Vox Populi

I want to take a moment to say something that may seem shocking in progressive circles. In the unlikely event that Donald Trump wins the support of a majority of American citizens this election I will not be moving to Canada, I will not support a military coup to overthrow him, and I will not call for impeachment hearings unless he actually commits an impeachable offense. I say this because I am an adult and perhaps more importantly because I am an American regardless of who my commander in chief is. In no way does this mean I will work any less diligently to stop someone like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or any of the crazed right wing zealots who have descended upon this nation like locusts, to steal a turn of phrase from the aforementioned Cuban Canadian American ideologue. I intend to do my part to get American citizens to vote for qualified and sane candidates, while exposing the wrongheadedness that now pervades the GOP. But if at the end of this cycle a majority of Americans support the other guy, I am going to do my best for my country first and that means accepting the will of the people. Because, in the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Every high schooler, who has gone through civics, will snidely say that the United States is not a democracy, it’s a republic, but as so often is the case the lessons we learn as children are just a little less nuanced than reality demands. It is indeed true that we are not a direct democracy, because who has the time to vote on every matter anyway? In actuality the reasons why we are not a “true democracy” have more to do with the sensibilities of the people who wrote Constitution than it does with a concern for the busy schedule of the average citizen. We have a representative democracy with a strong legal condition because of two competing premises. On the one hand, our government is based on the premise that legitimacy arrives from the consent of the governed, that it is we the people who declare what form of government is acceptable, and that it is we the people who are ultimately responsible for the stewardship of that government. However on the other hand, our government is based on the premise that people are imperfect and potentially dangerous when riled up into a mob, which is why above all else the Constitution seeks to ensure that along with curtailing a conventional tyranny that we curtail the tyranny of the majority. Of these two rather conflicting premises, the founders seemed to think the latter was more integral.

It may not be surprising but the interests of a handful of landed, pseudo-aristocratic white men are not necessarily the same as the entire population of a diverse nation. The Constitution, as much as it is a brilliant legal framework for a modern democracy, also includes many profoundly undemocratic elements that were expressly designed to protect the interests of the men who wrote it. This is not, however, to say that these undemocratic elements are necessarily wrong or bad, just to point out that the origins of such contrived concepts as the electoral college were not merely the result of practical limitations of long distance information transfer in the latter part of the 18th century. The inclusion of indirect elections for the President and the Senate, as well as the appointment of Supreme Court Justices, is a direct challenge to the assumption that the citizenry is capable of choosing the people who are entrusted with writing, interpreting, and executing the laws under which we live. Nevertheless, this is a representative democracy, at least in principle.

The United States does have something of a centuries long pendulum swing back and forth between more or less democratic states of being: the enfranchisement of more citizens and the direct election of senators on one side and the consolidation of certain powers into unelected departments on the other. However, at the end of the day the average citizen is empowered with certain basic rights and related responsibilities. The fact that we have a right to vote should not be taken for granted, though it sadly has. In theory, each congressman and woman has a term limit, and every other year we determine if they’ve reached it. In theory, we can recall politicians even sooner if they are not meeting the standards of their constituents. Yet we know in practice that the vast majority of incumbents will be reelected because they are either unopposed outright or virtually unopposed due to a system that heavily favors the incumbent. But even that is not the real problem.

The reason why I can comfortably say that the election of a president, with whom I profoundly disagree, has no effect on whether I continue to live in the United States is because I live in the United States. By this I mean that in other countries the election of a president would have a direct and tangible effect on the lives of the average citizen, but not so in the US. Our president is not a dictator, is not a monarch, is not a tyrannical autocrat, much to the disagreement of the modern GOP. And I don’t just mean President Obama, I mean the office of the president is not terribly powerful when it comes to domestic issues. The Affordable Care Act was passed by Congress and was remarkably different from the plan Obama ran on. The victories on marriage equality came from the Supreme Court and not the president’s pen. The president has great power when it comes to foreign policy, but not so much at home. So unless you are a part of the military you probably wouldn’t notice who is the president on a day to day basis; not so with local and state governments.

I feel like I’m doing a disservice by writing this now, during a presidential cycle, because while it is important to vote, this is already the time that most people are likely to vote anyway. Or rather, presidential elections are the times when American citizens are most likely to attempt to vote at any rate. Many Americans, who are legally entitled to vote, won’t be allowed to vote in the coming election or subsequent elections if things don’t change soon. See, while everyone was busy crying wolf about the progress that has been made under the Obama administration, there has been an effort to make voting as difficult as possible for people that aren’t likely to vote for Republican candidates. At the same time as state governments have been passing laws requiring specific state IDs to vote, they’ve been closing offices allowed to provide those IDs in communities that happen to be poor or inhabited by ethnic minorities. These aren’t the result of an executive order or even the product of one of Congress’s less glacial periods, but the work of state legislatures and governors who seek to have only the voice of people who agree with them heard. And that’s a perfectly understandable ambition, after all wouldn’t it be just so easy to govern if it weren’t for all that pesky dissent, but this is the tyranny of the temporary majority that the founders expressly wished to prevent.

I can accept a government that I didn’t vote for, but I can’t accept a government I couldn’t vote against. What we face is a democracy in line with the values of Kim Jong Un, where you can have any opinion you want, just so long as it’s the party’s. And let’s call a spade a spade, it’s not the Democratic Party that is trying to strip Americans of their voting rights. We are facing a fundamental crisis of our democracy if, on top of all the other structural failings that make it so hard to uproot the bad elements of our government, we choose to let one side silence all opposition and deny undesirable citizens their votes. The voice of the people is indeed worth protecting, even if it is disagreeable, because if not for the full force of the electorate how are we supposed to keep the power structure in check and how is our government supposed to be viewed as in any way legitimate?

Voting is important and elections always have consequences. People have fought and died for their right to vote, yet we’ve given it away so easily. The calls to suppress voter turnout are coming only from the Right and they degrade the very concept of a democratic government by undermining those who try to elect a Democratic government. And this should indeed scare the members of the GOP, who are now faced with the reality that they can’t get back in control of the asylum. The only hope of Republicans trying to get anyone but Trump elected is the Democratic Party, but they’ve shot themselves in the foot by trying to enfranchise their most extreme elements at the direct expense of the American Left. So now it seems we’re heading toward a rather tragic test of our democracy, to see if the voice of the people is still enough to drown out the voice of tyranny in all forms, at all levels.

All the Small Government We Can’t Afford

“When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13:11. Now aside from being one of the two Corinthians Donald Trump spoke about this seems as good a was as any to dive into the major problem I have with the foundational principle of conservative economics. How’s that for an introduction? When I listen to conservatives speak on just about any topic I hear a level of certainty and oversimplification that makes me immediately skeptical of the claims. To be blunt, I believe that they are reasoning as a child does, seeing the world in perfect black and white, without ever acknowledging that the world is complicated and that moderation is almost always the proper tack to take. This is chiefly expressed in one of the most often heard refrains in conservative circles “that government is best, which governs least.” Irrespective of whether or not these words came from Thomas Jefferson, they are wrong.

Near as I can tell the government that governs best is the government that governs best. Tautology? Technically no because I didn’t even bother to rephrase it, but in principle yes, yet that doesn’t take away from the reality that there is no hard and fast rule that applies to the appropriate size of government for all cases. There are times when we want government to stay out of our lives and especially out of our bedrooms and there are times when we want government to have a small regulatory role, just to maintain a level playing field while principally staying out of our way, but there are indeed times when we want the government to be a big player. This is not some alien concept to conservatives, who supposedly think that there is no such thing as too big a military budget or too much spent on arming police with military surplus. As a progressive I would argue for more government in some places that a conservative would not be so supportive, but I think if we’ve learned anything from the last decade or so it should be that we need to find some happy place in the middle because we’ve been experiencing the trouble of too little government all over.

As a friend of Dorothy, I find it appropriate to begin by talking about Kansas. What’s the matter with Kansas these days? Well to be pithy, they aren’t paying enough taxes. Sam Brownback has promised for years that his conservative experiment would give conservatives the kind of proof they needed that their principles are sound, and for years he has given conservatives plenty of evidence that they might want to consider the destructive capability of their side’s extremism. Kansas has trouble keeping their schools open, which is going to hurt them even more down the road, but right now just means that any person thinking of moving to Kansas for work is going to have to second guess raising a family there. Kansas has racked up huge debt, which makes prospective employers skeptical about the long term stability of starting up or expanding businesses in Kansas. This is most clearly evident in the loud and growing calls from business owners themselves calling for tax hikes and closing the LLC loophole. This might just be because it does no good for a business to save money on taxes when they are going to be wasting that money navigating their goods around crumbling infrastructure for instance. Nevertheless Governor Brownback has doubled down with his commitment to lead his state into the poorhouse, to prove a point that smaller government is better, regardless of what happens in the real world.

And I’m not arguing that the polar opposite would be ideal, because that’s just as wrong. Our political discourse has become so binary that it becomes impossible to actually work toward the common good, and I fall into this trap myself. Not all conservatives support Governor Brownback, which again is why he’s facing quite a bit of opposition as a result of his extremist positions. The biggest enemies of extremism are often not from the opposing side, but from the more moderate elements of that same side. George Orwell was a Democratic Socialist, he fought in the Spanish Civil War alongside socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, and yes even communists. Nevertheless, he saved his most scathing critiques for the kind of authoritarian communists who represented a violent extreme of socialism. This didn’t make him a conservative by any stripe, but when you are defending an argument there’s nothing more destructive than the person who claims to be on your side and is wrong on just about everything. This is why I am virulently opposed to communism, regardless of its supposed promise on paper. When you remove the autonomy of the individual and the incentive to work for more, you take away the most powerful creative engine humanity has ever known. I just wish American conservatives were as dogmatically opposed to the extremists within their own ranks.

Which brings me right back to the problems Americans face as a direct result of the premise that the problem is always the inflated size of government. The citizens of Flint, Michigan and St Joseph, Louisiana face the damning evidence of the ultimate cost of smaller government every time they turn on their water faucets. It was a poignant observation that “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” And it is true of many other parts of our lives that we expect our government to take care of; the up front cost of these benefits pales in comparison to the ultimate costs of not having them at all or not paying for the upkeep. The money that was “saved” by changing the water source for Flint is nothing compared to the costs they now face in putting in an entirely new plumbing system for the whole area. The price of dealing with EPA or FDA regulations to keep air, water, land, food, etc clean is a drop of water compared to the hospital costs and funerary costs from making these organizations toothless. And we can have adult conversations about when these organizations go too far in making decent businesses suffer under overburdensome regulations or highlighting when they become wasteful with our tax dollars, but it gets increasingly difficult to hear the argument coming from the extreme Right as anything but a justification for really bad and costly business practices.

And since I did also mention a town in Louisiana in that last bit, it’s worth mentioning that Governor Brownback wasn’t alone in experimenting with just how small government can be. Louisiana is in the midst of a huge debt crisis, one that ushered in the end of Republican leadership statewide. Former Governor Bobby Jindal sold off government property, sold short public institutions like schools and still couldn’t pay for his massive tax cuts. As even more salt on the wounds, the current low oil prices that conservatives have been saying would be a godsend for the US economy are a part of the reason why Louisiana isn’t getting enough revenue to pay for the long term environmental damage done to Louisiana by the fossil fuel industry. All the money from the BP spill settlement doesn’t rebuild the coastline that has been eroding for decades, doesn’t stop the rising water levels, and doesn’t fill the state’s coffers. But it would be a wonder if, after Jindal’s time in office, the schoolchildren of Louisiana have even heard of climate change, leave alone evolution.

Cutting the size and scope of government was supposed to solve all ills, but like any supposed cure-all it has failed to live up to the hype. Again it’s not because cutting taxes or regulations is always a bad idea or because government should always grow exponentially, it’s because by definition too much or too little of anything is not ideal. I like keeping my own money when I get my paycheck, but I also like being able to drink my tap water without getting sick. I don’t want to see my tax dollars wasted on extravagant and wasteful government programs, but I do want public education to be free and available to every child in this country because we’re all better off with an intelligent populous. If the solution is always to cut government and taxes we’re going to be saddled with huge debt at least, and as we’ve seen across the country that is really the least of our problems. I’m all for government getting out of the way of the individual, but there’s a limit and we really need intelligent conservatives to stand up to the extremism that paints their entire movement in a really bad light. Are there problems with government spending too much? Sure, just look at Illinois’s debt crisis, but there are things we want government to pay for and it has to be paid for one way or the other. So let’s stop pretending like the only problem is that governments spend too much money, because that is something we can ill afford.

The Aftermath

I had been trying to square the circle of how Republican doomsday predictions can be so severe at a time when unemployment is down, wages are rising, America is not embroiled in large wars, our major competitors are going through economic slumps, more people are insured, and the benefits of modern technology are more widespread than at any time in human history. Obviously there’s the political narrative to it, because why would the average voter jump ship to the Republicans if the Democrats have been doing so darn well steering the ship of state. But that only works if you can paint a convincing case that country really is doing so poorly that it needs to be made great again. Yet there are undoubtedly a great many people who see the world not as rosy but as bloodstained and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the GOP was so convinced that it was the end of the world, and then it struck me. It is indeed the fiery end, but not for the world and not for the United States. This is the Republican Armageddon.

On Sunday the Republican Party will celebrate its eight score and second year as an American political party. In its prime it put forward such great presidents as Abraham Lincoln, who led the Union through the Civil War and led to the abolition of slavery; Theodore Roosevelt, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War and invited the first black man to be a guest in the White House; Dwight Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War and integrated US schools; and George W Bush, who once choked on a pretzel. Actually to be fair to President Bush, for all the many things I disliked about his administration, his devotion to Africa has undoubtedly saved millions of lives and lifted many more out of dire situations. It seems incredible now to imagine that the people currently putting (R) after their names have anything to do with any of these policies that helped real human beings who may just have had complexions darker than a cup of milk. The party of Frederick Douglass, the party of Booker T Washington, the party of Sojourner Truth is dead. Too bad it didn’t make it to the bicentennial.

The GOP was once founded on the principles of equality alongside the abolition movement and the women’s suffrage movement, progressive reforms like that of TR’s trust busting and environmental policy, and even just simple but effective government like that of George HW Bush administration. But all that good and decent history doesn’t phase the modern GOP for even one second, because as far as they’re concerned there have only ever been two presidents: Barack “Satan” Obama and Ronald “God” Reagan. For those of us who live in reality we can accept the fact that both of these presidents have done some good things and some bad things and when weighed against each other’s record it should seem clear that President Obama gets the better of it. The Obama Administration didn’t sell arms to the Iranians, that would be the Reagan Administration. Obama has cut the deficit year after year, while deficits under Reagan shot up so much it ruined President Bush’s tax pledge. And whereas the Reagans were willing to sit by while thousands of Americans died from complications of HIV/AIDS, the Obama administration has expanded insurance coverage and done more for the LGBT community than any other president. But of course it’s Obama who is the devil in the GOP, because it is their apocalypse after all, and he is just the scapegoat du jour.

If it were just a matter of the GOP putting forward candidates that I find detestable, that would not be some great departure from their basic MO in the 21st century. Between Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker etc it’s been a veritable rainbow of candidates who vomit at the sight of a rainbow flag. I’ve almost become desensitized to the religious rhetoric so extreme that Bob Jones himself would feel ill at ease being seen with these people. But what is different here is that the Republican Party has finally become self aware, and it shows in the little cracks that pop up even if they try their best to cover up the underlying problem. At no point in the 2012 race or the 2008 race did a significant percentage of the party ask itself “what have we done?” Even though these were the races that gave us the 47%, death panels, Obama is an Arab, and Sarah Palin. Nope, it took being faced with the choice between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump to force the politicians and a significant number of Republicans to realize that the chickens have come to roost and the nest can’t handle it.

It’s at this point that inevitably someone will claim argue that the Democrats also have undesirable candidates, and while it is true that many in the Democratic Party would never have seen either Bernie of Hillary as their first choices for president, neither of them are so universally loathed by their coworkers as Cruz or just so blatantly absurd as Trump. You might be able to find one or two Democrats who will say on record that they intend to just stay at home for the election, but there aren’t entire campaigns and superPACs being created to enlist candidates who weren’t planning on running or to create a third party in the event that the other guy wins the nomination. In the same way that the movement to shut down the government was completely a Republican problem, the whole danger of imploding the party is entirely a Republican issue.

Normally I would try to calm the talk down and start offering constructive ways to fix the problem, but it’s too late for that. At this point it would be like telling the GOP to cut the red wire when the timer is flashing 0:00. There is still an entity that calls itself the Republican Party and there are still people who claim to be Republicans, but it’s not the party of Lincoln or Roosevelt or Eisenhower or Bush. Hell, given some of the borderline liberal policies of the Reagan administration it’s not even the party of the Gipper anymore either. This is the party of ever higher walls, bludgeoned reporters and protesters, KKK endorsements, Planned Parenthood shootings, routinely shut down government agencies, closed schools and hospitals to pay for lower taxes, and all the other goodies that come from this shadowy group that still clings to the letters GOP. It’s no wonder the Republicans think we’re entering a post-apocalyptic dystopia, as far as they can see it’s already happened.

There is a bright side though, and the most conservative of this Mad Max world are not going to like it. In spite of everything, the Obama administration has not only kept this country moving forward, but ultimately has left it far better than it was found on January 20, 2009. With the help of even some RINOs the Democrats have been able to get quite a bit done in two terms, even with the unprecedented obstruction that has been the hallmark of the GOP throughout Obama’s tenure in the White House. And better still it is that very obstinate strategy that is going to cement all the progress that has been made during the Obama administration. As he is wont to do, President Obama chose a conciliatory tack with his Supreme Court nomination. He has selected Merrick Garland, whom Republicans have approved previously, as a moderate to fill the vacancy in the hopes that the GOP might do the reasonable thing and actually do their jobs in the Senate. They have no plans to do so; therefore, they have committed themselves to having Scalia’s replacement be a fierce liberal lion chosen by the next Democratic president and approved by what seems increasingly likely to be a Democratic Senate.

The real tragedy is that the Republican Party was once a source of pride for this country, a fringe political party that was born out of the noble goal of ending slavery that became one of the two national political parties that dominated the American political spectrum. The terrible irony being that it used to be the Democrats who were saddled with the racism and bigotry that has now eaten the GOP from the inside out. It should come as no great shock why Republicans have such a fondness for the “good old days” because for the GOP that is indeed all they have left. There is an elephant corpse in the room that needs to be addressed and I can only hope that whatever replaces it takes to heart the lessons that need to be learned from this collapse. I can only hope that in the aftermath America is treated to a party as fundamentally good as the Republican Party was at one point. Until that point, we all just have to hope that enough adults still get elected to office so that we can continue the sane policies of presidents like Barack Obama.

Choice

If this primary season has clarified anything, it is that in the general election there is no choice for the rational citizen. This is not to say that there won’t be a clear candidate to vote for, just that the Republican Party has become so unhinged, so extreme, so bigoted, ignorant, and violent that they have eliminated themselves from even the most brief consideration come the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. And I am of the opinion that we are poorer for it, not only because there are inevitably right wing extremists who end up elected, but because a pluralistic democracy only works when there is a legitimate competition of ideas and policies. This nation suffers because we are no longer able to choose between two good choices in the general, though for the moment we are able to do so in the Democratic Party and that’s just not good enough.

Both the Democratic Party and the GOP are comprised of such differing interests that they would likely be at least eight different parties in most parts of the world: Social Democrats, Liberal Democrats, Trade Unionists, Green Partiers, Christian Conservatives, Libertarians, Free Market Conservatives, and Fascists immediately jumping to mind. In the Democratic Party there is a robust debate between the social democratic and liberal democratic wings of the party, but on the right we have mishmashes of their groups that range from far right to jackbooted thug far right. In either case these primaries represent an inter-party coalition struggle more than an intra-party attempt to put the best face on the party. And it is unfortunately the case that the only party with factions that deal in some form of reality are the Democrats.

Well, oh casual straw man, you may ask, ‘what problem is that?’ The problem is that in practice both of these parties govern, to the extent that at least one of them tries to govern, in a way that demands widespread party unity from parties that are fundamentally disjointed. So we never pursue social democratic solutions or libertarian solutions, etc but instead try to placate everyone with proposals that are designed from the get go as compromises, and it is that very watered down nature that prohibits any long term success.

Countries can live and even thrive under less than ideal law and economic policy, but only when there is a certain level of pragmatic consistency. Singapore has seen rapid economic growth and an almost unbelievable development of the national quality of life, despite enacting many policies that I would find distasteful. Singapore is a profoundly one party state because despite the existence of other political parties the ruling People’s Action Party holds 82 of the 89 parliamentary seats. It can be occasionally difficult to identify what the ideology of the PAP really is, other than to claim that it pursues pragmatic policies to improve the country, which can really only be done because there isn’t a constant struggle to cater to various other parties. The problem with one party states however is that they have a tendency to ignore minority groups, and even if you have a good reason to dislike an individual group, say the KKK, it is best to design systems that defend certain basic liberties blind to race, political orientation, religion, class, etc because you never know when you’re going to find yourself in the minority.

Singapore has a bad track record when it comes to treating the LGBT community as a group of human beings. There is also a fairly well documented history of suppressing a full freedom of speech and using the paternal nature of the government to crack down unmercifully on benign infractions. Many have also pointed to China as the defining rebuttal to pluralistic democracy, but as it now faces a slowing economy they are poised to undo so much of what has been achieved because party unity is being held above competent policy.

Which brings us back to the national American discussion. We have two conglomerate parties, only one of which continues to operate under the assumption that good government is better than bad government or no government at all. Meaning that as citizens we are getting the worst of both worlds when November rolls around. We don’t get the potential efficiency of a good but imperfect single party state and we don’t have a legitimate choice between otherwise coequal parties. If I were the average voter, and I suppose I am, I would be pretty miffed with the status quo.

And it’s interesting to see how, for many, the option is to burn it all down to make this country great again or to Bern it all up to create a future we can all believe in. In either case there’s an advocacy to revolutionarily change the current dysfunctional system, but only one of those two has actually put forward clear policy proposals and fine print as to how it could be implemented. On the Democratic side there is also a more evolutionary proposal on how to affect long lasting structural improvements, by using the rules and structure of the current system, à la LBJ. On the Republican side there are essentially the exact same choices but with varying soupçons of Cuba, Canada, Axis powers, or Leave it to Beaver. In fact the only thing that can be said in favor of Trump is that his fascist rhetoric is less frequently shrouded in religious diatribes that resemble the Taliban more than the Third Reich, not that I claim to know which of those two options is ultimately more dangerous. But where are the well intentioned, reasonable people of the American Right supposed to go?

They’re not Democrats, in most cases, and they do have worthwhile arguments that the GOP used to espouse. Why should they be denied a choice at the ballot box just because a plurality of the modern GOP is now so far gone as to tacitly support fascism? I am not a libertarian in any meaningful sense, but I do appreciate the argument and understand how others could be swayed by it, yet Ron Paul was all but shut out of the contest whenever he ran. So the libertarians are tacitly told to just take it on the chin and vote for the GOP because they want lower taxes, even as they attack individual liberties, because where else are they supposed to go? For that matter where are Democrats, who don’t see their wing of the party represented by the current slate of candidates, supposed to go?

In a more ideal world I might suggest voting for a third party candidate. It’s not unthinkable that in a country like Canada or the UK or Israel for a relatively unknown party to gather enough support to either win control of the government outright or at least win enough to become an influential part of a coalition government. But the American political system makes this an inadvisable strategy, because by not supporting the candidate you can stomach you are effectively voting for the party you can’t stand. The last time there was a viable third party option was just over a century ago, when TR split off from the Republican Party to form the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party. He did earn more votes than the incumbent GOP president, but it only served to create a landslide victory for the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. So I can’t say that this is a viable solution at the moment, as the only choice you have is to elect the candidate you most dislike.

Depending on what aspect of the problem we are talking about there are several potential solutions that could be effective in ameliorating the situation. Impartial district drawing algorithms like the shortest-splitline algorithm can be effective at negating the intentional usurpation of the will of the voter. Mixed-member proportional voting can effectively eliminate the problems of voting for smaller parties, while eliminating any accidental exclusion of significant voting blocks they may result even after implementing shortest-splitline. Longer terms for all offices would create an incentive for legislators to support policies that are beneficial in the long term and not just popular in the short term. Mandatory voting would make sure that smaller interest groups, which aren’t representative of the larger populous, are blocked from having undue political power. But ultimately the only real solution to a structural problem like this is for all Americans to take the responsibility of voting seriously.

The only reason why our political parties continue to leave us without a choice at the ballot box is because we choose to be without a choice. Every citizen who fails to live up to the responsibility of voting is responsible for allowing political discourse to appeal to the interests of the most base among us, who do actually turn out to vote. There is no reason why these ridiculous candidates should win an election if the people who opposed them actually showed up to vote. At his best, someone like Trump commands less than half of the primary electorate of one party. Less than half of Americans identify with that party, meaning that if all those people who claim to despise what he represents actually showed up, it would be a bigger blow out than 1912. But so many of us choose not to vote and are then surprised by the lack of choices at the polls, which then serves as justification to choose not to vote. This horrific cycle has to end somewhere, and even if it’s not the most palatable choice for some that means showing up to each election, to find the time on two days (primary and general election) every other year. Because if we can’t choose to take the responsibility of democracy seriously, then why should we expect that our choices at the voting booth would be any more serious?

In Defense of Political Correctness

One of the constant refrains in this election is the now common wisdom that the greatest threat to our democracy is not climate change, is not terrorism of all stripes, is not economic instability, etc. No, as it turns out the single biggest threat to the American experiment is political correctness. I know, I was surprised too, but as it turns out the desire to treat people with a certain modicum of respect is in fact the single biggest boogeyman that threatens to destroy the totality of human civilization. This is certainly the refrain of each and every GOP candidate and as liberals are wont to do there is no one taking on this narrative head on. So it’s left to me and my unfortunate contrarian spirit to fight against this notion that PC culture is some great big threat to liberty, democracy, and the American way.

Political correctness is one of those terms that everyone has heard about, but nearly the only people who talk about it with any conviction are those who have no idea what they’re talking about and who invariably hate it. It’s not unlike the word socialism in that regard, and in fact if you go through the darker circles of conservatism you will undoubtedly find a number of people who think that one is a conspiracy stemming from the other. To be frank, political correctness doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s a description of several phenomena that are loathed by some subsection of the American population and used as a blanket insult for the lot. The desire to integrate schools could be described as political correctness and the desire to limit the use of racial epithets in friendly conversation is political correctness gone mad. If PC culture were in fact a thing it would be rather toothless because America is a liberal democracy that above all values the freedom of expression, even expressions that many would find distasteful.

In my experience what the critics of political correctness often refer to is what I would call basic human decency, but as so often happens there are a tiny but loud minority of people who take a fundamentally good thing and make it annoying. I am an atheist, it’s a fairly meaningless identity in its own regard as it neither adds nor subtracts substantially to how I view myself, but it can be a constant source of frustration to encounter members of the “atheist community” who are, to be blunt, assholes. I’m not necessarily referring to those who can be a little bit too strident in opposing religious influence in daily life, e.g. the people who actively try to remove “In God We Trust” from our currency, but more to the people who ignorantly and repeatedly claim that religion is a mental disorder. They are an example of what can happen when you take a good thing and make it annoying. Similarly there are people who are a bit strident with encouraging people to refrain from using the R-word or the F-word and so on, whom I don’t have a particular problem with, and then there are those who make the pursuit of civility into a self aggrandizing struggle to loudly boast of how accepting they are.

In both these cases the unfortunate reality is that the extremists of either group are virtually powerless in actually accomplishing anything substantive, but they hoist the mantle of whatever movement they adopt upon themselves so forcefully that it gives the people who are actually working to make things better a bad name. When Donald Trump refers to the political correctness we can ill afford he goes on to list basic human decency like not committing warcrimes or remembering that the actions of one person who was born in Mexico do not reflect on the entirety of the Mexican population. Yet people go along with him on his tirades against political correctness because in their mind they’re not thinking of being considerate enough to warn an epileptic person of impending strobe lights, they’re thinking of the opinionated busybody who chastised them for an innocent mistake one time. And the reason this sinks in in the first place is because the American Left sucks.

Liberals are annoying, I know this because I am a liberal. And I’m not going to pretend that this is just the cross we bear for being right and telling people to eat their vegetables. No, the American Left is just awful at creating a genuinely positive movement and defending our positions. Liberals run and hide at the first sign of a fight with the mean old conservatives because they don’t want to be labeled as communists/socialists/liberals or weak or whatever the accusation of the day is. This is why the Right gets away with advocating for policies and political strategies that demonstrably hurt the country, this is why they get away with social policy that keeps Americans hurting, this is why we are kept in almost perpetual war. It’s the simple reality that for many in America, we all know that the GOP is wrong on damn near every issue, but the damn liberals are just so annoying…

But here’s the crux of the issue, no matter how annoying you may think people who are “politically correct” are, the root of that phrase remains the same, that they are correct. It’s not some ploy at political correctness when it’s pointed out that illegal immigration from Mexico is not a real problem, that’s just correct. It’s been the case for years now that net migration with Mexico is going into Mexico, not the US. It’s not an attempt to be politically correct to point out that in the US the majority of terrorism comes from Conservative Christian Extremists, and not Radical Islamists, that’s just correct. And while the haters of all things PC may point to suggestion pamphlets that encourage the use of admittedly over the top language to avoid offending people, it’s not the Left that tries to infringe on our first amendment rights in America by legislating what words can be heard on TV, how much skin a person can show in a PG-13 rated movie, or whether a mother can breastfeed in public.

In America the greatest threats to religious liberty come from the Far Right, as I’ve explained so many times. The assault on liberal churches, temples, synagogues by denying them the ability to tend to the poor and the addicted, to marry same sex couples, etc doesn’t come from the PC crowd. No laws are sitting in the back benches waiting to deny the Mormon Church its freedom to deny gay parishioners, but there are always bills waiting to be passed to deny gay workers any job protection. The PC crowd isn’t poised to close any Baptist Churches, but GOP candidates are repeatedly vowing to shut down Mosques. And it’s simple enough to find one exception to the rule where a liberal tried and failed to enact a “PC” policy, but the rule still stands that in the face of the almost impotent PC movement to try and treat people as human beings, the anti-PC crowd is the one trying to control language, education, media, etc.

It really should not have come as a shock to anyone why Bernie became so popular so quickly even with some fairly basic and insurmountable barriers between him and a nomination. Democrats have been the absolute worst at defending a cause for the bulk of my life and the epitome of it was this past midterm cycle. The economy has been doing pretty darn well since Obama came to town, unemployment was down and although wage growth was nearly flat it should have been an easy case to make that the constant filibustering from the GOP is what has made job creators uneasy about making the long term investments that actually yield jobs and wages. Obamacare is doing a heck of a lot of good for a lot of people and it should have been a pretty damn easy case to point out that the people getting hit by changes just happened to live in conservative states that refused federal funds. But there wasn’t a great celebration of the effective governance of the Obama administration, there was just a bunch of lily-livered Democrats running from White House begging not to be hit because they stood for healthcare access, a stable economy, lower deficits, greater social inclusion, and increased employment. All those positions are just too politically correct, and it was just so much easier to pretend like the world was falling apart, but not because of us. So when it came to actually standing up for liberal policies it took a freaking socialist to finally say ‘no more.’

The key word here is correct, politically or otherwise, the enemies of PC culture are simply not correct. They aren’t correct when it comes to economics, which is why we’ve had growing income inequality and debt since Voodoo Economics blew into town. They aren’t correct on social issues, which is why any attempts to treat the LGBT community, racial and ethnic minorities, women, addicts, the mentally ill, and any number of other human beings as human beings have been glacial. They aren’t correct on foreign policy, which is why we’re perpetually forced to fight a new war to pick up the shrapnel from the last war. Wouldn’t it be just peachy if for once there really were a PC police to show up and lay down a bit of truth with the kind of force that is used to undermine reality?