Riley Tenor

Joe Biden is too old for the Presidency.

There is no public evidence that he is, as Yascha Mounk has asserted, senile — at least if “senile” means demented as opposed to just elderly. Videos that purport to show him wandering off, disoriented, turn out to be deceptively edited; and why would deception be necessary if he’s so self-evidently out of it?

But the aging brain undergoes changes even in the absence of dementia. It becomes less supple and nimble, and slower to absorb new information. We all lose our train of thought once in a blue moon, or have trouble retrieving a word or name that we know we know. With age, those blue moons occur more frequently. These symptoms of an aging brain also come and go: late in the day, or under high stress, or sometimes for no particular reason, the aging brain may be less capable than at other times. And even in his heyday, Joe Biden, like FDR, was characterized more by a first-class temperament than a first-class intellect.

So maybe President Obama was right that Joe Biden just had a bad night. But that can’t be the end of it. The Presidency is not a beginner or part-time job. Our Presidents need to be on top of their game even — especially! — at times of high stress, or off hours.

It gets worse. Whatever the true condition of Joe Biden’s brain — and no one who is not in daily contact with him is making more than an educated guess — it will not improve spontaneously. A second Biden term would begin more than 6 months from now, and end in over four and a half years. If Joe Biden is still alive at that point, he will surely be further diminished from what he is today.

If this were an ordinary election — if Joe Biden were running against a Reagan, or either Bush, or a McCain, or a Romney — then that would be the end of it. It would be said that Joe Biden had underestimated the progressive toll aging would take when he committed to seeking a second term some eighteen months ago, and that the Democratic Party miscalculated in putting its faith in his self-assessment. The Republican candidate would be elected. That Presidency might work out well, or poorly, but probably not disastrously; either way, the voters would have a chance to reassess in four years.

Democracy can be hard to love. It only occasionally puts the best available candidate in charge, or leads to the best policies — certainly from the point of view of an individual voter, or faction. We don’t always get what we want. Some will always be tempted to do away with democracy’s annoying process, all the elaborate rigamarole and restrictions and rules, some of which really are archaic artifacts that no longer make sense today (looking at you, Electoral College!), and just install a leader who will do the right thing.

The catch, of course, is that there’s no consensus as to what’s the right thing. Democracy’s great virtue, which fully eclipses its drawbacks, is that it provides rules to resolve conflicts without violence, and a check on truly bad performance. Mediocre leaders are re-elected often enough, and capable ones turned out. But do a really bad job, and you’re far more likely to be turned out than not. The system is never entirely stable, but its instability is bounded, as long as the rules are respected.

That is what John Adams meant when he said that we were to have a government of laws, not of men. It has nothing to do with any particular policy; it comes before policy. For democracy to survive, voters must reject unconditionally any candidate who threatens to undo it, regardless of whatever else they think of the candidate’s proposals. We know what happens when the concept is discarded in the interest of  some  supposedly larger goal: making Germany great again, say. Taking away democracy’s ability to self-correct ends in disaster.

There is no sign — none — that Donald Trump understands the concept of a government of laws, much less respects it. The idea may exceed his powers of comprehension. The man has never seen the law as anything more than an impediment to his goals. To vote for him is to abandon the bedrock that has made our system of government work, however imperfectly, for 235 years.

And that means that conscientious voters must vote for any candidate opposing Donald Trump’s bid for the Presidency, no matter how inadequate that candidate is in other respects. I have no idea if Joe Biden will or should be replaced on the Democratic ticket. This year, voting against Donald Trump, no matter who is running against him, is imperative for the preservation of the Republic.

Suppose for the sake of argument that Joe Biden really is senile, or will become so during his second term. We’ve survived disabled Presidents. Woodrow Wilson was completely out of the picture for the last 18 months of his Presidency, felled by a stroke. Ronald Reagan, never a detail-oriented leader, was so addled and forgetful during his second term that members of his Cabinet narrowly avoided invoking the 25th Amendment and replacing him. These things are bad — we really should  avoid them — but the wounds they inflict on the nation are survivable. The system self-corrects, eventually. The wound heals. Electing a leader who has contempt for the whole concept of law is not a survivable wound.

The purveyors of polls and focus groups claim that this is not a winning argument, that voters are bored by talk of democracy being at stake. But winning or not, it’s true. It may be that, having lived for generations in a rule of law society, people take its benefits for granted. They are guaranteed to miss them when they’re gone. One is tempted to respond, paraphrasing Trotsky: you may not be interested in tyranny, but tyranny is interested in you.

If we survive this election, there will be an opportunity for reckoning, to figure out how we got into this mess, and, more important, how to get out of it and do better. The current gerontocracy will be gone soon no matter what, to be replaced soon by a new generation of leaders, some good, some bad. But tear the whole structure down in favor of a strongman, and it won’t soon be rebuilt. And we will have squandered the gift our ancestors gave us, too often paid for in blood.

 

If some of the holiday spirit of charity remains, you might take a moment to sympathize with Nikki Haley. Appearing at a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire, Haley was asked what was the cause of the United States Civil War. Haley stalled for a moment, then served a massive portion of word salad:

I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run the freedoms [sic] and what people could and couldn’t do…. I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are, and I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. That was never meant to be all things to all people [sic].

Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom.

We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.

Haley is neither stupid nor ignorant, and it’s safe to assume she has some inkling of the causes of the Civil War, whose first shots were fired in her home state. It’s shopworn advice to politicians that, when asked a question you don’t want to answer, you just answer the question you wish you had been asked, instead. Haley clearly didn’t wish to address the causes of the Civil War, so she simply pretended she had been asked to please provide a list of vacuous platitudes.

But for the “answer the question you wish you’d been asked” trick to be effective, it can’t be too obvious that you’re doing it. In this case, Haley’s failure to even mention slavery when asked to comment on the Civil War gave away the game.

What is striking is that Haley thought — likely correctly — that a simple, historical question about a war that ended over 158 years ago needed to be dodged. Haley was born and educated in South Carolina, and eventually became its governor. She will be all too familiar with the power of the Lost Cause myth, which, to paraphrase Faulkner, is not dead, or even past — especially among certain groups of voters with whom Haley is trying to remain popular.

The Lost Cause myth holds that the Civil War had multiple causes, but slavery was definitely not one. According to the myth, the war pitted a materialistic, industrialized, amoral, and rapacious North — a sort of evil empire — against an honorable, agrarian, völkisch society of God-fearing freeholders earning an honest living not in shady financial speculation or industrial manipulation but in working the land by the sweat of the brows of people they owned. The South wanted only to be left in peace in its wholesome ways, but the North could not restrain its greed and launched a war of aggression, which the South resisted with great, but ultimately hopeless, valor. The South seceded as a matter of principle: it was a question of “the role of government and what the rights of the people are”, as Haley said. It certainly wasn’t about slavery.

As a matter of history, the Lost Cause myth is preposterous. South Carolina, in its Declaration of Secession, cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery.” In the decades preceding the War, it had become clear that the practice of slavery was in decline. The idea that people captured in Africa and brought to the Americas against their will were not chattel, but human beings, was spreading alarmingly. Far from merely wanting to be left alone, the South wanted the practice of slavery to be expanded into the new states and territories of the West. Schemes were hatched to annex Cuba and Nicaragua to the US, to add more slave regions to the United States, so that pro-slavery forces could maintain political power. The South sensed that it was on the wrong side of history, a state of affairs it found intolerable.

In fact, the Lost Cause myth originated decades after the War had ended, as an attempt at retroactive exculpation, once Reconstruction had failed and the North had exhausted its will to enforce the Constitution south of the Mason-Dixon line. It was largely created, and heavily promoted, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which was established 29 years after the end of the War. The UDC was responsible for the erection of those Confederate monuments that are the subject of controversy today, as well as pushing Lost Cause mythology into history textbooks. The UDC, and the Lost Cause myth it promoted, provided the underpinning and legitimizing mythology for the Jim Crow era, in which the white South established a regime of systematic racial oppression that was, de facto, an only modestly attenuated variant of slavery.

Haley probably knows all this. But she also knows that a constituency she wants to woo doesn’t want to hear it. Would it have been possible to thread the needle, to reference slavery, at least in passing, without hemorrhaging potential supporters who will abandon her for someone less “woke”? We’ll never know.

Like the other candidates challenging Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for President, Haley had to choose one of two lanes, both of which seem hopeless. The first is the Christie lane: tell the truth about Donald Trump, about his profound psychological, moral, and intellectual deficits, about the mortal danger his dictatorial impulses pose to the Republic, and hope to reawaken the spirit of the old Republican Party: fiscally and socially conservative, favoring a government modest in ambitions but high in integrity, combined with an activist foreign policy. People will quarrel over whether that “old” GOP ever existed, or whether it, too, was a self-serving myth. But in an important way, that quarrel is moot: whether or not it ever existed, it does not today, in any significant number. And that means Chris Christie won’t be the Republican nominee for President in 2024.

Haley chose the other lane: appeal to Trump supporters by being much like Trump, but better … somehow. And in that “somehow” lies the rub: all evidence suggests that Trump supporters consider their candidate perfect, or nearly so — and it’s hard to improve on perfection. So Haley is left searching for the magic formula, the key that will peel away enough of Donald Trump’s supporters to get her the nomination. In the heat of the moment, in Berlin, New Hampshire, Haley decided that saying the word “slavery” would cause the magic formula to be lost to her forever. What Haley, along with the rest of us, needs to grapple with is that maybe the magic formula doesn’t exist at all.

California is embarking on an ambitious program to mandate zero-emission vehicles (which today means electric vehicles, in practice), while also converting the electricity supply to renewables (mostly solar and wind, plus storage technology to be determined). An article by Andrew Stuttaford in National Review, “Volt Farce“, makes clear just how daunting the combination of those two tasks is: electricity production will need to double to accommodate all those new electric vehicles, at the same time non-renewable electricity production is phased out. Some 6 gigawatts of new, renewable production capacity will have to be brought on-line each year for the next 20 years — an unprecedented pace. (For comparison, peak total statewide demand in 2022 was about 52 gigawatts, one afternoon during a brutal September heat wave.) Over a million new public chargers will need to be built and installed.

Then there’s the grid, which connects power producers to power consumers. Nationwide, the grid is already stressed, and there’s a large backlog of planned transmission lines. Needing much more electricity than today, in different places and times of day, while also fundamentally changing the way electricity is produced, is going to put unpredictable, but large demands on a grid that is barely keeping up today.

There is one potential bright spot: renewable generation has to be complemented with storage, since (as its detractors enthusiastically point out) the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. But each electric vehicle comes with a big battery that stores energy. Today, electricity flows only one way: from the grid into the car. But in principle, a plugged-in, parked car could give up some of its stored electricity to the grid in times of high demand. An army of parked, plugged-in electric cars could do double duty as a storage buffer, providing energy where and when it’s needed and charging when supply exceeds demand.  Stuttaford points out, though, that “the technology is new and has not been tested in electric cars”.

All in all, a major challenge, with lots of ways for big, expensive things to go wrong. What could possibly be motivating California to undertake it? Stuttaford has an answer: “central planners”. They have decided we must all live with this project, and “central planners have a way of brushing unpleasant and inconvenient questions without bothering to come to an answer”. As for its prospects for success, they’re dim: those nasty central planners again. “When central planners are involved — and have no doubt, that’s what’s going on here — pessimism is the appropriate frame of mind.” (Delays in upgrading the nation’s grid seem to have more to do with a lack of central planning than an excess of it, but never mind.)

And what could be motivating those central planners? There is an obvious answer: the increasingly disastrous consequences of the human production of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The science keeps getting clearer: immediate and drastic action is needed to avert global catastrophe — exactly the kind of immediate and drastic action California is proposing to undertake.

But you won’t learn that from Stuttaford’s article. The word “climate” does not appear in it. Neither does “warm” or “warming” or “carbon” or “carbon dioxide”, except indirectly in noting that the electric grid is “already shaky … undermined by the decarbonization process”.

It seems like a significant omission. If Stuttaford doesn’t think there is any need to decarbonize, he should say so — and explain why he thinks he’s right and the world’s experts on the subject are wrong. If he thinks we do need to decarbonize, but there’s an easier way, he should at least hint at what that might be.

Just leaving us readers hanging doesn’t feel right. When your house is on fire, you don’t write articles about how hard it will be for the fire trucks to get up the driveway.

One of the more illuminating events in a year short of illumination was the recent publication, in Harper’s, of a letter signed by 153 scholars, writers, artists, and journalists, and the brouhaha in response.

The letter applauds the current protests and demands for inclusion and equality, calling them overdue. But it goes on to lament a growing intolerance and narrowing of discourse on the left (it acknowledges and treats as a given the extreme levels of intolerance on the right); and it asserts that broad and open dialogue is a prerequisite for achieving the goal of greater social justice and inclusion. It is, in short, a “small-l liberal” plea for a robust, broad marketplace of ideas in a free and open public square.

The blowback came fast and hard, and in its wake, two signers recanted. Professor Kerri Greenidge of Tufts initially said that she had not endorsed the letter at all, and would be requesting a retraction from Harper’s — though an email chain appeared to contradict her. And Jennifer Finney Boylan, an author, columnist, and professor, engaged in self-criticism for having lapsed into incorrect thought patterns, concluding, “The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.”

Why the fuss? The complaints about the letter are quite varied, and in some cases contradict each other: The letter is just a lot of whining by a bunch of has-beens resentful that they’re no longer relevant. Or the letter is pushback by immensely powerful people who want to retain their power. Or the letter is hypocritical because none of the signers has ever faced any consequences for anything they’ve ever written (Salman Rushdie’s name among the signers apparently having been overlooked). Or the letter is vague and incoherent, hence meaningless (so why all the excitement?). Everyone who was unhappy about the letter, apparently, was unhappy in their own way.

Nonetheless, some themes emerged. One was that, far from the “norms of open debate and toleration of differences” weakening, as the letter contends, they are actually growing stronger as the previously voiceless find their voice. The signers are merely unused to seeing their Olympian pronouncements being disagreed with, and mistake being challenged for being silenced. They can dish it out, but they can’t take it.

At least as a personal criticism of the signers, this argument is hard to sustain. Nothing in the letter suggests the signers are complaining that they themselves are being treated unfairly.

Another was that, whatever the merits of the letter, the signers were horrible people, so the whole letter was a bad faith exercise. That appears to have been at the root of Greenidge’s and Boylan’s back pedaling: Greenidge knew the text of the letter ahead of time (“it reads well”, she wrote), but had no idea that her signature would end up in disreputable company. And it is explicitly the text of Boylan’s anguished retreat, also: “I did not know who else had signed the letter”, she complained, adding, “I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.” The problem was the messenger, not the message.

The notion that the truth of a statement depends on who utters it has a long history; only with the advent of the Enlightenment did society really begin to internalize the idea of an external truth, independent of our hopes, fears, or the authority of the person saying it. Before that, if the pope or the king said it, then by golly it was true, and woe unto anyone who dared suggest otherwise. It remains a staple of dictatorships to this day. And it is far from extinct even in “advanced” nations like the US, where the current President spews an endless stream of obvious falsehoods that are accepted credulously by his most fervent followers in a way they never would be if spoken by someone else.  But modernity presumes that the truth of a statement is independent of the speaker. “The world’s greatest fool can say the sun is shining, but that doesn’t make it cloudy out”, as Robert Pirsig wrote.

Nonetheless, reputation matters. Even (maybe especially) in a wide open public square, a speaker’s reputation — or the company she keeps — is often a shortcut to deciding how carefully to listen to her opinions. Asked to sign a letter endorsing, say, public funding of healthcare, along with several other endorsers, most people would think twice if they found out the other signers were all members of the American Nazi Party. It’s just not company you want to be seen in.

Playing the role of the Nazi in today’s performance was J. K. Rowling, who has gone out of her way to make comments that offended transgender people. Leaving aside the question of just how bad a person J. K. Rowling is, she is one of 153 signers with a broad diversity of viewpoints. Is she a sufficiently bad apple to spoil the entire barrel? For many, the answer is apparently yes. That stance unwittingly supports the letter’s point that “censoriousness, … an intolerance of opposing views, [and] a vogue for public shaming and ostracism” are in the ascendant.

One response to complaints about “cancel culture” is that free speech does not mean freedom from accountability: people used to be able to express vile opinions (especially about race and gender) without fear of criticism; now they can’t, and that’s a good thing. There’s something to that. Some opinions are so terrible that they impair the credibility of the speaker on all subjects.

But in healthy discourse, that kind of ostracism should be the most extreme remedy, used in the rarest of circumstances. If nothing J. K. Rowling says on anything can be credited because she has expresses reprehensible opinions about transgender people; and any statement Gloria Steinem or Noam Chomsky make cannot possibly be correct if Rowling signed on, also; and inadvertently being caught in bad company is cause for groveling apology (“the consequences are mine to bear”); then the portal of truth rapidly shrinks to a pinhole. That is not the path of progress. We are all better than the worst opinion we have every expressed, and certainly better than the worst opinion of anyone we’ve ever agreed with on anything.

The Washington Post recently reported that Elizabeth Warren is being attacked as “angry” and “antagonistic”, and hence perhaps not likable. Amanda Hunter, a spokeswoman for the Barbara Lee Foundation, “citing extensive research”, is reported as saying that “voters will not support a woman they do not like even if they believe she is qualified … but they will vote for a man they do not like.”

This brought to mind the chapter “At the Parlor Lecture Club” from William Saroyan’s 1943 novel, The Human Comedy. Homer Macauley, the  young protagonist, is charged with delivering a telegram to Rosalie Simms-Pibity, the current speaker at the Ithaca Parlor Lecture Club, which appears to be solely attended by women. “Wonderful, plump, middle-aged ladies, most of them mothers, were cheerfully entering the building,” writes Saroyan.

It quickly becomes apparent that the telegram is a ruse: Homer is instructed to rush forward and interrupt the speaker to deliver the telegram only once she appears on the stage, as a device to inflate her importance. Saroyan continues:

“Members of the Ithaca Parlor Lecture Club,” the President of the Club began to say. “This afternoon,” she continued, “we have in store a great treat. Our speaker is to be Rosalie Simms-Pibity.” … “The story of Rosalie Simms-Pibity, ” the President of the Club said, as if she were telling a fable not the least unlike, or not one bit less majestic than the fable of the Odyssey itself, “is a story especially thrilling to women. Simms-Pibity — for that is how she prefers to be known — has lived a life brimming over with adventure, romance, danger, and beauty, and yet today she is scarcely more than a dashing handsome British girl — at the same time a girl hard as steel and stronger than most men….”

Now a note of tender sadness came into the voice of the President of the Ithaca Parlor Lecture Club as she continued the legend of the great female hero. “As for us,” she said somberly, “the stay-at-homes, the mothers, the bringer-uppers, so to speak, of children, the life of Simms-Pibity is like a dream — our dream — the unfulfilled dream of each of us who have only stayed at home, given birth to our children, and looked after our houses. Hers is the beautiful life each of us would have liked to have lived if we had dared, but Fate, as it will, has not decreed such adventures for us, and in all the world there is only one Simms-Pibity. Only one!”

There follows a multi-page recitation of Simms-Pibity’s adventures. Like Hemingway, she drove an ambulance in World War I. That is followed by a life of travel, espionage, disguise, bravery, and danger, in Africa, China, and Arabia.

“Simms-Pibity went disguised as an Egyptian woman one thousand miles on camel-back, her only companions coarse, native men who could speak no English.” The President of the Ithaca Parlor Lecture Club lifted her eyes at this remark and looked over at two of her most intimate friends. Homer Macauley wondered what she meant by that glance and then wondered how long she was going to continue to talk about this incredible and wonderful person, Rosalie Simms-Pibity.

Quite a while, it turns out, while Homer shuffles his feet impatiently, waiting for the speaker to appear at the lectern so that he can deliver the telegram as instructed. Finally, the President announces the speaker.

“It gives me great pride, as President of the Ithaca Parlor Lecture Club, to present to you — Rosalie Simms-Pibity!”

The applause this time was almost an ovation…. After perhaps two full minutes of clapping … the great lady finally presented herself.

Homer Macauley expected to see someone unlike any woman he had ever seen before in his life. He couldn’t imagine exactly what form this creature would take, but he felt certain that it would be surely at least interesting — and so it was. Rosalie Simms-Pibity was, briefly, an old battle-ax, horse-faced, sex-starved, dried-out, tall, skinny, gaunt, bony, absurd, and a mess.

Homer is pushed through the crowd to deliver his telegram.

On the stage the great lady pretended not to be aware of the commotion. “Ladies,” she began to say, “Members of the Ithaca Parlor Lecture Club–” Her voice was equal in unattractiveness to her person.

Homer Macauley hurried up onto the stage and in a very clear voice announced, “Telegram for Rosalie Simms-Pibity!”

The great lady stopped her speech and turned to the messenger as if his appearance was utterly accidental. “Here, boy,” she said, “I am Simms-Pibity!”

She glanced back at the audience and said, “Excuse me, ladies.” She signed for the telegram, took it from the messenger, and then offered him a dime, saying, “And that’s for you, boy.”

Like the fictional Simms-Pibity, this chapter has not aged well. Indeed, the characters are so cartoonishly broad that it’s hard to believe it was ever taken seriously as literature. Whatever the depths of the human soul, male or female, might be, Mr. Saroyan does not plumb them here.

But the caricatures do make his message clear. Women should be stay-at-homes, mothers, bringer-uppers of children. That way, they can become wonderful, plump, middle-aged ladies. They may think they want more, pine for Simms-Pibity’s life, maybe feel a frisson of sexual excitement at the thought of those coarse, native Egyptian camel riders who speak no English — but they are confused, bless their souls. That way lies ruination, and their thoughts of a larger life had best remain daydreams, lest they end up horse-faced, sex-starved, and dried-out.

Much has changed for women in the 76 years since that chapter was written, largely in the second half of that period. Until 1974, banks could refuse a credit card to an unmarried woman, or require her husband’s approval if she was married. In many states, women were automatically exempted from jury duty. The top educational institutions were almost exclusively male, while the relatively small number of selective women’s colleges saw their mission as producing cultured, refined wives and mothers. Adlai Stevenson was the graduation speaker for the Smith College class of 1955, and told the graduates that the purpose of their education was to make sure that their husbands always had high-quality reading material at their bedsides. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from Columbia Law School in 1959, tied for first in her class, she was unable to get a job as a lawyer, so outlandish was the notion of a top female attorney.

These rapid, tectonic shifts cannot help creating some social stress fractures. By and large, women have flourished under their ongoing liberation — unsurprisingly, people prefer being free to being constrained. But even some women have been unsettled by the rapid change in social expectations, and feel some ambivalence, and nostalgia for what is perceived to be a simpler time.

For men, the change has been more complicated. Human flourishing is not zero-sum, and improving the prospects of women has also liberated men to lead fuller lives — fatherhood, for one thing, can be much more rewarding today than it was when men’s role in child-rearing was limited to bread-winning and imposing punishment. Especially toward the lower end of the education and economic spectrums, though, men have had difficulty holding their own in a changing job market without the protection of a gender-based cartel.

Life is difficult under all circumstances, and when those circumstances are changing rapidly, it is easy to succumb to the nostalgic fallacy: things were so much simpler, better, happier in the good, old days. The political version of nostalgia is reaction: the desire to turn back the clock to an imagined, idyllic past. The mental archetypes of earlier times do not exit the stage gracefully or quickly.

Elizabeth Warren can stand for hours in the rain as her supporters take selfies with her, crouch down again and again to chat warmly with a young girl or boy, get photographed with her adorable golden retriever, and talk about her humble upbringing all she likes. She is an accomplished attorney and professor, intellectual and ambitious, aspiring to what is still the most powerful office on the planet. And that means that, no matter what she says or does, some will hear her voice and see her face, and hear only the unattractive  voice, and see only the sex-starved, dried-out horse face, of Rosalie Simms-Pibity.

 

A friend pointed me at this article by Michael Shermer, which suggests that a reinvigoration of what Shermer calls “classically liberal” values is what is needed to heal our divided country.

As a proponent of those classically liberal values precisely as Shermer defines them, I initially loved Shermer’s article, even though one wonders how much pure exhortation can accomplish. If a sizable minority in the nation opposes those values, and another sizable minority is indifferent to them, how much will just asking those groups to embrace liberal values help? Still, on the facts, Shermer is correct.

On a more careful reading, though, some of Shermer’s framing is wrong in a way that ends up being misleading in important ways.

Shermer begins with the recent incident at a Starbucks in Philadelphia. Let’s recap: two young men were waiting for a third man at a Starbucks, for a business meeting, and had held off ordering until the third man arrived. One asked to use the restroom, and was refused as he hadn’t ordered anything. Shortly after, the police were called, and arrested the two men for trespassing, putting them in handcuffs just as the third man arrived for the business meeting. Neither of the arrested men was disruptive or combative in any way. The two arrested men are black, the third man, the latecomer, is white.

Does anybody actually believe that this would have happened if the two young men were white? Or that this is just a freak, one-in-a-million occurrence caused by a rogue Starbucks manager?

Shermer sounds wounded that Starbucks is now making its employees undergo sensitivity training to combat implicit racism “that, apparently, everyone in the company unconsciously harbors.” Hurt feelings aside, is there an actual argument there?

Shermer writes: “Traditional bigotry operates by mapping a stereotype of a collective onto an individual. Within Starbucks, the process has been inverted, with the vector of prejudice emanating from the one to the many.” I don’t see this at all. The original incident was precisely a case of “mapping a stereotype of a collective” onto two individuals. Shermer seems more worried that Starbucks’s response to this incident is somehow inappropriate (how, exactly?) than about the incident itself.

There’s a more fundamental problem, though. Shermer provides a truly outstanding definition of the core elements of classical liberalism, as a set of bullet points. They’re so clear, concise, and complete that I’ll quote them in full here:

• a democracy in which the franchise extends to all adults;
• rule of law, including a constitution that is subject to change only under extraordinary political circumstances and well-defined judicial procedures; a legislature whose laws are applied equally to all citizens; and a system of courts that serves all litigants impartially;
• protection of civil rights and civil liberties;
• a potent police and military to ensure the safety of citizens;
• property rights, and the freedom to trade with others at home and abroad;
• a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system;
• freedom of internal movement;
• freedom of speech, the press, and association;
• mass education, accessible to all, of a type that encourages critical thinking, scientific reasoning, and the dissemination of knowledge.
• adequate public spending to help the needy—including the homeless, mentally ill, physically handicapped, unemployed, aged, and very young—through the provision of such needs as shelter, child care, food, energy, education, job training, and medical care.

My question is: how does this set of bullet points not coincide with the core values of the Democratic Party? And how has today’s Republican Party not positioned itself in opposition to every single one of these bullet points?

Shermer uses phrases like “the left”, “the social justice left”, and “liberals” (without the “classical” qualifier) interchangeably. That’s a pretty common tic, but it’s often malign, and certainly obfuscates. It leads directly to what Paul Krugman calls “both-sides-ism”: “gosh, isn’t it horrible that we’re so divided, if only there were someone who would stand up for classically liberal, centrist values.”

There is such a someone: it’s the Democratic Party. Shermer implies, at least, that those classical liberal values have been neglected or abandoned by all and sundry in favor of a deplorable factionalism practiced by all. In reality, the very source of the factionalism, and the intensity of the division, is that one side is defending those classical liberal values, while the other is attacking them. This is a fight over first principles, so it’s unsurprising that it’s bitter.

It is true that there is a left-wing ideology that puts group identity (ethnic/racial/gender) at its center, just as there is a right-wing ideology that does the same. These two ideologies have much in common, though the former is focused on using identity to transfer power to groups that have historically had less than their pro rata share, while the latter is focused on using identity to preserve what they correctly perceive as a diminishing surplus of power. Still, both are illiberal in carving up society along ethnic, racial, and gender lines.

What they don’t have in common is size, power, and influence. The left-wing identitarians exist, in small numbers, at the very fringe of the Democratic Party, and also outside the two-party system (two words: Jill Stein). The right-wing identitarians are in nearly total control of the Republican Party: Republicans who still hew to classic liberal values are either too cowed by the power of the identitarian majority to speak up, or are not running for office.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine an African-American man running for the Democratic nomination for President, with a platform that no white candidate could possibly be legitimate because such a candidate would represent “slave owner culture.” How far would that man get toward the Democratic nomination?

Now imagine a white man running for the Republican nomination for President, and claiming without any evidence whatsoever that the incumbent President, an African-American, was an illegitimate office holder because, not having been born in the US, he wasn’t a US citizen at all. Or that the incumbent President was secretly a Muslim. How far would that man get toward the Republican nomination?

Put another way: who’s more electable, Louis Farrakhan or Donald Trump?

We know the answer to that one, of course.

We are in a battle for the survival of precisely the classic liberal values that Shermer enumerates so articulately. On the classic liberal side is the bulk of the Democratic Party, a sizable number of independents, and a largely silenced minority of renegade and former Republicans. Opposing them is the bulk of the Republican Party along with a small fringe of left-wing ideologues. Why anyone on that side would ever be called “conservative” is beyond me. What is desperately in need of conserving now is precisely the traditional values that so many self-identified “conservatives” are trying to topple.

 

If I knew I’d be dead in a year …

… definitely less of this:

and more of this:

 

 

(With apologies to T. S. Eliot.)

OK, maybe it’s a little cowardly to respond to the disaster by hiding far away. Even here, it certainly isn’t out of our minds for long. But there is solace in sitting outside with Walter the dog and Lili the cat, as the sun sets, watching the surfers comb the white hair of the waves blown back.

We will linger here a little. Human voices will wake us soon enough.

 

Competence

Let’s start with the smaller part: our President-elect is remarkably ignorant of how government works or the challenges our nation, and the world, face. He doesn’t appear to have read the Constitution, and doesn’t seem to think much of whatever he’s heard about it. He is remarkably uninterested in learning. His decision to stop attending the daily Presidential intelligence briefings because “I’m, like, a smart person” speaks volumes. One yearns to ask him, and those who voted for him: Is it your impression that being President of the United States is easy? Should a President-elect, even one who is, like, a smart person, approach the new job with a certain amount of awe and humility, even fear; or is it the kind of job where winging it is good enough?

But the larger issue is mental competence. I do not say this to be insulting, or partisan, but as a simple statement of fact: the President-elect has obvious psychological disabilities that render him unqualified to be President of the United States. The rash insults, the constant self-praise, the clear tendency to shoot from the hip, and to double down when attacked — these are the hallmarks of a narcissistic personality with a brittle ego.

There is nothing particularly subtle about Donald Trump’s psychology. He’s not the charming guy who reveals himself to be a sociopath after you marry him. He’s an open book: what you see is what you get. That will also be obvious to foreign leaders, the more unscrupulous of whom will find it ridiculously easy to manipulate him, by goading him, or flattering him, or challenging him, or telling him that somebody else is laughing at him or doesn’t take him seriously. Consider that this childish, thin-skinned man will soon have his finger on the nuclear button, and realize that the United States is in as grave peril as it has ever been in.

Decency

Not the decency of Mr. Trump, which appears never to have existed. But decency on the part of the tens of millions of Americans who voted for him. The howling mobs yelling, “Lock her up” — at the Republican convention! The harassing of protesters, the racist taunts …. A friend sent a photo of a nice, middle-class home in Sebring, Ohio, the kind of place where parents likely work hard to pay the bills and raise their kids. And there on the front lawn is the sign: “Trump that bitch”. Some family values!

I have known my countrymen and women to be remarkably open, kind, and decent. I’m not blind to the thuggish mob behavior, the gross brutalities and indecencies we’ve regularly engaged in. This country was founded by conquering and displacing the previous inhabitants. It took almost a century for us to renounce slavery, and the racial divisions and wounds that atrocity engendered are with us still. But we keep trying to do better. And we mostly shun the angry mobs, the extremist inciters, and the cheesy demagogues. We listen, but we don’t let them run the show. That might happen in some third world countries, but not here. We’re better than that. Father Coughlin can have his radio program; Joe McCarthy can ruin quite a few lives before being exposed as a charlatan and ruining his own; George Wallace can carry six southern states. But we turn away; we always turn away. We would never actually vote someone like that into the Presidency. It’s just not who we are.

Or it’s not who we used to be, anyway.

Truth

This is the biggest one, because a democracy cannot function without it.

None of us has a perfect handle on the truth. We don’t have complete information, we’re not infinitely observant or intelligent, and all of us are prone to denial and wishful thinking. It’s part of being human.

But for a democracy to function at all, we have to agree that there is an external truth that exists independent of our needs, wishes, and fears; and that we trust our fellow citizens — at least most of them, most of the time — to acknowledge the existence of that external truth, and to arrive at peaceful compromise and effective government in the shared pursuit of it. In the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. It never actually works that way in practice, of course: it’s an aspirational model. But aspiring to it is a good thing; and the closer we get to it, the better we do, in governing ourselves equitably and in our dealings with other nations.

Donald Trump simply ignores the truth. Those who describe him as a serial liar may be missing something: he may simply consider the truth irrelevant, as opposed to considering it and deliberately telling a lie. Actual liars try harder to cover their tracks. Trump doesn’t bother. He baldly contradicts written and video records, and simply expects us not to care. He has treated the American people as if we were dumber than potatoes. It gives me absolutely no pleasure, no smug, coastal sense of superiority, to point out that that strategy actually worked.

Who can say what goes on in his head? He probably couldn’t tell us, even if he wanted to, introspection not being his long suit. My own sense is that Jonathan Chait got it closest to right when he said that Mr. Trump’s one core belief is that whatever is coming out of his mouth at any given instant is true.

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump should not be our main concern. Every nation has people like him. But we take the measure of ourselves in the voting booth: what are we willing to put up with? Do we care about what’s true, and what’s simply made up on the spot, do we allow ourselves to be distracted from our civic obligations as the citizens of a democracy? Forget, for a moment, holding our public officials accountable. Are we willing to hold ourselves accountable? On the answer to that question rests the health, indeed the survival, of our republic.

And the news is not good.

 

1968, when I was in seventh grade, was when I first became interested in politics. It was a tumultuous year. In January, the Tet offensive shook the US narrative of a steady slog toward victory in Vietnam. By March 31, President Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run for re-election, his Presidency broken by Vietnam and civil unrest. Just 4 days later, Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. was assassinated, and American cities exploded in riots.

I wasn’t in America; I was an American child living in Europe. I was an ardent Humphrey supporter; my friend, David C., was for Robert Kennedy. I still felt, at the time, that the cause the US was fighting for in Vietnam was a good one, and that Kennedy was too defeatist. (I’m not sure where that came from; to the best of my recollection, my parents were far more skeptical of the war than I was.)

On the morning of June 5, I got to school and found David in the hall listening to a transistor radio. “Kennedy’s been shot,” he said. For a seventh grader, just becoming aware of current events, it seemed that politics was one long series of assassinations.

Kennedy’s life hung by a thread during that school day. We had English class in the early afternoon, but our teacher, Miss W. was out, so the Physical Education teacher, Mr. B., substituted for her. Mr. B. was bluff, calm, amiable, but quietly authoritative: the kind of personality that the best coaches and police officers have.

At some point during the class, some of us must have been horsing around a little — I don’t remember what we were doing, exactly, only that it wasn’t a big deal. But Mr. B. snapped, which I had never seen him do: he shouted at us, told us to sit down and be quiet. Then he said, almost to himself, “I’m upset enough about what’s happening in my damned country, I just don’t need this.” His use of the word “damned” was as striking as his outburst — striking enough that I remember it nearly half a century later.

Democracies are fragile, and ours keeps being bent, in one way or another, by events and by our most fervent disagreements. Sometimes it seems it is getting bent beyond repair, but it keeps snapping back. You could say it broke during the Civil War, but somehow, after killing over 2% of our own population, we patched things up, however messily, and carried on. At other times, even after horrendous missteps, we have found our more level-headed selves and returned to the uneasy business of getting along. During the seven years after Mr. B.’s outburst, we endured a Democratic convention of tear gas and riots; saw Richard Nixon elected, then re-elected, then resign in the face of overwhelming scandal; and withdrew from Vietnam. Yet by 1976, traveling around the country, as I did, it was clear that the war at home was over. Disagreements didn’t end, of course, but as a nation, we were at least back on speaking terms with each other.

We’re being bent again now.  A sizable minority among us is enraged at our current state: some because their times are genuinely hard, and some, bafflingly, because they think there must be easier answers for a complex, changing world. Through a fluke of electoral politics, that sizable minority has chosen our next President: a shallow, compulsive liar with a thin skin, an admiration for dictators and an intolerance of dissent, who has gained power by fanning the most divisive sentiments we harbor.

I’d like to believe that this is just a phase we’re going through, that this flirtation with authoritarianism will pass, that we will find our own cooler heads, eventually, and show the world that we still know how to make democracy work.

But the world changes, and so do we, as a people. Just because we’ve survived every bend until now doesn’t mean we won’t break this time. Once again, we find ourselves at the abyss. Let’s hope that, as we have before, we find it in ourselves to take a deep breath, step back, and allow the American experiment to endure.