Moral Absolutes

There are no moral absolutes. There are just consequences and preferences and rules that apply for only a short or long time.

Most people think, to the extent that they think about the matter, that almost all people think they have basic principles of conduct and that people more or less try to abide by their principles, while acknowledging that people in other cultures may have different basic principles and so follow those different ones. Everyone has their principles, whatTalcott Parsons called “values”, and that is what differentiates people. Values are the axioms from which behaviors are implied or descend. So people believe that you should not kill or steal, and some emphasize that they are loyal to religion, family, or church, and there is no logical way to dissuade them from their values even if you might disapprove of those allegiances although you might try to argue an opposing point of view was cruel or revengeful but your antagonist might simply embrace that point of view however contrary it is to your own values, or try to move an advocate of reproductive rights that a fetus looks like a human being but the reproductive rights person could steel themselves to this appeal by asserting that nonetheless a woman controls her own body.  

I want to suggest that this point of view is not true. There are no such things as values, just short or long chains of  causes and consequences which justify a behavior and the eventual end of the chain is a matter of fact which is true or false and so that the value has been reduced to being true or false rather than good or bad. This apparently outlandish view of morality is consistent with Spinoza, the Pragmatist tradition of William James and John Dewey and, I would say, of G. E. Moore, who claimed that a sense of right or wrong was independent of theories of ethics but a particular sense of the rectitude of a behavior as when a person might sense it was acceptable to kill enemy soldiers even if killing is generally wrong.The reconstruction of philosophy Dewey contemplated meant that a number of traditional terms in philosophy just disappear as meaningless. Among them, I would say, is “nature”, which simply means everything, so that angels living on clouds and having wings would be natural rather than supernatural if that in fact was the way they existed even if you know that fact only on faith. Another term to be abolished is “cause” which is a force and that can be substituted with the word “context” and so people don’t get pneumonia because of germs because pneumonia germs are always present and a necessary condition for the disease but also require people who are run down in one way or other, all the conditions together and being arbitrary as which condition is to be regarded as the cause. 

There is also no need for the word “justice”, however much the term is bandied about. “Justice” is a term that cannot be defined because there is no balance of interests, as there are with weights, and so perhaps applicable to some damages, such as restitution for a wrecked car, but when applied in the criminal court system simply means punishment as if incarceration or execution somehow balances the original offense. All it does is repeat the action of killing. The victim of murder does not come back to life. All that can be meant by “justice” is palliative or remedial programs for those who live under dire conditions. Similarly, there is no need for the word “should”: even though Kant insisted the word was so essential in conversation that it must necessarily have meaning, when the word “should” is a shorthand for all the consequences one prefers that, as I say, resolve into being matters of fact, as when I say I should be nice to my wife because to do otherwise leads to wear and tear on a relationship and wanting to have that relationship is satisfying, which is a fact not a value. Now consider the status of a number of well known values that are absolute in the sense that they are axiomatic and so beyond appeal when that is clearly not the case.

A simple derivation that reasons to an absolute are the morals in the Ten Commandments. “Though shalt not steal” can be found in its consequence that this is functional for the maintenance of society. As Hobbes might say, allowing people to steal leads to anarchy and so has to be raised to the status of a moral outrage. That practical usefulness is reason enough. But some religionists might say that the implication need not be practical, that it is akin to dietary laws which some people say are sanitary or otherwise useful, but have to be obeyed because God mandated it for whatever reason He had. Your’s is not to argue. But if God commands something, the question resolves itself to the factual question of whether God exists and I have said elsewhere (See my “Contra-God” in Wenglinsky Review) that the term God is essentially meaningless, just a set of metaphors drawn from lords and masters. The commandment doesn’t hold if there is no God to command it.

Try another commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”. Leave aside the functional argument that allowing killing also leads to eternal fear amidst anarchy. Or that there are qualifications whereby enemy soldiers at the least are allowed to be killed. Consider the legal death penalty. People offer the reason for allowing it is that it may serve as a deterrent and that under present guidelines it is more expensive to do that rather than put a murderer into life imprisonment but underlying the practical considerations is the view that killing a person is worthy because it shows the sanctity of a society to protect itself, and so execution symbolizes the authority of the state. Opponents of the death penalty go beyond the practical claims that there are people who are wrongly convicted or rehabilitatable to the bedrock, axiomatic symbolic idea that refusing to execute people shows the respect of a society for all human life, even of those who are just awful. But in both cases of symbolism, the object is empirical: whether to enhance the glory or value of either the state or the individual. 

Avoid the shorthand of referring to God or symbolism and so provide the practical chains of reasoning for policy decisions. A particularly complex chain of causation to ultimate ends or values means a longer one. These are political ones such as price supports and making castes into ethnic groups. These chains, however, do not follow the model of Euclid and Spinoza to assemble axioms, already proven theorems and lacunna so as to arrive at a very different and perhaps surprising result ending with “ergo something”. Instead, a moral absolute is challenged by a logical or empirical objection followed by an alternative moral absolute that is also answered with a logical or empirical response until all the moral absolutes are used up for that particular question. 

J. F. K. said that price supports for farmers were necessary because they had been promised to them and we should honor that promise. That seems pretty weak, begging the question of whether price supports were a good thing in the first place. A more candid answer to why to continue to honor price supports is because farm states have a disproportionate number of Senators and get the support to trade favors with other things that are important to industrial states. A more generalized and moral value for farm price supports can instead be offered. It is that farm families need it and the government should provide help to whatever constituency needs it, whether struggling farmers or inner city youth, even if some politicians support one or the other because of their own interests. That moral principle is too general because it would include financial and moral support for Nazis or criminals, and indeed there is political support for either one in that Trump thought Nazis in Charlottesville were among the good people there and that Liberals want criminals to get good conditions and rehabilitation. The more economic and practical issue underlying farm price supports is that agriculture is a different kind of business than manufacturing where you can cut back on production and so cut costs when there is less demand but that farms don’t save much money by decreasing production and so the question is if there is the demand for the ample opportunities farms produce. Farm subsidies and government bought food like butter ate up some of the farm crops and other products. But things changed in that the family farmer was replaced by the industrial or corporate farm and large amounts of farm products like soybeans were sent to overseas markets at least until Trump upset the applecart with his tariffs. So farm subsidies largely become obsolete, which is not a value but an empirical question, a matter of fact about the rural economic and institutional structure. 

The same practical issue of obsolescence holds with regard to slavery which was regarded by Southerners as a necessity and Northerners as an abomination even though, not for them, the reason to go to war. The absolute moral claim of whether all people are by their nature free and that to enslave others is to diminish oneself, is countered by William Graham Sumner, the turn into the twentieth century sociologist, who said that slavery was obsolete as a method for procuring workers because wage workers were more productive and less costly. The same goes for Jim Crow. Integrating the work force and other amenities to the South helped in the decades after the Second World War, along with air-conditioning and Northern investment, to make the South prosperous. So the moral sentiment for treating people as equal is not a moral absolute but the question of obsolescence, which is an empirical matter as well as an operative rather than idealized condition.

Here are two other social policy issues that seem to rely on the same absolute value: the taking of risk. The overt and initial reason for providing Social Security is that it provides income to the elderly and old people are no longer the worst income groups in America and so easing the elderly is a good thing because people should be nice to old people. The objection to that is that the provision of pensions to the elderly allows people not to provide for their own old age by saving money and investing in private insurance or investment instruments. Those who are self indulgent, like the grasshopper, aren’t able to last the terminal winter. But that again can appeal to the cruelty being inflicted on the old. Another objection to Social Security is that people of even moderate means will never make up in their benefits from the contributions they have made in withholding payroll income taxes, and so that is unfair to the better off workers, and the answer to that is that Social Security is not an annuity but a tax scheme whereby money is transferred from the people working to the people no longer working and can easily enough be funded despite the lower number of workers to people retired with minor tax adjustments such as lifting the cap on incomes to be taxed. 

Underlying these other reasons for and against Social Security is a very different issue. Social Security is a system where people do not have to take risks and risks are a good thing, part of a person being alive and an active member in life. So Social Security would be alright if people were allowed to invest their Social Security contributions into stock portfolios and so risk making either a profit or maybe a loss and so a participant based on their own judgment even though the conversion to such a system would require massive amounts of money and also require the government to list which stocks were eligible for investment lest citizens invest in very long term odds and lose their money and have to be supported by a supplementary Social Security fund for bad investors. But that would mean engaging in the unprecedented event of the government intruding in the stock market to decide which companies were winners and losers, either worthy or unworthy objects of investment. Those who support the insistence on everyone engaging in risk as a natural and praiseworthy enterprise for all people, a kind of right, are willing to accept the costs and the transformation of the American economy in a radical way in order to accomplish this end. Risk is the absolute value.

There is another kind of risk, a social rather than an economic risk, which seems to have come to prevail in American and Western society as the essential way to manage a practice. That is courtship. People in the old days and in the Old Countries had arranged marriages. That meant that potential spouses would be culled and even marriages enforced by parents or professional matchmakers who might have better judgment than young people about what couples might get along as well as fit their lifestyles. Never mind romance. People of good will will find it easier to become companionable with a chosen mate rather than one found otherwise. But people decided differently. The young men and women who came to America decided that Western liberty meant finding a spouse on your own though usually from their own neighborhoods or mixers where the people they met were likely to be compatible. They had romantic love  interests as the basis for settling down and even had serial love affairs, as it now turns out, before settling down. Yes, that creates considerable emotional wear and tear on people and leads to computer dating and other sketchy devices for identifying who is the One, but it is worth it because romance is the greatest risk people will have in their lives, remembering how the two hit it off at a bar or a mixer, and so everyone becoming a kind of hero and heroine in their own lives however pedestrian their occupation or other activities in life might be. You did it yourself. You risk-take for better or worse. And that is an end in itself to have that adventure, something no longer available only to knights on a pilgrimage or an explorer going into the wilderness, and so part of the pursuit of happiness available to all rather than just some elites. 

Given that both Social Security and courtship, very different things, are both rooted in risk, it might be thought that risk was a moral absolute but that would be incorrect because it leads to a deeper idea than absolute value. People can either decide to accept risk or reject it as a moral principle and there is no way to insist on taking risk or not taking risk though a different value, such as the obligation to answer a military draft can entail risk and is maybe morally mandatory without it being an absolute value but one of the many obligations that people take on by being a citizen or an employee or a spouse. Rather, risk is a preference, which means a voluntary choice akin to liking Chinese or Italian food or one of the range of breakfast cereals in the supermarket, these considered in a trivial sense to be matters of taste, which means of no significance. Only your spouse cares about whether you like asparagus.

But there are also matters of taste that are significant that they are deep expressions of character. A preference for Verdi melodramas paraded as tragedies rather than a Mozart rom-com is a test of what you sound as simpatico about life, just as is the case in preferring middle brow John Steinbeck to high brow Modernists like Mann or Joyce. It tells you who you are and adopting one or the other is also a matter of taste in the sense that Hume meant that taste was a sense of something deeper not deeply explored or what C. E. Moore meant when he said that morality was taste in that it was a sense of what is right or wrong in a particular matter without reference to some moral rule which necessarily does not spell out what might be or might become regarded as exceptions. So the heart of morality is  preferences and not rules, much less absolute values, which can exist singularly as a sense of justice rather than a code of justice. And there you have it: you have a taste for or a preference for a potential spouse or a politician and that tells a lot about you but that does not exhaust you and you can change your preferences and these still have the weightiness of moral decision making but are not moral absolutes, just possibly very bad judgments that other people or even yourself find disreputable or invoke mean thoughts rather than whatever other thoughts and feelings that a politician can evoke.

There is another meaning to “moral absolutism” other than the one discussed, that it is axiomatic, and it too can be dispensed with. This second and related meaning is that moral principles are not only true but are always applicable, the view that if that timelessness is abandoned for cultural relativism, it means that it is not truly a moral principle and is subject to the whims of cultural fashion, so that principles of “Thou shalt not kill” are acceptable in some cultures or times rather than in others. When in Rome do as the Romans do applies to togas or good manners (which I would argue are in fact long lasting rather than transitory, only the expression of good manners varying from time to time but the function of good manners is more or less permanent). The status of whether a moral is absolute is just a question of whether you look at the short run, such as that of a few millenia, or the very long run, in which case a moral principle changes only when the social structure changes so fundamentally as to be difficult to imagine when the absolute moral principle disappears. 

Consider “Thou shalt not steal” again. That makes sense for all societies that have existed so far (though some Marxists believe that caveman societies might have had a primitive communism where everyone worked together and distributed goods on a need to have basis.) It makes sense that people should not take grab of the holdings of another person, whether a meal or an item or a piece of land appropriated except by law, or even a woman, though the Ten Commandments speak of two other ways not to take women, neither to engage in adultery or even just to covet them. The ancient Hebrews must have been a lascivious people, just like everyone else. Think of stealing as becoming no longer meaningful if there is so much abundance created by technology that everyone can get free of charge everything they want, available online to your heart’s content, money an unnecessary transaction, even though there still might be records of transfers so as to keep the production and distribution line going. There would be no scarcity, which ends economics and theft as a meaningful idea. That is a very long way away and so we might think not stealing a universal and permanent rule for the game of organizing social life but still nevertheless theoretically terminal.

A less fanciful notion of a permanent moral principle that could in fact become suspended because it is no longer meaningful is “Thou shalt not kill” which would occur when there arrived what Kant called “perpetual peace” when a world organization made it no longer necessary to have wars and killing people for greed was unnecessary and killing women or men for lust or jealousy gave away to the pacific world of Diderot who thought that women in Polynesia might think they were kind to even ugly men. Even closer to the horizon are the abolition of penitentiaries as punishment just as penitentiaries replaced a very general death penalty when rehabilitation of criminal minds could be successful rather than serious crime to be the result of bad social conditions or a bad seed. A shorter time frame would be to eliminate the forbearance of those who suffer from illness if most illness was eliminated through vaccines and quick surgery of the sort imagined in “StarTrek” which is just half a millennium from now, which is not very far away. Then, people would not have to be patient with the pathetic because no one would be pathetic however much that aspect of human compassion may seem a bedrock of moral existence.and universally admired as a virtue. Absolute morality, therefore, is always for a relatively short time.

Another Short Post on Race

People say the United States is on the edge of a constitutional crisis when in fact the nation has gone over the edge and it is about race. Masked government agents detain and make disappear long established as well as “criminal” people on the basis of them looking Hispanic or speaking Spanish or around places where illegal aliens might be found. The Supreme Court has decided in early September that such apprehensions are justified because the detainees can be released if they are found not to be illegals. That violates both the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments which has for hundreds of years meant that people can be detained for probable cause of a particular crime rather than general suspicion or suggestive features. I don’t know why the American people are not up in arms about this authoritarian move but life seems pretty ordinary despite this insult to the Constitution but after all the Harris campaign did not make much headway with the American people in that democracy was on the line in this election and Democrats today are going back to inflation and economic issues as the basis of their challenge to the Trump administration rather than getting to the core issue of constitutionalism. What the Supreme Court now allows can be used to stop anyone of color or race or political affiliation to be stopped and detained for any suspicion, which means most people and that is an attack on the heart ofAmerica.

Trump’s racist impulses are overt and of longstanding, back to the days when his father discriminated against Blacks in his housing developments and the federal government went after that for that. He came down the escalator to announce his candidacy for the Presidency in 2015 by excoriating Hispanics for having calves like cantaloupes because they were carrying drugs with them over the border. Trump has said that Norwegians can come to America but not Arabs or people from “Shithole” nations. He said Haitian legal immigrants were literally eating cats and dogs inSpringfield, Ohio. He treats inner cities as pestholes rather than struggling populations of the sort of areas from which white ethnics emerged. He doesn’t hate all minorities. He is more supportive of Israel than any prior President and gave the Jews the backhanded compliment when Trump was running casinos that he wanted his accountants to be wearing yamulkas, but all things considered he is the most racist President since Woodrow Wilson, who expelled Black workers from the federal civil service and does worse than Wilson in trying, as abetted by Governor Abbott of Texas and others to eliminate voting rights protections or gerrymander out minority districts. 

People are blase about the present situation and it traces back to the unwillingness of Democrats to ask Republicans again and again whether they supported Trump fomenting the insurrection on Jan. 6th, 2021. Unmasking his racism would be a worthy companion piece. Don’t be civil so as to bring down the heat when the other side undermines American principles. As the Senate hearing yesterday with Pam Bondi showed, the two sides have only contempt for one another. I don’t know how it will end.

A Short Post on the Shutdown

The shutdown is a constitutional way to  confront Trump’s unconstitutional and just very bad policies and statements.

I think I am insufficiently knowledgeable about the inside baseball of politics to know what is going on behind the shutdown, however much the significance of the shutdown is clear and everyone decides whether or not to support it. Four months ago, Chuck Schumer and some of his Democratic Senators went  over to vote with the Republicans to support a continuing resolution so as not to shut down the government on the grounds that Trump would use a shutdown to fire a lot more federal workers more easily than otherwise and his Progressive allies thought that a bad idea but this time Schumer is standing up to Trump and Trump is threatening publicly to do in a few days just what Schumer said would happen. What changed? Maybe Schumer decided that the Medicare and the Affordable Care Act cuts were so serious that he had to take a stand regardless of the consequences. Or maybe the Progressives pressed Schumer on the issue and he gave in. The Progressives think there has to be more confrontation with Trump and not wait it out until the midterm election which Schmer prefers because the Constitution might be in a shambles to wait that long and I tend to agree that Democrats should resist Trump in every way possible that is legal. Moreover, the polls, according to a thousand member focus group by the Washington Post, support the Democrats, with twice as many blaming the Republicans as the cause of the shutdown, which is what happened as well in past shutdowns.  So Schumer is reading public opinion rather than the Progressives on how to play this rather than to accommodate to keep Trump from being even worse. So the Democrats are getting a shutdown on their own issue rather than a Republican issue but the Democrats will gain politically. 

Within a few days of the shutdown, the tone of Democratic support of the shutdown has shifted. Though minority leader Jeffries still insists itis about sustaining medicare and obamacare , others, including Sen. Adam Schiff, have enlarged the confrontation. The President has refused to pay for programs already authorized. He has fired people illegally. He is punishing only democratic cities and states from getting funds for infrastructure. He says Portland is in flames, which it is not, just like saying Springfield, Ohio legal Haitians were eating cats and dogs. He tells the military to wage wat on Democratic cities and regards Democrats as full of hatred, evil and Satanic, when I think only the first two applies to Republicans for cutting off nutrition to malnourished African children even though ngos would take the supplies and distribute the aid before they expired but the State Department refused and no Republican protested. There is nothing to compromise. Jeffries should take up a sombrero and a moustache along with all the other House Democrats as a badge of honor and so to make fun of the President. I don’t want the shutdown to end before the President and the Vice President, who abets the President with his lies and misrepresentations, to resign. It is going to be a long shutdown.

The virtues of politics as an object of contemplation of what it is as a thing and as a participant is that it is clear and easy rather than secretive. It is not a Manoichien world where opposing elites battle above the fray of the common man as Whittaker Chambers thought was the case because he thought the final war wou;ld be between the Communists and the ex=-Communists. To the contrary, the confrontation took place in full view during tbhe Cold War and everyone was aware of it and took sides on whether the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Vietnam was a good thing and it ended with the Reagan=-Gorbachev meeting in Iceland, though I suspect that not all of the Reykjavik Accords have all been disclosed these thirty five years later. Nor is domestic confrontation like it is in the recent very well done but fanciful movie “One Battle After the Other” where an oligarchic cabal represents white people in a war against Mexicans who are armed with secret codes and secret confederates everywhere. The oligarchs are in fact just out there buying Supreme Court Justices and giving gigantic campaign donations as are their opponents and legislation results unless taxes for the rich when the oligarchs win and gigantic campaign donations are offered to the opposition, not that the contributions don’t cancel one another off because what matters is whether the nominee is personable or not. So politics is clear in that what you need to know about it is apparent. Politics is also easy in that you need no expertise to participate not needing to know the expertise required to run a supermarket or a hardware store but relying on whatever information or rumors a voter comes across and apply whatever common sense, as it is called, or ideological framework it has to inform itself. Politics is not in the stars but in peoples selves. So an educated person can decide to rid their hands of the matter, deciding that religion or cultivating one’s garden is the way to live, but I prefer this sport and form of co;;ective interaction as a way to understand something always engaging, a never ending soap opera with new faces and struggles and carrying great moment for how a collectivity will proceed and worthy because it is not opaque but transparent. Politics in our time can muddy or cleanse and see it happen, and that will occur with the shutdown.

Charlie Kirk's Decorum

I liked Charlie Kirk when I saw his YouTube videos of his format that any topic is up for discussion at meetings with college students, at one of which he was assassinated Wednesday. I liked when he took up Feminists who couldn’t say what a woman was and he took up Hamas supporters who were very ill informed. I didn’t agree with him when he was out of his depth and didn’t see the difference between Soviet Communism and Socialism. Maybe he should have finished his undergraduate education. An autodidact will have a lot of holes in his education. But many educated people also think they know more than they do, including me.

What I liked best about him was the manner and content of his discussion with students. He was pointed, humorous and, most important, never tried to demean his interlocators, only to make a shambles of their intellectual positions. He was respectful, just the way a debater is supposed to be, which is not what political advocates and especially politicians do not do. 

There were two immediate standard responses on the news of his death. David Axelrod said that both sides should draw back and consider carefully their remarks so that people recognize that they are human beings rather than just partisan advocates. Elizabeth Warren provided a different take. She said that Trump should be blamed for having fomented violence, and there is some truth in that in that Trump is notorious for villainizing and personalizing his opponents ever since he appeared in 2016 presidential debates and talked about sleepy Jeb and little Marco. So the Republicans are more the offenders to decorum in politics rather than equal offenders with Democrats. I remember when Jesse Jackson during a Presidential Primary Debate in 1984 confronted Phil Donahue, a talk show host trying to play moderator, who was being sarcastic. Jackson  said all of these candidates deserved respect. It was a grandstand gesture to answer a grandstand attack but still deserves notice as the honorable custom for how people for high office should be treated.

 Oh yes. There was the trucker who said  on the evening of te assassination, “This is war”, disregarding or even not knowing that two Democratic Minnesota state senators had been shot in their home a few months ago. If this is war, like the movie “Civil War”, then you are entitled to kill the President or a trucker, and we haven’t come to that. In fact, the anti-Trump people have showed remarkable forebearance. They have not accused the newscast Trumpites of being in the league of insurrectionists, as all supporters of Trump were, as there is plenty of evidence of that from the Jan. 6th investigation and the tape ofTrump trying to fix the vote in Georgia. Trump nor his allies have ever offered an explanation of those matters and the rest of us have let go because the judicial system was too slow to bring Trump to court..

Cable news commentators on MSNBC are also violative of political decorum. They go after the persons rather than their positions. Lawrence O’Donnell showed the video of hair dye streaking down Rudolph Guiliani’s cheeks so as to defame him. MSNBC shows Trump to be having intestinal difficulties, the back of his pants stained. More undignified for the ones who present these facts than the ones in physical distress. Remember that photographers did not take pictures of FDR in a wheelchair though later on when addressing Congress about the Yalta meeting he said he would have to sit because carrying around a lot of iron was tiring. We had come a long way to when the Miami Herald broke the story of Gary Hart dallying with Donna Rice in 1988, dooming his Presidential nomination or Ken Starr trying to doom Clinton’s Presidency because of Clinton’s liaison, hardly an affair, with Monica Lewinsky. Nor do I care about connecting Trump to Jeffrey Epstein. There are bigger fish to fry, such as cancelling USAID so that food packets for malnourished children in Africa will not be distributed to them.

So we lost in Charlie Kirk a model of decorum even if his President, his principal, does not exemplify that.

Sleazy and Serious Politics

The Jeffrey Epstein case shows the differences in the Democratic and Republican parties.

When I taught introductory sociology and courses on social problems, and when AIDS was introduced to the world and all we knew at the time were the demographics of the disease, I would discuss with my students the inferences to be drawn from it so as to show how such inferences were made and keep my students up on current events. Haitian men seemed prevalent and were only later revealed to be homosexual because homosexuality was so frowned upon by the Haitian community. It was known, however, that children did not catch AIDS from the others in the family who shared utensils and a common living space, and so the disease was not transmitted by air or touching surfaces. When AIDS was discovered to be a STD, I would discuss what kinds of unions, what form of copulation, might lead to an infection and I did not feel queasy about discussing these matters with my mixed sex undergraduates because this was, after all, a biological matter, no different from discussing Malthus, who said that population increased more quickly than agricultural productivity. 

On the other hand, I did feel embarrassed discussing, some years later,  the stained blue dress Monica Lewinsky kept without cleaning it as evidence of her liaison with Bill Clinton which she revealed to Linda Tripp who told Roger Starr and that got rolling the Clinton impeachment. But I did talk about it, as well, such as concerning Clinton’s insistence that he had not had “sex” with her because he used that term only when there was mutual satisfaction. It was all so sordid and not befitting people of high political stature, just as it was unappealing to learn about Gary Hart’s dalliance with Donna Rice, which destroyed his presidential campaign, and the romantic entanglements of FDR, which were hidden, or the unfaithfulness of Martin Luther King, Jr., where J. Edgar Hoover tried to drive King into suicide but to no avail.

And now the nation is confronted with the Jeffrey Epstein case and whether Trump was entangled with that and I also find the whole matter sleezy, not a proper topic of discussion in high politics because it demeans everyone touched by it including the female journalists cloaked with their own respectability but hardened to deal with unpleasant things because of their duties, like policemen or female lawyers. ButI do not want to hear about such things because however unfortunate are the victims, and that criminal penalties should be assigned, these are not matters of state, issues that turn the nation in one direction or another, such as international relations or tax and welfare policy, which impact vast numbers in the popu;ace. Both Republicans and Democrats violate their vows and people have done so through history, and we make progress for the nation by improving, in general, the condition of women so that none of them need to be exploited. Why care so much about sexual malfeasance in high places?

Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan is my current pin up girl because she wants to take the high road when Democrats confront Republicans. She thinks Democrats can win if they recapture the economic issues; I hope a generation from now she can run for President. She is a centrist Democrat who appeals to Republicans as well. But I think she is mistaken about the electorate. The economy was doing pretty well. Wages were up and inflation was low even if it did not result in de-inflation to make up for the inflation of the Covid years. That was not the engine for Trump. It was immigration and the deep state and Republicans and what are called low information voters who adopted those issues even though they told opinion polls that economics were the reason for supporting Trump because that was a more respectable reason to offer. They liked the disagreeable man because he was disagreeable: crude and angry. They wanted a strong man, cynical that leaders could be noble and considered, like Henry Fonda when he played a President. It is hardly comforting that recent polls show that immigration and decimating the bureaucracy are no longer in favor once Trump started doing what he promised to do. They voted for him and there are no reruns for elections, just the next one, but I am not sure Republicans will change their hearts now thatTrump is no longer on the ballot.

Republicans win by doing Republican things and Democrats win when they do Democratic things. Republicans since the end of the Second World War have been plagued by conspiracy theories and more establishment Republicans have had to deal with that. Joseph McCarthy insisted on numerous Communists in government agencies but always changed the figures of how many and shuffled his papers at a press conference so asto indicate information he never provided, just as MAGA people insist there is a great conspiracy of pedofile bureaucrats without providing information, as if they had lost the ability to distinguish speculation about terrible things with evidence. But while McCarthy was talking about something that was real, the Communist movement in the United States, which was in fact trivial and honeycombed with FBI agents, the MAGA people are so intellectually impoverished that they cannot think of any greater threat than a pedophile ring to assign as what is rotting America. They might have focussed instead on the diabolical nature,. let us say, of Hollywood and Broadway. MAGA does vie with elite universities as having subverted America, insisting on more representation for Conservative professors and students, without considering that the brightest prefer to abjure Conservatism because MAGAs insist that politics is a faith that need not be explained, just extolled. Moreover, moderate Republicans also engage in an upward climb against what George W. H. Bush considered “voodoo economics”, the height of which are current MAGAs voting for the biggest deficit in relation to GDP since the Second World War.

The Democratic Party, for its part, has been ever since FDR on a long march to expanded entitlements. Obama was in line with that in thinking he had accomplished only one big accomplishment in that direction, the Affordable Care Act, and no more than such an increment could be expected in any one Administration. Sen. Slotkin is in line with other Democrats in saying it is always the economy, stupid. But that is not the truth. Civil liberties, immigration and the Constitution were on the ballot in 2020 and it was right for Harris to pit democracy versus authoritarianism. The fault was not in the message but in the voting public which failed to understand the key issues to be what they were.

Moreover, to our surprise, Trump in his Big Beautiful Bill is out to overcome incrementalism in the other direction by expelling millions and millions of immigrants, thrashing the bureaucracy, and violating civil and criminal law. Trump may be ignorant but he is still audacious. Why can't he make Canada the fifty-first state? Some Republicans these days who are outspoken Christians condemn the assaults on women by Epstein and his ilk, are nevertheless willing to accept allowing foodstuffs to be destroyed rather than sent to malnourished  children. They are hypocrites. They forget the coals in their own eyes. Jesus must weep.

The Jeffrey Epstein case will pass. Despite the Democrats thinking otherwise, the MAGAs will not eat their own. Today, July 22nd, Speaker Johnson closed Congress by going into summer recess so as to avoid a bill to open the Epstein files and the suits to open the files will be bogged down in technicalities, as has happened with past attempts to make Trump responsible for his actions. Just as well. I don’t want the public to make decisions on the basis of sleaze.. Let us get on with more serious politics.