Winging It

This past weekend, I listened to a podcast. It was something of a profile of yet another right-wing internet personality. That part of it, frankly, was boring. Where it was interesting was where it touched on the reaction to such people by their critics. Here, I would like to have seen it go deeper, because it's become a fairly broad phenomenon, and I would like to see a more thorough analysis.

The podcast profile noted that there's little point in the American Left pointing out that someone is a racist, an anti-Semite or even a fascist if that person leans into those labels. And people have started leaning into them because there is now a substantial audience for whom the terms racist, anti-Semite and fascist have come to mean: "Has our best interests at heart." I've made this point before, and while yes, it's cynical, I have yet to have anyone tell me it's broadly inaccurate. People don't have principles. They have interests. Because eating is good, and principle is inedible. Accordingly, for a person who finds a modern day state that values pluralism, tolerance and diversity is not working for them, naming people as openly hostile to those values carries no shame.

FiveThirtyEight had a couple of headlines that illustrate this: "Is This The Indictment That Really Hurts Trump?" and "Will Three Indictments Prove Too Much For Trump’s Campaign?" The underlying expectation, which I've heard from any number of media types, is fairly clear; the idea that, sooner or later, the drumbeat of criminal accusations against Mr. Trump will grow loud enough that voters will begin to look elsewhere. But there's never a real reason why anyone expects this to happen. After all, Republican voters aren't supporting Mr. Trump's bid to return to the White House because they want or moral or legal exemplar. They support him because they understand that his re-election is the best way to safeguard their interests. And Mr. Trump understood this from the beginning. When he remarked that "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible," he was referencing more than his popularity; he was expressing the sense that people viewed him as vital enough to their interests that they'd be willing to overlook, excuse or explain away whatever they had to. Or simply fall back upon the age-old idea that what's right in the world always draws unjust opposition.

And in an age of intense negative partisanship, this works for people, because they understand events in the world around them through their partisan viewpoints. No matter what happened during the Trump Administration, it was better than what would have happened during a Hillary Clinton Administration. And no matter what happens in the Biden Administration, it's worse than what would be happening in a second Trump term. This is the reality that people live within. Not because they're somehow out of touch with the truth of what's going on around them. But because their perceptions start with their understanding of whether things are being done to help them or to hurt them, and they go from there. It is, in a way, the ultimate triumph of politics. Causes are no longer inferred from effects; they're simply matters of faith. And it's difficult to argue with faith.

And the American political system has, for any number of years now, behaved in a way that reinforced people's faith that it couldn't, or simply wouldn't, look after the interests of all of it's citizens. That government was liable to being captured by some or another interest group and turn its efforts towards benefiting that group at the expense of others. The American Right has managed to convince itself that it's their turn to have others benefit at their expense. And the far Right says that if someone is going to dominate, and victimize others, it's better to be the victor than the victim. It's not a difficult message to sell to people who have been left behind by "progress" that feels like little more than someone else taking what was once theirs.

What I've found interesting about the common critique of Trumpism, the far Right, and the like is that it doesn't make the point that a pluralistic, diverse and tolerant democracy is going to do a better job of helping the majority of people meet their needs than a "fascist" dictatorship or racially-based caste system (and then take steps to concretely show this). Rather, it (like a lot of institutions, really) simply repeats, over and over, that the people who are being asked to give something up in the service of a more pluralistic, tolerant and diverse world have enough to share without missing any of it. Their subjective lived experience that this is not true is dismissed as deluded or condemned as a commitment to injustice.

Donald Trump understood this, and by doing little else than telling people that their subjective feeling that they'd been left behind was a deliberate outcome created people who were unjustifiably hostile to them, rode a wave of resentment all the way to the White House. (He just may ride it back there next year.) And in his wake, a number of people have come to understand that people's broad disaffection with their circumstances in life, and the idea that those circumstances are just and/or their own fault, offer them a path to fame and wealth. Of course, this didn't start with Donald Trump; but I do think that his sudden and somewhat unexpected success with it boosted it in a way that may not have happened had the votes in 2016 fallen in a slightly different manner.

A good number of journalists and political commentators don't seem to understand this. They understand liberal democratic institutions as the self-evidently correct way to go about things, and thus that people have a responsibility to them that overrides their own wants and needs. Perhaps it's a belief that progress should always move in one direction, such that any deviation from the correct path can only be the result of something being deeply wrong. But nothing in the world is genuinely self-evident. The changes that have occurred throughout human history have come from people pursuing what they understood their interests to be at the time; those who managed to succeed altered the landscape for those around them.

Even if one believes that things aught to be a certain way, that is not enough to bring it about. Rather, the state of the world is something that must be worked for. The American Left tends believe in their vision of pluralism, tolerance and diversity enough to demand that they be the norm, but not enough so to put concerted effort into showing they would work for everyone. Or, at least, for a large enough segment of the populace that there's a consistent majority who would vote to maintain them. The forces of illiberality understand their audience, and what their audience wants from them. Moreover, they also tend to understand how to prevent the opposition to them from actually being effective. Preaching to the choir podcasts are little more than a way to allow the audience to congratulate themselves on their commitment to what's right and proper. What's needed is action that shows people that a liberal democratic world is both necessary and sufficient to bringing people the lives they want to lead.

One Among Many

A self-described "southern journalist who is tired of a lack of common sense" says: "Let's talk about a GOP constitutional amendment...." Sure, okay... but it's worth pointing out that the policy which would require said amendment was not advanced by the Grand Old Party. Rather it was put forth by Vivek Ramaswamy. Vivek Ramaswamy is not the Republican Party. He's simply a businessman and author who is running for Vice President.

And his idea is that people younger than 25 don't value the United States enough to be automatically granted the right to vote. So his proposal is to raise the overall enfranchisement age to 25. For those people in the 18 to 24 range, they would be allowed to vote if they either a) had been in the military or some sort of "first responder" job for six months, or b) passed the civics test that immigrants seeking citizenship need to pass.

This is described as: "straight out of a movie that was satirical [...] and making fun of fascist governments." Now, I've never seen Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. But I have read the Robert Heinlein novel. Now, I will admit that I wasn't particularly interested in what the story may have said about Mr. Heinlein's politics. I was interested in the book as the genesis of the modern idea of powered armor, something that was left out of the original movie due to special effects budget constraints. In the Starship Troopers novel, birthright citizenship has been eliminated across the board. Only those people who have served in the military are full citizens, with the right to vote. If I remember correctly, there was a bit in the book about attempts to expand the allowable service to other things. But, there was one important concession; because military service was a requirement for citizenship, the military was not allowed to turn anyone away. If a person wanted to enlist, the military had to accept them, and had to find some job they could do. At the end of the book, the main character's parents enlist, and are leaving for their training. I've heard that that Mr. Verhoeven was satirizing the setup that Mr. Heinlein had put forth, in the same way that Mr. Heinlein took some pot shots at modern liberalism (and society in general, for that matter), but if Mr. Ramaswamy's proposal actually matches what's in the movie, then Mr. Verhoeven also took some liberties with the setup.

The video purports to explain "Why the GOP would want this" - but no evidence is ever offered that "the GOP" as a party is interested in advancing Mr. Ramaswamy's idea. The amorphous "they" is thrown around, but again, this is the idea of one person. At the end of the video, the commentator notes that people are going to ask who made the proposal. But, even then, rather than name Mr. Ramaswamy, he simply sidesteps.

It's this sort of thing that leads to the term "extremists" being thrown around as often as it is. The fact that Vivek Ramaswamy is (allegedly) seeking seeking the Republican nomination for President of the United States, and is polling above 0% (he's at about 7%) is not the same as the Republican party having decided to add his idea to their current policy platform in the name of disenfranchising young voters because it's somehow too difficult to indoctrinate them into Conservative ideology. There is no rule that states that in order for a person to run for a major party nomination, their views must line up with some idea of how the party views the world. Otherwise, people like Senator Bernie Sanders (who is an Independent when he's not running for President) and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would have been preemptively frozen out by the Democratic Party apparatus. While I'm not particularly highly engaged in politics as a matter of day-to-day life, I try to avoid being completely out of the loop; enough so that I would like to think that I would have heard of something as consequential as the Republican National Committee formally moving to adopt Mr. Ramaswamy's position, especially given the level of effort that changing the United States Constitution would require.

The unwillingness to make the determination between anyone claiming membership in a group and the group itself is common, especially in a situation like American political parties. This commonality, however doesn't make taking some statement made by a person and passing it off as the policy of some group to which they belong any less disingenuous. There are a number of corrosive elements to modern American politics, and this is one of them. But it's also corrosive to social trust, and that is also in a bad state. Democrats and Republicans are far enough apart, in both style and substance, that one doesn't need to play fast and loose with how one represents the other side to drive the two of them further apart. So I'm not sure why it's worth creating higher levels of distrust to do so.

(Aside: Other than Donald Trump, there are no people actually running for the Republican nomination. They're either running to be Mr. Trump's pick for Vice President, like Ramaswamy, to raise their profile for a 2028 or maybe 2032 run, like Governor Ron DeSantis or Senator Tim Scott, or they're simply hoping to score some of the few anti-Trump points that are left out there, like Governors Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson. Sure, out the current field of more than 250 people, some of them may be deluded enough to think they can swing it; however, no-one with enough name recognition to be included in a poll is that far out of their mind. And many of the very dark horse candidates are likely running simply to call attention to some cause they favor. For the big-name candidates, this assessment is based more on their actions than their words; the way the field is acting now, it's hard to believe that they're serious about unseating Mr. Trump.)

Props

I'm not very good at modern video games, especially the big, "AAA" titles that sit at the top of the market. They require skills and reflexes that I no longer have, and lack the time to regain. Fortunately, I can get a sense of these games without having to play them myself, given the substantial number of people who hope to game their way into, if not internet stardom, a workable sideline by posting videos of themselves playing on YouTube.

And this is how I came to learn of Final Fantasy 16. It's an action-adventure game, that takes a lot of the elements that have found their way into the Final Fantasy franchise over the decades and seeks to tell a new, and somewhat mature, story with them.

One of the primary plot elements is a group of people (or non-people, really) termed "bearers." Bearers are, unlike the rest of the population, capable of using magic naturally, and as a result of this are despised and enslaved by the non-magical populace. (People born into the aristocracy often exempted, of course.) It's one of those design decisions that the cliché "bold choice" was specifically coined for.

The problem is that the delivery is about half as subtle and nuanced as carving "slavery and prejudice are bad" into an anvil and dropping it on someone's head would be. And it's not helped by the fact that model of slavery being presented is modeled on the practice of chattel slavery in the Americas, but without having any discernible basis in the economics of the setting.

The people I'm watching play the game have not finished it yet, so I don't know everything the designers have done with the story element, but, for the time being, the whole thing seems to be driven by the desires of national leaders at some point in the past. I'll be pleased if it turns out that there is some sensible reason that fits in with the world as they've built it, but I'm not expecting much change.

A common problem with including "difficult" topics in popular media is that people tend to forget that bad ideas didn't take hold because they were bad ideas; but because in the context in which they operated, they seemed like good ideas. Having the main characters of Final Fantasy 16 pushing back against a society that embraces slavery would likely work better if the slavery in question seemed to exist for any other reason than to have the characters fight against it; or for the audience to pat themselves on the back for being incensed by it.

Disconnected

I suspect that I've said this before, but every so often, something really drives it home to me: Humanity doesn't scale well.

I live in what might charitably be described as a faceless suburb of Seattle. It's a little more upscale, and somewhat less conservative, than the faceless suburb of Chicago that that I grew up in, but both were the sort of bland, colorless places that you could drive through and never realize that you'd been there. They're also both the sort of place that are small enough that city-dwellers regard them as minuscule, but large enough that they readily subdivide into cliques that have little to do with one another.

A couple of neighborhoods over, on the other side of the expressway, a house caught fire early this morning. I noticed it because the house in question is on a ridge overlooking the grocery store that I normally shop at. From below, the plume of smoke was easy to see. I drove by the scene on my way home. Fire trucks and ambulances were still arriving, even as the firefighters already on the scene where working to, I suspect, keep the fire from spreading to the other homes nearby, as the large, boxlike structures filled most of their lots. Uncontrolled, the flames would certainly have jumped the small gaps on either side.

Throughout the day, I checked the news, looking some word on what happened. Nothing. There didn't seem to be a single mention of the home that had burned. It was if nothing had happened. Even the smell of smoke was faint by the time the remnants of the plume reached my home, and well before lunchtime, even that was long gone.

I'm not nostalgic for the small-town life. I'm not wishing that one of my neighbors had knocked on my door to draft me join a bucket brigade or into caring for a burned pet. Communities like that are close-knit, but that comes at a price. Still, there's a part of me that thinks that a fire nearby should be a bigger deal than this one feels like.

If I hadn't just decided to go to the grocery story, more or less at random this morning, I would have never known that there was a fire. It would have been just another in an endless series of non-events that happen in places like these. Places that don't have enough people to have the sorts of things that make them interesting, but do have enough people that the vast majority of them will be forever strangers.

One of my neighbors did stop by today. She'd received an official-looking letter that, with her limited English skills, she had difficulty parsing. I skimmed it, then read it more closely, then explained it to her, along with what was being requested of her, and what she needed to do to fulfill that request. We didn't talk about the fire. She had the letter to concern her, and I needed to get back to work. As near as I can tell, she had no idea that, not very far away, a family may have been burned out of their home that morning. Because between our homes, and the one that burned, there are just too many people to know them all. And for all of the technology that we have to supposedly stay connected to one another, most of those connections are lost in all the noise.

Neither Way

I still know the odd Republican, and so, from time to time, I get a text message, seemingly intended to recruit me to the side of Conservatism through alerting me to some or another outrage perpetrated by someone who is intended to represent the whole of the American Left.

Maybe. I think.

Because I can never be sure if whichever of my vanishingly few Republican acquaintances sent the note honestly expects me to take it at face value. Generally speaking, none of what they send me stands up to even cursory research, at least in the sense of living up to the breathless hype. (But then again, nothing really lives up to the hype; if it did, the "hype" wouldn't have been hype...) Rather it's the sort of thing that prompts one to react without thinking about it, presuming that one's been waiting for just that sort of "proof" that the other side is chock-a-block with hypocrites, criminals and liars who are simply waiting for the chance to destroy everything that's right and good.

And no matter how many times I tell people that I don't believe that people operate in the world with deliberate ill intent, they keep sending me things that only make sense if I make that precise assumption about people.

So do they think that I'll eventually take one of these things at face value, or not? Honestly, I'm not sure which would be worse.

Now, to be sure, I also know some Democratic partisans. They don't bother attempting to stir me to outrage. Presumably because they've actually paid attention when I told them I wouldn't bite. I am, however, expecting at least one of them to start.

When someone shares an openly partisan take on something with someone who is not a fellow partisan, they can expect that this other person will either a) take that information in as the unbiased truth of the matter or b) treat the information as something that has been passed through the hands of, well, partisans, and, as such, reflects their specific view of the world. (Attempting to understand how the other person sees the world, and engaging with them accordingly seems to be right out.)

And so when someone tells me that all of the evidence against Donald Trump has been fabricated, on the basis of them reading that someone claims to be writing a book that will prove it all, I wonder what they actually expect me to believe.

For them to expect me to say: "Wow, I didn't know that. That's really opened my eyes to the idea that the former President can do no wrong and that he's being maliciously persecuted," seems to be expect that, deep down, there is only one legitimate way to see the world. I suppose that in a certain sense, it's complimentary, but this is undermined by the generally low quality of the information presented. On the other hand, if they expect me to say, "Well, here's yet more partisan drivel," why are they wasting both their time, and mine? If they understand the burden of proof that I have for coming over to their cause, why bother with things that they know don't meet the bar?

What bothers me about it either way is the sense that I'm being spoken at, instead of with. And I think that this is becoming the standard mode of political speech in the United States. People speak with those people who are already inclined to agree with them, and at everyone else. It's talking for the sake of talking.