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.

Analogies: Self-Interest

Let’s say you’re having an office party potluck and Brian is assigned to bring the dessert. What do you think of him if he says he’s going to bring peanut butter cookies because he likes them and doesn’t care what other people want? Or maybe he says he likes them and asks if it’s OK with everyone else, and a majority of people say peanut butter cookies are fine with them, but Mary in accounting says she’s deathly allergic to peanuts. Brian says he’s going to bring the peanut butter cookies anyway because they’re his favorites and most people will eat them. Brian is simply pursuing his own self-interest, perhaps even taking into account the majority opinion, and that leads to the best results, right? That's what the free market is all about and Brian is just a good consumer, right?

In the real world, we call Brian an asshole.