The Rise of the One Percent

                As the Trump presidency looms and the Trump cabinet is coming into focus, the rise of the one percent is closing in.  This is no ordinary transfer of power in what used to be world’s most stable democracy.  This is something completely different.  What is happening marks the end of over eight decades of cooperative government and liberal democracy dating back to the New Deal.  Over 75 years of ascendancy of American global power is about to end as nations – friend and foe – rush to arm themselves in the face of the most internationally  unpredictable and inept administration ever  preparing to take office.  Trump’s cabinet is the clearest sign of the consolidation of power in the hands of old, white, male billionaires who have no interest, experience or facility promoting policies that benefit anyone but themselves.  Trump ran as a populist, but he is setting himself up to rule as a plutocrat and dictator.

                Trump doesn’t deserve all the blame.  Mitch Mc Connell has been guiding us toward the end of democratic process for the last few years.  The refusal to confirm a Supreme Court judge, and the lack of confirmation for federal judges at all levels, has crippled one branch of government.  His refusal to work toward compromise, in spite of the fact that every position he holds is a minority position, has lowered public opinion and confidence in government to an all time low.  So low, that people would see a craven narcissist as a change agent.  Mc Connell has been matched, step for step, by Paul Ryan in the House.  When Trump takes office there will be no checks and balances left in place, and any procedural moves made by Democrats will be met with the same kind of response the Republicans made in North Carolina.  Ryan’s budget provides a clear indication of what we can look forward to.  Every program that benefits the poor and the vulnerable will be gutted to funnel more wealth to the top.  People who used to be in the middle, will find themselves slipping into the poor and vulnerable classes.

                Look at two areas that will be early targets, climate change and health care.  Trump has joked about climate change in the past, and his cabinet is loaded with people from the fossil fuel elite intent on extracting and burning every last drop of that fuel – the climate be damned.  The damage that these policies do cannot be undone.  Scientists are already trying to download as much data as they can from government data bases before they are erased or restricted.  NASA’s climate research will be halted and scientists will be weeded out of their government jobs.  Trump even promised to burn coal – COAL – in the face of economic and environmental arguments against it.  I can’t see even one speed bump in the Trump plan to ravage the environment.

                Health care is no better off.  Ryan and Mc Connell plan to repeal the ACA as soon as possible.  Of course, their public statements promise something better, but that has always been a lie.  The real Republican position is that most of us don’t deserve health care.  The argument that there is a Republican plan for health care is laughable.  The fact is that the ACA IS the Republican plan for health care and they won’t even support it.  We are headed back to the bad old days of people dying in Emergency Rooms and going bankrupt from health emergencies.  Women’s health issues and issues of access for women are going to revert to conditions not seen since the Fifties.  Medical care is going to go from a right to a luxury enjoyed only by a few.  The repeal of ‘Obamacare’ isn’t just the end of a law; it is the end of a philosophy of governing.

                The list of endangered programs doesn’t end here.  Public education, research in innumerable areas, housing, protection of workers and many more face the same fate.  The one percent see government as a way to consolidate and leverage their power, not to share the wealth.  There is a hard core social Calvinism baked into their view of the world.  They are a deserving elite, and the rest of us are an unfortunate and unnecessary problem.  At the end of the last Gilded Age workers were able to balance the political and economic policies a little because that economy need workers.  This one doesn’t.  It doesn’t take a factory or an office full of workers to write a Credit Default Swap.  Labor is not going to be the balancing force this time.  What could play that role is an open question.  The wealthiest among us do not seem to fear even the collapse of the environment.  It seems they have made a bet that a few will be able to survive with unlimited wealth and technology – that their children will live and ours won’t. 

                The rise of Trump and the one percenters marks the beginning of a new political and economic era. The old idea of politics and government will not be adequate to answer this challenge.  What Trump has done is to make the consequences clearer than they would have been under a normal political regime.  Under Trump, there isn’t even the pretense any more that this is business as usual. They are betting that we won’t rise up, that the phony left/right or conservative/liberal dichotomies will prevent us from resisting..  I think it’s time to call that bet.

                

Epistemology #5

Paradox and Wisdom

                Human intelligence is built around the paradox that Maturana and Fell attribute to our biology.  We are always already connected and autonomous.  What we ‘know’ is never just what we experience as individuals (including the intelligence of our bodies), and it is never simply a cultural reaction.  We are constantly balancing the two.  Epistemology has traditionally focused on the autonomous side of the equation, but intelligence is always a product of both of these realities.  In that sense, paradox is a constant feature of human thought.

                Paradox has played a pivotal role in a lot of traditions.  It was central to early Greek thought, and can be found in both early Daoist teaching and later Zen kaons.  In Christianity the Trinity presents a paradox that most current Christians just skip over.  Even modern physics revolves around the paradox that both quantum mechanics and relativity are both ‘true’ but incompatible.  As Heisenberg famously said about that paradox. “the opposite of a small truth is false, but the opposite of a great truth is also true.”  Some have argued that poetry revolves around the paradox of ambiguity and the vatic implications of that kind of interpretation.  Keats once called that ‘negative capability,’ the ability to hold two opposite and competing ideas at once.  It is obvious that paradox has been a constant in human thought and language.

                The same might not apply to machine intelligence.  The algorithmic view of the world revolves not around paradox but simulation.  Algorithms work because they can run variable simulations of the same conditions to determine what is or is not likely to occur.  Every video game player understands that she has to ‘die’ a few times to reach the next level.  Simulation optimizes some options over others to provide a ‘right’ or ‘best’ option.  One of the great advantages of machine intelligence is that by using simulation it can find patterns that human calculation is too slow to uncover.  Computer programs can roll millions of dice to reveal an intricate pattern that no one roll or limited set of rolls can replicate.  In doing so, however, simulation renders any particular moment, including this one, insignificant.  I can ‘die’ as many times as I need to in a video game to get to the next level, but that’s not an option for me in daily live.  Here, I only get one chance.  One of the axioms of chaos theory is that the next roll of the dice or the shape of the next vortex in a tub of water when the plug is pulled is unpredictable.  That doesn’t mean it’s entirely random – it will fall within a range of limited options, but it’s exact shape is unknowable until you pull the plug.

                The difference between paradox and simulation defines the role of wisdom.  As cyborgs we live with both.  We have greatly benefited from the introduction of super fast simulation made possible by machine intelligence.  At the same time, the biological couplings that sustain us as organisms are continually presenting us with paradox.  We might be able to simulate many actions, but we can only take one.  When we take that one action, it is indeterminable how it will turn out in the moment.  We can know how it will turn out 99 times out of 100, but we can’t know about this time in advance.  I think that paradox is connected to wisdom because we have to make – and feel – the choice in the moment.  Paradox creates a pause – a mindfulness if you will – that deepens and enriches the moment we are in.  An epistemology for cyborgs has to entertain the possibilities of simulation without neglecting the need for wisdom.  That is, cyborgs have to possibility in both terms and develop an intelligence that uses both without confusing them.

               

Epistemology #4

Blindness, Authority and the Postmodern Dodge

                When it comes to the limitations of human intelligence, blindness is one the first and most important limitations we face.  The concept of blindness is captured in a lot of different ways.  It is central to the idea in quantum physics that there is a limit to what one measurement can tell.  In interpersonal communication classes it is part of the Johari window exercise designed to show students that there is always a part of themselves that they are not aware of when communicating with others.  The idea of a quadrant of blindness is also found in Ken Wilbur’s work on consciousness.  Maturana frames it in his axiom that everything that is said is said by an observer.  For Maturana there is no Objectivity that is the same for each observer.  Instead, he says that each of us have an (o)bectivity that we can only confirm as real and not delusional by sharing it with other (o)bjectivities.

                Blindness means that epistemology has to have a dialogical or relational metric to it.  No individual can, independent of others, produce a true statement.  Further, every ‘true’ statement is only true in the context of the connected whole.  The true can be wrong or threaten the structural coupling of the group to its environment, but it is still true.  The Western tradition of individual consciousness misses the role that shared observation, as Maturana would have it, plays in defining what is knowable.  In that sense, blindness never really is resolved, it just shifts to a cultural context that either confirms or denies what the individual thinks is real.

                In societies with a strong imagined order, blindness is counterbalanced by authority.  The individuals or institutions that hold authority can make it seem that what is known within that system is valid and complete.  The sanctioned view may – or may not – be accurate, which is one way that authority can be at risk.  But most of the time the authority sustained by the imagined order prevails.  Unless there is a disruption in the order – or a Foucault shows up – individual blindness is occluded by cultural blindness.

                One of the interesting things about this moment is that the imagined order and cultural authority are in disarray.  The intersection of cultural perspectives makes it impossible to take any one perspective as authoritative.  Some commentators blame this on what they call postmodernism (which in most cases is just short-hand for cultural relativism), but it seems highly unlikely that a group of geeky English and philosophy post-docs at a poorly attended conference in some major city had any impact on any of this.  What is really happening is that postmodernism (at least this version of it) is simply describing what is actually happening.  The authority generated in the long running narrative of what the West has called modernity is unravelling.  The election of 2016 is proof of that.  In those circumstances, with no real authority to counter it, individual blindness emerges and is fueled by the unsanctioned communication of the internet.

                A responsible epistemology has to return the concept of blindness to the individual.  In the absence of an imagined order that is sustainable with our biological couplings, the individual who knows is responsible, morally and ethically, for the act of knowing.  That is, the multiple (o)bjectives around us are also our responsibility.  Knowing, as Maturana says, is not trivial.  This epistemology must also navigate a new form of blindness, machine intelligence.  Not everything possible in a simulation or algorithm can be reconciled with the biological couplings of humans.  Not everything that can be simulated is human.

                We have an opportunity to see what blindness can teach us that was always prevented by the intrusion of the church, the state, and the school.   Blindness increases our connections to others and the planet when we act knowing that only in connection can we act wisely.   

Epistemology #3

The one and the Many, Version 2.0 rebooted

                The gold standard of epistemology for almost a millennium now has been the ‘justified true belief.’   The idea that there was a test that could determine whether what a person believed was true and that the person had a justified reason for holding that belief and wasn’t just lucky, or in the Gettier case actually believed the right thing for the wrong reasons.  After a century of language critique undermining the very idea of true and justified,  I think it is important to resituate what a justified belief might be.

                I want to start with the assumption that is implicit in the notion of justified belief that there is a world independent of our cultural description of it (whether that description be linguistic or mathematical).  In resetting the framework for epistemology the first step has to be that we reject the ‘objective’ view of reality.  Instead, we have to begin with the notion that whatever we see is a creation of the cultural processes we share with those around us.  Multiple cultures might share the same processes – science, for instance – but it is still the product of those processes and not an ‘objective’ world that we encounter.  In other words, as Maturana puts it, we bring forth a world that we share with other people.  We do not simply or objectively encounter a world that exists independent of that description. 

                This is an important point.  What is true is not true because it is real.  What is true is true because we collectively believe it to be so.  As both Hutchins and Maturana insist, the culture determines what can be said and what can be said that is believed to be true.  Of course, the culture could be wrong, in which case it will soon be in trouble, but that is a later consideration.  The starting point has to be that we can only see what we are allowed to and that we have words or other symbols to communicate.  It also means that no individual ‘sees’ it by themselves.  Getting beyond the long held believe in the West that we live in a ‘real’ world that we process individually is a key step in an epistemology for this century.

                One of Maturana’s most insightful followers, Lloyd Fell, puts it this way, we are always both autonomous and connected.  We are never just one or the other.  As autonomous beings we are grounded to what we see, feel and think, and we know more about us than anyone else (which is not to say that we know everything about us).  As connected beings we are expressing – both to others and ourselves – what we see, feel and think in a language and other sign systems we share as part of a culture.  It is only as a member of that culture that we can process and communicate what we experience.  We may process the same information differently.  There be wild disagreements, but the cultural processes will produce a range of responses that validate a common version of reality.

                This is not the same thing as what we might call a weak sense of postmodern nominalism that seems to suggest that we can call something whatever we want.  Each individual and each culture has a structural coupling with a biological system that it cannot violate without risking death or collapse.  What we call things is, as Maturana likes to say, not trivial.  The key point is that we participate, sometimes more actively than others, is this cultural naming and regulating.  We don’t simply accept the languaging, we help reshape and redirect it.  It creates what Harari calls an ‘imagined order,’ because ALL order is imagined.  Sometimes we disagree or even think a person we’re interacting with is ‘crazy’ (a feeling you may even have reading this blog), but they are always operating in the cultural system or we couldn’t understand them at all.

                What epistemology has to account for, then, is not how an individual comes to have or not have a ‘justified true belief,’ but how individuals and cultures come to negotiate a world that allows some things as true or valid and rules other things out of bounds.  It is completely inadequate to settle for an epistemological project that focus on how the individual checks her beliefs with reality.  Instead, we need a project that questions how beliefs and realities are created in the interaction between individuals, cultures, and the biological couplings that sustain them.

                The 2.0 reboot part of the equation is that we now have to do this both assisted and threatened by the presence of machine intelligence.  Assisted, because we can now have access to data and patterns of data that were never available before, revealing connections and patterns that we never even imagined.  Threatened, because what machine intelligence produces is not necessarily part of the biological coupling we have to maintain.  So much of what so many people ‘know’ exists nowhere but the binary and decontextualized patterns of data swarming around them on the internet.

                Resetting and resituating the epistemological project requires adjusting to this new intersection of possibilities and problems.           

I remember the Democratic Party

                I grew up in a trade unionist family in a union town.  It used to be a Democratic stronghold.  Genesee County went heavily for Trump in the last election.  When I went to visit my father before the election, Trump signs were everywhere – big Trump signs. 

                In the shambles of the election, I’m left contemplating how the party of my father and my neighbors became the enemy of the people who live there now.  Flint and Genesee County have been heading down this road for a long time.  GM has pretty much abandoned “vehicle city’ for cheaper wages.  Only the truck plant on Bishop and Van Slyke still cranks out vehicles.  ‘Buick City’  is an empty field.  The rest is filled with the blight of a city with no real hope for a future.  The racism and segregation that were always there have a meaner tone to them now that the economic miracle is over.  The school systems were never meant to produce anything but shop rats, and they can’t even do that anymore. They voted for a man who wouldn’t even let them on his property, let alone understand or share their suffering.

                There a plenty of ways to explain the election.  Maybe it was as simple as the fact that the director of the KGB – I mean FBI – intervened in an unprecedented way.  Maybe the crony-capitalism and wall street coziness finally caught up with the Clintons.  There was certainly a heavy dose of misogyny and rejection of Obama in the mix.  It doesn’t really matter now.  All that really matters now is to understand where we are and what we have to do next.  We are at the end of politics as we’ve known them, at the end of a liberal democracy that dominated world affairs.  We find ourselves in the last, gallant (recognize irony when you see it) rise of the Confederacy.   We are in the last, desperate days of a white, male dominated narrative about the world that is determined to resist what is next.  We are at the last failed attempt by the Baby Boomers to make a better world.

                I suppose it was naïve to think we would ever reach the end of that narrative without at least one last plunge into darkness.  It seems inevitable that Trump and the insane clown posse (apologies to the band) that he surrounds himself with would try one last time to restore order to world that was slipping out of their control and understanding.  That world still awaits, but like all new orders it will have to fought for.  The answer to Trump is not policy or programs – the answer to Trump is a movement.  The polite political discourse of the past will not unseat what the Republican party has become, and it will not stop what they intend to do next.   Only a movement will do that.  The Republicans have chosen their path.  They haven’t really been interested in democracy for a long time.  They want power.  Power to make other people stop making them uncomfortable .  Power to stop the creation of a democracy that is inclusive and fair.  Power to make the most brutal form of capitalism triumph over democracy.  They haven’t been trying to ‘govern’ for a while – no compromise, no Supreme Court nominee.  Now they are ready to rule.

                We need to be ready for that fight, and if, like me, you’re a  Baby Boomer, you need to understand it is not really your fight.  There are things we can do, and there are things we know that will help, but this fight belongs to the Millennials (insert your favorite joke about them living in their parent’s basement here).   We had our shot.  It this is going to have the force and the energy it is going to take to turn the page on the failed narrative of white, male privilege, then they have to do it.  The movement has to be younger, more feminist, and more diverse in every conceivable way.  They have to find their own leaders, write their own progressive demands and be ready to fight for them.  If they are resolute and believe in their cause they will prevail.  They have to – the arch of history and age is on their side. But nothing is promised or guaranteed .  As Raymond Williams said in The Long Revolution, the next step can never just be assumed.

                I am optimistic.  I think the stakes are clear and there are too many of us to ever go back.  That doesn’t mean it will be easy or pretty.  But if the narrative is going to change, then let it be with a bang and not a whimper.    

Epistemology #2

The Conversation:

               

After framing the question of what makes human knowledge unique, a closely related problem is who has to be involved in the epistemological conversation.  One of the reasons that this conversation has lost its cultural importance is that it has been dominated by professional philosophers.  I respect the work that is done is specialized discourse communities, but there is a question whether it ‘travels’ into the public discourse.  There are certainly things that can only be developed in the back and forth of a highly technical and professional practice, but I’m not sure epistemology is one of them.  The current situation has clearly not served to promote a broader conversation about this issue.  I think that if the problems and potential of an epistemology for cyborgs are going to fully explored, it is going to take a much more inclusive conversation.

This is a tricky proposition.  Much of what I have to say here comes from my readings and conversations with people in specialized discourse communities.  I respect and appreciate that input.  On the other hand,  whenever I have tried to have a conversation about these issues outside that fairly limited circle of people, the specialized knowledge has either been a hindrance or a nuisance .   In his book,  States of Shock ,   Bernard Stiegler argues that the model of the university that grows out of the Enlightenment no longer works in a world where the competing spheres of knowledge intersect in different ways because of technology and capitalism.   Specialized knowledge is specialized precisely so it can’t be appropriated by ‘amateurs.’   That may be fine if the purpose of writing about it is promotion within a discipline, but it won’t foster a broader conversation.  We all have to be vigilant about how we use language to encourage others to want to talk about this issue.

If the most central part of human knowledge is knowledge about ourselves, there is no way around including people in their own sense of knowing.  Because we have split education away from any serious discussion of epistemology, we have fostered a sense of ‘learning’ that is completely divorced from the personhood of the student.  We have followed a modernist, social science model of metrics and statistical approximations of learning that we could ‘objectively’ measure and assess, but we have failed to see the person in the center of the learning.  If we see education as largely external to the growth of the person, then we will never expand the conversation about epistemology enough to find a deeper sense of learning.

We live at a time when so many people have rejected the elite narrative of the world that they are ready to embrace almost any simple narrative to avoid participating in a world that demands their presence.  The conversation about knowledge is also a conversation about culture.  As Edwin Hutchins says, intelligence is a cultural artifact.  It can’t exist in the isolation of individual minds.  It requires a context of tools and protocols, of definitions about what things are and how things work, that allow us to operate in synch with each other and our environment.  Those of us who care about learning and education have to find a way to open up this dialog in a way that is meaningful to the other people we share it with. 

In the year of Brexit and Trump it should be obvious that whatever public discourse we’ve had about knowledge has failed.  We are moving to a more unrealistic and less humane narrative about the world.  The idea that there is an objective reality we all can use as a common touch point is pretty well in tatters.  We not only can’t recognize a common reality, we can’t recognize each other.  The long, slow road back from this precipice is a learning that has an essential humanity at its core.  The modern belief in reason is dead.  We need a new conversation about who we are and how we survive on this planet.

That conversation will take place among cyborgs.  The acceleration of technology and social media has changed the dynamics of what it means to know.  Our conversations are no longer dominated by pulpits or classrooms.  There is no authority, no definition of ‘real,’ that can control what it means to know.  We find what we need to support our beliefs and reject anything that we don’t want to believe.  If there is a god figure in our epistemology its name is Google.  When we turned information into binary bits and freed it from context and location, the act of knowing fundamentally changed.  To embody knowing is no longer just a battle between mind and body but between the biological and the technical.  It’s not that long meditations in the form of books are no longer important, at least in some parts of the conversation, it’s that they are no longer adequate.

How we proceed isn’t clear.  My sense is that we start this conversation slowly and try to find ways to work it into regimes and domains that are part of the larger cultural artifact of intelligence.  It certainly means a sea change in what we think of as education and religion.  We are witnessing the decline and possible extinction of the great institutions of modernism and idea of reason.  The church, the school and the government have lost whatever control they had over the ‘imagined order.’  Being right isn’t going to help unless it penetrates what Kevin Kelly calls the ‘technosphere.’  There are biological restrictions to what we can know; machines aren’t limited by them.  My goal is to at least find that line and use it as a starting point for a new dialog.

An Epistemology for Cyborgs

In the next several entries to this blog I want to focus on epistemology and the implications of technology on the question of how and why we know what we know.  These posts will be numbered, not because they are in any kind of sequence, just to help keep them organized.

Recovering the Question:

                Epistemology has fallen out of favor (but not quite as much as its half- brother metaphysics).  It has been kidnapped by analytical philosophers who have starved it to near extinction, making it live off a steady diet of over and under coded sentence fragments.  The grand reach of the original question has been lost in the science of cognition and the rise of artificial intelligence.  Before we concede the field to ever more sophisticated machines and the algorithms that run them, I think we should step back and ask exactly what it means to “know” something in this environment, bordered on the one hand by technology and on the other by increasingly mechanistic notions of what it means to be human.  I think it is important to pause for a moment and sort out what human intelligence is; what are its characteristics, limitations and purposes.

                It’s become too easy frame these questions in disembodied contexts that focus on speed and information in one direction and chemical reactions in another.  The value of thinking epistemologically is that implies an embodiment – a biological, that is to say living, entity – that can’t be reduced to information or chemical reactions.  Epistemology also implies the consciousness of the knower, the awareness of the act of knowing.  Human intelligence may seem limited when compared to the speed and data of a computer, but it also presents an option that artificial (I would prefer to call it machine) intelligence lacks; it is organic.  It is organic in a way that even the most sophisticated algorithm, even ones that produce infinite variable, cannot completely mimic.  I mean no disrespect to the potential and power of machine intelligence.  It has become a valuable tool, maybe we could even day collaborator, in the way we understand our world and our place in it.  I simply want to draw a line between machine intelligence and what it means to know and learn as a human being.  Confusing them only confuses and limits the potential of both.

                When we learn, we are not learning about an objective world that is static.  When we learn, we are first and foremost learning about ourselves, and we are bringing forth a world that we share with others through the act of languaging.  Epistemology is not about absorbing or manipulating knowledge as much as it is creating consciousness.  What gets lost in the technological and materialist notions of learning and knowing is the connection between learning and living well, fully engaged in both the creation of the world we bring forth with others and the responsibility of harmonizing with it.  In other words, epistemologies move and change – they are themselves organic.   To reclaim epistemology is to reclaim the way we ground ourselves in an ongoing dynamic process.

                We live in a country that produces more technical and expert data and information than any culture has ever created.  There are over a billion pages of new scientific data alone published every year.  Yet we also live in a country where the shared understanding and value of that data is limited to a very small sub set of the population and in which many of the most basic findings of science are rejected by large swaths of the population.  We surround science, and every other academic and professional discourse, with barriers meant to limit participation and understanding.  While some people ‘know’ a lot about a particular subject, it doesn’t ‘bring forth a world,’ as Maturana would have it.  It also doesn’t shape the actions and consciousness of most of its practioners.  Only a few scientists really do science; most are mere technicians.  An even smaller number of the people who really do science think that way in the rest of their lives.  The same is true of the rest of the academic and professional worlds.  Separating the things we think from the social, biological, technical and spiritual worlds we inhabit is to engage in what Blake called ‘ single vision.’

                To reclaim the question of epistemology in a world dominated by technological and analytical systems is not going to be easy.  Not reclaiming it will mean that the only real outcome of ‘human intelligence’ will be to build machines that can escape this planet to colonize others.  Only by resituating ourselves in the autopoietic context of our own lives can we learn, again, who we are.

               

                

Alan Trammell Should be in the HOF

To grow up in the Midwest is to grow up rooting for underdogs.  In my childhood that meant the Detroit Tigers.  I was just becoming a baseball fan in 1961, playing little league and dying a little when my home town team rolled into Yankee Stadium to play the hated Yankees in a Labor Day series that would decide the pennant.  The Tigers were swept, and my long agony – interrupted only be the miracles of 68 and 84 – as a fan was born.  We get used to our teams losing (well, in less you’re a Cubs fan), it’s the lack of respect for our heroes that really hurts.  Oh sure, there is an occasional Kaline or Greenberg that sneaks in, but players who if they had played for the Yankees, Dodgers or Red Sox would surely be in the Hall are routinely ignored.

 To me the most irritating example of this is Alan Trammell, shortstop for the Tigers.  He played of the 84 world champions, the team that opened with a record of 35-5, still the best on record.  He was the MVP of the World Series and probably should have been the league MVP, losing out to George “Taco” Bell of the Blue Jays.  Along with Lou Whitaker, he was part of the longest playing and most productive double play combination in the history of baseball.  He was a consummate professional, adapting to multiple spots in the order to help the team.  No one who looks at the numbers seems to disagree that he fits comfortably in zone of HOF shortstops.  So what’s the problem.

Any Tiger fan can tell you the problem – he played in Detroit.  If he had played in New York, Boston or LA, he would have already have his plaque in the gallery on the first floor of the Hall.   But unless the Veterans Committee has mercy on he and Sweet Lou (Jack Morris was probably the best player on that team but he left via free agency, so Twins and Blue Jays fans can lobby for him) they’ll be unjustly forgotten.  Trammell isn’t upset at the snub, but at its core this is about more than baseball.  This is about having to deal with the snobbery of the East and West coast.  Of having to listen to idiots who think they own the known world because they happen to live in the promised land.  Alan Trammell is being discounted for the same reason we are all discounted – geography.

In the Midwest we grow up hearing about the “best” schools, food, people and sports teams.  We listen, but we never hear our names called.  Frankly, it’s sickening.  I’ve been around plenty of the best people from the best schools, and – unless you count massive egos and hubris – I’m still waiting to be awed.  Alan Trammell (even though he’s from California- only a little better that the East) is a consummate Midwestern hero.  He was a great baseball player, but he wasn’t a celebrity.  He did his job and he did it well – better than a lot of shortstops who have been inducted.

There’s nothing you folks in the East can do to solve what ails us here in the heartland – well you could just shut up and listen sometimes.  But you can make a good faith gesture.  You can put Tramm in the Hall where he belongs.trammell

Why Progressives are the Real Conservatives

                The word ‘Conservative’ has become a reliable part of our political dialog.  Everywhere you turn there are appeals to ‘conservative values’ and ‘conservative principles’ without any thought about whether or not the people making those claims and the positions they have staked out deserve to be legitimized by being called ‘conservative.’  The implication is that the conservative movement in America is somehow trying to save what has made this country what it is by defending their brand of ‘conservatism’ from the change driven and thoughtless erosion of values by people they call ‘liberals.’  There is even a 24/7 cable news network committed to promoting a conservative agenda.  But to say one is ‘conservative’ in America demands some analysis of exactly what American values are being ‘conserved,’ and not just a knee-jerk assumption that one side of the political spectrum is inherently ‘conservative.’

                Today’s incarnation of conservatives claim a lineage going back to Goldwater and Reagan, which would be problematic enough, but their policies and actions contradict even these claims.  The ideas of limited government and individual liberty have given way to a massive surveillance state intruding into people’s lives in the most private and intimate matters.  The expansion of the vote and participation in democracy has been replaced with an open and cynical attempt to limit not just the number but the kinds of people who get to vote.  Responsible fiscal management has been replaced by tax plans drawn up on napkins that are draining the public coffers while creating the greatest unequal distribution of wealth in our history.  The commitment to infrastructure has been replaced by a protection of individual wealth that have left us with roads, bridges, and water systems that even third world counties would find unsatisfactory.  Finally, the decorum of traditional conservatism has given way to a bombastic and juvenile rhetoric of personal attacks and demagoguery.  While it is true that racism, misogyny, and xenophobia have always been part of our political discourse, when did promoting and preserving them become ‘conservative?’

                The so-called conservative agenda today amounts to little more than old, white, male privilege.  It is not inclusive.  It is not American, and it has no viable future.  It is led by men (and occasionally women) who doubt science, refuse to believe anything except their own phony talking points, and are immune to evidence from the outside world.  They have made it ‘conservative’ to not follow the constitution, shut-down the government and use congressional oversight to prosecute partisan politics.  None of these are foundational values in this country; in fact, they are exactly the opposite.  The values that have made America what it is are inclusion, economic fairness and equal protection under the law.  We have survived and triumphed by expanding the franchise and allowing more people to vote, by investing in public institutions and infrastructure and by making sure that the religious convictions of some do not deny others a chance to run their own lives as they see fit.

                There has always been a strain of American culture and politics that has been exclusive and exploitive.  The issue is not that this iteration is somehow more loathsome or un-American.  The issue is that ‘conserving’ those attributes is not what makes us great.  They are the attributes that we have had to consistently struggle against – and apparently still do – to be a great nation.  Celebrating them as our heritage or our core values debases what it means to be American.  It is worth fighting over this distinction.  If we can see what the current crop of conservatives is promoting as anti-American, we can stop lauding their patriotism and appreciation of the past.  Instead, we can see them as the small and pathetic people they are.  We can see this generation as perhaps the last gasp of what we were ever so fortunate not to become.

                Ironically, the only people in the political spectrum that are fighting for these values are called progressive.  They are often young, people of color and female.  They are the true ‘conservatives’ of the American political process.  They are the ones expanding on the foundation that makes us ‘American,’ and they are the ones preserving what this country promised it would be. Progressives are pushing the agenda that defines ‘American values,’ unless you think those values are about bigotry and exclusion.    The next time you hear someone talk about conservatism, think of them; they are the ones fighting to save what is best about us.

  And when you hear some politician touting their ‘conservatism’ you should hear white, male privilege writ large.

Freddie Gray and the Legacy of Ronald Reagan

By: Barry Alford

It’s tempting to look at Baltimore and think that this is an urban event, impacting the lives and futures of relatively few  who are relatively insignificant.  It’s convenient to think of a ‘riot’ as breakdown of civil society, but civil society broke down long ago.  The streets of Baltimore are the parallel to Reagan’s fantasy view of America.  They reflect a reality that in spite of the effort to hide and marginalize it won’t go away.  It proves that that no matter how much we try to argue otherwise, our collective fate must honor all those who are part of it, not just the few.  Freddie Gray wasn’t just murdered by the ‘depraved heart’ of the cop driving a police van; he was murdered by our collective ‘depraved heart.’  Reagan had a small view of America, one no more expansive than the wealth of his comfortable and intellectually limited circle of friends would allow.  His America is an America of fear: fear of each other, fear of change, and fear of our possibilities.  Freddie Gray is merely its newest and most well known victim.   There is no way out of Baltimore that doesn’t begin with rewriting the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

Let’s start at the top.  The racism and police violence that killed Freddie Gray didn’t start with Ronald Reagan, but the governmental indifference to the poor and minorities that have militarized police departments and estranged members of the underclass in America did.  Freddie Gray (and Michael Brown etc.) are the legacy of the conservatism of Reagan that stopped the civil rights movements of the 60’s in their tracks and put us on the path that leads to the events in Baltimore.  Freddie Gray was killed not for violating a statute or breaking a law but for not knowing his place.  He was executed not by a public police force but by what amounts to a private security force dishing out ‘justice’ for imagined crimes and immunity to the rich and powerful.  The callous indifference, murder by depraved  heart, that leads to Gray’s death is a direct outcome of a  conservative movement that has redefined government as the protection of the few at the expense of the many.  A libertarianism that trumpets freedom of government intervention for the rich (and mostly white) and yet invests in the massive use of governmental force to suppress the rest of society.  This starts with Reagan.

                It was under Reagan in the 80’s that the attack on public education and the demonization of teachers begins.  It is under Reagan that the war on drugs takes on a strategy of mass incarceration of poor and minority males so the people driving SUVs in the suburbs, and consuming most of the drugs, can feel safe from this ‘menace.’  It is Reagan that drags us back into the gross expenditures on the military that drain social programs of the money to keep them going and create an America not only ready to go to war but itching to do so.  It was Reagan who took aim at unions and the rights they had achieved for workers as being too expensive.  It was Reagan who began the political movement to reduce taxes on the wealthy, ‘job-creators’ he called them, that left us with schools and roads more befitting a third-world country than the ‘shining city on the hill’ he romanticized.  In short, it was Reagan who crafted an America where some people matter a lot and most of us don’t matter at all, a nation where ‘murder by depraved heart’ is inevitable.

                This is precisely the time in America when ‘crime’ was reconstructed to mean something poor people did against the system.  It marked the beginning of aggressive police strategies such as ‘stop and frisk’ that brushed aside the constitutional rights of the poor and minorities in order to protect the privilege of the white and wealthy.  At first, these policies looked  populist, but 35 years down the road the gap between those that have and those that do not is greater than ever, and fewer and fewer people fit under the shrinking umbrella of government protection.  Crime was no longer against the commonwealth; stealing seventeen trillion wouldn’t even get you indicted.  In fact, the government would reimburse you for your trouble.  The idea of community policing was replaced by more and more aggressive policing, culminating in bringing the equipment of war into poor neighborhoods.  One of the signature pieces of this kind of policing was the ‘war on drugs,’ which still rages across the country.  Calling it a ‘war’ legitimized tactics usually reserved for foreign combatants.  Drug squads, many of them drug users themselves, used intelligence and surveillance techniques from the military to kick down the doors of the poor and minority populations in our cities, mushrooming the prison population.  That population, however, did not reflect America or even the people in America who used drugs.  Instead it reflected what the new conservatism in America sought protection from.  The internment of the Japanese in WWII involved far fewer people than the incarceration of black males in America.

Ronald Reagan constructed an America that replicated his infamous ‘kitchen cabinet.’  A white America, a privileged America.  It was a fantasy land, and like all fantasy worlds it blocked out any news or disturbance that challenged it.  It has been humming along for over 35 years spinning off a ‘conservatism’ that is less and less about conserving democracy or its public institutions and more and more about pampering the few.  A’ conservatism’ that has turned its back on the environment and government alike to promote an untrue and unsustainable view of the world.  A world where trees are responsible for pollution and no one can remember whether or not they authorized arms for hostages.  A world where not only do the ends justify the means, they justify fabricating the ends.  A lie told by a Twenty Mule Team Borax/General Electric huckster that spawned a generation of politicians who no longer even remember the original lies.  A view of America as it never was that helped propel it toward something it was never meant to be.

What is wrong in Baltimore doesn’t start or end in Baltimore.  What is wrong in Baltimore is what is wrong in all of us.  The ‘depraved heart’ that killed Freddie Gray is the denial at the core of our current politics that ALL of us are Americans.  ALL of us deserve justice, respect and opportunity.  Reagan never believed that.  His America was a nation divided between those who thought the 60’s had gone too far in enfranchising the marginalized and those who fought to open the nation to the promise it represents to all its citizens.  To do that, he began the process of turning away from reality and constructing an ideology impervious to fact, reason and compassion.  Thirty five years down that road,  Freddie Gray went for a ‘rough ride’ in Baltimore, and reality must now be served.

Flint

I grew up just outside of Flint, Michigan.  In my childhood Flint was a very different place than it is today.  Flint is where the middle class in America started; the 1937 sit-down strike that unionized GM happened here.  It used to be a city of blue collar workers surrounded by the cooperate affluence of high level General Motors staff.  It created a city that was as gritty as the factory floor but as elevated as the first class city library, Planetarium and symphony orchestra.  It was a city fiercely proud of its place in the world and dedicated to improving the lives of its citizens.  All of that gets lost in the narratives coming out of Flint today that make it seem like it was always a failed city.  It wasn’t.

When the lead poisoning story hit the news, I was drawn to it for a variety of reasons.  For me, it was ‘home town’ story (I still watch the news from Flint just like I did as a kid).  But it also represented a story that had no specific place of origin, a story of the slow decline of an America of democratic values and economic opportunity that projected a sense of justice and righteousness.  Where had that Flint gone?  Looking back, it seems all but inevitable that the children of Flint would suffer lead poisoning at the hands of a Republican governor who valued a few dollars more that their health and future.  It seems inevitable that we would be treating parts of America like a third-world catastrophe unfolding on the news right in our back yard but feeling like it was coming from far away.  Flint was no accident perpetrated by a couple inept water employees or state bureaucrats.  It is the predictable, and I would argue intentional, consequence of decades of urban policy and abandonment.   

The shift started when Nixon chose war spending over continuing the anti-poverty programs of LBJ.  It started in the “southern strategy’ of Lee Atwater and Republican politicians milking the racial and class tensions that progressive change was starting to address.  It matured under Reagan and the ‘golden age’ rhetoric of the ‘city on the hill.’  Whenever politicians talk about the good old days in America, they are talking about the good old racist, misogynistic, elitist days.  The country of opportunity and economic justice is not part of our national narrative without unions.  That narrative starts in Flint.  Almost four decades of failed economic and social policy by mostly, but not only, Republican politicians have lead us to poisoning 9,000 children to save a few bucks.  It has lead us to this crossroads as a nation that has to now consider its legacy.

 The people of Flint didn’t choose this future; it was chosen for them.  It was chosen by cooperate greed and tax policies that allowed the greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of the fewest number of people in history.  A recent headline said that two-thirds of cooperation’s haven’t even paid taxes in this century.  Would the city of Flint have ever gone into bankruptcy if GM stayed and followed through on its promises or the tax base of the city wasn’t gutted with giveaways to robber barons?  We are here today because we failed to follow –up on what the workers in Flint created in the 30’s.  We bought into the dream of consumer capitalism that preached the only important part of production is what it costs in the end.  We failed each other by abandoning the commitment to a larger community of workers and their wellbeing.

The unions lost their way; they lost sight of the larger community.  We continue this folly every time we walk into a Walmart to save a few pennies and drive another stake into the heart of shared prosperity and economic justice.  We continue it by voting for politicians who promise to save us a buck or two on our taxes while sheltering trillions of dollars of cooperate wealth from taxes.  We continue it by supporting policies that demonize and abandon the poor, accusing them of draining public coffers, while the rich rob us blind.  Flint is the future of every city in America if this doesn’t stop.   If you get bogged down in the argument about who we should blame or that we just need to replace a few pipes, ask yourself this question – what if they were your children?  If we don’t change course, they soon will be.

 Extractive Education:

                The current debate over educational policy is being waged on an unequal battlefield.  The assumption that drives much of the public conversation is based in the faulty assumption that this is a debate between two sides pursuing the same outcome through different means.  That is, the assumption is that both progressives and conservatives want to improve and save public education albeit following severely different strategies.  My contention is that that assumption is false.  The current policy debate over educational policy needs to be framed in a way that highlights the intentions of those attacking public education not as potential saviors but as intentional destroyers of those institutions.

In their recent book, Why Nations Fail ,Darren  Acemoglu and James Robinson introduce the notion of ‘extractive’ institutions, institutions that are run by elites to extract wealth or other social capital from a society for their benefit instead of distributing or expanding wealth for the whole society.  While their analysis is mostly focused on the way economic institutions play this role, the concept lends a clarity and precision to the plight of institutions of education in the current context.  In short, it makes it possible to see the practices and politics of education in America since the Nation at Risk fervor as intentional and not accidental in terms of the impact they have had on public education.  ‘Extractive Education,’ then describes education that feeds the status of the elite instead of benefiting the broader social context and most specifically, without benefiting the students in those institutions.

How else would we make sense out of the thirty year war on public education except to see it as a means for the elite to eliminate the social capital and mobility that education provided in the first decades following the Second World War?  The object of these policies, NCLB is the poster child of this effort, while couched in terms of educational reform have really been the deactivation of the role education plays in expanding social capital and providing meaningful access to non-elite students.  Critics of these measures site data and research that proves to anyone interested in a fair analysis, that the educational reforms and testing regimes of the last two decades are counter- productive, and the prevailing consensus in the research and reform community seems to be that the next study will finally and conclusively prove the failure of the educational policies in place.  The problem, as Acemoglu and Robinson make clear in their analysis, is that for the people directing the policy, the elites who promote and implement policy over the objections of the research community, the policies are not failing, they are doing exactly what is intended. Just as tax codes and financial regulations are used by elites to turn the markets into ‘extractive’ institutions, the educational policies of the last few decades are guaranteeing that schools will protect rather than challenge a cultural concentration of power and influence.

There are several characteristics of what an extractive educational system would look like.  The particular arrangements could vary, but the general trend of moving resources that used to be directed to broadening access and expanding the public benefit of the institution are being replaced by trends that shrink the benefits and restrict the access.  In recent years, the following trends have been evident and widely reported on in American education;

1.       System Participants are Restricted and Their Resources Reduced:  If you accept, as I do, that the assault on the educational system has nothing to do with improving that system, but is instead directed at transforming the educational system from an expansive and democratic system to an ‘extractive’ one, then attacking  the people who work in the system makes sense.  The attacks on teachers are not so much about improving education or even the much trumpeted idea of accountability as they are a systematic dismantling of public education.  Teachers have become the ‘welfare queens’ of this round of public hysteria.  Just as Reagan used the trumped up idea of the welfare queen to rip apart the safety net in the 80’s – and poverty has increased ever since – this attack on democratic inclusion has an equally fallacious villain : the bad teacher.  To be sure, there are bad teachers, but there are bad doctors, lawyers, and legislators, too,  and the country doesn’t seem to be on the brink of mass lynching because of it.  Teachers get singled out in this process for two reasons.  The first is that destroying their credibility is critical to destroying the credibility of the institution (think Wall Street bankers) and limiting their potential to save children in the system helps accelerate the move away from public and democratic educational institutions to private and restrictive versions.  Could teachers do better?  Sure they could, but reducing their benefits, cutting their salaries and limiting their freedom of practice hardly seems like a recipe for improving the profession. If it were, imagine what we could do with the aforementioned bankers.  It is impossible to conclude that the attack on teachers has anything to do with improving education.  The second reason for the attack is to limit their effectiveness.  The last thing the shift to an extractive version of education can tolerate is unexpected success.  However limited teachers might be, if freed from the restraints of invalid standardized testing and allowed to actually interact with their students, they would ‘save’ more children, and in an extractive model that is simply unacceptable.  Teachers have to be attacked and their credibility destroyed so that evaluative measures can be put in place that guarantee as little social mobility as possible.

2.       Limiting Social Mobility:  If we understand that the purpose of extractive institutions is to benefit an elite, then it should be no surprise that the elite wants to keep their numbers small.  One way to look at the pitiful results of the standardized testing diaspora of American  education is to say that too many children are failing, but from the perspective of an extractive set of practices that is precisely the result desired.  What gets reified and replicated in this version of extractive education is the status of the elite.  Time after time, what the test results show is that the socio-economic status of the parents is the best predictor of testing success.  It is such a stable component of test results that is  impossible to see it as a coincidence or an accident.  Instead, it makes far more sense to see it as the desired outcome.  Standardized testing creates an invalid measure of student learning in so many ways, but it creates one desired outcome that is essential to extractive education: it reifies the social status of the elites.  How else can we understand the politics of continuing a testing regime that has so many problems and limitations.  It helps, of course, that by putting our money in testing we are supporting private and not public interests, but the main value of this approach is that it makes it harder for teachers, students, and parents to engage in an educational practice that might help their children move upward or change the distributional schemes of the society. This is not to say that every use of standardized testing is invalid, but when they are used in high stakes assessment to rate teachers and schools there is little or no validity.   Add to this the lurid and absurd spectacle of charter school lotteries and the admission practices of elite institutions, and we have a perfect picture of how education becomes a scarcity instead of something that the whole culture can partake in and benefit from.

3.       Extracting Resources: The obvious consequence of extractive educational practices is that resources that used to be dedicated to a public institution will be reduced or diverted to private business interests.  This step is so obvious that it needs little commentary except to point out that the rhetoric surrounding these moves is not about educational reform.  The hidden winner in this type of policy, even more than vouchers and charter schools, is the money diverted from public education to standardized testing.  The millions upon millions of dollars being spent to develop, administer, and score standardized instruments that have little validity, even just in a parallel sense, is spent not to enhance education but to produce and reify predictable data points that validate the rest of the political agenda of extractive educational policy.  Not only does the money support the political and economic agenda of extraction, but it now goes into business and not schools.  The end result of these policies, of course, is the complete destruction of public  education and the creation of a private educational system for elites.  This will limit the access of marginal classes and free the elites of the tax burden of public education. These ideas were first developed by the Mackinaw Center in 1986 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  They also helped pioneer the use of shoddy data to under estimate the success of public education and over-hype the success of private charter initiatives to spin the public debate over the effectiveness of public education.

4.       The Triumph of Elite Institutions:   The end result of extractive educational policies is return education to the practice of credentialing and benefiting an elite that can then culturally dominate the rest of society.  Prior to the last part of the 19^th century which ushered in the revolution of the American university, education beyond wage earner status was restricted to the upper class or the people Gramsci called “the hundred at Eaton.”   The changes in the economy after the Civil War required the change in educational policy as a new managerial class emerged to run the capitalist empires of the robber barons.  The post WWWII wave of democratized higher education marked by the GI Bill and the growth of Community Colleges saw an even greater expansion of access and mobility.  It is precisely this expansion that the move to extractive educational practices is intended to roll back.  The current globalized economy, based as it is in financial transaction and not labor based production, is not only not aided by an expansion in educational opportunities, it is threatened by it.  Perhaps for the first time since the demographic pressure of the Black Death gave the concept of skilled labor a foothold into economic prosperity and brought the feudal economies of the Middle Ages to an end in the Renaissance, the surplus of labor is so great that it is a burden and not an asset to the kind of wealth produced in the current economic system.  Add to that the fact that the productivity of individual workers keeps increasing, and the picture for ‘work’ in the future economy is nothing short of dire.  The lessons of the collapse of 2008 is not that job growth is difficult but that for the people who run and benefit from an economy based in financial markets it is completely unnecessary.  That fact will translate to educational policies designed to shore up the elite institutions at the expense of public education.  An early example of this can be seen in the recent move by the SAT to offer early testing to students who are recommended and can afford $5000 for an intensive three week prep course.  In this scenario, even the pretext of equal opportunity and participation is gone.

If the people who want to augment and improve public education want even a chance at success, they must reposition their arguments and their policies on a broader economic and political strategy.  There is no way to save public education in the midst of economic and political policies that favor a smaller and richer elite at every turn.  Indeed, there is no need to do so.  The political system will not produce results contradicted by economic reality.  Progressive defenders of public education and the role it plays in a democratic society must come to grips with the fact that the defense they pose also requires at least a somewhat democratic economy.  The war waged on public education, as well as other public institutions, by an isolated and extractive elite  is not new and will not stop at charter schools.  If democracy matters then public education must be part of that formation.  Losing the battle over public education makes it highly unlikely that any other democratic institutions will survive. Those fighting on the front lines over the future of education should understand the scope of the battle and not be distracted by proposals that, whatever their individual merit, are part of the agenda to dismantle the link between public education and democratic mobility.  As it stands, America has become one of the societies with the least economic mobility – only Great Britain is worse in the industrialized world.  Educational policy alone will not reverse that trend, but the dismantling of the public education system will guarantee that it will not be reversed in the foreseeable future. 

  

Combatting Trump

We’ve all been watching the Trump campaign in slow motion, wondering when the train will finally jump the track and plummet into the abyss.  The problem is that we’ve miscalculated just what kind of event we’re watching.  We have tried, Hillary has tried, the punditry and media has tried to frame the Trump campaign as a ‘political’ event, and it’s not.  ‘Politics’ is a frame we use to privilege a rational and policy driven enterprise which is largely, but not entirely, run by elites.  Most people don’t really participate in it (except to vote every now and then) and really don’t care for it that much (which probably says something inherently positive about them).   Trump is none of these things.  Trump is ‘molar.’

In their seminal work, A Thousand Plateaus, the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator Felix Guattari describe word orders as existing in two types.  The first is molecular – a stratified and solidified kind of order that is stable and predictable.  There is an affective domain inside of it, but the way we talk about it walls that off and leaves only the rational traces of the event.  Our ‘politics’ is a molecular word order, and most people recognize the limited dynamic at play.  The other kind of word order is ‘molar.’  Molar events “flow” because they have broken out of the static confines of their rational containers and are sent pouring out into the culture breaking down the word orders and practices that used to stabilize them. (I know this analysis would get a D at best on the midterm).   I think the only way to understand the Trump phenomenon is recognize it as a ‘molar’ event, all affect and emotion.

For months the Democrats, the media and even a good number of Republicans have been waiting for the ‘normal’ rules of politics to kick in and stop Trump.  The problem with that is that Trump could never exist if those word domains were intact.  Trump can only exist when the linguistic structures around politics have been breached by something too intense and too emotional to qualify as ‘political.’  Molar flows are ‘nomadic,’ seeking a new constellation and a new order, and they cannot be contained or understood from the molecular standpoint that they broke away from.  The ugly emotional content of the Trump campaign doesn’t need reason or logic or even consistency to validate it.  The people who believe are validated by the simple fact they believe.  This emotional stew has always been a part of American politics, even being hinted at occasionally by unscrupulous politicians who use ‘dog whistles’ to signal their followers.  In a normal political season, that’s as far as they can go.  The emergence of Trump means that the dam broke and that we have gone from a normal political campaign to something very different and much more dangerous.

Pointing out Trump’s flaws, besides being a never ending activity, is largely useless.  Everyone who is using normal political reasoning to calculate their vote has already done so.  If truth or logic or competence where the answer, the race would already be over.  The fact that it is far from over, means that it is time to realize what is happening and combat it in the only effective way we can, with a molar event of our own.  Hillary and her surrogates were at their best during their convention.  They waved flags, gave emotional speeches, and brought people to their feet.  Khizr Khan moved a nation with his direct and indignant rebuttal to Trump.  Then Hillary went back to being Hillary, perhaps the perfect embodiment of a ‘molecular’ politician.  I don’t mean that as a slight, but she is not an emotional politician (and given the sexism in the electorate, may not be able to afford to be one).  But the answer to Trumpism is not rational or policy driven – the answer is to call on the potential molar powers that the convention displayed with powerful effect.

The campaign is in the home stretch and a lot is at stake.  Even if you have, as I do, reservations about Clinton’s connections to crony capitalism and the overly militaristic view of the world she seems to promote – the list could go on – this is no time to quibble.  As Bernie himself said, there is really no viable alternative to Hillary becoming president.  She has to find a positive and emotional message and forsake the notion that Trump can be held accountable in a traditional political calculus.  The media has to stop chasing every new shiny thing Trump says and does and focus on the themes that make us a democracy – although one certainly at peril.  If they can’t stop fixating on the carnival and focus on the larger issues, the media, and the political establishment will be swept away by the pyroclastic flow we call Trump.

Is Mitch McConnell a Terrorist?

                Calling someone a terrorist is problematic on any number of levels, not the least of which is that it has become such an overused label that it is often little more than name calling.  Even so, some characteristics of terrorism have remained clear.  Terrorism requires the intentional act of someone of extreme and dogmatic character; someone willing to inflict pain, suffering and even death on the innocent to achieve their own ends.  We usually attribute that sort of orthodoxy to religious beliefs, but there is no reason that the extremism cannot be politically motivated.  Using this broad definition, it is time to ask whether or not Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should be considered a terrorist?

                The initial response to this question is probably to assume that it is a flippant and hyperbolic overreach to equate a political figure like McConnell to a terrorist.  I think a careful analysis of the damage the Leader’s actions have created, however, make it a matter of serious consideration.  I contend that no one has done more to harm the democratic institutions that this country is founded on than McConnell.  No matter how gruesome and horrendous the attacks of terrorist networks have been, none of them have threatened the American political system more than the Senator from Kentucky.

                McConnell has led an assault on the very foundations of American democracy by refusing to let those institutions function as they were intended.  Terrorists who attack buildings and people pose a threat to those buildings and people, but they don’t inherently challenge our form of government.  In fact, attacks from the outside can even strengthen the government, forcing petty and patrician issues aside to focus on more important threats.   McConnell and the rest of the Republican leadership has done exactly the opposite.  They have taken the radical and extreme partisanship of a small minority of their party and used it to bring the federal government to a complete standstill.  The Congress can’t pass a budget, keep the government running or pass funding for natural disaster or the Zika outbreak without the drama of extreme political dysfunction.

                A democracy requires compromise, and this iteration of the Republican party refuses to compromise.  Instead, they offer only the most extreme ( and often already debunked) ideas and use the procedures of the congress to insure nothing ever happens.  I don’t think this is a coincidence.  While making sure nothing happens is bad for the majority of the country, it suits the interests of the Republican donors just fine.  The utter failure of this congress to do anything is the only way that the people supporting the Republicans can stay in power.  They need our energy policies to stay focused on the hopeless expansion of fossil fuels, and they need our economic policies to continue to benefit the very richest tenth of one percent for them to keep their power.  McConnell has even gone so far as to violate his constitutional duty to participate with the duly elected chief executive to fill the current vacancy on the Supreme Court.

                This extremism has led to the lowest approval rating ever recorded for congress.  It has led to a generation of millennials vital to the future of our country to turn away from the political system, and who can blame them.  It is naïve to assume that this is not the intended outcome.  McConnell and his backers can only succeed if the system fails and the young voters stay home.  McConnell isn’t just ‘playing politics,’ he is destroying politics.  In doing so he is striking at the heart of what makes us a democracy.  No plane, no bomb, no gun can do that.

                If you think it is blasphemy to equate politics to terrorism because it somehow doesn’t honor the memory of the 3,000 or so people who died on 9/11 or the brave civilians and veterans who have died fighting terrorism, I offer this response.  Over 30,000 people a year die in gun violence in this country and at least 60,000 people die from the effects of environmental pollution.  Where is the honor in their deaths?  Mitch McConnell has become the face of a party willing to knowingly kill its own people for the sake of ideological purity.  If that isn’t terrorism, what is it?

The Day After the Election

We are heading into the most contentious and ugly election in our lifetimes.  It is almost devoid of serious issues and is dominated by a 24 hour news cycle detailing the latest high wire failure of the Trump circus.  The day after the election, America will face a choice that has never been directly confronted by the campaigns.  The day after the election, we have to tell a new story.

It is obvious that what Harari has called the “imagined order” that we refer to as America is broken.  This is not to suggest that both parties are equally guilty.  Hillary and the Democrats are running on a theme of ‘stronger together,’ but in the end it’s clear that we’re really not all that together.  Obviously, a Trump presidency would be disastrous in ways that are even hard to imagine, but regardless of who ‘wins,’ the problem of who we are remains.

This is not a question of policy or programs.  This is a question of narrative.  What is our story about who we are and what we intend to be?  We already have a nation gridlocked and polarized by parties that don’t just disagree on the details; they disagree on reality.  The worldview of Trump supporters doesn’t just disagree with what Hillary’s supporters believe, it negates it. There is no longer any starting point for a dialog that both parties could agree on.  In 2016, ‘facts’ are whatever anyone wants them to be.  Climate change is a good example.  No one who understands science (by that I mean that they realize that there is always some dissent among scientists) doubts that climate change is real and that human activity plays some role in it.  But we have a major party who simply refuses to acknowledge that.  The same can be said for any number of critical issues facing the country – from economics to education.  We no longer share a reality – an “imagined order” – that can serve as a default setting to ground our disagreements and diverse perspectives.

The campaign will only make that worse.  Aided and abetted by a media establishment only interested in the horserace, one that refuses to call out even the most transparent and obvious lies, the narratives of the campaign are only going to move further and further apart.  Words such as America, patriot, and democracy are going to thrown around by people who assume they have a common meaning, but, of course, they don’t.  We don’t just vote in separate parties; we live in different worlds.  Assuming we avoid the utter catastrophe of electing the most unqualified candidate any of us has ever seen, we will still be left with a self-described policy wonk who is anything but inspirational..  In some ways her story and the reality of the first woman president is inspiring, but how will she lead.  She will undoubtedly purpose solid policy initiatives, but she will do so to a divided and gridlocked congress who is no more ready to work with her than they were Obama.  There is little hope that the divide opened up during the campaign will be healed by the politics that follow.

In some ways, we are like people caught in a relationship that was on the skids but was barely holding itself together.  In this election, we dropped the pretense of the relationship and started yelling and name calling.  The convenient fiction that we were one people is now gone.  I don’t think it can be pieced back together.  I think we need a new narrative, a new “imagined order.”   We need on that can truly embrace diversity, unlike the old one that paid it lip service but never quite figured how equal and diverse went together.  We need a narrative that embraces uncertainty and pictures America as a partner in the world not the alpha male.  We need one that realizes that ‘knowledge’ has to created by the people who live it and not by ‘experts’ who don’t.  We need that and so much more.  It is hard to imagine how a political leader can do that in the political context we live in.  Even the most gifted orator I have ever seen failed miserably, in spite of a heroic effort.

On November 8^th we’re going to elect a president.  Turns out, what we really need is a story teller.