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Sycophants explained

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

One of my Drinking Liberally friends has it in his head that I’m always wrong, but I disagree strongly. However, I’m sometimes wrong, and it’s time for me to confess a major blunder. Back around December of 2019 I predicted that Biden would win the presidency. I was right about that. But I was wrong when I predicted that the former guy would quickly be consigned to the memory hole by Fox, the Republican Party, and the media generally, where he could keep George Bush company.

It didn’t work out that way, primarily because he refused to concede what was by any measure a blow out election, thereby giving the right wing establishment a choice: try to push him into the memory hole and risk the wrath of the whackjobs upon whom they depend to keep them in power or continue to kiss his ass despite any bad taste that might leave in their mouths.

We all know what choice they’ve made.

What brings this to mind is an excellent Paul Krugman column in today’s Times, in which Krugman distills lessons he gleaned from The Mechanisms of Cult Production, a book by Xavier Márquez, a sociologist from New Zealand. It seems that there’s actually nothing unusual about the sycophantic behavior on display from so many on the right:

Signaling is a concept originally drawn from economics; it says that people sometimes engage in costly, seemingly pointless behavior as a way to prove that they have attributes others value. For example, new hires at investment banks may work insanely long hours, not because the extra hours are actually productive, but to demonstrate their commitment to feeding the money machine.

In the context of dictatorial regimes, signaling typically involves making absurd claims on behalf of the Leader and his agenda, often including “nauseating displays of loyalty.” If the claims are obvious nonsense and destructive in their effects, if making those claims humiliates the person who makes them, these are features, not bugs. I mean, how does the Leader know if you’re truly loyal unless you’re willing to demonstrate your loyalty by inflicting harm both on others and on your own reputation?

And once this kind of signaling becomes the norm, those trying to prove their loyalty have to go to ever greater extremes to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hence “flattery inflation”: The Leader isn’t just brave and wise, he’s a perfect physical specimen, a brilliant health expert, a Nobel-level economic analyst, and more. The fact that he’s obviously none of these things only enhances the effectiveness of the flattery as a demonstration of loyalty.

Does all of this sound familiar? Of course it does, at least to anyone who has been tracking Fox News or the utterances of political figures like Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy.

Apparently this sort of thing has been going on at least since Caligula, and probably even longer.

What is so puzzling about it is that, at least in the case of Trump, and quite likely in most other such situations, the loyalty only goes one way, and nothing you do or say can ever truly guarantee that the object of your feigned attention won’t turn on you. Just ask Mitch, Mike, and Bill.

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Mandatory vaccination was court approved. Who knew?

Monday, July 19, 2021

I was unaware that the Supreme Court ruled a century ago that public institutions could require vaccinations. I don’t find it particularly surprising, since there was a time when even the most conservative judges were merely in the pockets of corporations and had no need, or did not perceive a need, to kill off thousands of people in order to preserve their hold on power.

But that was then and this is now, so I am skeptical about whether a judge’s recent ruling that Indiana University can require students be vaccinated will withstand an appeal.

I think it’s even odds that the Supreme Court will overturn it, but that might make it harder for them to come up with anything approaching a logically defensible position when they overrule Roe vs. Wade, given the argument the anti-vaxxers are making:

A lawyer for eight student plaintiffs had argued that requiring the vaccine violated their right to bodily integrity and autonomy, and that the coronavirus vaccines have only emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, and should not be considered as part of the normal range of vaccinations schools require. He vowed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

I suppose the lawyer, who is an anti-abortion crusader, can come up with some way to thread the needle between arguing that requiring a vaccination violates a right to bodily integrity and autonomy, but forbidding abortion does not. I’m sure the court will be able to do so as well. We have come to the point where logic in judicial decisions is entirely optional.

The article to which I’ve linked makes another good point. The FDA should get off it’s ass and give the vaccines full approval. Certainly now that millions of people have taken them, there is ample proof both of their efficacy and a paucity of side effects. That would remove the one and only somewhat valid anti-vaxxer argument. I agree too that Biden should require vaccinations in the military and other contexts in which he has the authority to do so.

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Book Report

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

We returned from a Vermont vacation a few days ago, which explains the absence of posts, though I can rest assured no one cares. Despite the gloomy weather we managed to fill the time, so I didn’t do much reading, but I did continue to make my way through Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, which I finished shortly after we got back. I read The Warmth of Other Suns, her last book, which I thought was good, but this one is far better.

This is the sort of book that indirectly explains the recent right wing rage against Critical Race Theory. I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of Critical Race Theory, but, then again, neither do the right wingers condemning it know precisely what it is. What they do know is that they don’t want to acknowledge the role of racism in this nation’s past history, or in the history unfolding in the present. The last thing they would want to see taught in our schools is a book like Wilkerson’s, which makes a solid historical case for her thesis while also making a solid emotional case. It would be a worthwhile read in any high school American history class, a useful antidote to the societal conditioning American kids are undergoing at that time in their life.

The book is a blend of history and personal memoir. She examines the caste systems in three cultures: the United States, India, and Nazi Germany, but the main focus is on the United States. We don’t normally think of this nation in terms of caste, but as she demonstrates, we very much do have a caste system, and while the people at the bottom (black people always, indigenous people, Latinos and immigrants when it serves the interest of the dominant caste) suffer the most, almost everyone but those in the very most dominant caste suffer as a result of caste, for one overriding concern of the Brahmins of this society is preventing the lower castes from seeing that their interests actually coincide. She makes a compelling case that this country lacks adequate health care, among other basics, because the very most dominant caste has been so successful in keeping lower caste whites obsessed with maintaining their position vis a vis the even lower class blacks. As Dylan put it pithily in giving voice to white politicians of the South, being white is sufficient:

A South politician preaches to the poor white man

“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain

You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.

And the Negro’s name

Is used it is plain

For the politician’s gain

As he rises to fame

And the poor white remains

On the caboose of the train

Well, not exactly on the caboose, since that was definitely reserved for black people.

Wilkerson demonstrates that we are, all of us, infected by the caste system, our mental operating systems being programmed around it. We have the choice of fighting the programming or giving in, but it’s always there. Some of the most disturbing passages in the book are recountings of humiliations that black people have endured at the hands of white people, often when those white people are not being consciously racist, but are merely operating consistent with the societal assumptions with which they have been indoctrinated.

Though I’ve certainly been aware of these issues, the book opened my eyes a lot wider.

I’ll close with a quote from the Epilogue, which I think encapsulates the book’s lessons, though it doesn’t convey her pessimism about the possibility of America destroying its caste system:

A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist-in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of the meaning attached to people’s physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be.

Once awakened, we then have a choice. We can be born to the dominant caste but choose not to dominate. We can be born to the subordinated caste but resist the box others force upon us. And all of us can sharpen our powers of discernment to see past the external and to value the character of the person rather than demean those who are already marginalized or worship those born to false pedestals. We need not bristle when those deemed subordinate break free, but rejoice that here may be one more human being who can add their true strengths to humanity.

If anything, the modern day “Party of Lincoln” is looking to strengthen the caste system. It’s all they’ve got to maintain power, as they’re offering nothing of substance to anyone but the rich.

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Another crushing defeat for Trump

Friday, July 2, 2021

Some might think, judging by the title of this post, that I will be bloviating about the recent indictment of the Trump Organization. While that might be well worth the bloviating, this post bloviates elsewhere:

Historians: Trump Was Only the Fourth-Worst President of All Time

Today, C-SPAN released its Presidential Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, which asks historians and professional presidential observers to rate commanders-in-chief on a scale of one to 10, focusing on 10 key leadership areas, like moral authority, vision, economic management, and more. At the top is Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the very bottom is James Buchanan. Just above that bumbler is Andrew Johnson (first President to be impeached), then Franklin Pierce, then the most recent Oval Office occupant, the twice-impeached Donald Trump at number 41. Trump came in lower than James Garfield, who was President for 200 days, and William Henry Harrison, who lasted only 31.

This is a shocking injustice to the former guy. He’s far and away worse than Buchanan and Pierce, though as a Bowdoin alum I can’t help agreeing with the fictional Bowdoin history prof in this old post that Pierce deserves to be closer to the bottom. As I said then, it’s a matter of institutional pride, he being a fellow alum. Still, we don’t talk about Pierce much. His classmates Longfellow and Hawthorne have a library named after them, but it there’s anything at Bowdoin named after Pierce, it must be a toilet.

But, back to the former guy. Leaving Johnson aside for the moment, was he really better than Buchanan and Pierce? As much as I’d like to give Pierce the crown, he had far less impact on the course of history. The country was headed toward Civil War, and Pierce did nothing to stop it, though it’s arguable that in those times, it was Congress that held most of the power, and it’s not at all clear Pierce could have done much to stop it, though like the former guy he was beholden to the forces of reaction, which were his base. But, at least so far a I know, he never encouraged a violent attempt to overthrow the government. Nor did Buchanan, he just stepped aside and did nothing while the Southern states seceded and took over the U.S. Army’s military bases and stole their arms. Really trivial when compared to the genius.

Now Johnson is the guy who can give the Donald a run for his money. If there was anyone worse that the genius, it was him. He succeeded Lincoln at a time when presidential leadership in the right direction-toward equal rights for blacks- would have made all the difference. Instead, he did all he could to set the country on the road to Jim Crow, a road that would develop few potholes until 1965.

But time will tell. The genius has left a fully formed fascist party behind him, something Johnson did not do. If the Republicans manage to pull off massive voter suppression (see, e.g., the recent Supreme Court decision sanctioning said suppression) and the installation of corrupt election officials, as he has encouraged and demanded, then we are in for a full blown fascist state, and he will surely steal Johnson’s crown.

Or maybe not. They say that history is written by the winners, and, in that case, he’ll rise to the top.

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Pence goes off the reservation

Sunday, June 27, 2021

You have to wonder if Pence has plans that might prove somewhat disruptive in 2021:

During a speech at Ronald Reagan Library Thursday, former VP Mike Pence publicly broke with Traitor Trump’s unconscionable lies about so-called “voter fraud” in the 2020 election.

He did that liberal thing where you remember the past accurately: “January 6 was a dark day in history the United States Capitol,” Pence said.

…

He continued, “We reconvened the Congress the very same day to finish the work of counting electoral votes from every state in the union. Now, there are those in our party, who believed that, in my position as presiding officer over the joint session, that I possess the authority to reject or return electoral votes, certified by the states.”

“But the constitution provides the vice president with no such authority,” Pence stated.

“The truth is, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

“The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone.”

It has been put about that Pence actually thinks he has a future in politics, and given the reception he got at a recent whackjob conference, it may be the case that he has concluded that no amount of sychophancy to the former guy will restore him to the good graces of either said former guy or his adherents.

If Pence really wants to run for president in 2024, he will have to do it as a sort-of-anti-Trump. That is, never directly attacking Trump, but pushing back at the Big Lie and presenting himself as a true conservative who supports the constitution.

It won’t work, particularly if Trump runs again, but if Pence does make such a run, it may roil the Republican Party somewhat. If Liz Cheney, by that time former Congresswoman from Wyoming, runs as a third party candidate, Pence’s failed candidacy may have the effect of pushing his followers (if there are any) into the Cheney camp. A third party run, in the words of the Bard “ ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d”. It would guarantee a Democratic victory on the presidential line, despite the fact that a number of traditionally red states will be stolen as a result of voter suppression and outright theft. What effect it would have on the Senate is, unfortunately, an open question. Odds are that if Congress hasn’t passed a voting rights law by 2024 the Republican Party will have effectively created one party states in those states in which it has suppressed the votes. There’s not much doubt that the Supreme Court will give a thumbs up to the voter suppression laws, so states such as Georgia and North Carolina, where an electorate allowed to vote would likely vote for Democrats, will be safely in the Republican camp.

AFTERWORD: It’s interesting that Bill Barr, arguably the most sycophantic of them all, is putting distance between himself and the former guy. Given his willingness to abuse his office for the genius while he held it, it may say something about where these people think things are heading. Of course, in Barr’s case, he may just be trying to head off obstruction of justice charges.

AFTER THE AFTERWORD: As usual, Driftglass has a perceptive take on Pence.

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An easy prediction

Thursday, June 24, 2021

I have ranted on several occasions about the inability of Democrats to get their message across and their tendency to undermine themselves by their inept communications strategy. The Republicans, by contrast, have done a great job of manipulating the media and their base, enabling them to pursue policies that hurt their own voters at least as badly as they hurt everyone else, moreso in some cases. But the Republicans are not perfect, and I hereby predict that they are about to embark on a public relations disaster.

The Republicans are nonentities in cities, and are rapidly losing the relatively affluent suburbs, maintaining maximum strength in those places where folks are losing intellectual capacity through extensive inbreeding. That’s why they need to suppress votes, but they wouldn’t have to suppress quite so many if they could pump up their numbers back to where they were when they once ruled in the suburbs. One of the many things driving suburban types away from the Republicans is their attempt to transform the insurrectionists into a band of harmless tourists. It will work on the brain dead, who they already own, but it won’t work with people who saw it live at the time and whose brains have not been thoroughly Foxified. Not everyone lives in an Orwellian world in which, despite the evidence of their own senses, they believe whatever they are told to believe.

Which brings us to the news that Nancy Pelosi has announced that she is going to form a special committee to investigate the attack on the Capitol. Kevin McCarthy will presumably decide which Republicans will be on that committee. He could appoint people who would sit quietly through the hearings and investigative process, neither helping very much nor impeding. If he did that it would not rankle any of those former Republican leaning types who might, properly coddled, return to the fold. But he won’t do that. He will appoint folks in the Jim Jordan/Devin Nunes mode, maybe even the more extreme nutcases (seemingly impossible, yet true) like Lauren Boebert. They will proceed to argue incessantly that nothing happened that day; that they weren’t hiding out from a rampaging mob, and those conspirators testifying to the contrary in the hopes of getting their sentences lowered are actually Antifa or FBI plants. That sort of thing will simply solidify Democratic gains among the suburban demographic, a demographic that, for the most part, the Republicans have not marked for suppression and which would be harder to suppress if they tried.

It is to be hoped that Pelosi will appoint a chair who is a skilled media manipulator, but that may be asking too much.

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Theological Ruminations

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Oddly enough no one has asked me to weigh in on the Biden communion controversy, despite the fact that I’ve made known on several occasions that I have an advanced degree in theology, strictly of the Roman Catholic variety, from Our Lady of Sorrows Grammar School, late of Hartford, Connecticut.

As has been reported, the Bishops are proposing that Biden be denied communion, because while he is personally opposed to abortion, he has not seen fit to impose his views on others.

First a little background. Communion is a “sacrament”, allegedly instituted by Christ at the last supper. During Mass, the priest waves his hands over some foul tasting wafers, says some magic words, and presto-chango, the wafers become Jesus, and every good Catholic gets to eat him. (The magic doesn’t change the taste at all) Well, you don’t exactly eat him, as you’re not allowed to chew. You have to wait until he sort of melts in your mouth, then get him down in a single swallow. You get used to it.

You are supposed to be free from sin before receiving communion. The easiest way to get free from sin is to go to confession right before Mass, as regardless of what you’ve done, as long as you say a sincere act of contrition, and the priest buys into it by saying the magic words, you’re sins are washed away. But the truth is, generally, everyone’s on the honor system, all you have to do is walk up to the communion rail and stick out your tongue, and the priest is going to give you your wafer. But, the priest can always just walk on by a really notorious sinner, say, someone who has been divorced multiple times and has more or less publicly committed adultery while married to one of the women he eventually divorced. Or someone who, for another instance, publicly supported a political leader who tore innocent children away from their parents and put them in a concentration camp. The priest could do the same thing to a politician, who supported the death penalty, something the church now opposes, though truth to tell, there was a time when the church spent a lot of time imposing that sort of penalty. But that was long ago in a continent far away and it is not convenient to remember such things at the moment, nor should we dwell on the abuses in which the Church engaged here in North America, not to mention the odd sexual predilections of so many Catholic priests. In any event, politicians who are all in favor of doing terrible things to people who have actually been born have nothing to fear from the Bishops or the priests, the theoretical right of the priest to pass them by notwithstanding. They can get their wafer, no questions asked. Despite some offhand remarks by Jesus, the church establishment has no problem with whited sepulchers.

It is also the case that the Church has always put its own interests ahead of some narrow minded principles of equity or fairness, and right now it sees itself in competition with the evangelical right for the ever more dwindling stock of sectarian adherents in this nation These people need red meat and the Church has every right to serve it up. Whether it will ever be able to compete in the whackjobbery department with the more experienced fundamentalists is quite another story, since it may have trouble disassociating itself from its troubling past, such as its recognition that the Earth may actually be more than 4,000 years old, humans may in fact have evolved from monkeys, and the earth actually does orbit the sun.

So my considered opinion is that what the Bishops are doing is thoroughly consistent with Catholic doctrine and the Church’s historical mission. Some might argue that the Church could gain more adherents by trying to appeal to the non-Foxified who might still be interested in a religious affiliation consistent with reason and mutual respect, but the Catholic Church has a long history of rejecting the rational until it’s far too late to derive any benefit from accepting it. So while the Bishop’s obnoxious proposal is thoroughly consistent with Catholic theological teachings, we OLS graduates (most of whom, of which I’m aware, have made the transition to agnosticism, if not atheism) can take some comfort in the fact that it will likely drive more of today’s Catholics into our ranks.

AFTERWORD: Speaking of my Alma Mater, Our Lady of Sorrows School, once located on Grace Street (how did they get the city to give it that name?) in Hartford: it is with mixed emotions that I learned that the convent in which the nuns who taught at OLS resided is being converted into housing units for anyone who wants to buy or rent them. You don’t even have to be Catholic! The few remaining nuns are getting a “modest portion…for their housing, offices and a worship space”. The actual chapel is being converted into a gym!

I lived a block away from the convent when I was a very little kid. At the time, there were lots of nuns and they even had cows that they milked. That part was sort of neat, and truth to tell, while the net effect of their teaching was pretty horrible, individually some of the nuns were good people. The truth is that nowadays women have more options, so they are less inclined to follow Hamlet’s advice and get themselves to a nunnery. I often wonder if, and hope that, the nuns I liked escaped the convent, but I’ll never know. Anyway, one more brick torn from the wall.

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What we have here is a failure to communicate

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

This article at Hullabaloo should be required reading for the folks currently running the Democratic Party, but there’s little question that while it correctly identifies a fairly obvious problem with the Democrats, it would be completely ignored.

The article, which refers initially to a New Republic article by Alex Pareen, relates that the Democrats are sort of stuck in a prior error, and have failed to adjust to the realities of the modern age.

The Republican Party does not control the conservative propaganda network that keeps it relevent despite the party’s failures. Conservative media drives the party. But the two are at least symbiotic. Democrats rely on an outdated model of staging events and votes designed to get corporate mainstream media to tell their story for them for free (“earned media”). It is a strategy, Pareene suggests, that dates to when there were only three network news outlets. But after decades of the right “working the refs,” the media’s framing of Democratic narratives often goes sideways.

One thing the article notes would be effective, and which of course the Democrats don’t do, is sell the party as an entity, rather than solely individual candidates:

Some political science professors summarized a recent research experiment in Politico Magazine earlier this month. Alexander Coppock, Donald P. Green, and Ethan Porter “conducted a series of randomized experiments to test whether parties can win over new loyalists” with ads that promoted a party rather than a particular candidate. What they found was that, with repeat exposure, “people changed their partisan identification ever so slightly after seeing the ads,” and that “higher doses of party-promoting ads” could influence people’s voting decisions and feelings about Donald Trump. “Partisan identity is usually understood as a root cause of political behavior,” the political scientists wrote. “By moving it, we also appear to have moved real-world political decisions.”

Here at this humble blog I’ve been arguing forever that the Democrats have to come up with a narrative that they repeat like a drumbeat. Everyone should be singing from the same page, as the Republicans do, with those not inclined to sing obediently sitting quietly on the sidelines, doing what they’re told when the time comes. Right now, Republicans are actually trying to sell themselves as the party of the working class, and they’ll be successful if the Democrats don’t effectively counter them, and they can’t rely on MSNBC or CNN to do that for them. As the article notes, there are plenty of skilled writers who would be more than happy to help craft a message to shape the Democratic Party’s brand.

The article implies what appears to be the case with the Democrats who have seized control of the national party apparatus: they care more about keeping the money flowing and directing it to their favored recipients than in winning, much less actually effectively governing.

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Worth reading

Friday, June 11, 2021

The Boston Globe is in the process of publishing a series of editorials containing its recommendations to prevent future presidents from engaging in the criminality in which the former guy engaged. It is well worth reading. Oddly enough, while the daily paper is only up to the fourth editorial, you can read all of them on-line already. The recommendations all make sense, though for some of them to work we would have to rely on the good behavior of future Congresses and future courts, both of which have themselves become deeply corrupted for a number of reasons, each of which is directly attributable to the Republican Party in one way or another. Still, the editorials have identified an urgent need. If we went to avoid another corrupt attempt at democracy destruction by a future president, a necessary if not wholly sufficient precondition is a change to our laws to clearly bar the most egregious acts in which the former guy engaged. So give it a read.

DISCLAIMER: By no means am I suggesting that one should read these editorials because my Pulitzer Prize finalist son may (he never tells us these things) be the author, or one of the authors. That possibility is merely coincidental.

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No threat to society

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Those of us paying attention were aware that much of the violence taking place at Black Lives Matters protests was fomented by right wingers who rightfully expected it to be blamed on the left, primarily the almost non-existent Antifa. While there was substantial evidence that this was happening, it got very little notice from the press, either that of the right wing such as Fox (predictably) or the allegedly neutral press, such as the New York Times.

However, when part of your violence fomenting involves killing cops, it’s a good bet that even the cops will decide to take you down, right wing or not, which is what happened to one Steven Carrillo, who killed one cop and tried but failed to kill another.

But he didn’t act alone. He was part of a group that called itself the Grizzly Scounts, who organized via WhatsApp:

The men created a so-called “Quick Reaction Force” intended to perpetrate acts of violence against their perceived enemies, and sent one member to scout a protest in Sacramento. They also cooked up an “Operations Order” document describing police officers as “enemy forces,” and described taking some law-enforcement officers prisoner: “POWs will be searched for intel and gear, interrogated, stripped naked, blindfolded, driven away and released into the wilderness blindfolded with hands bound.”

On May 26, three days before he shot Underwood, along with another federal officer who survived, at a Black Lives Matter protest in Oakland, Carrillo had messaged Ybarra that he wanted to conduct a “cartel style” attack on police, and the two men then met in person in Ybarra’s van to discuss the idea. Before leaving his home in Ben Lomond for Oakland on May 29, Carrillo had texted Ybarra that he was heading out to “snipe some you know what’s.”

His co-plotter have been indicted, but would you believe it:

Even more disturbing, according to the San Jose Mercury-News, most of these conspirators, following their arrests for destroying evidence in the case, have been released on bond by federal magistrates who have deemed them not a risk to the community.

Of course you’d believe it! And wouldn’t you also believe that had they actually been Antifa they would very much be deemed a risk to the community?

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