Analogies: Teaching the Proper Lesson

There are plenty of wrongs in the world. Which ones you choose to fight against, and when you make your choice, says a lot about what you consider good.

Fear is Rational

Let’s talk about North Korea for a second. You know, that crazy little country somewhere in Asia with a nut-job dictator who lies to his people and doesn’t seem very stable. Over here in the U.S. (with a nut-job President who lies to his people and doesn’t seem very stable) we’re mighty afraid of North Korea. That fear is rational. They are a belligerent country with a large army and now, apparently, nuclear weapons, which they suggest they will use on their enemies if threatened, and they view the U.S. as their main adversary. They have serious social problems because they’ve spent so much money on their military but the only way for those in power to stay there is through controlling the population and whipping up support through nationalistic pride. Having a credible threat to fight against works to their advantage. We should be afraid of them.

Of course, they view us as a belligerent nation, with an even larger army and more nuclear weapons. We have a lot of problems in our society but we spend more on our military than anyone else on earth, more than the next ten countries combined. Our military-industrial complex keeps raking in enormous profits and our leaders constantly use the threat of attack to justify increasing their power and stifling the opposition. They are very afraid of us.

The biggest difference between our two countries’ perspective is that their fear is much more grounded in history.

Most Americans don’t know that history very well, but even a casual review will show their animosity to be very rational and their actions to be quite sane. Start with the end of WWII where the U.S. and Soviets arbitrarily divided the country in half with a dictator on each side. North Korea’s goal of unifying their country is as good a justification for war as any. During that war, their enemy ( de facto the U.S.) committed many war crimes. As many as a million civilians were killed in indiscriminate bombings, with more munitions dropped on their little country than we used in all of WWII. It was brutal. It ravaged their country in a way that the U.S. has not experienced since our Civil War. And the war technically never ended - there was no surrender, no truce, just a cease-fire that has held for a long time.

And during that period of relative peace, North Korea has watched the U.S. invade countries all around the globe. We’ve sent in troops, bombed places from the sky, fought proxy wars, all with the intent of imposing our will and way of life on the world. We often advocate for regime change under the pretense of bringing stability and democracy to a people, though that has never been the result. Even countries that work with us, especially those that agree to give up any nuclear aspirations (Iraq, Libya), are eventually subject to our need to destroy and replace. In fact, the only countries that appear to be safe from our interference are those who have a credible nuclear deterrent.

For over sixty years North Korea has shown that they are capable of restraint, that they understand the threat we pose and are not interested in entering into a war that will lead to their destruction. Sure, they talk about wiping us out, just as often as we talk about wiping them out, but they haven’t attacked South Korea, or the thousands of U.S. troops stationed there, or any of our allies in firing range. Their fear of the U.S. is rational and they have been behaving in a rational manner.

Now, this doesn’t mean they aren’t the bad guys. They have a repressive regime that literally tortures their own citizens who are often starving and freezing due to the poor state of the country. Their leader is quite possibly insane and most certainly evil. They are bad. But that doesn’t make us good. We helped create this mess and we certainly are responsible for our actions in the past which were also quite evil, and our record on the world stage is not a pleasant one. There isn’t always a good guy in every story.

The point is that we should be afraid of North Korea. We don’t want them to have nuclear weapons. But we don’t really have a moral high ground to make that demand or even a reasonable approach to enforce it. What we do have, hopefully, is two nation-states who bluster and threaten but up until now have shown the self-restraint necessary to avoid a war, nuclear or otherwise, which would assuredly kill hundreds of thousands of people on both sides. Let’s hope everyone keeps acting rationally.

Let the Statues Fall

The long debate about what to do with Confederate Monuments has heated up recently, and it always amazes me the number of liberals who argue we should keep the statues up. What’s worse, they do it with the same lazy logic and false equivalencies as the Right. So let’s break down the arguments and try to come to some reasonable conclusions.

Let’s start by getting this out of the way: the Civil War was about slavery, not state’s rights. This one really only comes up from southerners in denial or die-hard racists, so don’t even go there. It’s ridiculous on its face and I’ll let the preponderance of evidence speak for itself: Declarations of Cause of Seceding States (https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states)

But most people know the war was about slavery. Most people know that slavery was wrong. But they argue we can’t erase our history, even the bad parts of it. Here’s the thing, statues aren’t history. They aren’t even how we remember history. We have these things called books and museums, which are used to teach our history to children all over the country. The statues we are talking about were erected to honor the Confederacy (or someone who represented it). They were mostly erected fifty years after the war during a period of segregation and put up in public spaces as a reminder of who controlled those spaces, as well as our government. And the facts and information listed on most of the statues aren’t even historically accurate or particularly germane to the truth of that history. There is a difference between remembering something and honoring it, between stating the record and romanticizing a horror. We don’t need statues celebrating Benedict Arnold to remember the Revolutionary War. If the statues themselves are historically important, then we can certainly keep them in a space where memorials are appropriate without giving them a place of honor in our society, because we should have no pride in what the Confederacy stood for.

But some of the Confederate soldiers were good men, they say. Of course they were. But you haven’t put up a statue commemorating their good deeds; the statues commemorate their worst failing: fighting to maintain the abomination of slavery. Maybe Robert E. Lee was a good university president, but the statues of him are always of a white man in a regal uniform looking brave and determined on his trusty steed as he heads into battle. It’s quite clear the honor is for his leadership and courage, but in the service of an evil cause. He hunted down slaves. He executed them. He fought and killed fellow Americans to maintain his right to own black people. Those are not good deeds.

But if we take down the statues of anyone who wasn’t perfect, where will it end? The old slippery slope argument. First, let me reiterate that it’s not just about the man of the statue, but what particularly deed or philosophy the statue is commemorating. George Washington might not have been a better man than Robert E. Lee, but a statue to Washington is there to remind people of his leadership and courage in fighting for our freedom from British rule and the establishment of a country founded on principles of equality and fairness. Neither the man nor the country entirely lived up to those ideals, but the concepts themselves are clearly worth honoring.

Second, taking down one statue doesn’t require we take down every statue any more than putting up a statue for one person requires we put up statues for everyone. We have a process for both that revolves around our democracy and the ability of our elected leaders to not only respond to the will of the people but also to make considered judgments for the good of all. Sure, I expect they’ll screw that up sometimes like they always do, but it’s not an argument to do nothing. If we can’t be trusted with the decision to take certain statues down then we shouldn’t have been trusted with putting any statues up, which is indeed an argument to get rid of all statues.

An argument that I’ll only hear from liberals is that we should let them have this one - meaning we shouldn’t worry about small things like statues, and it’s counterproductive to piss off the people who want to keep them up. The argument goes that if you want to win over the racists to our side, or to make them less racist, let them keep their trinkets to make them happy and start a dialogue. This is bad on many levels, the first being that these statues have been up for a hundred years, so if keeping them was going to work we should have solved racism long ago. Letting someone hang onto their racist artifacts, letting them honor an atrocity, saying it’s okay for them to distort history and deny the pain and suffering that slavery inflicted on so many in this country is not a path towards healing and reconciliation. But perhaps most importantly, it’s fundamentally wrong to look at the issue of slavery and say: let’s let the white people have this one. If any group deserves the right to decide what is done with these statues it is the descendants of the slaves and those living with the still all too prevalent acceptance of the hateful discrimination that followed.

One of the weakest arguments but still out there, is that we should respect the art. But most of these statues are nowhere near artistic masterpieces. Most were mass-produced on the cheap to satisfy the urgent need of southern whites to find a way to assert their dominance without breaking the bank. And if you want to preserve art, once again that’s what museums are for.

If you’re a Southerner and proud of it, that’s fine. The South has produced many a fine human being and has many noble virtues. If you think the Confederacy and those who fought to maintain slavery fit that description, you have a fundamental problem with your morality and no sense of history. If you need a statue of the Confederacy to remember your heritage, it shouldn’t be one of a noble white man on a horse, but one of a black man beaten and in chains. That’s what the Confederacy stood for, and we the people of this United States should never forget we all started there, but we should not honor it. We cannot erase the past but we can grow beyond it, but only if everyone is ready to let go.

Analogies: Setting the Rules

Imagine you were starting a TV reality show with two groups of people - group A and group B. Each week they had to play some sort of game or contest and the winner got first choice of a limited supply of food for the week. To start things off, group A gets to choose the game and set the rules for the first contest. Don’t you think it’s likely they would set up rules to favor themselves? Even if they tried to be fair, you know the game would be tilted to their advantage, because there is nothing to stop them and no punishment if they do. It’s just human nature.

So Group A wins the contest. No surprise there. But here’s the kicker: the winner of the contest each week gets to set the rules for the following week’s contest. Winner's rules - that’s the American way. Now after several weeks of Group A winning and Group B going hungry, Group B will complain it isn’t fair. But Group A says they're simply following the rules. Group B starts each week with just as much chance to win. And maybe even feeling a little sorry for Group B, Group A now tries to set rules which are actually fair, though after months of eating well and Group B living off their crumbs, it’s hardly surprising that even under equal rules Group A keeps winning. But it's fair, right?

It’s not just about making sure everyone follows the same rules. It’s about setting up fair rules. It’s about leveling the playing field by making up for unfairness in the past. Life is a set of rules called society, and it wasn’t created by some neutral third party. Our rules were determined by those who took advantage of their advantages in the past, and they are propagated by those who win in a system that advantages them. Fairness is a different path entirely.

Analogies: Removing a Pencil from your Eye

Imagine I stuck a pencil in your eye. That’s clearly wrong. It was done with deliberate intent to hurt you and as long as that pencil was there you’d be in pain, half-blinded and full of rage. But what if you went to the ER and the doctor said he couldn’t remove it. He didn’t want to upset me and I clearly wanted that pencil to be in your eye. How else will you remember that I hate you, how else will I remember that time when I was able to hurt you so much? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Crazy, right? Who cares what I think - get that damn pencil out of my eye and do it NOW!

Most of the Confederate monuments in this country were put up long after the war. They were put in public spaces often without discussion, paid for by private groups, certainly without the support of African Americans who often weren’t allowed to vote at the time. They were erected to remind those descendants of slaves who really controlled those public spaces. There is nothing honorable or decent about the actions they memorialize, a war fought against this country to support the institution of slavery. They were a pencil to the eye of equality, and as such need to be removed. That it still entails debate is a sad commentary on the moral fiber of our country.

It's not Trump, it's Republicans

Trump is no longer the story - he is what he is, we all know what he is and he’s not going to change. Sure, what he does still deserves attention and has very important repercussions on the world, but the deep-seated problem we need to discuss is not about one man. It’s about many. Republicans have embraced Trump, they voted him into power, they support his policies and actions, they deny or decry any reality that doesn’t agree with their fantasy world-view. The entire party apparatus has built the Trump phenomenon through decades of attacks on political institutions, public norms, and the rights and liberties of those who disagree with them. Trump is the result, not the cause.

A majority of Republicans would support postponing elections to keep Trump in power, a majority would like to ban immigrants based on religion, a majority believe Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim. They believe Trump won the popular vote, that climate change isn’t happening and certainly isn’t caused by human activity. They don’t believe Trump Jr. met with Russians even after he admitted it and released the emails confirming the meeting. They believe trickle down economics works, that crime is at an all-time high, that colleges have a negative effect on our country. They don’t believe discrimination based on race/gender/religion is real or significant, that Russia hacking our elections is a problem, or that humans evolved from monkeys. They really don’t like Obamacare but they’re okay with the Affordable Care Act.

I’ve talked before about the false equivalency that’s so often drawn between our two political parties, and some of that is policy ideas and honest debates over data analysis and historical records, but most of it comes down to the crazy. Republicans - party leaders, conservative think-tanks, right-wing media - have gone out of their way to destroy a fact-based, reasoning electorate in order to tribalize their side into a win-at-all-costs political machine. In many ways it has worked: Republicans dominate government both nationally and locally in spite of being a minority in overall numbers and on the polling for most important issues. And now we’re stuck with ‘the base’, the twenty-five percent or so of Americans who are die-hard Republicans, who will vote for anyone with an R after their name, will believe anything their dear leader tells them, who will ignore/deny/attack any facts or information that threaten their world-view, and have become so detached from the shared reality rational people use as a base for communication that they cannot even hear us.

It’s a scary time. Trump will burn out but the problem will remain. They’ll jump behind the next demagogue who suggest the ‘others’ are to blame and willingly toss away the foundation of our democracy through a constitutional convention in the name of safety. Safety from a threat that doesn’t exist. The only hope I see is to pull back those who are standing at the edge but have not jumped, those Republicans who have misgivings about our current state of affairs even if they’re willing to go along for a chance at a tax cut or two. But in looking at the beliefs held by a majority of the party, it’s hard to see where these reasonable, rational Republicans might be hiding out. Wherever you are, please come out into the light before we all end up in a darkness too deep to escape.

Analogies: Two Paths in the Woods

You’re walking with a large group of people through the woods when the road splits into two choices. The path on the left is overgrown with weeds, the ground is wet, it takes some turns that make its final destination unclear. The path on the right heads through a thicket of poison ivy before starting up a treacherous cliff with loose rocks, the sound of hungry bears and buzz of stinging insects coming from its foreboding shadows. Both bad choices, but one worse than the other - more dangerous, higher likelihood of failure and injury, possibly death. The group must decide where to go but there is no leader. What argument do you make?

The natural instinct is to bitch and moan about your lousy choices. Point out the bad about each one but eventually, when it finally comes down to taking a vote, you know you’ll choose the one on the left, but you still won’t like it. The problem comes when you realize some people want to go right. In fact, many argue vehemently to the group that the right path is better, and if you sit by and grouse about the left path you’ll notice a lot of the people start to nod their heads. You see, most people haven’t bothered to check out either path very closely and just want someone else to do the thinking and tell them where to go. Maybe you get a little worried and start to argue for the left path, but they’ll just point out all the bad things you said about the left path a moment ago. You’ve undercut yourself and while a clear and rational approach would judge each path on its own merits, the truth is the mob mentality is often swayed more by passionate argument than facts and logic. Maybe you shouldn’t have spent so much time complaining about the better of the two choices, even if it’s far from perfect. Maybe you shouldn’t have spent so much time wishing for a third choice, longing for a straight path on solid ground directly cutting through a beautiful valley. Maybe your time would have been spent comparing and contrasting the two choices that exist and arguing strongly for what you know will be best in the end.

When the final vote is taken and the group heads off, you will know that you made the right choice regardless of what everyone else does. But that doesn’t matter if the group chooses the more dangerous path. Even if you’re confident in your wilderness skills to carry you through the danger there are many people who are stuck with the group. They don’t have the option to leave or the skills to survive without the group. Or maybe you know you can go it alone on the left path, but what happens when you reach your destination and there is no-one else there to share your success; what if none of the others survive their bad choice?  

In a lesser of two evils scenario it is an oft-mentioned truism that both choices are evil. Yet what really matters in any choice are not the similarities but the differences: one is lesser. So you should clearly choose the path on the left, the lesser of the two evils. We all know this even if we try to come up with some other third option, some excuse to avoid making the difficult decision. But if it’s really just the two choices, the choice is simple. What’s difficult is getting everyone to make it. And that’s where the decision-making process of a group is much different than the thought process of an individual. It’s not just the decision you make, but how you arrive there, the way you discuss it with others, the words you choose and the attitude you bring, it all helps drive the decisions of each other, especially those who may not be able to work their way through to the simple choice on their own. If you recognize the importance of choosing the lesser evil, you need to recognize the necessity of fighting for something you do not like.

The Poverty Cycle

There are way too many fucked up people in this country. At least that’s what I hear all the time from people on both sides of the political divide. They may be more polite in the terminology they use, they may have completely different basis for what’s considered fucked up, but it’s a given in our society that there are too many people who make bad choices, do bad things, and generally fail to contribute positively to the world in which the rest of us (the good people) live. Our political disagreements don’t really stem so much from the problems facing us as they do the solutions to such problems. It is those solutions that deserve careful analysis.

So let’s start with a basic problem: poor people. Poor people don’t have good jobs, they don’t pay much in taxes, they commit more crimes, use more drugs, and soak up government welfare. Let’s all agree that the world would be a better place if people weren’t so damn poor. How do we solve that?

Well, why are people poor in the first place? The conservative motto is that people basically choose to be poor. It’s not a conscious choice, per-se, but their financial status is the result of the life choices they have made. They aren’t hard-working enough to get a decent job, they haven’t educated themselves, they lack moral character which is why they make bad choices like using drugs, committing crimes, and having children out of wedlock. And if we, through government handouts, reward such behavior, we’ll only perpetuate the cycle of poverty.

Let’s go with this idea: the poor choose their own misery. They done fucked up and them’s the apples they gotta eat. Let’s cut off their aid and see what happens.

First, they no longer have health care. Every evidence says they will be sicker, have higher medical costs, and more die sooner. Hard to see how that will help them get out of poverty.

Second, no more welfare, like SNAP and WIC (food stamps). They’ll go hungry - see first point.

Third, no free education or training. Well, being poor, they can’t really afford to pay for education, so they will stay uneducated. Without skills or knowledge it’s hard to see how they will get a better job.

Fourth, no tax breaks. They should pay an equal share. Once again, how to see how taking money from the poor will help them get not poor.

And to circle back to the beginning: poor people are poor due to bad choices they’ve made. No one really expects that by making their lives more difficult they will suddenly start making good choices. But their misery is on them and it will serve as an example from which the next generation will learn to make smart choices. What about that?

We’ve transferred our hope to end poverty by teaching the world that it sucks to be poor so don’t do it. So let’s look at the poor kids (since it’s mostly those who are born poor who end up staying poor) and see how this message works.

First, poor kids have no health care, so like their parents they are more likely to be sick (starting with higher rates of infant mortality, which I guess in a way does reduce the number of poor people). Sick people have a harder time finding employment and use a greater share of their income from medical expenses. Sick people are more likely to end up poor.

Second, those poor kids are hungry. No SNAP, no school lunch programs. It’s well-established that undernourished children do worse in school, so it seems unlikely they will end up well-educated and capable of making good decisions.

Third, poor children do worse in school, hunger aside. They go to poorer public schools with fewer resources. They have less help and encouragement from their parents -who are apparently bad role models because they chose to be poor. How realistic is it to expect poor children to learn the value of education and hard work if they cannot see any examples of it?

Fourth, by making things harder on their poor parents, making them even poorer, you reduce all basic sustenance to their children. Fewer toys, worse neighborhoods, more crime, and yes, even worse morals.

If we write off the poor for being poor we write off their children. The cycle continues.

The whole premise is rather ridiculous. Does anyone really think the poor, child or adult, don’t realize it sucks to be poor? Talk to one and find out. They don’t need us to show them the hardships, to make it more obvious or more extreme. What they need is for us to teach them how to escape that poverty, and that doesn’t come from political speeches or church sermons. It comes from their daily life. It comes from getting enough food to eat in order to work hard or pay attention in school. It comes from having a school with enough funding to not only teach arithmetic but to enlighten a child’s soul. It even comes from having the ‘conveniences’ in life, like a working car, cell phone, and internet connection, that are not only factors in a quality of life that lifts spirits, but also essential tools in the modern workforce.

People fuck up. You can’t stop them. But you can limit how miserable they become, because their misery affects us all. Especially their children. You can only save the kids if you save the parents.  If you write off today’s poor you guarantee tomorrow will have more. Break the cycle.

The Criminality Gap

I believe the best way to protect the lives of law enforcement is to remove criminals from the streets. But I also believe history shows that arresting criminals and locking them up does not accomplish that goal.

If you think of criminality as a personal defect, that there are a group of people out there with bad morals who become criminals, then it’s natural to assume that if you lock up enough of them there will be fewer left on the outside to cause trouble. But the evidence suggests it doesn’t work that way. In the U.S. we lock up more people than anyone, but we still have higher rates of crime than most of our contemporaries. Unless you think Americans are particularly violent and immoral, then there must be some other explanation.

I believe that criminality is not so much a reflection of the individual criminals, but of society as a whole. Criminals are created through socio-economic conditions, through a system that often rewards such behavior and limits the other choices available to the disadvantaged. If you think of criminality as a layer of society then you realize removing the individual criminal will not change the layer as a whole. If you arrest a big-time drug dealer, a medium-level dealer will take his place. A low-level dealer will take the medium-level dealer’s spot, and some troubled kid who sees no way out of poverty and misery will step up to fill the void at the bottom level of the ladder. For every criminal locked up you create a replacement.

Truthfully, you create more than a one-to-one replacement. That criminal has family who is now without a father (even if he may have been a crappy father). That neighborhood sees crime continue and a system that focuses on punishment without resources to change the underlying dynamic. They all become more discouraged, more willing to fill the next gap when you arrest the next criminal.

We do need to lock up criminals. That in itself is not the problem. But neither is it the solution. The solution is to spend our significant resources attacking the structure that creates a criminal layer. Provide more for education. Give people the training necessary to find decent jobs and work within crime-ridden communities to create more jobs to be had. Work harder on building a society that values and rewards the right choices and you will diminish the appeal of criminality. Locking people up won’t lead to a better, safer world, but creating a better, safer world will lead to fewer people locked up.

The Anecdote isn’t Evidence, it’s Representation

Human beings are made from stories. Stories guide our lives, they tell us who we should be, who we want to be. They connect us to everyone else who shares our story and they allow us to understand the world in a way that facts and figures simply fail to achieve. Stories have power.

That’s why so many causes use a personal story as a rallying cry instead of merely reciting the evidence of a problem. Rosa Parks, Tamir Rice, Matthew Shepard. What motivates people is not the number of deaths, not the injustice to a group, but the loss of a specific person, a story that allows them to step into the shoes of the oppressed and experience pain through a shared reality. It works, but it generates a counter-productive reaction.

Since it’s well-known than an anecdote does not equal evidence, anyone opposed to the message a story carries will then attack that story to destroy the entire narrative. They focus on the particulars of the story, on the flaws or discrepancies every story has since no single action represents the whole in every detail. They dismiss it as mere anecdote and don’t bother with the underlying facts that create the sentiment behind the story. Segregation, racial injustice, women’s inequality - these are concepts too big and powerful to deny, too socially reprehensible to defend, so they approach from the side: that particular black man wasn’t innocent, that particular women wasn’t discriminated against.

And they may be right. There are always cases where the injustice is vague or circumstantial, where multiple factors make a single cause insufficient. So they may be technically correct to deny the story in its details. But that misses the point. The details of any one story don’t matter. The representation is never complete or perfect, so to pick it apart accomplishes nothing but distract from the reality behind the story. That’s what they don’t want to face. Maybe Trayvon Martin wasn’t innocent, but stereotyping of black youths and violence against them is impossible to deny. Maybe Ellen Pao lost her case, but the horrible record of Silicon Valley on women’s rights and equality is all too stark in the data. If you can’t answer the bigger picture problem, don’t tear down a single story and expect it to refute the whole.

Don't Believe What They Say

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” - Maya Angelou

“When someone tells you who they are, doubt them every time.” - Me

I still hear talk that Trump supporters are decent people who voted for him because of economic anxiety, not racial prejudice. Ask them and that’s what they’ll say. But there’s a world of difference between what someone tells you and what they show you. Believe actions, not words.

Trump’s economic policy was all over the place during his campaign. Americans can’t compete because our wages are too high, but we should raise the minimum wage. We need to cut taxes for everyone but also decrease the deficit. Wall Street is corrupt but don’t take policy advice from poor people. Incoherence, ignorance, and incompetence. So to suggest that people supported his economic vision was to insult their intelligence: he offered no vision and his gilded words were transparently false. To think people bought his schtick is to think very little of them.

And since his administration has started it’s been worse. Tax plans that favor the wealthy and increase the burden on single, middle-class parents. A cabinet full of Goldman Sachs executives and billionaires. A healthcare plan whose only consistency is a huge tax cut for the rich. Still no details on infrastructure, no real increase in job growth, and a steady decline in growth forecasts. But his base is still with him. They’ll tell you he’s improved our economy and they are optimistic. None of that is true or rational.

What has been consistent is his bigotry. His attacking and denigrating those with dark skin and different religious beliefs. He started his political career by slandering a black President, launched his campaign by denigrating Mexicans, and received loud cheers bashing Muslims. In fact, bigotry-based actions like the Muslim Ban and increased immigration enforcement are the only areas of success his administration has had.

Does it make more sense to believe Trump supporters are stupid rubes who don’t understand much of anything about our economy and support tax breaks for the wealthy, or to believe they (being mostly white) have racial anxiety and rationally support the man who is taking concrete steps to help secure the supremacy of white Christians in this country. I don’t have to ask them to know what their reasons are - they’ve shown me plenty.

Your Friends Aren’t That Special

Let me start by stating that I have a great group of friends, both of the personal persuasion as well as my wider social network circles. They’re intelligent and caring, generally well-informed on the happenings of the world, they treat me and everyone I know with respect and empathy, and they definitely make the world a better place. I know they’d help me out if I needed it and I’d be willing to do the same for them. They’re good people. But the thing is, they aren’t that special.

I’m pretty sure that everyone out there has a group of friends that they consider to be upstanding people, better than the ordinary, and we’d all like to think it’s proof of our great taste in people, but if everyone is special then no one is. What this tells me, what my rational mind forces my ego to admit, is that people in general are pretty good. While my friends may not be a perfect representation of American demographics - they definitely tend to be white, middle-class, well-educated, outdoorsy, and liberal - they are representative of the type of people you’ll find at every strata of our society. My friends, and everyone else’s, are America.

This is important because how we treat our friends, how we think about them, the kind of reasoning we use to justify their bad behavior or explain away actions that are inconsistent with our philosophical beliefs, doesn’t get applied to everyone else. It should. If our friends aren’t special, if they are just a somewhat random cross-section of the population, even if any one group doesn’t cover the entire spectrum of diversity in America, then we should treat everyone the same way we treat our friends.

I’ve read a number of articles on the concept of in-group thinking when it comes to politics, but the usual narrative likes to break things out by demographics: working class white males, urban-rural divide, partisan parties. People don’t think that way. They think about people they know (their friends or larger social circle) and about people as a type (the ‘other’). Their friend on disability deserves it because he worked hard before bad luck befell him. Their friend who ran up credit card debt isn’t a bad guy at heart - he coaches the little league team, after all. The neighbor down the road who has three kids from three different men just has low self-esteem, but she’s fundamentally a decent person who needs food stamps to feed those lovely kids. On the other hand, welfare recipients are lazy; city dwellers are violent; politicians are liars. No slack is provided, no benefit of the doubt or a helping hand offered to those whom never physically cross their path.

This disconnect between how we treat our friends vs. the rest of society is at the heart of the how our personal beliefs play out in the political sphere. It’s the reason devout Christians can vote for policies that are an affront to everything the church teaches, the reason women vote for candidates who openly disparage women’s rights, the reason a minority member supports a party that discriminates against minorities. It’s the basis for every attempt to cut government programs that benefit people we don’t know, even if we have friends who we feel deserve those benefits.

If we all became a little friendlier, not in person but simply in the attitude we take towards the world at large, we’d choose differently. We’d see the good in people we don’t know, we’d respect their challenges and listen to their complaints. We’d recognize their errors as only one side of a whole person and offer second chances and new beginnings. We’d be willing to sacrifice a little bit of our own largesse in order to help the community as a whole. That’s what you do for friends, you treat them like a person and not a people.

The 100 Person Test

Policy can be abstract, and while it is best driven by data and analytics, it's often very useful to think about it in terms of real people. But you can get too real - personal stories have a lot of power for persuasion but they can also be easily dismissed as mere anecdote, lacking connection to our own everyday experiences. Somewhere in between impersonal numbers and tales of strangers lies a sweet spot. A useful exercise is to consider one hundred people, a number small enough for us to grasp yet large enough to offer a realistic distribution. What do our decisions mean for the 100.

For instance, let's consider government aid programs. When people talk about cutting programs, their argument almost always is the same: some people who benefit don't deserve it. We all know some people deserve help, but it's hard to view their gain as our own, whereas when someone undeserving gains, whether through fraud or simply exploiting loopholes, it is viewed as our loss, and people hate to lose more than they like to gain. So people are always ready to cut aid programs to prevent getting taken advantage of, and they like to think such cuts will cut off the undeserving without affecting the deserving. That's not how it works. Most government aid programs already have stringent measures to prevent the undeserving from taking advantage of them. Not that they're perfect, but perfection isn't possible. Simply cutting the funding for a program affects everyone, and often reduces the amount of effort put forward to prevent fraud and waste. If you want to help anyone, you have to accept that some help will be siphoned off to those who don't need it. So what are the tradeoffs you're willing to make?

Let's say a hundred people receive food stamps. Food stamps have strict income requirements and stern rules for what they can be used for, but it is possible to get around them. Maybe 10 of those 100 are undeserving (actual estimates are lower, but let's go with a high fraud rate at ten percent). Is it worth reducing the benefits to the 90 who need it in order to root out the dastardly ten? To let 90 people end up hungry because they can't afford enough food? Does it matter that the majority of those 90 deserving recipients are families that include children, the elderly, or disabled persons? Even if it was 50 underserving out of 100, would you be willing to make 50 people go hungry in order to stop a different 50 from getting a free ride? Or would you stop for a second and consider that only two percent of your tax dollars go to help the poor feed themselves, and be willing to let some people get over on you in order to keep children from malnourishment? What's more important, your pride or a hungry child?

On the other hand, let's look at mortgage interest deductions. It's really just another government aid program, reducing the tax burden of those fortunate enough to be able to afford a house. It also has some waste/fraud, people who cheat the system for their own benefit. But in this case, the 'deserving' people are generally those who earn more than the average American and include the very wealthiest individuals. If 10 people are unfairly taking a tax deduction, are you willing to cut the program and limit the tax deduction from the other 90 mostly well-off people who would still be fine without it? Yet, for some reason, I never hear this topic come up when people discuss government waste or people gaming the system, even though it costs five times more than food stamps and a higher fraud rate. Hmm.

The programs people always talk about cutting are largely the ones aimed at helping those most in need -  food stamps, Medicaid, Disability - when the program offering aid to the well off - tax deductions, business subsidies - often have much higher rates of improper usage. But we don't see those people. We all see the person at the grocery store buying soda with food stamps, the person with handicap plates who gets out and walks into the mall. Of course, we don't know their full story, don't know if they buy soda once a year as a special treat for their honor roll kid, or are in remission the day you spotted them walking pain-free. It's much easier to assume they are undeserving and thus there are too many undeservings out there. We don't see the tax cheat, we don't see the business use a loophole to avoid paying their fair share. We might know it happens in the abstract, but if they don't rub our faces in it we don't get angry about it. We should. We should be mad when people cheat the system. But we shouldn't let our outrage hurt the people who need help even if that means we live with a little outrage once in a while. Out of any hundred people I assume most of them deserve my help. How about you?

Bad People

During the 2016 campaign, I opined that anyone who would vote for an explicitly racist, bigoted misogynist who showed no understanding of important issues or the basic functioning of government was a bad person. An acquaintance took umbrage because he knew some of those people, they were his friends, and he knew they weren’t bad people, even if he didn’t agree with their choice. They were mothers and fathers, hard-workers and taxpayers, good Christians who helped their communities and treated people with respect. He had a point.

I didn’t admit to being wrong (because who does that) but further clarified my statement. No person is entirely good or bad; we are all made up of positive traits and negative ones, with a balance that shifts and a rather arbitrary line that demarks one side from the other. It is quite possible to commit a bad act and yet have enough good deeds to make up for such an error. I should have said that voting for such a horrible person, giving an ignorant buffoon such power over our lives and the world we live in, was a truly awful act, but that one act, no matter how reprehensible, did not determine the balance of a person’s soul. As my acquaintance so desperately wanted to believe: they could still be good people.

But that was before the election, before the very clear evidence of exactly what the presidency of such a petulant man-child would look like. Now we know. I’ll say once again: anyone who supports the administration, the racist policies, the dismantling of our social safety net, the disregard for the basic rule of law and principles of democracy, is a bad person.

Let me expand. Their support is bad in the good vs. evil sense of the action, but as I stated earlier a single action cannot define a person’s totality. They may very well have a lot of good in them. But bad also refers to quality, of the good vs. poor kind. If someone can look at the past six months and not realize how awful it has been, who doesn’t see the danger in our executive branch obstructing  investigations into their own criminal behavior, who can’t recognize the constant lies and misinformation, who won’t admit the hate and harm coming from the head of our government - well, that’s a bad person. They are bad at being a person. They are a failure at adulting.

Being a person, as opposed to an animal, requires thought and reasoning, a sense of our own sentience, and an understanding of the basic facts of reality in our world. If you can’t think on your own and simply believe the lies coming from the White House and its many right-wing propaganda arms, you are a disgrace to your own humanity. I know it’s a sweeping pronouncement, I know it includes a significant portion of our populace, and many of those folks do, indeed, possess positive traits and contribute to good in the world. But incompetence on this basic level, and never in my lifetime has there been a case of government evil so basic and understandable as our current situation, is simply inexcusable. Anyone exercising even a small amount of gray matter put towards understanding how we got here, what is happening, and how much harm is being done to millions and millions of people, could not fail to see the error in our electoral choice. This is bad, the people who support it are bad. But they could change.

The thing about being bad at something is it also implies the ability to improve. You can get better if you work at it. Read some history. Study some economics. All you need is the basics, simple understanding of accepted facts. Then listen to the words of your neighbors. Read mainstream (and historically accurate) sources. Stop repeating the lies and talking points. Become a better human being and join the rest of the world in repudiating the hatred and ignorance that comes from our Commander in Chief. We all can do better. We can be good people.

Analogies: Fair Play

Imagine you’re playing a basketball game, but for some arbitrary reason the refs decide your team only gets to put four players on the court against your opponent’s usual five. Clearly, that’s unfair, and you complain, but the refs won’t change their decision. What do you do? You play as hard as you can. Your work your butt off, you expect your teammates to do the same, and you give it everything you have. But the result is most likely you will be way behind by half-time. So maybe the refs then decide it wasn’t really fair. So for the second half you’ll get to play with five players. All good, right? No, not really. Even at five on five, is it really fair? After all, the refs who disadvantaged you are still calling the game. How likely are they to be fair in the second half? Especially if you look at the stats and see that they call more penalties on your team. Wouldn’t it be quite reasonable to be suspicious of their ‘fairness’?

But even if the refs were truly impartial, the game wouldn’t be fair. You’re starting the second half way behind. Maybe if they forced the other team to play with four players against your five in the second half, that would be fair? But do you think the other team will agree to that? No, so you’re still likely to lose the game. How long do you have to play at five on five before it’s fair? The next game? The rest of the season? No, that loss will still affect your chances of making the playoffs. You’d have to play a long, long time, much longer than the one half you were disadvantaged, before it would approach fair. And everyone deserves fair play, right?

We had slavery on this continent for three hundred years. We had Jim Crow laws for another hundred. We still have a lot more fouls called on African Americans and people of color than on white Americans. It isn’t fair yet.

Be a Better Ally

As most people do, I think of myself as a good person. I’d like to think I’ve always been a good person, but I know my actions in the past haven’t always lived up to my ideals of the present. One regret, in particular, is that I haven’t always been the best ally. You see, I’m a well-educated, middle-class, straight, white male in America, and that means I’ve received a lot of support and deference from the world around me. My life has been enriched by many people, some who do not share all those traits and have faced greater challenges than I simply because of their skin color, gender identity, or sexual orientation. They deserved more help from me along the way. I grew up without racism mostly because my town was all white so it was nowhere to be seen. We did have one black kid in school but he was a couple years behind me so it was easy enough to never notice him. In junior high an Asian kid moved to town. I liked him well enough and we treated him like every other boy on the playground - meaning we teased him mercilessly. His nickname was Gook and I didn’t even know what that meant, much less had any incentive to rebuke my peers for using crude racial slurs. It barely occurred to me that it would be hard to be the new boy in school, much less to have to smile and laugh along with jokes about your slight accent or clueless questions about life in the jungle. He deserved more understanding. My college was far more diverse and liberal, but I didn’t have time for politics, too busy on the tennis court and in the physics department. Science didn’t care about personal identity, at least so it seemed to me with a Korean advisor, a hippy lab professor, and the rest of the good guys on the faculty. We even had a solid 25% female class (2 out of 8). I was surprised in my senior year to discover that both of the women were also applying to graduate programs; more surprised to learn they both had GPA’s comparable to my own; downright shocked to learn they didn’t receive the same support and encouragement from the faculty that I, the golden boy of the department, had. They always seemed so quiet in class and never joined in our study groups. It wasn’t until much later I realized maybe they were quiet because I spoke so loud, and maybe they didn’t feel welcome at our beer-and-pizza study sessions late at night at the far side of a dark campus. They deserved more consideration. My graduate school class only had one woman (out of 25) but lots of ethnic diversity (mostly foreign nationals), yet without trying I ended up with a circle of white, middle-class American friends. We were the cool kids - cool as far as physics grad students go. When one of the guys came out as gay in the second year I had the same reaction as the rest of the group: so what, no big deal. Science didn’t care about sexual orientation. When he drifted away from the group I eventually understood it was a big deal for him and that was the whole point. He deserved some caring. It wasn’t until after more life experience, more interactions with the big, broad world of people that I woke up to the little differences that separate us in vast ways. I had always been too busy working my ass off to get ahead to really stop and consider how I had gotten to be a frontrunner, that perhaps I had a head start and an easier road. I try not to beat myself up too much over my failings. I was young. I treated everyone with the same respect and consideration that I would have wanted. Now I know that all those people actually deserved better. They had accomplished much more just to catch up to me. I should have known, should have understood. I was young but not stupid, and it doesn’t take much smarts to know you should help those less fortunate than yourself. These days I try to be a better ally. I try to pay attention to the differences even when I can’t see them right away. I withhold judgment until I have the full story. I try to listen more. When I do speak up it’s to magnify the words of those whose voices are often ignored - especially the ones I don’t even know. Everyone has their own struggle and the world is much bigger than the people you interact with personally. The faceless masses often need more help than your neighbor down the street and the only way we can help everyone is to expand our range of compassion beyond our line of sight. I can’t change the past, I don’t know the future, but I can do what I can in the present. Maybe some others can learn a little earlier than I did. Take a moment and think about the people around you and how their world might differ from yours. More importantly, think about the groups of people who are affected by policies which you vote on, through officials you elect, and consider them as individual human beings who struggle to make the best of their life, the same as you and I do. If you don’t see those people, can’t talk to them and get to know them personally, read about them. Read what they have to say. Listen with an open heart and mind and consider the person, not the people. We live in an age where ignorance is a poor excuse for anything this important and our quick reaction based on personal experience is simply not good enough. It’s time to stop demonizing the other, it’s time to stop ignoring the powerless, it’s time to start making equality a reality. Whatever social capital you have, whatever gifts hard work or good fortune have blessed you with, use your power to raise up those who still face challenges from an inequitable world. Now is the time that matters and the good people need all the allies they can find. Even if you’re already a good person - you deserve to be better.

In Times Like These

Has anyone ever seen times like these: a President with no regard for truth or respect for the rule of law, a Congress of Party-men turning a blind eye to our government’s downfall for the sake of their petty goals, a media bifurcated into opposing camps with separate realities and a public too shallow to glean fact from fiction. We live in an age where hyperbole is understatement and the dangers to our society are imminent but invisible. The question that surfaces time and time again, more often as an excuse than an inquiry, is: What can I do about it?

Without a true historical precedent, the answer is elusive, yet history is where our thoughts should lie. What would I have done? That’s the question we often ask when we read about the pivotal periods of history. Would I have marched against segregation? Would I have taken up arms in the Civil War on the side of my neighbors or of my country? Would I have risked a beating to march in the streets to demand women be given the right to vote? We’ve all read the stories of the courageous souls who put their bodies on the line for what was right and their actions have given them some immortality. More importantly, they made the world a better place. We all wonder what we would have done if we lived in such tumultuous times. Perhaps we do.

It’s easy to believe that we are all caught in the mundane and commonplace if only because we are in it. But if history is any guide, we are no longer in the everyday; we are in the moment of decision. An administration under investigation (by a Special Counsel) for colluding with a foreign power to affect the outcome of our election. A President who has all but admitted obstructing that investigation. And the Party in power behind him complicit in it all with their obfuscations and dismissals, intent on using their ill-gotten position of power to enact legislation woefully unpopular among the populace. It’s time to consider how we all want to be remembered in history.

Can anyone still doubt that history will look back on this moment as a betrayal of our country by a group of privileged and mean-spirited men? 120 days into the Trump Presidency and we are rocked by scandals, with executive orders squashed by the courts, an unwinding of much of the social progress made in the last half-century, with nothing but plans for worse to come. The writing on the proposed wall couldn’t be any more clear and we all need to take a step back to take it in.

What can you do? You can decide to be on the right side of history. You can speak up, call out those who enable this travesty to continue. Voice your anger to those in power and hold them accountable at every opportunity. Use the most powerful tool ever given to a people: vote. Vote in a fair and democratic election and make sure everyone else does the same. Help those who need to register; stop those who try to deny a citizen their voice. It’s a new time but it requires an old solution. Power to the people.

Contact your Congressperson.

The Conservative Reality

It's easy to talk about concepts and ideas, and easy to make arguments about hypotheticals and statistics. What's harder is understanding reality and empathizing with people who are different than you. As a well-educated white man in America, when I hear political discussions amongst my peers I too often hear a pseudo-academic sheen applied to what conservatism means and where its heart lies. For 'conservative' in this sense, I'm talking about the Republican Party, both in its official capacity and in the minds of the members of the party who support its positions, as demonstrated in their policy positions and arguments. They are heartless.

The general arguments on welfare are a clear example. The conservative position is that welfare only breeds more welfare, that people become dependent upon the government, and that the free market is the solution to any economic ills (this last is the favorite of those with a libertarian bent). So when they talk about the poor they see no need for the government to help (no food stamps, no medicaid, no Planned Parenthood, no after-school programs, no decent education). But instead of The Poor, lets look at one poor young woman. What about her? Well, if that girl ends up pregnant, she made a bad choice and needs to take responsibility for herself. If she has to drop out of school to care for her baby, she just needs to work hard. If she can't get a decent job without education, she needs to educate herself, if her job doesn't pay well or provide time off to care for a sick child, she should find a better job. If she ends up on drugs, if she has overwhelming medical bills, if she feels nothing but despair and hopelessness that is evidence of her poor moral character. The conservative view is that we all have opportunities (whether or not they are all equal), and we all need to make the best of our situation regardless of how difficult it might be. The government's role is not to help out.

Let's accept that for the moment. Let's put aside the government assistance that small businesses gladly welcome in the form of government loans and grants, let's put aside the corporate welfare that allows many of the largest companies in this country to avoid paying any taxes, let's put aside the great respect conservatives show the millionaires who have inherited their wealth. Let's admit that the young woman made some bad choices. She shouldn't have gotten pregnant in high school. She should have taken better care of her health and worked harder to educate herself. She certainly shouldn't have tried drugs. Maybe she could indeed have become a better person. But she didn't. She should face the consequences of her actions.

In the free market utopia of conservatives, what are those consequences? First, there shouldn't be any minimum wage, so an uneducated person who needs to care for a child has no right to expect a well-paying job. If healthcare is strictly for-profit she certainly can't expect any healthcare she can't pay for (which means cancer is a death sentence and a moderate car accident would put her in debt for the rest of her life). If she can't afford food then she will have to go hungry. If she can't afford rent, she will be homeless (but not in my neighborhood - that's a crime in these parts). Sure, she will be miserable, but that's what happens to those who can't compete in a market-place world. It's the only thing that encourages people to work hard - she serves as an example for everyone else to avoid.

That young woman brought the misery on herself and it simply isn't the government's role to ameliorate it in any way. But what about her son?

This is where the religious-cum-libertarian bent of the American conservatives really fails humanity. First, that child must live because to terminate any pregnancy is not allowed. If the mother can't take care of the child they can give it up for adoption (of course, that will probably mean foster care, which is heavily government subsidized, so we really shouldn't allow that either). Either way, that child won't have a true family to support him. He won't have a mother who can nourish him because she can't feed herself. The child won't have a roof over his head or be able to receive medical care. He won't be educated because public education is not capitalism. He will suffer in misery that is every bit as bad as his mothers but he will have had no choice in the matter - until he grows into an adult. If he manages to survive that long, then he will be expected to make good choices, to have educated himself along to way to find a decent job, to work hard and contribute to society in spite of all the suffering his life has entailed. And if he fails, if he repeats his mother's mistakes and becomes a burden upon the good folk of the world, that will be his failing, his poor decisions and our government bears no responsibility to help him in any way.

People do make bad choices, even those who have every advantage and plenty of opportunity to make good choices. but even those people do not deserve unlimited suffering. And those who never had a chance, who face harder choices every day than those who have the luxury to sit and pontificate about the nature of political philosophy, they deserve a safety net. We have the capabilities as a society to eliminate extreme suffering among all our people, even those who may deserve it. To choose not to do so in the name of some abstract concept of an economic system whose practical failings are numerous and obvious is disgraceful.

We can afford to educate everyone. We can afford to offer everyone healthcare. We can food, clothe, and house all our peoples. Many comparable societies in the world have shown us how it can be done. We can even do all of that while running a market-based economy that allows for competition and innovation. It's a little harder to do all that while spending ten times more money on defense spending than any other nation on the planet, but it would still be possible. But first, we need to show humanity and compassion, and we need to do it through the representation of ourselves that is our government. We need to choose who we want to be and how we want to treat each other. Not as class segments, not as statistics or demographics. But as people. One person to another. That is the philosophy that should guide a government. From there it is free to use data analytics, to use market-based forces to figure out solutions to the problems of society. But no one deserves misery. Not that young woman. Not her child. No one.

Analogies: Evil with a Clear Conscience

Very few people choose to do evil in the world, but much evil is done by those who think themselves good. Through a combination of self-justification and selective awareness we often perpetrate evil while keeping our conscience clean.

When we’re driving down the highway and want to cut over to the fast lane, the proper thing to do is to wait for a opening, and we all know that, but sometimes we choose to force our way in. We know it’s wrong, but we maintain internal rationalizations that excuse our poor behavior: everyone else does it, it’s not a big deal, that car I cut off shouldn’t be going so fast in the first place. The wrong we commit doesn’t stick to us, but our conscience doesn’t matter to the car we cut off and the rest of traffic which gets slowed down by the cumulative repetition of such actions.

But sometimes we try to do the right thing and yet ultimately encourage the same evil we tried to prevent. Once in the fast lane, maybe in an effort to ease our guilt, we slow down to let someone else cut in. That’s good, right? But what if that person had cut off several others to get in that position? Our rewarding their bad behavior only encourages it more. And if the car behind us was rushing to the hospital, the consequences of our actions are negative. But we feel our moral slate is clean because our intention was good, despite the outcome.

The real truth is that we could have, and should have, expected the outcome of our actions and made our moral choice based on realistic expectations instead of blind ignorance. If we had paid attention to the world around us we could have seen the car we let in weave their way through traffic and known our kind act would only encourage them. The car behind us flashed their lights, honked their horn, and waved a bloody bandage to get our attention, but we couldn’t be bothered to interpret such signs.

There are more good people than evil in the world, but that balance doesn’t make the world a better place. Our intentions are rather meaningless if they are not carried out with a good faith effort to divine the likely results. Our internal justifications to excuse our bad actions do not make them any more palatable to the victims. It’s not enough to consider ourselves good, it’s not enough to resist those who actively pursue evil; we must be the most vigilant with regard to ourselves and face the unfortunate truths that we are part of the evil that needs to be resisted.

Conservative Legacy

The Wall Street Journal is a bastion of conservative thought, in many ways a standard-bearer for Republican ideology, and I’m sure home to many of the best and brightest journalists who lean to the right. So it’s not surprising that their piece on President Obama’s legacy (it might be behind a paywall, but here's the link: Obama's Legacy) comes to the conclusion that he was a failure, but the shallow level of analysis, the willfully ignorant arguments and outright misrepresentation of reality points not to Obama’s failure, but to the failure of the right-wing press and conservative intellectual arguments in general.

The basic gist of the article is that Obama and his progressive policies have left the country, the whole world really, in worse shape than it was in before. The fault lies with him and him alone. It starts by arguing that he chose to push through a left-wing agenda and rejected bipartisanship, ignoring the fact that Democratic control of government lasted for less than two years of his Presidency, that the Republicans in Congress literally stated from the beginning that their goal was to obstruct and defeat everything he proposed regardless of its merits or even their previous positions on issues such as stimulus spending or immigration reform. Even the Affordable Care Act, passed in that first window of opportunity, was ultimately a compromise, ceding a public option and prescription-price controls to satisfy the right - two of the largest weaknesses in the current law.

And while the Wall Street Journal does consider the ACA a failure, it doesn’t bother with the details of why or who is responsible - it’s simply Obama’s fault. That it is a failure is also glibly assumed, despite an additional twenty million insured, the lowest uninsured rate in history, and price levels that have risen slower over its lifetime than at any time in the last two decades. The ACA is flawed - all compromises tend to be - but it is far from a failure and the fact that no Republican alternative exists (after six years of claiming they would have one any day now) shows how hypocritical their attack on Obama really is.

They also blame Obama for the poor growth of the economy, contrasting his results with those of Reagan and Clinton. No mention of the recession he inherited from his Republican predecessor, no mention of the Republican blockade of any further stimulus from the government - something even most conservative economists agree would have been helpful. It's also quite telling that they don’t mention that Reagan’s government ushered in the modern era of crushing federal debt or that Clinton’s policies of de-regulation ultimately led to the financial crisis (a position that they’ve argued many times before). No, they threw in Reagan, analysis free, because conservatives blindly accept he was the last great President and they included Clinton in a poorly disguised (and ultimately futile) attempt to pretend they are not partisan and it’s Obama in particular who is a failure.

They blame Obama for pulling us out of Iraq too soon without mentioning he simply followed the scheduled Bush had structured, and they completely ignored why we were there in the first place. Obama was a bad president because of Syria and ISIS, but no mention of Al Qaeda and 9/11 which resulted from the policies of the (supposedly) great Reagan and Clinton years. The responsibility for all the world’s problems lies solely on Obama’s shoulders with no effort given to find any other possible explanation.

They even blame Obama for the poor state of our race relations, noting that as a black President he surely should have done better. While not stated, it’s clear that by ‘better’ they mean keeping the black folk from complaining so much. Because you can’t make the claim that life was better for oppressed minorities under Clinton and Reagan - all the data shows it was just as bad if not worse - but the wealthy white folk at the Wall Street Journal (and by extension their readers) didn’t have to hear about it. They actually think Obama failed because minority groups now feel they have a voice and the freedom to speak out.

It’s common for partisan news outlets to slam the other side, and any President’s legacy is open to interpretation and argument, but to do so with such openly motivated reasoning and disregard for the obvious complexities of reality and thoroughly documented facts of the past show who is the real disappointment over the past eight years: the Wall Street Journal and conservative intellectualism and integrity.