Three Kinds of Politicians

 

All politicians have their individual quirks, personalities, viewpoints, and priorities. Within that, we can sort politicians into roughly three categories. 

The first category, the pragmatists, approach politics as an art of problem solving and consensus building, aiming to accomplish effective governance. Pragmatists tend to focus their efforts on issues and in directions where an opportunity to build a working coalition exists. Pragmatic politics involves listening and adjusting positions; pragmatists change based not only on practical politics, but also in response to information and to logical arguments. Abraham Lincoln was, famously, a pragmatist in his approach to ending American slavery.

The second type of politician, the romantics, start with a specific goal or outlook, one they resist compromising. Romantic political orientation has its value where compromise is either ineffective or morally intolerable.  Winston Churchill was largely romantic in his implacable opposition to Nazi Germany. However, in most cases a romantic approach to politics ends with fireworks such as those produced by romantic conservatives in the American Congress, have who achieved periodic shutdowns of the American government but little in the way of legislation. 

The final type, the incendiary, is more common in social movements than in politics, but incendiary politicians do appear from time to time. Incendiary politicians are distinguished from romantics by their willingness to go outside the formal and informal limits of political discourse to achieve their goals. Andrew Jackson was an incendiary politician, most notably when he defied the US Supreme Court ruling on Indigenous rights to commit one of the worst acts of ethnic cleansing in American history. Donald Trump is, of course, cut from similar cloth.

All of which makes Rich Lowry's recent commentary in the New York Times downright interesting.

The mask is right off

This time he said it before a microphone and TV cameras. Donald Trump claimed that from his perspective the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he has awarded to, among others, donors, professional athletes, politicians, and radio commentator Rush Limbaugh "is better" than the Medal of Honor. He claimed the medal of freedom is "better" precisely because recipients do not have to sacrifice their health or their lives.

Donald Trump has made it clear from the outset that he despises service and sacrifice. He has repeatedly, and very publicly, rejected the notion that those who sacrifice themselves for the good of others have a claim on their fellow citizens. He dismissed the five and a half years his political rival John McCain spent in brutal captivity for his country with a sneer: "I like people who weren't captured, OK?". When the family of Humayun Khan, who had given his life in Operation Iraqi Freedom, appealed to Donald Trump to abandon his Islamophobic policies in the name of the United States Constitution, and of their son who had given his life for that constitution, Donald Trump dismissed them by doubling down on his Islamophobic positions.

Eleven score and eight years ago...

...the continental congress of what would become the United States severed their links with the most scientifically sophisticated and democratic nation in Europe. In doing so, they also cut ties with the most just, wise, and honourable monarch in Europe at that time, a king whose Royal Proclamation of 1763 laid out the requirement to treat the Indigenous peoples of the continent with basic respect.

 Last month, the Supreme Court of the United States decreed the presidential powers extend to immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, and rendered prosecution for any act by a president extremely difficult. Last week, President Biden announced he would forego a presidential nomination that was his for the good of the country. Both decisions, in their way, stand to shape the nature of the American experiment.

A verdict and a question

The conviction of Donald Trump by a New York jury actually raises a number of questions, some trivial and some decidedly not.

From the beginning, Donald Trump's behaviour has appalled me. His casual cruelty disgusts me, and his contempt for the very idea of service angers me at a deep level that frankly surprised me. His profound divisiveness and heedlessness incompetence frightens me, particularly when I consider the power of the office he has held and wants to reclaim. I and others appalled and enraged by Donald Trump should probably ask ourselves how much we really want to celebrate the conviction and possible incarceration of an elderly and by all accounts rather pathetic individual on a relatively minor, if squalid crime. 

On the trivial side, I wonder how the US Treasury Department, which provides security for American presidents and former presidents, will decide which agents have to accompany Donald Trump to prison. Musical chairs, perhaps? Offering danger money or hardship pay?

The jury verdict on Donald Trump does not, in fact, mean he will go to prison or even jail: not soon, and quite possibly not at all. Courts have routinely sentenced people guilty of worse things than any of the charges against Mr. Trump to fines, community service, or probation. As well. Mr. Trump still has avenues of appeal.

William of Occam

William of Occam

 The intellectual asceticism of William of Occam is not popular in American conservative circles. The American commentator Rod Dreher has extended his dislike for Occam's antinomianism into a distaste for the rule against multiplying causes known as Occam's Razor. Plenty of conservatives who do not often refer to William of Occam by name refuse, in practice, to apply his insight. 

Occam's Razor provides a central insight in all forms of intellectual endeavour, but nowhere does it matter more than in the formation of policy, because in politics the facts and the logical conclusions from these facts matter most when they come with bad, or at least unwelcome, news. Facts always matter, but when they happen to align with our desires, they have only a marginal influence on policy. After all, we seldom turn from doing something we want to do because the facts and logic affirm our choices. Living by the truth only really counts as a virtue when it includes a willingness to live by truths we find unpleasant.

Occam's Razor plays a vital role in this process, by cutting down the number of conclusions possible from any given set of facts. If I write a computer program and the test runs keep providing the wrong output, I can conclude I have made an error somewhere in my logic, or I can decide the operating system has an arcane defect my program has somehow stumbled into, a system error capable of evading detection for decades, and one invoked by only the tiniest set of circumstances. While such things happen, Occam's Razor tells me to start looking for errors in my own work. 

Thinking About the Rule of Law

 When Rudolph Giuliani called for a "trial by combat" on January 6, his hearers probably did not envision the ancient Germanic judicial ritual. Indeed, to judge from the number of supporters of the "Q" conspiracy theory attending the rally where he spoke, his call for "trial by combat" probably evoked, in at least some of his hearers, an imagined reckoning which, had it taken place, would have resembled the baptismal scene in "The Godfather", with Donald Trump reciting the oath of office as his surrogates systematically slaughtered his enemies. This displays a profound detachment from the rule of law; paradoxically, it also illustrates the importance of the rule of law. The Godfather movies chronicle the profound tragedy of a man drawn into a corrupt and violent system despite his intentions, and the baptism scene in that movie vividly illustrates, in its hypocrisy, the corruption behind the violence. To imagine a similar scene as a triumphant vindication, as the believers in "Q" appear to have done, with Donald Trump beginning his second term with a mass hanging following a military coup and unlawful tribunals represents a catastrophic corruption of the American imagination. 

Peter Pan's Crocodile and Donald Trump

Many years ago I heard a theatre legend, one of many such stories, in which a young and cocky actor playing the crocodile in Peter Pan managed to infuriate the stagehands. In crocodile costume, of course, he walked bent over, following tape on the stage, and one night, after a particularly egregious offence against the stage crew, he followed the tape, tick tocking away... straight into the orchestra pit.

The usual message for this story for actors is: don't piss off the stage crew. It also has a message for politicians and pundits: don't blindly follow the tape. In politics, of course, the tape we follow has many names and takes many forms: peer pressure, compromise or the allure of power. More dangerously, the tape we follow takes the shape of a phenomenon visible throughout politics and society: a series of minor propositions, each of which we may not want to agree to, but which at the time seem less painful than a sense of letting the team down, or losing friends, access, and influence. C. S. Lewis described this process in his great essay The Inner Ring.

Living not by lies but ignoring the truth

Reverend Dwight Longenecker has reviewed Rod Dreher's new book "Live Not by Lies", and his review essay is interesting. In fact, I would go so far as to call it fascinating: it brings to my mind an essay by Connor Cruise O'Brien called "What can become of South Africa?", in which he speaks of the potential of ideological rhetoric to "boggle the mind" and completely drive out ordinary, humble respect for everyday reality. Reading Fr. Longenecker's essay, I can't tell whether he actually does not see the contradictions in his writing, or whether he simply wants to know if his readers have paid attention, because he wrote the following paragraph in his glowing review of Mr. Dreher's book:

 No matter what you believe about the legality of Joe Biden’s election, the fact remains that half the country believe Donald Trump and his Trump army were planning a coup. The other half of the country believe Joe Biden accomplished a coup through a rigged election. Again, no matter what the facts are–the result is that the Joe Biden presidency appears to be propped up by military might. Calling up 25,000 troops to Washington this week was not just for “security”. It was clearly a show of strength by the winning side. It was a display of military might to remind the other half of America who won and who is in charge. 

 In case anyone has forgotten, one of the books praised in this review essay bears the title "Live Not by Lies". That context makes the above quote from the article quite remarkable. 

January 20

As I write this, Joe Biden prepares to take the oath of office as president of the United States. He now has an opportunity: to move American politics in a new and humane direction. He also has a series of challenges: a republic fractured, with at least some bitter end fans of the previous chief executive who will not accept him as their president, and who have made no secret of their propensity for violence. He has to lead his country through the worst months of a pandemic, made far worse by the blundering, posturing, and dishonesty of his predecessor. He has to deal with a historic deficit and a government burdened by over seven trillion dollars more debt than it carried when he left at the end of his terms as vice president. He, his government, and the American people also face the task of weaning the American economy off the twin narcotics of easy money and fossil fuels.

I wish him well. 

Dr. Biden, I presume...

Ralph Alswang, White House 
photographer

Now eighty million American voters, well over fifty United States judges, and the electoral college have awarded the title of president elect to Joe Biden, mainstream conservative publications have a problem. Refusing to call Mr. Biden the president elect looks increasingly desperate, increasingly unrealistic, and with increasing clarity, it reveals a lack of respect for American democracy. At the same time, it seems evident a great many people with influence among conservatives don't believe in conceding with any grace. Perhaps they have internalized Winston Churchill's quote:

Nations which go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.

 Most of us can discern the difference between the Wehrmacht and the Democratic Party, but American politics has grown more extreme lately. Some conservative opinion journalists in search of a hill to defend have found one: they may have to call Mr. Biden the president, but to call the incoming first lady by her academic title of Dr. Biden: never.

It started with an essay in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal decrying Dr. Biden's use of her title, then spread to National Review, where one article gives the laxity of American libel standards a serious workout by suggesting, with no apparent basis save the writer's own opinion, the University of Delaware had chucked its standards to award a degree to the spouse of a senator.

Looking ahead

 

Gen. Gus Perna, second from left 
(Photo Credit: U.S. Army)

Sunday night, the CBS news magazine program 60 minutes interviewed General Gus Perna about his work preparing to distribute Covid vaccine to all Americans upon completion of the necessary clinical trials. Seeing him speak, seeing him hold himself accountable for achieving results for the American people, seeing him describing the gaps in his knowledge and his method of educating himself, I had two thoughts.

First, for the sake of my American friends, I hope this man succeeds. Second, I hope he's a Republican. The only candidates for the next Republican presidential nomination I have seen floated so far have no practical experience or qualifications except in opinion journalism. Even a short glimpse of General Perna at work suggested how much better Republicans, and indeed Americans, can do.

General Perna may not deliver, of course. A single 60 minutes interview hardly provides a basis for a comprehensive assessment of anyone's character and abilities. Operation warp speed may fail. The whole project, and particularly the military role in it, may turn out badly, and I have observed this administration long enough to know their decisions do not come with a guarantee of quality. But seeing the way General Perna took responsibility for his part in the work, without qualification, gave me a reason to hope for his success, and a reminder of how much better the Republican Party can do.

Logophobia redux

Rod Dreher links approvingly to an article by Elizabeth Corey in First Things that tackles the concept of intersectionality. Corey dismisses the concept as "a wholly academic invention", then promptly refutes that characterization by citing a real life example of discrimination and the ensuing legal case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors. Corey writes:

...five black women sued General Motors for discrimination. GM had not hired black women prior to 1964, and had dismissed all but one of its black female ­employees hired after 1970 on the basis of seniority. The plaintiffs claimed that the harm they suffered could not be addressed by suing as women only, because GM could point out that it had indeed hired women (white women) prior to 1964 and had retained those that were hired after 1970. 

Nor were they willing to sue on the basis of race alone. The discrimination they suffered was not merely racial, they argued, but a result of their combined racial and gender identity. The district court dismissed this claim, observing that the prospect of “the ­creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.”

Pirsig, Bell, LaPadula, a different kind of braid...

Fredrik deBoer asks why so many people have so much trouble evaluating propositions to do with social justice on a continuum. He cites examples from cultural appropriation to campus hookups, asking in every case why so much of the conversation about these issues ends in extreme, opposing, and angry positions.

I don't have the answer, I don't think a single answer exists. With multiple cultures rubbing up against each other, ideas and expressions may seem perfectly innocent to some people, and egregiously offensive from a different perspective. Some commentators have suggested the growth of social media has reduced dialog between people who disagree while concentrating and amplifying the dialog among like-minded people, thus encouraging the unchecked adoption of more and more extreme positions.

I don't know why this has happened, but I have a theory.

Size the office to fit the man

photo by Gage Skidmore

 Donald Trump’s recent behaviour has provoked dark thoughts among American opinion writers. Ross Douthait, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, has raised the possibility of declaring Mr. Trump medically unfit for his job and invoking the 25 amendment to the US constitution to remove him.

That is a spectacularly bad idea. It is, to paraphrase Orwell, a bad idea even though National Review says it’s a bad idea. For one thing, the authors of the 25th amendment intended it to deal with a medical crisis, not a policy disagreement or even justified reservations about the character of a president. For another, it doesn’t deal with the structural or even the psychological problems the Trump presidency raises.

An apology to Rob Ford

By West Annex News
(Wikimedia Commons)

Rob, if you can hear me... sorry.

Earlier in this election, I compared the brash populism of Donald Trump to the populism of Rob Ford. At the time, the comparison seemed to make sense. Rob Ford had, and "Ford nation" still has, the same sort of supporters who turn out for Donald Trump: lower income individuals who have trouble getting ahead and who see, often correctly, that people who know the secret handshake get breaks from governments the rest of us do not.

But I don't for a second believe Rob Ford would ever have treated the Khans the way Donald Trump treated them, making insinuations about Mrs. Khan's silence as she stood by her husband, or fatuously insisting the "sacrifices" he made to get rich compared with those of the Khans.

By Gage Skidmore 
(Wikimedia Commons)

When I asked myself how Rob Ford would have responded to Khizr Khan's speech, it occurred to me: Rob Ford would have called the Khans. He would have talked to them. Rob always called people who disagreed with him. He would have listened the he Khans. He would have expressed sympathy with their sacrifice. He would probably not have changed any of his positions, but he would have given the Khans the courtesy of a hearing.

All Rob Ford's most vehement opponents, which some
times included me, acknowledged his ability as a retail politician. He listened to people, and whether he agreed with us or not he gave the impression he cared what we thought. I think he genuinely did; I think he had a real desire to help and connect with people, and unlike Donald Trump, he did not respond to opposition with the fury of wounded vanity.

I had the experience of watching Rob Ford as mayor and as councilor. Mr. Trump, you're no Rob Ford.

Another comment on Black Lives Matter

By Fibonacci Blue (Wikimedia Commons)

Six months ago, Chris Lollie settled a lawsuit against the City of St. Paul Minnesota and the police department of that city. In response to a complaint by a private security guard that Mr. Lollie had sat in the wrong chair in an area open to the public, the police shocked him using an electric discharge device and arrested him.The courts first dismissed all the charges the police laid against Mr. Lollie, and subsequently cleared the way for his suit to go forward. At that point, to avoid the possibility of a larger damage award the city settled, although to the credit of the councilors who made the decision, they also considered the police had done wrong. As a member of council said: "I want to see our city make national news for many things. And this is not one of them."

Mr. Lollie took a cell phone video of his arrest, and the release of the video, as well as the subsequent discussion, took place just as the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson MO came to international attention. Seeing the way the police treated Mr. Lollie, and discussing his arrest, led me to see the phrase Black Lives Matter as not simply the self-evident truth that the police should not shoot people with black skin, but that Black people have a right to live a full and whole life, lived in dignity, freedom, with a sense of possibility. I do not see Black Lives matter simply as a not shooting, but as upholding the dignity of the person.

The heart of the matter

In a previous post, I wrote about the so-called "Overton window": the conviction that policy proposals have a simple linear value; that setting them out, ordered, on a line makes it possible to define a range, or a set defined in linear order from a minimum to a maximum value (the "window") that opinion makers empowered to do so will deem acceptable.

This linear view has no relation to the complicated reality of politics. Using it distorts and even corrupts approaches to politics in many ways: ultimately, treating politics as symbols with single ordinal values offers considerable scope for attempts to control the process.

Nowhere man

The Atlantic Magazine staff writer Connor Friedersdorf has a post up on Ezra Klein's discussion of Paul Ryan's budget proposal. As a Canadian who nether pays taxes to, nor does business with, the United States government, the outcome of this argument doesn't affect me, but the ideas about politics and political discussion do interest me.
Connor Friedersdorf argues that despite Ezra Klein's claims to base his analysis on pure data, he has, in fact, a political position. Further, he and by extension other writers need to make their ideological assumptions and biases clear, so the reader can evaluate the assumptions underlying the facts they choose to present. Mr. Friedersdorf cites one claim Ezra Klein makes: that Paul Ryan bases his budget choices on the belief that American federal involvement in the social safety net "strangles" or "muscles out" state, local, and community initiatives. He cites a long passage from The Economist which includes this:

Don't expensive federal guarantees make community and family charity both less necessary and less affordable? Hasn't the increasingly intense and comprehensive regulation of the health-care sector made free markets in insurance and medical services basically illegal? I'm not so sure it's unusual to think so.

As someone who grew up in and still lives in the kind of community that does supports its members, I reject this premise. In my neighbourhood, in Toronto, one of the homes of Canadian single-payer health care (and very glad to have it), I and my neighbours for a number of years have held a block party and yard sale in which proceeds have gone towards supplemental care for a child with cerebral palsy. Access to world class medical facilities does not diminish community solidarity. To the extent that government policies have caused community programs to shrink over the past forty years, aid to the dispossessed and guarantees of basic services have played a minor role.

I grew up on the water, spending a part of my teenage years as a watchkeeper on the sail training ship St Lawrence II. A group of local Kingston businessmen built this ship for the youth of the community, and in so doing created a spectacularly successful program. In a sense, when conservatives speak glowingly of community programs, they refer to success stories like this. But community programs like the Brigantine rely on local businesses deeply invested in the community, and with the resources to back up that commitment with cash. In a series of policies that began before the Second World War and accelerated dramatically after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, North American governments have fostered the growth of massive enterprises that have no ties to any particular community. Today, local business that exist have their margins squeezed by competition with Walmart and other big box discounters. Governments have indeed fostered the growth of these large scale businesses, and in the process, in the name of efficiency, have disconnected communities from their economic support. That, in my experience, has had more to do with the ability of communities to support their members than federal entitlements.

Ruins in Detroit

In a sense, this, too illustrates the weakness of an analysis that claims to have a basis in pure data: it ignores not the ultimately sterile matter of political or ideological affiliations, but both the richness of knowledge and the passion that springs from the lived experience that numbers do not capture. In the worst of the plague years, some political leaders wished the communities affected by HIV would simply disappear. The searing account by Garance Franke-Ruta allows us to understand the passion with which communities afflicted with HIV not only survived but broke through their oppression. No table of numbers will ever bring home this lesson. In the same way, to understand the absurdity of the assumption that gutting government support for basic human needs will cause communities to magically rally to fill the gaps takes experience of the way communities really work. Imagination helps, too. Consider the actual condition of too many American cities: does anyone really believe the poorest American communities have the resources to create great social programs if the national government would only leave them alone?

[edited March 17]

Terror, courage, and justice

President Obama's decision to lead off his term in office by bringing his administration into compliance with the law has led to some hyperventilating from some quite predictable quarters.

I have written elsewhere about my conviction that the use of torture undermines the foundation of Western freedom, limited government under law, in a way that nothing else can. Preserving that freedom takes courage; a people that writes their government a blank cheque in the name of fear will eventually lose their freedoms to a leader who promises security.

But giving up freedom out of fear of a few hundred plotters in al Qeada does not only denote a cowardice that ill becomes the children and grandchildren of men and women who endured the horrors of battle against the Third Reich. It also shows a rather pathetic inability to evaluate risks. Consider this: in the worst years of the crack epidemic, from 1988 to 1992, homicide statistics from the US Department of Justice suggest that conflict over drugs may have led to over 9000 additional homicides. During that period, young drug dealers indulged themselves in expensive cars and lavish pre-paid funerals. Too often, they used the funeral services before they could legally drive the cars. And yet, with all this mayhem, with almost three times the number of deaths caused by al Qeada's attacks on the United States, the American government never considered suspending the rule of law. The perpetrators responsible for drug wars appeared in courtrooms and enjoyed the rights of any criminal defendant. And the rule of law prevailed; even with the terrorist outrages of 9/11, fewer Americans died violently in the year 2001 than in any of the worst years of the crack epidemic.

So people who fret that a civilised nation and justice system cannot handle a few fanatics hiding in attics and scribbling in Internet chat rooms really need to consider their recent history. The justice process has handled serious bloodshed before, and it can do so again.