On the radicalization of the U.S. Republican Party

Following up on the topic of my previous post, I thought that I should mention that Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann have an excellent article in today’s Vox: “The Republicans waged a 3-decade war on government. They got Trump.” The article refers back to the authors’ 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, and their related Washington Post article, “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem.” Here is the key passage from their 2012 argument:

The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

As Ornstein and Mann point out in the Vox article, the nomination of Trump – and the collapse of any serious opposition to that nomination amongst the party’s elites – vindicates their earlier thesis.

In the end, the exploitation of anti-government sentiment by Republican leaders, and the active efforts on their part to make all government look corrupt and illegitimate, reached its logical conclusion. The Republican political establishment looked no less corrupt, weak, and illegitimate than the Democratic one, and the appeal of a rank outsider became greater.

It’s grim reading. And it underscores how vital it is that Trump be defeated in November. Even if that happens, though, Ornstein and Mann are skeptical that the Republican Party can become a constructive force in American politics for the foreseeable future.

Trump is a horror – but then so is the Republican Party

In an earlier post I claimed that it was the moral duty of all American citizens to oppose Donald Trump’s attempt to become U.S. president by the most effective means available to them. For most citizens, of course, this means voting for Hillary Clinton.

My favourite American pundit, Charles Pierce, points out (for the nth time) what a danger Trump is in his recent post: “This Isn't Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” Pierce doesn’t pull any punches (not that he ever does): “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” 

His conclusion:

Here is the truth. Nobody called for a moment of silence for Micah Johnson. Eleven U.S. cities are not on the brink of racial violence. He, Trump just made that shit up so his followers can stay afraid and angry at the people he wants them to fear and hate. This lie was a marching order and the Party of Lincoln is right in step with him, straight into the burning Reichstag of this man's mind. 

Welcome to the 2016 Republican convention: a four-day celebration of the ritual suicide of American democracy. 

With balloons.

Sadly, the fact of the matter is that most of the candidates whom 'the Donald' vanquished were pretty horrible as well (they simply were more subtle in expressing their racism, misogyny, homophobia, inegalitarianism, and intolerance). The Republican Party has become an extremist party, one now closer in its rhetoric and agenda to France’s National Front or Britain’s UKIP than the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower.

But lest despair overwhelm us, I recommend the following two pages that mock the Donald:

1. This one mocks Trump by imagining what kind of Dungeons and Dragons ‘Dungeon Master’ he would be in a series of tweets. It’s called (appropriately enough) ‘Dungeons and Donalds.’

2. This one replaces Calvin’s head with Trump’s in a number of classic ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ strips. No dialogue is changed! The aptness of Trump uttering Calvin’s lines indicates that intellectually he on par with a six year-old cartoon boy. (And the expressions on the photos of Trump’s face that are pasted into the strips are perfect.)

Guns versus liberty

In light of the horrific mass shooting last weekend in Orlando, I thought that I would link to a post I wrote last October: “An armed society is an unfree society.” It expresses (more or less) the reasons why I think that easy access to firearms reduces the freedom of citizens (in addition to all the other harms it causes with respect to loss of life, health, etc.). In other words, the debate over gun control in the US should not be construed (as it generally is now) as a debate between 'freedom' on one side and 'security' (or life) on the other. Rather, it's really a debate about the just distribution of freedom. And the gun control side is the one that promotes greater overall freedom for citizens.

On this topic, well worth watching is this hilarious rant about guns from Australian comedian Jim Jefferies (from 2014).

The moral duty of American citizens to vote against Donald Trump

Political theorist (and friend) Julia Maskivker has a recent piece in the Washington Post: “Yes, you do have an obligation to vote for the lesser of two evils. Here’s why.” I think that her position is spot on.

The forthcoming American presidential election will be between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It is clear which of these two candidates is the greater evil: the unstable, narcissistic, quasi-fascist Donald Trump. Trump plays to, and is in large part supported because of, the authoritarian impulses and racial resentments of many white American men.

I am no fan of Hilary Clinton. Her foreign policy record is too hawkish for my comfort. And based upon her past positions and ties to Wall Street, I have little confidence that she will pursue genuinely liberal and egalitarian domestic policies, especially within the economic domain. But Clinton is the candidate whom the Democrats have chosen, and whatever her flaws, I cannot comprehend how anyone can deny that she is several worlds more competent than Trump. His destructive and incoherent policy views aside, I find it unimaginable that someone so manifestly unbalanced – a person in the grip of a juvenile ‘dominance’ view of political relations – could have control over the United States’ nuclear arsenal.

There is no grey area in – or room for ‘reasonable’ debate concerning – this US election. American citizens have an overriding moral duty to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president. And voting for Clinton is simply the most effective means that most citizens have to fulfil this duty.

Update on the Wisconsin GOP's unending efforts to thwart democracy

This is just a quick follow-up to my earlier post on the real aim of the recent GOP-passed Wisconsin 'voter ID laws': namely, to suppress the franchise amongst Democratic-leaning voters.

These laws presently are being challenged in court, and the former chief of staff to then-Senator Dale Schultz (Republican), Todd Allbaugh, has named names and presented some of the comments made by key Republican legislators in a 2011 closed caucus meeting. As Allbaugh makes clear, preventing (practically nonexistent) 'voter fraud' had nothing to do with the law; rather, it was all about suppressing the ability of people to vote in Milwaukee and on college campuses. Apparently, many GOP legislators were 'giddy' at the prospect of preventing many citizens from voting. (Unsurprisingly, the dim-witted and contemptible Glenn Grothman said this: "What I’m concerned about is winning. [...] [W]e better get this done while we have the opportunity"[.])

Update 1: Some further coverage at The New York Times and Talking Points Memo.

Update 2: My favourite American political commentator, Charles P. Pierce, has weighed in on the matter: "Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, has conspired with his pet state legislature to make it harder for Wisconsinites to vote."

Happy May Day!

I thought that I would mention that I have a paper coming out in the journal Philosophy, Politics & Economics somewhat related to this occasion. It's called, "Freedom, Money, and Justice as Fairness." (I'm not sure when it will appear in print; I submitted the final version less than a month ago, and I have yet to receive the proofs.) One of the things that I argue for in the paper is a basic right to discretionary ('leisure') time ("8 hours for what we will") for all citizens.

Here is the abstract:

The first principle of Rawls’s conception of justice secures a set of ‘basic liberties’ equally for all citizens within the constitutional structure of society. The ‘worth’ of citizens’ liberties, however, may vary depending upon their wealth. Against Rawls, G.A. Cohen contends that an absence of money often can directly constrain citizens’ freedom, and not simply its worth. This is because money often can remove legally enforced constraints on what citizens can do. Cohen’s argument – if modified to apply to citizens’ ‘moral powers’ rather than ‘negative liberty’ – threatens a core feature of Rawls’s conception of justice, as it is unclear why the parties within the ‘original position’ would endorse the lexical priority of the first principle over the ‘difference principle’ (which concerns the distribution of wealth) if both principles similarly shape citizens’ freedom. I concede Cohen’s point regarding the relation between freedom and money, but argue that it is not fatal to Rawls’s conception of justice if the ‘basic needs principle’ is understood to enjoy lexical priority over the first principle, and is modified to include a right to adequate discretionary time. Nonetheless, Cohen’s argument helpfully highlights the infelicitous nature of Rawls’s terminology with respect to liberty: the basic needs principle, the first principle, and the difference principle all should be understood as shaping citizens’ freedom to exercise their moral powers.

Growing up in Ontario, I regularly was exposed to commercials for "Lotto 6/49" on television. These commercials annoyed me to no end, but the slogan "Imagine the Freedom" became firmly imprinted onto my brain. Many years later, when I read G.A. Cohen's paper, "Freedom and Money," the slogan leapt back into my consciousness, as it seemed to express perfectly Cohen's core thesis (roughly: the more money one has, the more 'negative liberty' one has). So I became determined to incorporate a reference to those blasted commercials in the paper itself.

In case any readers are curious, here is a relatively recent Lotto 6/49 commercial:

Cheers!

From Macbeth to political philosophy

William Shakespeare died 400 years ago today. It is partially his fault that I became a professional political philosopher.

In high-school we (the teenagers of Ontario) had to study one Shakespeare play every year. In grade 12 it was Macbeth. The students in my class were allowed to design their own assignments, so I decided to write a "Machiavellian" assessment of Macbeth's strategy and actions in achieving and using political power. This involved reading The Prince, summarizing the main points, and applying them to Macbeth.

I don't remember much of what I wrote now, but it was one of the very few high-school assignments that I did not put off until the night before it was due. I loved it.

When I went to university afterwards, I decided to take some courses on political theory because of that experience. And, many years later, I ended up teaching political philosophy for a living -- though not Machiavelli, alas, as he's generally not covered within philosophy courses.  (This is one of the noteworthy differences with respect to 'the canon' between 'political theory' as taught within political science departments, and 'political philosophy' as taught within philosophy departments. I started out in political science, and indeed began a PhD after completing a politics MPhil at Oxford, but eventually moved to philosophy.)

So to the Bard: happy 'death day'!