Politics Akilter

There is a widespread perception afoot, so announced by a number of pundits, that American politics and American society are out of whack. The evidence that suggests that the regular institutions and the usual arrangements and interests of the various demographic populations are not doing what they are supposed to be doing include the fact, central to me, that half of the Republican congresspeople have not admitted that Biden was legitimately elected, that Congress does not want to investigate an insurrection at the Capital, and that poor people are supporting Republicans and that farmers are also supporting Republicans even if trade wars against China have not been to their economic advantage. What is going on? The usual explanations have come up empty. 

It may be that politics, to the contrary, has not itself gone off the rails. It may just be that the Republican Party has just realigned itself, after Trump, around other issues than those that dominated Republican politics for so long when Republicanism meant small government, the free market, a balanced budget, a strong defense, and law and order, and have come to focus instead on border security, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and suppressing voter rights while asserting the need for social order at least against people of color. The realignment of the Republican Party is not just the result of embracing Trump positions. It is also the shift in demographics whereby the ranks of Republicans are more and more the uneducated, those from the South and the Mountain States, and among the declining number of white ethnics who seem threatened at the United States becoming a majority minority in the next generation or so. In that case, the system isn’t out of whack; it is just adjusting, as happened when Progressive Republicans shifted after 1912 to support the Democrats or, before that, when Whigs went Republican. Politics evolve and so only seem for the moment to be weird, but I don’t think so because the New Republicans are full of conspiracies and other issues that seem very marginal and unserious, such as the anti-vaxxers. It might be a relief for Republicans when they next year again become pre-occupied with abortion, given the impending Supreme Court decision about it, because that is a tried and true culture issue that separates the two parties.

A simple and straightforward explanation of how politics is out of whack offers itself as purely political. The Congress is dysfunctional because the two parties are so equal in power, tied, in fact, in number in the Senate, and the Democrats having only a handful of votes to give them the majority in Congress, each party therefore becoming totally oppositional to its other party, every one lining up with its party leader in both houses, rather than having a few that peel off to follow their own ways, even Senators not following their prima donna ways. So, it is argued, there is no need for a filibuster in that the practice protects renegades or small minorities, when the parties run as packs. The only way to avoid gridlock would be for a Congressional election to result in a two or three margin of one party over another and then the party in power would be able to get its legislative agenda through.

But, in fact, it has often been the case that the two parties have been close in number to one another for a long time, at least back to the Fifties, and important legislation got through, as when Everett Dirksen helped get civil rights passed in the Senate and Republicans got through the giant infrastructure bill known at the time as the Interstate Highway Defense Act, the fear of war an excuse to build the interstate highway system. Those were big endeavors. The problem at the moment is the malaise itself which results in Mitch McConell being Dr, No, in total opposition to whatever the Democrats do so as to win the Senate majority in 2022 rather than running on the basis of an alternative agenda. Why aren’t Republicans lambasting Biden for not being belligerent to China as they did when they lambasted Truman and others for being soft on Communism? It is as if the Republicaans cannot bother to invent arguments and instead say only stupid things, like that Pelosi is responsible for Jan. 6h. That is part of the malaise; not even to bother to form a counter argument to the Democrats that is plausible.

Biden, for his part, has clearly maintained to his own point of view that politics as usual has not changed, that it is possible to make bipartisan support around conventional political bedfellows across the aisle by emphasizing infrastructure, and, at the moment, that does seem the successful move in that a dozen Republicans have sided with the infrastructure bill including the Senate Minority leader, though we still have to see whether the bill will be passed and signed. In that case, politics can work and it would show, as Biden has said, democracy also can work. It is not broken, despite all the bad feelings and the corrupt instincts and the wreckage of Donald Trump. The American Union is to be restored even without the Republicans admitting that Trump had disrupted the American polity. We got over Watergate so soon enough that Gerry Ford was nearly reelected and Reagan won the Presidency just six years after Watergate. It took not so very much longer, a generation, for a Democrat, Grover Cleveland, to be elected as President after the Civil War, which was a disruption of the political system if there ever had been one., certainly more so than the glitch in the system represented by Donald Trump. So it isn't politics but something deeper which explains what is akilter with American society. 

A better and more usual explanation of a disjointed politics and culture is to reduce it to matters of social structure. That is as old as the device of de Tocqueville explaining northern democracy as the result of stone filled, post ice age topography that lends itself to small homesteads that will lead to cooperation while the South has large scale plantations that lend themselves to oligarchy. Twentieth Century historians and social scientists looked at the rise and fall of the social classes as explaining why people took up intemperate political views. Downward mobility leads people to become angry and reactionary. That was the explanation of the original Radical Right explained by Richard Hofstader and Daniel Bell in the Fifties and Sixties. Another variation is that the opposite, upward mobility, leads people to become angry and reactionary. A case in point is  J. D. Vance, whose “Hillbilly Elegy” portrays people doing better economically and restraining their own propensities to violence and, perhaps, now feeling entitled to the halff baked opinions they have as a result of getting just a little bit educated and so feeling the desire to be respectable folk who now join a church and become vituperative about abortion, just as anti-Semitism was appealing in the Twenties and Thirties as one way a backward reactionary in eastern Europe might become seen as a person of principle. The trouble with either theory is that it is very difficult to establish their beliefs and what sections of the population are worse or better off in that everyone is doing better in that minority groups are doing better than ever and rural areas are raising wages so as to attract workers to their areas because new businesses are expanding. The American problem is the scarcity of the workforce rather than immigrants taking jobs away from the local workforce, and yet some people see the border as an exigent problem for American life. What is weird at the moment is that politis don’t seem interest or ideology based. What causes people to think their thoughts about politics?  Why is there a lot of anger and resentment of the government even though the government is delivering plenty of goodies?

One explanation that people find plausible even if it is fallacious is that people feel that they are losing their liberties. They are angry and won’t take it any more because social life has become so bureaucratized that you can’t turn your head and breathe free. To the contrary, you have to register your credit cards every time the company decides you need a new authorization code. It drives me crazy. You also have to meet government requirements about sorting your garbage or what to do to register your driver’s license. You have to file income tax and quarterly statements. And, of course, nowadays, you have to wear masks or are implored to get a vaccine shot. This rebellion against all the dos and don'ts which seem so trivial and yet encumbering and necessary to just get on with your life goes all the way back to when freedom meant heading out west, over the Appalachian Mountains, so that you would not see the smoke of any chimney, no one in sight, left to peace and quiet, only you with your family and the rifle with which you could shoot a racoon or a bear. That is freedom, somehow somewhat remembered in American lore, though it has been a long time since anyone was a homesteader outside Alaska.

That doesn’t hold up as an explanation of present day unrest because it is a trend so long in its gradual accumulation over the history of the entire nation tht you would have to ascertain what finally was the straw that broke the back rather than just ever accumulating indignities which, by the way, some people might have acclimated or other people have moved on to other issues, like abortion or racism, more appealing as getting up your dander in that people display moral fervor about higher standards for morality and ever lower standards, so they seem, for people of other races. Just about any pet peeve that is of long standing or of ancient vintage can resurrect itself as the cause for current unrest, whether automobiles tooting around country lanes scaring the horses on the road or railroad trains killing cattle and so having cowcatchers attached in front of the locomotives. Ben Franklin setting up a postal service is an intrusion of not being left alone even though most people think it an advantage to make contact with people just as people today think that rural and poor availability of the internet is an advantage rather than a privation and everyone, or most everyone, is keen for the government providing that service. So it seems precious to think of being independent in the Dav’y Crockett sense when the benefits of complex interaction are so obvious though people, some of them, may speak words invoking a simpler and better time. There has to be something more specific that is riling people up right now.

My favorite explanation for what has gone akilter is a logical fallacy that has come of very recent times to have pervaded American thinking and is evidenced by the rhetorical displays offered in the media in quite recent times as if to act as if there were no logical fallacy at work. People posit conspiracy theories and voice them without bothering to provide explanations or evidence, just the fact of them as “opinions” being the sufficient justification for their being told. People and therefore networks think that forest fires are made by global warming when they are demonstrably started by sparks from electrical wires that overhang a forest rather than set underground, which would be more expensive. People think vaccines can interfere with fertility because they are reported as having said so and so perpetuated as a rumor by the media. Illegals are deluging America without reporting facts of whether the upswing is higher over the long term or whether it has deleterious effects.

Looking at logical fallacies might seem an arcane and abstract explanation for a social event that obtains for a great many people. But remember that a logical fallacy had previously been seen as the source of an important part of social dysfunctions. In the Fifties and Sixties, one argument raised by sociologists and psychologists for the explanation of racial prejudice was that people mistakenly attributed the characteristics of a group to the characteristics of a member of the group. So white people found that Blacks as a whole had more crime or juvenile delinquency or poverty and then attributed the same to apply to individuals in that group. Point out that problem, clarify what is an imperfect inference, and racism is resolved. That was the task of Dianne Caroll in her sitcom “Julia”, where being an exemplary Black person would disarm racists and other people suspicious of Black people by seeing exceptional ones of merit and so people to be judged individually even though it might remain the case that most gang members are bad sorts. I don’t think that theory was very successful because people could easily remain convinced that a group was a bad lot even if it had some exceptions. Let's look at the group, not the individual.

Trump was not the culprit of a logical fallacy when pundits pounced on Kelly Ann Conway for having invoked “alternative facts” to explain something, insisting that she was making facts relativistic when all she was saying was that you can make a different case if you mobilize a different set of facts, but pundits already hated her for defending Trump and so deliberately or not misinterpreted what she had said as a defense of being illogical and so descending argument into chaos, however true it might be that Trump was not exactly an example of a clear thinker. Most Presidents are clear enough or have people around them who will be, even if some of them are ideologues who like Dick Chaney will insist on twisting facts to make them come out the way they want. But that is a different problem.

The logical fallacy that seems to me to explain the current situation or, even better, is the substance of the mess that America finds in itself, is one that concerns the burden of proof. It is a version of Occam’s Razor, which propounds that the simplest explanation is the most likely exclamation. In this version, the more outrageous or complicated ofne of two explanations is the one that is required to assume the burden of proof, to explain why that is so, rather than is the more garden variety and familiar explanation. That the world is flat might seem obvious and so the burden of proof is to explain why it is not, and that is provided by the fact that ships descend under the horizon rather than go on forever until they are too small to see, and so the world must be round. Here is what happens when the burden of proof is appropriately and logically applied. There are any number of explanations offered by the authority of the CDC about face masks and vaccination while, of course, I do not have sufficient knowledge to judge the questions on my own. But that does not mean I can throw up my hands and no one can say whether pro or anti vaxxers are correct. Rather, I can say that, most of the time, authority will be correct because what it says is plausible and that vaccines have been used many times before, for flu and measles and smallpox, and so if you are claiming contrary to this fact, then explain why it should be questioned. 

Conspiracy theories readily reveal the inappropriate assignment of the burden of proof. Qanon supporters suggest that there is a pizza parlor in Washington D C that engages in sexually exploiting children and, by the way, also is undermining the federal government. That is a bizarre theory and should get some credence only in the sense that any theory should be looked into. But the explanation is far fetched enough that the burden of proof is to show how that works: to interview ex-members, let us say, who observed what the pizza parlor was doing,or to get the police to raid the pizza parlor. But none of that happens. What happens instead is that Qanon supporters say everyone knows what they are saying is the truth and so have no need to explore the matter further. That, as Spock would have said, is illogical. And yet the unwillingness to assume the burden of proof by what is clearly the challenging party, the one which is saying things are different from what they seem, is the basis of Jan. 6th and its underlying premise, which is that Trump won the election. How so? No court has ever found there had been voting irregularities that might have changed the election, and if you think there is a conspiracy whereby all those judges, Republicans and Democrats, are in cahoots to subvert the true election, then the Trump supporters would have at least offered a white paper which summarized the arguments and facts that the election was unduly overturned and put that out to public scrutiny. But neither Trump nor their supporters ever did so and so the rational person is left with the conclusion that they would have made the public brief if they could have but didn’t because they couldn’t concoct a reasonable one. But my logic works only if there is an acceptance, as there has been since William of Occam, that the burden rests on the preposterous or the unlikely to explain itself, which is what Trumpists do not feel the need to do, the obvious principle of logic put topsy tervy. 

That is the problem, the source of our collective quessiness. Congressional Republicans say nothing, explain nothing, or some of them say something so outrageous, so as to disbelieve how violent were the events on Jan.6th, as one can see on the videotape, that it doesn’t matter that those who say it are even to be believed having said it. It doesn’t matter. Logic is chaos. Gov. De Santis in Florida says that there are no mask mandates for Florida school children saying it is a matter of liberty without considering or answering the objections of the CDC or asking whether liberty has not had the exception of public health measures in Europe and America for five hundred years. He doesn’t argue, just proclaims. William Jennings Bryan did better at the Scopes Trial. My sense is that illogicality can be contagious for a while-- or indeed for a very long time, as happened in the Middle Ages, and that it will be set aright when a new Republican Party comes to develop its own principles or when the frenzy over Trumpism is finally deceased, but meanwhile we have had a setback that infringes on how society much less politics are allowed to persist without reason. Meanwhile just remain aware of your righteous queasiness about politics even if you can’t quite pin down what it is about.

Let me be clear. I am not evoking the Frankfurt School that unreason had descended upon the West under Fascism and Communism so that people became deranged and compliant, all of this inspired under capitalism, a system whereby people became deranged into acquisitiveness rather than happiness. Even America was in its sway in that, as Marcuse said, people bought trinkets just so they could in a mad dash to buy what was until tomorrow the better product. I am saying instead that unreason is easy, readily adopted if one abandons the structure of logical inference, politicians adopting it only because they have no need to adopt being reasonable and find that they are successful anyway. It doesn’t have to do with the nature of society or democratic politics. It is only because Trump found the way and some people are willing to adopt the adjuration of being against reason because it suits their only immediate purposes, even if logic is in the nature of things rather than a cultural fad or a long term developed mental structure, and so I think it most likely will soon pass as distasteful as it is to be in the midst of its moment.