A few posts ago I wrote about my reaction to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, which I was in the process of reading. I’m still reading it, since it’s fairly thick, and I’m on vacation. Anyway, I have another bone to pick, and I think it illustrates anew Pinker’s both siderism and the fact that he falls into some of the intellectual traps he criticizes in the course of his book.
He makes the well founded point that people on each side of the intellectual spectrum often make predictions about future events based on their ideological beliefs rather than sound data, and notes, correctly, that there is an abundance of pundits that are constantly wrong in their predictions who suffer no consequences for that fact. He more than implies that the truth is always somewhere in the middle, between the two “extremes”. I’ve made the point before that there are not two extremes in this country. I’ve often stated in other contexts that our “extremist”, Bernie Sanders, would, if transplanted to 1968, be simply a typical liberal Democrat.
What set me off was Pinker’s claim that we have become increasingly (and implicitly irrationally) polarized, with irrationality abounding on “both sides”, using as an example the fact that 25% of Democrats consider the Republican Party “a threat to the nation’s well being” while noting that even a greater percentage of Republicans say the same thing about Democrats. Pinker insists in the course of the book that we must use reason to assess the truth value of any proposition, yet he makes no attempt to assess the truth value of either “side”, of this question, but invites, nay demands, that we assume that “both sides” are being irrational and that it is obvious without the need for argument that the Republican Party does not constitute a threat to the nation’s well being. After all, if it does pose such a threat, he can’t possibly have a beef with those 25% of Democrats. I should add that at this point that number has probably swelled among Democrats, Independents, and former Republicans.
Let us pause to set forth what we might consider to be the minimal requirements for the nation’s well being, considering the principles from which it was conceived and to which it is dedicated. Our nation is a liberal representative democracy, now (we like to think) dedicated to the proposition that all peopleare created equal, and that they are endowed by nature with certain inalienable rights. Among those rights are the right to participate in the electoral process and the right to a representative system in which the will of the majority can be expressed through the legislative body, and that the laws promulgated by that legislative body will be faithfully executed, in good faith, by the executive and others charged with their execution. Our system demands that the various branches of government serve as checks upon one another, so that no one branch can dominate and put itself in the position of assuming dictatorial powers. A number of conclusions flow from this, including the conclusion that no group of persons should be able to combine among themselves to accrue the ability to oppress their fellow citizens through, for example, monopoly power or abusive business practices, for such power mimics governmental power yet is not subject to check by the people in any form other than legislation. One could write a book about the nature of a representative democracy, so the above is merely a brief summary of the ends of representative government. I content, (though I think someone else said something similar before) that whenever any political party becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to declare it a threat to the nation’s well being, and, to the extent it lies within their power, to destroy it.
I would humbly submit that Republicans do constitute such a threat. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
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The Republican Party, aided by partisan Republican judges, has engaged in, and continues to engage in, wholesale voter suppression, thereby depriving the citizens of a purported democracy of the fundamental right of citizens of a democracy: the right to vote.
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The Republican Party has engaged in gerrymandering on a scale never seen before, thus insuring that the minority of those allowed to vote select the majority of those elected as representatives.
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The Republican Party has made common cause with a foreign country to spread disinformation in this country in order to further distort election results.
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The Republican Party has, at least since 1968, and ever more blatantly, exploited racism in order to prevail at the polls. The Justice Department is now in the hands of an acknowledged racist. Racist judges are being nominated and approved by a Republican Senate. The purpose and effect is to render people of color second class citizens, thus undermining the fundamental principle that all humans are equal and entitled to equal rights under the law.
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The Republican Party is in the process of attempting to roll back advances with respect to the rights of women, racial minorities, and gay and transgender people.
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The Republican Party is promoting legal theories that are “weaponizing” the First Amendment in order to exempt its adherents from civil rights laws, thus legalizing discrimination against women, blacks, gays, and immigrants based on specious free speech and free exercise claims.
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The Republican Party has turned a blind eye to the criminal behavior of the person who currently occupies the office of President of the United States.
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The Republican Party, through it’s captive television network, has propagandized a large segment of the American population into believing demonstrable untruths.
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The Republican Party has handed regulatory agencies over to the regulated, and appointed agency heads hostile to the purpose and intent of the legislation they are appointed to enforce, thereby failing to assure that the laws are faithfully executed, and endangering our environment, our educational system, our healthcare system, our access to the internet, and our judicial system, to name just a few.
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The Republican Party has, with malice aforethought, appointed partisan judges who have ignored decades of precedent in order to allow corporations to purchase politicians through campaign donations while, in effect, legalizing bribery of those politicians once they are elected. The Republican Party has frustrated all efforts to reverse these lawless decisions through curative legislation.
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The Republican Party has denied proven scientific facts, further endangering our environment and our world.
For the most part, this by no means exhaustive list, is confined to examples of the ways in which Republicans are undermining the structure of our democracy. Further examples of threats to the lower 99.9% of the citizenry abound in other areas, such as the Republican’s determination to transfer wealth to the extremely rich from the rest of us and its determination to accede to the most outrageous demands of the NRA despite the havoc this has wrought. I have not supplied links to the evidence I’ve cited above, because I’m on vacation and I’m lazy. However, most if not all of what I’ve stated above is such common knowledge that, as the judges sometimes say, “it needs no citation”.
It is perhaps true that one can find isolated examples of current Democratic politicians (yes, there were racist Democrats in the past, but the ones who are still alive have all become Republicans, as did those who have since died) who have committed one or more of the above sins against the nation, but such examples are isolated in the extreme, and the Democratic Party does not promote or dog whistle any position that threatens the governmental structure of our nation. The list above does not represent the fringe of the Republican Party, it is a list of the mainstream positions of the Republican Party, with only Susan Collins left to play Hamlet before going along with everything they propose and the always ineffectual John McCain to bleat a protest before doing essentially nothing. There is absolutely nothing similar going on in any significant portion of the Democratic Party. Pinker may know some academics that espouse extreme and wacky “left wing” positions, but those positions never become part of the national discourse. The most radical position taken by any Democratic politician is that we should have a health care system similar to those in every other advanced Western nation. Perhaps slightly to the left is the call from some quarters for a guaranteed income, but I challenge Pinker to explain how that proposal can be characterized as a threat to the nation.
It is simply not true that when there are two sides at loggerheads, they must both be wrong and those in “the middle” (which often simply can’t exist as a matter of logic) are right. The abolitionists were right. The slaveholders were wrong, and by extension, those who sought to preserve the system by a middle road compromise were also wrong. 1932 Germans who perceived the Nazis as a threat (yes, I’m going there) were right; the dog of both sides would not have hunted then either. If a person comes to the well founded conclusion that the Republican Party is a threat to the nation, based on an abundance of evidence, then he or she is using the very faculty of reason Pinker insists they have abandoned. The fact that lots of Republicans say the same thing about the Democratic Party, in the absence of any evidence to support such an assertion, does not by itself invalidate the opinion of the Democrats that Pinker discounts, just as the fact that there are plenty of people that deny climate change does not invalidate the opinion of those who accept climate change as fact. It is, in brief, a matter of fact that the Republican Party is a threat to the nation. I count myself among the 25% (again, probably more by now) that consider the current Republican Party a threat to the nation, and I’m not wrong.
UPDATE: So, I left off reading Pinker’s book after reading the offending statement I’ve cited. A few pages later, after deploring political correctness in academia, he turns to the sins of the right:
…Politicians, unlike professors, pull the levers of power. In 21st-century America, the control of Congress by a Republican Party that became synonymous with the extreme right has been pernicious, because it is so convinced of the righteousness of its cause and the evil of its rivals that it has undermined the instutitions of democracy to get what it wants. The corruptions include gerrymandering, imposing voting restrictions desinged to disenfranchise Democratic voters, encouraging unregulated donations from moneyed interests, blocking Supreme Court nomintions until their party controls the presidency, shutting down the government when their maximal demands are not met, and unconditionally supporting Donald Trump over their own objections to his flagrantly antidemocratic impulses. Whatever differences in policy or philosophy divide the parties, the mechanisms of democratic deliberation shoudl be sacrosanct.
In light of that, how can Pinker state or imply that people who think the Republican Party poses a threat to the nation are irrational?
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