Hail Mary pass incomplete

 When Joe Biden took office, his administration knew that they had a limited window in which to make noticeable improvements in the economy. People fail miserably at voting with their wallets, but they vote from them all the time.

Simultaneously, the Biden administration had to lay down social progress that would reassure the progressives who had grudgingly thrown in with them. Everyone wants a magic bullet election, regardless of how history shows that we never ever get them and never will. Government doesn't work that way, especially in a ponderous global superpower. Make up your mind: do you want to be the exceptional behemoth that steers the entire rest of the world with your economic and military might, or do you want to have a government that operates with absolute transparency and almost telepathic indulgence of your most recent hot take?

Foreign relations have always depended on public agreements and secret treaties. The general public has never known a fraction of the details of interactions with other nations. As technology evolved, the extent of the gap between public and insider knowledge has increased. You can't run a real grownup country without a bunch of things that happen out of the spotlight.

The opposition filled the news with as much distraction as they could. The media helped them immensely by taking that bait.  The senate majority failed because of Manchin and Sinema. When the House of Representatives went under Republican control in 2022, it was all over. We could pretend that it wasn't, and set our sights on 2024, but the odds of success had crashed. Ideological voters dashed away, while consumerist voters fell for the raft of lies floated by the presidential challenger and lovingly illuminated by the corporate media and the relentless right wing disinformation machine. The Biden administration was democracy's hail Mary pass, and it dropped to the field without anyone near it.

The 45th occupant of the Oval Office had packed the courts with the judges he was assigned by oligarchy's intellectual machine. He's too stupid and short-sighted to care about anything other than his own immediate pleasure. But that doesn't matter when his backers assure him that an appointment will work out in his favor. Naked corruption goes unpunished when the institutions assigned to control such behavior are already corrupted. Clarence Thomas doesn't care about the country, "his people," or anything more than his own access to luxuries. He made it, and frames his story as the American Dream written in bold Black. Y'all go out and cut your own deals to get ahead. That's how this country works. You figure out how to monetize your most prominent characteristics. Why do you think so many Black entertainers signed on for the Inaugural festivities? Money's money and a gig is a gig. They got theirs. Y'all figure out how to get yours, and ignore the losers dying all around you.

The unhappy consumers low in the food chain who make up the solid core of Republican support would have benefitted greatly from the Biden administration's policies to grow the economy "from the bottom up and the middle out," but they've been so conditioned to hate the government in general and the Democrats in particular that they will very seldom cross that line. I know a tiny few who appear to have done so, but they're unlikely to do it again soon, because it didn't work this time. They were betrayed and abandoned by the non-voters. We may not get another chance anyway. Between the damage that the oligarchy has already done, and the structural reinforcements they will build without opposition over the coming years, they may manage to make elections into the kind of meaningless shows that they are in Russia and Hungary, and other nations collapsing into right wing fantasylands.

It's tempting to check out, to disconnect completely from politics. That temptation is what got us where we are. In defense of that apathy, we could say that not much seemed to change from one party's control to the other, because both factions seemed to believe in principle in the vague generalities of the American ideal. Even the Republicans could be convinced to support some environmental protections and diversity initiatives. The environment was a slightly easier sell, because diverse people are so weird and disturbing, but we made progress all the same, until the backlash of 2016 blew it all up.

The "left" frames everything as a cooperative endeavor. The right frames everything as a war. The "left" tries to promote kindness and tolerance. The right stokes anger and promotes aggressive confrontation. There are exceptions in that Black protesters might lose their tempers after yet another deadly police encounter, and gosh that's just unforgivable, those uppity n****rs! But in general the leaders of what are referred to as leftist groups in this country try to conduct themselves as they wish that we all would. They keep advocating for ridiculously expensive things like an actual system of universal health care that would threaten the ability of anyone to amass multibillion-dollar fortunes at the expense of sick people, and environmental regulations that will assure that the children coming into the world now won't die miserably on a smog-choked, stinking rock swirling forlornly around its sun.

We might yet manage to veer toward that left exit and get on the road to the pretty planet where people realize that they're going to have to get along. We're going to need a lot more people to wake up and start leaning that way. You don't have to blossom into a full-blown commie liberal. Just vote against the anger and destruction a few times and see how it goes when you give it more than an 18-month chance.

-ophobia

Idly cruising Twitter this morning, I kept seeing a thread about how legal experts on the right and the left are continuing and intensifying the polarization that has afflicted us increasingly since the election of 1980. The thread addresses the alignment of the legal profession into partisan wings, and the presentations of argument and information by each side.

Justice may be supposed to be impartial, but the law is consciously and purposely partial. Laws are written to define what is legal and what is not. Judicial interpretations declare a winner. Discussions of legal interpretation will have their basis in the philosophical position of the interpreter. Lawyers go into litigation knowing who they want to see as the winner. Even a negotiated settlement starts from the premise that there are sides -- two or more -- to the question.

Polarization in American politics has waxed and waned many times since the country's founding. The height of tension usually yields to a partial solution good enough to bring things down from a boil while not really fixing anything in the long term. One time, the boiling escalated to the actual Civil War, but even that only brought the partial solution that ended open warfare between white people, but left African Americans subject to racism and oppression.

Side note: No crisis ever addressed the treatment of Native Americans in a dramatic and significant way. The treatment of the indigenous people grew from fundamental principles of capitalist expansion even more so than did slavery. Slavery might seem like the capitalist dream of labor, but it is economically debatable. Displacement of the natives and seizure of their assets is only morally objectionable, and morals have no weight in capitalism. If there's more money to be made being cruel and heavy handed, guess what's going to happen.

Today, humans face many issues that have been presented in a binary fashion: it must be this way or that way. You're either with us -- in complete agreement -- or against us. This attitude closes the door to both compromise and synergy. Compromise is often worse than polarization, as elements of each side's plan are instituted in ways that guarantee that neither one will work. But synergy draws from actual good ideas that may have come from disparate sources, blended into a policy that actually helps. It's extremely rare, but possible. The resulting policy might be almost entirely as one side wants it, but with some rough edges or sharp points sanded off, or some curlicues and doodads simplified as a result of beneficial critical input.

The situation is rendered more difficult by the fact that the side we refer to as the left has had a better vision of the future than the right since at least the early middle of the 20th Century. But the broad divisions of left and right encompass fringe elements that represent unacceptable authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is the lazy or desperate shortcut to enforcement of ideas that should be popular enough on their own to need no whip hand to keep them dominant. But the whip hand is attractive to some people. They may use social philosophy as a basis for their policy prescriptions, but they also just like whipping. "It's for your own good!"

The lawyer suggesting that inquiring minds delve deeper than the talking points and the exchange of clever snark between right and left stated that we would do better to listen to more voices on each side and find common ground. That sounds bravely intellectual, strong, and positive. And it can be. But it requires strength and courage to listen deeply and carefully to the intellectual proposals of someone speaking from a point of view opposite to your own. Common ground is very scary.

An argument against homophobia has long said, "What are you afraid of? That you might be attracted?" It calls upon the 'phobe to face up to their own inner self, to entertain the possibility that their own subconscious might entertain the possibility. Arguments for open consideration of sociopolitical solutions that incorporate elements from the conservative, racist side risk legitimizing it. Because both sides depend on basic principles that have to be accepted as absolute in order for the subsequent logic to hold up, following a logical path on the right inevitably leads back to their version of bedrock. Trickle down happens in porous limestone. "White supremacy is real, y'all, just look at how we have dominated every major trend in history for a couple of centuries." "You're just jealous of the wealthy and want to rob them of the fruits of their hard work and superior intelligence."

The most blatant straw-person arguments can be brushed aside. It gets harder when the opposition comes up with something that sounds okay, like figuring out that profit-driven health insurance is bad for small business and the self employed. I saw a thing on Breitbart once that I actually agreed with. It was very unnerving, because it was nested among tons of other stuff that I didn't agree with at all. So the brave intellectual sifting through for things on which to agree has to wonder how many poison pills will be thrown in with the little kibble of real nutrition that one might glean from sources more noted for their bigotry, and their hostility to inclusion and diversity.

By welcoming the input of opposition thinkers, each side complicates the chess game in which a benign move may conceal deeper strategy. Indeed, how could it not? We can't even really agree on the ultimate objective of society. Is it to provide necessary services cost effectively to the people within its boundaries, with a broader view of improving quality of life world wide? Or is it to facilitate the most ruthless and financially successful competitors in a winner-take-all world of endless conflict? Is it survival of the fittest? If so, fittest by what definition? Are the stakes life and death? Should the losers in capitalism be destroyed as quickly as possible to make way for the victors to prosper?

Should we throw open the town square and let every idea seek its popular following? The condition of the environment demonstrates how harmful pure democracy can be. Many people would say that they are in favor of a clean environment, but sales of fuel-guzzling vehicles remain robust, off-highway recreational vehicles (dirt bikes, ATVs and snow machines) are extremely popular toys, and motor boats far outnumber sailboats at most launching sites -- motor boats towed behind fuel-guzzling large vehicles capable of pulling them at highway speeds. People buy large houses of poor quality, built quickly, often on virgin land or former farm land. Most development chews up new land rather than redeveloping old sites, while developers continue to press for lenient environmental regulations so that they do not have to mitigate the effect of covering more and more ground with impervious surfaces. You might consciously vote every couple of years for lip service policies that restrain the destruction, but in day to day life the wallet votes add up strongly on the other side.

In a purely capitalist world, everything and everyone is for sale. If you're not for sale -- or at least for rent -- you deserve nothing from the marketplace of life. You might want to choose your clientele based on your personal principles, but this usually limits your income. Sometimes it limits it pretty severely.

In a collectivist world everyone has to kick in, too. Totalitarian collectivism might provide comfortable basic sustenance for everyone, but any human organization tends to develop some degree of hierarchy. "Some are more equal than others." Any synergy of free enterprise and collective sharing of responsibilities needs to take that into account.

A perfect example of how opposition input can destroy a collectively-based social policy is the so-called Affordable Care Act. As soon as the insurance industry had their operatives in Congress kill the public option, the ACA became just a herding mechanism for profit-driven insurance and health care providers. A lot of people believe that they benefitted by being able to get insurance when they could not get it before, but it's still a complicated bureaucratic mess designed around corporate income, not patient outcome.

Yes, we should listen to all intelligently composed input. But the answer still may be no, and perhaps even hell no.

A drunken preppy snot on the Supreme Court

Only the people in the room at the time know the absolute truth about what happened between Christine Blasey (Ford) and Brett Kavanaugh. Each side has its adherents. One side is wrong. There is no debate.

Setting aside that specific issue, the crisis served as a pressure test that the nominee failed. He demonstrated that he is not impartial or dignified or resistant to stressful confrontation. Perhaps that explains why he was comfortable as a law clerk and then on the bench, because in neither case does he have to face adversaries in argument. He was doing research, running errands, and then, after he was appointed to his first judicial position by George W. Bush, he got to sit up there in the black robe and preside over the lowly combatants presenting their arguments before him.

The expensive incubators of the leadership class in this country can't help but foster a climate of unquestioned entitlement to rule. Your Type A achievers already have more than a little of the psychopath in their makeup, just to have a strong enough ego to play to win all the time. You will sometimes win in spite of yourself, but if you want to make a habit of it you must feel that you deserve to prevail. You have to convince yourself that you are at least as good as everyone in the field. When that field has been distilled from the most powerful families, over multiple generations, your ego has to be that much more aggressive. You hope that they're driven to do things society finds beneficial, because they're going to do them anyway.

My own experience as a preppy snot was limited to two years in a fairly minor boys' school in Maryland, after two years in the school just down the road from it, that was coed through sixth grade, and girls-only through 12th. That school was trying to go coed, so they added boys to a grade at a time going up. I could have attended with the first class of boys that went on to graduate from there. Instead, I did as the boys had done in prior years: I went up the road to the one that bolstered the masculine image.

It sucked. I hated it. But it was a good experience to have had. The entire student body seemed to fit itself into a bullying hierarchy. That was educational.

Abused people become abusers. No doubt some of my later actions through the years, the ones I look back on with the most shame and chagrin, stemmed from trained responses I had to the world view created by a culture of bullies and their subjects -- not to say victims. Victim is a very specific role defined by the amount of helplessness and degree of damage suffered. I was miserable, and suffered a lot of symptoms of stress, but most of the immediate oppression went away when I finally snapped and punched somebody in the face. That sums up the boy/man view of interpersonal relations completely. Punch somebody. Repeat as necessary for the relief of whatever is bugging you.

My older brother attended that boys' school for four years, graduating in 1971. He told me about how the boys in his class who lived nearby would go home and drink alcohol at lunch. Their weekend and vacation parties were legendary. We didn't hear anything about gang rape or contrived ways to get young women to have sex with them, only that young women did. The Sexual Revolution was intensifying rapidly from 1967-'71 (and beyond), so a lot of young women were up for more adventure than might hitherto have been the case. It's the alcohol that stands out, given the role of that liquid in the recent shameful circus in the Senate.

My father had been a scholarship student at Browning from 1939 to about 1943. He has never told me stories of underage drinking there -- he saw more of that from fellow Eagle Scouts when he worked for the Boy Scouts of America in New York. He did recount visits to the homes and Long Island "cottages" of some of his classmates who extended some degree of friendliness -- but never equal status -- to this funny little guy from Paris, who got in not because he was connected, but because he was merely smart. Smart doesn't get you shit unless you can convince the privileged people that you can do something to make them more so. He was unable to do this. Classmates of his went on to do things like inherit the New York Times.

In my own teen years in public school, I knew that some of the kids were having very wild parties and going to bars with fake IDs. It's a teen thing, not just a preppie thing. What sets the prep culture apart is their assumption of superiority. Even if an exlusive school requires community service, it's reaching down to help, not pitching in on a struggle that they share in any way.

People can and do learn from their past mistakes and become better people as a result. Or they settle in and become better at being the kind of jerk they were then, only with more experience.

The newest addition to the Supreme Court destroys forever our longstanding illusion of an impartial judiciary. Law is about interpretation. No jurist can be impartial, because the very act of deciding depends on point of view. A result may run counter to expectations, but always for an interpretive reason ultimately formed by ideology. No matter how convoluted the connection may be, any decision they hand down has to satisfy their philosophy. Everything that this young man passes judgment on will pass through the filters of his education, experience, mentors, and vision for the world. There's no longer any point in trying to guess how he will fulfill his duties. From now on we have to deal with how he actually does.