Democracy Is Not to Blame

Democracy’s strife on an unlevel playing field

Democracy’s greatest weakness: itself?

There’s an idea circulating among the intelligentsia that democracy carries the seeds of its own destruction.  This is more or less the thesis of a book entitled The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion, by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing. These are brilliant, learned gentlemen, and while I haven’t read their book I recommend it based on this in the New York Times which you may have access to, and a three-cornered podcast which you probably do have access to and sheds light on what appears to be the essentials of their thinking about democracy.  One of the corollaries of their argument is that democracy can easily slip into autocracy, and this is not a bug but a feature—that is, autocracy itself is not a feature but the potential for slipping into autocracy is. The podcast differentiates between just plain democracy—where you can have a tyranny of the majority—and liberal democracy, where you have minority protections. It’s more complex than that—they say we might see the end of liberal democracy but keep some more generic kind of democracy—but I’ll drop it because I’m more concerned about what’s missing in the discussion.

What’s missing is that when we’re talking about democracy in the United States, we don’t even have a democracy, much less a liberal democracy, to talk about. Don’t have, never did, and by the look of things probably never will, unless . . . (see last section, Voices of Hope below).

The very wise Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, two of the most influential framers of the Constitution, called the American experiment a republic.  To resolve the semantics, I like this source, which lands on the side of calling what the U.S. system is, purportedly, a “hybrid democratic republic.” This is the entity that Gershberg and Illing are calling a “liberal democracy.”

But . . . 

Any suggestion we did have a liberal democracy (hybrid or not) up to about 2005—before social media began to make a hash out of our political discourse and undermine even our pseudo-democracy —is misleading.

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Trump Stolen Document Drama: Even Split on Responsibility

An inexplicable delay: what really happened here?

Who’s to blame for Donald Trump having a horde of classified documents including Top Secret and Top Secret compartmentalized (a narrower category than mere Top Secret) at Mar-a-Lago for 18 months?

Well Donald Trump obviously. But he had plenty of help, starting with the people who elected him President in the first place, and even more the large segment of them who took to worshiping him to the degree that he really began to believe in his own godlike status–not bound by the  rules and laws by which all American citizens, including the top office-holder, are bound in principle. Next layer above voters consists of Republican politicians, primarily hypocrites who felt it was necessary to support Trump publicly for the sake of their political skins (and given the violence of Trump’s True Believers, perhaps their literal skins) even when they were well aware of his wrongdoing. The layer closest to Trump comprised members of his administration, most notably Bill Barr as Attorney General, who sank the Mueller investigation, and even launched a counter-investigation led by John Durham—a counter-investigation which basically in three years turned up nothing corrupt about the Mueller team. Bill Barr, first fired by Trump for dismissing Trump’s fraudulent charges of election fraud that cost him the 2020 election, and now horrified by the trove of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, has withdrawn his support of Trump . . . a bit late to curtail much of the enormous damage the ex-Prez has done to the country. (Done even if he hadn’t taken all those documents.)

We could go on naming enablers and Trump cult members on the Right,  lawyers with preposterous claims about the 2020 election, and other lawyers who knew the facts but nevertheless created a legal cocoon around the ex-President, but you already know most of them, if not by specific names then the groups to which they belong.

Enough rightward finger-pointing.  Let’s try some
more targeted finger pointing.

At this point, it’s evident that half the blame belongs to the parties named above.

The other half belongs to the Biden administration, in particular Attorney General Merrick Garland.

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Freedom’s Double-Edged Sword: Kansas Abortion Vote and Resistance to Public Health Measures

Dramatic pro-choice victory in Kansas demonstrates the power of the appeal to personal freedom

Central to the argument that swayed 60% of Kansas voters to preserve protections for abortion rights codified in their state constitution was the value of personal freedom.  It was not the only piece of the argument, but it was key to bringing along a big share of a predominantly Republican electorate to vote resoundingly for choice. They voted for choice not Democrats, even though most of pro-choice energy and grassroots work came from  Democrats. In fact, one of the tenets of American conservatism is that it’s the Left that poses the greatest danger to personal freedom and personal choice.

The high-profile alignment of “pro-life” Christian absolutism with the political Right creates the illusion among Democrats that Republicans are universally opposed to abortion. To the contrary, Kansas voters proved that views on the legality of abortion cross party lines.  There are some Democrats—Catholics in particular—who are against abortion in most if not all cases, and there are obviously plenty of Republicans in Kansas who believe in a lawful right to an abortion. My father was a bedrock fiscal conservative who demonized Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he was also an agnostic, and he believed in abortion rights.

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Gun Violence: Facts, Alternative Facts, and Frightening Facts

Polls say Americans’ overall support for gun control is tepid

Despite what you may be hearing on CNN and MSNBC or other left-leaning news organizations, recent polls indicate that Americans’ support for more gun control legislation nationally has been falling, has rarely topped 60%, and lately has dipped to 52%.  I’ll list the polls at the end of this post—three by Pew Research and two by Gallup.  These polls were taken before the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, NY, and Uvalde, TX. As in the past there will now surely be a surge in support for more and more effective gun controls—but if the past is any guide, the surge will subside and in a few months support for gun controls will flatten out again. Although a slight gain in support for more gun restrictions might occur, it can hardly be decisive legally due to our political paralysis.

What’s missing in most of these polls is a comparative breakdown by state and region.  Does high public support for stricter gun laws correlate with lower rates of shooting deaths? Hard to tell. There’s a lot of data on gun deaths and shootings by state and region, but when it comes to public support for stricter gun laws the data are either missing or confusing.  One obstacle to doing so is that there is no one single metric by which to rank “support” because what gun control means in one location is different from what it means in another location: background checks, age requirements, license requirements, training requirements, red flag laws (and their level of enforcement), properties of the firearms themselves (e.g. semiautomatic vs fully automatic, rate of fire, accuracy, ammunition, size of magazines, etc.), can all be mixed in proportions that are not standardized.

Nevertheless, an attempt was made by “World Population Review” in which there is a table (scroll down to “Strictest Gun Laws by State”) comparing “Strictness Grade” and gun death rates, and using a single number to represent a group of measures that vary from state to state. In general, the states with the strictest gun laws have the lowest gun death rates. Sure, say the liberals, duh. But that’s not the point, say Second Amendment zealots. The pro-gun counterargument is, that states with the strictest gun laws are the least “free.” Murders and suicides by guns are as Bill O’Reilly once said, “the cost of freedom.”

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Joe Biden’s Perfect Storm

A storm of woes haunts the Biden presidency

*COVID-19 Original
*COVID-19 Delta
*Fox News
*Divisive social media
*Donald Trump
*Russia
*Countless claims that Biden lost the 2020 election, believed by 78%
of Republicans
*Trump toadies Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, et al
*Trump thugs Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, et al
*Senate obstructionist Republican team, head thug Mitch McConnell
*Senate obstructionist pseudo-Democratic tag team Manchin-Sinema
*Militant House progressives
*Pigheaded House moderates
*Anti-Mask rebellions
*Anti-Vaccine rebellions
*Republican governors taking every opportunity to undermine his authority
*Anti-democratic Republican state legislatures
*Sinister conspiracy theories
*Bloodthirsty crazed dupes of conspiracy theories
*Threats against his life rising along with deadly threats against all office-holding Democrats (and some non-Democrats who refuse to be intimidated by the thugs)
*Emboldened white supremacists
*Irresolute Attorney General
*Bungled Afghanistan pullout
*Chinese saber-rattling
*A tsunami of pandemic-rebound shopping
*Oil price shocks
*Clogged supply chains

and now . . . 

The headline in the November 10, 6:24 pm story in The Hill was: “Biden Gets Inflation Gut Punch.”  Sure enough, just when it looked like a coalition of moderates and progressive Democrats was going to stitch together enough of the remains of Biden’s Build Back Better legislation to have all House Democrats call it a win, along comes inflation to poison the deal.

The result of too many dollars chasing too little capacity as the economy ramps up boosts inflation, and makes big government spending—of the magnitude that would benefit Americans up and down the economic ladder—enough of an inflation risk to stall or starve Biden’s Build Back Better legislative agenda.

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Budget Policy, Taxation, and Gratuitous Suffering

[Preamble: Along with the prospect of a massive national infrastructure program has come talk of the necessity of raising taxes in order to pay for it—from Democrats as well as Republicans. That talk is a mistake. My apologies for writing the third post on this subject in the last month, but I realize I have failed to convey the importance of it. Perhaps it’s better to frame it in the negative: how balancing the budget produces not just suffering, but gratuitous suffering. ]  

The tax and budget debate and gratuitous suffering

Continuing to talk about federal deficits and taxation is  dull, particularly when politicians from Bernie Sanders to Paul Ryan trot out the same tired commonplaces about taxing the rich (Sanders) and saddling future generations with crushing debt (Ryan & his successors).  Arguments from Left and Right are both couched in the paradigm of either balancing the federal budget or courting future disaster. Stuff we’ve heard countless times before, and just as irrelevant now as in the past.

Cloaked by the dullness is the true human cost of decision-makers getting bogged down in  meaningless arguments about budget deficits and taxes, while those who bear the greatest costs of the decisions have little voice.

The bogging-down leads to what Modern Monetary Theory champion Stephanie Kelton terms “gratuitous suffering.” Kelton:

It is just about the worst kind of suffering, because we have the capacity to do better, and to do better for our fellow Americans. To do better by others.  And if we can improve economic life for millions of people without creating harm, why wouldn’t we do that? 

Gratuitous, because there is a way out, but getting out requires something that almost no one on the public stage is talking about: to shed the mindset of having either to balance federal spending with taxes, or having to rectify crushing debt somewhere down the road with even greater taxes.

If you—despite your generous impulse to provide tens of millions of people with economic relief through government spending—still worry yourself about terrible future costs incurred by relief given in the present, then just stop worrying. Worrying about balancing the budget keeps getting  in the way of real economic progress.

For a 5-minute primer on Modern Monetary Theory and how it does away with concerns over budget deficits, watch Stephanie Kelton below:

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Stop Asking That Question!

COVID-19 Relief Bill draws another round
of pointless reiterations of
“how-are-you-going-to-pay-for-it?”

Those who had the patience and tolerance to wade through my earlier post on Modern Monetary Theory (find here) might not need to read the rest of this one. This one is something of a rehash of the reasons not to pay attention to the tired refrain, in respect to a government spending program, “how are you going to pay for it?”

Specifically, how are you (that is, we the taxpayers as distinct from zillionaires whose tax bills are barely a blip on their balance sheets) going to pay for the $1.9 trillion COVID Relief Bill, without bankrupting future generations?

It seems, from most of what I’ve been seeing and hearing, just about everyone on the political Left and Right is still buying  into “The Deficit Myth”—the fertile soil from which the how-are-you-going-to-pay-for-it commonplace sprouts. In the view of both sides, the National Debt looms as colossally menacing to American financial welfare as was Sauron’s redoubt Barad-Dur  to the welfare of the peoples of Middle Earth.

Interestingly, neither current Federal Reserve chairperson Jerome Powell nor past Fed chairperson and now Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen are sounding alarms about national debt risk caused by a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus.  Powell, to the contrary (and to the discomfort of fiscal conservatives dismayed to find out that Powell is not exactly Their Guy), has been advocating a big stimulus bill for months in order to head off another deep recession.

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Democracy’s Deathbed: the U.S. Senate

[Most of the content below is probably familiar to you, but I wanted to put it all together in one place to get a sense of how much of an impediment to democracy and human progress the United States Senate is—at least as it presently operates.  Conceivably it could be reformed to conduce to the betterment of the American people, but the current rules exacerbate the harm from an already non-democratic structure dictated by the Constitution.]

Grave arithmetic: if you think the Electoral College is bad, just consider the Senate

At times, it looks as if a coalition of white supremacists and QAnon cult members, together with right-wing government-hating, racist and xenophobic gun nuts,  whipped into a fact-free frenzy by Donald Trump, is what we most have to worry about in preserving our democracy.

If only.  The Capitol riot was a symptom of a societal breakdown a long time in the making. What we’re looking at now is a tipping point, a massive destabilization of the American public and the institutions on which it relies (with little thanks from a clueless majority of voters). It’s come to the point where such observers as MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan only half-jokingly wonder if the U.S. is becoming a “failed state.” (URL to YouTube is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mzFqKZe60o

There are plenty of villains to blame for this scary predicament—my favorite being social media—but one key contributor is the workings of the U.S Senate.  If we need big change quickly enough to stave off shocks to the system of which the January 6 riot at the Capitol is a brief forewarning, then something drastic has to be done  with the Senate.

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The Fix for the Economy You Never Hear About: Slaying the Budget Deficit Myth

Forget the mantra, “how are you going to pay for it?”

On page 182 of  The Deficit Myth,  author Stephanie Kelton quotes Alan Greenspan expressing the key idea that underpins Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)—that’s the theory that shows we can dispense with pointless agonizing over federal budget deficits. Deficit spending is the bugaboo that looms menacingly over every proposal to spend big on some government program—the bugaboo that elicits the refrain, “How are you going to pay for it?”

The bugaboo can be easily slain, and  conservative Alan Greenspan was just the man for the job.

The Greenspan quote at the end of this paragraph is an answer he gave to famous deficit hawk Congressman Paul Ryan in a hearing about entitlement reform.  Ryan was hoping to elicit Greenspan’s endorsement of privatizing social security—Ryan’s premise being that government-supported Social Security was insecure due to  impending deficits, and that “personal retirement accounts” were the remedy.  Greenspan, however, disappointed him. His answer was, “I wouldn’t say pay-as-you-go benefits are insecure. There’s nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody.”

Whoa! Was Greenspan—chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time, and self-described “lifelong libertarian Republican”—really pulling the rug from under Paul Ryan’s cherished agenda to wrest safety-net programs away from the federal government and hand them over to his big-money donors? Was he really saying that the federal government could pluck money out of thin air to fund an entitlement?

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Biden’s Challenge: to Unbreak America

Taming a raging fire

If someone tallied the number of times Joe Biden used the words “unity” and “together” in his inaugural address, it would have run over a dozen, but whatever the score was, it’s a measure of the dominant theme of Joe Biden’s inaugural address: in unity is strength, and unity is achievable.

And yet, when Biden spoke to the reality of political conflict at this time, his words were those of hope, but his tone was plaintive. “Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire,” and “we must end this uncivil war.” These phrases hang in the air like pleas for reconciliation.  But who will answer them?

Of the host of challenges facing Joe Biden, from a pandemic out of control to the plundering of the planet, the “raging fire” of politics and the fuel that feeds it are the most fundamental. We will get past the most toxic phase of Covid-19 in a matter of time. But most of the other problems—economic inequality, racial injustice, an inequitable health care system, environmental breakdown, our allies’ mistrust—will remain intractable without an end to the uncivil war.

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