Cromwell

Historically, Democratic candidates (e.g., Warren and Sanders) have viewed culture war issues as an annoying distraction–the product of false consciousness–from the real business at hand, which is redistributing wealth from plutocrats to working people. Given the widespread (if largely incorrect) perception that the economy is in freefall, that option will not be available in 2022. The Democrats will have to engage the GOP on its favorite turf.

How can that be done? Here are three principles to guide them:

1. GO ON THE ATTACK: If you want to motivate the base to get out and vote, don’t cower in the corner. That doesn’t motivate anyone.
2. MAXIMIZE POINTS ON WHICH THE BLUE TEAM IS UNITED: Use the liberal argument relating to discrimination against historically powerless groups instead of the woke argument that LGBTQ people are normal, which is not accepted by many left-leaning voters.
3. FIND THE WEDGE ISSUES FOR THE RIGHT: How many white Christian women think they should be forced to bear the child of a rapist? Let’s find out!

In short, spend lots of time talking about abortion, and as little time as possible defending the right of trans women to participate in sports.

With the conspicuous exception of “Defund the police,” red positions on culture war issues typically don’t have the support of a majority of Americans, if the polls are to be believed. Why then, does the GOP always pursue them, and why do they succeed?

Two words: geography and intensity. Bright blue culture war positions predominate in states like California, where rolling up huge majorities doesn’t help to win national elections. In addition, the GOP is relatively united behind the most extreme positions expressed by the reactionary plurality, while the Democrats are united only in their opposition to the GOP. Liberals and moderates (i.e., Biden voters, the majority of Democrats) have nearly the same degree of disdain for the woke Twitter left as conservatives and reactionaries. As a result, cultural issues are effectively wedge issues for the right.

To my knowledge, even our most militant right-wing chicken hawks (think John Bolton here) aren’t contending that NATO should openly enter the war and march on to Moscow. With that possibility excluded, there are three plausible acceptable military outcomes for the war:

1. Russia is completely expelled from Ukraine, as it existed prior to 2014;
2. Russian troops are thrown back to the line as it existed prior to the 2022 invasion; or
3. Russian troops remain in control of the land they have taken in the Donbas, but no more.

It is important to note that all three of these outcomes represent a massive strategic defeat for Putin. He has increased the size of NATO, shattered his economy, unified Ukraine against him, and destroyed the myth of overwhelming Russian military competence, all for some fairly useless land in Ukraine, for which he will now have to take responsibility. In that sense, even #3 would be a great victory for NATO.

That said, which of the outcomes makes the most sense? #1 would represent a complete military victory, and would best send the message that aggression doesn’t pay. It is the Dateline option: the bad guy gets his just desserts. Unfortunately, it is extremely unlikely without open NATO involvement in the war. The Ukrainians simply don’t have the men and the firepower, even with advanced NATO weapons, to make it happen, and if it did, Putin would probably escalate with WMD in a way that could cause World War III.

Option #2 is more plausible, still sends the message that aggression doesn’t pay, and doesn’t threaten a wider conflict, based on Putin’s behavior to date. Option #3 gives Putin a reasonable off-ramp, and limits the deaths and war damage within Ukraine, but doesn’t send the anti-aggression message as clearly as we would like.

In the final analysis, the shape of any settlement will depend on the attitude of the Ukrainians. Biden is right to give them the weapons they think they need to negotiate a reasonably acceptable peace, but not to threaten regime change or attacks within Russia’s borders.

Hurricane Agatha is currently pounding Mexico. Its remnants may reform into a new tropical storm after it passes into the Gulf of Mexico. If that occurs, the new storm will be named Alex.

It’s the perfect tropical event for 2022–a trans storm! Let’s hope it does less damage than a typical cisgender event.

I used to say that abortion opponents should be willing to pay higher taxes to deal with the costs of unwanted children. Today, however, I saw a headline to the effect that Florida already has a shortage of foster parents. That gave me the idea–instead of simply paying more money to deal with new social problems caused by the elimination of legal abortion, why not forcibly enlist abortion opponents to foster the unwanted children?

If you’re not willing to put your money where your mouth is on this issue, you are, to quote Jacques Chirac, missing a great opportunity to shut up.

I was just reading the transcript of an Ezra Klein interview with the prominent social conservative commentator Erika Bachiochi. Her views on the appropriateness of sex within marriage are so consistent with those of the Catholic hierarchy, and so inconsistent with everyone else’s (including Catholic lay people), that they require no response. Her more interesting opinion, however, is that the overturning of Roe will lead to a productive dialogue between the right and left that will ultimately result in the construction of a welfare state which is more responsive to the needs of women and children than the market. Is she on target here?

Let’s look to the past to answer that question. We already have extensive experience with a world in which abortion is illegal, and contraception is severely limited. Was that world characterized by an extensive welfare state? Was it more hospitable to women with unwanted pregnancies than today’s world? And, to bring the matter up to date, are the red states with the most stringent abortion regulations currently proposing dramatic increases in social spending to deal with the issues that will be created by millions of new unwanted pregnancies?

Of course not! Abortion wasn’t legalized because men wanted to party without consequences, or because employers thought it was a good way to keep their female employees on board. It was legalized because women thought–probably correctly–that the economic, physical, and social consequences of an unwanted pregnancy were unbearable. They will become so again when Roe is overturned, which is exactly what most of the right has in mind. Bachiochi, and other right-wing pundits expressing similar views, are nothing more than useful idiots for the hard right.

For many proponents of red morality, tradition and authority are sacred, and there is no room for negotiation or even discussion. That is not universally true, however. Here are some of the ways in which reactionaries respond to progressives on the latter’s terms:

1. As I’ve noted many times before, many reds are faux libertarians. Their appropriation of the slogan “My body, my choice” in the context of masks and vaccines is a parody of mainstream libertarian thought; no serious libertarian believes he has a right to injure others. Parody or not, this is a gesture in favor of blue morality.
2. Some reds extend the concept of injuries to others to aesthetic concerns. This is the supposed “right not to be offended,” a “right” which does not appear in mainstream libertarian philosophy.
3. Reds frequently break out the parade of horribles to justify their position on tradition and authority. For example, if evidence of concrete harm is necessary to justify moral sanctions, why isn’t sex with animals OK?
4. Some reds make “social contagion” arguments. The idea here is that the failure to enforce traditional norms inevitably results in experimentation and abuses of power which ultimately result in nonconsensual behavior and the creation of innocent victims. The most extreme example of this is the assertion by members of the DeSantis Administration that anyone who opposes the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation is a “groomer,” because gay people are pedophiles.
5. The most sophisticated arguments on this issue are essentially sociological and communitarian. Their proponents contend that blue morality basically turns society into nothing more than a trade alliance, with harmful psychological effects to all concerned. Society consists of all of the ties that bind citizens together. Disregarding traditional norms in favor of individual autonomy dissolves some of those ties and reduces society to a series of pure power relationships, to be exploited by amoral tyrants and charlatans like Trump.

For their part, supporters of blue morality rarely go as far as the parade of horribles described above would suggest even though the red argument on that point is quite logical. They also concede some of the points set out in #5.

It isn’t a lot of common ground, but it isn’t nothing.

The Republic of Ireland was a reactionary paradise prior to the revelations about abuses in the Catholic Church: economically backward; intellectually isolated; and dominated socially and politically by the Church. Today, largely as a result of the Church’s loss of prestige, the ROI is a “normal” secular country. Could the recent revelations about the Southern Baptists have a similar result in American red states?

No, for two related reasons. First, the SBs are nowhere nearly as entwined in the secular political system in any American state, regardless of how red, as the Catholic Church was in the ROI. There are plenty of other options for religious consumers in America, so the SBs don’t have that kind of political clout. Second, the SBs are far more decentralized than the Catholic Church. Any abuses in the Catholic system ultimately implicated people at the top of the hierarchy; with the SBs, it will be easy for most of the believers to treat the abusers as a few bad apples for which they have no responsibility.

It’s relatively easy to create a political and legal system that is designed to please God if there is a consensus as to who He is and what He wants. When that consensus breaks down, however, politics and morality inevitably tend to focus more on people than the meaning of scripture. So it was in Western Europe after the inconclusive end of the religious wars.

The prevailing Enlightenment attitude was that people should be free to develop their talents, pursue their interests, and express their opinions as long as they didn’t injure others. You see this in the reference to the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. You also see it in recent Supreme Court opinions regarding gay rights; if the record doesn’t show any concrete harm to society from consensual sexual practices, they have been found to be protected by the Constitution, regardless of what tradition tells us.

What we have here, then, is a battle between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. How do the two interact, and is there any common ground? I will discuss this tomorrow.

Effective gun control will never happen in America, for two reasons. First, the political system will never allow it, due to the identification of guns with the core values of the Republican Party, the filibuster, and the Supreme Court’s view of the Second Amendment. Second, even if you could somehow overcome all of the political hurdles, there is no practical way to enforce any such regulations. There are just too many guns, they are too easy to conceal, and their owners would respond with violence.

So, if you’re a law-abiding person who fears violence, what options are left? The only plausible choice is to arm yourself, even if you object to guns on principle. And so, in the end, the GOP will win; the country will have to rely on good guys with guns to stop the bad guys with guns.

Of course, the GOP’s definition of a bad guy with a gun probably includes liberals as well as criminals. That part may not work out so well for them.

Trump, Cruz, and the NRA quite naturally see no connection between the recent massacres and America’s incredibly lax gun regulations; instead, they attribute mass killings to “evil.” Since America is more, not less, religious than other comparable countries with no mass killing problem, our exceptionalism cannot logically be traced to poor values education. So where, then, did the evil come from? The only plausible answer, from the perspective of the right, is that the 1619 Project crowd is correct: America is an inherently evil empire.

And you thought they were flag-waving chicken hawks!

David Brooks thinks that red people have a communitarian view of morality, as opposed to the self-autonomy model used by blue people. Since he typically writes with a sociological bent, this is not surprising. Is he right?

He’s close, but not exactly right. The roots of red morality are authority and tradition. Authority, of course, comes primarily from religious scriptures. To the average reactionary, it is self-evidently correct and non-negotiable. Not coincidentally, it is also often self-interested; those in positions of power have every reason to think highly of tradition and authority.

The red views of morality have their historical origins in the medieval world, in which the purpose of political systems was to create a society of which God would approve; the interests of individual people were of no significance in this intellectual world. Blue morality has its roots in the world which came after Catholics and Protestants battered each other relentlessly, but inconclusively. I will discuss its premises and origins in a post tomorrow.

On the GOP leader named Cruz.

He just loves to be making the news.

When the subject is guns

And the cameras run

He will say something stupid on cue.

If you’re Mitch McConnell, the American political system is working just fine, thank you. The electoral system is biased against the left, and the filibuster prevents them from getting any sweeping social legislation through the Senate, but tax cuts for business can be approved through reconciliation. There’s no need to blow anything up. Life is good.

But if you’re a reactionary, life is about to get a lot more frustrating. Sure, on paper, you might be able to ditch the filibuster to get a national abortion ban approved, but your larger objectives of permanently transferring power to white Christians and shutting up the woke left are going to run into trouble with the judiciary immediately. How are you going to impose Christian values on the country without getting rid of the First Amendment and forcing regime change on blue states? It can’t be done under the current system.

You need to scrap the Constitution–at least, the longstanding interpretations of it– and start from scratch. How can you get there? It will take a ruthless, single-minded reactionary as president and something he can plausibly call an emergency. You can probably rely on the Supreme Court, the military, and your militias to take care of the rest.

Progressives think the deck is stacked against them. They’re right. The combination of the Electoral College, the unrepresentative Senate, and relentless GOP gerrymandering has made it very difficult for the Democrats to win elections regardless of public sentiment. Then, even if they do, the filibuster prevents them from moving much significant legislation through the Senate, and a right-leaning Supreme Court threatens to invalidate anything they can accomplish. It’s very dispiriting.

For all of this, the left, unlike the right, has shown faith in the system and the rules of the game. How long will that last? Will the evolving majority continue to tolerate minority rule even if it means, for example, that nothing can be done on inequality, guns, and climate change? Will the left simply lie down for an openly insurrectionist GOP in the long run?

I don’t think so.