I find the uproar over the Kavanaugh nomination to SCOTUS to be emotionally tiring. Not because I’m a liberal or a conservative, but because, not being a member of either of the aforementioned tribes, I don’t have the luxury of chanting in unison with my fellow ideological travelers. I am stuck with the non-trivial task of trying to evaluate the situation with my brain, rather than shaking my goofy little spear at my enemies while gibbering wildly.
And notice I didn’t say ‘nomination,’ but ‘situation.’ By this I mean the many facets of this ridiculous clusterfuck:
- The removal of the requirement of 60+ yea notes in the Senate to confirm, an idea advanced by former Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), and implemented and utilized by current Senate leader (a term to be used loosely, if not with derision) Mitch McConnell (R-KY – notice how both major American parties are complicit in this screw up).
- The attempts by the GOP to ram this nomination through so quickly it’ll leave flaming wreckage in its wake.
- The last-hour appearance of an accusation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh in the person of Professor Ford. Why didn’t this show up earlier in the process? See: Looming mid-terms.
- The refusal to release relevant material by the Administration under the rubric of Executive privilege relating to Kavanaugh’s job duties in previous Administrations. This is apparently unprecedented, particularly since we’re not talking about release to the public, but only to the Senate. The job of the Senate is to evaluate a nominee, and that evaluation must range from job qualifications to possible vulnerabilities which would permit a national adversary to influence decisions he may make as a member of the highest Court in the land. The Trump Administration’s secrecy should automatically disqualify Kavanaugh. However, the cancer of team politics has forced his nomination forward.
- The last half-hour appearance of an accusation of sexual impropriety against Kavanaugh in the person of Debra Ramirez. Again, etc. etc.
- The kow-towing to an external partisan organization in selecting Kavanaugh as the nominee with little inspection by the Administration itself. That’s an embarrassment all in itself.
- The aggressive assertions from the Democrats that the various claims of sexual improprieties are credible and should result in the immediate withdrawal of the nomination. Really? All I hear are various assertions, no one is under oath, yet, and, really, I’d rather see corroborating evidence, thanks.
- Nominee Kavanaugh claims he has calendars proving he didn’t go to any such party as Professor Ford claims. Wait. Just who keeps such calendars and puts such faith in their veracity as to raise such a claim? Does he think we are all half-wits here?
- Attorney Michael Avenatti, already involved through his representation of porn star Stormy Daniels in the matter of an attempt to buy her silence with regard to her tryst with the current President, now claims to represent an unnamed woman who also has accusations of a sexual nature against Kavanaugh.
- The various hints that nominee Kavanaugh might, or might not, have lied to the Senate during other hearings. Are they fabrications by the tribe on the left, or is the tribe on the right so committed to this nominee that they’ll ignore evidence that he lies on official matters in order to get him seated?
- The composition of “explanations” for the incident, involving “mistaken identity,” which damages someone else’s reputation. At least in this instance, the perpetrator, long time Republican strategist Ed Whelan, has apologized, withdrawn the statements, and claims he’ll be withdrawing from public discourse for a while. I do hope he was sincere in stating that he’ll be searching for reasons for his mistakes. I suggest mistaken zeal and being a team player as a substantial first step. Try imagining the opposite of what you keep saying about the opposition, hey?
- And lots more.
Old football fans would describe this as “student body right”, wherein all the offensive players try to move the ball by forming one tight formation, daring the defense to find a way to stop them.
Notice the lack of reference to concepts like truth, reality, compromise, and civilized discourse. The Republicans have their prize bull to put in the corral, and the Democrats are massed to stop them, if they can, with neither side considering what this entire mess means for the future of the Country as a whole. Scream, scream, scream.
Andrew Sullivan addresses the tribal problem in his excellent latest column:
And it’s this reflexive, reptilian sorting of in-group and out-group that has now been supercharged by social media, by Trump’s hideous identity politics, and by campus and corporate culture. There seem to be just two inalterable categories: the oppressors or the oppressed; elite globalists or decent “normal” people. You are in one camp or the other, and, as time passes, those of us who don’t fit into this rubric will become irrelevant to the discourse, if we haven’t already got there.
After a while, the crudest trigger points of tribalism — your race, your religion (or lack of it), your gender, your sexual orientation — dominate the public space. As Claire Lehmann, the founding editor of the refreshingly heterodox new website Quillette has put it, “the Woke Left has a moral hierarchy with white men at the bottom. The Alt-Right has a moral hierarchy that puts white men at the top.” The looming midterms will not be about health care or executive power or constitutional norms (although all these things will be at stake). They will primarily be about which tribe you are in, and these tribes are increasingly sorted racially and by gender. The parties are currently doing all they can to maximize these tribal conflicts as a way to seek power. This isn’t liberal democracy.
And in this fevered, fetid atmosphere, where the stakes are always sky-high, there are no constraints. Dox, harass, troll, lie, smear, mock, distort, harangue, and preferably ruin: those are the tools of the alt-right just as much as they are the tools of the woke left. In such a civil war, the idea that the Supreme Court could ever perform the role it was designed to — interpret the law in a non-tribal way — is laughable. Indeed, the notion of a filibuster becomes moot, because it requires some sort of common ground between senators, and this is regarded by both sides as complicity in evil. Even a private, confidential hearing for accuser and accused is now, according to Senator Gillibrand, equivalent to silencing the accuser. I lean toward believing Christine Blasey Ford, as I believed Anita Hill and Juanita Broaddrick and Paula Jones, but I cannot know about something that happened 36 years ago. So I favor an FBI investigation and see no reason to rush a confirmation vote. But offering someone a chance to provide testimony in a private session wherever she chooses is not “silencing” her. Senator Hirono has gone further and told half the citizenry to “shut up” solely because they are male.
Andrew is fearful for the upcoming generations:
They have been told, in Haidt’s and Lukianoff’s view, that safety is far more important than exposure to the unknown, that they should always trust their feelings, and that life is a struggle between good people and evil people. This infantilizes them, emotionalizes them, and tribalizes them. These kids have been denied freedom, have little experience of confronting danger and overcoming it themselves, have been kept monitored to all times. They tend to have older parents and fewer siblings. There is a reason the safest generation in history is also the most anxious, the most depressed, and the most suicidal. It is not that it’s all in their heads — prejudice and discrimination exist — but that they do not have the skills to put any of this in perspective. And so rather than rebel against their authorities, as students used to do, they cling to them like safety blankets, begging them to protect them just as their parents did.
In other words, they’re being taught to stick with System 1 thinking, rather than System 2. In fact, this is discussed in Garvey’s The Persuaders, which I reviewed a while back. Here’s part of my review:
Garvey also introduces us to the idea that we have two thinking systems. The first is the fast one, and is the one that is employed when, on a camping trip, the bushes rustle and you take off running. There’s no active, rational thinking, but rather the instinctive consideration that a mountain lion is about to leap upon you. What should one do? Run for your life. The second is the much slower, rational system, where we try to apply logic and reasoning to a situation. The goal of the Persuaders? To activate and manipulate the first system, leaving the second quiescent, through the use of keywords.
Which is all very interesting in view of an opinion piece in NewScientist (15 September 2018, paywall) concerning populism by Simon Oxenham:
Many are now wondering if this [the right wing populism pervading Europe and the United States] is the new normal. In 2015, Manuel Funke, then at the Free University of Berlin, and his colleagues turned to data analysis for an answer. They found that over the past 140 years, every major financial crisis has been followed by a surge in support for far-right movements. The good news for liberalism is that this faded after 10 years. If this pattern holds once more, we should be on schedule to see the surge in populism petering out.
Funke and his colleagues wrote: “After a crisis, voters seem to be particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners… Votes for far-right parties increase strongly, government majorities shrink, fractionalization of parliaments rises and the overall number of parties represented in parliament jumps.” Although some political after-effects are measurable for a decade, the political upheaval is mostly temporary, they add.
Funke’s work is rooted in data analysis, finding evidence for the apparent link between political trends and financial crises, but not for deeper behavioural reasons behind that link.
However, other studies already suggest reasons why, in times of turmoil, support rises for protectionist policies favoured by far-right and populist movements, be they on immigration, “unfair” trade or security. The studies point to negativity bias, a common trait in which people subconsciously respond more and pay more attention to negative than to positive events.
After taking into account socio-economic factors, those who are more biologically responsive to and devote more attention to negative events tend to favour “protective” policies.
It reads as a classic “let’s try that path, oh that hurt, let’s not do that path after all” situation, doesn’t it? The task for the right-wing extremists, then, is to convince the voters that venture on that path that any other path – the liberals – are evil incarnate. We’ve seen this in the abortion debate, where Evangelicals have basically slept with the devil in order to get judges friendly to their one and only cause of abortion seated, and the recent immigration debate, where the extremists magnify whatever crimes immigrants, illegal or not, may be committing, removing the all-important context. Context-free may be great when parsing computer languages, but it’s the worst way to think when it comes to social issues and, generally, real-life.
Simon notes there are uncertainties and dissidents to this study:
Not all political scientists agree that these cycles will apply now. Justin Murphy at the University of Southampton, UK, expects the pendulum to continue to swing further in the opposite direction this time. To him, the root cause of the contemporary rise of the populist right may be linked to a backlash against social liberals overstating the extent to which freedom of thought or behaviour has been restricted – despite declines in racism and sexism in the US and UK in recent decades.
There is clearly a case to be made that at least some overzealous elements among the left are harming their own cause and may be sparking a backlash at the ballot box. This was demonstrated in an incident earlier this year when renowned liberal psychologist Steven Pinker outlined his thoughts on how to deconstruct and fight back against false and illogical racist and sexist claims made by alt-right activists.
A point Andrew has also made.
Sometimes it helps to take a step back and consider the larger situation, and if it wasn’t for the fact that this particularly sordid episode involves a life-long appointment of someone with a religious viewpoint at odds with most of the United States, and probably devilishly hard to remove, I’d just sit back and laugh at it.
But that’s not so easily done here. Best to hope more and more partisans become conscious of this ludicrous situation and come together to figure out what can be done about the current bands of resolute zealots in both camps.
