Who's on First

Imagine a tyrannical corporate CEO, someone who wants more money for himself no matter the cost.  It would be pretty easy to imagine someone like this embracing the concept of Libertarianism save for its one saving grace - that people are free to spend their money with other people.  That is, if they don't like what the corporate tyrant is doing, they can simply shop somewhere else. 

(That assumes, of course, that the tyrant isn't one of many tyrants all doing the same thing, or that the tyrant hasn't formed a monopoly on a vital service or good).

Integral to fighting that tyrant and preventing him from abusing his power, then, is people actually learning about what he is doing, and that relies desperately on the free trade of information - that is, that:

1. People are able to discover what is happening
2. People are able to communicate that discovery widely

It's for that reason that our founding fathers created the First Amendment, which, among other things, guarantees both freedom of speech and freedom of the press.  It is notably our press that is able to make discoveries and communicate those discoveries to people, but when the press fails (as it so often does), people themselves are able to communicate - whistle-blowers within organizations can tell those outside, people can organize boycotts against companies they take issue with, and so on.

Such a tyrant would, necessarily, need to attack the First Amendment in order to expand his power. 

We've been seeing that happen from both the right and the left, lately, and in some very insidious ways.

First, we have the advent of "fake news."  Though we have long been aware that news sources were not always reliable, in the age of Facebook their power has risen exponentially.  On both sides of the aisle, they rouse the fervor of their readers by publishing stories that have a morsel of truth, but they couch that truth in a bed of lies and half-truths, all of which sound reasonable enough to the person reading.  They take advantage of the human tendency to accept things which confirm our beliefs, known as "confirmation bias."  When we are presented with some argument that sounds plausible, we don't tend to investigate it further, because we already know that it's right (even when it's not).

Fake news is a war against the First Amendment, however, for two reasons: First, because when we encounter fake news from the other side, we have a tendency to want to outlaw it, recognizing it as lies and seeking ways to protect ourselves from the fallout of fake news (namely, rising anger from the opposition and new arguments to deconstruct and prove false); Second, because fake news distracts us from real news.  It provides an echo chamber that reinforces lies and blocks out facts.  On our opposition side, it presents us with those arguments that we have to now deconstruct before we can start dealing with facts. 

But we also have a war on the First Amendment from people getting upset with how people use the first amendment - and again, this is not one-sided.

For liberals, the most clear example are the cries to outlaw the burning of the American Flag.  Though burning the flag is tasteless to most of us, we must accept that the flag is, at its heart, a symbol, and burning the flag is also a symbol - a symbol sometimes of hatred against America and an embrace of what we might consider "anti-American values," yes, but a symbol sometimes of disgust with certain things that America has become.  America in many ways embraces lies and half-truths, promotes and values those views, makes policy decisions based on them.  Let us not forget that for most of America's history, America embraced the belief that black people were sub-human, that they were not as capable as white people at understanding math, literature, and science, that they were good only for their muscles.  This was a lie, but America based huge legal structures such as slavery on it.  Many of those structures still exist today.  The flag not only stands for the America that offers hope and love and opportunity for those who have had none, for the "American Dream," but also for those racist structures that it built so many of those dreams upon. Burning the flag for many is a protest against that version of America, and someone can still hold great love for the country while protesting those structures. 

That said, there are other, less toxic examples.  Taking a knee during the national anthem, for instance, is seen by conservatives as disrespect for the flag, and through it disrespect to those who have died for the nation, even though taking a knee during the anthem was designed specifically to show respect for those who have died while still disrespecting the national institutions of racism that are being protested.  Again, though, you can only learn that information if you can accept news from outside of your echo chamber.

For conservatives, though, there are also clear examples.  For instance, when Loretta Lynch started looking into whether climate-denying scientists could be charged with fraud.  Conservatives say this is an attack on their freedom of speech - and they wouldn't be wrong (provided she had actually charged them with fraud, which she didn't). 

As much as we sometimes hate it, the freedom of speech and freedom of the press are often used by our political enemies to extreme effect - but it is their right.  The more we fight against it directly, the more we chip away at our own rights and protections against tyranny.

Taking Back Oklahoma

Election day was pretty lousy for those of us on the political left in Oklahoma.  While nationally Democrats picked up a few seats in the senate, mitigating the potential damage of a Trump presidency (we only need one dissenting vote in the Senate from the Republicans to block any nominations/confirmations), here in Oklahoma we lost several seats in both the House and the Senate, and lost some elections where the Democratic candidates had raised significant war chests and had a huge amount of ground support - candidates like John Waldron.

The problem is as it has been for the last several election cycles - Republican support in the state is at an all-time high entirely due to religion.  People associate Christianity with the Republican Party, and literally believe that it's a sin to vote Democrat.  When you really believe, or are even given pause to consider, that your immortal soul will burn for eternity in Hell if you vote for a single candidate with a D next to their name, you really have no choice in the matter.

If Democrats want to win in 2018 or 2020, that perception has got to change.

Democrats have for too long tried to win the war purely on ideological terms.  We tend to go overly analytical on all issues, and don't stop to consider how people feel about said issues.  Of course abortion should be legal, because women are human beings and human beings deserve body autonomy.  But your "body autonomy" argument falls flat to someone who thinks that an unborn fetus was put in a woman's womb directly by God.  You cannot hope to challenge such an argument with science.

To that end, I'm going to work on publishing articles now on religious justifications for various stances; however, we need to start now on the work of advertising the religious power of our positions.  We need to take out billboards with black backgrounds and white letters attributing statements to "-God" and make them say things like,

"Love your neighbor as yourself."
"The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt."
"Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker,
    but whoever is kind to the needy honors God."
"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money."
 

The Victories We Can Get

Last night's election of Trump is a horrible tragedy.  His threats - to nominate conservative Supreme Court justices who would overturn gay marriage, to round up illegal immigrants, to force Muslims to wear identification - should be taken as very real threats to minorities, as well as to American freedom and democracy. 

That said, it is not quite the victory he thinks it is.

I don't think it's fair to call all of his supporters "racists" - at least, not in the form of the word they probably imagine.  Racism comes in varying degrees along a spectrum, and at one end are members of the KKK and the Nazi party.  Many in the US see this section of the spectrum as "racism" and everything else "not racism," but those of us dedicated to fighting against racism of all forms see it everywhere across the entire spectrum.  Still, by calling people "racists" or by saying that their rhetoric is racist, we unintentionally label them as being equal in kind to the KKK - which they aren't.  They're clearly better than that. Let's call everyone in the middle of this spectrum "racish" - that is, sort of racist, but not so violently racist.

When you're racish, you don't question whether things you say are racist, unintentionally or not.  You may make racist jokes, and you think they're funny, and all the while wink and nod and say, "but of course not all people of that race are like that" - even though the joke is only funny if some part of you really does believe that.  Because you don't consider yourself racist, you also don't think that racism is a problem in America, and you don't sit down with members of minority communities to ask them if racism is still impacting their lives - because of course it isn't, it's not a part of your America, in your mind.

This, I would say, is the reality for the vast majority of white Americans.  More than likely, the vast majority of people who voted for Trump last night fall into this category.

This is all to say - they didn't vote for him BECAUSE he's a racist, or because of his racist rhetoric; rather, they ignored his racist rhetoric because it didn't fit their definition of racism, which of course doesn't exist in America.

The same parallel can be made for sexism.  His supporters are sexish, not sexist, and they ignore his sexist comments because they don't fit their definition of sexism, which of course doesn't exist in America.

So, what else did they vote for him for?

Most, it seems, voted for him because he's anti-establishment.  That is, he is a political outsider, someone who doesn't follow the normal rules of politics. 

Hillary, conversely, represents everything the establishment has to offer.  She is part of a political dynasty and wielded complex political forces like a hammer to smash Bernie in the primaries and to repeatedly bash Trump during the general.  Many people, even on the left, noted that electing her felt more like a coronation than an election.

Now, many of us tried to fight back against that idea that being part of the establishment is somehow bad, but even for us it was half-hearted.  Yes, having political experience is a great thing.  We need to have a president we can trust not to turn an ally to an enemy or accidentally start WW3; however, we also hate it when people get elected to office over and over again, when it feels like the entire process gets stuck in a quagmire because everyone in Washington has lost their idealism and is simply churning on the same old worn-out talking points.  We note that everyone in office has a vested interest in simply staying in power, not with rocking the boat and doing meaningful things.

This is why Trump supporters often use the hashtag, #DrainTheSwamp.  It refers to getting corruption and establishment politics out of Washington.  For some reason, they think Trump is the person best suited to accomplishing this.  And they think this will happen even though they elected the very same Congresspeople and Senators that had just been in office.

This anti-establishment fight is one we on the left can get behind, too.  We need to remind Republican voters in 2 years that the swamp they seek to drain is the very one they elected again.  We need to use their hashtag against them.  You want to upend the establishment?  Do it everywhere.  Do it in your state.  Do it in your county.