Protest Politics: Part 2

This is not meant to be a retraction, but perhaps an amendment to, my earlier post on the cancellation of a Donald Trump rally in Chicago (original post here). Additional information, and additional time, have caused my viewpoint on the matter to evolve a bit, and conversations with others have let me know that on certain points I have either not communicated my position well, or have simply been wrong and had to reconsider.

A big motivation for this further response is the arguments being made on the left like this one, suggesting that liberals who have any criticism of the protesters and the events in Chicago are traitors. While I disagree with some of the characterizations made, or take issue with certain conclusions drawn, on the whole I find this line of reasoning to really resonate with me, and can certainly be sympathetic to the emotion behind it.

Before continuing, full disclosure: I am a straight white American male. Except for 'born rich' I have checked all of the privilege boxes, and if you think that it means that I should avoid participating in this conversation, or that my opinion should carry less weight, I can't fault you for that. I have never known explicit or systemic discrimination, I have never had to speak with a subaltern voice, and I do not daily confront the legacy of any particular oppression. I try to be aware of, and adjust for, the native entitlement that naturally comes from a position of privilege, but there it is. I certainly recognize that what people say is affected by who they are, and how that changes the impact of my words.

There is no doubt that some of my natural inclination to be overly zealous in defending free speech comes from the fact that I get to take my own for granted.

A part of me thinks that maybe there should be a way to silence Donald Trump, and that the country would be a better place without his hateful, divisive rhetoric. In fact, I'm fairly sure about the latter, if not the former. I think that there probably are a number of ways to limit the spread of his ideas, or at least to stop making it so easy for him to reach a mass audience, if we can't prevent him from speaking them in the first place. I think that the freedom to assemble and speak for the protesters is just as important as it is for the supporters of Mr. Trump, and I think that it's a good thing that so many people turned out in Chicago to show those supporters just how unwelcome Trump's views are to broad swaths of the citizenry that they otherwise don't interact with.

Let's be clear about a few things though: Donald Trump is NOT a threat to this country because he represents a potential reality in which he becomes president and abruptly installs a fascist dictatorship. There is literally no mechanism by which he could do that in our current system of government (hell, given the current political environment, it would be a surprise if he could get a lunch order through the legislature), and more importantly, he has not espoused a lot of views that suggest he would even want to. He IS a threat primarily because he has contributed to an environment where explicitly or implicitly racist and xenophobic viewpoints are considered to be part of the mainstream political discourse, rather than something to be ashamed of and kept to one's self.

I think that this is an area where those of us on the left have done everyone, including ourselves, a disservice in our use of language. Calling Trump and his supporters fascists is either intellectually lazy, or deliberate hyperbole to inflame people, and neither one is a good thing when it comes to actually solving problems. Can't we just call him a racist, and a stupid clown who has terrible ideas? This isn't post-WW1 Italy or Germany, and comparisons to Hitler just don't stand up to scrutiny. Trump is his own brand of terrible, but thankfully, he isn't going to be invading Canada or building gas chambers. Again, I don't think that there is any value in the man or his message, but let's not pretend that his narcissism and ignorance make him a mass murderer.

Additionally, as far as the 'he doesn't need/deserve the right to a platform because he already gets too much attention from the media' argument goes, it's either stupid or hypocritical. First of all, pick an argument and stick to it, don't just pull in whatever comes to mind. Media savvy and/or previous media coverage as a prerequisite measuring stick for freedom of speech is a non-starter, and well beside the point. Saying 'we already know what he stands for' is not a reason that he shouldn't have the ability to a.) repeat that message, or b.) change his message, as has already happened in this campaign cycle.

More importantly however, we need to be realistic and acknowledge the fact that every time the protests get so virulent as to disrupt an event (like Chicago, or the guy who rushed the stage in Ohio), it increases the attention given to Trump. I would have no idea that he was even doing these events if it weren't for the protesters, so it doesn't make sense to blame the media for giving him all this attention when you are turning an otherwise non-newsworthy gathering of local bigots into a lead story. If Trump is a fire that threatens this country, attention is his oxygen. Protesters who make themselves into a news event are pouring gas on that fire, when we should be smothering it, with either silence or shame, but realize that you are not doing anything to hurt him by getting him more publicity.

I think that's a big part of what this keeps coming back to for me, the idea that Trump and the counter-Trump protesters are both expressions of anger, but that the form that the expression of that anger takes makes a difference. It might be cathartic, or even empowering to try and shut down the Trump machine through violent protest, and I can see how that kind of power can feel really good to people who have had to struggle a great deal. But don't conflate it with an effective means of defeating the ideology Trump and his followers. I've dealt with assholes, and I've wanted to punch them in their dumb faces, and a very few times in my life, I've taken the opportunity to do it. It feels great (unless it's followed by them punching me in my dumb face), but that doesn't mean that it was the right thing to do, or that it did anything long-term to modify my opponent's behavior.

...But maybe it did? If all of the above seems like criticism that is overly harsh, I can see the flip side of this, as well. If the problem is that Trump's campaign has normalized harmful speech by legitimizing it as reasoned political discourse, then a potential remedy is to shame the people that show up to listen to it. I think that's a positive outcome of a scene like the one in Chicago, in that it forced a bunch of (likely) suburban white people to confront just how upset Trump's rhetoric makes a big chunk of the American public. It's important to remind these people that whatever the source of their frustrations are, in 21st century America bigotry is something that should not and will not be acceptable in any kind of social setting. This is exactly the point of this type of protest and demonstration, even if it could have achieved that goal without becoming violent (though I can accept the argument that it wouldn't have gotten covered otherwise, the old 'Trump paradox').

It also seems like the ugliness of the eventual outcome in Chicago has helped prod the media to start condemning Trump's complicity in the violence a bit more, which is only a good thing. Obviously, the Marco Rubio video that has been spreading over the last 24 hours, in which he goes on at length to be critical of Trump and what it says about the electorate and the democratic process in this country, exemplifies that people are starting to take off the kid gloves that, for whatever reason, they have seemed to treat Trump with to this point. I agree with the people calling Trump a coward for not showing up to an event due to protests, but I wish that it was a viewpoint that had gained more traction for a candidate billing himself as a tough guy.

Maybe all of this will also bring about a discussion on whether or not the idea of unfettered free speech is still something that we choose to value as a society. It's possible that, just as we decided that yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater is not protected, or direct plausible threats against another individual's person, we will now decide that we need to be a little broader in our definitions of what constitutes public safety concern.

Donald Trump is definitely a monster, and his message should be defeated by (almost) any means necessary, but there is room for disagreement, even within the ranks of the left, on how to go about doing that. Certainly he and those who would attend his events should be forced to confront, in no uncertain terms, how hurtful and inappropriate their views are to the rest of the country. But make no mistake, such views are disappearing in this country despite Trump's best efforts, and nothing he can do will change that. If those of us who oppose him and his ilk allow ourselves to be internally divided over how best to defeat his message, we will have opened the only possible door to giving him actual power.

Have Some Respect for Your Founding Fathers

One thing that really irks me in the debates that fill the public discourse, is the way that people say, "Obviously our founding fathers couldn't have foreseen [insert some eventuality], when framing the Constitution." [Note: I'm also going to include the Bill of Rights in this umbrella term from now on] This is followed by that person using it to justify his or her position in the debate. Now, the first thing that I should say is that I also hate when people use this rhetorical/logical device in support of positions that I myself back.

Allow me to make an example. "The founding fathers can't possibly have foreseen the kind of weapons that we have in society today, so the second amendment can't be taken as a literal statement, applicable in our time."

Now, without going into details that are off-topic, I generally agree that some additional gun control would be good for America, but I have also been a hunter and shooter for most of my life. Despite that, I can't support any attempts to dismiss, off-hand, the decisions made during the formative years of this country based on the clairvoyance of our predecessors.

For one thing, making that argument is somewhat self-defeating. If you are saying that people can't possibly imagine the legislative needs of a future version of their own society, then why are you supporting a particular approach? Doesn't that mean that your efforts are doomed to let down your great-great grandchildren, constraining them to a set of options ill-suited to the problems they face?

Now, that response is as spurious as the argument it refutes. I didn't spend much time on that back-and-forth, because it doesn't seem to bear much effort in my mind, due to the mechanical inconsistency involved (if you disagree, please comment, I would be very happy to see another point of view). As such, I'm going to get to what I think is the central issue, which has more to do with a basic misconception.

I think that what bothers me most is what could be considered an amalgam of two common cognitive biases; recency and confirmation. We want to believe that we are the smartest, most well-informed people ever, and so we gravitate towards evidence that supports that notion. We are also most familiar with our contemporary situation, which puts evidence in support of our modern sensibilities at our finger tips at all times.

...And that's fine. It isn't new; our grandparents suffered from those biases, and so did the framers of the Constitution. You know what else we have in common with them? The ability to consider a large data set, identify patterns, and extrapolate possible futures. We don't have a monopoly on that kind of thinking. We didn't invent it, we inherited it.

By the time the Constitution was being written, humans had investigated cause and effect pretty thoroughly, and utilized geometry and calculus (which they had already invented) to describe and predict the movement of heavenly bodies with a high degree of precision. The ability of humans to evaluate a situation taking into account nuance and subtlety was well established long before the United States came into being (a process which also took place over about hundreds of years, not in a moment).

It's not even a very complicated thought process, and there is extensive documentation proving that people of that era (and every one before it) were aware of the evolution of western armaments, along with many other things. Does anyone really think that members of the colonial aristocracy didn't understand the significance of the difference between the weapons possessed by the Native Americans and European settlers? Are people so arrogant as to believe that the founding fathers didn't have a sense of history very nearly as advanced as our own? Do people think that imagination is a recent evolutionary development?

There is no chance that Thomas Jefferson wasn't consciously aware of at least the following progression:

Humans throw rocks at one another
Invent slings to better throw rocks
Invent bows and arrows, replace rocks as missiles
Invent crossbows, replace bows as delivery mechanisms
Invent primitive firearms, replace both the launcher and ammo
Invent muskets, replace delivery mechanism

With plenty of iterations in between these leaps (one of the big advances in crossbow technology was the windlass, which required less strength to more quickly cock the weapon). When we represent things like photon torpedoes, light sabers, and ice-nine, we are taking our current understanding of technology, and applying our imagination to a projection of observed trends to create that image. It's a brilliance that, as far as we know, is unique to humans, but isn't unique to humans in the past 30 years.

Temporally, our distance from those colonists is only about 200 years, even if the technological gap has accelerated lately. That is about the same distance as they were from the 16th century, a time that saw Copernicus and Tycho Brahe challenge the widespread assumptions about the heavens and propose a heliocentric rather than geocentric system. The founders were building a new democratic society on a continent that had hardly existed on maps 200 years earlier. They were the inheritors of a network of settlements created by Protestants as a result of Martin Luther and the Reformation, you guessed it, about 200 years earlier. These were massive scientific and philosophical advancements that had radically changed Western civilization, and to suggest that the founders would not have been self-aware enough to recognize social evolution is either silly or arrogant.

Are we writing laws to control the proliferation of civilian models of future-government space lasers? Of course not. We are dealing with our current problems, not trying to legislate the solution of tomorrow's problems.

[Understand that this isn't a gun control argument, that's just an example of one way that the false dichotomy that I am illustrating is manifest] 

Quite frankly, any discussion of the framers' intentions is pointless because we either have their own words expressing their thoughts, or we are guessing. If it doesn't inform our attempts to solve our current problems, it's no more than an interesting academic exercise in the context of the current debates (I say this as someone with a history degree). The Constitution is an important document, but it isn't the Ten Commandments, carved in stone. If we want to sanctify it, then it should be lovingly retired and removed from issues of public governance, because at that point it is no more than an idol for dogmatic worship. If it is sacrosanct and immutable, then it is a religious document and has no place in politics. If we treat it as a vital, living part of our republic, however, then we should be able to shape it and change it to suit our needs the same way that we would a bill that funded local road improvements.

If the founding fathers didn't create rules for us today, it's because they trusted that we would be able to handle that ourselves. We shouldn't belittle their contributions to the growth of this nation in order to justify our own. The United States, as a nation, continues to evolve, as does the body of documentation that defines it. We should feel free to change the Constitution because it is our responsibility to safeguard the well-being of this country today, not because we need to correct the ignorance of yesterday.

Party System Has Outlived Its Usefulness

In sports, we are often taught that true fans root for (or against) the laundry, not the players.  A roster turns over, players get traded, retire, or leave through free agency.  It doesn’t matter who plays for the Red Sox, I am always going to want them to beat the Yankees.  I would be downright gleeful if they didn’t lose a game to New York for the next five years.  I have trouble understanding how Yankees fans date Red Sox fans, but I have seen it happen.

The problem is that this mentality has spilled over into politics.  You root for Democrats, or you root for Republicans, and the politicians themselves act as if the two parties were adversarial, rather than collaborative.  Imagine if your company’s divisions acted like this.  What if the Display team and the Search team couldn’t agree on how to divide the Digital budget for 2011, so they simply froze it so that neither side could get anything done.  Meanwhile, the client is stuck on the sidelines watching their products not being advertised.  That would last for about 10 seconds, until your agency were fired.

In theory, both parties belong to the same company, with the same goal: to ensure peace and prosperity for the citizens of the country.  The idea of a party isn’t strictly terrible, either.  A group of individual representatives coming together to achieve common goals and push forward a collective agenda makes sense, as long as it works.  Any organizational structure is the right one if it contributes to a functioning body, be it a government or a corporation.

The issue is that it isn’t working, and it has been slowly descending into paralysis for years as allegiance to parties became more important than individual contribution.  This is ultimately the crux of the biscuit, and what brings me to the most obvious solution:

Get rid of the useless categorization.

How about instead of choosing a team, voters actually elect individuals.  Vote for an official because you think he/she has integrity, or has good ideas, or is an able administrator.  Make every candidate run on their own merits, with their own funding.  Then, you will have a collection of bright, capable people whose views are actually somewhat representative of their constituents, and can work together unrestrained by party lines.

As it stands now, politicians have no choice but to adhere to party stricture, if they want to have a chance of winning/keeping their post.  You aren’t likely to replace an incumbent without the financial and PR backing of a party.  If you won’t toe a line, they will nominate someone who will.  The laundry is what matters in the election process, not the player.  If you put the party war chest and PR machine behind basically anyone, they become a viable candidate.

Ultimately though, this is a matter of practicality.  Would I love to live in a country where we just elected the best 100 individuals to be Senators, locked them in a room and said “solve some problems?”  Hell yes.  Do I think it will happen?  Of course not.  But what they are doing right now, isn’t working.

We live in a results-driven world.  When your job is to legislate, and set budget allocations so that the government can do its job, that’s what the people expect you to do.  If the current system isn’t working, it is completely unacceptable to stubbornly keep on doing the same old thing.  When things don’t work, you have to identify the problem, and then come up with a solution that involves doing something different.  In my industry, and I suspect most industries, “test & learn” is a phrase you hear a lot of.  If your results are satisfactory, develop a theory, and run with it.  If it doesn’t work you stop, but at least you a.) gained some valuable information about what doesn’t work, and b.) YOU DID SOMETHING. 

Doing nothing isn’t a solution, and neither party can sell the current service that they are providing to the “consumer” (in this case Americans) with any degree of honesty.  I would rather see our politicians try something to fix the economy and see if fail, than see them refuse to do anything because it’s either a potential liability for them if it fails, or a potential win for the other party if it succeeds.

You (I am shifting to speaking directly to the politicians, because it adds narrative force) aren’t doing your jobs right now, period, and a lot of people depend on you.  We as a people are sick of excuses, and finger-pointing, and empty rhetoric.  Just show us that you are even trying to help.  Pretend for a moment that you aren’t athletes playing in the big Republicans-Democrats rivalry game, and that you actually care about the people you supposedly govern for.  Make sacrifices, think outside of the box, don’t factor the 2012 elections into your decision making.

Can’t figure out how to compromise on budgets?  Here’s an idea:  Every Senator takes the 2011 budget and has to make a 1% change somewhere, in any program.  He writes it on a slip of paper anonymously, and hands it in.  That’s it.  If you personally hate Medicare, you can choose to take 1% away there.  If you feel that the Pentagon budget is too high, take 1% away there.  If you think that infrastructure is a pressing need, add your 1% to the Highway Department.  By making it anonymous, everyone will feel free to actually do what they think is best for the country, not their party.  By making it an aggregate, naturally, less popular programs will lose money and more popular ones will gain.  Chances are the final result won’t make everyone happy, but no one will be able to say they didn’t have a hand in it.  As Calvin & Hobbes taught us, “A good compromise leaves everyone unhappy.”

Is that idea unreasonable?  How about this:  TAKE TURNS.  We can learn from children on this one.  You don’t think the Democratic plan is a good one?  Fine, that’s an opinion you can have.  But let it pass, give it 6-12 months, and see what happens.  If it doesn’t work, do a post-mortem and try to figure out why, take some lessons from it, and then give the Republicans a shot.  Keep taking turns trying solutions until you hit on a fix, if you aren’t able to work together on one.

We recognize that this is a tough situation, and that you guys have an uphill battle in front of you, but give us a little credit.  We can forgive mistakes, and we can forgive failures, but inaction is unforgivable.