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25 September 2024

Conservatism: Resentment of Elites to Change 

Thomas Edsall’s essay in the NYT of 9/25/2024 characterizes the appeal of lying demagogues to members of the classes that are losing status to the inevitable progress of knowledge as confirming their dislike of losing their place in the social pecking order.  This is a natural regret of having less privileges than they have been accustomed to.  They call this change “political correctness,” but it really shows that time marches on; and if you lose step, you will be left behind.

In fact, the strength of the demagogue also has a shortening half-life.  Fortunately, the number of the demagogue’s followers will diminish over time.  That will  make him a political artifact and only a temporary threat to social advancement; however, during his heyday, he will be ridiculed by forward-looking critics for his backwardness and futile but dangerous threat social progress.


21 September 2024

Reinstituting a National Abortion Right 

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has fomented a serious political conflict in the U.S.  Overturning it under the Constitution requires a variety of extremely difficult action plans: (1) election of  politically sympathetic controlling parties to two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the fifty state legislatures (and governors?) allowing the proposal and adoption of a Constitutional amendment; (2) the morbid strategy of anxiously awaiting changes in the membership of the Supreme Court, or in the Justices’ philosophies, that allows it to countermand the Dobbs decision and accept an Act  of Congress restoring the terms of the Roe v. Wade decision; or (3) the election of abortion-favorable majorities in all  the state legislatures and governorships.  Therefore, the promise of a 2024 Presidential election candidate to “sign into law” a Congressional bill that restores Roe v. Wade holds little weight.

In the meantime, the tragic deaths cited by that candidate were inevitable consequences of the barriers to reproductive health care erected by the Dobbs decision.  There have probably been and there surely will be others.  Moreover, before the Roe v. Wade decision more than fifty years ago, such tragedies were probably common.  The ideologue who’s running for VP on the Republican ticket would probably say, “That’s life.”  I await his debate performance next month to see how he rationalizes that sentiment.


13 September 2024

Is Reality Just Entertainment? 

Michael Hirschorn’s guest essay in the 9/13/2024 NYT makes me wonder whether those of us who still read the Times aren’t the ones living in a fantasy world. Trump, Hatch, Santos and other remarkably “unmoored” celebrities demonstrate how to succeed in the popularity sweepstakes by catering to the nearly half of people who think that only diversion from the awful truth is worthwhile.

But the truth is not awful.  Hopefully, most of us will show in November that we choose to live in what we believe is the real world, which is not tethered to someone else's delusions.

11 September 2024

Harris - Trump Debate 

All the news media, including FOX, agree that Donald was shown up by Kamala. The former prosecutor kept the former President off balance by prompting him to explain his policy proposals.

Apparently her campaign will advocate for another debate. That may be pushing it. Trump’s team may succeed in preventing him from taking her bait. Moreover, even the small minority of undecided voters may believe that it is unfair for Harris to use that prosecutorial tactic to lead the irrepressible former President into raving inaccuracies.

To combat such objections, the Democratic candidate need only point out that America’s enemies could easily use the same strategy. The chief danger of that retort is the mistaken assumption that the undecided minority is as committed to fact as the never-Trumpers.

02 September 2024

The Forgotten Man Can Vote 

Is there a disconnect between the ideals of democracy and equity?  We are caught in our democratic system of government in the anomaly that majority rule doesn’t mean that everyone will agree with the foundation of each other’s conclusions.

FDR accused the Hoover administration of ignoring that recovery from the Depression had to start with rebuilding the liquidity of America’s consumer economy.  Just as his New Deal program would revive the economy by making available the liquidity needed by the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid, the Democratic candidates in the 2024 election are proposing to restore confidence in the political ideals of America’s government.

We can all be committed to the benefits of equality before the law and still disparage each others' value systems. Kamala Harris famously claims that her values haven’t changed despite some changes in her policy goals.  However, we may not all be able to make that distinction. Similarly, we may not all agree that life is worth living when the only people who reap rewards from our actions are others or persons unrelated to us. How real is the satisfaction that is felt by a do-gooder who won’t be alive to enjoy the fruits of his or her labor?

Of course, most systems of faith advocate a continuum that transcends the relatively brief human lifespan.  In addition, the Rawlsian Theory of Justice proposes a rationale for far-sighted selection of one’s actions that does not depend on faith. But as Nicholas Kristof points out in the 9/1/2024 NYT, whatever the reason for one’s value system, all persons deserve respect in a true democracy and not dismissal as deplorable.

Some of us proudly display our ability to subsume personal advantage in the general welfare owing to luckily having achieved higher education. But that academic training should also have taught us that democratic self-government doesn’t allow discriminatorily weighting individuals’ influence based on the luck of the draw. Democracy also prescribes that the majority rules if everyone can be equally exposed to respectful presentation of unbiased information. When that condition is distorted, however, the democratic model can easily lead to tyranny.

Forgetting the man at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid in a formally democratic system of government leaves him open to exploitation by a demagogic manipulator of majority rule.  That can corrupt its structure and achieve the opposite of the general welfare.



18 August 2024

Self-awareness vs Evolution 

Living beings develop their features along a random line called evolution. Civilization evolves on multidimensional pathways made possible by the self-awareness of its component agents. Each thinking agent has the potential to plot an innovative response to separate environmental challenges in parallel with and complimentary to the responses of others.

Suppression of freedom to innovate slows down cultural and economic growth and results in social entropy. It is only when self-aware agents are motivated by the endless possibilities in communal innovation that they combine their  efforts to  advance civilization towards improved common welfare.


22 July 2024

How Personal Is Politics? 

It only became apparent to me how personal many people take their
political views when I received responses from some of my conservative
friends to an email I sent to them, along with other left-leaning
friends, expressing my concern about the prospective outcome of the
2024 presidential election.  I know that all of them are aware of my
personal political views, which are usually liberal democratic, but
not populist.  However, some of them seemed to take offense that I
would include them in a list of friends to whom I would feel free to
state how critical it appears to me what is at stake for the political
future of the country.  

I thought that I could innocently assume that even my conservative 
friends might agree that there is a difference between advocating 
libertarian policies because they are what’s best for the country and 
espousing them only because they will attract votes in a game the 
point of  which is only to win, with little intention to benefit the 
common welfare.

One conservative friend of mine told me that he had lost many
friends in the past because they disagreed with his political views.
Somehow they could not accept continuing their personal
relationship with him  because of their differing opinions on issues
related to public policy, despite their similar attitudes towards
family as well as business and social behavior.  I don’t believe that
it is a fault to compartmentalize one’s attitudes towards various
aspects of life or to choose one’s friends by a common sincerity of
thought rather than by agreement on the conclusions of that thought
process.  How few friends are we willing to live with if we would
limit their number only to those with whom we share identical
conclusions from our analysis.  Life is not a scientific experiment
subject to peer review—even Newtonian  and quantitative physicists can
share a drink from time to time.

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