The Tree of Liberty

 We may have been too complacent.

Let me circle back to that. I'll return to my statement, I promise.

I've been thinking about some of my political science classes - one on interest groups and party politics in particular. The class was fascinating for a variety of reasons. Like most white midwesterners, I grew up thinking that all politicians were lying scoundrels and that politics was a deeply corrupt enterprise (which probably says something about me, that I chose to study it despite that. I mostly would argue that if you avoid politics for those reasons you're leaving the field to the ones who actually are lying scoundrels. That's overly simplistic, like always, but not my focus right now.) The class was interesting, because it gave me a way to reconcile a bit of cognitive dissonance. After all, one of my rules of thumb is that people generally don't wake up and decide to be evil. If politicians don't think of themselves as corrupt or evil, then how and why do we have such a bad impression of them? Figuring that out was critical in determining what sorts of warning signs indicate when you're crossing a line. (This is, again, a long and complicated topic that isn't really my focus right now.)

One of the things that stuck with me was the role of lobbyists and truth. We were taught that knowingly telling lies would destroy your ability as a lobbyist. Politicians might rely on think tanks, interest groups, and lobbyists to do the long and complicated research that they're not staffed for... but if one of those groups was discovered to be concealing the truth and lying, no politician would rely on their research. 

Hence why I generally accepted the idea that incorrect analysis had more to do with biases, groupthink, and other failures in our ability to reason rather than deliberate malevolence.

But we have seen a spate of lying, especially in the last year, and I wonder if that analysis still holds true. That's part of why I started commenting about 'bad faith actors'. It's hard to believe that the people who claimed coronavirus would kill maybe 10,000 people were honestly mistaken. Or that the shenanigans I see online to hide the toll and push for everyone to open back up... how can that be typical human biases and denial? There feels to be too much effort put into it, from bad statistics to misleading news articles. 

It feels - deliberate. Intentional. To the point where the people pushing it are either terribly deluded or knowingly evil.

I hate how dramatic that sounds, it's all judgy and makes things sound black and white. And yet I have no other word for people who understood that a lot of people would die if we didn't handle covid properly... and just didn't care.

Where was that understanding that, regardless of whether you liked the results or not, you had to be honest? Where were the politicians who stopped accepting meetings with think tanks and lobbyists that knowingly gave false information? 

Democracy, the social contract, the wisdom of crowds - for these to function correctly we need good faith actors. That doesn't mean everyone has to agree...

One of the things about politics is that you have to deal with reality. Where there are limits and constraints and you often have to choose between one value and another. It's sort of like the classic project management triangle:

You can pick 2 of 3:
a) Good
b) Cheap 

c) Fast

Everyone values all three of these, but having something be good and cheap means it's generally not fast. Having something be cheap and fast means it's probably not good. And having something good and fast is probably not cheap. When you can't get all three at once, what do you prioritize?

Politics is like that. We all generally care about things - like freedom, education, infrastructure - not having masses of people dying, not having a lot of homeless people on the streets.

That's also why 'red states' and 'blue states' is misleading. Or rather, even two red states will prioritize things differently. Same with blue states. I don't envy the people trying to shape a coherent national policy given the wide variety of differences here, though I would encourage pushing most of those down to the state level unless there's a compelling reason otherwise. (Don't take that as a 'states rights' argument. Not until you understand what I'd consider a compelling reason to handle something at the federal level.)

The marketplace of ideas is a fine thing - when honesty is valued and dishonesty punished. It becomes something else entirely when bad faith actors knowingly push bad information. 

This is where the complacency comment comes into play. I thought we'd had a shared understanding on the importance of the social contract, the marketplace of ideas, honesty, etc. I know every nation/state/society has it's fringe elements that would love to overturn the status quo. We've had our militias, for example. And the Branch Davidians in Waco. We've also got anarchists (who may have an overly bad rap, but were definitely responsible for the Wall Street bombing in 1920). 

It's a bit like cancer... a healthy person is able to keep cancerous cells in check, it's only when things get out of whack and the cancer metastasizes that you run into problems. 

It's one thing to have some two-bit radio show host spewing a late night conspiracy. It's an entirely different thing for the President of the United States to spend 45 minutes spewing electoral fraud conspiracy to an audience of millions.

And the support and silence from the Republican Party and from right wing news sources is particularly telling.

They either are marks themselves (believing the BS), or they're going along with it despite the damage it's doing. In other words, they're letting the cancer metastasize.

We were too complacent, in thinking that most of our politicians and business people understood and accepted the importance of democracy, of the social contract, and of honest analysis and reporting.

I had long resisted the cynical claims that 'they're all just in it for power', and that the system is 'too corrupt', 'too broken'.

Seeing what Trump has done to us, seeing what Republicans have allowed Trump to do to us, seeing what a group of out-of-touch plutocrats and oligarchs are willing to support - it gets harder to do so.

The next couple of years will be particularly telling, I think. First is making sure Trump leaves office, of course. He doesn't look like he's going to do so without a fight, and we'll still have to deal with the millions of Trump supporters that believe his lies.

But we also have to address the underlying reasons why Trump came to be. The disconnect between the average American and the oligarchs/plutarchs. The racism, yes, but also the fact that we've utterly failed at passing significant infrastructure bills for over a decade. Even though the idea is wildly popular. We have to address the people who have decided they want government to be shrunk down to the point where they can drown it in the bathtub... an attitude that has contributed to the sense that it's 'smart' to find ways not to pay your taxes, thereby making it very difficult for the government to pay for things (like infrastructure, or education). 

I can see them making the point that these shouldn't be government responsibilities in the first place, and that might make sense - if the wealthy were therefore funding these things privately. But they aren't, are they? 

I suppose, if the majority of us truly want to live in some libertarian ideal where there's absolutely no government regulation - and they're all truly okay with hundreds of thousands of Americans dying in a pandemic. Or having Flint-like water problems all across the US. Or having our bridges collapse and roads fail...

I mean, I personally think it'd be a pretty horrible place to live, and I won't vote for it... but if enough Americans choose that then I guess we get the government we deserve. 

I just think it should be an honest choice, and Americans should fully understand what they're choosing. (I'm fairly sure they aren't choosing that when they fully understand the choice, which is part of why we're dealing with such blatant dishonesty.)