Compassion Deficit

Although New Hampshire went for Harris in the recent election, her opponent enjoys considerable support from people who have flown his banners continuously since 2015. Because the state population is predominantly white and conservative, with a deep puritanical tradition, most of the residents will feel only the generic ill effects of the incoming administration's economic policies, rather than the targeted persecution promised by the winning party's campaign. Hard to say whether anyone in the protected majority right around here will bother to lash out at marginalized people. I expect few serious personal attacks and atrocities, just slurs and shoves.

Legislatively it's a different story. With a Republican governor and legislative majority, and MAGA still controlling the national Republican brand, women's freedom and health remain at risk, education funding is in peril, and the future of federal funding the state has relied on to keep its parsimonious tax system on life support is questionable. The tourism economy depends on at least the appearance of a clean natural environment, but with the economy likely burning down nationwide, who will have the money to be a tourist? And the ski industry is clearly doomed by the abandonment of any efforts to slow climate change.

We always have our wealthy summer residents. They are buying up more and more of the quaint towns and villages they treasure as theme parks of family memory, which stimulates the incomes of building contractors and maintenance staff to keep everything nice for them in the off season. Anyone outside of these bubbles will be struggling, but then they always have. It's a point of pride to work long hours at a brutal job like logging, and vote against anything that might make your life more comfortable. The risk is too great that it might make someone else's life more comfortable, someone who doesn't deserve it. And that is the root of the compassion deficit that fuels MAGA.

Compassion deficit underlies all conservative political philosophy, but MAGA concentrates it to a high potency drug. If a conservative person isn't experiencing difficulties, anyone else who experiences those difficulties brought it on themselves. Difficulties are a sign of poor character. If your unusual circumstances make you a target for hardship, quit being unusual! Being normal isn't so hard. Just be normal!

If your norm is based on being a white male or a white female under the protection of a white male, how do you expect someone of a darker hue or not in a safe, subservient relationship to normalize themselves to your satisfaction? The country was built on incurable disparities. Slave labor built the Southern economy, and much of the early infrastructure of the federal government. The abolition of slavery didn't miraculously transform the freed population into acceptable citizens. The conflicts of the 1840s and '50s continue today. And the country's embrace of immigrants has added more unrest.

The Statue of Liberty will probably be melted down now to make ammunition for the Border Patrol.

A progressive attitude depends on people who realize that our entire species will do better once we make it a priority to help our entire species do better. You can't keep exporting your problems, putting dirty industries in seemingly distant lands. Their smokestacks belch poison into the same atmosphere we all use. You can't exploit labor in countries far away and not expect to pay for it in some other way. You can't ignore massacres because no one happens to be massacring you at the moment. If you make your country good for yourselves, expect displaced people from the ruined lands to want to get in here. If you isolate yourselves from the world, your nation still has to hold its place among rivals all too happy to close in if you let your guard down. The alliances with dictators that led to the installation of the one we are going to coronate on January 20, 2025 obligate our dictator to those other ruthless powers. Our dictator is not a fighter. His counselors are not fighters. They're sleazy quislings who will deal away the lives of ordinary citizens to preserve their own comforts in the hateful world they helped create.

We have a few chances to pull the country back from complete submission to the will of tyrants. It's not tyranny when your old racist jokes aren't funny anymore, and people abandon bigoted attitudes. It's not tyranny to tax businesses and individuals that have grown fat on, among other things, government contracts funded by taxpayer dollars. It's not tyranny to release women from second-class citizenship. It's not tyranny to release health care from the grip of insurance and pharmaceutical profiteers. It's tyrannical to deny these things and to codify a tiered society in which some people are more equal than others. That's about to happen.

Cynics will say that we already live in that society, and they're not entirely wrong. However, we still had mechanisms to exert our own leverage, if we had been able to gather enough voters to weigh that plank down. The beneficiaries of our ignorance and distrust have dumped enormous bags of money on the other end of it. They fund all of the information channels that keep us apart. The mechanisms survive, but barely. Mostly dead isn't the same thing as completely dead. But we do have to survive a couple of years, minimum, of whatever chaos the incoming government unleashes on us in their greedy bumbling.

Somehow, we have to get people who don't already understand it to believe that caring about other people and promoting their acceptance doesn't cost most of us a thing. It will undoubtedly chip away portions of the obscene fortunes of a few individuals. That is not a bad thing in the least. Every person alive is a stakeholder in the planet. The few have their fortunes. All we will ever have is each other. We won't agree on everything. We shouldn't agree on everything. But if we don't resuscitate democracy we will lose even the faintest chance to participate in government rather than just submitting to our rulers. Restore the checks and balances. Suffer through the boring slog of learning how government works and why we need one. No one's liberty is absolute, but we can improve everyone's average if we try.

Have they got us by the founding document?

 I keep seeing posts on Xwitter asking whether we should impeach Clarence Thomas. Other posts ask about investigating and prosecuting members of Congress and other public and political figures for crimes associated with the Trump administration.

Of course we should. The Constitution provides a few avenues through which this can be done, and the legend of the Rule of Law in this country promotes the belief that the public should welcome it. Investigate fully and fairly. Penalize appropriately.

The problem is that the government is not the Constitution. It is the visible manifestation of the intentions of the Constitution. It relies on people to execute the programming written into the Constitution. Partisan people. And it all plays out in front of an audience constantly being recruited by the two major political parties and a myriad of fringe groups.

You'll have your own opinion about which of the two major parties is more corrupt and why it's the Republicans. It's easy to spout the truism "power corrupts," and point to political machinery in strongholds of either party. How about this? Corruption empowers. Look at Jimmy Carter. A nice guy who made it all the way to presidency of the United States, and then spent his retirement helping poor people get houses. While he was in office he was terrible at playing the power games necessary to outmaneuver political opponents and impress the public. A little bit of sleaziness could have shined up his image.

Anyone who stays in the game develops a cloud of suspicion around them. No human reaches a position of power without offending someone, or worse. The more entitled to power a person feels, the more they will treat others as objects to be used. Power selects for corruption.

Power also selects for nobility. Some leaders have the ego to envision themselves in a prominent role, but the integrity to respect the humanity in at least some of the people they deal with as peers, rivals, and constituents. The greater the recognition of humanity, the higher the level of actual nobility. These are the people who concede elections when they lose, acknowledge their mistakes, and accept the just penalties for more serious transgressions.

The Constitution was designed to protect us from authoritarian leaders. But the country itself was formed by compromises between factions with opposing views of who gets the rights of full citizenship, and how the governments of states interact with federal authority. As the country expanded and developed, private wealth gained unanticipated power. At first this seemed to be a point of pride, that hardworking Americans could amass fortunes that rivaled the old money of Europe. It was only fitting that these achievers should exert leverage on the government. Weren't they of the people? Shouldn't the country be for them, as leading citizens?

We're still arguing over the place that massive wealth should have compared to the workers who generate the wealth. In the meantime, the country still needs to run. Power gravitates to the people best placed to exert it. The members of the Republican Party, and the billionaires pouring money into increasingly questionable plans for the country are already framing the constitutionally outlined processes for dealing with criminals who infiltrate government as totalitarian attacks on legitimate political opponents. Americans who have absorbed decades of anti-government rhetoric and stories about totalitarian regimes in other countries don't scrutinize the critical differences between a righteous defense of citizen government and American liberty, and a genuine act of dictatorial revenge.

The Republican Party declared war on the United States when Ronald Reagan gave his commandment that no Republican shall speak ill of another Republican. It squashed intra-party dissent and set them on the path to perceiving themselves as the only true Americans. It began the rightward drag that has dumped us here on the threshold of genuine fascism.

The f-word gets thrown around a lot, so I can't blame busy people for just tuning it out as more hype. Just remember that one day the boy who cried wolf actually got eaten by a wolf. If you never have a fire drill, how do you know what to do when there's a fire?

To get to the point where we could even consider investigating and prosecuting all of the criminals associated with the Trump administration, we first have to remove the GOP from power in Congress, deny them the presidency, and break their power at the state level and below. Then we have to remain vigilant so that the Democratic Party doesn't succumb to its own forces of corruption, because corruption cozies up to power.

Citizen government requires constant attention. This alone is why overworked, tired people are tempted by an authoritarian leader and his political machine, so that they don't have to think about it anymore. It's all nicely bleached and homogenized.

Our country has tried traitors before, and investigated presidents. What stops us now, besides the decades of paranoia cultivated in susceptible conservative voters, is the sheer scale of it: so many people in all three branches of the federal government and multiple state governments. Private citizens. Foreign agents. It's too big, too close to focus on. If ever something did need to be prosecuted to prove that the Constitution is real and powerful, it's this mess. Republicans are going to have to acknowledge it and join the Democrats in calling it out and taking it down. Many of them won't. Even if none of them do, the Constitution, the undying document from which we all get our notions of individual rights, must be defended.

It will be very hard to punish the most powerful criminals in the Trump administration, because they have legends now. Lock them up and they become folk heroes. If they die in prison they become martyrs. It will be very frustrating to watch, but nowhere near as frustrating as watching them skate away with no consequences, or far worse, getting elected again to cinch their theocracy and take us all to church with them. It was another Republican who declared to the world, "If you're not with us, you're against us." That all or nothing mindset is deadly for a country that wants to think of itself as the Land of the Free.

Veterans of the Covid Insurrection

 Because everything in the United States has to turn into a stupid argument if not an outright gunfight, response to the global pandemic has been no exception, including the brandishing of firearms as the proponents of liberty bellow their defiance. Sides have been chosen all over the world. The US is not the only place in which oppositional defiance and paranoia have hampered perfectly reasonable procedures to restrict the spread of a new and contagious disease that can kill people fairly readily.

None of this is news to anyone who has not been in a coma for the past year. With every piece of good news about containment and prevention of Covid-19 comes a volley back about how the disease isn't serious, how the dead we're losing are just old people who would die soon anyway, how the disease itself -- though not serious -- was created in a Chinese lab as an attack on America, or possibly commissioned by the Deep State to help enslave ordinary citizens, and how the vaccine is in various ways tainted.

Live free or die. The sentiment is hardly limited to New Hampshire, where adherence to disease precautions has been average or better. But it perfectly describes how the heroes of the biological warfare insurrection view their cause. They bravely risk getting the sniffles to prove to the cowardly mask wearers that life is to be lived and death is to be embraced. And occasionally one of them gets very sick. Some die. Heroes all.

The rest of the quote from General John Stark is that death is not the worst of evils. Death isn't the only consequence of Covid-19. Some people suffer long-term ill effects. But the dead and the long-haulers are still in the minority. Most who get the disease and survive have their story to tell, about barely being sick, or feeling like they had a nasty flu, or even being so trampled that they had trouble drawing a full breath, and lay in delirious fevers for days. That's if they didn't have to be hospitalized. But if they survived and recovered, clearly there was nothing to worry about. And now they're immune, right? Problem solved. Challenge faced and overcome. That which did not kill them not only made them stronger, it confirmed them in their arrogance.

Once in a while you hear of one who repented and bore witness to the world that they were wrong, and that we should take this disease seriously. Wimps. Softies. When this is all over in a few months we'll all be drinking and laughing together about how so many people got duped into wearing masks and getting vaccinated with some pharmaceutical company's experimental drug, while the brave and proud remained valorous and philosophically pure. And had fun.

A half a million dead is a tiny fraction of the total population of the United States. This will be swept aside by the return of mass entertainment and the distractions of political theater.

First they came for the...

History repeats itself because it is a product of a species that is generally slow-witted, irritable, and hates change.

The oft-quoted words of Martin Niemöller about the sequential suppression of groups deemed undesirable by the Nazis stir no anxiety in the Nazis themselves. Granted, in a paranoid, authoritarian regime there will be internal strains from time to time. You want to watch your back and try to be sensitive to shifts in power, but that's upper echelon stuff. Down in the middle and lower ranks, you'll be fine if you just don't think for yourself. 

Here in America, the happy followers of rising authoritarianism still talk about freedom, but they've actually given up on the idea of personal advancement. They know that the game has been rigged against them. Now they're just begging for sustenance in return for obedience, and protection in return for nationalism.

What changes as history is added? The population of humans steadily rises. Technology becomes more sophisticated. These should not be brushed off. They're critical variables. Denser populations mean we are forced into contact with each other. Technological advancements mean that people in power can exert control far more easily than control can be wrested from them. You can neither run nor hide. Back in the 1930s, you could still do both.

Because technology can't be rolled back without a pretty widespread catastrophe, our only check on its power is our own will to control it. It can't be made idiot proof. You can't set it and forget it.

I can see why hardworking people are ready to let go of democracy. I learned a few months ago that you have to contact your legislators all the time, even if you are confident that they will vote your way on an upcoming issue, because they need to be able to show supporting numbers when they're arguing for their point of view. So a voter really needs to follow every issue and ring in for or against, just to be sure that representative government is as accurately representative as possible. All this is on top of your virtuous toil in service to the economy. Day off? No such thing. You're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution. The issues never rest. Nor should you.

The realization that the work never ends feeds the desire for Utopian solutions. If everyone believed the same thing, we could all relax, because the natural flow of decision making would support the greater good. Now listen to my beliefs...

Reality is always messier than even our most chaotic imagination. Everything could be destroyed in the competition between Utopian visions. But if it doesn't feel Utopian to you, then it isn't really The One. When, oh lord, will we ever truly be able to set it and forget it?

If freedom isn't free, but nothing else is free either, what's worth the trouble at all? Freedom requires such constant maintenance that it becomes a kind of enslavement all its own. Someone sneaky or overbearing will always try to bend things for personal gain or factional advancement. It's mentally and emotionally exhausting. The simple pressure of tyranny feels like a relief. Then you know who's stepping on you, and you can focus on building up your tolerance to it. As a citizen, you no longer have the constant pressure to make the right decision. You're free to devote yourself to simple survival and pointless griping. You're absolved of guilt.

Tyrants and Patriots

The only way for the tyrants versus patriots model of a free society to work is if you have a bloody revolution every ten years to wrest power from the last crop of revolutionaries who have made their pile and blocked upward mobility. Too often and no one has a chance to make it. Not often enough and peace becomes a habit. Tyranny establishes its propaganda machine to make the status quo seem patriotic.

A country constantly swept by armed revolt can never be great, but greatness is itself an enemy of freedom through equality. If we had focused on our own freedom and happiness,  we would never have become imperialists. We might have temporarily united in the face of actual invasion, but only long enough to clear the field for our own intramural contests.

Sitting as we do, upon a vast swath of arable land and tempting exploitable resources,  we had no choice but to eschew a course of frequent cleansing in showers of blood. We had to become a robust nation paying lip service to pure liberty while dealing in all the intrigue and oppression that naturally go with the running of a mature country.