Like anyone not deliberately cutting themselves off from the news, I've been inundated with the daily drumbeat of stories regarding Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court confirmation process, and the increasing number of women accusing him of various assaults and misbehaviors in the past. I finally had to shut it all off, because in the end it all just makes me sad.
The chances are extremely high that Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the Supreme Court. As a justice on the bench, he will likely add another (hopefully thoughtful) conservative voice. I don't go in much for Court politics, and tend to eschew predictions of the end of the world because the 5-4 split on the court shifts.
So up until a few weeks ago, I wasn't overly concerned about Kavanaugh's nomination. In the traditional sense - in the realm of concern for how the Court will rule on various matters - I'm still not. What will be, will be. I realize this isn't everyone's view, but it's mine.
What makes me sad about the whole thing is the damage that this process is doing once again to the right of women not be assaulted/harassed/abused by men. Just like Anita Hill a generation ago, women across the country are being re-taught the lesson: if you tell your story about a man in power, you will lose.
We thought we were making progress. Bill Cosby fell. Harvey Weinstein was brought down. Louis CK, Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, Les Moonves - a host of figures from TV and Hollywood were (at least temporarily) laid low by what seemed like a burgeoning movement. #Metoo seemed to finally have broken down the walls, gotten people to listen to women and brought men to account for their often atrocious behavior.
A few voices pointed out that all of these figures were in show business. What we're learning now, I believe, is just how powerless those men are. Or how much power women have obtained in that particular sphere. Which would be a good thing, but it's clearly limited to that arena.
Other areas are different entirely. Men in sports seem to continue to enjoy protection against similar accusations. In sports, the crime of choice is often domestic violence rather than sexual harassment - arguably worse than the depredations of Harvey Weinstein, or at least equal to them. But coaches and players alike seem to continue their careers unaffected by the discovery that they beat their wives or girlfriends. Kneel during the national anthem, and your career is over. Hit your girlfriend repeatedly on camera and you get to keep playing. Joe Paterno was brought down because he failed to report child abuse. But Urban Meyer just enjoyed a brief vacation from his job for failing to report spousal abuse.
Then there's politics. When Rep. Jim Jordan was tied to a sexual abuse case at Ohio State on the wrestling team, his party and his fans flocked to his defense. Catholic priests accused of the same are defrocked and shamed, but not politicians. We believe the accusations when the target is a priest. When it's an elected official in our own political tribe, we don't.
Then there's the President, who has so far been unscathed by a host of credible allegations of his own misconduct, bolstered by his own on-mic admissions, to say nothing of his tone-deaf, retrograde tweets that make it clear that he doesn't understand women's point of view and has no interest in trying. If ever there were a poster child for the protection that politics affords men who abuse women, Trump is it.
So even as the #Metoo movement forges ahead, winning well-deserved victories, I can't help but wonder if they're only working on the fringes of the problem. Those with relatively little power - entertainers, Catholic priests, local high school teachers - can be brought to account. But the truly powerful remain unaffected, perhaps immune.
And that makes me sad. I am sad that after so much time - the entirety of my lifetime, now approaching 50 years - women (and some men) have been struggling to right this wrong, to afford to women the basic dignity of their persons, to win the right simply to be people. And in far too many ways, we seem little nearer than we were back in the 1970s and 80s.
When Kavanaugh is confirmed - and I expect that he will be - it will be yet another reminder that power and abuse go hand in hand, that our systems of justice are still radically imperfect, and that women are still denied the dignity afforded to men.
I recognize that by "men" here we need to acknowledge that this is largely about "white men". Men of color, especially black men, face their own problems in our society, from Colin Kapernik to Tamir Rice and too many others. But that's a topic for another day.
And so I am sad to see daily the evidence that for far too many men, partisanship and "victory" for their party is more important than women's right to be heard, to be respected, to be granted dignity, and for men to be held to account for their behavior. We want very much to claim that "we're better than this". But I have yet to see evidence that we are. And until powerful men change - or are forced to change - it is who we will continue to be.
When I was in graduate school, we spent a lot of time studying theories of international politics - how the world works at the macro level. The dominant theory of the day was Ken Waltz' structural realism, which purported to explain how a bipolar system (two superpowers, the US and the USSR) could be so hostile and yet produce a world without major war. The historian John Lewis Gaddis picked up this theory and used it in his seminal work The Long Peace.
But while structural realism and its major competition, Keohane's neoliberalism, were all the rage, I was always drawn more to an offshoot of the realist world - hegemonic stability theory. Robert Gilpin's War and Change in World Politics, penned in the early 1980s, seemed to me to offer a better explanation of the Cold War. The superpowers were clearly not equal; by the 1980s it was clear that the US was far superior to the USSR in every category save one: the destructive power of its nuclear arsenal. On this, and this alone, were the two sides equal. But in terms of alliances, economic strength, prosperity, and the influence of "soft power" (Keohane's contribution to the discussion), the US was clearly way ahead.
Gilpin's theory postulated that world stability comes when a hegemon - one clearly dominant power - establishes order and a set of rules for the international system. Those rules are plain to see, and are embodied in the many structures built up after WWII - the UN and its Security Council, the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT (which eventually became the World Trade Organization). Later we added to these the World Court and the International Criminal Court. All of these structures were, for the most part, written up by Americans - in part to make a better world, but in larger part to make a better world for the United States. Because that's what hegemons do - they write the rules of the world to advance their own interests.
The United States, moreover, seemed to have pulled off a singularly historical feat: it wrote a set of rules for the world that benefited not only itself, but also others. Anyone who agreed to play by those rules could participate and prosper*. Those that refused those rules - as the communists of the USSR did, preferring their own - were left out.
* An argument can be made that the prosperity afforded to others was limited and, to some significant degree, racially biased. It is true that chunks of the world were still exploited and left out of opportunity - though the causes were complex. Suffice it to say that the rules written by the United States were more open and inclusive than those of previous empires, even if they were not perfectly so. Africa has not faired well, but South Korea, Brazil, Turkey, and a number of others have.
Gilpin pointed out that the stability thus produced by a hegemon and a stable set of rules would last only so long as the hegemon could maintain its position against potential challengers - other powers that aspired to be hegemon themselves in order to impose their own rules. The Soviet Union was one such challenger, and not a terribly good one. It eventually drove itself into the ground in the effort. The end of the Cold War ushered in an era in which the US has, until recently, been largely unchallenged as the dominant world power.
Challengers do have a structural advantage: they don't have to pay the costs of maintaining the international system, whereas the hegemon does. Eventually, Gilpin argued, that structural advantage would cause a challenger to catch up, leading to a systemic war that would produce a new order - either the hegemon would reestablish itself, or the challenger would upend the existing order and take over. Either way, a new period of stability would then ensue.
Gilpin also pointed out that internal politics play a role, particularly within the hegemon. Because the hegemon has to bear the cost of maintaining the system, it's entirely likely that over time it will grow weary of spending the resources necessary to keep its position. The longer stability lasts, the more people will take it for granted as "the natural order of things", and forget that stability takes effort to maintain. The US did a good job to some degree of sharing those costs (the creation of NATO, for example), but there have been "burden-sharing" debates for decades about whether the US is "paying too much" to "be the world's policeman".
Into this world steps Donald Trump, who understands none of this. As many (supporters and detractors alike) have pointed out, he views the world in very transactional terms: every interaction is a separate, independent event producing a winner and a loser. These interactions appear in his worldview to have no connection to each other. He is the embodiment of Robert Axelrod's early experiment in multi-player prisoner's dilemma (though he obviously never read that article).
Viewed in this way, a trade treaty with South Korea (for example) has particular terms which favor one side or the other (the possibility that both gain is not entertained either - Trump's worldview is clearly always and everywhere zero-sum). The possibility that we might be willing to give something (or gain less) in this one interaction in order to gain something else in another arena (say, security cooperation and basing rights) does not occur to him. "Issue linkage", long a staple of American foreign policy, has been banished. In Trump's view, we must "win" on every single issue, or else pick up our marbles and go home.
The possibility that we might be willing to give up something as the cost of maintaining the international order is completely foreign to this President. Trump assumes that the United States is the dominant power, and the world is structured the way it is, because - divine right? Providence? I don't think he has any idea, because he's never asked the question why the world is the way it is. He is oblivious to the costs that the US has borne over the last 60+ years to establish and maintain the world that he has grown up in.
And so Trump is seeking to stop paying those costs, not because he wants to change the world but because he doesn't understand the consequences. He is like the homeowner who wants to rearrange the walls in his home without first asking which walls are bearing the load of the upper floors. In his view, it is better for us to keep and hoard our money than to spend it maintaining a system that clearly benefits others (as well as us). In his own words, doing so makes us "losers" and "suckers".
This is exactly the kind of behavior that Gilpin predicted 30+ years ago - that the hegemon will eventually grow tired of paying the costs of system maintenance, thereby hastening its own demise as the dominant player. In seeking to "Make America Great Again", Trump is actually moving in the opposite direction, driving the United States towards second-tier status on the world stage.
He does so, unfortunately, at a time when there is a real and viable challenger in the world: China. The Chinese government has made no secret at all of its desire for hegemonic dominance, and its plans for getting their are fairly plain to see. It will take some time, but that is the direction they are pushing in. As they move up, the United States is rushing downwards to meet them.
This, I suspect, is the source of much of the "resistance" within the Administration to Trump himself. Nearly everyone else in the government - certainly Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Mike Pompeo, Dan Coats, and their many underlings - understand American power and how our place in the world is maintained. This is not the "deep state", nor is it necessarily the "steady state" - it is simply the state, the natural outgrowth of two generations of foreign policy development in the United States that has always been more bipartisan than it appears.
What the result of this will be is yet unclear. The Trump Administration is young, and already faces resistance to Trump's apparent desire to chuck the role of hegemon and withdraw from the system we built. The midterm elections will matter, as will the next Presidential election. If Trump is just a blip, a future American President could restore the United States to its usual course - one that might forestall, or better manage, the growing conflict with China. On the other hand, if Trump gets his way then we may see a substantial rewriting of the rules of the international order - and not in America's favor.
So Justice Kennedy announces his retirement and the internet blows up. Liberals are screaming in fear because they believe the court will be stacked against them for the next 20 years, and conservatives (or whatever they are nowadays) are shouting in triumph that they will finally have a bulletproof majority on the Court.
All of this is wrong. All of it.
I get that the court is, by necessity, something of an all-or-nothing institution. When it makes rulings, its rulings stand - at least until a later court overturns them. Another casualty of the politicization of the law may be the stare decisis standard, which appeared to take a bit of a hit today in the Janus case. I fear that future courts, both right and left, will see their job as undoing the work of the "other side" in the previous generation.
The reality is that we live in a diverse, often divided nation. And we live under a political system that is supposed to value that diversity, and to produce outcomes that, however imperfectly, reflect everybody's voices. If only 20% of people want something, they shouldn't be able to impose their will on the other 80%. That's what we call democracy, and it's what we all claim to value.
Yet the celebration on the right, and the yearning on the left, for a court supermajority are both repudiations of these foundational ideals. It's not just that the court is (by some necessity) a non-democratic institution. How we think about the court betrays how little we really value our democracy.
Take the issue of Roe v. Wade, one of the most oft-cited cases for the importance of getting "your" side to dominate the court. I get that there are people who believe that abortion should be eradicated entirely. I also get that there are people who would like it to be restricted much more than it is. Just as there are people who think it should remain available, and people who would like to widen that availability. I spent a semester in grad school poring over General Social Survey data on Americans' attitudes towards abortion. They are diverse, and remarkably stable, and on balance tend to fall into the "keep it legal but hopefully rare" area, with a large standard deviation around that mean.
So if you celebrate winning a supermajority on the court so that Roe can be overturned and abortion made illegal everywhere, you're in essence saying that winning a complete and total victory on this issue is more important to you than democracy. That even if your view is only held by 20% of the American population, you think you should win anyway and impose that view on the 80% who think differently.
The alternative approach, which is actually far more consistent with our claimed democratic values, would be to try to persuade enough of that 80% to see things your way, so that your view prevails across the population. This is basically why gay marriage is legal now - not because a court said it should be, but because over the course of a couple of generations most Americans have come to agree that people should be able to marry whom they want. Want to change that? Convince them back the other way (good luck).
That approach hasn't worked well on abortion, as the GSS data shows. Hence the arguing over the court - and the hidden abandonment of democratic ideals.
You can substitute any number of other issues for abortion here - gun rights, labor unions, travel bans, take your pick. For those who take the "long view" on the court, who are looking out over the next 20-30 years, it's not any one issue. It's the desire to see "their side" win all of the battles over that period.
If we really believed in democracy - if we really believed that we make our best decisions collectively when everybody's voice is in the mix - we wouldn't want a supermajority on the court. Or a permanent majority in Congress, as Karl Rove used to dream of. If we really believed in democracy, we would want Justice Kennedy replaced with another moderate, swing-voting judge. If Elena Kagan stepped down, we would want her replaced with another liberal justice. If Clarence Thomas retires, we would want him replaced with another conservative.
If we really believed in democracy that's what we all would want, regardless of our own personal views. But we don't really believe in democracy. We only support it when it means we get to win.
All of this is compounded by the fact that we are living through the most anti-democratic Presidency in modern US history. Trump has not the slightest regard for the views of others, and - by his own repeated admission - he wants to win all the time. He doesn't care about what other people think. If he could impose his will on the world, he would, even if nearly everyone disagrees with him.
The mood of the country as a whole is increasingly anti-democratic. Sure, lots of folks are saying, go out and vote. Voting is not a reliable indicator of democracy - just ask Zimbabwe, or pre-1990 South Africa, or Saddam Hussein's Iraq. On all sides, the act of voting - indeed, all political acts - have taken on existential proportions. Everything has become Chuck Norris' "1000 years of darkness" warning, on all sides.
Don't believe me? Watch Tucker Carlson, speaking to a national audience of millions, equate the desire to welcome immigrants with suicide. Translate that into Kinyarwanda and Carlson would fit in nicely with RTLMC radio just ahead of the Rwandan genocide.
This is not Schoolhouse Rock America anymore. We are not e pluribus unum - rather, our motto ought to be e unum pluribus. Out of one have come many. Where there was one nation, united by a common set of political values, now there are many, divided by fear and anger and hatred.
For those who look at Kennedy's retirement and say, this is why I voted for Trump - who believe that for all of his faults and problems, it was worth it to "secure the court" for the next generation - you're entitled to your reasons. If you feel happy today, you're entitled to that too. What you're not entitled to do is claim that you value democracy. Because in the end, if we don't value each other more than we value winning out over each other, then what are we?
Now that the Trump Administration has recognized Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel and moved the US embassy there, many are asking what this will mean for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and prospects for future peace. A lot of public discussion, however, tends to be driven not by an analysis of what is and what may happen, but by what people want. This is one of those conflicts where dispassionate analysis is hard to come by - so naturally, I thought I'd give it a shot.
Objective analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is difficult because both sides have very strong narratives rooted in justice and righteousness. That these narratives are largely incompatible is lost on no one, which goes a long way to explaining why there's been no resolution. Even outsiders tend to look at the conflict through the eyes of what they want to have happen, and make predictions that are really attempts to calculate how to get from wherever we are at the moment to that end.
This is particularly true for those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. The case for injustice in Palestine is easy to make. Even former President Jimmy Carter, a man of wisdom who knows how to weigh his words carefully, has likened the separation of Palestinians from mainstream Israeli society and the control over their movements and territory, as akin to South African apartheid. The Palestinian population is stuck in a third- (or even fourth-) world existence, both politically and economically, from which there appears to be no escape. There's an easy justice narrative there.
Israel too has a narrative about justice and victimhood. Beyond the Holocaust, which was perhaps the worst targeted crime against a population in human history, and beyond the centuries of violent anti-semitism that preceded it, modern Israel is an island of less than 9 million inhabitants surrounded by a sea of hundreds of millions of Arabs, many of whom have expressed the desire to wipe Israel from the map. However powerful Israel has become - and it is indeed very powerful - it is difficult to fault modern Israelis for believing that the world is a threatening place, with hatred directed against them from all sides.
But if we want to understand the possible and impossible next steps in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, none of this helps. For a conflict analyst, it is enough to know that the two sides have mutually incompatible, even mutually contradictory, narratives about themselves and the other. This much has been true since 1947, and it hasn't changed.
So what now? Is the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capitol city the end of the peace process? Or will this usher in a new era of opportunity? There answer can't (or shouldn't) depend on whether we like or don't like Donald Trump, or whether we prefer the Israeli or the Palestinian narrative, but on an analysis of the situation.
In any such analysis, it is important to note that neither "side" is a monolith. There are Israelis who are happy about the US embassy move, and those who are upset by it. There are even Israelis who would be perfectly happy to see all the Palestinians expelled from the whole territory, although they tend to be quiet about it. There are Palestinians who desire to "drive the Jews into the sea", and those who would be happy to live beside them in peace. So what we see at any one point in time reflects a rough majority opinion of each side. Feelings and goals can change, and if they do the analysis changes with it. But for now, things are what they are.
As of today, Israel has most of what it wants. It has complete control over its recognized sovereign territory, and (as of today) a slightly greater recognition of its claim to Jerusalem, which it already controls anyway. Since its withdrawal from direct occupation of the West Bank and Gaza back in the 1990s, it no longer has the immediate burden of trying to provide services or a functioning economy for most of the Palestinian population, nor the difficulty of policing it from within. Israel still faces security challenges from terrorism, from the Syrian civil war next door, and from Iran, but these are for the most part as managed as they can be, and the bigger issues (Syria and Iran) are independent of the Palestinian issue.
The status quo, in essence, is one that most Israelis are perfectly happy with. The moving of the US Embassy doesn't really change that, except perhaps in a minor symbolic way. Despite the emotional narratives and (for some) references to the Will of God, the primary interest for the median of Israeli society is peace and security.
There is a subset of Israelis who would like to change the status quo still further, by gradually assuming control over the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria, in their parlance). The settler movement is actively engaged in this effort at what Palestinians might call slow-motion ethnic cleansing, encouraged (or at least enabled) by the current Israeli government. Again, the moving of the US embassy doesn't change this calculus much either, except perhaps as a further signal that the US will not actively oppose settler expansion. Then again, no American administration since George H.W. Bush has done much to dissuade this movement, so there again the Trump Administration hasn't changed very much.
On the Palestinian side, of course, no one is happy with the status quo. The economy is a shambles, there is little hope either individually or collectively that their prospects will improve, they are subject to a host of difficulties in being told where they can live, where they can travel to, and what jobs they can or can't have, and their political leaders are largely ineffectual, alternately violent and corrupt. Things have been bad for a very long time, and every year they get a little bit worse.
Here, the moving the US embassy is a small material change in that it signals that the two-state solution - with Jerusalem divided into two capitols side by side - is dead. More importantly, today's events send a signal that the power of the United States is firmly on the side of Israel, the locally dominant power in the conflict. But this is at best a marginal shift, because these things have largely been true for a while. It is arguable that, except for the symbolic location of the embassy, not much would have been different under a Hillary Clinton administration.
It can be argued that outcomes are a function of the intersection between interests and power. Israel holds nearly all the power in the current situation, while the Palestinians have essentially none. Palestinians have not yet discovered any means of leveraging their assets in a way that would exert significant power on the situation. In the 1980s they launched the Intifadah, and although they paid a heavy price for it they did force Israel to reconsider the situation. Since that time, and with a few echoes in the 1990s, Palestinians have been largely powerless.
Palestinians' hopes have always leaned on one of three possible sources of power. Either their Arab brethren in neighboring states would help them, or the United States would help them, or they would somehow find the means to alter the situation themselves. The first hope vanished in 1979 when Anwar Sadat abandoned any significant pretext of sponsoring the Palestinian cause. The second swelled briefly in the Bush 41 and Clinton Administrations, but hasn't been much since; Trump's announcement is the last of a line of nails in that coffin. The third has been slowly leaching away with time, and as Israel has gotten better and better at sealing the borders and preventing any significant weaponry from getting into the Palestinian territories.
The most likely scenario, therefore, is that the conflict is stuck. The party which has the greatest interest in changing the situation has no power to do so, and no prospect of acquiring any. The party that has power to change things has no interest in doing so. Barring a truly massive uprising that disrupts Israel's security calculations - and today's events demonstrate that they're willing to be pretty ruthless about meeting the threat of force with much greater force - this isn't going to change.
So it is not true that Trump's decision to move the embassy has killed the peace process. The peace process was already dead. And, although I don't like it and wish the world were otherwise, I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Between this and the Trump Administration's decision to recognize a united Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel, things have been moving fast - and not in a good way.
These things together represent unilateral moves by Israel to resolve aspects of the conflict in Israel's favor. They represent a turning away from negotiation as a means to find mutually-agreed upon solutions, preferring unilateral solutions over the other side's objections instead.
Amazingly enough, this is exactly what I wrote my dissertation about twenty years ago. Then as now, I was interested in conflict dynamics: if side A does X, what choices does side B have, and what kinds of outcomes become more or less likely? One of the core organizing principles, which I still believe in today: in conflict, all actions are working either towards a Unilateral solution (imposing your will on the other side) or a Multilateral solution (finding an agreement that both sides accept). Sometimes parties try to do both, but that usually doesn't work well.
The thing about Unilateral strategies is that they are both one-sided (by definition) and path-determinative. If side A chooses to pursue the Unilateral route, side B loses the option of pursuing Multilateral options instead. Side B's options are reduced - either surrender entirely, or go Unilateral themselves.
Regarding Jerusalem and the wider Arab-Israeli conflict, Palestinians now face exactly this choice. Do they become despondent and simply give up, allowing Israel to take over all of the 1948 Mandate territory and becoming second-class citizens in someone else's country? Or do they fight back, pushing what has been a fairly quiescent conflict back into violence?
I don't know the answer here - I can't make a prediction, because I don't have data about how Palestinians see the situation and what their calculations are. But these are the only two outcomes possible - either surrender into de facto apartheid, or go back to violence. Neither is good from the Palestinian perspective, but they don't control the choices they're given.
I'm mindful too that there may be factions in Israel (including, possibly, the ruling Likud party) which see both of these as good outcomes. They will gladly take the territory if Palestinians are willing to surrender it, and they will gladly seize the opportunity to crush Palestinian resistance if provoked.
For those wishing for peace on earth in 2018, this doesn't look like a good start. Either way, Palestinians suffer. Israelis may suffer as well - how much depends on choices yet to be made. Not a great start to the year.
I write a fair amount about academia and higher education. I also write a lot about conflict. Sometimes, I get to cross my realms of expertise and write about both.
It was in that conjunction that this article from this week's Chronicle struck me:
The Reader's Digest version of the story is this: some folks at Northern Arizona University decided to have a public campus form titled "The Specters of Fascism?" It's the kind of thing that universities do - bring their expertise to bear on questions of public interest and hold open discussions about them.
In this case, the forum was mostly about Fascism in Europe, with the added question of whether there were lessons from those historical experiences that might be applicable to the United States today. It's the sort of question that historians, political scientists, sociologists, and others have discussed for decades - interesting, relevant in a high-level sort of way, and amenable to scholarly inquiry. In today's highly polarized political and tribal environment, however, it attracted a different sort of attention than one might expect when academics hold a scholarly forum.
A NAU student affiliated with a group called Campus Reform filmed the event and shared that video with the organization, which posted a segment of it on their website. Campus Reform, which bills itself as "America's leading site for college news", is a conservative project that "exposes bias and abuse on the nation's college campuses". It is an offshoot of the Leadership Institute, an avowedly conservative organization whose mission is "to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in the public policy process".
Needless to say, university professors speculating about whether European fascism has any parallels in American politics today proved to be red meat to conservatives, who boiled the whole thing down to "liberals equating Trump with Hitler". Abusive and threatening emails started flying almost immediately, aimed at faculty members associated with the event (often for things that they didn't say, as the video was apparently unclearly labelled).
Interestingly, the student who took and posted the video also came in for a fair amount of online abuse and some pushback from people on her campus, some of whom accused her of being a racist and of belonging to the "alt-right". She characterized her treatment (perhaps a bit hyperbolically) as "full-on bullying from the university".
The usual frame by which these kinds of stories are viewed is the "academic freedom/freedom of speech" frame. In this view, everyone has the right to say what they like and to express the views that they like. The forum was an exercise of free speech, as was the taping of the forum and posting it online. The subsequent abuse and death threats are merely an unfortunate byproduct of our exercise of our free speech rights.
While correct in itself, this frame is largely useless for understanding what's going on here. What this episode shows is one manifestation of a much larger conflict taking place across society, on campuses as well as in other ways. Once we place this in a conflict frame, we have the chance to make progress towards both understanding and mitigating if not resolving these issues.
Like all conflicts, this one has at least two sides, each of which is a coalition of actors and entities that agree with each other to varying degrees. What holds the sides together is not agreement about facts or ideas, but a sense of common identity - "us" versus "them". The student who posted the video may not like being lumped in with the alt-right, but she's planted her flag on that side and so, in the eyes of her adversaries, she's one of "them".
Like all tribal conflicts, the dynamics are pretty predictable. Each side defines the other as both monolithic and defined by its own worst actors. Each side is reduced to simplistic, usually dehumanizing, epithets by the other ("libtard", "redneck", etc.) Each side has only a vague notion of its goals and objectives - though individual actors may have specific plans - but in broad terms, the conflict is seen as zero-sum - either "we" win or "they" win.
It is this last point that gives rise to the deplorable kinds of behavior that we see - the online bullying, dehumanization, and threats. Because people the conflict is perceived as zero-sum, each side focuses on "winning". There is no notion of compromise or accommodation - such thoughts are heresy, and those who entertain them usually branded as heretics and forced to recant or tossed out of the tribe. In the terms of my own research, each side is pursuing a Unilateral strategy.
Sometimes in international conflict, Unilateral strategies make sense. One thing my research has turned up is that Unilateralism is contagious - if one side gets it, the other side pretty much has to follow suit. It's very difficult for me to try to reach accommodation with you while you're trying to kill me. This is why Zartman has spent so much time researching the notion of "hurting stalemates", because once you're locked into Unilateralism on both sides, it's very difficult to get out.
Some of the rhetoric within our domestic political conflict has taken on this sort of flavor. Dig around a little bit and you can find conservatives (often of the alt-right variety) talking about a "genocide" of liberals, while on the Left you have liberals talking openly about secession (Calexit?) from the rest of the country. Both of these assume a universe in which members of both tribes cannot coexist, at least not in the same political space, giving rise for the need for one or another kind of "final solution".
All of this, of course, is ridiculous. My partner-in-crime on secession research Steve Saideman recently pointed out that Blue State secessionism is nuts and anti-democratic. And the idea that "conservatives" can somehow identify and remove (via death or forced migration) all "liberals" is both wildly unrealistic and horrifying.
The reality is that within the United States, Unilateral strategies are a waste of time. They will never succeed. The only thing they are good for - and this goes a long way to explaining their popularity - is helping some politicians get into power and stay here. The side effect of this political strategy, of course, is that the body politic as a whole suffers. And so a college professor and a college student are both made to suffer so that demagogues who have no interest in resolving conflicts can go to Washington.
The Atlantic recently ran an article covering research that suggests that one side effect of Americans drifting away from organized religion (in particular, the many branches of the Christian church) is that they are become less tolerant of each other. While Christianity is often associated in the public mind with intolerance (towards gays, Muslims, single mothers, and others, mostly because of particularly vocal denominations), it turns out that the universalism within Christian theology (a universalism reflected in most major theological systems around the world) does tend to make adherents less rigid than we usually think. You can only sing "In Christ there is no East or West" so many times on a Sunday before it starts to occur to you that maybe God really does love everybody, even the people you disagree with.
The flight from religion is particularly pronounced on college campuses, both among academics and faculty (who tend to share a culture of cosmopolitan secularism) and among students (who tend to share the young adults' gravitational pull away from the religion of their parents, who increasingly don't have one anyway). So it's not surprising that when the broader conflict surfaces on campus, its manifestation tends to be particularly intolerant. Each side, of course, uses this to accuse the other of hypocrisy, thus making the whole thing worse.
The thing about viewing this as a conflict is that it helps us think about the important questions. What would a "resolution" look like? What is the conflict about, and what kinds of solutions to those problems are possible? Because we tend to think that the conflict is about "ideas" ("liberal" ideas versus "conservative" ideas), we then erroneously think that the solution is for our ideas to "win". That is not, of course, how the "marketplace of ideas" works. Change tends to come evolutionarily. Nothing "wins" or "loses" in whole, but the interaction changes all sides and produces new (and hopefully better) ideas. Hegel was right - the conflict between Thesis and Antithesis produces, at its best, Synthesis.
As long as people are sending death threats to each other, of course, this kind of progress is going to be very slow. And as long as students (of whichever tribe) think that they need to help their side "win" - whether by posting videos of views they don't like to like-minded websites or by shouting down speakers they don't like at public events - not much is going to change.
When you're in a conflict, you should be thinking about how to end it - about what realistic conclusions are possible and about how to get from where we are to one of those, as fast as possible and with the least cost. Right now, people on all sides aren't thinking this way. They're trying to "win" an unwinnable war. If you don't like the idea of strangers flinging death threats around, heed the advice of Joshua: the only winning move is not to play:
I am no fan of Charles Murray or his work. I suspect that if I read it exhaustively, I would find much to criticize. I have read The Bell Curve, and I'm unconvinced by his arguments.
That said: this behavior reported here by a group of Middlebury students is appalling. If free speech on a campus means anything, it means that people who are invited by members of the community - people who apparently thought he had something worth listening to - be allowed to share their views with decorum and civility. Shouting a speaker down, and then jumping on his car as he attempts to leave, are inconsistent with this notion.
The open letter referred to in the article linked above tries to square this circle by arguing, essentially, that there are certain views that are outside the boundaries of free speech protection and which therefore can and should be censured. It also argues that the airing of those views in and of itself constitutes a threat to other members of the community, a form of (their word) intimidation.
This is precisely the kind of division I spoke of in my most recent blog post. It will not get better by shouting and pounding on cars, or even by the more civilized means of "de-inviting" speakers. It will only get better through real dialogue. Whether a public lecture is the best form of that dialogue is another question, but I suspect that the students protesting made no real attempt to have an open conversation with their fellow students who had invited Murray in the first place.
I also suspect that the students who invited Murray in the first place knew darned well what they were doing, and that some of them are likely quite pleased to have provoked their liberal brethren into an overreaction. This is combative politics that divides. Rather than invite a controversial speaker to demonstrate your power, why not have a direct dialogue between student groups?
The students in question (on both sides) probably don't see it this way, but this is a politics of force. It is a politics that says, I am right and you are wrong and I am going to use all of the power at my disposal to impose my will on you. It is as anti-democratic as anything they are protesting against. I do not envy my colleagues in the Middlebury administration as they try to untangle this mess.
A lot of people - even people who don't study karate or the martial arts - have heard of Funakoshi's first two precepts regarding Respect and No First Strike. The other 18 Precepts are not nearly as well known - but there's a lot here that worth unpacking, and a lot that applies to our whole lives.
Funakoshi's third precept is this:
"Karate is an aid to justice."
I think he meant this as a reminder to his students. To study karate, or any martial art, is to develop power - specifically, to increase your power to physically harm other people. That power should only be put to use in the service of justice - that is, in the service and protection of others. Funakoshi, like all great teachers and masters, feared his teachings being used only to create bullies.
This is certainly true for karate - but it is true much more broadly of any kind of power we wield. All of us have the ability to impact others - to bring good or to cause harm, to build up or to tear down. Some have more than others, but this is only a matter of degree, not of kind. To possess power is an inherent part of being human.
Each of us can speak, and many of us can write, and our words will be heard and digested by others.
Each of us interacts with other people every day - some a few, some many. We can choose to make those interactions positive or negative, affirming or denying.
Each of us makes choices every day with our resources - our time, our money, our attention. Those choices impact us, but they also impact the people around us, for good or ill.
The lesson for us here is that, like Funakoshi's students, we should be mindful of the purposes we use our power for. We may not think of ourselves as "powerful", but each of us has an impact on the world.
Knowing that my choices, my actions, and my words have an impact, will I put those to work for justice or for my own selfish gain? Will I try to build a better world for everyone, or will I look to tear others down for my own gain or my own sense of worth? If I'm not pursuing justice intentionally, I may produce some accidentally - but I wouldn't count on it.
Comic book fans know this as the "Peter Parker Principle" - "With great power comes great responsibility." But part of the pull of comic books, especially those stories like Spider-Man which focus on an Everyman who suddenly acquires powers, is that we see ourselves in the characters. What's compelling about Marvel's new TV series, including Daredevil and Luke Cage, is not the main characters' amazing abilities - it is the struggles they face to use whatever abilities they have to make the world a better place. To pursue justice.
In one episode of Luke Cage, the main character is asked by a bystander who witnesses his power, "You're one of them, aren't you?" His answer? "If you mean one of those people who gives a damn, then yes." He's not interested in the nature of his power, only in how he uses it.
This is a warning that almost all martial arts students receive at one point or another: be careful how you use your power, because you can really hurt someone if you try. That's true of all of us - every day we hold the ability to really hurt others if we try. We can also help others with the power at our disposal. We can, if we choose, seek justice.
So remember today that you are powerful. And remember that your power is meant as an aid to justice.
Much of what I write - perhaps nearly all of what I write - touches on issues of power, conflict, and peace. Across areas of human endeavor I am endlessly fascinated with how power is created and exercised, how conflict is kindled and resolved, and what paths we should take in seeking to create peace. These ideas weave in and out of my writing, both here on the blog and elsewhere.
Regular readers know that a part of my personal exploration into these issues revolves around learning and practicing traditional Asian martial arts. In this I am both a student and a teacher; I love sharing what I know with others, and I have so much more to learn myself.
Those who spend time in the traditional martial arts world soon encounter one of its central tenets: that karate, or judo, or kung fu, are not merely for fighting in a ring or practicing in a gym. The benefits of the martial arts extend throughout the student's life, and indeed should be actively sought and considered far beyond the simple practice of physical techniques. This is probably why one of my most-read blog posts of all time is titled, The Benefits of Studying the Martial Arts.
Most of what I write isn't new - far deeper thinkers have been developing these ideas for centuries. What I try to do is simply bring them to audiences that might otherwise not be familiar with the practice of Do - "way", in Japanese. Karate-do, Judo, Aiki-do - all have this common root, a call to a broader understanding and self-improvement in service to others.
One of the best synopses of this is Gichin Funakoshi's list of 20 Precepts. Funakoshi, an Okinawan master who brought karate to Japan in the early part of the 20th century, is often credited as "the father of modern karate". He wrote his Precepts as a way to pass his notion of Do along to his students, to remind them that they were engaged in a calling far higher than learning how to defend themselves in a fight.
Starting with this entry I am planning to write a series of blog posts, one for each of the 20 Precepts, with musings and thoughts on how these apply to the world around us outside the dojo (literally, "Place of the Way"). I hope these will be of interest to practitioners and non-practioners alike.
The first Precept is this:
Karate-do begins and ends with respect.
In traditional martial arts, this is summed up in the bow, or rei. Students and instructors alike "bow in" and "bow out" when they enter and leave the training space, and bow to each other at the beginning and end of each exercise. Bowing is a physical means by which we remind ourselves of the culture of respect.
Some people are uncomfortable in traditional dojos because of this formality. Where else in our lives do we have such physical, visceral symbols of respect? In some traditional churches (though fewer all the time), people bow or reverence the altar or the crucifix, but in my experience this practice isn't universal even in churches that do practice it.
The underlying principle, however, is sound - and sorely needed. When we begin and end interactions with a sign of mutual respect, it is much more difficult in between to mistreat each other. If our first thought when starting a new conversation or walking into a meeting is, "I respect the people here as fellow colleagues", our whole demeanor changes. And if things go sideways in that meeting, ending with a similar posture of respect reminds us that we're on the same team, that we're there to solve problems together, that we share much in common.
In our culture today, in 21st century America, we have almost no such signs of respect. And where we do have them, we reserve them almost exclusively for our friends, our family, for those who are inside our boundaries of comfort. "If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?"
The Christian call to love one another as God loves us can be hard, especially today. That verse is followed by an admonition: "But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return". Even if we cannot imagine ourselves going so far, can we at least take the first step of respecting our enemies?
Funakoshi put this Precept first, I suspect, because he understood that without mutual respect (even mutual love), people will use their power to hurt each other. Karate is a form of power, but we exercise power every day in our conversations and interactions with others. When we start and end with a posture of respect, in between we will work to make sure that we don't use our power to harm, but to help. When I respect others, I want to help them. That is a Way worth following.
For most folks, this is an article about amending the Constitution to limit the size and scope of Federal government. Or it's an article about conservatives using their dominance of state legislatures to push a particular conservative agenda item, the Balanced Budget Amendment. People who identify as conservative may see this story as a hopeful one; people who identify as liberal or progressive will likely see it as a cause for alarm.
I see it as a story about the political process.
In conversation I will sometimes claim that there are "outcome people" and there are "process people", and that I'm a "process person". The dichotomy probably isn't perfect, and to the extent that these categories mean anything at all I suspect that there isn't a very even balance. I think a lot of people are "outcome people", and that "process people" are relatively rare.
There's a lot that's interesting in this story about how a process of amending the Constitution via the states would work. You can read this throughout the article linked above - these are interesting questions, largely since nobody's ever done it before.
But there's a part of this that really saddens me. My reaction doesn't come from the fact that the issue in question - the outcome - is a conservative issue. I believe most economists when they say that a balanced budget amendment would be a bad thing. But the prospect of a conservative "victory" in this arena is not what concerns me.
What does is the reminder that there are plenty of people in our political system who are unelected, extremely powerful, and willing to do absolutely anything short of murder to get their way. The Koch Brothers have become poster children for this problem, but at least they're visible about it. There's a lot of "dark money" floating around trying to influence political outcomes, money owned and controlled by very small numbers of people.
I find this distressing because for these people, democracy is simply one tool among many. If they can use their money, their influence, or their media savvy to obtain a policy outcome that most people don't really want, that's fine with them. They don't care if they have to lie, commit character assassination, distort the facts, make stuff up. They don't care what everyone else things. They don't care about convincing a majority of their fellow Americans. They think they have The Right Answer, and by God they're going to impose that answer on the rest of us come Hell or high water.
This phenomenon doesn't just exist on the right, of course. There are folks on the left who think the same way, who would be gleefully lie and cheat and play games to obtain the outcome they think is best. Trump and his minions have argued that the Clinton campaign will cheat, but the particular form of cheating they're afraid of - voter fraud - is ridiculous (or, as my friend Steve Saideman calls it, #voterfraudfraud). But that doesn't mean there aren't folks out there willing to lie and make stuff up across party or ideological lines. Witness the odd political bedfellows in the anti-vaccine movement.
It is this phenomenon, more than the prospect of this candidate or that candidate winning (yes, even Donald Trump - see this piece for my previous thoughts on that subject), that disturbs me. It's this willingness to put outcome over process - which really means putting outcome over people and relationships, because that's what process is.
There's been a lot of talk about how polarized our politics are, but I don't think there's much appreciation for what that really means. It's not just that we move closer or farther apart on some linear spectrum of policy preferences. Polarization goes beyond disagreement; at a certain level it becomes demonization. We come to see the people on the other side as Evil, as Traitors, as Monsters. We crossed that line a long time ago, and have gotten steadily farther and farther away from it since. Donald Trump's campaign actively encourages this movement; visit a Trump rally and see the t-shirts that people are wearing, listen to the things they are chanting in the crowd.
This is why Trump's "second amendment" comment shocked so many. At minimum, he was flirting with inciting violence against his political opponents - suggesting that people with guns could use those guns against candidates or judges they don't like. The choice of violence over democratic process is the ultimate betrayal of the political system, the Original Sin of politics.
There are many steps short of violence, of course. There are the lies, the distortions, the character assassinations ("Hillary is terminally ill!") People like to say that "politics is a contact sport", as if using a bad metaphor excuses the morally indefensible.
For all that people talk about the intersection between religion and politics (and in our country, particularly Christianity and politics), here is a viewpoint I almost never see. The reason I find all of this so saddening is that this kind of "politics" - the kind that will do anything, slander anyone, commit any sin in order to "win" - fundamentally contradicts the basics of Christianity as I understand them.
In my faith tradition, we are taught that humans are created in the image and likeness of God. That we have a responsibility to respect the dignity of every human being. That God so loved the world that he sacrificed himself for us. That the greatest commandment given by God is love.
There are lots of reasonable discussions about the details and niceties of how one best loves one's neighbor. But all of those discussions are light years away from what happens in our politics. The campaign to amend the Constitution isn't about love, it's about Winning. It's about Being Right. We have an entire presidential campaign that, so far as I have been able to tell, has not one drop of love in it. It is fueled entirely by hate, anger, fear. The other campaign is better, but only by contrast. Not much love there either.
The thing is that in politics, we think that the Outcomes are the most important thing. What policy we have, what law gets passed, what regulations are created or repealed - these are of the highest political priority. But these hardly matter at all to anyone who takes the basic tenets of Christianity seriously. Laws will change, policies will change, regulations will change. Obamacare was created, and it has not brought about the end of the world. If next year a Republican President and a Republican Congress replace it with a new health care system, that won't end the world either.
What does matter, if we take the Gospels at all seriously, is how we treat each other. Indeed, the Gospels scarcely speak of anything else. Jesus' sole foray into the political arena was to tell his followers, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's". Focus on what's really important.
This is why I'm a Process person. Because process is all about how we treat each other, how we work together, how we agree and disagree and discuss and argue. Process is where Love lives. Outcomes, like the grass, wither and pass away; only Love endures.
This is why I am so uncomfortable with political campaigns and electoral cycles. They drive all of the love from the public square and replace it with anger, hatred, fear, greed - the whole range of human sin. They tempt us to replace our faith with what C.S. Lewis called "Christianity and".
When November comes, I will vote. Between now and then, I will look for signs of love.
For much of last week the case of Brock Turner, a Stanford student convicted of raping an unconscious woman, took over the internet. It went viral when the victim issued her own statement at Mr. Turner's sentencing, and when a letter sent by Mr. Turner's father to the judge in the case pleading for leniency was released into the internet wild. It's been bumped from the "front pages" by the Orlando shooting (about which I will write separately), but it remains and will remain a powerful parable.
The case raises many broader issues: the power of privilege and wealth, "rape culture" on campuses, race and the fairness (or lack thereof) of the criminal justice system. All are issues we've been battling over for the last few years; that they all combined in one single story says much about why this particular incident has such a powerful pull.
The story that took over the internet centered around two competing narratives: the narrative of the victim, movingly shared in her lengthy statement linked above, and the narrative constructed by Mr. Turner and his family and friends. Thanks to a lot of work and a lot of discussion in recent years, the narratives of victims of sexual assault have come to be taken seriously, even to hold a place of cultural dominance. So many people are so angry with Mr. Turner's sentence (six months in jail, likely reduced to three for good behavior) and with the Turner family precisely because they seem out of sync with the victim's story of suffering.
The Turner narrative is a throwback to a time when alcohol could be blamed as a causal factor, that this sort of thing could be put down simply to "too much drinking" and "bad judgment". There was a time when those stories would have held sway. As the Turner family is learning, that time is gone.
This narrative is apparent in a number of statements written to the court on Mr. Turner's behalf, including one from the local municipal judge (and former federal prosecutor), who said in part:
There is no doubt Brock made a mistake that night — he made a mistake in drinking excessively to the point where he could not fully appreciate that his female acquaintance was so intoxicated. I know Brock did not go to that party intending to hurt, or entice, or overpower anyone. That is not his nature. It never has been.
The problem with this narrative is that we no longer believe that drinking alcohol will make you do things that are not in some way already part of who you are. Quinn makes an essentialist argument about Mr. Turner's "nature", but to believe her story is to believe that if we drink enough, we will do things that are foreign or alien to us. Some years ago we took away that argument with regard to drunk driving, and we are now well on our way to doing so in cases of sexual assault.
Interestingly, another letter ostensibly written on Mr. Turner's behalf appears to make the same point:
From scientific evidence I have studied during my education and from my experience, alcohol is a depressant and a chemical that can release inhibition and magnify both positive and negative personality traits, something I saw too often and too negatively in the Emergency Department. It is not however a substance that dramatically changes someone’s intrinsic personality traits, suddenly altering someone from being mild mannered to criminalistics.
Full disclosure: I know the author of this letter as a colleague. I have not spoken to him about this case, nor do I know his views beyond this particular quote.
The recent outrage over the case has centered around the sentence given to Mr. Turner: likely three months' jail time, plus a requirement that he register as a sex offender for the rest of his life (in addition to the loss of his position as Stanford and, as has been reported in some places, a lifetime ban from the US Olympic swim team to which he had aspired). Here there is a broad gulf of opinion, with supporters of the victim claiming that the sentence is far too light (and now calling for a recall of the judge in the case) while Turner's family and friends argue that it is in fact too much. Here again Judge Quinn's letter is illustrative:
I believe a prison term will serve no useful purpose in Brock’s case. He is forever changed by the events of that night. Judge please consider other options to prison — options which will serve the purpose for which a sentence is imposed, and options which will leave a future for this very scared young man. Probation could include heavy reporting requirements, counselling, community service in multiple ways, including speaking out about the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption, college partying, and the “hook-up” culture on college campuses throughout the United States.
If you read the victim's statement (linked above) carefully, you will note some convergence here. The victim doesn't was Turner to "rot in jail". She is also not particularly interested in how frightened or scared he is about his own future. What she wants, more than anything, is acknowledgement that her narrative is legitimate and real. She is frustrated that Turner, and his supporters, seem unwilling to accept that there is another story here, another way of understanding what happened.
In that sense, Judge Quinn is right about one thing: prison time will not, in itself, help Mr. Turner very much. As retribution three months is quite light, but retribution isn't the point here. In terms of rehabilitation - changing his heart - prison is a terrible tool, and likely to have very little if any affect.
Quinn's call for probation with community service, however, misses the mark. Read the victim's statement carefully and you can see that what her narrative demands is in fact far harder than prison, far more difficult than talking to college students about the dangers of drinking and partying. It demands not only acknowledging but embracing the very real and terrible pain he caused, and the fact that he himself caused it through decisions he made. It insists that he face that squarely, not hiding behind alcohol or youthful indiscretion or anything else - that he take the full weight of his sin upon himself, hold it and accept it as part of himself.
As the Christian church (among many other faith traditions) has been teaching for thousands of years, there is no other way to receive true forgiveness and peace than to first embrace the sin. It is an incredibly painful process, far worse than simply spending a few months in prison. It is so painful, in fact, that many spend their whole lives running from it. It is a path that no court, no government, can mandate; only Mr. Turner himself can choose it.
However "broken" his friends and family claim that he is, we know that he has not yet chosen that path. He has made no statement indicating anything other than his "alcohol-made-me-do-it" story. He continues his legal battle to appeal his conviction. To all outwards appearances, he is as convinced as ever that he did very little wrong. He is not ready to own his victim's pain and her story.
I do not know Mr. Turner or his family, but they appear determined to fight with all of the tools available to "free" their son from the punishments imposed upon him - punishments which will make his life more difficult, but which will not in themselves change his heart. That path will always be open to him, and we can hope that someday he takes it. Until then, this story will continue to be only a tragedy, and Mr. Turner both a despised and pitied figure in it.
It's May 4 (better known in much of the Nerdverse as May the Fourth) again. Three years ago I published this post talking about how, while I'm a huge nerd and a Star Wars fan, I'm ambivalent about the widespread cultural acceptance of May 4 as a sort of unofficial "Star Wars Day", because in so doing we have lost what little remembrance we had of the much more serious events at Kent State some four and a half decades ago.
In this midst of this Presidential election cycle, with all its unexpected bizarreness, I think that remembering Kent State is more important than ever. As is typical, I've had a blog post floating around in my head for a while with the title "Why I'm Not Afraid of President Trump" - this is as good an opportunity as any to try to get that point across.
What does the Trump campaign have to do with remembering Kent State? In part because remembering the past helps us put the present in some context. There is a pretty widespread #neverTrump movement within the Republican Party, and I have a number of Republican friends who regard Trump as a fascist and a threat to the republic. The former accusation may be true, at least to a degree; the latter probably is not.
Much of the narrative of this election cycle has been about the "angry voter". The success of Trump, and the better-than-expected showing of Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side, are held up as indicators that the American voter is "mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore". There is talk of "revolt" and "revolution". All of this because voters are voting for people somewhat outside the usual (rather narrow) mainstream of US politics.
We need to stop for a moment and remember what angry politics really looks like. If you want to see real anger in action, go back and watch footage of the riots outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago (an event that spawned the primary voter system we have today). Or read accounts of the race riots in over 100 American cities that same summer. Find a decent, sober history of the Weathermen (yes, I share a name [sort of] with one of their founders - no relation). And then read accounts, not only of the Kent State (and Jackson State) shootings, but of the divided reactions afterwards.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were suffused with anger so broad and so deep that substantial numbers of people seriously entertained the notion that violence was not only an acceptable tool of social and political change, but a necessary one. Part of this was generational, part of it racial, part based on the sudden collapse of a number of social norms and structures simultaneously. A lot of people were pissed off at other people (on both the Left and the Right), and in that anger were willing to support or at least sympathize with violence directed against their enemies.
Seen in that context, the interpersonal violence that has broken out at Trump rallies seems pale and almost pathetic in comparison. Yes, the candidate himself has at times egged his supporters on to beat up those who disagree with them. This has been directed largely at opponents who have shown up to those rallies - the few who have walked into the lion's den, as it were. Ugly as these incidents are, they are far removed from Nazi brownshirts accosting Jews in the street, much less an organized mass attack like Krystallnacht.
I find Trump reprehensible and completely unacceptable both as a candidate and, insofar as he presents himself in public, as a person. He is unqualified to be President. Being President would also probably drive him nuts, because it is a profoundly limited position. The history of our last three Presidents - all of them serving for two terms each - illustrates this nicely.
Opposition to Bill Clinton appears to have been largely personal, not ideological or political. Though Republicans accused him of being a "tax and spend" Democrat who would blow up the Federal government's finances, he was in fact a centrist who supported conservative ideas in welfare reform and brought the budget deficit down to near zero (depending on your accounting rules). He faced determined opposition in Congress despite his centrism. At the end of eight years, none of the terrible things Republicans feared had come true and the country was, to a substantial degree, much better off than it had been in 1992.
Leftist opposition to George W. Bush centered around both his foreign policies and, for the most committed opponents, his suspected authoritarian/fascist tendencies. His electoral victory in 2000 was questionable, which put his administration under a cloud from the beginning. The neoconservatives he brought into the government responded to the 9/11 disaster by starting major wars which, sadly, are still with us. These were policy failures of a significant order. He also supported a number of centrist domestic policies, with mixed results. One could lay some blame on the administration, perhaps, for the collapse of the financial system near the end of his Presidency, leading to the worst economic downturn in a generation. But in the end, he and his administration walked away from power after the 2008 election, and while the country was worse off the problems were recoverable and the republic still intact.
President Obama has faced a level of opposition not seen in modern times in our political system, both ideological and personal. His opponents have spread the most absurd of stories (He's a Kenyan! A Muslim! A socialist bent on destroying America!) while working to block nearly any initiative his administration has tried to undertake. Most of those initiatives have been (surprise!) centrist ones - even the much-maligned "Obamacare" is based on health care reform ideas largely drafted by Republicans a decade or two earlier, a far cry from the single-payer or government-run systems preferred by some on the Left. Nearing the end of his eight years in office, the country is somewhat better off, but not perhaps as far along as many might wish. But if he was trying to destroy the nation, he completely, totally, and utterly failed.
The point of these stories is that they all have a sameness. Despite our howls of protestation about the evils of our opponents (whoever they may be), there is a center of gravity in the American political system. That center can (and does) shift over time - since the 1980s it has shifted significantly to the right, which is why repeated Republican protestations about being victims in a country about to collapse into leftist socialism are bafflingly bizarre. The conservative movement has in fact been succeeding in slow, steady increments, yet to listen to them talk you'd think they were Davy Crockett at the Alamo.
And this is why I refuse to be afraid, even if Donald Trump is elected President. Whatever else he does, he will not push the country still farther to the right - he's not a conservative and never has been, which is why he keeps violating conservative principles on the campaign trail. He will not make the country more racist or xenophobic than it already is - all he is doing is drawing out the existing racism, xenophobia, and misogyny in the population. In a way (as some in the NYT have argued) he may be doing us a favor by bringing this nastiness out into the light where it can be more effectively countered.
Trump as President would be confronted with a badly divided and electorally weakened Republican party in Congress, quite likely a Democratic Senate that can filibuster anything he tries to do, and a vast Federal bureaucracy with decades of experience in centrist governance. Washington, DC isn't the Celebrity Apprentice - you can't just fire everybody and start over. If he tries - really tries - to impose his desires simply by force of will, as he has tended to do in his business life, he will rapidly find himself unable to do much of anything, and he might be impeached. His penchant for litigation will get him nowhere - who do you sue when you're the President?
Most of the stuff Americans really care about - that is, the economy - is beyond a President's grasp anyway. The Federal government tends to operate at the margins on the economy. Yes, decisions made today can have significant effects tomorrow. But given the opposing forces battling over those decisions, they are unlikely to drive us off a cliff. On foreign policy, Trump is likely to alienate a number of American allies - but will he do worse than George W?* In the end, international relations (as the Realists remind us) really is based on interests, not on personalities. Europeans and others understand this. They will suffer what they must and do what they can, and they will continue to work with the United States when it suits them, as they always have.
There's a popular saying that every crisis is an opportunity in disguise. A Trump Presidency would represent a crisis of sorts, but it would also present a lot of opportunities to have important conversations about what kind of country we want and how we're all going to get along in it. In the end, his greatest impact could well be to unite the country against him. Whatever happens, in the end the republic will still be standing. And so, while I will vote against him and urge everyone I know to do the same, I am not afraid.
*Some have argued that Trump's foreign policy views in particular need to be carefully examined, because Presidents have absolute power over foreign policy in a way they don't in the domestic sphere. See this piece in Vox today for an example of this view. I disagree with this diagnosis - there are in fact a great number of checks on the power of a President in foreign policy, not least that it is formulated, carried out, and managed by large bureaucracies (State, DoD, Treasury, even to some degree the NSC) staffed by professionals. Most of these organizations are only penetrable by Presidents down three or maybe four levels - everyone else is there whether you like them or not. And there probably aren't enough qualified people who share Trump's views on FP to staff all those Deputy Undersecretary slots. Some senior military officers have even indicated during the campaign that they will disobey orders that contradict US law and the Constitution - as they should. So in the end, I think a President Trump would find foreign policy just as frustrating as domestic policy, perhaps even more so.
Much ink has been spilled during this Presidential campaign cycle about the divisions within American politics. Analyses both sophisticated and mundane have been offered suggesting what divides us from each other. Of particular interest: what separates supporters of one candidate from supporters of another? Why do those people support candidate A, and what makes them different from supporters of candidate B? These are interesting and, to some degree, illuminating questions. But they miss a larger point.
The larger point is this: in the end, amidst all the ideologies and labels about "conservatives" and "liberals" and "progressives" and "tea partiers" and "socialists" and whatnot, there are really only two ways to run a government. All of those labels denote preferences - that is, things that people prefer to see in terms of the outcomes of politics. But as most people who study politics know, it's not about the outcomes so much as it is about the process. And in process, there aren't a multitude of options - there are only two:
1) We recognize that we have different preferences and devise a system in which everyone has a chance to express their preferences and give input. The end result is a weighted average of those preferences, with some bright lines ("rights") established and agreed to ahead of time that cannot be violated no matter what mass preferences are.
2) Political outcomes are decided by threats, intimidation, and force. Whoever has the most power will impose their preferences on everyone else, by threats if sufficient, by violence where necessary. Politics is essentially an extension of combat. Compromise occurs only when opposing preferences have sufficient power to balance each other.
In short, governments run either by a process of rules and agreement, or by a process of force and violence.
The first option, government by process and agreement, is largely but not completely a function of the Enlightenment. It holds up a particular set of ideas, chief among these being that people should not kill each other over political outcomes and that maximizing the welfare of the whole population is something that, as in Kant's Categorical Imperative, everybody should reasonably want.
The second, government by force, has largely been the default mode through much of human history. It can be found in every corner of the world, among every people, in nearly every age. It is so ubiquitous that some have suggested that it is at the heart of the human animal, a part of our very nature.
These are, to some degree, ideal types. Governments have been known to use horrific force against some groups (Jews in Nazi Germany, for example) while those same governments engage in cooperative action to look after the welfare of "their own". It is usually the lure of tribalism (or nationalism, or ethnocentrism, or racism - take your pick) that lures people back from the ideals of a reasonable society for all to a society in which violence against some is OK, even warranted.
Why does this matter? Because we tend to forget that, behind all of the other left/right, liberal/conservative divides that we put up, that there are some questions far more fundamental. We also tend to forget that, at least once upon a time, there was something that we really did all agree on.
I say "once upon a time", because now we have the Drumpf phenomenon.
I have said previously that I prefer not to write about Drumpf, because he gets enough press as it is. What I'm arguing here is not specific to his campaign, or to his followers. The phenomenon that is the Drumpf campaign has simply laid bare the choice that we face. It has also forced us to confront a difficult reality: we may have thought that Americans at least agreed on this, but it turns out that we do not.
What we have been faced with in recent months is a candidate, and his followers, who are clearly in Camp #2. They draw fairly clear lines between "us" and "them", even though members of both groups are what the rest of us would identify as "Americans". And Drumpf and his followers are clearly all too willing to engage in violence - in fact, that's exactly how they think things should be. Compromise, listening to others, following rules - those are for the weak, Drumpf says. And his followers clearly agree.
The Drumpf phenomenon is not alone here. Increasingly, "protestors" have been going to Drumpf rallies and attempting to shout him down or otherwise disrupt the proceedings. One even rushed the stage at an event here in Dayton, although that individual's motives were unclear. And while there has been much talk about free speech rights and their limits, some of these protestors aren't engaged in speech per se - they're trying to force a different outcome. They, too, want to exercise power in order to impose their will on others, if only in a limited way (by disrupting an event).
When faced with force, it is easy to resort to force ourselves. It is tempting to argue that we need to "fight fire with fire". But in a political process, that takes us all down the same road. We're not conducting campaigns anymore, we're simply engaged in a backyard brawl. And every escalation by one side is taken as justification for counter-escalation by another.
For me at least, this is what the Presidential campaign is about. It's not about Democrat or Republican, not about Conservative or Liberal, Socialist or Capitalist. Those are for the most part outcome preferences. This election cycle is really about the fundamental process question: what kind of politics do we want? Will we decide our futures together, as one nation of competing interests and ideas working with each other? Or will our futures be decided by brute force, with the strongest and most brutal winning out?
I know that kind of country I want to live in. I used to think I could take it for granted. I don't think that's true anymore.
