A Parable for Modern Politics

So a guy goes to a car dealership, and the salesman convinces him that this one car he’s interested in gets 50 mpg, does 0–60 in 4 seconds, and has a 5-year worry-free warranty. The dealership has one in a sweet metallic red, and so the guy buys it. He loves the car. Shows if off to his friends. Sometimes he just drives it around town for no other reason than because he’s enjoying driving it so much. But pretty soon he realizes that the salesman was…let’s say not quite telling the truth about the car. It only gets 15 mpg. It does 0–60 in about 7 seconds. And when the fuel pump quits after just two months…it turns out the “worry free” warranty doesn’t cover that (or much else that is likely to fail on the vehicle). The thing is, though, he still really loves the car. He’s willing to deal with all the problems because he still enjoys the pure pleasure of driving it around. Even after the dash instruments start failing one by one. Even after the timing belt breaks after 50K miles and the engine requires a total rebuild. Even after the chrome flakes off of all the detail work. Even after the squeaks all around the car get so loud that he can’t drown them out anymore with the car’s underpowered stereo system.

This has been a pretty a common American experience. And the thing is, getting angry at politicians or one political party isn’t going to fix this situation - because it has nothing to do with them. The guy should have done his research. He should have listened to some friends who told him to avoid this particular brand of car. He should have been more careful and thoughtful and maybe not believed a salesman who just wanted to make a quick buck. But he didn’t. And he has no one to blame but himself. But…instead of owning up to his mistakes and admitting he was hoodwinked, the guy is furious with anyone who points out he was deceived, or corrects him for trying to blame his bad choices on “government regulation,” or tries to explain that the problems with his car really have nothing to do with unions, but instead were decisions made in corporate board rooms so that shareholders could line their pockets with just a little more profit.

But the really sad thing is that, when the car finally breaks down completely after 100K miles, guess where this guy goes to buy another? The same dealership? The same salesman? A later model of the same shitty car…? No way! He’s finally “wised up” and gone to the competing dealership across the street, where the salesman welcomes him with open arms and convinces him to buy the latest model of THAT brand…which gets 50 mpg, does 0–60 in 4 seconds, and has a 5-year worry-free warranty (all of this isn’t true, just as it wasn’t the last time, but he doesn’t check the facts…). And so he buys the car - without doing the research, or listening to his friends, or questioning whether the salesman is telling the truth. And as he drives away, he shakes his fist out the car window at the dealership where he bought his first car, yelling “This is my ‘fuck you’ PROTEST VOTE!”

So…really, what’s the point of trying to listen to the concerns of such a mindless, irrational consumer who is so easily and perpetually hoodwinked by lies and deceptions? I mean, really it’s on him to recognize his own mistakes, and to take responsibility for all the bad stuff that has happened to him. And until he takes responsibility and stops blaming others for his problems…well, things are not going to change. Not for him, and not for anyone else like him in America.

How is the U.S. economy doing as of the end of Aug. 2023?

IMO the waters are very muddy right now. There are strong indicators of both fundamental strength and fundamental fragility in the U.S. economy (and the global economy as well). Currently, these strengths and fragilities balance each other out to some degree. And that caveat — “to some degree” — is important. Through economic, political, and military lenses, there is a high amount of volatility right now. The future is uncertain. I’ll throw out just a few variables so you can see what I mean:

1. China’s economy is currently tanking, even as they increase military saber-rattling over their geographical influence.

2. The U.S. bond yield curve is still inverted…and getting more pronounced.

3. U.S. labor force participation remains at a strong 62.6% (highest since March, 2020) and the U-6 unemployment rate has fractionally decreased. However, at the same time, the total number of new jobs created is slowly going down.

4. Credit is tightening — everywhere.

5. U.S. inflation is cooling (core inflation of 4.7% is the slowest gain in 20 months).

6. U.S. sovereign debt has been downgraded.

7. Half of the U.S. electorate remains in the thrall of a deluded con man, and their fundamental beliefs about all manner of things (including what policies will best protect democracy and preserve a strong economy moving forward) are totally at odds with reality.

8. In the U.S. and elsewhere, there has been an uptick in business investment (both public and private projects).

So…is it a complete wash? Well, in my humble opinion, it is for now. But any of these factors could easily be disrupted by current events. For example, what if Vladimir Putin — or Saudi’s MBS — decide to curtail oil production (and thereby spike gas prices) just to make Joe Biden look bad during the 2024 election? Such tactics are almost a given at this point, and these would add unwelcome pressure to the U.S. and global economies. With other factors like the ones described above still in play, what do you think will happen in terms of inflation controls and economic recovery? I don’t think the delicate balance of pros and cons would hold — there would be a major disruption, and possibly a crash.

This highly volatile situation is why it is simply not possible to look at just one metric — like employment — and come to any firm conclusions one way or another.

My 2 cents.

Why U.S. Conservatives Are Abandoning Their Values

Justice & Tradition


The wrong-headedness of the latest SCOTUS ruling in favor of evangelical web designer Lori Smith is obvious to thoughtful Constitutional and Biblical scholars -- as it doesn't reflect the values, sentiments, and standards embodied in either document. The previous day's ruling on affirmative action at Harvard is likewise transparently oblivious to the racial realities of American culture and history. But the question to my mind is: Why is this happening? Why are folks who say they are committed to longstanding principles of the U.S. Constitution, the New Testament, and indeed civil society itself so eager to abandon those principles?

Well, I think it is all about fear. A deep, abiding terror that one's status and privilege of being "White and Right" is severely threatened by the natural, normal evolution of a morally maturing culture. It is a knee-jerk grasping after the power and wealth that will inevitably be lost as a more equitable arrangement of civil society is achieved.

And I don't see an end to that grasping. As long as this fear-powered conservatism energizes our electorate and our government officials, these irrational and hypocritical patterns will continue to amplify themselves. What the U.S. Constitution and the New Testament actually promote are concepts like equitable justice, inalienable and universal human rights, the criticality of a strong and democratic civil society, and the unfailing power of a generous and accepting spirit, a reflexive willingness to help others, and an unconditional compassion for our fellow human beings.

Will the overarching principles of love and equality, so venerated by some previous generations, prevail...? Or will we continue to slide backwards into selfishness and prejudice?

Well I suppose we will see how folks decide to vote in the upcoming 2024 elections and beyond...and who decides to abdicate their responsibilities and not vote at all.

The Hallmarks of Bad Information – Misinformation, Disinformation, Propaganda & How We Can Manage It

We live in a world where lies run rampant, where public figures consistently misrepresent the truth, and where once trusted news sources are no longer viewed as reliable. More than ever before, it is now our individual responsibility to discern what is true and what is not, and to recognize when we become the target of deliberate hoodwinking. It is no exaggeration to claim that the durability of our political systems, the stability of our society, and the health of our planet increasingly depend on our vigilance in this arena. What follows is a brief but detailed overview of how to identify bad information, how we can protect ourselves from it, and how we can best respond to its increasingly loud and invasive presence in our lives.


First, what constitutes “bad information?”

Here are some of the hallmarks that help us quickly and reliably identify misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and manipulative deception:

1. Partial truths that rush to a sweeping conclusion. One of the most common techniques of communicating bad information is to offer only a small portion of cherry-picked facts for a given situation, deliberately omitting additional information that could provide a more balanced or measured perspective, and then quickly rushing into what is usually an extreme and unreasonable conclusion fueled solely on that partial information.

2. Fear or hate mongering – often involving conspiracy thinking and demonizing particular individuals or groups – followed by urgent and imperative calls to action. Negative emotion can be profoundly persuasive, even when the accusations being made have no evidence to support them. And once we have been caught up in strong feelings of foreboding or dislike, our rational faculties tend to shut down, and we may make decisions or take action based on strong emotions alone. And propagators of bad information know this, deliberately using it to their advantage to persuade us to conclude or do things we normally wouldn’t.

3. Visceral and vehement rejection of any reliable sources of information. Those who perpetuate bad information cannot tolerate or allow sources of more accurate information to be consulted by anyone, so they will attack them endlessly – though here again often without evidence to support their accusations.

4. The illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is when everyone begins to believe falsehoods are true simply because they get repeated by lots of people – because we are hearing them from multiple sources, the untruths begins to feel familiar and acceptable. Mainly as a consequence of the Internet, enduring falsehoods can now be spread very quickly all around the globe and become accepted into the mainstream as widely believed “truth” in this way.

5. Tribal conformance and groupthink. This technique relies on peer pressure and perceived threats to identity and belonging within a given group to generate lockstep conformance – often within a rigid set of values, priorities, and beliefs. Members of that tribe must, of necessity, conform to a given conclusion or course of action, and endlessly parrot particular talking points, to avoid being kicked out of their tribe. As inherently social creatures who crave acceptance and belonging, these are powerful pressures to keep us in line and make us feel we must propagate bad information…or else.

6. Reliance on a cult of personality or an idealized self-image. In an age of media celebrities who boisterously portray themselves as champions and heroes without any real evidence or history of their actually being that, adoring followers are lured into accepting falsehoods without question and then vehemently defending those falsehoods. They are, after all, defending a champion and hero that has inspired their adoration and made them feel important and “part of something,” perhaps even making them feel better about themselves and closer to an idealized version of who they want to be.

7. Projection, false equivalence, and whataboutism. These techniques attempt to paint the opposition with the flaws, faults, mistakes, and failings of the person trying to defend themselves or make their case. For example, someone who is profoundly corrupt or immoral asserting that their opponent is actually the one who is corrupt or immoral; this is projection. Or a politician claiming that an opposing party’s policies or practices have been just as flawed and destructive as their own, when this is only partially true; this is false equivalence. And, finally, when cornered with undeniable evidence of their own misdoings or malfeasance, someone may counter that their accusers have done something similar, when once again this may be only partially true or even false; this is whataboutism.

8. The constant promotion of other logical fallacies – such as ad hominem attacks, straw man arguments, the bandwagon effect, slippery slope fallacies, appeals to authority, appeals to emotion, false dilemmas, appeals to ignorance, false cause, manufacturing a “big lie,” and many others. Getting to know what these logical fallacies look and sound like can be very eye-opening – but they do take a bit of time and effort to fully appreciate (see References and Resources section below for more). In brief: ad hominem is simply attacking the character of a person rather than responding to their actual arguments; straw man is misrepresenting the opposing viewpoint so that refuting it doesn’t address the actual argument; bandwagon is claiming that because “everyone already knows” something to be true, is common knowledge, or will succeed, then it must be so; slippery slope is claiming that even a small admission, concession, or seemingly insignificant course of action will inevitably lead to much broader and disastrous results; appeal to authority asserts that because a trusted person or source claims something is true, it must be true; appeal to emotion is just that – there is no rational reasoning or factual evidence involved; false dilemma is insisting the only available choices are between two black-and-white extremes, when in reality there are more nuanced alternatives; appeal to ignorance takes advantage of our not having contrary, factual information to contradict the appeal; false cause links an incorrect cause to a given outcome; a “big lie” is a distortion of factual reality that is so grandiose and extreme – and repeated so often – that uncritical hearers begin to believe it.

9. The appearance of reasonableness. This is, for me at least, one of the more insidious techniques used in bad information. The objective here is to make an argument – usually one based on partial information, logical fallacies, or distortions of fact – in a reasonable, logical, and confident way that makes a given opponent or their viewpoint seem extreme, irrational, or hyperbolic. This technique is often combined with other methods meant to provoke the opposition into emotional reactions or overstatement of their position, and thereby undermining the credibility of their viewpoint.


How can we best respond to and mitigate these influences?

As you can see, there are a lot of tools in the bad information toolkit. And, unfortunately, once we become conditioned to respond to these tools, it is very difficult to free ourselves from their influence and not react impulsively or reflexively when they are used. In fact, one of the most effective ways to manage our immersion in bad information is simply to delay our response. To create a healthy space – in terms of time, emotions, and reflexive thinking – between the initial information we are receiving and how we choose to react to it. It’s a lot like creating space between other kinds of reflexive reaction. For example, if someone aggressively shoves me out of their way to cut past me in line, I might feel a reflexive urge to shove them back, or grab hold of them, or yell out “Hey, you can’t do that!” But if I instead insert a pause in my reaction, take a calming breath, and reflect for a moment about how best to respond, I can short-circuit my own visceral reactivity. Dealing with bad information can benefit from the same kind of patience and self-discipline.

Of course, being well-informed is also highly advantageous, so that when we are presented with partial truths, logical fallacies, or deceptive arguments we can more easily dismiss them because we know what the actual truth is. Amid today’s 24/7 fire hose of mass media – and with digital devices as our constant companions, delivering this firehouse with algorithmic amplification designed to keep our interest – the deluging clamor for our attention can be very challenging to manage.

So here are some helpful ways to buffer ourselves from the onslaught of such unfiltered, often questionable information:

1. Be proactive in how information is consumed. For example, avoid remaining logged into social media or receiving social media notifications on your digital devices. If we allow algorithms to decide what information we should receive, then most research indicates (see References and Resources) that we will receive what provokes our emotional engagement with that social media platform. Why? Simply because more engagement from us results in more ad revenue for those companies. This, in turn, results in what researchers call “computational propaganda.” So instead, if we deliberately choose to seek out specific information more proactively, we can protect ourselves from these profit-driven algorithms.

2. Be proactive in our selection of information sources – and even then, check the facts. This can take some effort to figure out, but eventually we can gather together a number of sources that provide high quality, factual information about our areas of interest. One way to vet the bias and factuality of potential news sources is https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/. And for reliable, in-depth research on many cultural and political issues, we can consult https://www.pewresearch.org/. To verify questionable information, I recommend consulting http://snopes.com/, https://www.politifact.com/, or https://www.factcheck.org/. And to appreciate how money intersects with politics in the U.S., https://www.opensecrets.org/ is an excellent resource.

In terms of the current political landscape in the U.S.A., it can quickly and easily be confirmed (see References and Resources) that the most prolific perpetrators of bad information practices are conservative pundits; the Republican Party and its political candidates; right-leaning U.S. media, bloggers, think tanks, and talk-show hosts; the official state-run media of Russia and China; and the efforts of social media troll farms and other “active measures” maintained by those same countries. Of course, you will want to evaluate and verify these claims yourself, but I think it is important to call out the most nefarious and destructive influences in U.S. politics right now.

Has this always been the case? With respect to Russia, this has definitely been the case since the Soviet era, but China seems to be a relative newcomer to the media-shaping game. Regarding the GOP in the U.S., it hasn’t always been this bad. In my opinion there have previously been reputable and responsible conservative-leaning media and pundits in the U.S. that would have called into question many of the claims being made by Republicans today. At the same time, conservatives have also executed long-term, well-funded efforts to discredit inconvenient facts that threated corporate profits – often through relentless “science skepticism” attacks (e.g. regarding tobacco risks, climate change, acid rain, pesticides, etc.). With equal fervor, conservatives have assaulted government programs and policies that protect consumers, workers, and the poor, usually with some flavor of fear mongering. These efforts include “red scare” anti-socialist propaganda techniques, as well as amping up rhetoric over “culture war” hot button issues (gay marriage and transgender rights; abortion rights; family values; parents’ rights; etc.) to agitate and motivate the Republican rank-and-file.

Do Democrats and those on the political left use similar tactics to persuade and manipulate people? And are left-leaning media, think tanks, and pundits as prolific in their propaganda, misinformation, or disinformation? Again, you will want to research and confirm the realities for yourself. But currently, although the left-leaning side of the political spectrum has sometimes been guilty of using similar tactics, it would be a grossly exaggerated false equivalence to say that Democratic politicians fabricate lies at the same rate as Republicans – or that Democrats rely on misinformation, disinformation, and logical fallacies to the same degree as the GOP. Left-leaning think tanks also tend to approach issues in a more even-handed, evidence-based, and scientific way than conservative ones. And in this moment of history, mainly driven by the extraordinary antics of Donald Trump and his “MAGA” followers, the GOP has gone down a rabbit hole of creating its own alternative realities. We could even say that, to exemplify the most potent examples of every “bad information” technique outlined here, we need only observe the copious pedantic claims uttered by Mr. Trump and his political supporters and media pundits.

As just a handful of examples of what right-leaning America has consistently gotten wrong, yet promoted as “truth” in order to win elections, sell ads, and raise donations:

• Joe Biden really did win the 2020 election, and zero evidence has been presented to the contrary despite repeated lawsuits.

• Donald Trump really did break the law in the willful hoarding of classified documents after he left office – and no, his evasive and obstructive behavior regarding those documents goes far beyond anything Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Mike Pence did by comparison.

• Climate change is a real, scientifically validated event, and not a liberal conspiracy.

• Immigrants had nothing to do with the decline in jobs or wages in the U.S.A. over the last few decades. Instead, it was mainly corporate greed and the natural consequence of those corporations seeking cheaper labor and resources abroad and automating production and services.

• Tax cuts have never “paid for themselves;” that is, conservative trickle-down economics has never helped the poor or working class, but only enriched the owner-shareholders of big business and other wealthy folks.

• Vladimir Putin is not an underdog victimize by “western aggression” who nobly aims to preserve Russia’s status in the world – he is a brutal, murderous, megalomaniacal dictator hell-bent on expanding his own political power and the economic and political influence of Russia so that he can increase his own personal wealth and that of the oligarchs who enable him.

• Obamacare has actually helped millions of people obtain health insurance who couldn’t do so previously, and has helped reduce health care costs overall. And there were never any government “death panels” triaging patient healthcare.

• Deregulation has not helped American consumers or saved U.S. industries – with very few exceptions, it has consistently hurt both.

• There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein had zero ties to the terrorists responsible for 9/11.

• Neither the recent escalation of inflation, nor the ballooning federal deficit, can be laid at the feet of Democrats or Joe Biden. While the legislation and executive policies of both parties have certainly contributed, the lion’s share of irresponsible spending, overly aggressive tax cuts, and disastrous economic and public health policies contributing to both inflation and the federal deficit can be laid squarely at the feet of Republicans – and indeed Donald Trump.

It is therefore not surprising that the GOP is so profoundly committed to false narratives and misinformation – because the facts on the ground make them look really bad.

But 70+ million voters in the U.S. continue to be utterly conned and hoodwinked into believing these lies and many more – and into consistently voting against their own expressed values and best interests.

These are truly extraordinary times.


References and Resources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_techniques
https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/problem-solving-and-decision-making/logical-fallacies/1/
https://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/c.php?g=849536&p=6077643
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/logical-fallacies/
https://www.propwatch.org/propaganda.php
https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2017/06/Casestudies-ExecutiveSummary.pdf
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/radical-ideas-social-media-algorithms/
https://level-7.org/Challenges/Opposition/conspiracy/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/big-lie
https://realmajority.us/files/stacks-image-d301f1f-1142x1600.jpg
https://level-7.org/Challenges/Opposition/
https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/apr/01/cato-institute/cato-institutes-claim-global-warming-disputed-most/
https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/Attacks_On_Science/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2014/11/conservative-nonsense-political-history
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/27/inflation-blame-game-sorting-out-the-culprits-00035712
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/10/03/republican-tax-cuts-fail-record-debt-and-inequality-gap-column/3833546002/
https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/GOP%20Policies%20Caused%20the%20Deficit%20REPORT%2010-15-18.pdf
https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-war-criminal-inhumanity-syria/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/24/republicans-parents-rights-education-culture-war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war

Why are there so precious few who truly get both sides of the political spectrum?

Thank you for the question. Here are what I believe are some contributing factors that have gained increasing prominence in the past couple of decades:

1. A deliberate, carefully planned effort on the part of political activists, think tanks, and corporate media to divide, polarize, and demonize across the political spectrum in order to secure votes, increase campaign contributions and media viewership, and secure political status. It is much easier to appeal to fear and anxiety, play the blame game, and energize “Us vs. Them” polemics than to thoughtfully explore nuanced political philosophy and policy positions.

2. A downward spiral of biased media reporting that was instigated by ending the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. As a consequence of that very ill-informed decision, consumers of news media are simply often not presented both sides of the argument on political issues in any meaningful or reasonable way.

3. Social media echo chambers, the illusory truth effect, and consequent groupthink. When algorithms and like-minded groups of users amplify extreme, biased, and often false information that confirms their worst fear and mistrust, there is no longer room for discussion. Political topics become too highly charged with emotional rhetoric to allow moderating (or even true) viewpoints.

4. An unfortunate dumbing down of the U.S. voting public. There are likely a lot of factors contributing to this — poor nutrition, increased collective stress and anxiety, incomplete education, epidemic levels of ADHD, cultural opposition to “intellectualism,” etc. — but it is increasingly obvious that a lot of folks cannot reason critically at all, and instead quickly race down a rabbit hole of logical fallacies and contradictory assumptions.

5. Overwhelming input streams that folks often just don’t know how to manage, leading to feeling paralyzed, confused, and consequently more vulnerable to the influencing factors listed above. For example: way too much information funneled at all of us 24/7 from all directions at once; increasing complexity in nearly every decision we need to make; equally increasing pressure to make important decisions at much higher quantities and at much faster rates than many previous generations; accelerating technological and cultural changes that are increasingly difficult to track, let alone accept or fully incorporate on cultural and interpersonal levels.

6. A consumerist culture than encourages us to “bandwagon.” We are conditioned from early childhood to be guided by advertising and cultural norms that basically say “Hey, you don’t need to have your own agency or be thoughtfully informed, instead you just need to buy this or that and we’ll solve all your problems for you.” This conditioning runs so deep in U.S. culture that many folks simply conform to the latest cultural fads — which often originate at the fringe extremes of the political spectrum — in order to feel a sense of belonging and empowerment.

7. State-funded disinformation from hostile foreign actors that takes advantage of all-of-the-above and makes them much worse to serve the agendas of that country.

My 2 cents.

Why are people afraid of the far right rather than the far left in general?

It’s really pretty simple :

1. Right-wing extremists have been responsible for the vast majority of domestic terrorism in the U.S.A. over the last few decades — and for the vast majority of murders in the course of that political violence as well.

2. Conspiracy theories, groupthink, and brainwashing are present on the far Left, but in only a fairly small percentage (my research estimates about 14% of the Left has succumbed to such maladies). On the right, however, I estimate the numbers to be closer to 35%. If we assume the U.S. electorate to be about equality divided, this means there are more than twice as many folks who are willfully deluded on the Right than on the Left. We should be afraid of giving such folks more political power, right? For example, electing 2020 election deniers to oversee future elections, etc.

3. The “Trump effect.” 70 million people voted a skeevy conman with serious mental issues and a huge ego into office. Putting someone like Trump in the most powerful position on the planet is just…inexcusable. The amount of damage Trump did to the global reputation of the U.S., to our domestic rule of law, to democracy, and to civil society itself is truly epic. And, needless to say, his antics nearly destroyed the GOP as well.

4. The far Right is utterly misinformed about…well…most things, really. Most of the concepts in far-Right ideology represent what I call “broken brain syndrome,” having no basis in fact or good evidence, often promoting strategies that have never demonstrated any causal link with the problems they want to solve. The far-Right rank-and-file are poster children for the Dunning-Kruger effect, where their profound ignorance makes them overconfident. That’s an inherently dangerous combination. And although folks may find the far Left’s vision of the future (i.e. less capitalism, greater democracy, etc.) unattractive, there simply isn’t as much counterfactual fervor there. Those on the far Left are generally much better educated about facts, history, and evidence than those on the far Right.

5. Far Left solutions have actually been tried and have succeeded historically all around the world (for example, take a look at these left-anarchist communities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities). Far Right solutions either have not been tried, or they have utterly failed (examples: austerity measures by conservative policymakers around the globe, Milton Friedman's disastrous interventions in Chile, nearly all deregulation in the U.S., the World Bank's structural adjustment policies in the developing world, etc).

6. As you can see from far-Right-leaning discussion of this and almost every other topic, they lie. A lot. For example, take a look at the "factual reporting" ratings of nearly all far right media sources on www.mediabiasfactcheck.com, and then review how many of those extreme rightwing bias sources are rated as "conspiracy-pseudoscience." Shouldn’t we be hesitant to trust liars?

My 2 cents.

Is the “tyranny of the majority” an unavoidable weakness of democracy?

No, the tyranny of the majority is not an unavoidable weakness of democracy. In fact there are so many welll-practiced and time-proven ways to effectively diffuse and countervail this possibility that its ascendence is really the exception rather than the norm.

Successful mitigation includes things like:

1. Implementing subsidiarity, so that democratic decisions are diffused down to the community level. At the same time avoiding concentrations of centralized political and economic power becomes a critical countervailing strategy.

2. Ensuring the electorate is well-educated about its responsibility to govern for the good of everyone in society, and is operating at a level of moral maturity that reflexively supports and enhances this view.

3. Strengthening egalitarian rule of law, and egalitarian civil society generally, to support an equality of rights, opportunity, ability, and enforcement across society — all of which inherently aim to compensate for existing inequalities and at least attempt to level the playing field.

4. Institute truly independent checks and balances to ensure no single institution, governing body, or system has absolute authority over any aspect of society. Interestingly, one way to accomplish this is by implementing direct democratic controls over representative bodies as some constitutions allow.

Sadly, what has become much more problematic is the “tyranny of the minority,” where a smaller group that has gathered an inordinate amount of economic and political power to itself runs roughshod over democracy and civil society to maintain its own privilege, influence, and wealth.

My 2 cents.

What are some things conservatives are right about?

Sadly, almost nothing. I’m not talking about the values that conservatives espouse — such as the importance of family and personal responsibility, the importance of the rule of law and being fiscally responsible, the valuing of the U.S. Constitution and expectations of personal liberty, etc. — many of which I myself agree with. No, the real problem is how conservatives allow themselves to be hoodwinked into believing utterly false claims about causality and therefore into promoting policies and praxis resulting in outcomes that completely undermine and contradict the values they espouse.

Take the example of abortion. Reducing the frequency of abortions seems like a good thing to almost everyone, regardless of where they are in the ideological or political spectrum. The problem is that the conservative approach — to overturn Roe v. Wade and, ultimately, to ban abortions altogether — simply isn’t effective. In fact, decades of data demonstrate that communities where Planned Parenthood has a long-term presence have evidenced a steady reduction in total abortions over time…even as populations in those areas grow…so that per capita abortions steeply decline. So this “liberal/progressive” approach to reducing abortions actually works, even though it flies in the face of conservative claims about “how liberals just want to kill more babies,” or that Planned Parenthood is an evil emblem of this baby-killing frenzy. And we know that, historically, women will still seek abortions whether they are legal or not. Lastly, SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade in the way that it did essentially threatens several longstanding protections of personal liberties (gay marriage, mixed race marriage, parental decision-making, right to contraception, etc.). So despite the rhetorical “virtue signaling” of the abortion bans we see being legislated in conservative states, real-world evidence and outcomes tend to contradict what conservatives claim the root of the problem to be, and their solutions undermine the very personal liberty conservatives claim to support!

And this is true across the board — in the flavor of crony shareholder capitalism that conservative policies promote, in the level of government corruption and law-breaking that politicians elected by conservatives carry out, in the failure of conservative economic policies, in their persistant undermining of democratic institutions, etc. The way conservatives go about reifying their values nearly always either falls short or makes things much worse — often smacking of hypocrisy and invoking high levels of cognitive dissonance within the conservative tribe. Thus conservatives seem to demonstrate a really terrible track record in areas where they are constantly accusing or attacking liberals and progressives. And this hypocritical spiral has extended all the way up to conservative Supreme Court Justices, who are shamelessly “activist” in their revision of 200 years of stare decisis (yet only regarding conservative hot-button issues, and little else). It’s more than a little astonishing.

Why does this happen with such frequency? Why are conservatives so often mistaken? Well…because the folks who work very hard (and spend lots of money) hoodwinking conservatives are benefitting from the false narratives about causality and preferred policy approaches.

Let’s look at just one potent example that spells this out really clearly. Consider that firearms manufacturers — via intense lobbying, funding of pro-gun candidates, generation of endless Second Amendment propaganda and fear-mongering, and long-term intimate relationships with “gun rights” organizations — have been very successful in persuading conservatives that civilians “need” to own lots of weapons, including military weapons. According to gun makers, owning a military weapon is a Constitutional right that is constantly under threat from gun-fearing libtards and the nanny state! But wait…who is this really benefiting from these endless and well-funded persuasion efforts? Well the firearms manufacturers of course! All that propaganda and lobbying directly increases firearm manufacturer profits in a world where starting wars that enlist mass armies has become much less popular, and the sale of military weapons to such armies has consequently become much less profitable. Gun manufacturers just needed to find a new market…and by hoodwinking conservatives, they did just that.

And this is how almost all conservative groupthink is generated…and how the conservative voting base is “energized:” it’s mostly just simple hoodwinking for profit. When we follow the money behind any conservative propaganda, it always leads to folks who want to enrich themselves directly — or empower themselves politically so that they can further enrich themselves.


REFERENCES/FURTHER READING


Some additional examples of conservative hypocrisy illustrated below from this website: www.realmajority.us




On the agenda and tactics of neoliberalism: https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/

On the nature of conservative “culture wars” and conning Christians into supporting right-wing agendas:



What are the causes of inflation in the US?

You’ll notice there isn’t one simple answer…but unfortunately that’s what a lot of folks would like — and certainly what political pundits and talkshow hosts are willing to sell us. :-(

Recent causes for inflation in the U.S. — really none of which can be “blamed” on any one political party or candidate — include:

1) Government stimulus spending during the COVID pandemic. This put more $$ in people’s hands to spend and many of them did.

2) Reluctance of Federal Reserve to address inflation sooner. Many influential economists (and folks in Fed itself) believed initial spikes of inflation were “transitory.” But they were wrong.

3) Russian aggression against Ukraine and consequent sanctions. The war itself was hugely disruptive to supplies of everything from oil and natural gas to grain, palladium (used in fuel cells and catalytic converters) and potash (a component of fertilizer production) — and the sanctions levied against Russia then amplified this effect.

4) Supply chain and transport problems around the globe. In addition to the war in Ukraine, a lot of this of this was COVID-related on a global scale, but some of it was also more localized. For example, there were oil refinery problems in the U.S. that added to oil production woes, a particular region of China that couldn’t produce microchips for several months, etc. Regardless, even as demand ramped up, supply chains remained choked…and many of those conditions continue to persist.

5) Pent up demand during COVID. This is actually a biggie, because that pent up demand is still in play — folks are still spending gobs of $$$ on things they couldn’t do during the pandemic, like travel and eating out.

6) Conspiracy thinking. This is actually a pretty nasty feature of U.S. culture that is really hurting the U.S. economy. As just one example, the resistance to COVID vaccination was really, really stupid and probably prolonged the negative economic impacts of COVID on the U.S. economy — and extended all COVID-related inflationary factors — for many more months than necessary.

7) Global economic shifts and expanding excessive consumption. Some twenty years ago the U.S. was able to source really cheap labor and raw materials from developing countries like China, Korea, India, etc. This resulted in much cheaper prices for U.S. consumers. But, as a consequence, Americans who make up only 5% of the global population were using some 50% of global resources. But now, the economies of the developing world have grown tremendously, and billions of their citizens are now much wealthier and expect a higher standard of living — along with higher wages. And of course those new consumers now have need of those same resources that were previously dedicated to supplying goods to Americans. Add to this that, globally, those raw materials are becoming more scarce even as demand for them grows around the globe. So…do you see the problem here? Americans can no longer expect cheap goods from China in particular the way they once did…so prices would have risen in the U.S. regardless of any of the other factors listed here. And the cost of doing business in the U.S. is just rising…period. Developing countries aren’t even willing to buy our garbage anymore! So guess who has to pay more for dealing with that garbage? We do.

8-) Anti-immigrant policies and sentiment in the U.S.. This is actually one of the dumbest “let’s shoot ourselves in the foot” developments in American politics. Blaming immigrants for our problems isn’t just mistaken, it’s really harmful to the U.S. economy. Particularly in agriculture, the U.S. relies almost entirely on immigrant workers to keep Americans fed…and big ag really has never cared if those workers were legal or not. So when politicians amplify fear over a “crisis at the border” and enact policies that keep immigrants from supplying U.S. companies with much-needed cheap labor, guess who pays the price? American consumers of course.

9) OPEC oil production policies. On the heals of oil sanctions against Russia, OPEC’s decision to cut back production was a really, really bad idea — basically a “punch in the gut” to the global economy at the worst possible time.

10) Corporate greed. This includes things like reluctance of banks to pass on increased interest rates to consumers. You may have noticed that mortgage lenders are happy to charge 7%+ on 30-year mortgages, but savings accounts in banks are still only providing less than an unchanged 1% interest. Then you have oil companies raking in ridiculously high profits (the highest in their entire history!) just because they can. This level of greed has plagued corporate America for a long time, but it seems particularly bad right now. And of course it’s not restricted to the U.S. And all of this opportunistic greed is what’s helping make prices on everything very high…and likely will keep those prices from going down even when all of the other inflationary pressures are relieved.

11) Labor shortages and consequent increases in salary. This has been falsely blamed on COVID stimulus and folks choosing not to work because they were receiving COVID relief and unemployment benefits. In reality, this is a much more complicated situation that involves a host of factors — things like folks leaving the workforce due to burnout (especially among what we discovered to be “essential workers” during COVID), early retirement, a sea change in attitudes about work commitment (i.e. “the great resignation” and other gen z attitude shifts), worker deaths and disability from COVID, and major career path shifts due to COVID impacts on certain industries (for example, restaurant workers who were laid off during COVID choosing new careers).

12) Some unfortunately timed fulfillments of campaign promises. On one side, student loan forgiveness could likely become an inflation stimulator if those are allowed to proceed. On the other side, any and all tax cuts have almost certainly helped induce inflation. Here we really can blame the politicians on both the Left and the Right…even though they are just following through on their campaign promises to voters.

13) Financial “psychologics” that are disconnected from reality. This is more subtle, but the U.S. stock market is a very good example. As a consequence of both institutional “build it and they will come” optimism and a huge spike in irrationally exuberant retail investors, the stock market has almost zero correlation with real-world economic indicators. This has been a long-term problem for sure, but essentially the opportunity to make a lot of money in speculative investing, which in turn supercharges valuation and reduces perceived risk, leads to everyone (consumers, corporations, government agencies, etc.) operating as if everything is golden and wonderful…when really the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes (or is wearing moldy rags…!). This false optimism and misplaced enthusiasm actually places a lot of upward pressure on everything from consumer prices to worker salaries, even as it encourages company’s to spend gobs of money because, well, they falsely believe in their own inflated valuation. It’s a pretty nasty cycle!

There are additional factors (after I finished writing this post I realized several more that should have been included) but this captures some pretty substantive issues. And, as you can see, we can’t really pin things on any one thing. It’s complicated. And we certainly can’t blame any one party or individual political leaders for inflation. That’s just a really ignorant knee-jerk response out fear and frustration.

My 2 cents.

In your opinion, what is dividing society currently?

An “Us vs. Them” mentality amplified by regressive cultural norms, for-profit media (including social media) that relies on provoking extreme emotional reactions in order to make money, disinformation campaigns funded by both U.S. corporations and foreign governments in order to consolidate power or disrupt threats to power, underlying and toxic levels of individualism and materialism inherent to commercialistic culture, technologically and commercially driven change occurring at a breakneck pace that inherently alienates folks with non-adaptive constitutions, demographic shifts that also make many people feel uneasy or insecure about their assumed position of privilege in society, exponential complexity and interdependency across all of society that is disorienting and destabilizes cultural traditions and norms, and an unsustainable economic system that has been breaking down for some time….

In other words: a perfect storm.

All of these pressures combine to create real tension and pain across multiple segments of society, and exacerbate differences in how people react to that tension and pain. For one type of group in particular, the disruption and discomfort is very acute — those with a naturally tribalistic, fear-based, morally immature disposition (i.e. a strong “I/Me/Mine” or “We/Us/Ours” moral bias). There is a growing visceral and irrational reactivity among this group, which mainly inhabits the conservative end of the political spectrum (about 35% of conservatives) but is also present in the liberal/progressive end of the political spectrum (about 14% of progressives). These folks are unfortunately mired in low emotional and general intelligence, high levels of willful ignorance, reflexive greed, racial and cultural prejudices, fear, pathological selfishness, and an enduring sense of victimhood and self-righteous indignation. I personally have begun to wonder if the amplification of these negative traits are at least partly the result of epigenetic breakdown of the human genome as a consequence of environmental toxins and stress — but that is another, more challenging topic to explore another time.

But of course such traits are being manipulated by the aforementioned media and disinformation campaigns, along with commercialistic culture, which use them to energize a collective Dunning-Kruger effect and illusory truth effect that result in automatic consumption of untruths, snowballing extremist views, conspiracy thinking, and an increasingly volatile and polarized mindset that unfortunately tends to vote, consume, and donate money entirely contrary to those people’s own best interests, and in contradiction to their deeply held and frequently expressed values.

For more on all of this, please read:

https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/https://level-7.org/Challenges/Opposition/

https://level-7.org/Challenges/Capitalism/https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/Attacks_On_Science/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effecthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

My 2 cents.

Do progressives have a limiting principle, a point where "this much change is sufficient" or is progressivism simply a direction without a limit?

Digging into the assumptions behind this question we discover some interesting contradictions — and likely a misunderstanding of the causality in play regarding certain outcomes.

The greatest drivers of change in the developed world actually do not include “progressivism.” That is a complete misunderstanding of causality in both history and current conditions. The biggest drivers of change include:

1.The profit motive as expressed in corporate commercialism — which has completely changed both the political power structure in the U.S. and globally through concentrations of wealth and plutocratic influence, and completely changed culture through “newer is better” Kool-Aid and commercialized homogenization across previously diverse cultures as well. When cookie-cutter legislation written by and for corporations (via A.L.E.C.) is passed in every state legislature, and every U.S. consumer is using the same products, listening to the same corporate-controlled media, and working under conditions and wages dictated by corporate investors, then “progressive” agendas really represent just a tiny drop of influence in the hurricane of dynamic capitalism — it is capitalism that is the juggernaut instigating and steering the direction of much of our culture and politics.

2. Technology — the industrial revolution, the information age, the rise of automation, and complex systems managed by algorithms and AI…you really can’t place any of these at the feet of progressives either. Our species is addicted to technological innovation. And it is a pretty unstoppable force at this point in terms of the impact it has on culture, learning, information propagation, and indeed human development. Progressives may celebrate technology in their policy proposals — but no more than conservatives celebrate and reinforce technology with their spending habits.

3. Scientific inquiry and knowledge — this has created enormous common sense incentives for changing certain traditional practices and revising traditional views about how the world works. When science discovers that a new way of doing things (or a new way of thinking about things) is advantageous and beneficial to everyone, then this creates tension with previous conceptions, habits, and beliefs. Here progressives do tend to be more emphatic than conservatives about promoting science and scientific understanding, that is true. But it is scientific discovery itself that is most often introducing and propagating the change.

These three forces have accelerated cultural shifts that likely would have taken decades or centuries to occur in pre-industrial mass societies. Have progressives often championed certain themes, practices, perspectives, and values that were accelerated by the breakneck growth of capitalism, science, and technology? Well sure…but saying progressives were responsible for these changes is putting the cart before the horse.

I noticed in some of the comments in this thread that critical race theory was raised as a concern. Let’s put that into the context I have sketched out here. Slavery was a key component in the development of capitalism (see Beckert, Baptiste, Johnson, et al for this linkage) — but in particular it was integral to the economic strength and success of Southern states. Technology (industrialization) was responsible for the economic strength of Northern states — and for an alternative to slavery in the production of goods — both of which rapidly undermined the usefulness of slavery and its economic status and preference. And of course industrial production was also integral to the development of capitalism. Interestingly, it was conservative Christians who were frequently at the forefront of championing equal human rights and emancipation of slaves in the first anti-slavery political movements. However, you’ll notice there aren’t any progressives involved here…in fact the progressive movement hadn’t even started yet. So the cultural shift away from slavery was driven by technology, an evolving economic system, and conservative values in this instance…and not progressives.

And this is the pattern that repeats itself even when progressives came on the scene: it was other primary forces that sparked changed, rather than progressivism itself. Progressivism arose in part as an affirmative response to some of these forces (technology and science in particular), and in part as a countervailing response to the abuses of capitalism. Progressivism was itself a consequence of these forces — one of many changes they inspired.

With respect to the evolution of CRT, all that progressives did was apply scientific inquiry to history in an attempt to identify patterns that kept occurring over time. That’s it. In the case of critical race theory, the understanding of history around the oppression of people of color seemed to indicate that white people sought to maintain their privileged advantage in society simply — this wasn’t always a conscious thing, but it seemed evident in many civic institutions and cultural practices. But this pattern of tacit prejudice did become an enormous blindspot in mainstream understanding, with even the history and practice of slavery being an example of this oversight. Unfortunately, there are a lot of other institutional, political, and legal examples of oppression that can also be explained as protecting the social and economic advantages of white people — so the hypothesis (which is really all CRT actually is) has gained a lot of traction over time. It’s just a pretty good explanation of certain dynamics in U.S. history.

But is the approach valid? I think the point is that CRT can be reasonably discussed and debated. But as the current anti-CRT movement also vehemently opposes any examination of racism in the U.S., we could say that, whether intended or not, the anti-CRT movement is itself an example of (mainly) white people suppressing any exposure of their own privilege and advantage in society — both historical and current — and/or the prejudice they may perpetuate without even being aware of it.

So, on the one hand, progressives do tend to promote technology and scientific understanding as solutions for longstanding problems. But, on the other, they often oppose corporate commercialism’s influence on how things change, even as conservatives tend to promote unchecked growth and change when it benefits the profit motive. So no one is innocent of advocating for change. In a way both progressives and consrervatives are equally both promoters and gatekeepers of change.
Lastly, trying to claim progressivism is some sort of Marxist academic takeover of America (i.e. the “cultural Marxism” attack) is utter hogwash. A thoughtful and observant person doesn’t have to be Marxist to see the problems inherent to capitalism, neoliberalism, and plutocracy.

So, as usual, such things are more nuanced than any black-and-white rhetoric. Putting a more nuanced spin on it, this question could be restated this way: “Does the runaway innovation and cultural change fueled by technology, science, and capitalism have no limits? Will the hunger for constant change inspired by these forces remain unchecked? Do conservatives recognize that their opposition to cultural change is contradicted and undermined by their support of commercialism, corporate agendas, and expanding the political power of owner-shareholders? And do progressives recognize their role in moderating the corrosive influence of plutocracy as inherently ‘conservative’…?“

My 2 cents.

Which policy preference do you feel progressives are on the wrong side of history with and why?

I’ll restrict my comments to progressives in the U.S.A. as that is what I know the most about.

At the granular level, there have been a number of progressive policies that started out with good intentions but eventually led to unintended consequences — especially when there were major economic and/or cultural shifts over time. One example is recycling: it used to make a lot of economic sense because the U.S. exported its raw recycling materials to China, but China has long since shut that gravy train down, leaving certain types of recycling like plastics completely untenable. Additionally, the early recycling of post-consumer paper waste actually produced a lot of toxic pollution that was potentially more ecologically damaging than harvesting trees. Then again, recycling programs have reduced landfill materials and extended the life of many dumps in large municipalities for decades…so it’s a mixed bag. But because recycling remains popular as a virtue-signaling activity among progressives, progressive politicians are hesitant to champion new policies that correct for new conditions on the ground. I think there are several examples similar to this, but it is by no means a majority of progressive policies, just a select few that remain problematic.

In terms of overarching policies, however, I think there are three areas where progressive ideology (or at least the beliefs of most progressives who hold public office) has been corrupted by neoliberal propaganda in very destructive ways:

1. The idea that corporations should be treated as “persons” in terms of free speech, political contributions and lobbying, receiving welfare, receiving aid when they are in distress (i.e. bailouts), and so on — when this is clearly the most toxic and corrosive thing that can happen in democracy, as it allows huge concentrations of wealth to create huge concentrations of influence and power (i.e. super PACs funded by dark money, the astonishing reach of the American Legislative Exchange Council, etc.). It has already turned the U.S.A. into a plutocracy, with really no end in sight.

2. The idea that a progressive arrogance or superiority complex has alienated rural white voters — when that alienation is instead clearly the result of rightwing propaganda around an invented “culture war,” along with the economic suffering created by rightwing economic policies like supply side economics, opposition to minimum wage, dismantling of unions, etc.

3. The idea that radical rightwing distortions of fact, deliberately manipulative disinformation, and extreme and hateful views need to somehow be “heard” or incorporated into our political dialogue — when in reality this far right ideology (anti-government, anti-democracy, seditionist, xenophobic, racist, religious fundamentalist, Trump cultist, willfully ignorant, etc.) is profoundly opposed to the values expressed by the U.S. Constitution and to democratic civil society itself…and really shouldn’t be honored, acknowledged, or accepted as “reasonable” within a sane political discourse. Instead, this increasingly deranged extremism should be called out — and dismissed — for what it really is: spastic wackadoodle wholesale destruction of democracy fomented in broken brains by the plutocratic masters of hoodwinking propaganda.

Essentially, then, progressives do make errors in some policies that they then fail to correct because of the virtue-signaling popularity of those policies….But the much more significant failure of progressives is buying into the idea that plutocracy, disinformation, deception, hate-centric beliefs, strident proclamations from ignorance, liberal-shaming, and outright lunacy should be “welcomed” on equal footing into our political discourse. This greater mistake of tolerating and engaging with the far right’s broken brain ideas — if it continues —will inevitably lead to the final downfall of the United States itself.

My 2 cents.

What do you think about the Cato Institute (their policies and proposals), and can they be considered an influential think tank?

Yes, CATO is extremely influential — often because they do credible and interesting research. However, they are part of the movement started in the early 1970s, inspired by the 1972 “Powell Memo,” that sought to combat the influence of socially liberal movements in the 1960s that constrained corporate power in politics, regulated industry, strengthened civil society, and undermined reckless profit seeking. CATO pretends to be pro-capitalist “right-libertarian” (historically a bit of an oxymoron, as libertarianism had been anti-capitalist for a century until Friedman, Rothbard, et al distorted its principles in service to corporate profit) but really CATO promotes crony capitalism — just like Milton Friedman did. And of course the ongoing influences of wealthy neoliberals like Koch, Bradley, and Scaife have just made that trend continually worse.

As to what I think of them, as I mentioned they actually have produced some interesting research — sometimes revealing counterintuitive causality or unintended consequences regarding certain policies and practicies (along the lines of Freakonomics). But these occasionally interesting and factual insights are overwhelmed by a mission to disrupt civil society and effective governance as we know it, and perpetuate deceptions on various topics (such as climate change, the effectiveness of government and government solutions, the ability of free markets to solve complex problems like health care, education, social security, and so on). On these and other topics that serve a neoliberal agenda, CATO consistently promotes deliberately deceptive or skewed data, and sometimes even misinformation, that transparently serves their donors’ capital accumulation. Below is just one example of deliberate deception — please note that this was from a full page newspaper ad that CATO created, promoted, and paid for:

"We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now. After controlling for population growth and property values, there has been no increase in damages from severe weather-related events. The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior. Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect."

For more, see:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/apr/01/cato-institute/cato-institutes-claim-global-warming-disputed-most/

And here is more info on the broader and deeper neoliberal trend that CATO aims to serve…basically, we just need to “follow the money” to understand CATO’s tactics and motivations:

https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/Attacks_On_Science/

My 2 cents.

Why do we have a national Republican vaccine backlash while the protection of all citizens should be the top priority for any political party?

Actually this question goes to much deeper issues, which IMO are really “the questions behind the question.” Here are some of those:

1. Why do so many Republican rank-and-file allow themselves be influenced by misinformation and conspiracy theories from highly biased media and/or obvious disinformation campaigns?

2. Why do so many Republicans mistrust scientific evidence from multiple credible sources in favor of their armchair Internet rants, ignorant talk show personalities, a handful of tribal authorities, and manufactured propaganda and groupthink?

3. Why do so many Republicans lack the critical thinking skills to recognize the contradictions and hypocrisy in their own beliefs and assumptions — and indeed how those beliefs and assumptions run counter to both their own stated values, an their own best interests?

4. Why did 70 million Republicans allow themselves to be utterly deceived and hoodwinked by a mentally ill, megalomaniacal con artist running for President?

5. Why do Republicans consistently misunderstand causal relationships, so that they are always promoting “solutions” that just make problems worse?

6. Why are Republicans just plain mistaken about so many things, to the point where they are becoming completely disconnected from reality…?
We can use the instance of anti-vaccine, anti-mask, anti-precaution backlash regarding COVID as an example that sheds light on all of these questions…and some possible answers.

So here goes….

1.A lot of conservative ideology is rooted and energized by fear. You could really pick almost any conservative position and explain at least part of its appeal in how it answers specific fears — or amplifies and justifies them. In the case of vaccines, it’s irrational fear of Bill Gates, of “big bad government” pushing some hidden agenda, of the medical industry hiding risks from consumers, of COVID itself being a conspiracy, and so on. These are all fear-based reasons for resisting common sense measures to lessen the impact of the virus or even stop its spread altogether.

2.Certain “trigger concepts” are used by Republican leaders to garner votes, and by conservative talk-show hosts to increase their viewership to sell more advertising. An example is “the defense of liberty” concept, which is a wonderful ideal but really has nothing to do with taking a vaccine or wearing a mask. We all make minor sacrifices of personal liberties in order for society to function — and wearing a mask or receiving a vaccine is not any different than driving on the right-hand side of the road, stopping at a red light, defecating in a restroom instead of on the sidewalk, hunting during hunting season, or shoveling the public walkways in front of our house in winter. These are not “oppressive and arbitrary” edicts from big bad government, they are common sense choices we make so that civil society can remain…well…civil and reasonably safe. But the point is that the “defense of liberty” trigger is a manipulative call-to-arms to unify an angry, irrational mob who doesn’t realize how utterly silly they are behaving.

3. Republicans have become poster-children for an extreme intersection of “the illusory truth effect” and the “Dunning-Kruger effect.” The illusory truth effect is when people start believing something is true simply because a lot of other people keep repeating it. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon of becoming more confident the more ignorant we are. Everyone does these unfortunate things…it’s normal human behavior. It’s just that Republicans have amplified these faults to an extraordinary degree, turning them into an art form of mass hysteria proportions.

4. Probably the biggest lever modern conservative politicians use to get their constituents to do anything is “Us verses Them” rhetoric. It doesn’t matter if an idea or approach from the political opposition is sensible, logical, evidence-based, or obvious…it has to be opposed because it issued from “Them.” Republicans have become so conditioned to howling at this siren that they don’t even realize they are just being manipulated. And because of that conditioning, conservatives remain perpetually ignorant and alienated from fellow human beings who may hold different views, but actually share many of the same values.

5. Conservatives tend to be deeply tribal, with a strong need to belong to their group and remain loyal to it, regardless of how that choice may hurt them or those they love. Republicans are so caught up in their identity as “Republicans” or “conservatives” that they never question all the sacrifices they make just to belong — sacrifices to reason, to common sense, to their own well being and the safety and security of their families, and even to the success and thriving of the U.S. itself.

So with those five considerations, we can begin to understand how difficult it will be for the ship of U.S. politics to change its course. Republicans will have tremendous difficultly breaking loose from this downward spiral unless they consider doing one or more of the following:

1. Stop being afraid all the time. Have a little faith in humanity, in themselves, and in their own professed spiritual beliefs.

2. Become more educated about what facts are, how science works, evidence-based decision making, and so on.

3. Stop listening to the lies, misinformation, and distortions of conservative mass and social media. Just change the channel.

4. Let go of the need to belong to the conservative tribe as a central pillar of identity.

5. Become more self-aware about logical fallacies and cognitive dissonance.

6. Start reaching out to progressive pinko commies in the community and become friends with them — in order to bridge the divide of ignorance and alienation that has been so carefully engineered by conservative puppet masters.

7. Realize at long last that all of us are being manipulated 24/7 purely for money and votes, and fight back by questioning what is being spoon fed to us.

My 2 cents.

What do you think about 'principled conservatism'?

I think it is a lofty ideal, but that it has never really existed in the U.S. “Principled conservatives” claim to base their ideology on actual sources like the Constitution, or the intent of the Founding Fathers expressed in the Federalist Papers and other essays and letters of the period, or the writings of Adam Smith and John Locke, or the Judeo-Christian ethics of the Bible, or other similarly vaunted authorities of the past.

The problem, of course, is that most of this framing has been achieved through radical reinterpretations of those sources by more recent thinkers, and the “core principles” have become severely distorted so that the new lens of conservative values teeters on a cherry-picked mountain of half-truths. This has been going on for a long time in the U.S. and elsewhere, as conservative religious and political figures have sought to harness authoritative source material to justify their own power, influence, wealth, and gender and racial superiority. Citing such authorities in conservative propaganda makes it a lot easier to persuade a conservative-leaning rank-and-file to vote a certain way and dutifully conform to the party line.

I suppose some examples would be helpful here, and there are many. It’s just that you have to really study that source material carefully to understand just how distorted conservative reinterpretations have become. Take women’s rights as one example. Established culture always trumps religion, and the Europeans conformed what was actually a radically feminist Christianity to their own misogynistic cultural tendencies, and that misogynistic strain of Christianity then migrated to the New World. If we spend any time at all studying the acts of Jesus and the writings of the Apostle Paul, we quickly realize that they both promoted a woman’s spiritual authority and position in the Church as being equal to a man’s, and frequently deferred to female leaders and influencers in critical situations. The words and deeds of the New Testament are radically feminist in this sense. That is…except for two (and only two) verses in the epistles (i.e. the letters at the end of the NT) that denigrate women and put them in subjection to men, and which conservatives have often liked to cite to justify ongoing oppression of women. However, nearly all — and certainly all of the most credible — modern Christian scholars recognize that these epistles are rife with interpolated verses…that is, with verses that were written centuries later and inserted into those texts…and due to their style and content these epistles were very likely written or rewritten at a much later time than the rest of the New Testament. Again though, we’re talking about two verses that contrast the majority of other NT writings that quite markedly liberate women from oppression and inequality.

So, as I say, this “cherry-picking” of conservative authorities has been going on for a long time. The same is true of Adam Smith, who promoted “good government” and its control over and taxation of commerce so that workers and the poor would be protected from the abuses of big business. Hmmm….why is it we never hear conservatives quote Adam Smith’s discussion of good government? Because it doesn’t conform to their narrative about unfettered free enterprise being synonymous with liberty and American patriotism. And of course similar distortions have arisen around how the U.S. Constitution is interpreted, which clearly states government is to provide for the common welfare of the United States, enshrines enduring socialist institutions like the Postal Service, and so on. Equally distressing, conservative distortions go so far as to invent — in what is a stark contrast to “principled” originalist or textualist interpretations of the Constitution — self-serving ideas about what a particular passage means. For nearly 200 years the phrase “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” was understood to relate to the “well regulated Militia” referenced in the same Amendment — even among conservative SCOTUS Justices. But, thanks to modern conservatives and the revisionist judicial activism of Antonin Scalia in his DC v Heller ruling, Amendment II now somehow refers to personal self-defense…!

Essentially, then, conservatives have traditionally begun with a self-serving objective — usually having to do with creating or maintaining white male pseudo-Christian privilege and wealth in society — and then carefully gleaning selective passages from authoritative sources from the past to support those self-serving objectives. These distorted justifications then become their “conservative principles.” Ironically, most of these self-protective and highly destructive conservative ideological habits can be quickly countered with other selective references from those very same sources — for example, both Jesus Christ and Adam Smith frequently warned of the dangers of greed and lust for power, the toxicity of lording it over others, and so on.

But in my experience very few “principled conservatives” spend much time really understanding or even reading those original sources. Some do, and their views are much more nuanced (but not at all popular among other conservatives!). Instead, the average “principled conservative” relies on the reinterpretations of much later thinkers and influencers who became conservative authorities in their own right — Hayek and Friedman, Gingrich and Buchanon, Scalia and Rehnquist, Graham and Falwell, the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation, Breitbart and Blaze, Buckley and Limbaugh, and so on. So with each passing generation, the abstraction from first principles becomes more and more elaborate and rationalizing…until we end up with a fascist, racist ignoramus embodying the very worst of human nature, and 70 million GOP voters supporting it as their “conservative” choice for POTUS.

Essentially, then, the principles of “principled conservatives” have become very far removed from the ideals of the original thinkers that supposedly inform them, and are reduced and upended into the very things those authorities warned against and attempted to countervail:

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant…” — Jesus Christ (Matt 20:25–26)

“For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed” — Apostle Paul (Rom 13:3–7)

“We should replace the ragbag of specific welfare programs with a single comprehensive program of income supplements in cash — a negative income tax. It would provide an assured minimum to all persons in need, regardless of the reasons for their need.” — Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

“I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness...Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [tyranny, oppression, etc.] and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance." — Thomas Jefferson, Letter to George Wythe, 1786

There are so many more examples…!

My 2 cents.

What kinds of limits, if any, on free speech should we accept in a free society?

The challenge as I see it is the weaponization of malicious deception through mass and social media. Take propaganda and disinformation. Before record broadcasts, mass media, and the Internet, this was limited to influencing those within hearing distance of a live speaker — or to those willing to read and absorb someone’s writing — and thus only seemed to propagate slowly over months and years. Mass movements were sparked by radical and revolutionary thought, to be sure, but the time these took to gain any substantive momentum in society afforded a modicum of wisdom, measured consideration, thoughtful discourse, and common sense to be injected into that process…well, at least most of the time. Humans have always been susceptible to groupthink and the lemming effect. But before the modern information revolution, the ability to hoodwink large numbers of people took some very committed effort and time.

Nowadays, however, disinformation disseminates in hours or days, capturing millions of uncritical and gullible minds so that substantive shifts in attitudes and behaviors can have a widespread — and often dominant — impact on communities and societies. I call this the superagency effect, and it is similar to other ways that technology allows us to project and amplify person or collective will in unprecedented ways…often facilitating great harm on an ever-growing scale.

So I think this change in the potential consequences of malicious deception — the amplification of harm, if you will — should inform our definitions of free speech, and the collectively agreed-upon ways we decide to manage free speech. I think this is part of what the Fairness Doctrine in the U.S. was intended to address: the advent of news media broadcasting to every home in America invited some sort of oversight to ensure what was being communicated in an ever-more-centrally coordinated way, by relatively few authoritative or trusted figures, offered equal time to multiple perspectives…and encouraged some of those perspectives to be controversial. Since the original Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast licenses, it of course would not have done much to curtail the explosion of propaganda and conspiracy outlets on cable and the Internet unless updated to address those new media (and there was, actually, a failed attempt to do this), but the point is that the concern about the ubiquity of these forms of persuasive communication has always been pretty obvious.

And of course this concern doesn’t only apply to ideological propaganda. It also applies to advertising, which has successfully convinced millions to buy things they don’t need, or become addicted or dependent for many years, or injure their health and well-being with caustic consumables. Again, all because of the power and reach of mass media.

So the vaunted ideal of free speech has to be understood in this broader context. The speed and destructive power of malicious deception in the current era cannot be understated. It has undermined legitimately elected governments, endangered individual and collective human health, propagated irrational fears and hatred that have lead to human tragedy and death, and wreaked havoc on the ecology of planet Earth — all with astonishing swiftness and scope.

Therefore, some sort of collectively agreed-upon mechanism — and ideally one that is implemented and managed by an informed democratic process — should be put in place to ensure some standard of truthfulness and fact-checking, representation of diverse and controversial perspectives, and diffusing or disabling of disinformation and malicious deception. The key, again, will be in the quality and fairness of the “regulatory” process itself — aiming for something more democratic and not autocratic.

My 2 cents.

Is conservatism inherently bad or misguided, or is it only how the principles are applied? What about liberalism/progressivism?

Here is the underlying problem as I see it: Blind, uncritical, or unthinking adherence to any “ism” is always misguided. There are good ideas — great ideas, even — available in every camp, but when loyalty and lockstep adherence to a given tribal membership or belief system becomes more important than discerning which ideas are good and which are bad, or even than having an intellectually honest dialogue with others with different perspectives and strategies, then that “ism” is just a restrictive and destructive straight jacket.

Right now, there is some of this behavior on both the Left and the Right. However, lockstep conformance and uncritical groupthink have lately become much more common on the conservative end of the spectrum. And this is the real problem, more than anything else IMO. Add to this that many of the ideas being championed by conservatives are informed by non-factual assumptions (climate change is a hoax; face masks won’t help control COVID; free markets and the profit motive always solve complex problems; the U.S. was founded by Christians for Christians; etc.), a profound misunderstanding of causality (for example: Planned Parenthood clinics do not increase abortions rates, they actually decrease abortion rates; stopping immigration will never restore U.S. jobs; there is no widespread election fraud; and so on); affection for policies and practices that have clearly proven ineffective or outright failures (supply-side economics; war on drugs; austerity measures; nation building; structural adjustment policies; deregulation; etc.), and opposition to policies and practices that work exactly as intended (Head Start; ACA; Keynesian macroeconomics; etc.). In short: modern-day conservatives just get most things terribly wrong.

As to the “underlying principles,” well sure, there is some really good stuff to be found among the more thoughtful conservative thinkers of past eras. And there is no reason to abandon the inclusion of intellectually honest conservatives in modern discourse. It’s just…there don’t seem to be many intellectually honest ones around right now, and a lot more ideas on the progressive side that are guided by scientific evidence and practices proven in the real world.

My 2 cents.

What is the anti intellectual and science denial things in the US about? Educated people seem to be almost resented. Expertise replaced by this weird need to not need experts. What has triggered this

This has been a long time in the making. Here are the primary reasons why conservative-leaning folks in the U.S. have succumbed to anti-intellectualism and science denialism:

1. Science skepticism and denialism have been carefully engineered by large corporations and the think tanks and media that they fund in order to protect corporate profits. This has been going on for a very long time in the U.S.A., and you can read about it here: Neoliberal Science Skepticism

2. Mistrust of education is, in part, a necessary “Us vs. Them” tribalistic groupthink that rejects what is perceived to be a threat to traditional values, traditional gender roles, traditional religious knowledge, traditional support of capitalism, traditional views of “American exceptionalism,” and other sacred cows of conservative American culture. When an educational process presents information or insights that contradict, revise, or evolve these cultural assumptions in any way, that is considered heretical and worthy of being burned at the stake. But this is only part of the formula. The other part is the creation of a “socialist bogeyman” that embodies all of these “un-American” tendencies to question the status quo — conservatives will sometimes refer to this imaginary bogeyman as “cultural Marxism.” The bogeyman is mainly used to frighten conservative rank-and-file into lockstep conformance (in voting, campaign contributions, consuming the right news media, etc.) in order to constrain “the godless socialist threat.”

3. The anti-expert revolution is mainly a result of the first two influences converging with the consequences of the Internet — and social media in particular. The Internet notoriously leveled the playing field of knowledge sourcing, so that an unemployed, uneducated, emotionally stunted nerd living in his mother’s basement could achieve the same “authority” with his armchair pedantry as a degreed expert with decades of experience in that field. Add to this the many deliberate distortions of fact by trolls and professional disinformation campaigns that the Internet and especially social media afforded, and the initially obvious divide between verifiable truth and absurd conspiracy has become increasingly muddied. What at first was a noble democratization of knowledge has become a free-for-all of “alternative facts.”

4. Lastly we have the issue of American gullibility. The spectacle of U.S. commercialistic culture has conditioned many Americans to believe things they are told in advertisements, on talk shows, or by religious authorities and ideological zealots. This is how scientology came into being, how Ayn Rand came to be considered a “philosopher” which she clearly is not, how Milton Friedman hoodwinked folks into thinking crony capitalism was “libertarian,” and how utter lackwits like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump became POTUS. Some 50% of the U.S. is addicted to being conned — being gullible rubes is just part of their cultural identity. So when a charismatic celebrity tells conservatives that climate change is a hoax, or that cigarettes don’t cause cancer, or that “freedom” means letting corporations completely control our lives, many of those Americans just desperately want to believe…to uncritically consume falsehood rather than accept responsibility for being well-informed.

My 2 cents.

Why is the West so sure they know what's the best for China more than Chinese themselves?

Thanks for the question. In answer to “As an outsider, can you accept China don't want democracy as they value unity, prosperity & stability much more important? Why is the West so sure they know what's the best for China more than Chinese themselves? What the West really want from China?” I think it would be helpful to break the question into parts. So…

1. “As an outsider, can you accept China don't want democracy as they value unity, prosperity & stability much more important?” There are a number of challenges with this question. The first is the false dichotomy between “unity, prosperity, and stability” and “democracy.” The two are not mutually exclusive. To insist that they are seems a bit like propaganda to me. That is not to say that unity, prosperity, and stability can’t be achieved without democracy — or that they always exist in a democracy. It’s just not a mutually exclusive choice.

The second challenge with this question centers around what the people of China “want.” Hong Kong is now subject to China, and the people of Hong Kong overwhelmingly want democracy. Taiwan desires independence from China, and its people want to continue their democracy as well. The Tibet “government in exile” is democratic, and some proportion of people of Tibet would like to regain their independence from China. So to say that “China doesn’t want democracy” is actually not a complete or true statement.

2. “Why is the West so sure they know what's the best for China more than Chinese themselves?” This a little trickier to answer. I believe there are two primary issues in play. The first is that folks in Western developed nations are generally pretty arrogant about their way of life being superior to everyone else’s. This is cultural to a large degree, but it is also economic because of the West’s historic relative wealth and privilege, and its historic military strength.

The second issue centers around compassion and concern for other human beings. Now there will always be people who judge other cultures without really understanding them, and so their concerns may sometimes be misplaced. But in China’s case, there really are some very dire conditions for some segments of China’s population. The rural poor in China — certainly as compared to much wealthier city dwellers — have a comparatively rough time of it. This is true even for those who travel to cities for work, but must leave their families and children behind for months on end. From the outside looking in, the way the rural poor are treated looks a lot like the very sorts of capitalist oppression and exploitation Marx decried.

Religious and cultural minorities also have a tough time in China — especially those like the Uighurs who ended up in Xinjiang “re-education” camps. This treatment looks just as bad as the “ethnic cleansing” and degradation that has occurred throughout history in other parts of the world — for example, what happened to many Native American tribes in the U.S.A.

And of course many of the people of Tibet and Hong Kong feel very oppressed by China — and many people in Taiwan live in constant fear of oppression issuing from China.

Taken altogether, it is I think fair and reasonable for a caring and compassionate person to have concern for some segments of China’s population, and want to help or advocate for them in some way. Yes…this can seem a bit arrogant — especially when folks advocating may be pretty ignorant about China in most other respects — but I do think it honestly comes from a genuinely charitable mindset.

3. Then we come to “What the West really want from China?” That is probably the easiest part of the question to answer. There are really two very different expectations that many folks living in the West have regarding China. The first is that the Chinese people succeed and thrive — regardless of the political economy in which they live. For example, there is real worry that climate change will cause profound damage in China — especially it terms of its water supplies and its ability to grow food. And that is a very worrisome prospect, so there is hope that China will engineer a way out of this impending disaster. There is also a fair amount of awe and inspiration in seeing China progress in its Belt and Road Initiative — and I think many people have been rooting for China to succeed there.

The second expectation is that China not become more aggressive militarily, or attempt to expand its territory and maritime control, or become so dominant economically that it dictates trade policy across Asia and the rest of the globe. This is a very real fear — and unfortunately China has poured fuel on that fear in some of its expansionist behaviors and rhetoric of late (i.e. South China Sea, Taiwan, India’s Ladakh region, Hong Kong, Himalayas, etc.). To make things worse, conservatives in the West have tended to trump up the threat China poses to the West, which has only made things worse. Of course, countries like Japan and India have expressed much more concern and unease about China’s recent behaviors and rhetoric than anyone in the West has done.

4. Lastly, we need to talk about Xi. There is no escaping that he is behaving more and more like a dangerous authoritarian dictator. His creation of a cult-of-personality around himself; his removing anyone in opposition from power; his ending his own term limits in office; his increase of mass surveillance, censorship, and highly coordinated human rights violations; and so on. I think that history has taught us that such behaviors from a leader are incredibly toxic to the ultimate well-being of a nation and its citizens. Xi’s rule will not end well. In the West, we have our own failings in leadership, but can be very grateful that democracy has removed some of them (such as Donald Trump). If Chinese government offered another civic mechanism besides democracy to remove Xi from power, I wonder if the advocacy of democracy for the Chinese people would be as great as it is.

My 2 cents.

Why is America so fervently capitalist? Why do they reject socialist/liberal policies with such indignation? What makes them so different from Europeans?

Thanks for the question. Here are some of the top reasons why folks in the U.S. are so “fervently capitalist” and suspicious of “socialism” and social liberalism:

1. Our commercialistic and religious fundamentalist cultures have made us a lot more gullible. We respond to advertising and marketing as if it is truth — which is great for companies selling products, and great for ideologues, con artists, and cult leaders selling lies. Consequently, when right-wing propaganda (Red Scares, “cultural marxism,” McCarthyism, Trumpism, Jordan Peterson, and other neoliberal disinformation) demonizes socialism and liberalism — or makes socialists and liberals scapegoats for outcomes that are actually caused by capitalism (like unemployment, income inequality, influx of immigrants, etc.) — Americans are just more likely to believe the hype. When I lived in Germany, I was stunned by how much more informed and cautiously critical even German kids were than most American adults.

2. Partial reenforcement is powerful. It is absolutely true than one-in-a-million people in the U.S. can work their way from poverty into affluence, and an even smaller number can become extremely wealthy. America really is the land of opportunity. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. Most businesses fail. Most people do not realize their dreams. And most people who try to become wealthy remain poor. Psychologically, though, this reality doesn’t matter, because if even one person in the U.S. wins a major national lottery and becomes a millionaire, people will still believe becoming a millionaire by playing that lottery (or starting a business, or inventing something, or writing books, or performing music, etc.) “is a real possibility.” Which, of course, it is…it’s just not very likely at all.

3. Americans actually don’t reject socialist/liberal policies — or, rather, they are raging hypocrites about it. The regions of the U.S. that are the most heavily pro-capitalist and anti-socialist are also reliably where the largest dependency on government programs can be found (see PolitiFact - 'Red State Socialism' graphic says GOP-leaning states get lion's share of federal dollars). It’s pretty funny, actually. Also, according to most polls, whenever socialist and liberal policies are described to respondents without loaded trigger language (for example, describing features of the Affordable Care Act but not calling it “Obamacare”), the response from a significant majority polled is positive. Most Americans actually like “liberal” policies — until they are told by right-wing media outlets and authorities that they shouldn’t (see Majority of Americans support progressive policies such as higher minimum wage, free college, and Working-Class Americans in All States Support Progressive Economic Policies - Center for American Progress Action).

4. Lastly, there are nut-job market fundamentalist outliers who are very vocal. Just like Twitter “cancel culture” doesn’t represent most left-leaning folks, there are frothing-at-the-mouth far-right crazies who get a lot of attention on the Internet and in mass media, but who don’t represent a majority of more centrist right-leaning Americans. I’m speaking of course of fans of Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and other thought leaders for the broken brain crowd — many of whom subscribe to the right-libertarian movement funded by the Koch brothers.
As a consequence of one or more of the above influences, U.S. citizens have the appearance of being rugged individualists who conflate freedom with laissez-faire capitalism. But that really isn’t true. In the U.S., as elsewhere, the embracing of socialist and liberal policies has actually made capitalism much more successful and enduring (see ). At least…they have up until now…

My 2 cents.

How is wearing a mask a political matter?

It’s not. At all. The politicization of mask-wearing was manufactured by politicians and other folks in power who want to manipulate people into fear-based reasoning. And it has absolutely nothing to do with “freedom.”

The reasoning is pretty simple: If you don’t wear a mask, you can infect other people. Not because you become sick, or have a fever, or have any sign of COVID-19, but because “asymptomatic” carriers of COVID-19 — and even those who’ve just been infected within the last few days but aren’t showing symptoms yet — can infect everyone around them really easily. Contrary to the misrepresentations posted in some of the answers in this thread, ALL of the science confirms that mask-wearing slows or stops the spread of COVID. That is in fact how other countries have successfully reduced community spread (sometimes down to zero!): mandatory mask-wearing in public.

So in this context, wearing a mask is pretty much identical to not constantly spraying machine gun fire into the air while walking around in a crowd. It doesn’t matter that the person spraying bullets doesn’t “intend harm” to others, because there is a very high likelihood they will harm someone by behaving this way. It’s really a simple cause-and-effect relationship: spraying bullets in the air in crowded areas is going to kill some people. What solidifies this comparison is the fact that, by not wearing a mask, it is also LOT more likely that the mask-rebel themselves will contract COVID and become a spreader — making the risk exponentially higher to everyone around them.

Here are some other things that are reasonably unlawful and highly dangerous, and are in the same category as not wearing a mask in public during COVID:

- Driving a vehicle at high speed down a street crowded with pedestrians.

- Having lots of unprotected sex with strangers every day against their will, when there is an increasing likelihood (from this very behavior) that we are transmitting a lethal STD.

- Being the driver of a school bus full of children who parks the bus across a busy train track several times a day because we insist we deserve to have a nap anywhere we want (and nobody can tell us we can’t nap anywhere we want to!)

- Inviting our friends over for a fun-filled evening at our home and feeding them carcinogenic foods for dinner (because hey, WE don’t think carcinogens cause cancer, and we don’t believe the scientists who do!).

Again, though, this is really about politicians creating divisions, polarization, and “Us vs Them” rhetoric, so that their followers can be easily manipulated to feel angry, afraid, and be lured into lockstep loyalty with deceptive groupthink.

I suppose the easiest way to summarize this idea is to say that folks who refuse to wear a mask during the COVID pandemic are basically unwilling or unable to question propaganda and indoctrination, and seemingly would rather kill people than offend their peers or educate themselves about doing the right thing.

My 2 cents.

What are the top 10 or 20 reasons to be Liberal instead of Conservative?


After living in different parts of the U.S., and in Europe for a few years as well, here are some broad generalizations I would make for why folks become liberal instead of conservative:

1. Emotional intelligence. The higher someone’s empathy, compassion, and overall EQ, the more they seem to gravitate towards progressive ideas.

2. Education. The more educated people are, the more likely they are to lean liberal.

3. Urban living. Urban living exposes people to different cultures, lifestyles, belief systems, and political leanings — and demands a higher level of tolerance and “getting along” with such diverse folks. Urban living also amplifies the impact of each person’s behavior on everyone around them. These things make a progressive mindset a much easier, more productive, and more prosocial orientation than being conservative in urban environments.

4. Love of science. It’s hard to be conservative if you’re passionate about scientific inquiry that constantly revises previous assumptions and beliefs.

5. Distaste for greed and selfishness. Liberals tend to be motivated by concern and caring for everyone in society, rather than by accumulating wealth or power for themselves.

6. Identifying as a world citizen, rather than only as an American. This doesn’t mean anti-American, it just means seeing the whole planet as home, and feeling a sense of duty to the Earth and all its inhabitants — and then wanting to act (and vote, and consume, etc.) accordingly.

7. A sense that liberty is more about removing barriers to shared opportunity for everyone, rather than enforcing any individualistic “rights.”

8. Love of Nature. It’s hard to be a conservative nowadays if you believe humans should respect and protect the natural world, rather than exploit it, destroy it, and use it up.

9. Authentic spirituality. I don’t really believe you can be an authentic Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu and vote conservative at this point in time. Those faith traditions — and many others around the world — are pretty incompatible with current conservative attitudes, policies, and ideals.

10. A desire for “good government” (that is, one that governs for the public good) rather than fortifying crony capitalist plutocracy.

11. Favoring evidence-based goals and policies. Progressives tend to rely on proven solutions, rather than ideologically pure but untested experiments (or worse, on ideas that have demonstrated failure over and over again).

12.Critical thinking. The logical fallacies, conspiracy theories, and denial of reality that has been running amok in conservative groupthink of late is just too distasteful and alienating for anyone who has learned to reflect carefully and critically.

13. An inquisitive nature, with openness to new ideas.

14. A propensity for love-centric reasoning, rather than fear-centric reasoning.

15. Having wisdom and discernment.

There are, of course, folks who are liberal or conservative because their parents were one way or the other, or all of their peers growing up were liberal or conservative, but that’s sort of a default conformist or reactionary reflex, rather than a motivating rationale….

My 2 cents.

When did politics become culture in the United States?

I think “politics becoming culture” in the sense of supplanting culture has been with the U.S. from its inception. The self-liberation from British tyranny was chiefly a cultural act, clothed in a loud and flashy political veneer/justification. And although, on-and-off over the decades, the U.S. has developed various regional sub-cultures that outshine its political currents for a time, these sub-cultures ultimately end up intersecting and merging with the political narrative. U.S. politics is like the Borg in this regard. Perhaps this is a feature of democracy itself — or of a democracy that has always been steeped in media, commercialism, and commoditization — where so much can be determined at a national level. Everything ultimately becomes political, because politics impacts nearly everything in our lives.

My 2 cents.

Is there left-wing liberal indoctrination in American universities?

As a student (briefly) at the University of Washington in Washington State, and then as an employee of the same institution for many years — working in several different departments on campus — I can honestly say that the whole “left-wing indoctrination” diatribe of the right-wing conspiracy theorists is absolute bunk.

The reality is that there are all sorts of personal bias and political leanings among professors, students, and staff. Sometimes there is a bit more right-leaning bias in some departments (like the Business School, which is one of the places where I worked). And in some there is a sort of enforced neutrality that may have leanings one way or another among faculty and staff, but tries very hard not to let it show — this was true at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, where I also worked for a time. And yes, sometimes there is a left-leaning bias, such as in the fine arts and literature departments. But you couldn’t generalize too rigidly about any of these places, because there were almost always exceptions.

What DOES happen, and I think this is what upsetting to conservatives, is that tacit assumptions and culturally adopted ideas students bring with them to university DO get challenged and sometimes upended or contradicted with a preponderance of evidence and a little critical thinking. That is very scary to some folks, who hold on a little too tightly to a certain way of thinking for their sense of security and identity.

My 2 cents.

What can the results of the 2020 election tell us about the American people?

Here’s my take, in no particular order:

1. A lot of Americans are exceedingly susceptible to malicious media influence, emotional reasoning, and charismatic hucksters and con men. There are a number of factors that contribute to this — many of which are cultural or which have been part of U.S. society for many decades — and likely all of them must be addressed in some way:

A. Every American should commit to improving their critical thinking and discernment skills. This begins at home and in K-12 education, but also should be reinforced by remedial classes for adults — as a free community service and advertised with PSAs — on identifying propaganda and logical fallacies, and differentiating between credible sources of information and those with manipulative agendas.

B. Mass media has to become more neutral, fact-based, and disconnected from the agendas of wealthy stakeholders and foreign disinformation campaigns. There are many ways to do this, such as reviving the FCC fairness doctrine, treating social media similarly to other news media, verifying the identity of everyone who participates in online discussions, and so forth — but we need to end the spirals of amplified nonsense that entice people into fear-mongered, self-destructive, crazed, conspiracy groupthink.

C. Along similar lines, there must be some mechanisms that help us all quickly differentiate factual and expert insights from armchair opinions and conspiracy rants — in all media, but especially social media. There are tools like Media Bias/Fact Check, PolitiFact, and Snopes.com that can be very helpful. But for social media, I’ve been thinking about something like an Information Clearinghouse structured like the Rotten Tomatoes movie review site, where both experts and the general public weigh in on various topics to help folks navigate them. Perhaps links to such resources could automatically populate all social media posts, so that folks could easily and quickly access better information. The “democratization of knowledge” that the Internet has afforded us is revolutionary…but it has also diluted the meaning of truth and facts to an almost comical degree.

D. There will need to be an attenuation of (or countervailing forces that disrupt or ward against) for-profit marketing and advertising practices in the U.S. that condition consumers to constantly respond to commercial calls-to-action. This conditioning begins at a very young age, so that Americans believe they must reflexively consume things outside themselves — including information and perceived “truth” — in order to nourish themselves and fortify their self-concept. In essence, commercialism infantilizes Americans so that they become dependent on (or even addicted to) external guidance and stimulation. How can we change this? By disallowing advertising to children, for one. By critiquing/satirizing ads (When I lived in Germany, they did this with stick-figure cartoons after each TV advertisement that made fun of inflated advertising claims). By ending direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies. By encouraging more holistic self-care. There are really a lot of tried-and-true approaches from other countries and cultures that could help.

2. Much of rural and blue collar white America is really suffering from profound poverties. Not just economic, but cultural, intellectual, and in their collective esteem and identity. This suffering has largely been ignored by the political class in the U.S., who has either been focused on enriching corporations (often at the expense of jobs and economic mobility for rural white America), or on promoting a flavor cultural progressivism that is very alien — or alienating — to rural and blue collar white America. This suffering is further exacerbated by the cultural, economic, technological, and demographic shifts occurring in the U.S. which have, by and large, been inevitable. Enriching culture, jobs, economic mobility, human diversity, and interesting opportunities, experiences, and life choices have all been concentrated in urban areas of the U.S. for many decades now. This began with the industrial revolution of the 1800s, has accelerated since, and came to a head in the neoliberal financialization of the U.S. economy beginning in the 1980s. It has been further exacerbated by what I call “neoliberal carpetbagging” in rural areas — persuading rural populations to fulfill corporate agendas (crony capitalism, monopolization, etc.) in agriculture, energy production, resource extraction, retail, and countless other sectors — that further decimates rural economies and cultures. And those “left behind” in rural America and former industrial centers have increasingly felt disconnected from — or even adamantly opposed to — the socioeconomic shifts associated with these changes. But cities, and especially those with high-tech and gig jobs, are where multicultural population continues to concentrate and grow, and rural America and former industrial centers continue to be hollowed out. So there is anguish among those who feel left behind, and grief, and anger…and Donald Trump simply tapped into those intense (and increasingly desperate) emotions when no one else running for President could.

Are there ways to relieve some of the suffering of rural and blue collar white America? Sadly, nothing Donald Trump has done — or has proposed — will do that in a substantive way, and many things he has pursued (like ending the Affordable Care Act, initiating a trade war with China, etc.) either have made, or would make, the situation much worse. Mr. Trump offered a rallying cry and temporary emotional bandage for his voters, and little else. Even his many judicial appointments to SCOTUS and lower courts will do little to mitigate the forward march of change that a large slice of America so fears and rails against — because, ultimately, those changes will be facilitated by legislation enacted/supported by the ever-increasing urban, multicultural majorities around the U.S. In this way the “progressive agenda” is just playing catch-up with on-the-ground change that is occurring at breakneck speeds. However, let’s be clear: a prominent feature of financialization is that all companies, across all industries, become solely fixated on pleasing shareholders, and do not care about the concerns of consumers or labor — eventually, that will destroy the relative affluence and status of high-tech and gig workers just as it did factory workers. So ultimately, no one will be immune from the same fate.

So is there a way to help rural and blue collar white America, and ease their pain? In the short run, probably not, because that pain is too acute, and has been horrifically amplified by propaganda discussed in point #1 above. In the longer run, though, healing could arrive through forms of subsidiarity (pushing decision-making and policy implementation to the most local level possible), providing targeted economic opportunities for rural America (a green tech revolution could be huge in this regard), aggressively countering neoliberalism and the ongoing financialization of the economy, and efforts at urban-rural cultural reconciliation — such as increasing dialogue between rural and urban voters, and between folks with different educational, economic, and ethnic backgrounds — and increasing joint activities between those groups to solve common challenges. But ending the forward march of inevitable change is probably not an available option for much of America, so outreach to help rural and blue collar white America cope with that change — counseling resources, support groups, and the like — may be an important consideration.

3. The cultural and intellectual isolation of rural and blue collar white America has permitted “Us vs. Them” thinking to take root, and consequently enabled othering and the scapegoating of outsiders. Immigrants, people of color, and “coastal elite” liberals have almost nothing at all to do with the pain rural and blue collar white America has been feeling. This scapegoating is just a trick used by politicians, crony capitalists, and nefarious foreign actors to persuade rural and blue collar white citizens to vote a certain way, give money to certain candidates, or mobilize against straw man threats. Although the solutions proposed in points #1 and 2 above may help diffuse or disrupt this trend, there is something deeper and more pervasive in rural/blue collar white America that needs to be addressed. I don’t think it’s productive to call it “racism,” “classicism,” or “sexism,” or any other “ism,” because although those definitely exist, *such designations miss the root causes*, which are:

A. Lack of exposure to and positive interaction with different cultures, racial groups, religions, values hierarchies, and ways of life.

B. Lack of broader, deeper, non-America-centric education about the world and human history.

There are ways to address both of these deficits, such as wholesale changes to K-12 education style and curricula across the U.S. (for example, increasing parental involvement, elevating more diverse and even contradictory perspectives, etc.); encouraging cultural exchange programs that involve rural and blue collar white folks and their children (having young people live for a few months with a family abroad could be very effective), incentivized service that exposes people to other regions, practices, and cultures (in the military, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, etc.), and so on. This isn’t an impossible task…but of course it is still impacted by most of the other considerations discussed here. In fact, if all of the other points aren’t addressed in some way, there will likely be vigorous resistance to broadening and deepening education and cultural exposure experiences from rural and blue collar white America itself.

4. The U.S. two-party system with high voter apathy and poor voting access unfortunately lends itself to polarization and the disempowering of diverse perspectives and political orientations beyond those two parties. In addition, the presidential form of democracy has led to an increasingly autocratic executive branch. In other systems, such as parliamentary democracies, there can be a much more diverse representation of perspectives, a more vigorous incentive to work out compromises that benefit more constituents or represent varied ideological approaches, and more distributed and diffused concentrations of power. I am also a fan of semi-direct democracy as practiced in Switzerland, which again pushes decision making down to more localized levels (subsidiarity), affords the electorate the direct means (referenda) of opposing or redirecting legislation passed by their representatives, as well as an avenue to enact legislation directly via initiatives (see This is how Switzerland’s direct democracy works for more info). And I think strongly incentivized voting with effortless voting access would go a long way toward encouraging Americans to be more engaged and committed to self-governance, regardless of what system we have in place (see Incentivizing Participation Would Increase Voter Turnout and Political Information). Although it would require a Constitutional amendment to make some of these changes, I suspect the U.S. will need to seriously consider doing something to fix what is broken.

5. We also have a perfect storm right now, in that we are overwhelmed with ever-increasing complexity — in how our world works, and in how we understand it — while at the same time that traditional values, cultural attitudes, and social roles are being upended or ridiculed. This means that men and women in the U.S. are no longer sure what it means to be “masculine” or “feminine;” that many folks simply find it easier to deny science than to attempt to understand its subtleties and perpetual evolutions; that “intellectualism” has become distasteful because it so often challenges or questions many beliefs and practices folks hold dear; that countless traditional phrases and attitudes are now suspect because they lack “wokeness;” that the seemingly bone-deep and enduring racism of some white communities is being reversed and used against them. The result? A “strongman” leader who is profoundly ignorant, misogynistic, racist, endlessly pedantic, and basically dead wrong on everything he opines about has become an attractive antidote to the overwhelming complexity and cultural fluidity of our times. What is the solution? I honestly don’t know. Maybe, as a culture, we need to recover our sense of humor about many of these things. Maybe we need to let go of reflexively judging each other, and just accept our differences. Maybe relieving some of the stressors and suffering described in other points will help folks let go of their prejudices and trying to control each other. Again…I’m not sure what will work best. I do know from experience, however, that compassion for — and radical acceptance of — what often seems like a combative diversity of values and ideals will go a long way toward healing the discord.

6. This point is probably going to be more controversial and hard to stomach for some people in the U.S., but after living abroad myself, I think it has a fair amount of truth: much of the U.S. is culturally immature, and at an adolescent stage of development as a nation. This is evidenced by individualistic and tribalistic morality (only considering I/Me/Mine or “what’s best for those just like me” in one’s moral reasoning, as well as prioritizing a need to belong and conform to a particular tribe above everything else); spiritual immaturity (dogmatic, black-and-white legalism and fundamentalism, instead of compassion-centric attitudes and practices); emotional immaturity (blaming others for problems we ourselves created, throwing tantrums when we don’t get our way, confusing willful selfishness with “freedom,” etc.); intellectual immaturity (excessive confirmation bias, tolerance of cognitive dissonance, closed-mindedness, logical fallacies, conspiracy thinking, etc.), and so on. It will simply take time for Americans to mature past this phase — perhaps another fifty years or more before U.S. Americans even catch up with the maturity of many older cultures.

7. Lastly, there were some 81 million people in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election who decided enough was enough, and that it was time to reject divisive rhetoric of hate and lies in the hope of rekindling governance of compassion, inclusion, reason, and truth. That’s sort of a big deal…especially considering that Joe Biden, who represented this return to sanity, received more votes than any other Presidential candidate in U.S. history. Hopefully this will mean there is real promise of healing and a semblance of unity to move the U.S. forward through a very difficult period. And yet, if the other considerations mentioned earlier are not addressed in substantive ways, we may see nativist, self-centric populism rear its ugly head once more….


So that’s my 2 cents. Hopefully it will help folks outside the U.S. appreciate at least some of the factors in play in the current election.

What would you say is the role of education in reinforcing, revealing, and dismantling various forms of oppression?

I am a big fan of Paulo Freire’s views on the power and purpose of education. Here is an overview that captures much of that — with the expressed aim of providing tools for self-liberation:



And if education is to empower us toward self-liberation — providing the tools, resources, and vision for any kind of positive change — a central emphasis will need to be an underlying philosophy that supports active participation in society. A constant drumbeat of the importance of civic responsibility, if you will — as well as how to avoid non-participation and tokenism. Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation” provides an outline of such personal and collective agency:



But at the core of such an education model, there must be an acceptance of the necessary evolutions and divergence of critical thinking from any presumed norms. This is what so upsets traditionalists and conservatives…but it is absolutely essential to navigating nuance and complexity. An example of this cognitive process:



Of course, there must also be truth-telling about systems of oppression. This is also distasteful for those who value and even revere those systems — and who may conflate them with tribal loyalties, patriotism, or even religious devotion. But again, it is absolutely necessary to reveal the man behind the curtain (or behind the bread and circuses, as the case may be…).



And, lastly, as part of a participatory landscape, education must itself model equality, democracy, diffusion of authority, subsidiarity, collaboration, egalitarianism, and so on. We cannot teach liberation from oppression within a system of education that is rigidly prescriptive, proscriptive, hierarchical, and authoritarian.

My 2 cents.

Why are liberals so afraid of saying something politically incorrect? Who started this trend?

Thanks for the question. The concepts and practices of “political correctness” did not, contrary to propaganda perpetuated by right-wing media, begin with the Frankfurt School or Marxism. And they are also not exclusive to “liberals” or the Left. In reality, versions of “political correctness” go back a very long way (likely thousands of years) in human society — they just weren’t called that in earlier times.

So…what is “political correctness” then? It appears to simply be a variation on some long-established patterns infecting human society and social groups:

1) In-group/out-group identification and bias.

2) Attempts to assert control, authority, and agency in contexts where such power may not be readily be available (or is being actively oppressed).

3) Self-righteous moral justification through a) framing certain interactions as variations of oppression/victimization/threat; and b) asserting protective alliances/championing on behalf of those who are oppressed/victimized/threatened.

4) Aggressive scapegoating that reenforces all-of-the-above.

And what are some groups or movements have been guilty of these patterns in recent history? Well, there are quite a few:

- WWII Red Scare/McCarthyism

- The most extreme (fundamentalist) white evangelical Christians

- Militant religious fundamentalists among other religions

- Most white supremacist groups

- The more radical 2nd Amendment activists

- Many hardcore MAGA Trump devotees

- Increasing numbers of young left-wing activists on college campuses

- The more radical/fringe LGBTQ activists

- The most extreme environmental activists

- The most extreme minority rights activists

- Many militant vegans I have known

- Supporters of nationalistic, populist fascist dictators all around the globe

And of course all of this “PC reactivity” is just amplified and propagated by far-right and far-left media outlets, the unfettered propaganda memes of social media, Russian troll farms and other disinformation efforts, and so on. Sometimes mainstream media is guilty of propagation too (coverage of Trump in 2016 is good example of this).

But this isn’t a new phenomenon. I would say the “self-policing” that liberals do (i.e. fear of being politically incorrect) isn’t much different from the similar fear that anyone in the above-mentioned groups feels as they are striving to maintain their position and social capital within those groups. Does a fundamentalist Christian tell their congregation they’ve discovered how great Buddhist meditation is? Does a Trump supporter who is beginning to doubt the wisdom of that support share such doubt with their MAGA-hat-wearing relatives? Does a leading member of a radical environmental activism movement who decides to take a job in the Oil and Gas industry worry about losing their community of friends…?

You get the idea.

These patterns of judging and ostracizing others in order to elevate ourselves within our group and secure social capital probably have been part of human society all the way back to our cave-dwelling days — and fearing that judgement and ostracism has likewise been part of nearly every human community. Think of the hysteria over “witches” in Europe and the Americas, or why Nero threw Christians to lions, or why various genocides have taken place throughout history…these very much appear to be variations on the same theme.

Eventually, we may grow out of this immature phase of fear-based tribalism and groupthink (you can read my thoughts about that evolution here: Integral Lifework Developmental Correlations). But we do appear to have a long way to go as a species….

My 2 cents.

Do you agree that we need a mix of conservative and liberal views to have a successful society instead of having it one way or the other?

Yes…but with certain caveats. Ideological differences can critical to refining, distilling, and improving any perspective, but only if the following elements are present during that process:

1) Relying on actual facts and provable evidence when making assertions.

2) Applying wisdom and discernment to each situation that aligns with expressed values, rather than contradicting them.

3) Avoiding the traps of propaganda, deception, logical fallacies, and exclusionary bias (i.e. ignoring critical and relevant info).

4) Defining clear metrics for testing an idea (in a pilot, etc.) and then carefully measuring the results of the test to see if objectives have actually been met.

5) Developing a multifaceted, broadly educated populace that understands both current science and the lessons of history in a more-than-superficial way.

6) Appreciating the expertise of folks who’ve spent their lives in a given profession…and not making the mistake of believing one’s own armchair opinion is equivalent to that expertise.

7) Hate speech, brazen sexism and racism, xenophobia, bullying, and other strong but irrational prejudices should be excluded for constructive dialogue to occur.

8-) Sensationalist journalism and social media meme-storms can’t be the basis of the exchange — there needs to be real, thoughtful, caring, substantive dialogue.

There are other important elements in the same spirit — but I think you can see what I’m getting at here. We can and should have a diverse dialogue, but not at the expense of truth, kindness, rationality, or wisdom.

My 2 cents.

If conservative Republicans dislike socialism, then why are so many still in favor of Social Security and Medicare?

First off, it’s much worse than this question supposes. Majority Republican states in the U.S. are by far the largest beneficiaries of ALL government programs. There are some exceptions to this pattern, like New Mexico (which is more of a swing state), but in general it is Republican-majority “red” states who rely the most heavily on socialized support systems. Some detailed recent data on this can be found here: Most & Least Federally Dependent States. There are many simple comparisons you can find around the web, and here’s an example:



Essentially, the higher taxes paid by “blue” states subsidize the populations of “red” states that pay lower taxes (discussion of that here: AP FACT CHECK: Blue high-tax states fund red low-tax states).

Now, many of the posts in this thread quibble over what “socialism” actually is. In short, it is widely acknowledged by everyone who studies political and economic systems and history that there are many different forms of socialism, and the strict and narrow “dictionary definition” of socialism (or capitalism, for that matter) that folks like to use in their arguments simply isn’t sufficient. The fact is that the U.S. and most other affluent, developed countries in the world are “mixed economies” of both socialism and capitalism. I’ve broken things out into a bit more detail here: What are the different forms of socialism?

So the reality is that, yes, Republicans who claim to be opposed to “socialism” regularly depend on socialism to survive and thrive.

BUT — and this is a pretty major caveat — those same Republicans are also constantly working to dismantle and/or privatize any and all forms of socialist institution in the U.S.A. Whether it’s Obamacare, Medicaid, Social Security, or the U.S. Postal Service, Republicans have been trying to obliterate many manifestations of socialism in the U.S. as a central plank of a conservative political agenda. But why are they doing this, if the vast majority of the Republican rank-and-file voters rely on these programs…? Well because what Republican leadership (and think tanks, and wealthy campaign donors, and right-wing propaganda media outlets) really want to do is eliminate what they call “the halo effect” of any successful government programs, a positive perception among voters which — horror of horrors — threatens to make “socialism” look attractive! You can read about this here: Opinion | Covid-19 Brings Out All the Usual Zombies

This does seem a bit contradictory, to be sure, but it gets even more interesting when we look at the kinds of “socialism” that Republicans actually promote — and rarely oppose. These are things like subsidies to big corporations, huge government bailouts of entire industries, tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, and lucrative no-bid military contracts. You can read about the GOP’s affinity for corporate welfare here: Corporate welfare state: GOP tax plan showers millionaires with $17 billion tax break and here: How Scott Walker and the GOP Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Corporate Welfare | Michael Rieger

So we’re left scratching our heads…Is all of this a sort of disjointed, self-contradictory hypocrisy without any guiding principles at all? Or does U.S. conservatism have an ideological anchor? Some core values that steer its ship? Well…there really is only one central theme that aligns with all Republican praxis, and that is a devotion to socializing risks and costs, and privatizing benefits and profits. That is, distributing costs and risks across all of society (i.e. all taxpayers), while concentrating profits and benefits in a select few (i.e. wealthy owner-shareholders), with horrific consequences for civil society. You can view videos of Noam Chomsky interviewed about this here: Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges discuss the history of neoliberalism and Chomsky's new book "Requiem for the American Dream" And also read more about this here: How to Prepare for the Next Pandemic.

There is, of course, another way to describe this behavior, and that was a phrase Adam Smith coined in his Wealth of Nations: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

So, in essence, conservatives love and support socialism when it benefits them, and vehemently dislike socialism when it benefits anyone who doesn’t vote Republican.

My 2 cents.

What steps could be taken to bring the current extreme political ideologies on both sides somewhat back to the center?

I think that’s actually pretty simple. Here are a few things that would help roll back extremist influence in society very quickly:

1) Reinstate and vigorously enforce The Fairness Doctrine in all news media — including social media (which, really, is just another platform for news media propagation). This would greatly reduce propaganda news outlets at both ends of the spectrum.

2) Reverse the divisive rules changes in DC that have prevented bipartisan dialogue and compromise: Abolish the Hastert Rule in the House; reverse Gingrich’s three-day work week and return it to five days, encouraging members of Congress to remain in DC and foster cross-the-isle relationships (this is what Gingrich wanted to destroy…and it worked); and so on.

3) End gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement. When large numbers of folks feel like their views and priorities are not represented by elected officials, they become more extreme in their views.

4) Increase direct democratic controls over ALL legislation (via referenda, etc.) up to and including at the federal level, and allow recall elections for ANY misbehaving elected officials (all the way up to US Senators). More effective and immediate democracy is a great mitigator of extremism — at least it tends to be over time.

5) Completely ban all special interest lobbying and enact sweeping campaign finance reform (for example, allow only public funding of campaigns).

6) Institute a public Information Clearinghouse of reviewed and rated information that helps folks navigate complex issues in order to vote on them in an informed way.

I’ve offered some additional ideas here: L7 Direct Democracy

And if these are simple ideas, why haven’t they happened? Why, indeed, have they been vigorously opposed? Well, because the neoliberal plutocrats who hold most of the power are quite happy to perpetuate division and extremism to manipulate voters and legislators into doing their bidding. It’s very transparent, and has been going on for a long time in the U.S. and elsewhere.

My 2 cents.

Christianity, Neoliberalism, & Right-Wing Populism: A Faustian Bargain




Here is an excerpt from my latest essay exploring the incompatibility between conservative Christianity and the New Testament's central Christian values and ideals.

"...my current thinking about this has distilled the primary dichotomy down to underlying contrasting views about freedom and equality. This may be just one more oversimplification, but here are the basic propositions:

1. Progressives view freedom and equality as collective agreements, supported by evolving cultural norms and the rule of law, that facilitate the most comprehensive collective benefit possible for everyone in society. In other words, progressives view equality between all citizens, and the maximization of freedom for each individual, as a consequence of mutually agreed societal expectations. And why are those agreements important? Because they can achieve egalitarian outcomes across all of society. Importantly, the equality and freedom of all people are predetermined assumptions about both ideal individual rights and the ideal conditions in which they ought to live. Therefore, progressivism tends to view itself as inherently aspirational, aiming for “life as it could be,” in perpetual opposition to a flawed status quo.

2. Conservatives view freedom as a natural right of every person that facilitates their ability to pursue beneficial outcomes according to their skills, aptitudes, and capacity to compete with others. Equality is likewise viewed more through a lens of merit – it is less a predetermined assumption about all people being equal, and more a possibility of achieving equal standing in society that can be earned through demonstrated effort. And what is the presupposed outcome? That some people will be winners, with a greater experience of equality and freedom, and some people will be losers, with less of that experience –but the conservative accepts this as the natural and somewhat fixed order of things. Therefore, conservativism tends to view itself as inherently pragmatic, embracing the status quo of “how things are” – a static view of cultural norms that benefit those who achieve privilege and position – and defending ways those norms can predictably continue.


Much time and effort could be spent appreciating the subtleties of this topic – details like equality of outcome verses equality of opportunity, facilitation of agency verse extinguishment of agency, positive verses negative liberty, and so on – but it seems to me that this boils down to different approaches to ending poverty, deprivation and oppression in their many forms. The conservative views the world as rich with opportunities, with the only major barriers to actualized freedom and equality – and the consequent attenuation of poverty, deprivation, and oppression – being interference or competition from other individuals, and interference or competition from civic institutions. The progressive, on the other hand, views the world as encumbered with many structural and pervasive cultural barriers (racism, sexism, classicism, ageism, tribalism, etc.) that need to be removed through collective agreements –most often embodied in civic institutions and the rule of law – in order for freedom and equality to be actualized, and for poverty, deprivation, and oppression to be vanquished. At its core, therefore, this remains a diametric opposition.

But which approach does the New Testament endorse? What does Jesus promote? For me this is where things get really interesting. Because the New Testament consistently presents very much the same contrast we see embodied in progressivism and conservativism. With regard to “the world as it is,” there are frequent reminders in scripture that the world cannot be changed, that its machinations, power structures, oppressions, arrogance, striving, and injustices must be accepted and its burdens dutifully borne. At the same time, the kingdom of God is promoted as “the world as it should be,” full of compassion, forgiveness, kindness, humility, generosity, and mutual aid. Christians are encouraged again and again not to conform to the world’s values, priorities, and divisive norms, but instead to evidence the fruit of the spirit of Christ (Gal 5:22) by reforming personal priorities and values – and the collective priorities and values within the Church – to reflect a new way of being. In fact, such reformation is itself proof of the kingdom of God’s establishment in the world. And what characterizes that new way of being? The virtues of righteousness, peace, trust, and agape that we explored in the earlier table (see below), and which are embodied in progressive praxis.

This contrast between the way of the world and the way of the spirit is really the central drama of all New Testament scripture. As Jesus personifies the way of the spirit in all of his interactions and pronouncements, he is confronted with antagonism from the status quo – from those who wish to preserve the way of the world and their own places of power and privilege within it. Jesus and his Apostles become ambassadors of a more egalitarian ideal, an aspirational vision of “life as it could be” in the kingdom of God, and thereby encounter tremendous resistance and resentment from those who currently benefit from the status quo, and therefore feel threatened by anything that challenges its power structures. This is why the Pharisees and Sadducees were enraged by Jesus’ pronouncements, why the Romans were concerned by Jesus’ rise in popularity, and what ultimately resulted in Jesus being condemned to death by crucifixion. Jesus was the radical progressive visionary of his time, while the pragmatic and entrenched conservatives were, in fact, the ones responsible for his death."



You can read the full essay via this link.

Why are people still thinking political even in this Covid-19 situation, instead of uniting all forces to overcome it?

Thanks for the question. My take is that there are many different reasons why COVID-19 is still being politicized and a unified effort is so challenging here in the U.S. — some of the reasons are more obvious, some more subtle. Here are a few that come to mind:

1) The profound political polarization of the country perpetuates partisan polemics — about everything. Nothing, really, can escape this gravity well right now.

2) Lots of folks are benefitting from politicization of COVID-19 — politicians taking a political stance to help them stay in office, companies and media outlets rushing to fulfill the latest priorities of the current political agenda, and so on.

3) There is a paucity of trustworthy leadership, competence and appropriate knowledge at both the national and state levels of government. This is true for both the legislative and executive branches. And, without these qualities, all the really remains is rhetoric, persuasion, and “Us vs. Them” jockeying to move the policy needle in any direction. It’s a sad situation.

4) The American electorate has an unfortunate habit of “going with their gut” instead of really thinking things through carefully. This is a gross overgeneralization of course — there are plenty of thoughtful voters out there — but, on the whole, I think this has been a pervasive problem. And one of the consequences is that these people’s opinions are not usually shaped by facts or logic, but by emotional appeals, groupthink, and the magnetism of their chosen “authority” on a given subject. It is, essentially, the perfect environment for political propaganda and maneuvering to shape all public discourse and narratives around something like COVID-19.

5) Most politicians — especially those who have survived a pretty hostile environment and remained in office for years — reflexively act on political instinct first, and everything else second. It’s behavioral conditioning because of an antagonistic status quo.

My 2 cents.

Do Americans make everything political?

Unfortunately, at this point we have to.

This wasn’t always the case. At one time, you could live in a small community that was insulated from other communities, from the rest of the country, and from the rest of the world.

That really isn’t true anymore. A single national election can determine (and has determined) the following — as have the critical mass of our daily purchasing decisions, the media we consume and support, where we decide to live and pay taxes, how we raise our children, and so on:

1. Whether or not the women in your community can get an abortion.

2. Whether or not you and your family will have healthcare.

3. Whether or not your community has more than one employer — or any at all — due to trade policies (voting in elections) and consumption habits (voting with your dollars).

4. Whether or not you can own a gun, carry a gun, the type of gun, etc.

5. Whether or not a local business can pollute the air or water nearby, or be held accountable for the illness and death that pollution causes over time.

6. Whether or not the BLM land or National Forest near your town becomes primarily an industrial center for raw materials extraction, or primarily a recreational area now and for future generations, or some balance of both.

7. Whether or not you and your children receive a decent education — or any college education at all.

8. Whether or not mass media can fabricate news or be required to provide balanced viewpoints (i.e. the Fairness Doctrine…gone now)

9. Whether or not you can buy something made anywhere but China.

10. Whether or not countless species of animals go extinct each year.

11. Whether or not future generations have anything left of the Earth to enjoy or thrive in (i.e. responding to climate crisis, avoiding nuclear war, etc.).

12. Whether or not someone who lives next door or very far away — even in another country — has a say in any of these matters in their own lives.

I could go on…but I’m sure you see the point. Because of the massive complexity and interdependencies of our current economic and legal systems, it is almost impossible to remain isolated and pretend that how we act (and vote, and consume) individually or locally doesn’t have a cascading impact on everyone else — both in our immediate community and all around the world, and both now and in the future. This is a de facto condition of modernity…to ignore it is just to remain willfully ignorant.

Therefore, everything really is political, now more than ever, and the question becomes: Will I pretend to be an atom who can act any way I please, engaging in life as merely a series of impersonal transactions, without acknowledging the impact of my choices on everyone and everything else, and fantasize that I have no responsibility to consider that impact? Or will I accept the impacts and influence of my choices on others and the world around me, the persisting and expanding relationships between my life and everyone and everything else’s, take responsibility for those relationships, and live more carefully and caringly…?

My 2 cents.

Is there such a thing as traditional progressivism?

The roots of progressive ideals can easily be traced to the Enlightenment in Europe, where increased understanding and knowledge through reason and scientific inquiry were intended to bring about improved conditions for everyone in society. This was in contrast to the established “traditions” of that time, and so the idea of progress for the betterment of humanity became associated with the Enlightenment itself. And since two core tenets championed by Enlightenment thinkers were liberty and equality, the process of social reform (and revolution) to upend the old traditions and social order also became associated with the Enlightenment.

Now the initial inspiration for the progressive movement in the U.S. was a response to the rise of industrial capitalism, along with its abuses of workers and concentrations of wealth in a small elite, initially during the Gilded Age. In a way, the power of large corporations became a stand-in for the social hierarchies and abuses of old that the Enlightenment sought to address: capitalism replaced feudalism but mirrored the same oppressive power structures as the wealthy owner-shareholders took the place of aristocracy. In this sense progressivism echoed socialism’s response to the same challenges — and with many of the same proposals (worker solidarity, civil rights, etc.). But it is really only at that thirty-thousand-foot level that we can draw parallels between those two movements — or track their evolution over time — but we can see inclinations of the Enlightenment reflected in both. Progressives were primarily interested in returning “power to the people,” and having representatives of local and federal government be much more responsive to the electorate than to special interests like the wealthy elite. Initially progressives focused primarily on empowering and protecting white, working poor folks and their families in this way — and included women’s suffrage in that mix. While socialism of that time also shared this focus, only some socialists advocated advocated as vehemently for strengthening democracy overall.

Today, although it not as coordinated or clearly defined a movement, the central tenets that continue to guide progressives is strengthening civil rights and civil society in opposition to plutocratic oppressions, and continuing to champion liberty and equality. So we can say that these have remained the “traditional values” of progressivism since its beginnings.

Interestingly, what has also persisted in progressive ideas and strategies since the beginning is an almost ridiculous (in terms of effectiveness) diversity of approaches. There has never really been uniform agreement among progressives about how to solve the wealth concentration problem, worker empowerment problem, or improving our elected representation problem. Which is why someone might indeed ask the question of whether “traditional progressivism” has really ever existed. So we can say that the intentions — the goals and aspirations — of progressives have always been the same, and unifying in that respect. But methods…no, that’s always been a hodgepodge of tactics and proposals. In fact, sometimes these have been contradictory approaches — for example, some have emphasized centralized federal government solutions, while others emphasized more localized or distributed solutions (via community organizations, NGOs, etc.); some have emphasized collective solidarity (in unions, civil rights movements, etc.) while others have seemed more individualistic (individual freedom of choice, abortion rights, etc.). These differences probably owe themselves to different conceptions of both liberty and equality.

Lastly, there are some reliable commonalities between most, if not all, modern progressives. The original emphasis on liberty and equality is still present, but it has expanded considerably since the Enlightenment. Today these values are championed not just for white working poor, their families, and women’s suffrage, but also for expanding the same rights and protections to people of color, to animals and the environment, to the sick and elderly, to the LGBTQ community, and so on. And the approaches to championing these interests still rely on reason and scientific inquiry to a substantive degree. The ultimate aim? To improve conditions for everyone — this is still how progress is defined — in opposition to those who would prefer to retain the old hierarchies and concentrations of wealth and power. Fighting plutocratic oppression with democracy and strong civil society is really still the heart and soul of progressivism, and what makes it a longstanding “tradition” in almost every respect.

My 2 cents.

Today, Donald Trump said the COVID-19 lockdown in America could be in effect until July or August. What will happen to the people who are forced to stay home from work and can’t pay rent or bills?

First I would encourage everyone not to listen to anything Trump says…ever. Any sensible person with an average IQ can observe that Trump can’t stop lying and contradicting himself. At every turn, he has downplayed the severity of COVID-19 and its impacts. Trump is, by almost any measure, an incompetent idiot. So instead, we should all become a bit more educated about the details of the novel coronavirus ourselves. Here is a page with helpful links and a frequently-updated overview: COVID-19 Overview

As to the impact on those under a “stay-at-home” order….

The potential negative impacts are both economic and psychological. Some people (like me, to be honest) are natural hermits who are perfectly happy spending time alone, and can keep themselves occupied and entertained without a lot of social interaction. Others are wired to be much more social, engaged, and entertained through interactions and activities that involve many people. This latter group will undoubtedly suffer a great deal during this period of social distancing — in particular I’m thinking of young people whose entire self-concept and self-esteem may be grounded in their social interactions. So having online activities and ways to connect virtually may be very important, and it seems as though there is already recognition of this and attempts to increase such online activity options. Nevertheless, depression and anxiety may be real battles for large numbers of highly social people right now. To address that challenge, I recommend folks take a look at the thirteen dimensions of nourishment (there is a free overview and self-assessment on the Integral Lifework website), and see if they can add some activities that nourish parts of themselves they may be neglected.

On the economic side of things, the situation could get very dire for those who have lost all of their income. There are several efforts at the state and federal levels to help people — from direct monetary payouts, to temporary debt and recurring bills forgiveness, to free medical care for COVID-19 tests and treatment. The benefits of these efforts will become clearer in the coming weeks, and they will certainly help cushion the blow. But they will only be effective for the short-term. The more permanent solution will be a) a COVID-19 vaccine, which is likely 12–18 months away; or b) a more successful and reliable COVID-19 treatment than anything tried so far — which could arrive much more quickly than a vaccine. Once either or both of these are in place, then economic recovery can begin in earnest. At the same time, this may also be a helpful moment in human history to reevaluate whether neoliberal crony capitalism — with all of its inherent resource depletion, worker exploitation, negative externalities (like climate change), and economic inequalities — should remain our primary global political economy. It just might be time for a change that would help us be better prepared for future crises like COVID-19. To that end, here is a link to an alternative political economy that is more equitable, sane and sustainable: L e v e l - 7 Overview.

My 2 cents.

Why does a person's response to COVID-19 often correlate to their position on the political spectrum?

Thanks for the question.

There are a few factors in play I think. First, there is a fair amount of research that shows differences in right-leaning an left-leaning people — both in terms of the values (or “virtues”) that are most important to them, and in the emotions with which they most frequently operate and are motivated. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which from the lists below. Of course, there are also folks who are closer to the middle, sharing characteristics of both groups. But in times of crisis, polarization tends to be even greater, so for now we’ll just look at the two extremes….

Characteristics of Group A:


1. More closed-minded and reactive to things that are new or “different”
2. Strong fear-based reasoning, often centered around losing status (both personally and for their group)
3. High tolerance of cognitive dissonance (when facts don’t match beliefs) and rejection of evidence that contradicts their beliefs — sometimes to the point of rather stubborn stupidity
4. Strong sense of loyalty to own tribe and traditions, resulting in reflexive “Us vs. Them” reasoning
5. Highly skeptical of science, government institutions, genuine altruism, collective concerns, leveling the economic playing field for everyone, and the importance of civil society itself
6. Insists that private enterprise is “more efficient” than government in providing public goods (healthcare, utilities, etc.)

Characteristics of Group B:

1. More open-minded and accepting of things that are new or “different”
2. Strong inclusive and compassion-centered reasoning, sometimes to the detriment of their own status and the status of their group
3. Low tolerance for cognitive dissonance, and fairly frequent updating of position based on new evidence
4. Hardly any loyalty to own tribe and traditions, and so sometimes creating “circular firing squads” within leadership
5. Strongly motivated to embrace science and justify positions and policies with scientific evidence; more trusting of government institutions; confident that altruism is real and important; and generally more invested in collective concerns, leveling the economic playing field for everyone, and the importance of civil society itself
6. Is skeptical of the profit motive’s efficacy in navigating or providing public goods

Now inject a new crisis into the situation: a previously unknown and highly contagious virus that requires close coordination between all governmental institutions; demands reliance on scientific data to plan an effective response; is indifferent to status and partisanship (i.e. doesn’t favor one group over another); and reveals profound weaknesses in privatization of public goods, where the profit motive simply doesn’t work for the scale of response required.

I think when we break down the political spectrum to these kinds of characteristics, it quickly becomes evident why left-leaning folks tend to respond one way, while right-leaning folks tend to respond in an opposite fashion.

My 2 cents.

What do you think of the survey that found socialism is now the favorable majority view with Democrats under the age of 30?

The right-wing propaganda machine has finally lost some of its momentum and, as embodied in the idiocy of Trump, is being abandoned as a farce. The echoes of that propaganda still persist in the fear-mongering around a Sanders nomination — from media on the Left and the Right — but folks are beginning to see through the supposed “moderate” critique to what it really is: the decades-long disinformation campaign of right-wing think tanks, ideological politics, and thought leaders that strives to reject all socialist ideas. This started all the way back with the Red Scare of WWI, was amplified by the neoliberalism of Hayek, Mises and Friedman, came to a head in the era of McCarthyism, resurged in the 1970s after the panicked Lewis Powell Memo (a reaction to the populist revolts of the 1960s), resurged again in the “trickle down” economics of Thatcher and Reagan, was championed even more when the Tea Party movement was coopted by crony capitalists like the Koch brothers, and has now come to a ludicrous climax in the election of an impulsive, megalomaniacal fool as POTUS.

To understand why this conservative “anti-socialist” movement has persisted for so long, just follow the money. The U.S. has had a mixed economy — with elements of both socialism and capitalism — for over a century, but wealthy owner-shareholders always want more. And that means they strive for weaker government and “less interference” from pesky regulations, human rights, environmental protections, etc. This has always been about the rich wanting to get richer, and the only answer to Adam Smith’s “vile maxim” (i.e. “all for ourselves, and nothing for other people”) has been the stronger, more democratic civil society championed by socialism (see How Socialist Contributions to Civil Society Saved Capitalism From Itself). To appreciate just how hard neoliberal conservatives have fought to control and consolidate wealth, I recommend perusing this web page, and then following some of its links: L7 Neoliberalism

Along the same lines, folks are beginning to realize that democratic socialism (as exemplified by much of Northern Europe) is NOT the same thing as authoritarian communism (i.e. Soviet-Style communism) — despite the ongoing right-wing propaganda to the contrary. (For more on this see http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/democratic-socialist-countries/)

In essence…young folks are becoming better educated about what democratic socialism really is. However…stay tuned for the right-wing propaganda machine to begin spouting lies about how socialism “always fails,” etc.

My 2 cents.

Is the United States at a point in its existence where the people are just going to have to give socialism a try to demonstrate that it does or does not work?

The U.S., along with most of the rest of the developed world, has already proven that “mixed economies” (mixing socialism with capitalism) can be very productive, as long as corporate power and wealth can be moderated by civil society (civic institutions, democracy, the rule of law, regulatory enforcement, etc.). Most other experiments (including those with socialism) have succeeded most when democracy and actual diffusion of power and wealth were strong. So really, what the U.S. needs to “try” is a return to this sensible balance. Right now, big money and big corporations pretty much own the U.S. outright — the voice of the people, and any real distribution of power and wealth, has been defeated by relentless neoliberal policies, leaders and politics…since about the time of Reagan. But if we can take a clear, propaganda-free look at the negative externalities of capitalism (like climate change), and work hard to rein in the influence of the owner-shareholder class, then the U.S. just might be able to regain a healthy trajectory. Does this mean “more socialism?” From the perspective of conservative, free market fundamentalists — it sure does seem like a bit more public ownership and control over things the plutocrats would rather keep for themselves. In terms of enacting Soviet-style Communism, absolutely not. Fear of that outcome is pure propaganda. But those wealthy owner-shareholders just don’t want to let go of the control and influence they have right now…and that could in fact bring the U.S.A. to its knees.

We shall see….

Do left-wing ideas stand up to intellectual inquiry better than right-wing ideas?

If by “intellectual inquiry” you mean critical, evidence-based evaluation or scrutiny, then I honestly don’t know of a single, current “right-wing” idea that stands up to it at all. There are a few left-wing ideas that falter as well, but far more that have been validated by the test of time. Most right-wing ideas are not just on the wrong side of history, and the wrong side of science — they are also on the wrong side of common sense. A very brief list of right-wing concepts that have proven to be disastrously wrong-headed include such central tenets as:

1. Trickle-down (supply-side) economics — an utter failure.

2. Economic austerity measures — also an utter failure.

3. Free-market solutions can solve any problem — no they can’t; for example: healthcare.

4. Corporations can be left to self-regulate — another epic fail: e-cigarettes; Boeing 737-Max; savings and loan crisis; mortgage-backed securities meltdown; Oxycodone; coal mining deaths; etc.

5. Opposition to teaching children sex-education or allowing them access to birth control — STDs and teen pregnancies abound everywhere this has been tried.

6. Climate change isn’t caused by people — yes it is.

7. Cigarettes don’t cause cancer — yes they do.

8. Good jobs are being stolen by immigrants — no they’re not, they’re being stolen by outsourcing and automation by companies that wan’t to increase their profits instead of pay decent wages.

9. Gay people shouldn’t be allowed to marry — that’s just dumb…and oppressive.

10. Black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote — also stupid and oppressive.

11. Women shouldn’t be allowed control over their own bodies — um…well, just wow.

12. Invading Iraq was the best way to fight Islamic extremism — LOL.

13. Obamacare has been a disaster — nope: it’s doing pretty much everything it promised to do (though it didn’t fare as well in Republican States that resisted Medicare expansion, and Republican efforts to sabotage Obamacare are weakening that success further).

14. Innovation comes from private enterprise — nope. Most “outside the box” thinking that has lead to major innovations was the result of academic or government-funded research (think the Internet, GPS, bar codes, microchips, wind energy, touch screens, etc.). Oops!

15. Capitalism lifts people out of poverty — wrong again: civil society (civic institutions, the rule of law, democracy, etc.) lifts people out of poverty in capitalist countries…in countries without strong civic institutions, the “capitalists” are just brutish thugs who keep all of the wealth for themselves.

16. Socialism has always failed. Really? The U.S. Postal Service? The Federal Reserve? The U.S. Highway System? The U.S. Military? NASA? K-12 Education? Public Lands? Public utility companies? Public transit? Social Security? Medicare and Medicaid? The FDA? Are all of these socialist enterprises failures…?

We could go on…and it would be exhausting…but this is why it so difficult for progressives to find common ground with American conservatives. Conservatives are just…well, unable to get their facts straight or clearly see the actual causes of the problems they want to solve.

My 2 cents.

The term "intellectual" is increasingly used in a derogatory sense, evoking a certain left-wing elitism. What should intellectuals do to escape this stereotype?

The really humorous thing about this dynamic (i.e. stereotyping “intellectuals” — or subject experts — as elitists who are out of touch with common experience) is that the folks usually using that stereotype it are even more out-of-touch with reality than “intellectuals” are. The anti-intellectual sentiment coming from right-wing propaganda is quite deliberate in this respect: it wants to villainize anything that is grounded in critical thinking, science, evidence and data — usually in favor of ideological principles that are routinely undermined by that data. Hence climate crisis is a left-wing conspiracy invented by academics to get grant money; solid historical economic data that shows how “trickle-down” theory (supported by the laughable “Laffer curve”) and austerity policies fail utterly can likewise be dismissed as “elitist” fabrication; statistics that prove how abortions decline wherever Planned Parenthood has a well-funded presence is crushed by hateful vitriol from pro-life folks who fervently believe Planned Parenthood should be defunded; science that proves cigarette use is linked to cancer becomes part of a “liberal anti-business agenda;” and so on ad nauseum. Such has been the relentless drumbeat of conservative think tanks since the early 1970s.

But can you see the problem? The folks who attack intellectualism (and/or left-wing elitism) have to do so to defend their completley-detached-from-reality beliefs and distortions of fact. Which is of course advantageous to the wealthy conservative owner-shareholders who benefit the most from voters, politicians and talkshow hosts parroting right-wing lunacy. Hence voting Republican in the U.S. has become synonymous with supporting unicorn policies and practices that maintain plutocracy and insulate the wealthiest elite, while effectively knee-capping scientific counter-narratives that could actually benefit everyone else. Critical thinking and actual evidence-based approaches simply cannot be allowed!

So I will proudly say “Yes, I tend to trust well-educated experts who’ve spent their lives researching and testing ideas with real-world data.” You say these are “intellectuals?” I say they are simply competent — much more so than armchair bombasts who believe in unicorns.

As to why folks who decry intellectualism are so confident in their armchair fantasies, I recommend reading up on the Dunning–Kruger effect.

What part of "Shall not be infringed" does the government not understand?

Well I’d say that, considering the level of debate around the 2nd Amendment over many decades now, no one really understands in any absolute sense what isn’t supposed to be infringed — and that includes governments at all levels. The wording of that single sentence is not clear. On the one hand, Amendment II seems to indicate that the federal government can’t infringe upon the right of states to have militias made of ordinary citizens. On the other, it also seems to indicate that citizens should be allowed to individually keep and carry arms — ostensibly for service in such a militia. But it really isn’t very clear beyond that what other conditions “shall not be infringed.”

Now, mainly as a consequence of military firearms manufacturers needing a new market as their military product orders declined, the debate about the 2nd has shifted. Should AR-15s be purchased by individual citizens, so they can participate in state militias to resist federal government tyranny? Well…okay, sure. But that’s not why they’re being purchased — and the original intent of the 2nd (if we in fact can discern it) doesn’t work very well as justification to sell military weapons to individual civilians who aren’t participating in a state militia. Which is why the propaganda and marketing focus shifted to a more absolute right than what is actually stated: the right to “keep and bear arms” for personal protection — or for personal resistance to government as a more general principle.

The problem, of course, is that the “personal protection” argument — which can in fact be supported by the many of the discussions, practices and documents from the period in which the 2nd was written — can rationally only be applied to non-military weapons. Individual citizens don’t need to protect themselves from the incursions of other nation states, or brigades of rogue soldiers that happen to show up at their door. That’s what the state militias are for. And indeed the “individual resistance to tyrannical government” argument really doesn’t have any historical basis…it’s quite an imaginative invention that has no support in documents and reports contemporary to the writing of Amendment II.

So…we have a right to personally bear arms that are suitable for personal defense as one possible thing “not to be infringed;” and we have the right to personally keep arms in readiness for participation in a state militia as the other thing “not to be infringed.” And therein lies the problem: because at the time of the writing of Amendment II, those two separate conditions were served by the very same firearms: muskets and pistols. You see the problem? It made complete sense at the time the 2nd was written not to differentiate between different weapons for different purposes…because they were one-and-the-same at that time.

Within a century, however, the two groups of weapons increasingly diverged, in both their specialized application and their lethality…and continued to do so more and more over subsequent decades. Hence individual citizens didn’t own machine guns for personal protection, and the military didn’t rely on compact 25mm purse pistols to defeat enemy combatants in the field. At the same time, a common sense distinction between the two types of weapons endured right up through the 1960s — and various laws (1934 NFA, 1968 GCA) were written to clarify that distinction. Interestingly, these laws also identified a third category of weapons and modifications: those designed for or associated with criminal activity — such as sawed off shotguns, silencers, explosive devices, etc. And so we arrived at the rather extreme separation in categories of weapons and specialized functions that we see today, ones that common sense can still discern: explosive devices, missiles and poison gas are not the same thing — and simply do not serve the same purposes — as a handgun.

But then, when it became clear by the early 1970s that public sentiment and national politics were opposed to large scale wars, and sales of military weapons by firearms manufacturers began to plummet, those companies strategized a new tactic that they continue to employ today: Every American had a Constitutional right to own military weapons! (see articles below) By the the 1980s, that tactic was in full swing, and the “common sense distinction” that had existed for two centuries evaporated. So that’s how things got so confused…or rather, that’s how the firearms manufacturers were able to muddy the waters. These companies lobbied for the ability to sell military firearms to civilians in order to enlarge their market — ignoring what had become a very large difference is weapons specialization, and using the 2nd Amendment and an implicit threat of government oppression as a smokescreen for their deceptive manipulations. And of course influential groups like the NRA, which were initially supportive of moderate gun control measures, were then taken over by those who supported the loosening of restrictions that benefited gun manufacturers (see 'Revolt at Cincinnati' molded modern NRA).

And, as it turned out, a spirit of Constitutional righteousness combined with fear of oppression and the “helplessness” of not owning a gun was a great sales tool. Gun profits soared.

Then, after firearms manufacturers had “militarized” the civilian U.S. population, they obviously needed to militarize law enforcement to match that rising firepower — and another juicy market for their products was born.

All of this has been, essentially, the perversion of the Constitution — and the annihilation of common sense — just to make a buck.

My 2 cents.

How it started: Militarization of Civilian Market.pdf

Using fear to sell guns: Fear Is the NRA and Gun Industry’s Deadliest Weapon

Gun profits soar: Gun boom: Smith & Wesson profits double, sales soar 40%

How it all fits together: San Bernardino shooting: US gun sales soar as new front opens in push for gun control

How it keeps happening: How Military Guns Make the Civilian Market

The militarization of law enforcement: We now have a terrifying, militarized law enforcement system

Comment from Ben Andrews: "I would say that the distinction between military and non-military weapons is facile. Like so many distinctions with regard to firearms, this military/ personal one is drawn after the fact, at a point convenient to the classifier."


LOL. I think everything posted on social media is facile, Ben. :-) The level of complexity of most topics on Quora goes far beyond what brief statements can capture. I still try to add supportive links for folks to follow up and explore with more depth, but I find very few fellow Quorans actually take the time to read them. Everyone seems to want neat, easy-to-chew packages of info. This is understandable, given the firehose of information coming at us from all directions in the current age. But for the purposes of real, substantive discussions…well, it’s a little frustrating, to be sure.

That said, specialization occurs in every industry, and has snowballed with the industrial and technological revolutions. There are tools and gadgets in each profession now that are totally unrecognizable to every other profession. The same thing has happened with specialized language. It’s one of the reasons, I think, that society itself is fragmenting: people literally can’t understand each other. The only force countervailing this is mass media, which tends to overly simplify and gloss over any level of detail or specificity, in order to achieve a lowest-common-denominator stream of easily-digested communication. The only real remedy is…again…for folks to take actual time and effort to more thoroughly research something.

In this case, firearms have not been immune to specialization across different fields. Although there have always been specialized applications (neither deck cannon nor dueling pistols would likely be used for hunting in the 1700s, for example), those specializations have snowballed like everything else. The ~$1,300 SSK Contender, MOA Maximum, or Freedom Arms 2008 are single-shot pistols or hunting game. No one would ever consider these practical for self-defense or military applications. And yet this highly specialized style of firearm has a growing market. Likewise the Rheinmetall MG3 really only has one purpose: mowing down humans at 1,300 rounds per minute — again, not really useful for plinking, target practice or game. There are firearms that have some history of multiple specialties, like certain hunting rifles used for sniper applications (Remington Model 700, for example), but even here you won’t see any hunting rifle listed in the top choices for snipers nowadays — instead, you’ll see highly customized firearms like the Steyr SSG 69…which, again, isn’t generally used for anything else.

So this is the state of affairs for most technology. Just buying a tool in a hardware store can be overwhelming to folks who don’t know what specific type of hammer, wrench or saw they need for their specific application. The same is true of paint for a specific surface or condition. Or clothing for a specific activity. And so on.

So this is really not an “after-the-fact” distinction. In reality, companies spend tremendous $$$ on R&D to develop new specialized lines of products that appeal to experts, hobbyists and professionals in a given field or activity. And, of course, this intended, planned and executed differentiation is why civilians can’t easily purchase an M16, and must make do with an AR15.

Hopefully this is a slightly less facile explanation of specialization.

Why does California have high taxes, high poverty rates, and so many homeless despite all its wealth?

I don’t mean to be flippant, but deepening income inequality is a problem everywhere there is capitalism.

As to California specifically, “high taxes” is a bit of an incorrect stereotype. If you look at a combined burden of local sales tax rates, state income tax rates, estate and inheritance tax rates, and property tax rates, California is actually pretty low compared to many other states (NY State, for example) — especially for middle and lower income folks. And, in fact, there have also been tax revolts over time — everything from Prop 13 (limits property tax increases) to revoking a luxury tax on expensive vehicles statewide. In both cases, these taxes used to pay for a lot of public programs and services…and now that money is gone.

What is really burdensome in CA (especially where I live, in San Diego) is the overall cost of living — food, medical expenses, gasoline, water, energy, apartment rental, home purchases…pretty much EVERYTHING costs more in CA (Sperling’s Best Places puts San Diego at 160% of the U.S. average). And, let me tell you, 160% is painfully high. Now combine this with the fact that wages are very depressed in California — and especially SoCal — to the tune of about 65% of similar metropolitan areas. So you pay more to live here, but earn less. They call this the “sun dollar” tax: because it’s sunny, beautiful weather, you have to pay extra for it. It’s also a consequence of having a LOT of cheap professional labor from Mexico making daily trips across the border to fulfill routine business and consumer needs — this takes a sizable chunk out of local business revenues in some industries, and depresses prices across the board for many goods and services.

Homelessness happens because of many of these economic factors…but the homeless population in California has also grown because people will come here from other places in the U.S. due to the climate year-round. It’s really a great place to be homeless — you aren’t likely to freeze to death.

But again…the reason all of this happens DESPITE really successful wealth production in California is because capitalism doesn’t distribute the wealth it generates — instead that wealth accumulates with owner-shareholders (many of whom may not even live in the state), who don’t necessarily spend that money in California either…and certainly not a lot of it on poor and homeless folks.

My 2 cents.

DEATH DRIVE - ONE

Within us
both hidden in Shadow
and exposed by Light
as primal as the urge to fuck
destruction haunts our being –
more enthralling
than potent swarms
of tiny deaths
more fundamental than fear
able to discard guilt and doubt
like wisps of ashen doll
along with other childish things –
this is the enigma
we now see face to face:

There is a lie about what evil is.

All being is Light
there is no darkness in it
except the occlusions of ignorance.
Each iteration, expression
manifestation of existence
is love in different form
and only love
from unskilled and muddled brutality
to deluded passions
to perfectly crafted kindness;
So what we believe to be wrong, or bad
or the meanest opposing antagonist
is simply one part of love’s continuum
misunderstanding its own.

Within the mind
negation is no enemy
and emptiness can be full;
within the world
death entwines the genesis of rebirth
and deepest night
invites the sun’s return;
within our hearts
acquiescence opens us
to peace
and letting go
bringing clarity and strength.

But in the realm of spirit
in the Before, where love was born
annihilation has a different heft.
For here, return to nothingness is so complete
that even its conception is bereft:
the will to destroy
regressing to an ever-earlier state
defies the Absolute itself.

A contrast can be made this way….
To behold the face of the Divine
and then be rendered mute
in fiercest sundering of soul
is a soaring acclamation: “YES!”
within silence as a whole;
But Outer Darkness is just that –
it is outside all realms of love
not night with promise
of some future day
but eternal absence of the Light.

This is the truest evil
– the ever-present first
the “NO!” devouring itself
the prime annihilation –
which we confront today.

This is the gnashing maw of death
that deniers of science embrace;
this is the Beast
that evangelicals beckon
with reckless political choice;
this is the extinguishing flame
that industrial commerce
demands consume the Earth;
this is the calamity
that picky liberals
bring upon themselves
when they stay home on election day;
this is what childish, spiteful populism
hateful of progressive change
has voted into being.

And of course this is not new –
just one more cycle
where the center cannot hold –
every age has its genocides
from Holocaust to Holodomor
Armenia to Circassia
Algeria to the Americas;
its ruthless dictators
Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun
Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin
Augusto Pinochet, Queen Mary I
Tamerlane, Pope Innocent III;
its chaotic groupthink
Dancing plagues and the Spanish Inquisition
The Great Fear and Irish Fright
Clown sightings and “Strawberries with Sugar.”
So easily…too easily
we spiral hysterically
into ruin.

Our Death Drive is real
its longing for regression overwhelms
and though hope seems vanquished
and common sense crippled
and lunacy ascendant
(surely even demons
shriek in terror at such folly)
we still reside in love –
we still inhabit that continuum
no matter how foolish we become.

So if you know what evil truly is
and endeavor to resist
with earnest mind and heart
calling on your highest art –
the spirit of a perfect love
that leads to sacred sense –
well then
perhaps all this silliness
can be undone.

If corporations create jobs and pay people who then pay taxes, how would/is increasing the taxes corporations pay help the economy?

Thanks for the question. A positive relationship between corporate tax cuts and “encouraging investment” that leads to economic growth is a fairy tale unsupported by data. It is, in fact, very similar to the fairy tale regarding supply side “trickle down” theory, which has also been soundly debunked (see The IMF Confirms That 'Trickle-Down' Economics Is, Indeed, a Joke).

Just let the data speak for itself. Take a look at Corporate tax rates and economic growth since 1947. Although there is a superficial correlation between higher(not lower) corporate tax rates and better GDP growth, there is not much evidence that lower corporate tax rates increase GDP growth. The net effect is statistically pretty neutral.

However, how those tax dollars are spent (and when in the business cycle they are spent) can result in highly variable impacts on the economy — which is why there is such a wide range of “multiplier” estimates for government spending (frequently between 1 and 3). In general, government expenditures during recession have a much larger positive impact than during an economic boom. Expenditures on infrastructure may provide an immediate boost to certain industries, but then a much longer and more gradual multiplier as new business expansion is built upon that infrastructure. In the same vein, government spending that results in free education can have a substantial impact on economic growth many years after those students graduate and become productive contributors to the economy.

But probably the highest “multiplier-friendly” activity the government can do is research: there is lot of research the private sector simply won’t do — and hasn’t done in the past — which leads to new innovations, technological advances, and even entire new industries. Many of the things we rely on today (cell phones, the Internet, computers, life-saving drugs, etc.) were mainly the consequence of government research that was then used to deliver products to the marketplace by private companies. And of course whenever government programs are able to put more money into the the hands of consumers, while at the same time government is directly spending on goods services, this can stimulate aggregate demand (and, consequently, GDP) much more than business investment alone ever could.

At the same time, there are of course lots of things government spends money on that aren’t really all that great in the multiplier department. A good example is defense spending. Some research (see Mercatus Center study at George Mason U) suggests that the multiplier impact of defense spending on the U.S. economy is less than 1. The hypothesis is that in defense industries specifically, government spending “crowds out” private sector spending. So again it does make a difference how the money gleaned from corporate taxes is spent.

But if government doesn’t have money to spend, then clearly either there is going to be less of a multiplier, or there or going to be government deficits. Now the impact on deficits on the economy is a bit more complex, so I’m going to duck that one for now. But suffice it to say that long-term deficits can actually mess up the economy in a number of unsavory and dramatic ways.

My 2 cents.

Which is the more complicated: for a right-wing person to understand a left-wing person or for a left-wing person to understand a right-wing person?

Thanks for the question, but I think that not only is it difficult to generalize in this area, but that it’s a moving target — the landscape is constantly changing. With that said, here is how I would approach some relevant characteristics:

1. My experience is that, on an interpersonal level, left-leaning and right-leaning people who have an honest, intimate and open friendship can come to understand each others’ position quite easily over time. Why? Because they build trust through friendship, and the politics are secondary.

2. It might be fairly easy to say that, the dumber and more ignorant two people are — and the more extreme their opposing political positions — the more challenging it will be for them to come to fruitful insight of each other’s POV. But, more importantly, if they already feel hostile and alienated towards each other, and are isolated from each other in terms of any interpersonal connection or shared experience, it might be pretty impossible for them to bridge the distance between their positions…ever.

3. Empathy is a powerful perceiver and communicator. If folks of opposing views have “strong empathy muscles,” they probably can achieve a basic understanding of each other’s perspectives with some concerted effort.

4. With all of these caveats, I would still have to say that I encounter more people with what we might call “identical, lockstep, reflexively regurgitated groupthink” on the right-leaning end of the spectrum than on the left-leaning end — and part of that groupthink is to deliberately distort and misunderstand left-leaning positions. That is not to say this same phenomenon doesn’t exist on the Left…it does…it’s just a lot more rare.

We can see a parallel example in media: if you compare the extreme bias and low factuality (or conspiracy-mongering) of media outlets on a site like Media Bias/Fact Check - Search and Learn the Bias of News Media (http://mediabiasfactcheck.com), the ratio of really “out there” right-wing media outlets to left-wing ones is about 10 to 1. That is, there are roughly ten times the number of right-wing media sources that are basically promoting yellow journalism, counterfactual reporting and conspiracy propaganda. In my experience, that’s about the same ratio of right-wing folks who can’t understand the other side vs. left-wing folks who can’t understand the other side.

My 2 cents.

Why can’t people agree to disagree when it comes to politics?

Thanks for the question. My take on why we can’t agree about politics:

1. Tribalistic groupthink: for many people, it’s more important to belong to a group and feel safe or superior than be open to other people’s perspectives. Hence “us vs. them” or “ingroup vs. outgroup” is a natural and persisting tension.

2. Different information sources and authorities. There is a lot of deceptive propaganda out there that is peddled as “news” or “fact.” Adding to this are phenomena like Illusory truth effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect). This means that when someone proposes an opinion or solution based on actual facts and provable evidence, it can’t be accepted by the peddlers of deception and their followers. This is a difficult gap to bridge.

3. Variations in intelligence and critical thinking capacity. For one person, a perspective may seem obviously false or ridiculous because that person is more intelligent and thinks more carefully than the person offering the “ridiculous” perspective. But they can’t just say “hey that’s really stupid” without being offensive….

4. Variations in real-life experience. City-dwellers live a much different existence than someone raised in a rural town. Folks who graduate with an advanced degree from college have a different take on education than someone who dropped out of high school. Someone who grew up in a hunting culture with family members in the military has a very different attitude about guns than someone who was raised in a pacifist Vegan household. And so on. Such differences in lived experience have an enormous impact on ideological and political beliefs and convictions.

5. Ego. Sometimes folks can’t agree — or even agree to disagree — because they are emotionally invested in winning. This is pretty immature, but also pretty common.

6. Engineered division. As to why we can’t seem to overcome all of these barriers to agreement, let’s not forget that it’s not to the advantage of the powers-that-be that any agreement be reached. Whether it’s the rabid partisanship encouraged in primary elections, or the “purity tests” with which each political tribe judges its members, or the “active measures” of Russia and China to amplify confusion and division among voters — all of this is driven by a “we must win at any cost” agenda.

My 2 cents.

What did Adam Smith outline about the dangers of capitalism?

Thanks for the question.

It’s a challenge, I think, for anyone to pick passages out of Smith’s work that apply exactly to today’s context of modern capitalism. Those who are friendly to classical liberalism and neoliberalism have made many errors doing so, and those who feel modern capitalism is problematic have also made errors picking-and-choosing from Smith’s work. With that caveat, here’s what I think might be relevant to this question:

1. The problem of business interests being at odds with public interests, and business having too much influence over both commerce and government. Smith touches on this frequently in Wealth of Nations, and uses the argument to encourage vigilant and thoughtful governmental oversight of business so that the public’s interests may be protected and business influence be reined in — Smith calls this “good government.” Without good government, Smith warns, the purveyors of commerce gain too much power. Why is this problematic? Because Smith observes that this particular breed of folks cannot be trusted with the public good; he writes of them: “The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” (Bk 1, Ch.11) Further, Smith observes that such men often come to operate according to a disturbing principle: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” (Bk 3, Ch.4)

2. The “absurd tax” of monopolies, and — once again — the dangers of their influence on government. Also not serving the public’s interests are monopolies that eliminate competition — which Smith warns are a natural objective of business, in order to maximize profits. “To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens.” (Wealth of Nations, Bk 1, Ch.11) In addition, monopolies can gain inordinate coercive influence over government itself: “like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature. The member of parliament who supports every proposal for strengthening this monopoly, is sure to acquire not only the reputation of understanding trade, but great popularity and influence with an order of men whose numbers and wealth render them of great importance. If he opposes them, on the contrary, and still more if he has authority enough to be able to thwart them, neither the most acknowledged probity, nor the highest rank, nor the greatest public services, can protect him from the most infamous abuse and destruction, from personal insults, nor sometimes from real danger, arising from the insolent outrage of furious and disappointed monopolists.” (Wealth of Nations, Bk 4, Ch.2)

3. The lack of representation of worker interests and needs. “In the public deliberations, therefore, [the laborer’s] voice is little heard and less regarded, except upon some particular occasions, when his clamor is animated, set on, and supported by his employers, not for his, but for their own particular purposes.” (Wealth of Nations, Bk 1, Ch.11) Smith does seem to think laborers aren’t always capable of constructive input to government — because of their lack of education, information and time — but he clearly doesn’t trust businesses to represent worker interests either.

My 2 cents.

Please note: excerpts from Smith’s Wealth of Nations in the above answer can easily be found via a full search string in quotes.

Is it true that a "far left" political position is necessary to counter an existential threat to humanity?

Unfortunately, many discussions around this topic reflect a profound, heart-stopping, mind-boggling ignorance about a) the nature of the current existential threats to humanity, and b) the nature of what “far left” represents. This ignorance goes a long way toward enabling the worst human habits and systems of our status quo to continue its dazzling downward spiral. In part, this appears to be ignorance stemming from right-wing misinformation (or disinformation/propaganda, as the case may be), and in part this ignorance seems just a reflection of poorly educated people trying to grapple with problems they don’t understand — and don’t have the discipline to learn about or carefully consider. The rest of the mix just appears to reflect a sort of native abject stupidity, and we can’t do much about that. But for those who are open to learning and self-improvement — or who are willing see through the propaganda — I’ll try to offer some clarity.

Nearly all of the “existential threats” to humanity — and planet Earth for that matter — are a consequence of a snowballing nexus of these global factors:

1. A style of extractive capitalism that is rapidly exhausting natural resources, while grossly polluting and destroying ecosystems necessary for the survival of life at the same time, in order to prop up a modern first-world lifestyle of overconsumption and excessive waste. The industrial and technological revolutions of the past two centuries have made this extractive capitalist engine so powerful (and the overconsumptive lifestyle so entrenched) that it has become extremely efficient in its destructive capacities — and very difficult to stop.

2. Rapid population growth coupled with equally rapid and expanding economic growth that has amplified these negative impacts in exponential ways…with no obvious end in sight, outside of eventual chaotic collapse.

3. Pro-capitalist sentiments and political forces (i.e. market fundamentalists, plutocrats, neoliberals, right-Libertarians, traditional conservatives, corporate investors, etc.) that have tirelessly sought to protect the extractive capitalist engine that generates their wealth, even while seeking to destroy or cripple countervailing influences that could moderate their self-serving greed or mitigate wantonly destructive consequences of that greed. Part of that self-protective strategy, it should be noted, is the advocacy of unproven or disproven economic theories (Austrian School, etc.), conspiracy theories, weakening of government oversight, “science skepticism” bolstered by fake research, and social and systemic approaches that have not been proven or are not evidence-based.

The “far Left” is comprised mainly of the following groups — who consistently attempt to support their positions with actual science and evidence-based approaches:

1. Left anarchists/libertarian socialists

2. Social progressives

3. Social democrats

4. Democratic socialists

5. Neo-Marxists

6. Environmentalists

It should be noted that these groups do not support Soviet-Style Communism — the bogeyman that many posts in this thread stand up as their straw man to tear down. In fact, most groups mainly aim to gentle the toxic strain of capitalism that dominates the global economy today, reining it in with democratic controls, worker empowerment, a strong bulwark of regulatory oversight, and a shifting of ownership away from wealthy owner-shareholders who have been such poor stewards of corporate power, and into the hands of public control. Essentially, the “far Left” is all about increasing economic, political and environmental democracy — a strengthening of civil society — and eliminating plutocratic corruption of civic institutions.

As such, the “far Left” is almost certainly the best bet — as a starting point at least — for reversing our current descent into self-destruction.

However, there is one small problem with the “far Left” as so defined being the savior of humanity and planet Earth: none of its constituent groups have addressed the issue of population very vocally or aggressively. Some environmentalists will meekly raise the issue…but that’s about it. Most other groups equivocate, downplay concerns, or hold a false optimism about global populations leveling themselves out over time. So although the “far Left” gaining more influence could soften the toxic impact of extractive capitalism, and perhaps delay the “existential threats” we face for a time, unless and until the population crisis is actively engaged as well, the far Left’s salvation will be tenuous at best.

My 2 cents.

What are the different forms and meanings of entitlement in American social and political discourse?

Thanks for the question.

What’s really interesting about this question is how folks in different economic strata (and different disciplines) usually think they have some unique take on “entitlements” — a definition or locus that is entirely separate from other definitions and framing. In reality, however, most are really all talking about two sides of the same coin: either the feeling of “being entitled to” something, or receiving some benefit or advantage that other people view the recipients “feel entitled to” (whether they actually do or not). What this all seems to circle around are feelings of jealousy or resentment from those who aren’t receiving some benefit or advantage someone else is receiving, or feelings of self-righteous certainty about ownership or deservedness of a benefit or advantage. In reality, folks of all walks of life — and across all disciplines — can and do experience both of these feelings at one time or another. These are common human reactions, easily tracing back to the sibling and peer rivalries of childhood. And, really, no one is immune.

So the rich or lucky may feel entitled to the profits from money they inherited or stumbled upon by chance; the poor or unlucky may feel entitled to charity; the addicted or chronically ill may feel entitled to care and support; the academic researcher may feel entitled to data that aids in their research; the professional journalist may feel entitled to “the truth;” a customer may feel entitled to receive a reliable product or courteous service; a company may feel entitled to disregard the interests of stakeholders when distributing profits; the oppressed and exploited may feel entitled to speak truth to power; a parent may feel entitled to lord it over their own children; one child may feel entitled to hit another child when they feel wronged by them; and so on. And, from the outside looking in, all of these instances can appear to be “entitlements” that aren’t necessarily earned, just, reasonable or fair. They are instead merely negotiated arrangements or cultural habits within an ever-evolving status quo — transactional usurpations of relational trust that societies of scale tend to deploy — and nothing more.

As I mull this over, it seems as though both accusations regarding the entitlements for others, and presumptions of entitlement for ourselves, are both just really primitive, immature and unproductive responses to the messy economic and status arrangements of what is admittedly a pretty dysfunctional society. They are much like a dog barking and whining when we are eating a piece of meat…or that same dog biting our hand when we try to take a piece of meat out of their bowl. It doesn’t really matter how either we are the dog came by that meat…the sense of “entitlement” is really just a variation of “I want…gimme now…you can’t have!”

My 2 cents.

How will the US's democracy be affected by its citizens not being able to trust the media to report the truth?

This question smacks of political propaganda and disinformation. Vladimir Putin’s “active measures” — propaganda that aims to disrupt and confuse people in target countries — include just this sort of message: “You can’t trust the press. They’re lying to you. You can’t trust the government. You can’t trust each other….” and so on. The way this question is phrased presumes that Americans don’t trust their own media…which actually isn’t true of ALL Americans…just the ones who’ve bought into that Russian propaganda.

The reality is that major conservative media outlets like Fox News do lie to their viewers all the time. However, those viewers still “trust” FOX to tell the truth…which has indeed been fairly disastrous for our democracy. In other words, because some people DO trust fake news, they are woefully misinformed and make very bad decisions. Unfortunately, it is mostly right-leaning media that tend to have the strongest bias and the least factual reporting (see http://mediabiasfactcheck.org (http://mediabiasfactcheck.org)), and indeed far-right media that has the highest conspiracy and propaganda tendencies. It is also right-wing media that parrots Russian propaganda that mass media can’t be trusted. The irony of this situation is pretty extreme, don’t you think…?

According to the most recent Gallup data, 69% of Democrats trust mass media, but only 15% of Republicans do. And liberal-leaning media actually has much higher factual reporting, and less extreme bias (again see http://mediabiasfactcheck.org). So you can see the effect here: Republicans distrust factual reporting in mainstream media with a left-leaning bias, but trust fake news outlets like FOX that peddle Russian conspiracies! They’ve got things upside down! So sure…the Republican mistrust in news media is having a negative impact on U.S. democracy. It’s how Donald Trump — likely the worst President in U.S. history and a truly awful human being — was elected and remains popular. And this horrific presidency, with its corrosive policies and fear-mongering, continues to be very damaging to America and the rest of the planet.

With that said, here is a Pew Research article with a deeper look at perceptions of media trustworthiness and democracy, with several relevant links:

An update on our research into trust, facts and democracy (https://www.pewresearch.org/2019/06/05/an-update-on-our-research-into-trust-facts-and-democracy/)

For more on Russian disinformation, check out these links:

From Russia with Likes (Part 1) | Your Undivided Attention

The disinformation age: a revolution in propaganda

https://www.europeanvalues.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/What-We-Know-about-RT-Russia-Today-1.pdf

My 2 cents.