Frank's Musings

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.