Our Unhealthy Fascination With Hypocrisy

For the last week, I have read through every political post or link I have come across on social media. That admittedly masochistic project was motivated by a desire to get into other peoples' heads by looking at the arguments they make or endorse, in particular the form of the argument. The ways in which we make claims or argue with one another says a great deal about what we think of one another, and I wanted to get a sense of that directly from regular people saying what they think, instead of reading about attitudes in a news story or a poll.

I was struck, from beginning to end, by how determined we all are to show that our opponents are hypocrites. This form of argumentation has been elevated to an art form by the president, who responds to every revelation of his own inadequacy by hurling the accusation back at the revelator, but he did not invent it. It has always been a cheap ploy in all kinds of argumentation and it knows no ideological boundary. What was surprising to me was exactly how pervasive it has become.

What's wrong with that kind of argument is that it doesn't address the issue. If someone disagrees with me on some public policy issue, and I respond by pointing out some time in the past when they supported a similar policy to mine, or some vaguely analogous issue in which they followed a different principle, or point out some ideological inconsistency of theirs, what I am certainly not proving is that they are wrong on the issue. What I am doing instead is ignoring their argument by claiming that I needn't acknowledge them as an advocate for their position.

In effect, when I call my opponent hypocritical, I am saying that they are either too foolish to have thought the issue through or too cynical to care about the underlying principle. In either case, I'm saying that they are wrong because of their characteristics as an individual, and not because of flaws in their argument on the issue at hand. It is a textbook ad hominem fallacy.

While those negative imputations may be true of many in public office and relevant to discussions of their desirability as representatives, they do not have a place in a reasonable discussion of serious social problems between adults.

It's too easy to simply say that someone who thinks differently than I do is shortsighted, shameless, and impervious to reason. Certainly there are a number of individuals who are any or all of those things, but when we start using the existence of disagreement as a suitable criterion for applying those labels, then we have crippled our ability to communicate with one another. The result is what we currently have - a feedback loop in which increasing polarization leads to increasingly harsh and uncompromising propaganda, which leads back to increasing polarization and on it goes.

I am deeply troubled by the way in which we reduce individuals entirely to their politics. What's more, the longer that goes on the more likely it is to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat people as enemies they are likely to become enemies. It does very real damage that is not easily reversed.

On my way to closing, I would like to point out that these observations are not an exercise in tone policing. Some truths are harsh, and many harsh truths are relevant to discussions of public policy, not least as they relate to race, foreign policy, and the federal budget. That being said, how we engage with other people matters and how we think about other people matters. If we start to erode those boundaries, our political divides will continue to widen.

Philando Castile and America's Mid-Life Crisis

On Friday, a jury in Minnesota acquitted Jeronimo Yanez, until recently a police officer, of manslaughter in the shooting death of Philando Castile. The details of the case may be found here, but in summary Mr Castile was shot seven times while reaching for his driver's license, as ordered by Mr Yanez, after having informed the officer in good faith that he had a legally registered firearm in the vehicle. Mr Yanez responded to that information inappropriately and created a confused, ambiguous situation in which he panicked.

Stories like this are commonplace. John Crawford III, Michael Brown,  Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner among many others have died in police interactions under circumstances ranging from fishy to egregious. In none of their cases was an officer held responsible in any legal way for their deaths.

It has been said frequently on the right that events like these are seized by the opportunistic to inflame racial tensions. The truth is that not only the events but the controversies surrounding them are symptomatic of a racial divide in our country that has existed from the beginning. The fact of the matter is that the high ideals of the country that declared in its founding document that "all men are created equal" have been paired with a social system that has been consistently and explicitly white supremacist.

The fact that the previous statement is still a matter of contention in public debate is a staggering indictment of our collective understanding. The ugliest moments in our national history all have been openly motivated by a sense of white racial superiority, from slavery to the systematic deception and destruction of Native Americans, to Jim Crow, to exploitation of Chinese laborers, to brutal repression in the Philippines, to Japanese internment and beyond. It continues today with the backlash to the civil rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. Not only that, but the moments of greatest internal division and conflict have been precisely those moments at which some important aspect of white power has been directly challenged. The Civil War and Civil Rights Movement stand as obvious examples, but it should unnerve us more than it does that the most efficient predictors of how someone voted in 2016 are negative attitudes toward racial and religious minorities.

Call it America's mid-life crisis. After 241 years, America has realized it isn't the country it always thought it would be. The conflict between our principles and our practice has at times become uncomfortably open, but we have always found it easier to address the symptoms than the disease. That is no longer a plausible way out. Current demographic trends indicate that within 25 or so years white people will no longer be a majority of the US population. America can be a democracy, or it can be a country ruled primarily by and for white people. It cannot long remain both.

It must be said that those who are representatives of the interests of primarily white populations recognize the situation. There is scarcely any other possible explanation for Voter ID laws that are written explicitly to be restrictive against the minority vote, or lobbying for intense restrictions on legal immigration in spite of explicit evidence that current immigrant communities are assimilating just as quickly as their predecessors. While I doubt that those who champion these policies are in general quite so nefarious or direct - though there are a number who are - one can hardly fail to notice that their collective effect is to politically empower white communities at the expense of others. The mind will always find a palatable justification for the convenient conclusion, but that does not make the policies themselves any less brazen.

Thus, like the person dealing with a proverbial mid-life crisis, America has a choice to make. We could acknowledge that we aren't who we thought we were, accept that, and make the changes we would like to make going forward. On the other hand, we could also stubbornly cling to a notion of ourselves that bears no resemblance to reality and make ourselves more ridiculous than we already are. Historically at its best moments America has found a way to face up to a distressing truth and embrace the difficult work of improving the world. At its worst, it has hidden behind comfortable delusions and refused to address festering problems.

One of the most enduring legacies of Barack Obama's presidency will have been the inspiration and empowerment of an entire generation of black activists, who saw a black man in the presidency and realized that the world they and their children deserve is possible. I am not qualified to pronounce on this directly, but I believe it is a safe statement to make that the patience of nonwhite communities is finite. The longer that White America shoves its head in the sand, the more difficult it will be to have the interracial dialogues that need to be had for progress to be made without significant violence. We, and by we I mean white people, need to start listening to what people of color are saying and take it seriously before we stop talking to one another at all.

Thoughts on Comey's Public Testimony

On Thursday, former FBI director James Comey gave testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding his relationship with President Trump. The substance of his testimony is, in the essentials, as follows.

• Comey met with Trump alone on three occasions. Once on Jan 6 at Trump Tower to brief the then President-elect on the contents of the salacious Steele dossier, once after he was invited to a private dinner on Jan 27, and once alone in the Oval Office on Feb 14. 

• Comey said that he felt uncomfortable on all three occasions, and openly admitted that he kept records of his conversations with Trump in significant part because he was concerned that Trump might lie publicly about them.

• At the Jan 27 dinner, Trump repeatedly brought up Comey's job status, in spite of previously having assured him he would be retained. Trump noted, unprompted, that a large number of people wanted Comey's job. In that context, he repeatedly asked Comey for loyalty. Comey says - and it is very difficult to avoid this impression - that he felt Trump was seeking to establish "some sort of patronage relationship" by linking his job security to a perception of personal loyalty.

• At the Feb 14 meeting in the Oval Office, Trump directed his personal consigliere Jared Kushner and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was then Comey's direct superior, to leave him alone with Comey. He then brought up the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, in particular the connections between Russian agents and Michael Flynn. It will be remembered that Flynn had been fired from his post as National Security Adviser the day before, after it came out that he mislead the Vice President among others about the nature of his contacts with Russians. Trump pointedly told Comey "I hope you can see your way clear to letting [Flynn] go."

• After Comey's firing, and upon observing the broad based campaign by the administration to belittle him publicly, he asked a close friend to pass the contents of some of his memos along to the press, in the hopes that a special prosecutor would be appointed to investigate them. That is, of course, precisely what happened. 

His testimony is compelling for multiple reasons. First is that the level of openness he displayed throughout the testimony about his own feelings and motivations, as well as his care not to overstate his case or leave out any detail of even minor significance, forcefully gives the impression of someone who is telling the truth. Second, Comey's own impressive track record with regard to resisting improper executive action is well documented and gives him personally a credibility on this issue few others can match. Third, Comey's account of Trump's behavior is so very consistent with what is already known about the president and his memorized quotes so closely track Trump's speech and mannerisms that it is hard to believe that the president never said them.

The picture painted by his testimony is one of a president purposefully attempting to cultivate the head of federal law enforcement as a lackey. Not only that, but after dismissing a room full of advisors including Comey's own direct superior to leave Comey alone in the Oval Office with the President of the United States, Trump pointedly told Comey that he hoped he would "let go" of an active criminal investigation into one of the president's recent subordinates.

While many have focused on Trump's precise use of the word "hope" in an attempt to paint the conversation as an innocuous expression of concern for Flynn that the investigation wouldn't find anything on him, it is very clear to me what the most powerful person in the country means when he clears the room and tells you he "hopes" that an investigation will go away. One might as easily argue that when Don Corleone pledged to make Jack Woltz an offer he couldn't refuse, he only meant to present the film producer with an extremely generous deal.

Honestly, and with full acknowledgement that I may well be mistaken in this, I doubt whether any serious consequences for Trump outside of political unpopularity and gridlock will emerge from this testimony. The Republicans on the committee made it clear that they would go out of their way to defend the president's actions as innocuous or the result of a naive neophyte who doesn't know any better. This is consistent with their behavior for a year now, as they have excused Trump's many damning statements and actions because they know that he is their only real hope for undoing the Obama years. If the expectation that the president will respect established alliances, or the longstanding standards of decorum in presidential conduct toward other public figures, or the political independence of the FBI has to take a hit for that to happen, so be it.

That being said, we should all recognize and acknowledge openly what is happening. The standards of conduct expected of the executive branch that involve restraints on the political exercise of executive power are being slowly eroded. Whether that erosion ultimately redounds to the benefit of a president of the left or right is immaterial, because in the long run arbitrary power will not benefit any significant number of people beyond those who wield it. This is something that needs to be stopped, and it is a moment for us to rise however temporarily above the day to day ideological warfare that has consumed us. It is a melancholy reflection on our society that we seem unable to do that, at least for now.

How Nickelback Explains Congress

It is one of the supreme political ironies of our time that an enormously unhappy electorate continues to return our representatives to office at historically high rates. Consider for a moment this extraordinary statistic - that the people who told public pollsters near election day that the country was on the wrong track by a 2-1 margin reelected more than 90% of their congressional representatives. So what gives? How is it possible for people who hate what their government does to continue returning the same government?

The emotional intensity of political issues makes it difficult to treat that question in an unbiased way. So, let's consider the analogous case of that Canadian rock band so many of us love to hate, Nickelback.

To state the obvious, Nickeback makes bad music. Their lyrics are an endless loop of drugs, meaningless sex, and borderline alcoholism that anyone who has seen Behind the Music already knows is more fun in songs than in real life. They recycle guitar riffs and song hooks more than every hair metal band put together. Many people boast that they are young at heart, but few would make Chad Kroeger's mistake in maintaining both the mentality and technical skill level of a 14 year old. Nickelback are geniunely, objectively bad at making music.

On the other side of that coin, they are also exceedingly rich. From 2000-2010 they were the 11th best selling musical act in the United States and trailed only the Beatles as foreign artists. Why, if they are most famous for making bad music, do they sell so very many records? The anwer is that they know their audience very well. The person who listens to Nickelback may be listening to same riff he's been listening to since Kurt Cobain was still alive, but thats the riff he wants to be listening to. Nickelback are rich becuse they don't pretend to make good music. They make the music they know a lot of people who don't care about the artistic novelty of their rock will buy.

That parable relates to Congress via the widely known phenomenon imaginatively called "Gerrymandering." For those unfamiliar with the term, it comes from the constitutional responsibility of state governments to draw the lines that define congressional districts after each census. Parties that control state governments regularly manipulate those lines to maximize the representation of their party in the national government, at the cost of preposterous geographical and cultural combinations. As the capacity for data analysis has increased with advances in computing technology, the ability to reliably construct "safe" districts has increased. In this way, politicians are permitted to pick their audience before the performance even begins.

This is where the analogy comes into its own. At this point, the incentive for the politician is to tell the constitutents they have chosen precisely what those constituents want to hear. What the people of any relatively small locality want to hear is likely to give rise to bad policy. How is one supposed to tell coal country that mitigating the worst effects of climate change requires them to change industries? Or an unemployed former factory worker in Ohio that her job is forfeit because more jobs are being created in Texas? Actual leadership and real risk is involved in tackling these subjects in an intellectually honest way with communities that are hurt by them.

Is it likely that a politician who has just been the beneficiary of a giftwrapped congressional district - and thereby very prestigious and rewarding employment more or less in perpetuity - will be willing to risk that gift by courting political controversy? I would suggest not. In other words, the incentive is to be like Nickelback, making creatively bankrupt music because you know a lot of people will still listen. Except in this case instead of two decades' worth of eye-roll-inducing radio hits, we get a government that refuses to even attempt solving difficult, long term problems.

Because our current situation handsomely rewards political short-sightedness, it is hardly astonishing that our leaders suffer from such an appalling lack of vision. Unfortunately, as is noted in the Book of Proverbs, where there is no vision the people perish. If we want better leaders, we need to alter the problematic aspects of how they are chosen. Certainly this process goes well beyond Gerrymandering, but I am of the opinion that it is the most significant obstacle to proper democracy in modern America, along with repressive voter ID schemes. If we are serious about changing the results we get, we need to seriously reform the process by which we get them.