About the Supposed Meritocracy . . .

Matt Taibbi discusses the "meritocracy," reviewing Michael Sandel's new book, "The Tyranny of Merit." He describes the divide between the those with and without college degrees as stark. He describes this entire topic as unsettling for everyone along the political spectrum. An excerpt from his article, which is titled "Does America Hate the "Poorly Educated"? Michael Sandel's "The Tyranny of Merit" doesn't say so, but the pandemic has become the ultimate expression of upper-class America's obsession with meritocracy":

As Sandel notes, Trump was wired into these politics of humiliation and never invoked the word “opportunity,” which both Obama and Hillary Clinton made central, instead talking bluntly of “winners” and “losers.” (Interestingly, Bernie Sanders also stayed away from opportunity-talk, focusing on inequities of wealth). Trump understood that huge numbers of voters were tired of being told “You can make it if you try” by a generation of politicians that had not only “not governed well,” as Sandel puts it, but increasingly used public office as their own route to mega-wealth, via $400,000 speeches to banks, seats on corporate boards, or the hilariously auspicious, somehow not-illegal stock trading that launched more than one member of congress directly into the modern aristocracy.

The Tyranny of Meritocracy describes the clash of these two different visions of American society. One valorizes the concept of social mobility, congratulating the wealthy for having made it and doling out attaboys for their passion in wolfing down society’s rewards, while also claiming to make reversing gender and racial inequities a central priority. The other group sees class mobility as entirely or mostly a fiction, rages at being stuck sucking eggs in what they see as a rigged game, and has begun to disbelieve every message sent down at them from the credentialed experts above, even about things like vaccines.

The eternal squeamishness Americans feel about class will prevent this topic from getting the attention it deserves, but the insane witches’ brew of rage, mendacity, and mutual mistrust Sandel describes at the heart of American culture is no longer a back-burner problem. Tension over who deserves what part of society’s rewards, and whether higher education is a token of genuine accomplishment or an exclusive social rite, has become real hatred in short order. In the pandemic age, Americans on either side of the educational divide have moved past rooting for each other to fail. They’re all but rooting for each other to die now, and that isn’t a sentiment either side is likely to forget.

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The Need for Politicians to Condemn the Outrageous Behavior of Members of Their Own Party

A small bit of my faith in the American political system would be restored if politicians would step up to condemn the atrocious behavior of members of their own political party. A small bit of my faith in the American media would be restored if party-affiliated news media (which is most of legacy media) would start stepping up to condemn politicians of their favorite political party. Ryan Grimm of The Intercept recently shined a laser beam on the disgusting behavior of the family of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and his family with regard to EpiPen corruption. On Breaking Points, Krystal Ball followed suit.

Meanwhile, Democrats and Democrat-affiliated-news-media are otherwise maintaining radio silence. This is merely a recent example of the kind of thing that infests both parties of our political system. Here is Krystal Ball's summary of the problem:

Under Joe Manchin's daughter [Heather Bresch], [Pharmaceutical company] Mylan jacked up the price [of Epipens], locked in a product monopoly jacked up the price of war, and then work to eliminate single pack sales with zero medical justification, simply so they could double their revenue, all with the explicit understanding that for their customers, their lives depend on the product, so they have no choice but to suck it up and pay whatever Milan decided to charge. There are no words to describe this type of exploitative, morally bankrupt and sociopathic behavior. It fills me with pure disgust that is only amplified by the knowledge that this type of criminality underpins our entire healthcare system: Bought politicians, price fixing, price gouging monopolies, every single person involved on the take with the cost in dollars, sickness and death passed on to the most vulnerable among us. It's disgusting. So next time the media tries to tell you "Joe Manchin opposes the reconciliation package because he's just trying to represent his conservative state," do not fall for their nonsense. His motives are just the same as his daughter's: to protect corporate profits and his own personal interests above everything else. And it's so disgusting here, Sagar, because you see it all. You see the way that the politician gets his daughter the job. You see the way that he uses his position to ignore when they ship jobs overseas. You see that once she's in that place, the way that she just exploits people knowing knowing that they have no other choice and explicitly making sure that these customers have no other product that they go to. It is some of the most despicable behavior that you can imagine.

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Greenwald: Cost-Benefit Analysis of COVID Issues Deemed Off-Limits

Glenn Greenwald writes:

In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.

If we treated car safety the same absolutist way that we treat COVID safety, we would ban automobiles.

In the above video (min 22) Greenwald points out that we are entirely ignoring the mental health damage being done by lockdowns, especially the mental distress and damage caused when children are prevented from attending school in person. That said, don't ignore the small total deaths by COVID among children, even in the era of the Delta Variant.

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What Motivates Trump Voters?

Many people who call themselves liberal have written on FB that (and several told me in person) that they despise Trump voters and that they need not ever have a conversation with anyone who voted for Trump. Why? Many of them give this as the entire reason: "Trump voters are racist."

This reasoning is distressing to me because I (I identify as an independent) communicate with more than a few people who voted for Trump. I voted for Clinton and Biden. I acknowledge that there are some racists in the Republican party (I also believe that there are many racists among woke liberals), but to sum up that the entire motivation of every Trump voter as "racism" is over-simplistic and usually false. That's why I found this Tweet Thread by Darryl Cooper interesting. Is there any reason other than "racism" for being a MAGA voter? Cooper offers many such reasons. It's too bad many liberals refuse to take time to consider these before launching attacks on Trump voters. Glenn Greenwald offered an introduction to Cooper's thoughts. Here's an excerpt:

[W]e asked Cooper to elaborate on his influential thread, with a focus on what led him to these observations about prevailing MAGA sentiments and why he believes they are important for people to understand. As Cooper notes, he does not share all of the perceptions and beliefs he is conveying, although he shares many of them. Instead, based on the recognition that most media outlets are incapable of understanding let alone accurately describing the views of a group of people they view with little more than unmitigated contempt, condescension and scorn, he believes it is imperative that people understand the actual reality of what is motivating so many Trump voters in their views, perceptions and beliefs — regardless of whether each particular belief is accurate or not.

We also believe this understanding is vital, which is why we are happy to publish Cooper’s essay. It should go without saying that, as it true of all of our articles published on Outside Voices -- which we treat as an op-ed page -- our publishing of this article does not signify agreement with all of its claims, but only our belief that it is a viewpoint worth airing.

Here are a few excerpts to Cooper's analysis. You can read the entire thread here and here. You can listen to it here:

Trump supporters know - I think everyone knows - that Donald Trump would have been impeached and probably indicted if Robert Mueller had proven that he’d paid a foreign spy to gather damaging information on Hillary Clinton from sources connected to Russian intelligence and disseminate that information in the press. Many of Trump’s own supporters wouldn’t have objected to his removal if that had happened. Of course that is exactly what the Clinton campaign actually did, yet there were no consequences for it. Indeed, there has been almost no criticism of it.

Trump supporters had gone from worrying the collusion might be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to seeing proof that it was all a scam. Then they watched as every institution - government agencies, the press, Congressional committees, academia - blew right past it and gaslit them for another year. To this day, something like half the country still believes that Trump was caught red-handed engaging in treason with Russia, and only escaped a public hanging because of a DOJ technicality regarding the indictment of sitting presidents. Most galling, conservatives suspect that within a few decades liberals will use their command over the culture to ensure that virtually everyone believes it. This is where people whose political identities have for decades been largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed not only partisan, but all institutional boundaries. They'd been taught that America didn't have Regimes, but what else was this thing they'd seen step out from the shadows to unite against their interloper president?

Cooper is not making a case that all of these things are true. His mission was to understand the mindset of MAGA advocates. It's too bad that so many people who identify as "liberal" would rather simplify MAGA voters as racist without considering any of these things. They would rather attack straw men. For those people like me who fear for our democratic project, this approach is dysfunctional and unproductive.

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