin, but no Democrat could ever get away with being so ignorant, so insane, so inexperienced, so incompetent as the people who make it their solemn mission to prove that government is as incompetent as they are.

The Constitution can only ever be as good as we are, and if we allow ourselves to be as politically inert as we’ve become then it should come as no great surprise when a growing number of people do see it as static. The Constitution was never intended to solve all our problems, if you’ve never read it, it’s quite short. It is the duty of each generation to fill in the gaps to suit their own needs, and on that task our current legislators have failed. The Constitution is outdated and it should be the great joy of each citizen to do their part to renew it, to update it, to improve it, and in all other ways to fit it to the needs of the people.

Fascist

The danger in using hyperbole too readily in politics is the same danger of crying wolf; at some point people just start tuning it out. The use of certain arguments or rhetorical attacks has made some words and phrases all but meaningless. As an example, take a word like ‘socialist,’ which has been used innumerable times to describe President Obama. Why? Because he let some of the Bush era tax cuts come to an end, leaving the top marginal tax rates well below that of Nixon and Ford administrations, which no one has ever called socialist. Now that Bernie Sanders is running for president the Far Right has had to seriously up their ante, but having alienated so many intellectuals they are finding it difficult to come up with fresh epithets. Putting that aside, on the internet it’s become a cliche in its own right that any sufficiently long discussion will eventually devolve into some inappropriate allusion to Hitler, the Nazi Party, or fascism more broadly. It’s so widespread that I have to admit to falling into the same trap of effectively turning off my ears the moment someone makes one of those allusions, and this is a significant problem in light of our current political landscape.

I would find it surprising if many people of my generation ever heard about the somewhat tempestuous debates between Gore Vidal and William Buckley, nevertheless during the last of those debates there was a moment where Mr Vidal got under Mr Buckley’s skin, as he referred to Mr Buckley as a “crypto-nazi.” This came after several conversations where the two men, who plainly despised each other, had managed to keep relatively calm in their disagreement. Over the course of those debates the pair of them outlined two wildly different visions for the United States, and it should be said that Mr Buckley’s was, as ever, extremely conservative. How conservative? Well, at the time Mr Vidal was appalled by the huge wealth disparity because the top 5% of people controlled more than 20% of the wealth, and Mr Buckley’s response was to promote the kind of trickle-down economics that were finally inflicted onto the country by President Reagan leading to today where the top 1% of people control just under 40% of the wealth. But setting aside economic policy the conversation that led into the barbs was over the right of demonstrators to raise the flag of the North Vietnamese army in protest of America’s involvement in the war. Mr Buckley was firm in his stance that certain demonstrations, certain beliefs, certain acts of speech could not be tolerated and it was the duty of the police to crack down on them.

The use of police force to silence opposition is at the very heart of fascism. The word itself comes from the Roman symbol of many individual sticks bound together to make one much stronger bundle or fasces. It represents governmental authority in democracies, which is why you can find it hiding in a lot of buildings in DC and used to be able to find it on the backs of dimes. In a more pointed sense it became used as a symbol of absolute unity and fascism as an ideology of one people with one voice. In a fascist government the idea of dissent is impossible and needs to be crushed insofar as it does exist, because it threatens the common cause of the nation. By saying what he did, Mr Buckley was indeed making the tacit argument of the fascist that certain political points of view must be banned outright, whether they are peaceful or not, if they run contrary to his view of what America is and should be. It should be noted that this runs directly to the contrary of American law, which allows for the KKK, WBC, and any number of hate groups to exist and speak their minds. The very heart of American pluralism beats for the unpopular opinion, not for the majority opinion, whether we always like it or not, precisely to disrupt our natural tendency to try and silence, or failing that to sock in the face, people who upset us.

But why bring up a debate from the 60s in reference to a movement from the 30s using the symbols of a culture that predate the Common Era? Because now we’re in an awkward spot of confronting a new wave of crypto-fascism, but we lack the ability to successfully convey the importance of this message because of how cavalierly we throw about terms. Because the voices calling for this despicable ideology have a plurality of support among one of the major parties. Because in an oddly prophetic sense the chickens of that debate are coming home to roost as the Far Right economic policy, having failed, has left only the dangerous, crypto-fascist hull to plague our body politic.

It’s been said that Donald Trump’s policies concerning Muslims have strong parallels with the Shoah and Nazi policy more broadly. It’s a fairly easy comparison to make: both want a country that supports the ‘real’ nation, both want to defend the nation from external forces that would otherwise change it, both want to monitor the identified other and shut down their places of worship, and both are willing to use military and police force to carry out these desires. It was something of a passing novelty that Mr Trump was revealed to have kept a copy of writings by Hitler on his nightstand, but in light of his now repeated claims that he would like to have a database that monitors the activities of Muslim refugees at least, if not all Muslims in America, it seems to be yet another red flag that was missed. To the casual observer this has eerie parallels with the yellow Star of David, the pink triangle, and any number of other symbols the Nazis used to identify and monitor who the outsiders were.

This all coming in the wake of his repeatedly inaccurate and vile accusations of various groups Mr Trump feels are not sufficiently American. From the trivial, e.g. people who say “Happy Holidays” and not “Merry Christmas;” to the outright offensive, e.g. supposed waves Mexican rapists flooding across the border, there are any number of groups that do not fit Mr Trump’s vision of what is sufficiently American and his prescription for all of them tends to be quite harsh and ill thought out. To my mind this is where the parallels with Hitler really hit home, because the contemptible man with the ridiculous mustache was not the great mastermind he is so often portrayed as. Hitler was a country bumpkin with ambitions of greatness, but not the talent. He famously failed to even get into art school, but it’s not like he was some great military or political leader either. Whether it was the development of weapons or the execution of field tactics, Hitler himself proved to be one of the biggest liabilities to his military success, thinking he knew far more than he actually did. But people went along with him for the ride because they just assumed he knew. And now Mr Trump seems to be both fitting that mould as well as proving the lyrics of “Fiddler on the Roof.” “It wouldn’t matter if I answer right or wrong. When you’re rich they think you really know.”

In a field of candidates who can’t paint a cohesive vision for America, Trump even manages to out vague everyone else. On every single issue Mr Trump cannot offer any detail about his plans, instead focusing on his goals. He wants to shorten VA wait times. How? He wants to shorten VA wait times. He will beat ISIS. How? He will beat ISIS. There are very few moments when he will actually offer examples of real steps he would take and they would be laughably stupid in another context, like re-commissioning WWII era battleships and of course building a wall along the entire US-Mexico border and get Mexico to pay for it. How? He will get Mexico to pay for it. He can’t clearly say what he would do if he took office because he doesn’t know the first thing about what he’s talking about, but he just shouts loud enough and violently gesticulates enough to rile up the crowds and that seems to do the trick.

But the reason I bring up the stupidity is to highlight the underlying logic of fascism, which is to say the lack thereof. Fascism is an attempt to feed off of our worst instincts, there is nothing cerebral about it. We are naturally inclined to dislike those who disagree with us and would therefore prefer it if they shut up. We are naturally fearful of the things we do not understand and would like the whole world to be much easier to understand than it actually is. We want to believe that our own thoughts are always right and if only everyone could just get on board we could fix all the problems in the world. But what we want to be true or what comes naturally is not always what is true or what is right. Mr Buckley was the absolute best the turd of crypto-fascism can be polished and even then it’s just a hair away from being a schoolyard bully calling people queer and threatening to assault those who disagree. Mr Trump is no William F Buckley, and damned if I’ll let this country make him the next Adolf Hitler.