Boogeyman, A Great American Witch Hunt

By David Dennison

Globalization has transformed our world, but not our political systems. Understanding the world of human development can help us avoid the narcissism that threatens whole societies with despotism. Understanding U.S. secrecy and militarism can help us avoid the failure of our imperial state. Vigorously addressing U.S. and global economic inequality grants our world the chance for free governance.

By the same author as the novel On Fire by Thomas Anderson, also available on Smashwords.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Anderson
• Release date: Feb 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463664445

Book preview

BOOGEYMAN

A Great American Witch Hunt

by

David Dennison

Smashwords Edition

Published on Smashwords by:

David Dennison

Boogeyman

A Great American Witch Hunt

Copyright 2019 by David Dennison

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Other Books by this Author

The novel On Fire by Thomas Anderson

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. —George Orwell

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking. —Martin Heidegger

If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed. —Thomas Jefferson

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. —Theodore Roethke

One has a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws. An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. —Martin Luther King

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. —MLK and Theodore Parker

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. —Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

You have to be taught to hate and fear. You have to be carefully taught. —South Pacific, Oscar Hammerstein

To the Staff, Aramark group, and Trustees

of the KCCC

A Note on Publication

STUCK IN AMERICA

i.e. Always Have a Dream

Fortune Cookie Say

This book has chased about like a bear careening madly in the woods.

It was sent to over a hundred book agents. A few sent back encouraging messages, even advice, and for those I will be forever appreciative.

The future may be about talking cars and fake hamburgers, but it will also be about globalization. A major contribution to globalization is the way that information can now flow instantly all over the planet, whether competitors like it or not, whether dictators like it or not. This is known as disintermediation. It’s also known as cutting out the middle man. It has made man’s ideas easily the most valuable currency on the planet. It has made man’s ideas more immediate and powerful than ever in man’s history. And it will inevitably and forever transform the world we are now living in.

Take travel for instance. Used to be you had to have a travel agent help you book your vacations abroad, mostly to mediate between you and the airline schedules. The schedules were complex and published separately by each airline. Hotel information was not readily available either. Typically, you had to call around or get information compiled by the hotel industry and sent only to travel agents. You needed an agent to figure your trip out. But with the internet, all that nonsense quickly became obsolete. Today everybody can easily book their own flights and hotels using a wide variety of web sites designed specifically for that purpose. Ordinary travel agents have nearly disappeared.

Retail and real estate are just two other common industries that have been similarly transformed. Instead, we have Amazon replacing most brick and mortar retail chains. In housing sales, the 6 or 7 percent fixed realtor fee is slowly disappearing as the stranglehold of the national Multiple Listing Service (the source of real estate sales information) is being eroded by other players. New and used car sales are moving away from car lots to direct online purchasing as fast as they can.

All this is because the cost of creating, holding and dispersing information to the consuming public has been reduced in virtually every industry to nearly zero by the internet. Consumers everywhere have benefited. That’s globalization. It is, in short, removing the cost of information, which previously served as a kind of transactional tax or friction in the typical transaction, to almost nothing. Organizations like Amazon, which have been capable of successfully implementing this principle, are now the most important economic actors on the planet. Of course, in the case of Amazon paying no federal income tax also helped.

Book agents are no different, but the American and international publishing industry remains to this day a kind of fortress, its battlements hard to scale and storm. Today there are only five major publishers left in this highly consolidated industry, all of them located in New York City. None of them will accept unsolicited manuscripts to evaluate for publication anymore. Once upon a time they did, but eventually they simply lost the numbers battle. A typical book agent today gets as many as 10,000 unsolicited manuscripts or book proposals every single month. The publishers will only accept submissions by known book agents, leaving it up to agents to cull the herd for them. Further consolidation of the industry has taken place in the meantime, resulting in greater and greater corporate ownership and less and less interest in taking chances with unknown writers and controversial subjects. The agents have come to reflect these tastes and many would rather tell existing writers what to write than bother to seek out anything new or different from others.

In effect, the publishing industry has come to be affected, some would say infected, with a kind of tribalism, a consensus on what sells and what doesn’t, a concept that book agents have neatly placed in a box tied with a very predictable looking bow. This is not their fault. The industry, like any industry, is in many ways like a living organism. It eventually tends toward entropy, loses energy and falls with rapidly increasing speed toward its demise. Take the creativity out of man’s most creative enterprise, the recording of human thought, and what are you left with? A vacuum of course. Witness book sales by the big five that have trended downward in recent years. Non-fiction books suffer the most. They are now dominated by celebrity, whether of the Hollywood kind or the kind minted by making frequent appearances on network television news shows. PhD’s still stand a chance, if they can dumb down their work sufficiently for public consumption. Many can’t. Histories prevail.

In contrast, E-publishing, while still very much in its infancy, especially as it regards individual authors publishing their works directly online, is showing promise. The trend seems to be aided by the increasingly sophisticated world of word processing, one which automatically corrects the work of even the most spelling and grammatically challenged of authors.

Thinking never had it so good. Subjects considered controversial now stand a better chance of getting a public hearing, though it remains to be seen how controversial democracy can really get. Or how prurient some may consider the exercise of free speech and the First Amendment in the face of virtually unregulated government censorship. Or how easily we can convince ourselves that our views are right in the face of every evidence to the contrary. In the face of these existential challenges to our future, it seems like a good idea to consult the wisdom of the past, even the long ago past. The following seems to apply.

What is good Phaedrus and what is not good, need we ask anyone to tell us these things? —Plato, The Phaedrus, 360 B.C.E.

Good advice I think, especially for a book agent.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: American Politics, the Short Course, aka The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Introduction

Me Generation

The Black Box Phenomenon in Governing

Professionalism

Role of Current American Politics

1) Nationalism, Populism, and Protectionism

2) Nativism

3) Too Much Money in Politics, Citizens United

4) Extreme Gerrymandering

5) Third party political pressure groups

6) Race, Religion and Education Matter

7) Anti-Establishmentarianism or Thumb in the Eye

The Trumpocalypse of Tribalism and Authoritarianism

A State of Mind

Trumpian Tribalism

The Modern American Political Pattern Health Care as example)

Religion’s High-Water Mark.

Chapter 2: What Kind of World Do You Want? Lose the Earthquakes, Keep the Faults

Chapter 3: Economics 101, or Let Them Eat Cake

Raising the US Top Marginal Tax Rate

The International Poverty Line (IPL) and the Gini Coefficient

Wealth Inequality in the World and US

Rising Costs and Debt for Housing, Education, Health Care

Free Trade, Free Willy!

Chapter 4: Top Secret: The Blind Leading the Blind

Blind Ambition

I Spy, They Give Merit Badges Don’t They?

No Such Agency, the NSA

A Prelude to Orwell’s 1984?

The Forever War

Chapter 5: It Happened One Night, or While I was Sleeping

Chris Hanson

Happy Town

Austin Powers

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Onanism

The Puzzle Palace

Chapter 6: Censorship, aka Sex, Lies and Video-tapped

A State of Nature

The Fall and Shame

Literary Censorship

The Abuses of the American Plan

War Censorship, the Sedition and Espionage Acts 1917-1918

The Life and Death of Free Music—The MP3, RIAA and FBI

Censorship in the Movies—The MPAA

Modern Censorship/Regulation of Adult Materials and Uses

Internet Privacy

Ripley’s Believe It or Not

Junk Science

The Breakdown, Foreign and Domestic

Sexting

The Catholic Church

Trafficking

Chapter 7: Last Call: Heaven Can Wait

The War on Normal People

The Second Progressive Era, Globalization, Gender Equality

Babies in Cages

Clean Up on Aisle 5

Take Out

Chapter 8: The List, or I Know What You Did Last Summer

Chapter 9: American Constitutional Reform: Tempus Fugit but Hopefully Not for our Democracy

Appendix: Chapter 10: A Prairie State of Mindlessness

Perfectly Dysfunctional Democracy

End Notes

Chapter 1

AMERICAN POLITICS, THE SHORT COURSE

aka The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

I’m old (or older), it’s a Saturday evening and I’m working in my den. I have imagined this moment since I was a college kid on summer break, driving a Yahoo ride mower around my town’s High School athletic fields. There was little to occupy my mind on those laid-back days. I baked in the sun and wondered about what I was going to do with my life. At the time I was waiting, like all kids do, for real life to start.

I had a sense of outrage, like everyone else at the time, over the Vietnam War and Watergate. I hoped that now, with those events in the rear-view mirror, America would soon lead the world in making social progress toward realizing true equal opportunity for all its citizens.

Introduction

We live in a time when much of life is knowable, or at least understandable. We can easily turn to whatever information sources we need make it through our days, Usually on the internet. We have even come to take this relatively new aspect of our lives for granted.

But we live sheltered lives, surrounded by the families, communities, schools and universities that dominate our early life, later by the certifications and licenses that will define our work and professional careers, later still by the complex interactions that make up daily existence between ourselves, our work groups, and the organizations that make up our society. We do all this within our narrow lanes, our chosen wheelhouses, our little areas of expertise. No one is Leonardo Da Vinci, a renaissance man and genius of his time, capable of understanding much of the known world. We can’t because we have entered the age of specialization, segmentation, bifurcation, spindling and mutilating of human knowledge and experience that now goes on to an unprecedented degree in giant sophisticated, modern economic engines formed as nations, made up of hundreds of millions (if not billions) of human beings.

We live in an age where much is knowable but in which few of us seem to know very much. This is frustrating. How can we understand how great societies work and should work for the benefit of all of mankind when we can only perceive our own small part of the world with any real clarity of understanding? Is life meant to be lived looking through a straw at the world around us rather than be tossed off our feet at the avalanche of social and political concerns that come at us every day. Surely the world at large is something that we citizens should know something about if we are to be effective participants in the democratic process that is our birthright in this country.

The answer is that very few people have time to concern themselves with such grandiose and universal questions in the first place. Sure, we were all teenagers once, undergoing teenage angst. We wondered at what a crazy world this is. We wondered how on earth were we ever going to find our places in the mayhem. We can, however, all remember the excitement we felt when we started out to survey future prospects for our lives. We were all Jeff Spicolis (Sean Penn) in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, too sure of ourselves, young turks and smart asses that we were. We knew everything that was important to know about the world at that age. The problem was that it was nowhere near enough. The excitement lies in the certainty that, while we all wanted to succeed in spectacular fashion, we were all almost certain to fail, at least at first.

Instead, as we developed, we learned to surf life, concentrating on taking the next wave, whatever that was. We learned that we can pick and choose our waves and our way through life. We took what we needed from the great mystical ocean of life and left the rest. The rest it turns out there is, simply, no time for.

The result is that we live in a society that is defined in both political and economic terms by things like geography, ancestry, education, work, family, friends, community, schools and government. Ordinary life.

In the U.S. in particular living this way has a downside in that we tend to live in rather closed circles. First of all, in America we live in communities where we can afford to live. This limits our community circles to others that are like ourselves in terms of income and education, and dramatically reduces our exposure to those who are not like us. There are many types of communities, urban and rural, suburban and inner city, and in a lot of ways they determine how we live. Suburban areas are the most highly differentiated. There are suburbs representing virtually every income level from low to high income in most big city urban areas. The school districts of each suburb are just as diverse. They compose mini-cultural environments of their own. It is a testament to American diversity that the result of America’s education system is far from boring sameness. Instead, there are amazing educational attainments being achieved at the high end balanced off by barely adequate education being provided at the low end.

Stultifying educational failure is most often reserved in the American system for inner city schools, which are well known as expensive to run and difficult to manage because of their large size and inevitable bureaucratization. The range of different languages and the existence of abject poverty that inner city schools deal with would be daunting for any educational system, but inner-city systems suffer these problems in addition because of their great size. Their size produces an inherent fiscal need for bureaucratic control. The need for control of a large organization imposes additional costs on decision making, which decision making becomes inherently limited by the need to impose fair standards applied equally across a large number of schools. It becomes too costly to manage a wide range of creative and progressive teaching methods for instance, and the result is education that is at its best bland, at its worst inadequate.

We can scale the problem up to look at all of the American economy the same way. Two-thirds of Americans work in organizations with over 100 workers, which therefore might be considered large and highly differentiated in terms of workforce. The American workforce is, in other words, complex. Urban areas provide the means for most employment to be accessible on a daily basis across the urban area, wherever the employee may choose to live. Americans are segregated therefore by where they live and where they hang their hats at night, not by where they work. Employment laws and protections have not permitted open discrimination and segregation of workplaces.

The result is that Americans sort themselves into classes by their choice of housing and the educational system (School District) that is tied to that housing. It is open segregation that the Desegregation Movement of the 1960’s and 70’s never adequately addressed or really ever even changed. Milwaukee, the most segregated City in the country, is, if anything, more segregated now than it was then. The Desegregation Movement only accelerated suburbanization, which resulted in the most racially segregated society on the planet. Over half of all Americans, the new post war majority, ended up voting on the racialization of American politics by using their feet to buy themselves into upscale suburban America and out of rural and inner-city poor America. Choosing your geography became the most political and tribal of American acts, and has defined the American political landscape as essentially geographic, racial and tribal ever since.

New standards of human conduct come every day to our workplaces and we learn and adjust because making a living has come to require it, which is a powerful inducement. Moreover, if as an individual we don’t get the message right away, we soon do. Our work performances tend to follow us through our careers, and how we screwed up in one place is often well known in our next place of work. Catching on quickly to how all this works rapidly becomes a matter of pure career survival.

Our ability to adapt like this as a species is inherent, ingrained by sixty thousand years as members of a small group of hunter gatherers confined to the 5 land continents of an Ocean World, and the ten thousand years after that, since the Agricultural Revolution, largely spent in small communities, often on the borders of these enormous food filled seas. This has been more than long enough for these social characteristics to be hard wired into our genetic material. We have therefore developed genes that influence our behavior. Many of them continue to aide us to this day in being successful in our work and in our personal lives. Unfortunately, we still don’t know enough about them yet to understand the details of how they work within specific individuals.

On a macro scale however, there is every reason to believe that genes play a huge part in how we act as political tribes, the basis for the identity politics of our time. It is the basis for how easily we close our eyes to the fate of others. And it is similarly the basis for how easily people refuse to believe what is otherwise abundantly true, only because they see it as a form of politics with which they disagree. We complain about how insular we have become, about why we live in political echo chambers of our own making, how we casually dismiss science, fact and truth. We are amazed when entire societies turn their backs on and actively persecute The Others, the chosen scapegoats of their times.

We wonder how this can happen and how it can be in a modern, educated society. What, we wonder, can create such callousness? What makes otherwise rational, otherwise good people behave irrationally? Is it because in our tribal days our very lives depended on the group, the tribe, for existence, and that we were forced to override every bit of reason to remain a member? Our survival depended on it. It became the prime directive and the first order of every day in the tribe, not just for thousands of years and hundreds of generations, but for sixty thousand years and thousands of generations, easily long enough for the tendency to become ingrained in the very core of human behavior. This is not the end of the story however.

You may have bought this book, or perhaps you checked it out of a library. Maybe you borrowed it from a friend. Maybe you found it as an e-book online somewhere. Perhaps you came across it as a lonely file floating lost in the vastness of the web. In any case, let’s hope that you are reading it in the hope that it will soon prove to be a useful, informative read. One thing is certain. By getting this far, you have somehow managed to see your way through the noise and clatter of a modern world rife with lurid headlines, intentional falsehoods, unsupported opinions and mind-numbing ridiculousness to something like what is presumed to be a kind of reason and, therefore, hope. That is a considerable accomplishment.

While America remains a bastion of freedom and democracy to the world, we have to acknowledge that going into the future this may not always be so. In other words, it is entirely possible that our country could change and become much less free and much less democratic than it is at the present time. Indeed, there are those who argue that this is already the case. And at least in some ways, they may be right.

The author’s background is in public policy, administration, finance, law, economics and urban planning. Public policy may be defined as bringing the rigors of scientific thought to the political and social affairs of men. The writer believes in the importance of an informed electorate for a democratic society to function and thrive, as well as the importance of community in our individual ability to lead successful and fulfilled lives. He does not think of either of these ideas as liberal or socialist or elitist, or really as political. Nor does he think of these ideas as particularly profound. In his way of thinking, these are principles that are necessary for the existence of any modern civil society.

Me Generation

Just to be upfront about it, the author may be unduly critical of the role his generation has played in making this a Me Generation era. There was a time when the baby boomers were the generation of resistance to the Vietnam War and Nixon’s rigid views toward crime and the youth culture that opposed him. Instead, being led by the whipped-up fears of generations of increasingly craven politicians, the boomers have engineered the greatest security state the world has ever seen. It is not a police state but it does have the largest prison system in the world, which is something one would ordinarily associate with police states. These are not accomplishment to be proud of in the author’s view.

The rise of the security state will in the long term have dangerously corrosive effects on our democracy, just as it once did in Eastern Europe. It is intended to target foreign adversaries, but it targets everyone, foreign friends and domestic contacts alike. It sweeps with impunity across the spectrum of modern communications, disturbing everything in its wake. No one is really immune. As former residents of the Eastern bloc can tell you, if the government can target anyone, they can target everyone. A presumption of innocence becomes an increasingly tenuous thing in an age of total surveillance.

Since 1980 the rate of incarceration in America has shot upward in the face of a huge prison building boom. We are now the world’s leading incarcerator in the world, having peaked in 2008 at 24.7% of the planet’s incarcerations. With so many millions (about 70 million to be more exact) of Americans now classified as felons by the criminal justice system, one would think that to be a felon would have lost much of its stigma. It hasn’t. Discrimination against felons in employment and housing is widespread, contributing greatly to a new American underclass which itself has become a significant source of fiscal drag on the U.S. economy.

Aside from shattering these world records, the Me Generation ushered in a period of unprecedented individual selfishness, accompanied by extraordinary financial and political ignorance. What in the 1960’s was assumed to be a generation focused on bringing about liberal political, economic, and social change not only in this country but around the world, became instead a generation focused entirely on the introspective self, in other words: Me. It could just as well have been called the Me First Generation, a group convinced that they were entitled to live better lives than their parents. Thinking they were so entitled, partly because they were more educated then their forebears, they fought for nothing that was not in their individual best interest, and quite often not even for that.

They were identified with The Counterculture, with free love, the Great Society, voting rights, equal rights, and feminism at the time. They championed Peace and Love and Woodstock and were brought together by being fervently anti-Vietnam War. The demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of protestors in Washington D.C. and other major U.S. cities gave the cause legitimacy, reinforced by trenchant analysis of how the War had gone wrong by respected authors such as David Halberstam in his 1972 book The Best and the Brightest. Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? became the cry of many of those demonstrating against the War.

The on-campus protests after the Cambodian incursion ratcheted up the pressure on Nixon to new heights, as did the deaths of students at Kent State University at the hands of the Ohio National Guard. Public opinion turned against the War as early as the Tet offensive, when the North Korean Army attacked the South in force, but the Nixon Administration was very slow to recognize defeat.[1] Nixon never really did, but was instead thrown out of office by Watergate. Because Watergate came right on the heels of the war, the Republican Party as a whole largely escaped major responsibility for the conduct of the war and were not turned out of office en masse.

But in many cases, the activists of the Vietnam War generation were a people apart, the affluent sons and daughters of the white upper middle class. They did not represent those who were being drafted in large numbers, those largely of lower income and those of color. Much like the older World War II generation, the blue-collar Vietnam War generation possessed substantial latent bigotry, nativism, xenophobia, and misogyny coming out of the period of the 1950’s and 60’s. This group is now the mostly older, white, rural, non-college educated lower middle class. They have come to represent a stumbling block to the progress of the nation that was leading the world toward liberal democracy, globalization, economic opportunity, individual equality, and income equality.

Make no mistake. America is still a great nation, with a proud history and record of achievement. But the Me Generation let us down. Bruce Cannon Gibney goes a step further in his book, A Generation of Sociopaths, How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, stating that it has been a concerted effort by the Baby Boomer generation to push off the bill for today onto the generations of tomorrow, and that the solution is to increase taxes generally across the board to address the long deferred maintenance of our economy, with special emphasis on assessing the Boomers.[2]

The U.S. has fallen far behind international norms when it comes to national infrastructure such as highways and dealing with traffic congestion. Public transportation in general has suffered, especially affecting central cities. High speed rail, airport design and efficiency, and freight rail, port and air have all suffered. All of these modes of transport also require serious consideration being given to their security, from ground installations to command and control systems. A simple trip to Asia, especially China, quickly reveals how far behind we have fallen against the international standards being adopted by our principle competitors. But this is nothing compared to how far behind world norms we have lapsed in terms of the quality of health care and education that we make available to our citizens in this country.

In addition, the baby boom generation has since Reagan brought about the most unequal distribution of wealth in this country since the Great Depression and the Gilded Age of the 1870’s Robber Barons. This was a movement by tax cut and spend Republicans to bring about a massive intergenerational transfer of wealth using high Federal debt and low taxes. Government policies during this time gave rise to a bifurcated, highly fragmented, and financially opaque health care sector that doubled in cost, damaging the international competitiveness of the nation and undermining its economic growth. The nation withdrew its support of higher education and permitted college costs to rise precipitously, curtailing upward mobility and further damaging economic growth. The country expanded its military bases and operations into virtually every nation on earth and entered into ill-advised foreign wars that cost trillions, further weakening the United States. All of these policies led to the weakening of the country’s middle class, faced with stagnating real incomes for over 30 years, while health care and higher education costs soared, actually diminishing real incomes for those in the middle of the income spectrum.

In his book Against Democracy, Georgetown Professor Jason Brennan uses philosophy, political science and economics to call into question the effectiveness of democracy as a means of governance of a large and diverse nation. He argues that voters are largely irrational, tribalistic, and that they make political decisions based on established biases because it feels good to reinforce already held beliefs, however demonstrably wrong they may be. He goes on to state that people who spend the most time on politics are the people who spend the most time in the echo chambers of modern communications, where of course television and cable news dominate, but also increasingly in select quadrants online. Here they are comfortable receiving affirmation of their long-held beliefs, whether factually or otherwise, and their thinking is not challenged.

Neurological studies indicate that group identity can produce physical sensations of satisfaction. Seeing group members do well activates the brain’s reward centers. When group members of an out group do poorly the same reward centers respond. Responses are heightened when the out group is feared or envied.[3]

In contrast to a widespread enfranchisement of such ill-informed voters, Brennan explicitly favors epistocracy or rule by the knowledgeable. In his view, the only effective way to govern is to have only the educated and informed vote. In some ways this harkens back to the original Constitution of the United States, which gave the franchise only to landed males. In other words, the Framers were agreed that only property owners would be sufficiently wise and knowledgeable that they could intelligently and responsibly vote for elected officials or on important plebiscites.

Brennan describes three basic classes of voters. Hooligans are those voters who are committed to their beliefs and follow the party they identify with slavishly. Hobbits are kind of the opposite of Hooligans, they have only loose associations with the contending sides in politics and can be easily swayed this way or that depending on the occasion and their whims. Many hobbits do not vote us they do not perceive much value in doing so. Finally, there are the Vulcans, the educated class who follow politics and are genuinely knowledgeable.

In Brennan’s view of the electorate, there are far fewer Vulcans in society than there are Hooligans and Hobbits. It may be useful to think of Hooligans and Hobbits as being in roughly equal number, say forty percent each, and Vulcans as perhaps twenty percent or fewer in number. In other words, the truly informed tends to make up far fewer than the majority in any society with universal suffrage, with the result that they cannot rule, however much they may deserve to. Which is why Brennan argues that only an epistocracy, rule by the knowledgeable, can overcome the numerous fatal defects of a democratic system. He documents these defects at length.[4] The author identifies as a Vulcan and presupposes that anyone enlightened enough to read his book almost certainly would have to be a Vulcan. Get out your Spock ears!

When it comes to politics, people believe whatever they want to believe. How often have you heard this? It’s axiomatic. It’s a free country and therefore you are entitled to believe whatever you want. Other people can say you are stupid and ignorant, foolish or naive, but you still have the right to believe what you want to believe. Just like religion, right? In other words, you have a constitutional right to be as dumb ass as you want and to hell with everybody else, as long as what you believe doesn’t have the effect of harming someone else. Right? Yes, but usually we are not so extreme about it. In fact, usually we settle on a set of beliefs that have been comfortably passed down to us by our family.

Political scientists of course have come to study this phenomenon quite a bit. One of the things they have noticed is that politics becomes much easier to understand when taking into account the role that voter identity has on our election system. In the age of micro targeting, small slices of registered voters can be identified to mine specific issues. Once discovered, these groups of voters can be exploited using their commonly held beliefs. They can be swayed to affect voter behavior and the outcome of elections. As a result, formerly unified voter blocks can be cleaved by issues that are well known to be particularly divisive. This cleaving of voter blocks has permitted the identification and targeting of select groups of voters in new and sometimes surprising ways for new and sometimes surprising purposes.

This is defining voters by a group’s set of political positions or beliefs, which then becomes a form of group identity. People form their individual identities while growing up in groups, absorbing the political views of those around them. They are primarily influenced by family and friends, ethnic group and religion, school and community.

In Democracy for Realists authors Achen and Bartels discuss the characteristics which define most voters, such as that most voters know nothing about issues and usually vote based on the identity of whatever group they hail from. Thus, they vote primarily based on whatever they are told by the family, party, religion or ethnic group they most identify with. Whatever they are told. It is worthwhile noting that this is especially relevant in our age, when much of what people are told in a political campaign may in fact be highly untruthful. When passing on their political beliefs, people are rarely encumbered by concerns about bias, bigotry, racism, fairness, or truthfulness. People should be expected not to care. They will accept whatever is represented to them by the group they most identify with, without regard to fact or the possible contradictions of reality.[5]

I liken this to saying that the average voter, because he is an identity voter, couldn’t find the facts or truth in a political campaign with two hands and a flashlight[6], which is a reference to a speech in the 1996 film The American President, written by Aaron Sorkin, starring Michael Douglas. In the film Douglas, the President, argues with his top advisor, played by Michael J. Fox, about the importance of leadership. Fox argues that the voters will go anywhere they have to in order to find true leadership, even to a mirage, which, having come upon it only to discover that it is a mirage, will then, out of desperation, drink the sand. The President responds to this by saying that the voters drink the sand not because they can’t find leadership, but because they don’t know the difference (between true and false leadership).

In other words, voters respond to politics as they have been taught to since they were young. They favor a particular position or policy not because they know anything about it, but because they heard it from the family, friends, party, religion, or ethnic group with which they identify. They spend their political lives being comforted by the old associations they developed in their formative years. Why? Because they feel good. They are shared, reaffirmed and reinforced by all the individuals and forces which surround and nurture them. These accepted political beliefs do not form negative associations or contradictions in minds that are already made up. They do not challenge or require thought. They do not require making painful decisions or exploring complex problems. They do not generally spur one to action or threaten any other long held belief. They are unchallenged and unchallengeable in the voter’s mind. To have them challenged would be to call into question the very identity of an individual, himself or herself, and that, of course, would be intolerable.

One of the ways in which this confirmation bias, or motivated reasoning, is measured scientifically is by brain scan. Studies using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) conducted at Emory University, University of South Carolina and USC have challenged individuals on their personally held political beliefs and found that the parts of the brain that respond are not the thinking part of the cerebral cortex but rather other parts which tend to govern emotions, including those emotions which govern existential threats.[7]

In other words, we are hard wired to interpret challenges to our political beliefs as existential threats, at least to some degree. We will go to just about any length to justify our beliefs in the face of counterevidence to the contrary, but usually this takes the form of denying the legitimacy of the source of any counterevidence with which we are presented. A threat to one’s beliefs is usually followed by an attack on those who threaten those beliefs, a common practice that has become all too familiar in our modern political discourse. It is also the reason that most political discussions seem to have such easily recognizable patterns, and why most people quickly grow bored with them, tuning them out.

However, when political discussions tend to reinforce already held beliefs, Viola! Nirvana is found and the political points score home with us, reinforcing our long-held beliefs and making us feel good. Internet and cable news channels thrive on such viewer identification and the insatiable demand we all have for having our egos stroked. They are also the principal propaganda agents for the respective parties they have come to represent, spreading falsehoods, distortions, and outright lies on occasion. All of this is gladly incorporated into the world views of their ratings generators, i.e. their viewers, in virtually self-perpetuating cycles of inanity.

The fact is that these networks thrive on their cozy relationships to the leaders they cover. These leaders are encouraged to keep appearing on their networks to generate further ratings and ad dollars to the networks. This further corrupts the media system, whose rights belong to the public they are intended to serve, and whose public they are intended to serve with fairness. The current corrupt system lays bare the media hypocrisy that they are in any way objective in how they cover politics. That television remains the king of communication on matters of politics and civic affairs in virtually every country in the world shows its importance and why television is always the first target for takeover by every non-democratic state. Television, with its immediacy and ubiquity, is the most important means in any modern society for controlling information provided to the public. It has also therefore become the most important means for controlling the public itself.

Identity Politics has become so powerful in America that it seems that even when one party takes a position, the other party automatically has to take the opposite position. This is as if the Republicans took a look at the pro-environmental policies of the Democratic Party and just woke up one day to say, Hey, if they are for this, then we need to be against it! In fact, if one ascribes the policies of one party with the President of the other party, you can be sure that most adherents of the one party will be opposed to them, so strong has the aversion to the President of the other party become. Policies don’t matter. Who is the President of your party matters almost entirely. This is because the average voter’s knowledge of policy is indifferent to non-existent in a strong state of identity politics.

In Identity Politics, the modern right, made up largely of evangelical white protestants, grew out of fear that pluralism (diversity, ethnic, racial, immigrant) and urbanity threatened the nation’s identity.[8] Urbanity here is a distinction between the nation’s larger urban areas and the country’s outlying areas. In urban areas average incomes are much higher than that of average incomes in the non-urban areas of the mountain west, mid-west, and southern states, traditional Red State areas. The differing average income levels are alone enough to stratify a society, but in the United States there are important social and religious characteristics which adhere to the groups that make up this Great Divide in American politics.

The modern right is rooted in the belief that the driving forces of American history are Christianity and private enterprise, not secular reason or social engineering. Further, for the right this driving force is extended to be pro-family, by which is meant traditional paternalism. Sex is defined to be within marriage only, safely containing women’s sexuality within the tradition that most preserves male dominance.[9]

Libertarianism as an opposite construct would, on the other hand, permit all kinds of personal behavior that conservatives would find deviant, disloyal and immoral. Such a force in opposition to the religious right would stop government from backing business, mothball the CIA, and demote the military to a homeland garrison. Libertarians would be the ultimate pluralists, while Conservatives believe in compulsory moral reform.[10] Libertarians here can be thought of as liberalism with a capital L, because today libertarianism, at least as personified in Rand Paul, is more a strain of conservatism than previously. An example of the moral reform prescribed by the conservative movement in America can be seen illustrated in the conservative movement of prohibition in the 1920’s, where the result was the quadrupling of the American prison population, a definite compulsory moral reform. Conservative identity in the U.S. has always contained, along with its xenophobia, an element of martial patriotism that fit extremely well with the history of the South.

Identity politics is the non-thinking man’s political system. And it’s here to stay in the new Hyper-partisan American political system. The Founding Fathers stressed the importance of controlling special interest politics in The Federalist Papers, but they never envisioned a political system where party identification would overwhelm politics itself, where Americans of disparate geographies would belittle each other’s party with references to fly-over country and bi-coastalism.

The Black Box Phenomenon in Governing

Another common problem in understanding modern political behavior is found in how people perceive government in general. Taxes go in, services and benefits roll out, is the usual interpretation. Between the two however, lies the millions of public servants in local, state, and federal governments who actually do the work of converting all those taxes into goods and services people need and use. These are widely perceived as government bureaucracies, and while they may be akin to corporate bureaucracies, they are generally thought of quite differently. This then is the field of public administration and it is very poorly understood by the public.

If a complex funding formula for a government program is only understood by a handful of state employees it may be reasonable to require that they not be allowed to travel on the same plane. In this scenario you have encountered the problem of the Black Box in real life. Of course, they are not allowed on the same plane because what would happen if it crashed? There would be no one left