The Muscovite Candidate

If Obama is a Muslim, is Trump a Russian spy? is one the cleverer ways that I've seen to point out one of the differences between Right and Left in the United States: that while both sides may dislike the other's candidate, the Left is less interested in attacking a Right candidate's "American-ness" than the Right tends to be. Of course, the fact that President Obama's father was not born in the United States, combined with the idea that "father knows best" makes it easier to envision President Obama as a foreign-born Moslem than Donald Trump's family history lends itself to the fact that he might be a Russian agent, but one can imagine that the more conspiratorially-minded of the American Right would be quick to see a Democrat who behaved in the way that Donald Trump has as wanna-be Soviet, to say the least.

To be sure, like most items of this sort, it indulges in calling out Institutional Hypocrisy. It doesn't take any prominent members of the Birther community and tell us what they've said about President-elect Trump. After all, maybe there IS a section of the conspiracy constituency that believes that there's something fishy about Donald Trump. They're just not marching around with signs proclaiming their theory yet. But even so, one can create a stereotype of the Right and the Left when it comes to how they oppose candidates.

Cheers

"Why would four suspects in Chicago broadcast the torture of a man on Facebook Live?" Good question. The easy answer, as N.G. Berrill, executive director of the the New York Center for Neuropsychology & Forensic Behavioral Science points out, is that they're stupid. To borrow a quote originally about sexting, one could make the point that some people call live-streaming one's own violent acts "entertaining," but that in a court of law, they call it "evidence." And, let's face it, by a certain standard, openly doing things that are likely to land one in prison with one or more felony convictions is nothing if not stupid.

But there's another answer, and it's illustrated by this:

At one point, dissatisfied with how few people have tuned in to watch the group assault the man, the woman with the cellphone says to her internet following, “You all ain’t even commenting on my shit. Ain’t nobody watching my shit.”

Mr. Berrill presumes that it's "a scary place" where people are willing to publicly engage in cruelty in order to earn accolades from others, but if that's the case, the United States has been a scary place for a very long time. Because while mistreating bad people may still be mistreatment, visiting this fate upon "bad people" has often been a way of reinforcing social norms, especially those that were not explicitly encoded into law. The actions of the four young people who have been charged in the Chicago assault don't strike me as much different than the actions of people who would turn up to attend a lynching - and then pose for photographs with the body. Of course, they were unlikely to have later been charged with the murder, or even being an accessory to same, but the basic thought process seems the same: "Here I am, being seen to participate in the inhumane punishment of someone different. Isn't that great?"

As long as people expect and/or are given approval for this sort of thing, it will continue. Approval is a powerful thing, and we shouldn't underestimate its ability to motivate.

Armed or Armored

It doesn't take a deep insight into the nature of humanity to realize that people are often cruel and often foolish. And let's throw egotistical into the mix for good measure. And so we have the case in Chicago, where four teenagers decided that it would be fun to torture one of their mentally disabled classmates - and then to live stream it.

Now, I'm old, and therefore I'm past being particularly shocked or appalled by this sort of behavior. I've heard of worse, and I'm sure that, sooner or later, someone will take this as a challenge to be exceeded in the name of being on the national news. But this case has been receiving a lot of air time, due to the fact that the assailants are Black and the victim is White. And a lot of people have been hashtagging their social media posts about the subject with "BLM Kidnapping," as if this were sanctioned by the Black Lives Matter movement.

When someone doesn't perceive, understand and acknowledge a threat against you, your preparing to defend yourself and a prelude to aggression can be difficult to distinguish. And this, I think, is the issue that many people have with the idea of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter came into existence, initially as a hashtag itself, after the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman. Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted of wrongdoing in Mr. Martin's death, in part due to Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which allows people to use lethal force without requiring them to attempt to retreat to safety first. And, presuming that Stand Your Ground would applied equally to everyone involved, it can be said that Trayvon Martin acted in self-defense when he went after George Zimmerman - after all, Mr. Martin was somewhere that he had a legal right to be, and was confronted with an armed man who turned out to be ready, willing and able to kill him. (And if you ask how Mr. Martin knew Mr. Zimmerman was armed, I'd ask what was it about Mr. Martin that prompted Mr. Zimmerman to bring his gun to the confrontation in the first place - whatever assumptions that George Zimmerman made that gave him the impression that lethal force could be called for could just as easily been made by Trayvon Martin.)

Black Lives Matter is a response to a perceived threat - namely the idea that Black people in the United States, young Black men for the most part, are often enough dangerous and/or criminals, that the use of lethal force against them is justified, especially in situations in which non-Blacks would be given the benefit of the doubt, and police would more often be expected to deescalate the situation. But I believe that it's safe to say that a lot of non-Black people in the United States (although by no means all) don't perceive that threat. And accordingly, they see Black Lives Matter, and the social changes that the group/movement/hashtag pushes for as weapons; something that makes society more dangerous by demanding that Black people be held accountable for their actions less often than Whites or others.

And in this, Black Lives Matter, rather than being a reaction to an aspect of society that Black people find frightening and destructive, is instead a tool for racial advantage, in much the same way that many people view Affirmative Action. For a person who sees themselves as just as likely to be abused by authority, or who sees the actions of the police as justified by criminality in the Black community, there is no threat there, and Black Lives Matter is a weapon to be wielded against them, rather than armor for a community that feels itself vulnerable.

Thirty years ago, if you had asked certain of my high school classmates about racism in the United States, they would have told you it was a thing of the past. And I suspect that they honestly believed that, even when they did things that a neutral bystander would likely have regarded as racist. But they didn't see themselves as a threat, and therefore, they didn't understand why I felt any need to guard against them - and instead, I was the threat - looking for ways to cause trouble for them for my own advantage. This aspect of human nature is unlikely to ever go anywhere, because it's ubiquitous, on large scales and small. An abusive spouse sees themselves as reacting to wrongs done to them by their partner, terrorists view their actions as justified by the crimes of their target's (or their target's government) and nations go to war with completely different stories of who took the action that finally sparked the conflict.

The inability to see ourselves as other people see us, and to demand that instead they see us as we see ourselves, is likely built into human DNA. It seems too widespread to be otherwise. But it prevents us from understanding when the people around us feel threatened by us, and are responding to us, rather than threatening us themselves. And the consequences of this will likely always be conflicts, no matter how unnecessary they turn out to be.

Capital E

Many of the more vociferous debates in American politics can be described as a continuing conflict over whether something is actively harmful to a degree that warrants legislative action, or simply a failure to live up to some one other another person's standards for virtue. In other words, when is the answer to a given "bad act" simply "if you don't like it, don't do it," and when is it "the power of the society at large should be brought to bear against this?" This is a disagreement that is exacerbated by a general tendency of people to understand that there most closely held understanding of virtue are all about avoiding things that are actively harmful, either to specific individuals or to the society at large. This exists on all sides of whichever political divide one cares to name, so I'm going to dispense with providing specific (and partisan) examples.

While Americans tend to view themselves as a tolerant people, it's worth keeping in mind that this is not the same as being an indifferent people. And thus that tolerance has limits. And in a society that generally believes in the realism of moral categories, tolerance ends when Evil enters the picture. And many of the arguments that arise around whether or not this or that action is acceptable are really about if something rises to the level of actually being Evil. I tend to be bemused by such debates, as I am not a moral realist, and so for me, "Evil" is nothing more than a label that we apply to people, things and/or actions that we dislike to some degree or another - some people use it more expansively than others. And when one sees the opposition, intentionally or otherwise, advancing Evil, it's unsurprising that the opposition is not seen as principled.

Relics

How to make someone mad at you: When they start grousing about the "undemocratic anachronisms" of American politics, innocently ask: "Like the Constitution?" Despite the reverence in which we hold the document, the Constitution of the United States can be described as both undemocratic and anachronistic.

While it's fashionable to describe the men who put together what became the model of governance for the United States as snobbish aristocrats who had nothing but contempt for the public as a whole, a more charitable reading of the time could be that they knew something that we often have trouble with: that "democratic" and "enlightened" are not synonyms. The idea behind democracy, direct or representative, is to give the citizens of a nation say and/or a hand in the decisions that are going to directly impact them, and that they are going to, in many cases, pay the price for implementing. Democracy doesn't automagically make people less selfish or more capable of foresight. Democracy is also a poor way of apportioning scarce resources between two mutually antagonistic groups of people, especially if those groups have ossified into fairly stable camps. Opportunities, and the benefits they bring, often come at a cost to someone, and in an unfettered democracy, a slim majority can consistently reap the rewards that come from taking advantage of opportunities, while saddling the remaining populace with the price.

It's for this reason that the Bill of Rights was put into place. While people today frequently grouse about government functionaries seeking to stifle free speech or get around due process in criminal cases, the fact of the matter is that sometimes, these abuses also serve the interests of large swaths of the public. While the sorts of laws that bar causing offense to religious groups are often the targets of derision here, I can think of any number of people who would happily outlaw open criticism of Christianity, and still sleep the sleep of the just every night. And while people seek to ban hate speech for reasons that they understand to be perfectly reasonable, things like that have a way of getting away from you, often more quickly than anticipated.

And while the history of the United States prior to effectively universal adult enfranchisement wasn't one long horror story of majoritarian tyranny, there are a lot of instances where it's fairly easy to figure out which groups found themselves being raked over the coals for the benefit of everyone else.

It's also clear that the times have changed. When was the last time you encountered a court case that dealt with the provisions of the Third Amendment? Has there been a Third Amendment challenge to anything in living memory? And the right to a trial buy jury attaches to any "suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars." While changes in the price of silver mean that twenty early American silver dollars would have a metal content value of just over $300 today, the changes in actual buying power are much more substantial - $20 from just about a century ago purchased nearly $500 in goods and services in today's money. And let's not forget that whole three-fifths of a person thing...

The fact of the matter is that we haven't been consistently re-writing the constitution to keep up with the times, and several of its provisions are specifically aimed at coming between the majority of the public and their ability to enforce their will on the rest of society. So it shouldn't be surprising that other artifacts of the nation's past are still floating around today.