A Moment of Unity Slipped Through Our Fingers

I feel like we let a moment of unity slip through our fingers. It seems that when we collectively watched the killing of George Floyd, we were all horrified. I have friends across the political spectrum, and even those I most disagree with – the die hard Trump supporters – were as outraged by that murder as anyone. And then came the first peaceful protest, and it seemed that everyone was absolutely behind it. For a moment.

Protesters gather in downtown Minneapolis. Unrest in Minneapolis over the May 25th death of George Floyd.

Then on the fringes of the peaceful, heartfelt protests came the fringe elements – the violence, vandalism, looting. Even then, for a moment, it seemed that the facts and the narrative were that this was a few bad actors and a few bad cops causing a disturbance at an otherwise peaceful demonstration.

And then very quickly our politicians and the media, jumped in to divide us again. Inadvertently perhaps, but now we're not just divided, we're fractured. Now there are multiple "camps" within the left and right, all disagreeing with each other.

I believe this is because we have gotten so accustomed to having quick, easy answers to what's going on. We need to determine, before we have any facts, who is responsible for the rioting and looting. We demand to know and the media is compelled to fill the airwaves with something, anything, to fill our need to know. And politicians are eager to point blame at whatever entity will help to score points with their base. We collectively want to blame one group of people for this, and assign a single motive. That makes it easy.

  • Angry black people fed up with the way they're treated
  • White people who want to instigate and turn the protest violent to make black people seem out of control
  • Undercover police who want to further the narrative that these protesters should be handled with violence
  • Opportunistic people of any race who want to take advantage of the situation for whatever reason<
  • Radical left wingers who want to destroy our country
  • Radical right wingers who want to destroy our country

Maybe it's all of the above. Maybe there are far more reasons for it than we've heard. But it's still a small number of people amongst the masses of peaceful protesters. But now, because our focus is on the violence, that's the narrative. Now when we say "protester" we think burning buildings and looting. That's so not fair.

It is not fair to anyone, and detrimental to our unity, when we see some photos of white looters, and conclude that all the looters are white. It's not fair to anyone, to see images of black people looting and decide that all the looters are black. It's not fair to see images of cops being brutal to peaceful protesters and conclude that all cops are out of control. It's not fair to see images of some police kneeling with protesters and conclude that all cops are good and want to connect with their diverse communities.

All of that is happening, all at once. We have to open our minds to the idea that this is not something that we can wrap up in a neat package, put a label on it, and feel good that we have the answer. We don't. None of us do. This is complicated. We need to unify to resolve it.

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Alleged financial reform

Regarding the recently announced "financial reform," Dylan Ratigan asks us to consider what has not been fixed.

- The Cops (regulators and ratings agencies) working for the crooks. - Banks still Too Big To Fail. - Banks gambling with your deposits. - Banks allowed to "mark to myth" and use off-balance sheet accounting to bonus themselves into the atmosphere, with the taxpayer taking the fall. - Banks getting trillions from the Fed, Fannie and Freddie -- AKA you, the future and present taxpayer. What does it mean for us? It means that the same people who brought you these horrible changes -- rising wealth discrepancy, massive unemployment and a crumbling infrastructure -- have now further institutionalized the policies that will keep the causes of these problems firmly in place.
This is Orwellian, indeed, yet the Democrats are celebrating. What's going on? Kevin Baker takes a crack at it in a Harper's article titled "The Vanishing Liberal: How the Left Learned to be Helpless."
Coming to power when he did, with the political skills and the majorities he possesses, Barack Obama squandered an almost unprecedented opportunity But it is increasingly clear that he never intended to challenge the power structure he had so skillfully penetrated. With the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations are, once more, people, American democracy has snapped shut again--the great, forced opening of the past 130 years has ended. There is no longer any meaningful reformist impulse left in or politics. The idea of modern American liberalism has vanished among our elite, and simply voting for one man or supporting one of the two major parties will not restore it. The work will have to be done from the ground up, and it will have to be done by us.

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What’s In A Label?

Conservative. Liberal. We act as if we know what these labels mean. Conservatives are traditionalists, fiscally opposed to anything that smacks of gambling, private, often religious, and pedantic on what they consider “appropriate” in either government or personal conduct. Liberals, on the other hand, are often taken for progressive, willing to spend social capital to repair perceived problems, tolerant, agnostic if not atheist, and overly-concerned with a definition of justice that ought to be all-encompassing rather than what they perceive as sinecure for the privileged. Well. Over on Facebook I posted a brief quote (my own) to boil down the actual underlying distinctions. Conservatives are those who don’t like what other people are doing, Liberals are those who don’t like what other people are doing to other people. It was meant to be taken as humorous. But I’m not being entirely flip here. When you look at it, and try to define the common factor in much that passes for conservative posteuring—of any country, any background, anywhere—it always comes down to one group trying to stop another group from Doing Things We Don’t Approve. I heard a news report this morning (on NPR—I unabashedly don’t pay attention to any other news source, I find them all utterly biased) from Pakistan about the university scene there, and one bit caught my attention—at a campus in Punjabi, conservative students who find men and women sitting too close together interfere and move them apart. At a game of Truth or Dare, conservative students pulled participants out and beat them. How does this apply here? Well, here’s a clip from P.Z. Meyers’ Pharyngula to illustrate: Rising Sun School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there’s the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form a club for non-religious students…well, you can guess what happened.

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Republican Scientists are rare

PEW has issued new research findings showing that relatively few scientists are political conservatives. Only 6% of scientists identify themselves as Republicans:

Most scientists identify as Democrats (55%), while 32% identify as independents and just 6% say they are Republicans. When the leanings of independents are considered, fully 81% identify as Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 12% who either identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP.

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Why do conservatives become conservative? It’s not a rational choice.

Nor is it primarily the result of a rational choice (i.e., a systematic analysis of facts) that liberals become liberals. 

We’d like to believe that we adopt our political views rationally, only after careful consideration of the “facts.” That’s a pipe dream, however.  Jay Dixit’s article, “The Ideological Animal,” (published by Psychology Today) demonstrates that our political persuasion takes root well before the cerebrum kicks fully into gear.  There are deep triggers that lead individuals to crave one political ideology over the other.  For many of us, rational thought is post-facto justification.  As David Hume famously argued,

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Dixit’s arguments dovetail with Hume’s beliefs.  As Dixit argues,

We tend to believe our political views evolve as a result of rational thought, in that we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions. But the truth is more complicated. Our political preferences are equally the result of factors we’re not aware of—such as how educated we are, how scary the world seems at a given moment, and personality traits that are first apparent in early childhood. Among the most potent motivators, it turns out, is fear.

What else correlates with political leaning?  You won’t be surprised at some of these differences:

conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and

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Continue ReadingWhy do conservatives become conservative? It’s not a rational choice.