Is it the Right vs. the Left--or the Right + the Left vs. the rest of us? At the local level, it's the latter.

If the Left seems to think the corporations can do no right, the Right reciprocates by thinking they can do no wrong. The notion that they've already paid the taxes on the money where it was made is part of this touching faith in corporate saintliness. As I said earlier, I don't think corporations are wicked. Just profit-seeking entities which are, however, distorted by the efforts of many of their executive suites to profit themselves, independent of what's done for the shareholders.

Time after time the executive class has managed to decouple itself from the fortunes of both their corporations and their nations (to the degree that the major corporations have any real ties to any one nation). Thus executive compensation has been shown to have zero degree of correlation with corporate profitability.

Yet this small group of a few thousand people, along with their families and hangers-on, have managed to persuade roughly a third of the nation to virtually worship them. To believe that all good in the land flows from their hands. That without them the nation would wither on the vine. And that the only alternative to their unfettered action is some home-grown version of the Soviet State.

How fitting, then, that the high priestess of this secular religion was a lady who'd seen her parents' property confiscated by the Bolsheviks and concluded that all government is inherently evil.

I've concluded that every locus of power is inherently self-aggrandizing and requires some form of checks and balances--and transparency.

For example, my city's government is controlled by right wing developers and left wing public employee unions and trade unions. Public input is solicited, politely listened to, then completely ignored. The only thing the city council listens to--apart from their patrons--is referendums and elections.

And the constant ranting between right wingers and left wingers is useless at this local level, since at this level--as is true in most cities, I suspect--the issue is an alliance of right wing and left wing special interests against the vast majority of the city's residents.

conservatives vs. reactionaries

Conservatives look forward cautiously. Reactionaries look backward longingly.

That's the difference, brought into sharp focus by this year's election politics.

And I've seen the Republican Party slowly morph from a conservative party into a reactionary one over the decades since people like Dwight D. Eisenhower led the party--and created the national highway system, a bold vision we now take for granted.


Look at this election year. The GOP campaign is against President Obama--not for Governor Romney. It's "Repeal and replace" against ObamaCare, with virtually nothing about the "replace" part--because past that bumper sticker slogan there's the added two words that are understood by most people as being "with nothing."


The GOP speaks to our inner child--the three year old boy who doesn't want to be told what to do. Who just wants to be left alone (until he needs something). 


This is an abiding dream. In fact it's how the United States was first organized, under the Articles of Confederation. The Federal government had almost no authority within the nation's borders. Didn't work out, did it?

It looks to me like that's what the GOP wants us to return to. It's certainly what their patrons, the CEO+Investor class, want.

But we don't have to go back to the 18th century to see how that would work in today's world. We have only to look to Europe. Aren't the Republicans demanding that we adopt their setup, with the EU plus NATO? Each state has vastly more autonomy than those of the US, and the banks call the shots economically.

How's that working out for them?

The fact is that against our present economic and potential military competitors abroad, and against the power large corporations can bring to bear against not just individuals but even whole states (Exxon alone is a more powerful economic entity than a lot of states--half of them?), the individual doesn't stand a chance.

Back in the 18th century we had virtually no trade with other countries--just a few luxury goods, basically. The young republic was self-sufficient. Nobody could invade us, as the Brits found out--and they were one of the most powerful nations on Earth at the time. But General Atlantic defeated them, ultimately. Though even then if the Royal French Navy hadn't intervened at a critical juncture we might have lost that war.

Now we have trade all over the place. China snuck a monopoly on rare earths production under Bush II's nose, and now we have to pay through the nose for a vital ingredient without which our cellphones wouldn't work. China has also gotten a near-monopoly on solar panels through government-subsidized production + low-wage labor that has bankrupted industries in "free" countries. Now we get to pay for that freedom. Not to mention foreign oil, which forces us to care what Arabs do.

Multiply these webs of interdependencies by thousands and you get today's world.

We could achieve autonomy today by returning to the self-sufficient, rural, agrarian, low-tech USA of 1776. For a start we'd have to get rid of most of our population living in cities--having so many people requires a high-tech urban society to maintain. So we'd have to do what Pol Pot did and exterminate them, starting with all races and cultures that aren't Anglo whites. That would thin the herd, but we'd have to get rid of more to achieve true self-sufficiency. Maybe all Anglos who are liberals and independents.

That would also free us from all Green-type regulations and restrictions. With a population of just a few million we could pollute at will without damaging the environment appreciably.

But that's not going to happen. So here we are in a world we can't control by ourselves, since we have to have the cooperation of other sovereign nations, and since the physical universe doesn't care whether we like environmental regulations or not. We'll have to deal with the consequences of collapsing fish stocks, salinization of irrigated croplands, collapsing porous aquifers, and above all the possibility of outrunning our drinking water resources--especially given the unsolved problem of water table pollution from both industrial livestock production and fracking.

As if that's not enough, what about political alliances? If China invades Taiwan, do we just shrug and tell Taiwan "You're on your own, pal." Or how about if a radicalized Egypt invaded Israel? How about if the Euro collapses, which is a definite possibility. We're inextricably intertwined in world financial markets, and economic turmoil in Europe could whack our economy regardless of whether Romney or Obama wins. How about a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan? And what do we do about the informal alliance of Russia, China, Brazil and some others semi-against us?

We can't secede from the planet. We have to form alliances with people we don't like to avoid consequences we don't want. We can't order around other countries. We have to make nice, make connections--and honor prior agreements a new administration doesn't like. We're still dealing with the agreements Bush II unilaterally abrogated during his terms in office.

In every area the instincts of reactionaries lead us astray--and contrary to the instincts of actual conservatives. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's something like the difference between the conservative Islamic government of Turkey and the reactionary Islamic government of Iran. Turkey's no saint on human rights but it's way better than Iran, and it's doing very well economically, while Iran is circling the drain.

The philosophy of "I'm against whatever you're for" doesn't work. Time after time the Republicans    declare their opposition to something they'd favored, even invented...until President Obama advocated it.

Best example: the universal healthcare insurance mandate, invented by conservatives because they didn't want healthcare moochers not getting health insurance until they needed it, which would invalidate the concept of insurance. But whatever you think about the universal mandate, it's a matter of record that conservatives cooked it up and its first application was by Governor Romney, albeit on the state level. But the principle of a universal mandate is the same on any scale, even if you think states' rights red herring trumps it at the national level.

Eisenhower was a conservative. He was absolutely not a liberal. But he had forward-looking ideas, like the national highway system. Bush I was a conservative. He didn't advance on Iraq until he had his ducks lined up. He raised taxes when it became clear that the alternative was even worse. He was conservative, not an ideologue, not rigid. Reagan also raised taxes and was pretty good at forging alliances. Bush II was a reactionary, trying to be the un-Clinton, the un-Bush I. In that sense he succeeded wildly...at America's cost.

Let me add that the Democratic Party's unquestioning embrace of illegal immigration, infinite population growth, and the minority-ization of America's Anglo culture are no improvement on the GOP's reactionary stance. There should be a word for the loony opposite of "reactionary." Whatever it is, that's that the Democrats have become--just not as whatever-it-is as the reactionaryism of the GOP. Which is why I'm still voting for Obama this November, but without the wide-eyed enthusiasm of some.

Conservatives' main issues aren't conservative issues

Consider the word "conservative." It comes from the verb "to conserve." It means being slow to adopt new, untried ideas/practices. It means valuing our traditions highly. It means being level-headed and practical, not hot-headed and theoretical.

That doesn't mean it was "liberal" to declare war on Japan the day after Pearl Harbor--in that case our hand was forced. Likewise it wasn't "liberal" to end WWII with a new weapon, given the extraordinary circumstances of that moment.

Now consider the conservative hot-button issues in play today:

1. Homosexual marriage

 Certainly there is no tradition of homosexual marriage in America (or anywhere else to my knowledge).
However, there is also no such thing as "the gay lifestyle" as the term is bandied about in conservative circles, because homosexuality is not a choice. It's something you're born with. There is no scientific evidence to indicate otherwise. As the large-scale research study reported on in the 1979 book "Love and Limerance" (1979) found, though a small of minority of people engage in sex with both sexes, people only fall in love with people of one gender. So no one is bi-romantic, so to speak.

This means that the percentage of people who are homosexual neither increases nor decreases according to how much the so-called "gay lifestyle" is accepted or sanctioned.

So "gay marriage," whether it's legal or not, is a blip statistically, because so few people are born homosexual--probably less than 2% of the population. The children of conservatives who are not born homosexual will not become homosexual even if they're taught by homosexual teachers preaching homosexuality throughout their schooling, even if your neighbors are all homosexual couples. The children raised by homosexual couples are no more likely to become homosexual than anyone else's children.

So it just doesn't matter, one way or another, in any practical, conservative terms.The energy expended on this issue is ridiculous in denotatively conservative terms. That is, it's a major distraction from genuine conservative issues like the national debt.

2. Gun control

In 1776 it took at least half a minute to reload a gun unless it had two barrels. Accuracy was iffy at any real distance--especially with anything but rifles, and rifles with yard-long barrels at that. Even the Civil War, 85 years later, was largely fought with muskets.

This means that modern weaponry has a level of power, accuracy and volume of fire utterly unknown to the people who wrote the Constitution, including the Second Amendment.

So the Right's fanatical support for virtually unrestricted modern handguns and rifles is anything but conservative. It represents a radical experiment, promoted not so much by the NRA as by the gun manufacturers who keep in the shadows but who utterly control and direct the NRA.

3. Abortion

The Bible says nothing about abortion. In fact, the Bible only mentions that babies don't get any rights as people until they've survived 30 days out of the womb--very practical in ancient times. So while the technology needed to do safe, practical family planning--from contraception to abortion--is relatively new...so is opposition to it.

So it wouldn't be conservative to instantly embrace abortion rights--but is also isn't conservative to invent a level of humanity that fertilized eggs don't have, or of misinterpreting sonograms to imagine that fetuses are little men and women, contrary to all scientific evidence about fetal development.

In fact this extreme reaction to abortion is less conservative than it is, well, ..reactionary. Which you might describe as conservatism morphing into a mixture of panic and rage.

It's not conservative to get into a froth--even over things that are important to you.

4. Science

Partisans of every stripe treat truth instrumentally, depending on whether it advances or retards their agenda. Liberals, for example, deny science when it comes to things like overpopulation and race, and (in Europe especially) genetically modified foods, and also nuclear power (new smaller-sized reactors represent a miniscule fraction of the risk of the big Fukushima-scale ones). People who call themselves conservatives do the same over overpopulation and environmentalism and man-caused global warming in particular.

Not that they should be all-out tree-huggers, but it has become a right wing reflex to just automatically take the side of Exxon Corporation and the Koch Brothers--no coincidence, given the efforts they've made to accomplish just that. It's amazing to see people who call themselves conservative oppose conservation, and in doing so to completely dismiss the validity of science and scientists. Or to think they can treat science on an a la carte basis.

It's the resurgence of an unapologetic, confrontational anti-intellectualism that shows how uneducated at least half the country is.

And to the point of this essay, it's hardly conservative to reject out of hand conclusions that scientists have spent many years of research and analysis and peer debate to arrive at. It seems that in today's conservative (self-described) movement, business and religious authorities are accepted credulously, while academic authorities would be lucky to be treated with skepticism instead of contemptuous dismissal wrapped in accusations of "liberal bias" and a worldwide conspiracy to cook the date to get grant money.

It's the kind of reaction I'd expect from English villagers in the Middle Ages, not modern Americans.

The Founding Fathers didn't believe in policies--they believed in goals

we tend to consider the Founding Fathers' specific policy/government recommendations rather than the goals those recommendations served; so that under very different circumstances--like the world today--being smart, independent thinkers by and large, they might recommend very different specific policy points, because they cared less about the policies than about the fundamentals of each American having as much opportunity to actualize himself as possible, and government governing with as much fairness and efficacy as possible. 

It's like being a bush pilot. Your goal, coming in for a landing, isn't to fly in a particular way regardless of weather--it's to land in one piece. Absent crosswinds and other weather problems, you come in straight of course. But if you've got a 30Kt crosswind you'll come in with plane facing kind of sideways--hairy to look at from the ground--and then touch one wheel down while horsing the plane around to point forward so as not to snap the landing gear off or flip the plane.

The point isn't to come in in any particular way--it's to come in so you land safely, adapting your flying to the flying conditions.

Which is why I don't think either Jefferson, Hamilton or Adams would change their goals about the good life for Americans that they sought to support with their policy ideas--just that you gotta know the territory, to quote from The Music Man.

For example, they may have supported every able man having a gun in the house. By "gun" meaning, of course, a musket that takes at least half a minute to reload between shots, per barrel. Laws appropriate to a musket-level technology might be silly to insane in the context of an RPG/Mac10/SAW/50 cal. sniper rifle technology. And in a highly heterogeneous society like ours. 

So I'm only saying that the Founding Fathers seemed to be pretty smart. The rest follows logically.

A plurality of Americans now call themselves "Conservative"

That's the Gallup Poll's conclusion:

"U.S. Political Ideology Stable With Conservatives Leading

August 1, 2011

Forty-one percent of Americans thus far in 2011 self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate and 21% as liberal, continuing a slight advantage for conservatism seen since 2009. Many more Republicans call themselves conservative (71%) than Democrats call themselves liberal (38%)."

 

 

Of course this trend must be considered in the context of the Right's relentless, abundantly financed propaganda campaign. The Left tries to do its own propaganda campaign, and much of it is just as unfair as the Right's, but their bullhorn is microscopic compared to the Right's.

Now the Right counters that the mainstream media--the New York Times and most other major newspapers, and the major broadcast networks are all "biased," spinning the news leftward because most mainstream journalists are registered Democrats. 

However, Democrat or not, the owners of the mainstream media are not Democrats. They're corporatists out for profit, not to promote leftist ideology. So while you can find bits and pieces of leftist bias in the mainstream media, by and large the bias is for whatever promotes profit--spicy scandal, puppies in wells, violent crime etc. That's not to say that these outlets don't editorialize from an often left-of-center viewpoint. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with these outlets' reportage. 

Moreover, the Right maintains a constant campaign to attack any mainstream outlet that says anything they don't like, including barrages of letters and calls, and attempts to mount advertiser boycotts. Mainstream journalists talk about these behind-the-scenes campaigns with shock and awe when they've been the target of them.

So the rightward tilt of the American populace didn't happen because all these people are reading the Constitution and all the bills in Congress and all the Presidential decrees and Supreme Court decisions. They are the product of the slickest propaganda the world has yet seen, and if you watch Fox--as I do regularly--you'll see it in action. 

But that rightward tilt still makes liberals plus moderates a substantial majority of 57% of the public. 

This means that a conservative candidate's best strategy is to lean far rightward, inflame the base, and do everything possible to discourage moderates and liberals from voting, while a moderate-to-liberal candidates's only hope is to forge a moderate-liberal coalition, plus conservatives who are intelligent enough to realize that the Republican Party isn't conservative in fact, and hasn't been since Bush I left office.

To my liberal and conservative friends as they yell at each other

A study done during the Bush v. Kerry campaign rounded up a bunch of partisan Democrats and Republicans, put 'em in an MRI brain scanner and while there had each consider material that was negative about their guy and negative about the other guy.

Both kinds of partisans reacted exactly the same: they experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance when they read negative stuff about their guy. They proceeded to rationalize away that stuff, and at the same time to treat the negative stuff about the other guy as presaging the End of the Republic if he won.

During this entire process their brains' cerebral cortexes never lit up. Not once. All the processing went on down in the Chimpanzee Core of the human bran, after which the partisan got a rush of endorphins upon getting rid of that distressing cognitive dissonance.

Conclusion:

* Doctrinaire Republicans and Democrats process political information IDENTICALLY--with emotions and tribal associations, not reasoning.

* Each only sees the bad in the other and only the good in themselves.

* Each considers their political philosophy as if it were a religious faith, whose principles are self-evident and not to be questioned. 

* Each sees the other as having consciously decided to be evil and destroy America and themselves to be right-thinking patriots (though the extremes of both extremes hate America--both the commie one-worlders and the militia group conspiracy nuts). 

* And each defines the same political terms differently, making it nearly impossible for them to communicate with each other.

* Consequently each sees the other as believing self-contradictory things because they apply their own definitions to the things the other side says.

My conclusion: America needs liberals, conservatives, and centrists. So has every tribe back to the dawn of time.

The tribe always had to decide whether to move or stay put, go to war or flee or surrender, try the new berry or not, see if you can pull more with those round thingies or a travois (answer: depends on surface conditions, actually). And between the eager proponents of the new thing and staunch defenders of the old, of considering issues by probable outcome or by strict adherence to principles, a plurality of centrists has always been needed to mediate, listen, and make the soundest decision possible.

Politics gets out of whack when either liberals or conservatives get control--or when the whole shebang becomes so mired in special interests that nobody gets what they want except for a relative handful of powerful families, as is true in most of the third world, and as has become true recently in America.

Those powerful families are delighted by liberals and conservatives thinking each other is the enemy, when its actually a group that has no political philosophy other than getting power, keeping it, and getting more.

But every time the people start to get an inkling of what's been done to them, the richest families get us to go after each other--and by doing so, play into their hands.

The Republican Party's rich patrons aren't really conservative, except when it fattens their wallets. As a Democrat I consider my part slightly less corrupt, but only slightly, and covertly beholden to the same patrons under the table, along with certain special interests.

Some have said there's only one party in Washington--the Party of Money.

I wouldn't go so far. Liberals and conservatives have real differences, of course. But have you noticed that neither side gets what it wants after "their" party gets back into power? Bills emerge, but always so loopholed and skewed to satisfy the whispering voices in the corridors that they're hardly recognizable.

Take healthcare reform. Yay, we won. Only "we" wanted single payer. What we actually got was the mildest of reforms--trumpeted as Armageddon by the Right, of course. But watch what "your" pols do now.

The fact is that the incomes of nearly all Democrats and Republicans have stagnated for over 30 years, while the richest of the rich have appropriated more and more of America's financial output. This has held true through both Republican and Democratic administrations.

And that's the reality, folks. So just remember as you're yelling at each other--you're amusing the billionaires no end.

The Right doesn't like sociobiology (& neither does the Left)

Yesterday New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks wrote a column debunking evolutionary psychology. You can find it at:
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/opinion/26brooks.html?_r=1)

Here's my debunking of his debunking:

Wow. This was a breathtakingly shallow editorial. Brooks argues persuasively against an evolutionary psychology that no evolutionary psychologist proposes. In other words, he's committing the "straw man argument" fallacy, where you oversimplify and distort someone's position, then knock down the oversimplified distortion.

Oh, and it's actually sociobiology. That was the original name for this field, and it still fits it best. Sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists persist in trying to be the last dog to whizz on every intellectual fire hydrant, perpetually rebranding areas of interest that cross over those disciplines' traditional boundaries.

Sociobiology just says that to understand modern behavior, it helps to understand where it came from. Nobody says that we act just like Kenyan hunter-gatherers did 50K years ago. Moreover--and here's one reason why I prefer calling it sociobiology--we are designed from the get-go to function in groups--some sociobiologists might go so far as to call an individual human being the instantiation of his/her gene pool.

Thus altruism is perfectly understandable when you look on us as a pack animal whose children are utterly dependent on us far longer than any other animal.

As for our vaunted malleability--well sure...up to a point. Those who are most controlled by their primitive heuristics are those who deny their influence the most.

Thus I know I'm hardwired to lust after salt/fat/sugar/meat--all vital to have in small amounts in our ancestors' world. That knowledge helps me fight the urge to overindulge in all of those things--yet I'm still packing 25 lbs. of lard I shouldn't be carrying--and the odds are that half or more of those reading this know what I do and still carry spare tires too.

Brooks really needs to read two books before he says any more about this field: The Moral Animal, which speculates about human morality evolved, and how the ingrained instincts involved are mediated in today's environment; and Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule our Minds, by a cognitive psychologist at MIT, which shows how primitive heuristics built into our brains helped us survive back then but distort our understanding of reality now.

One example: every time you see a three-pronged electrical outlet a face-seeking heuristic in your brain lights up and demands to know if that's actually a face. It was a vital survival trait for our ancestors to see faces quickly and in shadows--and far safer to see more than really are there than to miss one. I know this, and yet every time I see a 3-prong outlet I still feel that heuristic lighting up.

So yes, we can and do adapt. It's in our nature to be adaptable. But if you know anything about object-oriented programming (okay, I live in Silicon Valley--so sue me), you can think of our mind as having these nuggets of primitive instincts with modern adaptations wrapped around them. The wrappers can't change the nuggest, but they do let us function. However, in many circumstances--especially if we're unconscious of them--they subtly reassert themselves.

Liberals loathed sociobiology when it came out, because they need philosophically to see Man as infinitely malleable--a blank slate free for any sort of social experimentation, with no innate racial or gender mental differences whatsoever.

Conservatives also hated it because they need to believe that we are moral free agents, each of us totally responsible for everything we say or do from the instant of our 18th birthday onward.

Both sides forget Santayana's definition of freedom: arranging your chains as comfortably as possible...