Systematic

If you ever have time on your hands, and want to be bored to tears, listen to people argue about how the economics of the United States should be structured. Sure, people could actually put some effort into understanding the opposite viewpoint, but where's the fun (and moral superiority) in that? So instead, people tend to talk past one another, and look for excuses to accuse the other side of bad faith.

Part of the problem, as I understand it, is that the fundamental arguments isn't really about economics. Generally speaking, you'll hear people talking about what is best for the worst-off in American society, sometimes couched in the language of caring. Economics and social care are two different things. A society can change one, without substantially altering the other.

The social distance between any two Americans one might happen to come across determines the degree to which one might want a system, any system, to work for or against the other. Take, as an example, the justice system.

[T]he criminal-justice system is not well-suited and perhaps should not be primarily a vehicle for venting anger. It should be a vehicle for trying individual cases.

Sam Buell

This, of course, would require that the justice system not need buy-in from the public at large. And this is a situation that we are unlikely to find ourselves in anytime soon.

The systems of the United States tend to work in the way that they do because most people would rather not be directly involved with them. And that general passivity tends to allow the systems to be shaped to the interests of those people who are willing to engage with them (and the people who have been given the job of shaping them). What's interesting about the arguments over what system the United States should have going forward is that this same desire for passivity is still evident. People don't advocate for a particular system on the basis that it will allow them to better care for their fellow citizens. Instead the idea is that it will free them from needing to be directly involved in the care of others. The system will do the heavy lifting, of both uplifting the deserving and punishing wrongdoers.

The United States comes across as an uncaring place, because people's first priorities are themselves, and the nation, as a whole, does a poor job at creating an environment where people feel that their needs will be consistently met, and thus, their anxieties are at bay. Being the person who seeks to advance the general welfare instead of their own is viewed with some combination of disdain and suspicion. Politicians, in general, tend to adopt an "us versus them" viewpoint, which mouths the language of national prosperity, but is generally understood to be espousing partisan advantage.

In order to end these sorts of disputes well, it would need to be agreed by all sides that everyone cares for one another; then the debate can center on what programs are more or less effective. But when people have made up their minds about the latter, bickering over the former is all that's left.

Circling Back

My first real post for this blog was about a small group of protestors that, for several years, held court at the corner of Bothell Way and Ballinger Way in Lake Forest Park, Washington. Their fear, that their really quite small and innocuous protest would somehow lead to them being targeted for retaliation by the government, struck me as paranoid.

I'm not sure that I've changed my opinion on that in the decade and a half or so since then. But I do note that it's not that uncommon a feeling about the world. I suspect that it has a lot to do with people seeing themselves as good in an evil world, and, on top of that, a threat to the status quo.

It's an odd paradox, when people see themselves as targeted by a power greater than themselves because they are a credible threat to that power. While I can't imagine the paranoia to be pleasant, I do think that many people take a certain amount of pride in the idea that they're somehow capable of sparking a revolution that would literally reshape their world.

Right now, in the United States, the major energy in this sense is on the political Right. Whether that's Donald Trump's insistence that the "deep state" is out to get him to prevent him from making life better for "real Americans," the idea that the global SARS-2-CoV pandemic was a global hoax designed to allow "élites" to solidify power or the weird, cult-like Illuminati of the Q-Anon movement, for the time being, "conspiracy theorist" and "right wing" go together in the minds of many in the United States.

But that isn't going to be the case for long. After all, the Lake Forest Part protestors, who were so spooked by my camera back in the day, we all left-leaning. The idea that government and big business (again with the "élites") are hatching hateful conspiracies to subjugate "the people" in the name of helping the rich become even more wealthy is a time-worn stereotype. Eventually, something will take hold, and become an animating force of the American Left. If for no other reason than people understand the power that a shared belief, especially when it pits "us versus them," than create and direct.

For all that there is a vision of the United States as being a pluralistic, multicultural, multi-ethnic society, it's not particularly difficult to break it down into a number of competing groups. And some of those groups have interests that are mutually exclusive with other groups' interests. Their shifting coalitions and alliances have shaped, and introduced conflict into, American history for even longer than there has been a United States of America. For all that politicians (and would-be politicians) and other forms of leaders have spoken passionately about unifying the nation, they've never really had the resources to do so for more than sort periods.

And so the conflict continues. And for as long as it does, those people who see themselves both as losing, and situated to one day win, will see the powerful as afraid enough of them to send out the goon squad.

It's Not Okay To Be Okay

D. C. United (because American soccer teams need to have names that make them sound like they're European soccer teams) have fired their head athletic trainer. The offense? Making a "discriminatory hand gesture." Despite the fact that "The 'OK' hand gesture — making a circle with the thumb and index finger while the other three fingers point out — is typically used to indicate that all is well," White supremacists and the sort have apparently started using it; the idea here being twofold. One is that, viewed in a certain way, the "okay" hand sign becomes the letters W and P, for "White power." The other is that, because it's also the okay sign, that when someone calls a person out for using it, that person can claim innocence. After all, it's just the okay sign. This all has led at least some people have started to think that it should be ceded to the far Right and abandoned by the rest of society.

This, as the saying goes, is why we can't have nice things.

To be sure, I'm not particularly worried about a slippery slope here. As with a lot of things, the decision that "okay" is now fit only for White supremacists is a completely arbitrary choice. Maybe the next time, the conclusion will be different.

What I find irritating about this is the fear. A small minority of the population has been able to, in effect, force a change in the visual lexicon of the United States because people are afraid of them, what they represent and the idea that their ideology is attractive enough to spread out of control.

Part of this is politics. National Republicans have put themselves in a position where they can't just kick the farthest of the far Right to the curb, and be done with them. This leads to a creeping anxiety that, at some point, that a combination of political expediency and negative partisanship will lead to the Republicans openly supporting the sort of racist and segregationist politicians that many people today want to think died out in the Deep South in the period immediately after the Civil Rights era.

But part of it is the realization that these sorts of ideologies often appeal to the disaffected, and there are an awful lot of disaffected people out there. And no one seems to be doing anything to make their lots in life better, because that would upset the apple cart that is the current status quo.

Now, I haven't seen the photograph in question. It's entirely possible that the former head athletic trainer for D. C. United is, in fact, a White supremacist. Personally, that doesn't strike me as a firing offense, but I don't work in D. C. United's human resources department, so what I think doesn't matter. Someone whose opinion of these things does actually matter may have seen some context in the picture that buttresses the choice they made.

The National Public Radio story on the whole thing, however, doesn't provide any information that would allow someone to conclude that the sign wasn't something innocuous. Part of the reason behind the fringes of the American Right adopting the sign, the logic goes, is that it's so ubiquitous that everybody does it. Calling it out, therefore, is likely to result in a high rate of false positives, and strike a lot of people (including myself) as hysterical.

Treating the White nationalist (or whatever else one wants to call them, or they're calling themselves) as if they were ten feet tall seems like an error to me. But I understand that fixing the underlying problems that they're taking advantage of is difficult, especially in a country where the idea that different groups are working at cross purposes over a zero-sum pie is taken for granted. But the reactive mode of dealing with them isn't going to work. History should have taught everyone that by now.

Here We Go Again

SS.68.AA.2.3
Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).

Benchmark Clarifications:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
Florida’s State Academic Standards – Social Studies, 2023

And so it begins. The problem with Democrats and Republicans being members of a mutual hostility society is that it breeds suspicion to go along with the hostility. Talk to enough American conservatives, and you'll eventually come across one who believes that being slaves in the United States was better for the enslaved than the alternative. be warned, though. You may end up talking to quite a large number of people first. But as the political parties drift more and more towards their activist (and primary voter) wings, candidates for office find themselves needing to cater to those people, who often hold views that simply don't mesh with society at large. And that leads people on the other side of the political aisle, who are always ready to label someone an "extremist" in the hope of disqualifying them in the minds of the electorate, seeking to paint the whole of the party as subscribing to "dangerous" fringe viewpoints.

Into this environment steps Florida, with their new academic standards. Governor Ron DeSantis has already been very public with his disdain for "wokeness," and despite the fact that he tends to use it as a "'red meat' to the base" buzzword as opposed to anything that actually communicates meaning, there is a very real sense that "it promotes anti-Blackness," in the words of one academic. Even Donald Trump seems to understand that "[I]t's like just a term they use. Half the people can't even define it. They don't know what it is." Hours after making that statement, however, he was using it in its pejorative sense in a Fox News town hall. (Say what you will about the former President, but he knows how the game is played.) And now that Republicans in general have acquired the whiff of pervasive anti-Blackness, they no longer receive the benefit of the doubt.

So the snippet from the Florida Academic Standards for Social Studies for sixth through eighth grades is seen as yet another attempt by an anti-Black state government to portray slavery as something that was good for the slaves, in the service of appeasing modern White conservatives who bristle at the idea that some or other of their ancestors might be relegated to the ranks of history's villains. Republicans, within and without Florida, meanwhile, can't seem to understand how any right-thinking person could genuinely think that was at all what was possibly intended, and the mutual hostility society spirals another turn.

Part of the problem is that the wording chosen is a very clunky way of attempting to note that slaves may have been able to build or improve their own homes or make their own clothing, most likely in the service of maintaining themselves as fit to labor for their owners. After all, for many slave owners, the slaves were valuable property and a reflection on them. Having them going though their lives poorly clothed and exposed to the elements could reduce their ability to work. And if a person escaped, was freed et cetera, the skills they possessed would have been useful in finding a way of making a living. So personally, I'm not clear on why such a specific call-out is needed. I doubt that I'm the only one. And so this too plays into the suspicion that Florida Republicans are attempting to downplay slavery.

But I think that's what really going on here, similarly to the dust up over country and western singer Jason Aldean's video for "Try That in a Small Town," is that people who live in echo chambers don't think much about how what they're doing is going to be perceived outside their bubble. And why should they? They're in the echo chamber and the people whose opinions are important to them are also in the echo chamber. So as long as the residents of the echo chamber are happy, nothing (and no one) else matters. But the mutual hostility society suspects intentional hatefulness and responds accordingly. By the same token, there's little incentive for the department of education in Florida to actually seek a range of views on the curriculum and the language used to describe it, because they've been hemmed in by Governor DeSantis' theatrics concerning "wokenss." Even if they'd rather not cause a stir, taking steps not to is seen as a form of surrender to the hated enemy.

And so the merry-go-round keeps turning, even if many would rather get off than ride it again. Now that American politics has become about perceptions of good and evil, the incentives to ride, however, have only grown stronger.

Stewed

The Week's William Falk uses the common metaphor of the frog in the slowly warming pot of water to describe America's reaction to anthropogenic climate change. "My fellow frogs," he asks, "have you noticed that the water in this pot is getting awfully warm?"

I think that's not really the right question. But it is a pithy one, and that makes it perfect for closing an editorial. But the problem isn't that people don't really have an idea of what's going on. Rather, the problem is twofold. Fold one is a deep lack of social trust in the United States. Once the whole concept of anthropogenic climate change became partisan, one may as well have set the status quo in concrete, because it isn't going anywhere soon. Fold two is the price tag, and who's going to pay it. The climate may be a matter of pay me now, or pay me later, but to someone who's convinced that they're too broke to part with a dime of what they have, any amount at any time is simply too much. And given that the United States is a reasonably representative government, without a pretty good-sized constituency willing to push for payment, electoral politics will always be an obstacle.

And so I suspect that the messaging, and the tactics, need to change. Large scale whaling isn't a thing of the past because of activism or editorializing. Rather, something better came along, namely petroleum products and vegetable oils. And if people really want the majority of the accessible oil that's in the ground to stay there, then something better is going to have to come along. Granted, the lack of social trust I spoke to earlier is going to be something of a barrier in that regard, but even die-hard partisans tend to find a way to come around to the new thing when the alternative is a lower standard of living. Which is, in the end, what this is all about. Right now, the green energy transition doesn't promise people a better standard of living than what they understand they have right now. And so they keep turning up the heat.

Van Life

Around the corner from my home one can often find a tan minivan. Which, at least for right now, is someone else's home.

I live in the suburbs of Seattle, where homelessness isn't as apparent as it is in the city proper. I've come across panhandlers, outside of stores or at the expressway off-ramps, but the sprawling clusters of tents that one encounters in the city are few and far between, and the ramshackle half-tent, half-improvised structures that one sometimes finds next to (or on) Seattle's sidewalks are largely absent.

But one does find the occasional car, van or RV that's been pressed into service as a substitute home. My previous home was in an apartment complex, and lived-in vehicles tended to draw a resident's attention after a few days, which lead to someone showing up and telling them to move on. I suspect that not much thought was given to where they were going to end up.

But here, the van sits on a public street in a greenbelt, the windows covered from the inside for whatever privacy that affords. Often the driver's side window will be open, presumably for ventilation; even out of direct sunlight, I suppose it would become stuffy otherwise. It's not always there; sometimes, the spots where it usually parks (one to either side of the street) will be empty. But it will always have returned by the next time I pass that way, so I presume that these are short trips for food, gasoline and/or hygiene.

Not surprisingly, given that this is the suburbs, there are no services for the homeless anywhere nearby; at least not that I'm aware of. And the one place that I've seen host the Tent City is a couple miles away or so. I wonder if they have any means of support outside of whatever savings they have left.

And maybe that's the problem. I've done things to assist the homeless population of the area before, but it's always been at some level of scale - taking lunches to encampments or other places where the homeless congregate or loading up my car with items and hauling them over to wherever the Tent City happens to be that weekend. But when it comes to helping individuals, it tends not to occur to me unless I encounter them directly over and over. I suspect that they're working to stay under everyone's proverbial radar, but since they're on mine, perhaps I should treat them as more than a curiosity.

Erosion

The actors are joining writers who walked out in May, concerned about pay, working conditions and the industry's use of artificial intelligence (AI).
SAG strike: Actors join writers on Hollywood picket lines

I suspect that if the actors' concerns about the use of artificial intelligence tools to replace them in the future are founded, their days are already numbered. The question then becomes if they can make the studios go down with them.

Because it's one thing to force the "motion picture industry" as it exists now to agree to avoid replacing actors with technology. It's going to be another thing entirely to make the aspiring moviemakers of the future go along. I am reminded of the web series "Red Versus Blue" which was made within various incarnations of the Halo video games. The fledgling filmmakers at Rooster Teeth recorded their own voice lines, but all of the visuals came from the in-game rendering engine. It may not be long before anyone with access to good text-to-speech tools will be able to effectively make a passable radio play on their own. And even today's tools, which don't really qualify for the label "artificial intelligence" any more than the software on ones PC does, can do enough heavy lifting that a single person could crank out enough text for a 90-minute production in fairly short order. If it comes to pass that tools capable of rendering close enough to photorealistic video become available to everyday (if perhaps somewhat more affluent than the norm) people, people are going to experiment with making short films, then something long enough for a television episode, then feature-length, themselves.

Early efforts will likely be laughably bad, made by creators too invested to be able to see that their baby is ugly. But they'll get better. Once upon a time, it took entire studios to make animated short films. That's no longer the case. If that change comes for feature-length movies, such that a small group, or even an individual, can make something that's "good enough," the Screen Actors' Guild may be able to slow the tide, or make a bit more money from it, but they won't be able to stop it. If it comes in, it's going to wash them away. They may be fighting simply to enjoy the beach while it lasts.

Unlocked

As often happens in societies, mores in the United States are undergoing change. And one of those changes is that marriage rates are declining. Although part of the change is driven by an increase in the number of people choosing to forego marriage entirely, it also happens that the age of first marriage has gone up; those people who do marry are marrying later in life. Researchers have noticed this, and so too has the news media; both Axios and National Public Radio have had stories on it this year.

The NPR story was interesting in the sense that it covered what honestly strikes me as filler content with a certain level of alarmism; their headline was "Americans' attitudes toward marriage are changing rapidly." This, despite the fact that the story didn't at all touch on the timeframe over which this supposedly rapid change was to have taken place. (Axios notes that it's been half a century since marriage rates peaked.) And at one point during her interview with Bowling Green State University's Professor Susan Brown (who was also references in the Axios piece), Michel Martin, referring to emerging relationship patterns, asked:

Now, I'm also interested in whether these patterns - these new patterns of living are a problem. I mean, is this something that we should worry about?

For the record, I find the question: "Is this something that we should worry about?" and its close neighbor "How worried should we be about this?" to be vapid even when dealing with serious concerns; anxiety never helps anything, and the phrasing of the question isn't designed to elicit a response that would lay out a plan of action. But here, what Ms. Martin is asking about are people cohabitating or what Professor Brown refers to as "living apart together" (non-coresidential relationships). What could possibly be going on there that anyone would need to be worried about? (Although I'm pretty sure that University of Virginia Professor W. Bradford Wilcox, who tends to view any step away from tradition as a problem, would have found something.) All that sort of thinking does is create control freaks and busybodies.

American society is not the same as it was 50 years ago. And 50 years ago, it had changed from what it had been 50 years before that. Some of those changes were for the better, some were for the worse, but many of them were simply changes. Marriage is a human institution, with reasons for being that tend to be bound up in questions of resource allocation, relationships between (sometimes extended) families and property (including sexual) rights. And like all human institutions, it changes over time. While there are people for whom those changes, in and of themselves, are cause for alarm, most of the supposed problems stemming from changes in marital patterns also have other causes. Assortative mating, for instance, has lessened income heterogeneity of couples. As a result, there are more couples where both partners come from non-affluent backgrounds; and money problems are a common cause of both difficulties in marriages and their dissolution. Black women looking to stay with the once-common pattern of "marrying up" and having Black husbands has resulted in a very low marriage rate, resulting in high single motherhood. Sure, one could make the point that some sort of social and/or governmental pressure and/or incentives could be brought to bear to get them to the altar with someone, but perhaps altering some of the social structures that have come to result in so many Black men being considered undesirable partners would be a better fix. A generalized anxiety about people making choices other than entering into state-sanctioned relationships and becoming a single legal entity isn't going to help address those concerns.

To a degree, the question feels like filler, and Professor Brown treated it as such; her answer didn't even touch on the question as it was asked. But still, indicating to people that these sorts of things are legitimate reasons for anxiety seems to be counterproductive.

Running Scares

According to Axios: "Negative polarization — the intense dislike of the political opposition — is driving politics to the point in which we forget what our favored candidates even stand for."

That's one way of looking at it, I suppose. But what I think that negative partisanship (the more common term for this phenomenon) tends to mean that it doesn't really matter what people's favored candidates stand for; it's just assumed that they are the right things.

The gist of the article is that candidates for office, either running for re-election or challenging an incumbent, can raise substantial amounts of money to fund their campaign efforts (usually in the form of advertising to people normally unlikely to vote) by "caricaturing the opposition as uniquely evil." Again, I'm not so sure of the truth of this statement. I would submit that it's more accurate that politics has gone from matters of policy to matters of right and wrong. And when the assumption is that opposing partisans are supporting something that's actively wrong, there doesn't have to be anything unique about it. That said, it's true that American politics has become rife with accusations that whoever is running from "the other side" is intentionally backing wrongheaded policy out of an intent to injure people who shouldn't be injured, generally people who are part of the political coalition that the candidate in question supports.

So Republicans use their particular (and peculiar) definition of "woke" to refer to people and institutions who are presumed to have it out for Conservatives and/or "White working class" voters, and Democrats cast Republicans as deliberately targeting ethnic and sexual minorities to maintain their appeal to racists and bigots. And, to be sure, each party has a much longer list of hobgoblins to trot out of those don't inspire people to give. What else is new?

Not much, because the politics of fear goes back a long way by now. It's rare, it seems, for politicians to be credited with a workable grasp of human psychology, but that is what's at work here. Psychological research into the cognitive bias known as loss aversion has found that people are much more tuned into to what they have to lose, as opposed to what they have to gain. If people's subjective feelings of pain at a given loss are twice as intense as their feelings of pleasure at gaining the same amount, it stands to reason that to gain maximum motivation, one should concentrate on what people stand to lose.

And so politicians do. And if one understands loss aversion to play a role in what people expect to gain or lose from an election, negative partisanship is a perfectly rational mindset; even though it's one that primes people to be much more attentive to their political opponents, and what costs those opponents' policies are likely to impose, than to the benefits of their own side winning. And this, too, works in politician's favor, as it frees them from having to go into a lot of detail on the promises they are making.

In the end, it all becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although (or maybe because) I don't see myself as a partisan, I've gradually shifted from attempting to find the candidate who I think will do the most good to looking for the one who will likely do the least amount of damage. Because Washington is a Blue state, that tends to be the Democrats; they don't have to rely so much on turning out low-propensity voters that they feel the need to "scare people's face off." But not even that completely prevents them from fear-mongering. All of this conspires to make the sort of positive, benefits-based campaigning that I would prefer pretty thin on the ground. But such is the way that people work.

The Wrong Mile

Much has been made of the Supreme Court of the United States recently voting that the practice of Affirmative Action, at least as implemented in giving students from certain non-White backgrounds an advantage in admissions, is in violation of the United States' Constitution and (allegedly) it's founding principles. There has also been a fair amount of discussion of the partisan split in the vote, with the six Conservative justices voting that the practice is unconstitutional, and the three Liberal justices dissenting. (Although Republican and Democrat may be more accurate. While, theoretically, the justices of the Supreme Court are non-partisan, Presidents and Congress know what they are doing well enough that only a staunch partisan has any real chance of being seated. One may was well call a bowl a bowl.)

The varied and sundry commentary tends to completely ignore, or only briefly touch on, the broader issue at hand. Part of the Conservative majority's reasoning appears to be that racial preferences were never intended to a long-term solution. While one could argue that the circumstances leading up to the fact that certain groups of people were systematically kept out of selective (and many non-selective) colleges and universities in living memory were literally centuries in the making, the majority reasoned that surely they could be fixed in a couple of generations. And maybe they could have, if the correct remedies were put in place. And this is the shortcoming of the earlier efforts at affirmative action; the problem they were solving was not the correct one.

There is a widespread and quite popular idea that the United States is a meritocracy. Some people will dispute, and quite strenuously, any statement to the contrary. But what is "merit?" In college admissions, merit was commonly defined a combination of grades and scores on certain standardized tests. (At least, when sports isn't involved.) While this is often taken to be measuring a combination of academic rigor and willingness to apply oneself to one's studies, a lot of what is actually being measured is the quality of one's education. And because of the way in which the United States tends to fund education, all schools are not created equally. Equal protection under the law, has, generally speaking, not been considered to mean "equal access to quality in public goods." So while an aggrieved White or Asian student can have their case go all the way to the Supreme Court, students of any racial background, or their parents, who understand that their schools are under-resourced, and therefore deliver sub-standard educations, have no nationwide legal remedy. For that matter, they often lack local ones.

Because schools are often funded by the communities or municipalities wherein they reside, wealthy places have better schools. And better schools lead to better outcomes. Those better outcomes lead to greater wealth. Which leads to the ability to access better schools. And the opportunity hoarding that Affirmative Action was designed to dent continues. It's also worth noting that American housing policy, especially as concerns home loans, had been (and in some ways, still is) implemented, in some cases, intentionally, in ways that locked certain groups out of higher-income neighborhoods, even when they had the income to buy into them.

Colleges and universities were given the task of determining which students, whose scores wouldn't make the cut, would have been good enough had they had the same access to quality in education as their wealthier and higher-status counterparts. The Supreme Court voted that this last-mile intervention was inappropriate. But it doesn't now, and hasn't in the past, given accountability to anyone for fixing the tangle of historical problems that selectively set so many students back starting from the first mile of their education journeys.

Swerve

I, like a majority of people, I think, don't have bumper stickers on my car. The practice of using my vehicle to communicate some or another message about myself or about my politics (outside of what people might guess, assume or glean from the fact that I have a car, and what sort it is) has never really spoken to me.

But I have come across some really funny bumper stickers in my travels, like this one, that I saw today...

Blurred

It's also another thing that we're seeing on this court more generally; it's a pretty anti-defendant stance, rulings that are not helpful for criminal defendants in the federal system. And, again, that's sort of part of a longer trajectory: there was a short period in the 60s where there were all these rulings expanding criminals', um, or criminal defendants' rights, and we've gone in the other direction since then. Um, and this is just another way that this court is like really, going even more in, in the direction of, um, ruling against defendants.
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, Politics Podcast: How The Supreme Court Will Shape The 2024 Election. FiveThirtyEight.com.

As is my habit, I've quoted a bit from the podcast, to ensure that I pulled all of the context, but what stood out for me was Ms. Thomson-DeVeaux's stumble over "criminals'" vs. "criminal defendants'," rights. In part, because I think it provides a good explanation for the phenomenon she describes. For all that the justice system is supposed to operate under a presumption of innocence up to at least the point where a person is convicted of a crime, it's more accurate to presume that it often operates under a presumption of guilt. This is partly because in a system as large as that of the United States, presuming that people who enter the system are guilty, and pushing to formalize that presumption with a conviction as quickly as possible, is a matter of efficiency. There simply aren't enough courts for every defendant to have full jury trials; accordingly, the system would be hopelessly backlogged (similarly to American immigration courts) were every defendant to avail themselves of their rights. Part of it is a certain confidence that the the American justice system is (despite quite a bit of evidence to the contrary) knowledgeable and competent enough to only intake those people who are actually guilty of the crimes for which they are being pursued. Part of it is ignorance of the fact that there are numerous places where the system may choose to, or choose not to, exercise discretion. And part of it is the believe that once a person is convicted of certain acts, they'll simply always be a criminal.

That last part is important. Contact with the criminal justice system tends to snowball, as people with arrest records, even for relatively minor offenses, can quickly find that it's difficult to find work or housing, which tends to incentive criminal behavior as a means of survival. The sort of pretty street crime that straited people tend to engage in also happens to be precisely the sort of crime that most frightens people. And while there are federal defendants in prisons for white-collar crimes or violations of the public trust, a lot of them are there because the offenses they are charged with are part of the amorphous idea of crime that underpins people's fears.

And so, even when someone is considered innocent until proven guilty of the crime[s] for which they are being tried, their prior history lands them squarely in the category of "criminal" in the minds of many. And there is a large constituency for the idea that "criminals" should have, if not no rights, as few as can be managed. And for all that there is an impression that judges are somehow a superior class of people who are somehow above the prejudices of the public at large, they are drawn from that very public. To the degree that the public conflates criminal defendants with criminals, it's going to have an effect on the judiciary; even at the highest levels.

In the end, I suspect that there will have to be a greater need for human capital for things to change. Right now, warm bodies are easy to find when needed. And as with any resource glut, it's easy to overlook people who fall short of some or another standard when there are plenty more where they came from who will do. That the United States is large enough that the nearly 160,000 people currently in federal custody (about half of whom for drug use offenses) are effectively not missed by the labor force means that there isn't much incentive to get people out of prison so that they can be doing productive work. And if they are released, that same lack of economic incentive to employ them means that they have few options that will keep them away from the circumstances, people and behaviors that got them into trouble in the first place. And if they end up being defendants again, they're likely to find the courts, like the public, have little sympathy for them, having decided that they know all they need to.

Dead Letters

The United States, like pretty much every nation on Earth, professes ideals that it has not, does not and/or will not actually live up to as a matter of day-to-day life. Part of this is that people often see themselves as being better about attaining their ideals than they really are, and part of it is that often, those ideals aren't about the people who set them down. Rather they're pot shots at other people. Take "In God We Trust." Rather than genuinely being an assertion of faith in some Christian idea of a divine plan that would create some or another outcome, it was intended as a means of differentiating the United States from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was, as a matter of state policy, atheist (due to that whole "opiate of the masses" idea).

The same can be said of a lot of the Declaration of Independence. While it's generally considered, in American folklore, to be an assertion of the rights of free people, it's really a wrapper for a long bill of grievances against King George III. Grievances that have, for the most part, been completely forgotten by Americans at large. Most people are in the United States are aware of the sentence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," and that's really about it.

For a while, there was some interest in one of the grievances that didn't make it into the final document, namely:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The general complaint is that the signing of the Declaration was delayed by two days specifically to remove this mention of the transatlantic slave trade, this by way of explaining why John Adams had predicted that July 2nd would be the date that people would celebrate. While it's true that the South Carolina delegation had objected to anti-slavery language in the document, a number of other changes were made to the document.

In any event, the penultimate grievance in the document has become a new source of controversy:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

(Note that this was also edited from Mr. Jefferson's original, in which it was two separate passages.)

Some Native American tribes and activists have latched into this statement as a way of pointing out that the "all men" who were "created equal" didn't include them, either.

The fact of the matter is that it didn't include a lot of people. The Declaration would likely have been a much more honest document had it read "all Englishmen," since that's pretty much what most of the people involved had in mind.

"There's this moment of shocking people to the realization of how racist the Declaration of Independence was toward Indigenous peoples," Joseph M. Pierce, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, tells Axios. He takes a selfie with the shirt every July Fourth.

But that shouldn't be shocking to anyone.

Part of the problem is the way history is taught in the United States. While students tend to learn history in primary and secondary school, those levels teach a fairly simple and superficial understanding of the subject. And part of that is teaching early American history in a way that implies that the Founding Fathers of the United States set up a system that more or less matches what we have now, rather than modern American government, and society, being something that they wouldn't recognize, and likely wouldn't consider either wise or legitimate.

But a lot of this comes down to an understanding that people who hold what we now understand to be racist viewpoints are bad people, rather than simply people. And that sets up a conflict with the heroism that is broadly ascribed to people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson et cetera, especially among Conservatives, who tend to link their understanding that the United States is exceptional now, to the idea that the people who founded it were exceptional then, rather than being, for the most part, wealthy people who had material interests to look out for.

Native Americans, like Black people before them, are going to have a hard time making a dent in the heroic, romantic story that's in place concerning the founding and building of the United States, because most people, frankly, don't care. Some people are invested in the story, and what they believe it says about themselves, but for most people, it's simply an old story, about people long dead.

Cut Twice

The presidential campaign of Governor Ron DeSantis is said to have put out a video attacking former President Donald Trump for previously voicing support for LGBT Americans in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting. I looked for the video, to see it for myself, but it seems to have disappeared from Twitter, along with tweets from DeSantis campaign staffers defending it. In any event, fellow psuedo-candidate for the Republican nomination Chris Christie, said: "They’re trying to divide us further. And it’s wrong. It’s absolutely wrong."

Calling out other people as "divisive," or noting that "they're trying to divide Americans" has become a common line of attack in American politics. Which, given the nature of American politics, makes about as much sense as criticizing scissors for cutting things.

The entire structure of the two-party system divides the voting populace of the United States into factional camps. And the parties themselves put a great deal of time and effort into recruiting for their factional camp by demonizing the other factional camp. And given a contested primary election for the Republican nomination, the candidates are going to be looking for voters to support their camp, to the exclusion of the other camps. Even the Log Cabin Republicans, who were among those calling out the DeSantis campaign as "divisive," said: "Ron DeSantis and his team can’t tell the difference between commonsense gays and the radical Left gays." That sounds like attempting to make a pretty stark division to me... (I would also note that the DeSantis War Room calling a recent Supreme Court ruling  a "Sad day for affirmative-action advocates," didn't warrant the same reaction from other Republicans. Likely because they don't care for affirmative action advocates, either.)

The public, generally speaking, is on board with this approach. Not only do political constituencies expect to be told that they're on the side of right and justice, but also that those people support rival candidates are some combination of irrational, gullible or deliberately unethical. There's nothing unifying about leaning into the politics of grievance when the objects of people's rage, anxiety, ignorance and distrust are their fellow countrymen.

And that's, broadly speaking, what the DeSantis campaign was doing. It was leaning into the resentments and fears that conservative Republicans have towards the LGBT community. The Log Cabin Republicans might think that it's only queer people who lean Left who are "pushing their radical sex and gender policies on children," but I'm pretty sure that the DeSantis campaign understands that for most Republican primary voters, if someone's LGBT, they're likely a Democrat. And they were using that in an attempt to paint Donald Trump as someone who supported people they disliked.

Republican intra-party complaining about divisiveness will, for the most, go away once the nomination has been decided, and the attacks are all aimed at President Biden, other Democratic politicians and Democratic voters as a group; mainly because Republicans are nearly entirely unified in their anger and prejudices. There won't be any upside, therefore, in bucking the trend. Knowing this, the complaining about it now seems disingenuous. But it has been some time since American politics was not defined by disingenuity, and it will be a long time before it stops being so.