politics
- Killing is not only an appropriate answer to killing, it is the only appropriate answer.
- The worst betrayal possible is any opposition to killing.
- The only appropriate answer to killing is not only killing—it must be disproportionate killing.
- Any hypothetical future threat of potential attack justifies the same disproportionate violent response as an actual attack.
- Any killing we do, not matter how indefensible it is, can only ever be self-defense.
- Wanting to wage war makes you correct in a way that overcomes evidence or results or even coherence.
- Killing is the only thing that will keep us safe from killing. Therefore, anyone who opposes killing represents a threat justifying further killing.
- “Billionaires are quite philanthropic. Sure, this is a general statement, but check it out.”
- “The reason billionaires are billionaires is that, generally, they work extraordinarily hard to invest their capital using wisdom while calculating risks.”
The blessing of the dedicated civil servant
There’s a wonderful long-form profile on the Washington Post right now about Chris Mark, a man who eschewed an opportunity for a upper-class education to (literally) go work in the coal mines, and ended up revolutionizing coal mine safety. (That’s a gift link, so you can read it whether you’re a WaPo subscriber or not.) It’s a compelling story of a man, driven by some complex family dynamics, who found his niche and ended up in a government job where he could follow that interest in a direction that has resulted in countless miners' lives saved over his career.
The value of experts in government driving regulation gets stated explicitly late in the piece:
Every now and then, however, Chris’s work slipped into public view. His coal mine roof rating was used all over the world and, in his own narrow circles, he was well known. In 2016 — the first year in recorded history that zero underground coal miners were killed by falling roofs — Chris landed in a public spat. He’d seen an article by an economic historian about the history of roof bolts in the Journal of Technology and Culture. The historian wanted to argue that roof bolts had taken 20 years to reduce fatality rates because it had taken 20 years for the coal mining industry to learn to use them. All by itself, the market had solved this worker safety problem! The government’s role, in his telling, was as a kind of gentle helpmate of industry. “It was kind of amazing,” said Chris. “What actually happened was the regulators were finally empowered to regulate. Regulators needed to be able to enforce. He elevated the role of technology. He minimized the role of regulators.”
Government functionaries can be an easy target for criticism, but this profile highlights the key and dedicated role that so many play in today’s society. In my own work I have encountered many Federal Aviation Administration employees who fit a similar profile. They found some particular niche interest related to flying, and they made it their life’s work to make it better and safer. It’s often a thankless job, and on a government pay scale that pales next to what they could likely make in industry.
(As a side note, this is part of what makes Trump’s Project 2025 intentions to politicize the civil service so terrifying: it would eliminate protections on just these dedicated experts to replace them with people who don’t know the topic but who donated to the right political cause. You wanna see the country (literally) crumble? Ditch all the regulatory experts like Chris Mark and replace them with Heritage Foundation interns.)
Rethinking who are "The Normal Ones"? A.R. Moxon nails it.
I really appreciated A.R. Moxon’s weekend post framing up the “Weird” discourse from the past week. (This long-ish excerpt is still really just an excerpt. Worth reading the whole thing.)
Not so very long ago, it wasn’t normal to be trans or gay or even nonconforming to very strict gender roles in any way. It wasn’t normal to be a woman with a powerful job. It wasn’t even normal to be a woman with a paid job of any kind. It wasn’t normal or even legal to be a woman with a bank account. It wasn’t normal to be a woman who could just chart their own way in life, and make their own decisions about their bodies and their lives for themselves. And it wasn’t normal to be Jewish, it wasn’t normal to be Muslim, it wasn’t normal to be Hindu, it wasn’t normal to be an atheist; nor was it normal to be Black, or Asian, or any identity in a category called “nonwhite” that people used without really thinking about it. It wasn’t normal to be chronically sick or disabled, and it certainly wasn’t normal to expect to be treated as a full member of society if your way of being was not normal. And there were many many other ways of being that weren’t normal either. They were different, other—weird.
Some of these ways of being abnormal were permitted to a degree, others were not. They were permitted by The Normal Ones, who had the license to decide what identity was, and to establish the strictures which that identity must remain, outside of which that identity could not stray. And not so very long ago, one of the main requirements for anyone with a “weird” identity who was receiving from license for that identity was that they would agree that The Normal Ones had the right to bestow such a license, because they and only they were truly normal.
It was normal to be white. It was normal to be a Christian. It was normal to be a man with a job, and it was normal to be a woman who was a man’s property. It was normal for children to be viewed as property of the parents, which (see previous point) meant the property of the man. It was normal to be straight and cis. It was normal to be able-bodied and employed. More importantly, though, these were the only normal things to be. To not be those things was to be abnormal, and to be abnormal was to be at the mercy of The Normal Ones.
Abuse—by those who were normal, of those who were not normal—used to be normal, and not ever acknowledging how all the most normal forms of abuse actually were abuse was most normal of all. It was perfectly normal to be racist, misogynist, a religious bigot, as a way of defending and maintaining normalcy, which was a way of defending who did and who did not have the right to make decisions about what identities would be permitted, and to what extent the permission would be allowed. So rape was normal, and bigotry was normal, and exclusion and threats and punishment and murder of those who committed the offense of trespassing the established boundaries of what ways of being human would be permitted by normal people was normal.
I fooled you. All of that is still normal. But increasingly, more and more of us are moving on from all that. We’re done with it.
Imperfectly, to be sure, haltingly, no doubt. Sometimes it feels as if we’ve been scaling a mountain face and only recently passed through some clouds, allowing us a view, previously obscured, of what lay above—and so the distance we’ve come often only affords us a better view of how much further we have to climb. I know some would like to use the daunting climb looming above us to claim that we haven’t climbed at all. But, if we are attentive and look downward long enough, we can see, peeking through the clouds, the vast prospect of rigid and supremacist normalcy we’ve left behind. We can see all the ways of being a human that used to depend upon normalized bigotry for permission to exist but which now give themselves their own permission to exist, without seeking any other. We can see more and more identities that are now considered normal, and more and more of the abuse that once was granted as normal is now recognized, from loftier vantage, for the abnormal perversion it is.
Preach, brother Moxon, preach.
The reality gap
So Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. This morning I have a distant cousin on Facebook last night complaining about how broken the justice system is. And this morning he’s calling for another Civil War. I’m just not sure how to bridge this reality gap.
First off, as Matt Tebbe so brilliantly put it:
It’s not a miscarriage of justice when
a Black man is choked out in the street
Or a Black woman is killed in her bed
Or a Black man is gunned down running while Black
But it is when a white millionaire is convicted of many felonies.
This is how whiteness works.
That cousin surely didn’t make a lot of noise about the broken justice system after George Floyd was killed, or Breanna Taylor was killed, or Trayvon Martin was killed… I wonder why now?
And secondly, is that cousin really ready to take up his guns and kill people like me because we disagree politically? And because I think maybe the justice system did its job here?
Now I know it’s far easier to grumble on Facebook than it is to do actual work, and I’m willing to bet at this point I’ve been to more political protests in the last 5 years than he has. But I do wonder how we ever bridge the gap here. Are things so irreparably broken that chaos is inevitable? I fear so, but I hope not.
A radicalizing NYPD-Columbia Education
Sam Thielman goes hard in his most recent piece at Forever Wars titled “What Could Be More Radicalizing Than An NYPD-Columbia Education?”
Eric Adams, the ex-NYPD mayor of New York City —who, in keeping with the grand traditions of his old job, probably doesn’t even live in New York—cares deeply about our children. We know this because he told us so. “These are our children,” he told Katty Kay on MSNBC, “and we can’t allow them to be radicalized like children are being radicalized across the globe.”
It is important to Eric Adams that children learn the right lesson at the right time. And so, on the campus of Columbia University, where the Pulitzer Prizes will be awarded today, he deployed platoons of his former colleagues to administer the kind of education New York City’s ruling class prefers.
Worth reading the whole thing. (As is true any time Sam is writing.)
It is amazing to me the level of over-reaction from School Administration and the NYPD, who clearly wanted an excuse to display their power. Fascim, folks. It’s real. It’s not coming; it’s here already.
A. R. Moxon: War or Nothing
A. R. Moxon has a brilliant and brutal essay out today entitled “War or Nothing”, in which he describes a theme beginning in 2001 with the US’s response to the 9/11 attacks and continues all the way through 2020’s George Floyd protests and this year’s pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. From it he describes “seven laws of living in a war-oriented society”:
He’s not wrong. A taste:
And millions of us, who have been watching since 2001 or even before, can see how framing the apparatus of killing as indistinguishable from safety helps the apparatus of killing, but not how it helps make us safe. We can see how framing a country as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the country. We can see how framing all a county’s citizens as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the people. And we can see clearly how framing killing as the only way to bring safety, and any act other than killing as nothing favors those who want to see a world of death, but not how it helps honor the dead or keeps any of the living safe.
Millions of us think the bigger problem might be the killing. It seems to us war as the only option represents the greatest possible failure of human imagination there can be, and our wealth and resources and ingenuity seem to present many other options. Perhaps if we put our heads together, we might think of something else to do, that isn’t nothing but isn’t war, either. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant about what that something might be, we think that seeking that something is better than not seeking it. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant, many of us are not, and even those of us who are ignorant fools can see the way the suggestions and solutions presented by those who are not ignorant fools are ignored while those of us who are the most ignorant and the most foolish receive the most attention from our institutions of influence and power, to frame this whole act of imagination as ignorant and foolish.
And even those of us who are ignorant fools can see how this helps promote the ideal of war or nothing, but we don’t see how it helps us find something that is not killing but isn’t nothing, either.
God grant us leaders brave enough to consider responses to killing that aren’t more killing, but aren’t nothing, either.
I'm not claiming any special prescience, but...
I was cleaning up old blog posts here and found this that I wrote back in 2012:
I think it may take the American evangelical church another decade or so to really realize how closely intertwined they are with the Republican party, but my prayer is that the realization hits sooner rather than later. What compounds the issue is that our view of American exceptionalism makes us prideful enough that we are resistant to learn from our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world on the topic.
Little did I expect that, a decade later, the evangelical church would, see it, realize it, and embrace it. God help us.
Billionaire Hoarders and “Charity”
I re-posted a meme to Facebook the other day which suggested that billionaires are “hoarders”, likening them to a “human dragon sleeping on their piles of rubies and gold”. Someone popped up to dispute this characterization, making the following assertions:
Now, there were other assertions and comments, but these two were enough to not pass my smell test. My immediate inclination was that (a) most billionaires aren’t particularly charitable, and (b) most of them have gotten that rich by running exploitive companies - either exploiting natural resources or human beings, or both.
Rather than just go with the smell test, though, I decided to do a first-level investigation and summarize what I found. To do this, I took the Top 10 off the current Forbes 400 list. These guys (and they’re all guys) are all household names, each worth $60B or more. (Yes, that’s billion with a B.) To put $60B in context, if you got $80,000 per day, every day, since Jesus was born, neglecting any inflation or earnings on that money, you would just have gotten to $60B this year. That’s a staggering amount of money.
For each one of these guys I am summarizing their current net worth, reported charitable giving, and how they made their fortune. Spoiler alert: it’s not a pretty picture. Let’s go.
#1: Elon Musk
2022 net worth: $167.6B
Charitable giving: in 2022 he donated $160M, the most ever! Fortune also reports he gave $5.7B to a foundation, but it’s under his control and hasn’t actually been disbursed anywhere yet. That $160M is less than 0.01% of his net worth. Even the $5.7B is only 3% of his net worth… seems unimpressive.
How he made his money: mostly from Tesla. How much his own work and skills contributed to the company’s growth is up for debate, but Tesla and Musk have been sued for running a toxic, discriminatory, abusive workplace on multiple occasions.
#2: Jeff Bezos
2022 net worth: $120B
Bezos has in theory pledged to give his money away, but reports say it’s unclear whether he is actually doing that. The biggest documented donation I saw reported was $100M to Dolly Parton’s foundation. Which, to be fair, is a noble cause, but $100M is only 0.08% of Bezos’ net worth.
How he made his money: Amazon, of course. You don’t have to search far to find multitudes of reports of Amazon’s abusive practices to their employees. Maybe not such a good guy, either.
#3: Bill Gates
2022 net worth: $106B
Credit where credit is due: Gates has already given more than $50B of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, and that Foundation is doing significant work around the world in important causes. Bravo, sir.
How he made his money: Microsoft. As in, he wrote the original MS-DOS, and just managed to hit the wave of computers in an unprecedented and unrepeatable way.
#4: Larry Ellison
2022 net worth: $101B
Ellison reportedly is struggling to figure out how to give his money away. So far his reported donations are all in the $100 - $200M range (0.1% - 0.2% of his net worth). (He apparently found it easier to spend $300M to buy an entire Hawaiian island.)
How he made his money: Oracle databases. And then a lot of big finance and investing.
#5: Warren Buffett
2022 net worth: $97B
Here’s the other bright light on this list. Lifetime Buffett has given away almost $50B, largely to the Gates Foundation. However, his wealth is growing “faster than he can give it away”.
How he made his money: investments. If there’s one guy on this list who meets the “a lot of hard work and wise investing” criteria that my interlocutor set out, Buffett is probably that guy.
#6: Larry Page
2022 net worth: $93B
It is reported that he has funded his foundation to $6B, but most of it is in donor-advised funds for later donation, and while the tax breaks have kicked in now, the money hasn’t actually gone to any good use yet. That same article is touting donations to actual charities in the $100k (yes, that’s a K) range, which is, oh, 0.0001% of his net worth. Color me unimpressed.
How did he make his money: he co-founded a little company called Google. So some of that I’m willing to attribute to just hitting the right tech at the right time, similar to Gates and Ellison. But Google’s money-making methods continue to get nastier every time you look - the incessant ads, the deep user tracking, the toxic YouTube algorithms that are happy to feed you fascist content if it’s what keeps you watching… not particularly honorable.
#7: Sergey Brin
2022 net worth: $89B
Brin has given maybe $1B over the past 10 years to his own foundation (which is beneficial for tax purposes), and of that billion, the biggest chunk, almost $200M has gone to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research. A noble cause, yes… but only donating 1% of his net worth over the past 10 years? Peanuts.
How he made his money: He’s the other half of Google. (See #6.)
#8: Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $83B
Ballmer’s foundation breathlessly announced a $217M donation in 2022, which is to say they are going to offer grants on the topic of climate change. That appears to be the biggest chunk Steve has donated anywhere. That’s 0.25% of his net worth, which I guess is a little more than Sergey Brin gave to the Fox Foundation, but still… it ain’t much.
How he made his money: Ballmer was in early following Bill Gates into Microsoft. If only he were so quick to follow in Gates’ footsteps when it comes to giving his money away.
#9: Michael Bloomberg
2022 net worth: $78B
Bloomberg also deserves some credit here. He has donated as much as $14.4 B lifetime (18% of his current net worth) to his personal foundation, and that foundation has actually dispersed significant funds, including $1.7B in 2022. He has also given nearly $3B in donations to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University.
How he made his money: he started in investing, and then jumped on the integration of computers and investing in the early 1980s. He branched out into other areas of financial market reporting, but then has also taken detours into politics, serving as the mayor of New York City from 2002 - 2013.
#10: Jim Walton
2022 net worth: $58B
In 2019 Walton made his first significant donation to charity - $1.2B to (naturally) the Walton Family Foundation. That Foundation has done some good stuff in Arkansas, so credit where credit is due there. But $1.2B on a net worth of $58B is still only 2% as a donation, which feels paltry.
How he made his money: he inherited it. (As did his siblings, who are #12 and #15 on the Forbes 400 list.) And how does Walmart continue to turn profits? Well, among other things, by mistreating their employees. Wages below the poverty level. Poor working conditions. Unlawful termination. Union busting. Maybe $1B for art and education in Arkansas can assuage your conscience? Jim can only hope so.
Let’s sum up
So, the Top 10. “Quite philanthropic”. “Work very hard” and made admirable business decisions. Really?
“Quite philanthropic” - I think we can safely put that label on Gates, Buffett, and Bloomberg. Many of the others have made pledges that their money will be given away before or at their death, but that isn’t doing anybody any good now. So, 3 out of 10. Not great, Bob!
“Work very hard and made wise business decisions” - I mean, at some level if you want to lionize people playing the capitalism game to come out ahead, by definition these guys have all done that. But if you want to put some sort of moral filter on it, asking whether their gains are well-gotten or not, I think we could safely chalk up Musk, Bezos, Page, Brin, and Walton in the exploitive category. I can’t say I’m very impressed with Ballmer, either, but Microsoft isn’t ugly and predatory in quite the same way that Walmart, Amazon, and Google are.
You do you, Facebook friend, but to my eyes, it’s not a stretch to see these guys as dragons sleeping on piles of gold and gems while 10% of the world lives in extreme poverty.
A little more back-of-the-envelope math
Just for fun, let’s imagine the top income tax bracket from the 1950s (by all accounts, a wonderful time that a lot of people want to go back to) was in place for these guys. That bracket was 91%. And let’s just do the math on their current net worth. All up the wealth of the Top 10 here and it comes out to $994B. Take that times 91% and you come up with $904.5B which would be in the US Treasury. Now, we can quibble about how wisely the US Government spends its money… that’s for another time. But the US budget deficit last year was $1.4T. So, a tax on just the top 10 wealthiest men in the country would take care of more than two-thirds of the deficit. Yes, that’s just for one year. Adjustments still need to be made. But the wealth of these privileged few, even in the scope of the national economy, is, to quote a famous cartoon moose, “antihistamine money”: not to be sneezed at.
Eerie Parallels
Last night I started reading Dr. Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Having not gotten any further than the introduction there are eerie parallels between the support the German church gave to Nazism and the support the American evangelical church is giving to the MAGA movement. A few samples:
The German Christian movement was faction within the Protestant church of Germany, not a separate sect, and eventually attracted between a quarter and a third of Protestant church members. Enthusiastically pro-Nazi, the movement sought to demonstrate its support for Hitler by organizing itself after the model of the Nazi Party, placing a swastika on the altar next to the cross, giving the Nazi salute at its rallies, and celebrating Hitler as sent by God.
The three ideological prongs of the German Christian movement within the Protestant church, as Doris Bergen has delineated, were its opposition to church doctrine, its antisemitism, and its effort to craft a “manly” church…
German Christians appropriated Nazi rhetoric and symbols into the church to give its Christianity a contemporary resonance.
Theological conclusions regarding Jesus’s teachings and his interactions with the Jews of his day were shaped into a rhetoric that endorsed Nazi ideology, making Nazism appear to be realizing in the political sphere what Christians taught in the religious sphere.
On to chapter 1….
Thoughts upon Rush Limbaugh's passing
Rush Limbaugh passed away today at age 70.
I spent countless hours listening to his radio show as a pre-teen, teenager, and into early adulthood, largely absorbing both his Republican political views and his cruel, snarky attitude toward those who disagreed with him. I tried calling in to the show on multiple occasions. (I remember getting through to the call screener once, but never got on the air.) I recorded some of the political spoof songs he played and memorized the lyrics because I thought they were funny. (The spoof of “Bette Davis Eyes” as “Billy Clinton Thighs” to commemorate the jogging President’s short shorts is still in my head today.) I laughed as he called people names and ridiculed people who weren’t like him: Democrats, environmentalists, feminists, immigrants, LTBTQIA people…
Rush made it easy to dismiss people who disagreed with you, and made sure you knew who those people were. I carried those views and attitudes well into adulthood. If you search back far enough you will find posts on my blog here that reflect that sort of snarky and uncaring attitude toward political opponents. I’ve spent the last decade or more regretting and repenting of those words, actions, and attitudes.
Rush caused a lot of people a lot of pain over his lifetime in talk radio. I am glad that his passing means he will stop causing people more pain. Sadly, the effects will linger far longer than his voice did on the radio waves. He had a massive amount of talent and opportunity to do a lot of good for a lot of people. It’s sad that he chose not to.
I’ve seen a lot of understandable pain and bitterness on Twitter this afternoon as people react to Rush’s passing. I don’t want to criticize those reactions. Pain has to be acknowledged to be worked through. I’ve seen a lot of comments about Rush now in eternity finding out how wrong he was and some sense of justice that he might be in hell. I get it. I do.
But I can’t gloat in his passing, and I can’t hope for his eternal torment. Rush was a human created in God’s image the same as everyone else, and he deserves that respect even if he refused it to others.
I’m hopeful of some sort of universal reconciliation through Christ. I know you can interpret the Bible to say otherwise, but after a decade of reading on the topic that’s where I land today. Does my sense of justice think Rush deserves punishment? Yep. But if I can hope for something more beautiful, it’s for a bitter old man with a lifetime of hate coming to sorrowful repentance and being eternally reconciled to Democrats, feminists, immigrants, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, and everyone else he hurt through the transforming love of God.
It feels wrong somehow to say “rest in peace” for a guy who caused so much discord. Maybe instead I can wish that he will rest in a discomfort that will lead to repentance and eternal reconciliation. Then I can pray for and work toward healing for those he hurt.
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
2 Corinthians 5:18-20, NRSV
July 4, 2020
America’s Independence Day seems a strange holiday to “celebrate” this year. Our country is in turmoil with racial protests in cities both large and small. Our government’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic has left our country first meriting the world’s scorn and eventually its pity. Our people are so polarized that even wearing a mask is viewed as a political statement.
Yesterday President Trump gave a speech in front of Mount Rushmore, a site where white Americans literally engraved their political heroes on top of the sacred hills of the Native Americans they displaced. In his speech he declared that this summer’s protestors - a group that includes me - are a “dangerous movement”, a “radical assault”, “far-left fascism”, a “left-wing cultural revolution designed to overthrow the American Revolution”, resulting in “the very definition of totalitarianism”.
Me? I’d just like to see some responsible leadership. I’d like to not have black people get killed by police at ridiculous rates. I‘d like to have more white people like me start coming to grips with how recent (and current) our racist systems were and still are. And I’d like us to start changing those systems.
My Christian faith should be common ground even with those who see politics very differently. Yet this year there are so many, especially among the white evangelical group, who don’t even seem to share a common reality. Inconvenient facts are “fake news”. Any wrong that the President does is either overblown by the media or justifiable. (The ends are what are important, right?)
How can you sit quietly to maintain the perception of unity in the fellowship when it requires you to not talk about applying your faith to current events?
That thing where Jesus said he would set brother against brother seems a lot more real when your brother is so frustrated with your application of faith to your politics that he isn’t talking to you. But then I wonder whether he’s quoting the same verse thinking about me. And I wonder how we ever get past it.
There is no city fireworks display this year and I’m finding no joy in the neighbors’ best attempts to make up for it. Not so many Independence Days ago I would drag the kids out into the oppressive humidity and battle mosquitos just so we could enjoy the fireworks with oohs and awe. Tonight the explosions just bring acrid smoke and unwelcome noise late into the tired night.
What will next year’s celebration look like? What will we be celebrating? Will we be any less tired? Any more hopeful?
Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace; but when I speak, they are for war.
Recommended daily reading: Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American
In these turbulent days the news can quickly become overwhelming, and the social media noise can quickly drown out the worthwhile signal. One bit of regular news writing I’ve found very helpful, though is a daily email newsletter from historian Heather Cox Richardson. Dr. Richardson has a Ph.D. from Harvard and is currently a professor of history at Boston College.
Dr. Richardson’s email newsletter, titled “Letters from an American”, comes out nightly and usually summarizes the day’s key events. She provides an historian’s perspective on what she believes is long-term important out of the day’s news rather than what just made the most noise. I particularly appreciate that she provides sources for her story at the bottom of every post. Some days she’ll take a longer view and help set this day’s events in context. In that vein I’d particularly recommend her May 3 post tracing the history of the 20th century American rhetoric of patriotic individualism.
If you’re looking for some daily summary reading, I’d recommend giving Letters from an American a try. It’s a free newsletter, and easy to sign up!
An Iowan's thoughts the morning after the 2020 Caucus
Last night I and thousands of Iowans like me participated in the Democratic Party caucus. After three chaotic years of a Trump presidency and more than a year of non-stop campaigning in our state, it felt good to get on with things. Regardless of the result, we know the ads will stop for at least a few months now.
My caucus experience was pretty low key and without major hassles or snafus.
Late last night, though, the reports started rolling in that there are hiccups in the party reporting. As I write this at 6:30 the morning after, there are still no results reported. Half of the candidates have declared victory (or at least success), Republican operatives are spinning claims of fraud and manipulation, and once again Iowa looks like a bunch of rubes who can’t even figure out how to tabulate votes.
So, a few thoughts on Tuesday morning:
This is ridiculous. Campaigns and volunteers have spent countless hours and dollars here over the past year to court our first-in-the-nation voters, and we can’t even get an accurate count at the end of the night? The caucus format is quaint (or, as a Canadian friend said, “quirky”), but if in 2020 we can’t even manage to report up simple voter counts, some other state should be going first.
We will get reliable results eventually. I have no doubt that the votes were carefully tabulated at my caucus site, and that they have a paper trail of every ballot preference card that was filled out. The volunteers running the caucus worked diligently to get an accurate count. Surely a similar scenario played out at each other caucus site through the evening. The data is available and reliable.
This is not an election and isn’t run by our election staff. This point can easily be missed in this morning’s reporting chaos. Normal elections in Iowa are overseen by the Iowa Secretary of State, and run in each county by the County Auditor. When we have the actual November election, each voter will fill out a paper ballot and feed it into a scanning machine with a locked collection bin. An electronic count is available almost immediately with paper backups in case a recount is needed. It’s a reliable system. That system was NOT used last night. Last night’s caucuses were run and results tabulated by volunteers from the political parties. They only do this once every four years. It shows.
This is a system ripe for change. The election cycle is far too long. The caucus system is antiquated. Iowa has no particular business being the first in the nation. Let’s try shortening campaign windows. Let’s have just a handful of primary election days on the schedule, with multiple states participating each time. Let’s have ranked choice voting. (Oh, let’s also make sure everyone has access to vote and encourage as much voting participation as we can.) We can do better.
Time to weed out some candidates
I’ve spent a few hours now sitting down with my 13-year-old daughter to watch the two nights of Democratic debates. (Yay for a kid who is interested in politics!) And while it was interesting to see 20 people on stage, it’s definitely time to weed some candidates out.
Can we continue the race with just Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and Julian Castro?
The other folks are mostly nice and all, but clearly don’t have what it’s going to take to lead a national campaign that can win. Sure, Biden and Bernie are polling well, but they’re so obviously old. It’s time for some younger candidates. (And yes, Elizabeth Warren is 70, and somehow I’m calling her a “younger” candidate.)
In the end of it all, at this moment my heart is with a Harris/Buttigieg ticket, with them finding some special policy czar spot for Elizabeth Warren. But it’s still a long way until the Iowa Caucuses.
(For the record, my daughter declares her preferred candidates are Warren, Harris, Booker, Biden, and Buttigieg, and that she’s disappointed she isn’t old enough to vote in this election. )
These Democrats Should Run for Senate instead of President in 2020
With today’s announcement by Montana governor Steve Bullock that he is throwing his hat in the ring for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, we now have 23 nationally recognized candidates running. With the field wide open and a troubled incumbent, this is to an extent understandable.
However, (and I’m by no means the first to observe this,) if the Democrats want to make lasting changes to the direction Trump and McConnell have taken the country since 2016, they need not only the White House - they need a Senate majority. So, here’s my run-down of the current presidential candidates and where I think they should be running for Senate instead. (Candidates listed alphabetically, direct from the relevant Wikipedia article.)
Michael Bennet - Bennet is currently a Democratic senator from Colorado, and his term doesn’t expire until 2022. He isn’t hurting the Dems’ chances at the Senate by running.
Joe Biden - While Biden had a long and distinguished career in the Senate, he’s not likely to run again after serving as VP for two terms. And Delaware’s two senators are already Democrats. Joe can stay in.
Cory Booker - Booker’s Senate term is up in 2020. Somebody’s gonna have to fill that hole. My 10-second Google search didn’t turn up anybody announced yet to run to fill his spot, but New Jersey is a fairly safe state for Democrats, seeing as they keep re-electing even the highly corrupt Bob Menendez.
Steve Bullock - Bullock is touting his ability to have won statewide office in a majority Republican state as a qualification for his presidential campaign. But Montana has a Republican senator up for re-election in 2020, and if Bullock really has such skills, he should turn them toward defeating Steve Daines to turn the second Montana Senate seat blue.
Pete Buttigieg - Mayor Pete might be at some point a worthy Democratic Senate candidate from Indiana. However, Indiana doesn’t have a Senate seat up in 2020. Mayor Pete can keep running. He might make somebody a good Vice President.
Julián Castro - Castro would need to do a little bit of coordinating here with Beto O’Rourke. Both are from Texas, and Texas has a Senate seat up in 2020. O’Rourke almost knocked off Ted Cruz in 2018; Castro could surely put up a strong state-wide campaign if he took up the torch. One of these guys should be challenging John Cornyn next year.
John Delaney - Who is this guy again? Maryland already has two Democratic senators and neither are up for re-election in 2020. Delaney is welcome to keep tilting at windmills as long as his funding holds out.
Tulsi Gabbard - In pretty much the same spot as Delaney. She’s not going to challenge one of Hawaii’s existing Democratic senators, so why not run for President?
Kirsten Gillibrand - Gillibrand is already a Senator and just got re-elected in 2018. If she doesn’t take the White House, she’ll stay in the Capitol. No impact.
Mike Gravel - LOL.
Kamala Harris - Harris has two years left on her term in the Senate, so she’s safe either way.
John Hickenlooper - Here’s another guy who should reconsider. Cory Gardner (who I always seem to get confused with Cory Booker for some reason) is up for re-election in 2020. Hickenlooper has been popular as a governor in Colorado. If he could oust Gardner that’d turn another Senate seat blue. It’d be worth a shot.
Jay Inslee - Inslee is currently Governor of Washington, a state that already has two Democratic senators. No harm in him running.
Amy Klobuchar - Klobuchar just won re-election to the Senate in 2018 so she’s safe either way. Fortunately for her it’s almost done snowing in Minnesota for the season, so her campaigning will get a little bit easier.
Wayne Messam - If you’re saying “who is that again?”, a reminder that Messam is currently the mayor of Miramar, Florida. Which, to be fair I guess, is about the same size as South Bend, Indiana. Florida doesn’t have any Senate seats up in 2020, though.
Seth Moulton - I had to look this guy up to remember who he is. (He’s a member of the House from Massachusetts.) Ed Markey is up for re-election in Massachusetts but surely he’ll run again, so Moulton is left out in the cold.
Beto O’Rourke - As I wrote above, he’s gotta get w/ Julián Castro and figure out which one of them is gonna take out John Cornyn.
Tim Ryan - No Senate seats open in Ohio in 2020, so Ryan can be another nondescript white Midwestern guy running for President.
Bernie Sanders - Bernie just won re-election in 2018. His seat is safe until old age catches up with him.
Eric Swalwell - Again, who? Another non-descript Midwestern boy (he was born in Iowa, even if he’s currently a Californian) who doesn’t have a Senate seat to run for.
Elizabeth Warren - Just won re-election in Massachusetts in 2018.
Marianne Williamson - LOL. (From California. See Swalwell above.)
Andrew Yang - Also LOL. From New York. Not gonna challenge Schumer or Gillibrand even if they were up in 2020.
So, let’s review.
Which Democrats should run for Senate instead of President? Bullock in Montana. Castro or O’Rourke in Texas. Hickenlooper in Colorado. Then Stacey Abrams should challenge Perdue in Georgia.
Then we need a strong Democrat to run against Joni Ernst in Iowa, but the Iowa Democrats haven’t managed to field a strong candidate for anything in a while. (J. D. Scholten might have a better luck running state-wide against Ernst than he did running against Steve King for the House…)
And can North Carolina get enough voting rights back to unseat Thom Tillis? They get to undo some gerrymanders but that won’t affect a statewide race like the Senate.
In short: there are some opportunities for Democrats to make gains and possibly take an outright majority in the Senate in 2020. But they need to spend their energy running for those seats instead of having all their strong candidates running in a giant knock-out race for President. If 2020 is really about our Republic’s survival after four years of Trump and McConnell destroying all governing norms, Democrats need to treat it that way and make a cooperative concerted effort to win both the White House and the Senate.
At least a guy can dream, right?
DBH: Can we relax about "socialism"?
David Bentley Hart reworks his Facebook post from last year (which I posted about at the time) into a New York Times opinion piece. It’s still sharp and incisive in all the best ways. A snippet or two:
I have lived abroad often enough to be conscious of the flaws in various nations’ social democratic systems. But I know too that those systems usually make possible something closer to a just and charitable society than ours has ever been.
One need not idealize any of these nations or ignore the ways in which they differ in balancing public and private financing of civic services. But all of them are, broadly speaking, places where — without any unsustainable burden on the national economy — the cost of health care per capita is far lower than it is here and yet coverage is universal, where life spans are longer, where working people are not made destitute by serious illnesses, where a choice between food or pharmaceuticals need never be made, where the poor cannot be denied treatments by insurance adjusters, where pre-existing health conditions could never be denied coverage, where most people have far more savings and much lower levels of debt than is the case here, where very few families live only a paycheck away from total poverty, where wages generally keep pace with inflation, where every worker has decent vacation time each year, where suicide and opioid addiction are not the default lifestyle of the working poor, where homelessness is exceedingly rare, where retirement care is humane and comprehensive and where the schools are immeasurably better than ours are.
Americans, however, recoil in horror from these intolerable impositions on personal liberty.
Brutal.
Democracy for Republicans
There’s a really good essay by Jacob T. Levy (Professor of Political Theory at McGill University) over at the Niskanen Center today in which he argues that the Republican Party needs to renew its commitment to democracy. “One sign of seriousness” of a post-Trump Republican Party, says Levy, “would be a commitment to building a Republican Party that can win free and fair elections, a Republican Party whose strategy rests on appealing to pluralities or majorities and that can embrace more voters rather than fewer.”
Levy goes on to document how over the past 30 years, both at the federal and state level, Republicans have frequently failed to win a plurality of the popular vote and yet still have held majorities in legislative bodies. The Republican Party, says Levy,
…is now the beneficiary of all the countermajoritarian mechanisms that make it difficult to translate voting pluralities or majorities into electoral wins, including those that were deliberate creations of constitutional design, those that evolved more or less accidentally, and those that were opportunistically engineered in recent decades. It is moreover the beneficiary of actions that selectively suppress voter turnout and eligibility to vote. Democrats more often than not command popular-vote pluralities even though many Democratic-leaning voters are discouraged or prohibited from getting to the ballot box at all.
Levy argues that the longstanding conservative suspicion of majoritarian democracy is based more on the Founders' understanding of classical, zero-sum Roman economic precedents, and that such a system is poorly equipped to handle modern commercial capitalism. And while that conservative suspicion is often justified by an argument that the mob will just vote for socialism to line their own pocketbook (as if the elites aren’t also voting for their pocketbooks?), Levy argues that position is unjustified by history.
While there have been deeply despotic socialist regimes in modernity, these have almost never come about through the domestic subversion of democratic governments; they have been imposed by external military domination or else have replaced domestic oligarchic autocracies of one type or another. The fear of the redistributionist mob exercises a powerful hold on the conservative imagination, and has often served as an excuse for repression and constitutional violation. But we should understand that excuse as an excuse.
It’s a long essay and worth reading in its entirety. While I’m not personally likely to support most of the Republican Party ideals regardless of their political strategy, I’m fully on board w/ Levy’s conclusion:
It would be good, in other words, to have a competition in the direction of freer, fairer, and more open-access elections, with competing ideas about what that means and what to prioritize. That’s compatible with making an issue out of instances of Democratic misconduct that themselves call for future-oriented, general, rule-governed remedies. But it means not an agenda based on fake panic about nonexistent undocumented-immigrant voting or almost nonexistent voter fraud, not an agenda about dressing up restriction as reform. I am not sure that there are currently any powerful Republicans who are willing to try to take part in those debates, Republicans who are willing to embrace the goal of building a party that can win pluralities and majorities of freer and more open elections. I am sure that it will be a good sign when there are.
A passion for Jesus and for justice
Justice is inherent in justification.
This understanding of justification will have enormous effects on the church’s understanding of mission. Like Paul, the church that lives by this account of justification will not merely be trying to “save souls” but will want to be God’s agent in the creation of a justified and just people - transformed and participating in Christ and his current work in and through the church.
Evangelism - sharing the good news - will be a message about liberation from all sorts of sin, including hatred and violence and injustice, and into a new life. Centrifugal activity, or outreach - embodying the good news in the public square - will mean siding with those who are neglected and mistreated, whether in the neighborhood or in another part of the world. In fact, the differences between terms like “evangelism” and “outreach” will in part collapse, not because Jesus is being replaced with justice, understood in some generic, secular way, but because Jesus is justice, the justice of God incarnate. The result will be a deeper spirituality, not a lesser one, a closer walk with God (the God of justice), not a more distant one. In fact, the result will be a passion for Jesus and for justice.
-- Michael J. Gorman, from Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission
Welcome to America...
David Bentley Hart with a prophetic critique of America in a recent NYT column (HT to Richard Beck for pointing it out):
“America — with its decaying infrastructure, its third-world public transit, its shrinking labor market, its evaporating middle class, its expanding gulf between rich and poor, its heartless health insurance system, its mindless indifference to a dying ecology, its predatory credit agencies, its looming Social Security collapse, its interminable war, its metastasizing national debt and all the social pathologies that gave it a degenerate imbecile and child-abducting sadist as its president — remains the only developed economy in the world that believes it wrong to use civic wealth for civic goods. Its absurdly engorged military budget diverts hundreds of billions of dollars a year from the public weal to those who profit from the military-industrial complex. Its plutocratic policies and libertarian ethos are immune to all appeals of human solidarity. It towers over the world, but promises secure shelter only to the fortunate few.” –David Bentley Hart, “The New York Yankees Are a Moral Abomination”
Christ has made our hearts glad... and is waiting for our politics to catch up
Matthew Lee Anderson has published over on Medium a transcription of a great little talk he gave recently at the Evangelical Theological Society. [Aside: I cringe every time I see good authors publishing stuff at Medium… it’s not hard to own your own words on a site of your own, come on, folks!]
Anderson makes the point that, as much as anything, it’s evangelicals' attitude that needs to change - an approach that Andrew Wilson, picking up from Anderson and riffing off Rod Dreher, describes as The Taylor Swift Option:
[T]he conservative evangelical political witness has been fueled by a narrative of decline and of its own precarious position in the world. This narrative, that to be an evangelical means to be an embattled minority fighting the dark forces of an oppressive secularism lurking in every public school and in every corner of Hollywood, empowered evangelicals to be adept users of the grievance politics we are now so familiar with from other communities… Every response by evangelicals to contemporary events happens against this backdrop, whether we like it or not, or were responsible for it or not. Regardless of our intentions, our denunciations of the spirit of our age invariably take on the atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and resentment that has suffused evangelicalism’s political life for the past 30 years. The first task, then, is to purge ourselves of such affections and passions and establish the evangelical political witness on a new foundation. Such fear and resentment cannot be simply verbally repudiated; they must be expunged, rooted out and replaced by a hope that is less spoken of directly and more felt, a hope that we do not name but that permeates and suffuses our response to culture war conflicts. Such good cheer must be hearty, for Christ hath made our hearts glad—and he is waiting for our political discourse to someday catch up. Second, with this gladness I would commend a deflationary attitude toward those grand narratives of decline and to the day-to-day disputes and dramas that we think embody them. If the West is dying….so? If we are all going to be bigots, well, we might as well get on with it and become likeable bigots. If “marginalization” or “dhimmitude” are the new form of persecution, I for one will happily take it over many of the alternatives. The sooner we turn such instruments of stigma into pieces of art, the sooner we will begin actually resisting the very ideology we claim to be. As the prophet Taylor Swift hath said unto us, “haters gonna hate, hate, hate….you just gotta shake, shake, shake…”
I’m not much for claiming the evangelical label myself these days, but I think Matt’s put his finger on changes that have to be made if the evangelical church is ever to regain its witness in America.
I’m reminded of the subtle dig thrown by Metropolitan Tikhon Mollard in the statement from the Orthodox church after the Obergefell ruling back in 2015. His opening paragraph:
The recent ruling by the US Supreme Court on the legality of “same-sex marriages” has received much press coverage and has already caused some consternation about its implications and ramifications. But we Orthodox Christians must rest assured that the teaching of our Holy Church on the Mystery of Marriage remains the same as it has been for millennia.
“Eh, what’s that, a “recent ruling”? The church has been around for millennia. We’ll survive this. "
Regardless of your feelings about Obergefell, this is the sort of attitude the evangelical church should be taking more often.
Now if I could just get that Taylor Swift song out of my head…