Side Vs. Side

[B]ack in September, Flynn made it clear how he felt about people who seek immunity.

"When you are given immunity, that means you have probably committed a crime," Flynn said  during an interview with MSNBC commentator Chuck Todd.
Michael Flynn's comments about immunity last year are coming back to bite him

While I will admit that this prompts me to look askance as General Flynn, in the end, that's because I'm not a staunch partisan; I don't have an interest in shielding Republicans from criticism and casting Democrats in a bad light. But, by the same token, I'm unprepared to level charges of "hypocrite;" again, because I'm not a staunch partisan. I don't have an interest in shielding Democrats from criticism and casting Republicans in a bad light.

For me, where General Flynn erred was in not being more partisan during his interview with Chuck Todd in September. Had he simply cast the Clinton aides who had requested immunity as probable criminals flat-out, he'd still be facing criticism for following in their footsteps, but he's have an easy defense in the idea that he was impugning the motives of the specific people he was talking about. Because that's likely what he was intending. I somehow doubt that General Flynn honestly believed that the American justice system was 100% witch hunt-free until the day he decided that asking for immunity in exchange for testimony was a good idea.

After all, this is the nature of partisanship. If I'm talking to a die-hard Republican, I'm not at all surprised when they insinuate, or even flat-out declare, that Democrats are dishonest by simple virtue of them being Democrats. Likewise for Democrats. Of course, any investigation mounted by Democrats that target's Republicans is simply a political which hunt and power play. Of course, any Republican operative who requests immunity from prosecution is looking to avoid jail time for crimes they knowingly committed. When speaking to someone whose worldview, and perhaps more importantly, moral compass, is centered around their partisan/tribal affiliation, why would one expect anything different?

Our problem with partisanship isn't that many of us are active partisans. It's that many active partisans openly look down on active partisanship, and so seek to present themselves as neutral, objective, players. And they do this despite the fact that it fools no one. In a sense, we're all partisans, in the sense that we have biases. If you've read more than two or three of my Politics posts, my biases should be fairly apparent to you by now. And if there were a political party that directly aligned with my biases, I'd likely be a fairly partisan supporter, and have to constantly be on my guard against reserving the presumption of good intent exclusively to fellow party members. So, in that regard, I'm non-partisan in the American system only in the fact that neither of the two major parties particularly suits me. I'd like to think that I'd escape groupthink enough to only believe in my party, right or wrong, as opposed to my party is always right, but I don't know that I'd bet on that.

Because in the end, there's no profit in being even-handed about these things. A Republican who disputes that there's a witch hunt or a Democrat who says that General Flynn is simply playing the game as it played won't earn themselves anything with the people who matter. Their co-partisans will likely resent the party's reputation being undermined, and counter-partisans might be happy to point to their statements as proof of the other side's dishonesty, but that's different than an embrace at the ballot box.

Knowledge Based

Which is better: A short news story with an increased probability of leaving listeners (especially motivated ones) with misconceptions, or a long new story that people don't take the time to listen to all the way through?

Now, this is somewhat of a leading question, and I suspect you understand what the "correct" answer is. I was listening to Morning Edition on the radio this morning, when a story cane on about geoengineering to reduce global warming. Morning Edition is intended to be "drive time" radio, and so the stories are short. And that brevity can sometimes work against a full understanding of the issue at hand.

This morning there was a story about climate engineering in the service of cooling the planet, and how the researchers involved are weighing federal funding for their research. Whether or not climate engineering is the best way, or even a good way, to combat the overall warming of Earth's atmosphere is certainly open to debate, especially given that it's never been attempted on a large scale. So one can understand the importance of researching the issue. But now that President Trump is in office, backed by a Republican Congress, researchers have become more leery of accepting funding from the federal government.

Many environmentalists are suspicious of efforts to deliberately tinker with the climate. They think just talking about the possibility of cooling the planet will threaten the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

So the last thing [Ted Parson] would want is for this research to be associated with the Trump administration.
Scientists Who Want To Study Climate Engineering Shun Trump

I pulled this particular quote from the story because it points to a particular facet of the climate change debate and its goals. Namely, the issue with carbon. For many people in the fossil fuels business, especially the rank and file workers whose job it is to help extract, process and transport the materials, climate activism seems like a direct attack on them and their livelihoods, hence the rhetoric of a "war on coal." From the environmental activism side of the equation, things look a little different. Workers in the fossil-fuel industry may be being asked to sacrifice their careers in the name of cleaner energy, but that's a means, not an end.

To the uninitiated, given those positions, climate geoengineering seems like a win-win. Energy workers can keep their jobs and the temperature of the atmosphere can be controlled. One can have one's cake and eat it, too. For climate scientists to appear to back away from an idea they saw as promising a year ago, simply because the current administration is more committed to fossil fuel industry employment than the previous one seems to undercut the idea that the problem is the effects of fossil fuels, and not the fossil fuels themselves.

Here is another quote, this one not taken from the radio piece, but from the accompanying article on NPRs website:

"I am more comfortable," [David] Keith[, a climate scientist at Harvard University] said, "taking money from clearly environmentally aligned philanthropies or philanthropists than I am taking money from the administration."

For someone who sees money as money, something that spends the same no matter where it comes from (or who writes the check), this statement could easily stoke their suspicions that climate scientists have an agenda, and that they are being less than honest about their findings. Why, after all, should money from a Clinton administration or "clearly environmentally aligned philanthropies or philanthropists" be any better than money from a Trump administration? It doesn't require a particularly suspicious mindset to suspect that climate scientists are more comfortable taking money from those they agree with ideologically, because they'd be more likely to accept ideologically-driven results.

All of this is not, I suspect, the intended takeaway from this piece. But if you know little to nothing about climate engineering initiatives other than you heard/read in this story, it could easily be the message you're left with, especially if you already think that something's not on the up-and-up. On the other hand, the alternative may not be workable. Giving an audience a working primer on the scientific concerns about climate engineering and then discussing climate scientists concerns about the current administration is a tall order of a drive-time news story with a three minute running time. I'm a fairly regular NPR listener (whenever I'm commuting) and I'm somewhat up on the debate over climate engineering. But NPR, and media outlets in general, can't count on their audiences always knowing the greater context. And it does their audience a disservice to leave it out.

Stranger Danger 2.0

Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Moslem.
Donald Trump is agent for Russia.
Micah White is a Satanist.

Or, perhaps more simply, each of these people is a Dangerous Other in the eyes of those who oppose their politics. So why not focus on their politics? In an intensely partisan environment, it isn't very difficult to find some policy prescription that a candidate that is vulnerable to being described as Wrong For America, or whatever jurisdiction that they hope to represent or manage. In a world where solutions are rare and trade-offs are common, most policies will come at a cost to someone - those costs being the necessary trade-offs for the benefits proposed - and people's Loss Aversion tends to prime their sensitivity to those costs, making them easy targets for mobilization to scuttle the entire enterprise.

Part of it, I think, is related to the idea of Lovely Awful Things - the seductive nature of Bad Ideas that makes them attractive to people other than ourselves. The injection of ad hominems into the mix is designed to inoculate people against Wrong Thinking by casting the source of those thoughts as Evil.

But I also think that this phenomenon grows out of a focus on Stranger Danger. Although Stranger Danger is perhaps most accurately defined as the conceptual framework that we've built around the idea of the threat to children posed by adults they don't know, I think that we can also broaden the term to encompass the idea that people we don't know who don't signal shared virtues with us are dangerous, in no small part because they seek to advance their own special interests at our expense.

In this sense, the focus of Birtherism is a way of blunting the rhetorical skill of President Obama and the accusations that President Trump is intended to undermine the idea that he's simply another partisan. Likewise, but on a much smaller scale, labeling Micah White a Satanist is mean to counter his for-the-common-man bona fides. Just like an adult unknown to a child offers sweets as a lure, politicians from the other side of a political divide offer reasonable-sounding policies only as traps for the unwary, and casting them as an evil person aligned with an outsider enemy allows for ad hominem attacks on them without appearing to be openly partisan. The non-partisan may be repelled by an attack on someone for their partisan affiliation, but calling them out as a Dangerous Other allows that unacceptable prejudice to be cloaked in an tolerated one.

In 1992, I turned 24, after a childhood in which Stranger Danger was starting to become a thing, even if it hadn't yet acquired that name. Stories of predatory adults prowling about for children to victimize seemed to be slowly becoming more an more common. And even though people my age often look at modern parental hysteria with a mix of amusement and concern, it's not as if our own generation didn't indulge in it. And I wonder of part of the pattern of increasing, and intractable, partisanship that seemed to take root as my age cohort came to be of voting age isn't perhaps rooted in the distrust of strangers that was starting to be seen as a virtue when we were still in school. Part of that distrust was buttressed by the speculative things that were attributed to unfamiliar adults, things that, as time went on, morphed from unsupported suppositions to presumed truths, each becoming a justification for shedding the presumptions of innocence and good intent.

Of course, I'm speculating here. I don't have any evidence one way or another, and correlation does not imply causality. But part of me hopes that there's something there, for no other reason than it offers a visible, if not easy, path to begin to undo some of the divides that we've built between ourselves.

And the Law Won

Instead of changing in the couple’s favor, the laws evolved to make her husband more vulnerable to deportation, a development the Beristains never expected. She told the Tribune that Trump’s deportation measures — the one’s she thought her family would be exempt from — are harming “regular people.”

“I understand when you’re a criminal and you do bad things, you shouldn’t be in the country,” Helen told the CBS TV affiliate WSBT. “But when you’re a good citizen and you support and you help and you pay taxes and you give jobs to people, you should be able to stay.”
Trump supporter thought president would only deport ‘bad hombres.’ Instead, her husband is being deported.

Helen Beristain has already received a lot of criticism over this situation, from both the Left and the Right. (Of course, they are attacking her for different reasons, but neither side seems inclined to hold their fire.) So I'm not intending this post to be a direct criticism of her, myself. Rather, I'd like to point to an aspect of this situation that I find instructional.

Roberto Beristain, for all that he might be a wonderful person is, by definition, not a good citizen. And that's because he's in the United States illegally. And there was nothing in President Trump's rhetoric, back when he was still Candidate Trump, that pointed to the idea that simply because Mr. Beristain was a good person - that he supported and he helped and he paid taxes and he gave jobs to people - that he would be converted into someone who is in the country legally.

Helen Beristain, his wife, says she supported President Trump but feels his policies shouldn’t apply to her husband because he owns a business and pays taxes.
Trump Supporter’s Husband Faces Deportation

While this is sometimes the way that laws work, when we refer to "the Rule of Law," this generally isn't what we have in mind. The Washington Post headline says that Mrs. Beristain believed that President Trump would only deport "bad hombres." And while it's an understandable sentiment, it points to a fundamental understanding of the nature and the purpose of laws.

Now, I'm not going to claim to be an expert on immigration. That's a body of law that, like many of them, takes quite a bit of time and effort to really understand. But, to the best of my knowledge, the United States does not have a policy that accepts all potential immigrants, with the exception of who are criminals or have been adjudged to have done "bad things." Rather, one has to apply for entry and be accepted. The original intent behind the United States' immigration policies may or may not be valid, depending on how one views the nation's motives when they were first enacted or how strong a position one takes on the idea that people should have unfettered rights to move about in the service of bettering themselves. But even if we ascribe a desire to apply a filter to would-be Americans, and the rules are designed to let in the good, and keep out the bad, there is a process by which the government determines who should be allowed to stay, and who should have to return to their home nation. And it's not based on the personal sentiments of private citizens, whether they be immigration activists, low wage employers or the spouses of those who didn't make the cut.

Generally speaking, the purpose of law is to be a weapon against people who behave in ways that we find to be unacceptable. In order to live in communities, human beings have evolved the capacity to create and manage remarkably complex series of rules and strictures that govern personal behavior and mandate sanctions for violations. But part of what allows rules to work is that they have to be (reasonably) consistent, and in a society like ours, where the body of law is simply too large for any one person to commit all it to memory, it has to be applied in accordance with how it is recorded.

The problem that many people had with President Obama's actions on immigration was that it didn't square with their personal desires on how the law should be applied. For critics on the Left, the President's stepped up enforcement actions were an affront to their ideas that people who were seeking better lives should be allowed to do so without interference. For critics on the Right, the loopholes that the President opened in the rules were proof that he wasn't serious about enforcing laws that they saw as essential for the security of the nation. But both sides seemed completely disinterested in examining the purpose and the wording of the laws under consideration and asking it were time for changes. My personal understanding of the reason for this is that it allows both sides to retain laws on the books for the purpose of being weapons against those they don't like - a broadly-written law that is ignored when convenient can be just as easily recalled for convenience. But that's likely an overly cynical way of looking at it. Rather, I think that most people are like Mrs. Beristain - they believe that the intent of a given law roughly matches what they would intend with it - in this case that the objectively criminal and the subjectively bad would be barred from entering the country, and we would simply look the other way for the "good" immigrants. (And despite the fact that "good" and "bad" are perhaps the most subjective determinations that we ever make, that people would generally agree on who belongs in which category.) But in the end, that creates a legal structure that lends itself to either being arbitrary or to being sectarian and prejudicial; and American history is rife with heartbreaking stories of how that wound up allowing the law to become a cover for abuse.

In a nation divided by competing political and moral ideologies, a body of law that is to everyone's liking is probably beyond our ability to put into place. But that doesn't absolve us of the responsibility to cultivate a high-level understanding what our currently laws are and understand what provisions are encoded into them, and what informal and unwritten modifications have come about as a result of custom, resources or simple desire. And if we understand the law as it is practiced to be superior to the law as it is written, lobby intentionally for those changes, rather than simply assuming that they will always stand.

Jumbled

I never knew that flowers could be unkempt.