O.P. Recommends: Landmark Cases / Injustices, Two Great Works on the Supreme Court

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Amy M Cools

This last couple of weeks or so, I’ve been packing in a lot more learning about the Supreme Court, and is it ever fascinating.

It began when I stumbled on Landmark Cases last month, a C-Span series about 12 Supreme Court cases chosen because they had a dramatic impact on the legal landscape in United States history, and because they likewise had a significant impact on the Court itself, as precedent and on its perceived legitimacy, for good or ill. It can be found as a video series online, but I’ve been listening to the podcast version.
http://landmarkcases.c-span.org/

As I was listening, the discussions reminded me of a book I had heard about a little while ago but had forgotten to read, a book about the Supreme Court’s worst failures, terrible decisions that undermined its legitimacy and had a negative impact on the lives of people for years to come. It’s called Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, by Ian Millhiser. So, I went and picked it up, and just as with the Landmark Cases Series, I’ve been finding it difficult to tear myself away.

Both the Landmark Cases series and Injustices reveal that though sometimes the Supreme Court has been the bulwark against congressional, state, and individual encroachments of freedom, it has also too often betrayed the public trust. While we remember and celebrate such cases as Brown vs. Board of Education, Griswold v. Connecticut, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which brought the blessings of liberty to more of the American people than ever before, we sometimes forget how extensive the history of freedom-crushing Supreme Court decisions really is. The Dred Scott case, Lochner vs. New York, Korematsu vs. United States, and Citizens United v. FEC, for example, allowed employers to exploit desperate workers by cornering the market, fixing wages, and creating terrible working conditions with health-destroying long hours; permitted the government to imprison innocent citizens and allow the looting of their property based on no other consideration than race; and enabled the wealthy few to effectively buy up elections. Millhiser’s view of the Supreme Court’s historical tendency to value states and property rights over civil rights and the public interest is summarized here: ‘If American government truly derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, then [the] agenda [of the hardline conservatives] that is so often and so soundly rejected at the polls must not be implemented by one unelected branch of government when there is no constitutional basis to do so.’ (pp 184-85).

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices, joined at times by their otherwise more liberal-minded colleagues, all too often decided their cases according to the view that the Constitution only prescribes and limits federal action, and was not intended to do likewise with state or individual action. But as many other Supreme Court justices observed, especially in its civil rights phase throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, this reading of the Constitution renders it impotent (FDR’s terminology in his second inaugural address) to extend the protections of the Bill of Rights to citizens in almost all arenas of life.

After all, most of one’s life is not spent interacting directly with the federal government or its institutions, but in homes, shops, public squares, workplaces, and so on. If the state, or an employer, or a county sheriff, or a bus driver, or a neighbor, or any other non-federal institution or person uses their liberty to oppress another individual, then the latter can’t actually enjoy the freedoms that the Bill of Rights guarantees*. And surely the founders of our nation didn’t intend the Bill of Rights, demanded as a condition of the Constitution’s passage, to be powerless to protect individual freedoms in most circumstances. This is the principle which drives the more liberal Supreme Court Justices, Millhiser, and commentators on the Landmark Cases series to agree that strict constructionist, hyper-conservative, elitist, and commerce-centric justices have historically imposed opinions on the public that do not serve their interests as idealized in the Bill of Rights, and allowed the the powerful and wealthy few to claim the right to do as they like while trampling the liberties of everyone else. Since the Constitution derives its legitimacy from ‘we the people’, then we the people, in our institutions and as individuals, should be likewise bound by the Bill of Rights.

At times, I think that Milhiser champions too strongly the general principle that unelected judges should get out of the way and allow elected representatives to legislate as their constituents demand. After all, as so many of Milhiser’s examples indicate, legislators historically have been all too happy, too often, to make laws that favor some while trampling the rights of others. The potential value of an unelected judiciary to balance the power of an elected legislature is, I think, revealed more clearly in the Landmark Cases discussions. After all, the will of the majority often runs contrary to the national project laid out in the Preamble of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to protect and promote the rights of everyone, especially those in the minority who need protection the most. However, as author Jeffrey Toobin points out in his endorsement of the book, Millhiser’s book does an excellent job of balancing the good history of good Supreme Court jurisprudence with the bad.

Listen to the podcast version here or on iTunes

*For more on the distinction between liberty and freedom, please see my essay Freedom, Liberty, and the Inevitable Interconnectedness of Human Life

Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

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Sources and inspiration:

Landmark Cases: A C-Span Original TV Series, 2015
http://landmarkcases.c-span.org

Millhider, Ian. Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted. New York: Nation Books, 2015.

“One Third of a Nation”: FDR’s Second Inaugural Address, published at History Matters website. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5105/

O.P. Recommends: Fareed Zakaria on What America Could Learn From Singapore About Racial Integration

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Amy M Cools

In thinking recently about the nature of government and its proper roles, I recalled this Fareed Zakaria piece about Singapore’s engineered diversity.

In it, Zakaria praises Singapore’s efforts to reduce racial and religious bigotry by increasing the diversity of its neighborhoods. The government’s tactics to achieve this would be intolerably intrusive to most Americans, and indeed to the citizens of most modern democratic nations. When it comes to race and class, the Singaporean law favors the government’s interest in providing an environment where citizens are brought up in familiarity with people who are different than they are, and therefore less subject to the harmful effects of bigotry, over the rights of individuals to freely choose where to live.

So can Singaporeans be considered more free than Americans when it comes to race and class? What does it mean to be free, in this sense? We struggle here in the United States from the ugly effects of entrenched bigotries, ancient and new, long after we considered it okay to sanction them by law: we live in self-segregated neighborhoods where racial minorities and the less wealthy enjoy a far lower level of health and personal safety, religious minorities (at this moment in our history, especially Muslims, although Quakers, Catholics, Jews, and others have had their turns) are subject to the suspicion and hatred born largely of ignorance, and social mobility is extremely slow. But we can choose to live, at least on paper, wherever we want. Does that really make us more free?

And if we generally agree, as a society, that we believe the end of bigotry is a worthy moral goal, is it right and proper for the government to be the arbiter of that goal? Is morality a governmental concern at all? Or is it the government’s role to keep out while citizens wrangle with important moral questions, interfering only to protect its citizens from bodily harm?

Along with Zakaria, I find much to admire in Singapore’s goal, and its tactics do appear to help foster social cohesion and reduce conflict. Would Americans would ever ‘go for’ anything like that, if our conflicts of race, class, and religion continue to set us against one another? I doubt it. But I don’t think we should kid ourselves that it makes us any more truly free.

*Listen to the podcast version here or on iTunes

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Source and inspiration:

Zakaria, Fareed. ‘What America Could Learn From Singapore About Racial Integration’. The Washington Post, June 25, 2015 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/from-singapore-lessons-in-harmony-and-diversity/2015/06/25/86fcbfa2-1b72-11e5-93b7-5eddc056ad8a_story.html

A Moral and Political Critique of Democratic Primary Debate Arguments of 2015, Part 2

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Amy M Cools

This is the fourth installment of my examination of the arguments presented by presidential primary candidates of both major parties.

As with the previous posts, the debate transcript selections are in red, and my own remarks in black. I leave out introductions, banter, moderator comments, lines which indicate audience response, some purely empirical claims, and other parts that don’t directly pertain to the political and moral ideas considered here. The parts I leave out are indicated, as usual, by ellipses.

From the CNN Democratic presidential primary debate, October 14th 2015 (continued)

The source of the debate transcript which follows is the New York Times, at nytimes.com
Participants: former Governor Lincoln Chafee, former Governor Martin O’Malley, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders, and former Senator Jim Webb
Moderators: Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash, Juan Carlos Lopez, and Don Lemon

COOPER: …And welcome back. …I want to talk about issues of race in America…

WILKINS [guest]: …My question for the candidates is, do black lives matter, or do all lives matter?

SANDERS: Black lives matter. And the reason — the reason those words matter is the African American community knows that on any given day some innocent person like Sandra Bland can get into a car, and then three days later she’s going to end up dead in jail, or their kids are going to get shot. We need to combat institutional racism from top to bottom, and we need major, major reforms in a broken criminal justice system in which we have more people in jail than China. And, I intended to tackle that issue. To make sure that our people have education and jobs rather than jail cells…

O’MALLEY: Anderson, the …Black Lives Matter movement is making is a very, very legitimate and serious point, and that is that as a nation we have undervalued the lives of black lives, people of color. When …we we burying over 350 young men every single year, mostly young, and poor, and black, and I said to our legislature …that if we were burying white, young, poor men in these number we would be marching in the streets and there would be a different reaction.

I’ve seen many people respond to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement’s motto with a sign, or Twitter post, or internet meme reading ‘All Lives Matter’. It seems clear that those offering these responses are taking advantage of an easily derived self-righteous-sounding motto to skirt the issue while making it clear where their sympathies lie …not with the black lives lost and ruined by failed policies and cultural attitudes left over from our slave-owning past. Of course all lives matter, and I would add to those who use the latter slogan, please don’t insult the intelligence of your fellow citizens by pretending they don’t believe that too. The whole point is that our practices and policies have indicated that for far too many Americans, black lives don’t appear to matter enough, and this movement’s slogan is meant to point out that ugly fact. The ‘Black Lives Matter’ motto is powerful because of how simply and directly it highlights the often stark difference between how black people often fare than other people in so many spheres of American life.

A couple of years or so ago, conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly spent a lot of time talking about the issue of black Americans and crime, since the media debate was raging especially hotly around stop-and-frisk policies, black-on-black violence, mass incarceration of black people, violent confrontations between police officers and black people, and so on. O’Reilly placed the blame solely on culture: in his view, it could all be blamed entirely, or at least mostly, on violent rap lyrics, baggy clothes and hoodies, drugs, and other… ahem, peculiarities of black culture, with which he seems very uncomfortable.

I’ll give O’Reilly the benefit of the doubt a little here: culture could have something to do with it. It probably, actually, does. But it has nothing to do with the fashion choices of young black men, which is no more or less anti-authoritarian than those of other youth subcultures, and it doesn’t let our society off the hook, far from it. And it doesn’t at all justify his implication that the flawed policies of our police and justice systems aren’t to blame.

You see, if you don’t want kids to be brought up in a culture where they think going to jail is normal, practically even a rite of passage, than don’t institute policies that make it more likely they’ll grow up in families and neighborhoods where so many are incarcerated. For decade after decade, as demonstrated by masses of data we’ve collected on the subject, black people have been subject to a different kind and degree of law enforcement than white people, over our entire history. (Same goes for many other groups, but not for as long and to the same extent overall.) Black people are pulled over for minor infractions (real or invented) more often than white people, stopped and frisked more often, are directed to prison rather than treatment more often, receive tougher sentences, and so on and so forth.

The drug war has been especially hard on black citizens: while drugs are used at about the same rates in every racial and economic group, the laws are enforced far more rigorously against black people. I wish, for instance, police officers would prowl the frat rows of every wealthy college town in America and throw those drug offenders in prison at least as assiduously as they do in predominantly black and / or poorer neighborhoods, if they must do it at all. If they stopped and frisked there, image what a haul they’d get every weekend night! But of course they don’t. They don’t want to ruin those bright young lives for mistakes they made while in their foolish youth and throw them in jail for every little minor infraction, lowing their chances of getting a decent job, ever. But black youth must live to a higher standard. Whether or not they had the advantages of security or wealth when young, whether or not the fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, or neighbors in their lives were wealthy, middle class, poor, or ever had been in prison, they must never make the same mistakes as those frat kids, or in fact most ordinary people who live it up and do illegal things from time to time, or else.

There are black criminals who are just as bad as any other criminals, who injure or kill police officers unjustly, for just doing their job protecting all those in their care. That’s true of people of all races, in any population. But in a society that incarcerates people to an obscene degree, even for minor infractions that arguably shouldn’t be illegal in the first place, and enforces the law disproportionately and often more harshly against black people, it shouldn’t be a shock or surprise that so many run-ins between police officers and black people turn violent. I just hope that one day it will be a matter of shock and surprise that we kept going about it all wrong, in the same way, for so long.

COOPER: …Secretary Clinton, …Senator Sanders wants to break up the big Wall Street banks. You don’t. You say charge the banks more, continue to monitor them. Why is your plan better?

CLINTON: Well, my plan is more comprehensive. And frankly, it’s tougher because of course we have to deal with the problem that the banks are still too big to fail. We can never let the American taxpayer and middle class families ever have to bail out the kind of speculative behavior that we saw…. So I’m with both Senator Sanders and Governor O’Malley in putting a lot of attention onto the banks….

SANDERS: Let us be clear that the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street, where fraud is a business model, helped to destroy this economy and the lives of millions of people…. Check the record. In the 1990’s …when I had the Republican leadership and Wall Street spending billions of dollars in lobbying, when the Clinton administration, when Alan Greenspan said, “what a great idea it would be to allow these huge banks to merge,” Bernie Sanders fought them, and helped lead the opposition to deregulation….

CLINTON: …I have thought deeply and long about what we’re gonna do to do exactly what I think both the senator and the governor want, which is to rein in and stop this risk. And my plan would have the potential of actually sending the executives to jail. Nobody went to jail after $100 billion in fines were paid…

The Clinton administration seemed to buy into the same optimism that had fueled the Reagan years and the Golden Age: let the market run free, there’s lots of money to be made with the new kinds of financial market tools we have, knock down those pesky regulations and let the market regulate itself with consumer choice, and the bad products and practices will weed themselves out through self-destruction.

Well, we’ve learned that while all too many don’t regulate their own greed, the bad practices do self-destruct sometimes… the problem is, we can’t let them, because when and if they do, they can also sometimes take everyone else down with them. So, we bail out the bad actors to protect the innocent. Out of caution, or out of our almost cringing deference to Business, they mostly go unpunished, and so it goes, boom and bust, the good years awash with raging confidence, the bad with consternation, blame-slinging, and assurances that ‘this time, we’ve learned our lesson!’ And none of the worst offenders, those whose behavior did most to destroy the livelihoods of those who did not behave irresponsibly, seldom go to jail, or even forfeit enough money to stop being wealthier than most. Woody Guthrie sang: ‘Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.’ If you want to steal from people, even to the point of destroying them, just don’t do it with a gun (or while black, for that matter). You might get off scot-free.

COOPER: Senator Sanders… congressional leaders were told, without the 2008 bailout, the U.S. was possibly days away from a complete meltdown. Despite that, you still voted against it. As president, would you stand by your principles if it risked the country’s financial stability?

SANDERS: Well, I remember that meeting very well. …Hank Paulson, Bernanke came in, and they say, “guys, the economy is going to collapse because Wall Street is going under. It’s gonna take the economy with them.” And you know what I said to Hank Paulson? I said, “Hank, your guys — you come from Goldman Sachs. Your millionaire and billionaire friends caused this problem. How about your millionaire and billionaire friends paying for the bailout, not working families in this country?”

I understand the practical need for corporate protection, which allows a business to work on a bigger scale while shielding the business owner from personal financial liability. It allows the business to take more risks, which can lead to much more innovation than if they were forced to be cautious out of self-preservation. But here’s the thing: it can, and does, undermine the sense of personal responsibility in relation to doing business. For many, business is an honest endeavor, even, as a good friend of mine pointed out recently, almost altruistic: you listen to what the people care about, what they want and need, and you spend your day doing your best to make sure they get it. But for others, they’ve come to take it for granted that doing Business means that you have to take risks but that you shouldn’t personally have to pay for doing do. We need to keep this in mind, and tailor our policies accordingly: anytime someone ask society to let them to avoid being held financially responsible for the results of their choices, be wary. The motives may be benign, but the incentive to cheat, avoid regulation, exploit others, and gamble is a significant one, so we must be ready to shut down these attempts to game the system. Perhaps we should set a financial cap on financial immunity, or determine a level or quality of harm that’s too egregious for the protections of incorporation to remain in place.

BASH: …Senator Sanders, you’ve mentioned a couple of times you do have a plan to make public colleges free for everyone. Secretary Clinton has criticized that in saying she’s not in favor of making a college free for Donald Trump’s kids. Do you think taxpayers should pick up the tab for wealthy children?

I’m with Sanders on making college free for everyone, regardless of income, because Thomas Paine convinced me. I recently wrote a piece examining Paine’s ideas for a sort of basic income, a certain dollar amount that everyone receives early in life as seed money for their life’s work, and a stipend for old age. Paine thought everyone should receive it equally, rich and poor, not only because everyone would pay into it with taxes, but more importantly, it would avoid the deep sense of unfairness that so often fuels class division. Sanders’ plan for equally free college for everyone is great for these two reasons and for a third: it would promote an excellent cultural value, that we value education so much for its own sake, that we want everyone, equally, to have free and equal access to it, regardless of background or perceived need.

*Listen to the podcast version here or on iTunes

Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and is ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

Welcome to the new Ordinary Philosophy!

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Amy M Cools

Greetings to all,

On this New Year’s Day, which also happens to be my birthday and therefore, personally, doubly a day of new beginnings, I’m looking forward to a more expansive, more energetic future for Ordinary Philosophy!

What is Ordinary Philosophy?

It’s a series of explorations founded on the belief that philosophy is an eminently useful endeavor as well as a fascinating and beautiful one, and that citizen philosophers and academic philosophers alike share in making it so. A citizen philosopher myself, I found that my experiences as an avid reader, an artist, a working person, an entrepreneur, a student, and a writer filled my mind constantly with questions and new ideas, spurring me ever on in the search for answers. As I’ve always been a restless and hungry thinker, I fell in love with philosophy, especially, practical philosophy and the history of ideas.

What is Ordinary Philosophy’s mission?

It’s always been to share this love of philosophy and the history of ideas with you. In my explorations, I’ve encountered the most fascinating, innovative, and beautiful ideas from the curious, thoughtful, questing, and inventive world out there, from academic philosophy to science to history to current events to politics to the arts and so, so much more; so much more, in fact, that I can’t possibly process it all on my own.

So here at O.P.’s new home, I’ve broadened the mission.

While there have been occasional guest posts, there will be much more of an emphasis on providing a forum for many more voices at O.P., representing views from all walks of life. O.P. will also publish many more reviews, recommendations, and links directing readers to the great ideas proliferating out there that may be of special interest to O.P.’s audience.

The Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series will also expand. Each series will become more in-depth, with more detailed explorations of the life and ideas of each subject and more resources for further exploration and study. The podcast will expand in tandem: new audio recordings of longer pieces published in O.P. for those of you on the go who enjoy the ideas found here but don’t always have the time to sit down and read. As time goes by, I plan to expand the podcast as well to include interviews and a series of downloadable travel guides to accompany the History of Ideas series.

To better accomplish this expanded mission, I’ve moved O.P. here to its new platform: easier to read, use, and share. So if you love great ideas and the pieces you encounter here, please support O.P.’s expanded mission by sharing as widely as you can.

Lastly, dear readers, I appeal to you: Ordinary Philosophy is a labor of love, and depends entirely on your support. I’m determined to keep O.P. ad-free, but can’t do it without you. All financial contributions will be credited by name (unless anonymity is expressly preferred, of course!) on each project funded by their donations, and welcomed with deepest gratitude. Please support Ordinary Philosophy today!

Yours,

Amy Cools, founder and editor of Ordinary Philosophy

*Listen to the podcast version here or on iTunes

O.P. Recommends Freakonomics: Is Migration a Basic Human Right?

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Amy M Cools

I just listened to this episode of Freakonomics Radio podcast the other day, which I enjoyed very much and learned a lot from, and I think you’ll love it too. Freakonomics Radio is hosted full time by Stephen Dubner, one of the two authors of the famous book of the same name, published in 2005, with occasional guest hosting by its other author Steven Levitt. The book and podcast consider individual, social, and political situations from the view that human behavior is best explained in terms of the incentives that motivate us.

The podcast episode I’m recommending here is called ‘Is Migration a Basic Human Right?’ and I can hardly think of a more timely question. As Syrians fleeing death and destruction flee their war-torn country, we are invited to consider this question: do nations’ rights to maintain secure borders trump (how funny …no, actually ironic that I need that particular word right here!) the individual human right to survive and to flourish?

I love Freakonomics, despite the fact that it adopts, at times, a dismissive and even scornful tone towards philosophy (as do some of my other favorite podcasts), but that’s okay: there’s so much good information and clearheaded processing of it that its informative values trumps (groan) what might be philosophically lacking. After all, I believe, philosophy is at its best when it’s informed and disciplined by evidence, and it’s such a firmly established, fascinating, and eminently useful discipline that it can withstand critique and dismissiveness from economists, science enthusiasts, and so on. But to my edification and delight, the guest in this episode, Alex Tabarrok, professor of economics at George Mason University, gives a spirited defense of philosophy almost right off the bat.

Here’s a little excerpt for those of you in a hurry, but for the rest, I recommend you just skip this and go listen to the whole thing. Enjoy!

DUBNER: …As much as you may not like those reasons, aren’t they very much a symptom of the way humans have behaved throughout history? Borders, I mean.

TABARROK: So, borders are very common in one sense. As you say, when you look around, that’s the way the world is organized. And we’ve just gotten so used to them that we don’t even ask very much about their fundamental justification. And it’s when you come to ask about the fundamental justifications for borders that they begin to look very strange. Because they run counter to almost all of our moral writings and intuitions and philosophies. …

DUBNER: …I’ll be the skeptic for a moment — I could just say, “Well, that’s what philosophers do. Philosophers talk about ‘in a perfect world where all people were X, Y, and Z, things would go like this.’” But we all know that philosophers have no idea how the world actually works.

TABARROK: So, you know, our moral intuitions and indeed our laws today are that you shouldn’t discriminate against someone because of their race, because of their gender, their sexual preference or other issues. But for odd reasons, it’s perfectly OK to discriminate against someone because they were born somewhere else …Now, to defend philosophy, for very long periods of time, racism was perfectly normal; people have been doing it for thousands of years. And then people began to ask, “Well, what justification is there for treating someone so differently just because of their race?” And when people couldn’t come up with an answer to that question, when they were forced into this discomforting area that they can’t justify this terrible injustice, things began to change. …

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Sources and inspiration:

Dubner, Stephen. ‘Is Migration a Basic Human Right?’, Freakonomics Radio podcast, episode 231.
http://freakonomics.com/radio/

Social Transparency and the Epistemology of Tolerance, by G. Randolph Mayes

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Amy M Cools

Last week I learned a new word- apotropaic -and darned if I haven’t heard it three times since then!

Everyone is familiar with this sort of thing and has at least briefly experienced it as uncanny. It is called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Generalized, the BMP is our inclination to mistake an increased sensitivity to P for an increase in the number or frequency of P itself.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the BMP in relation to social transparency. The free flow of social information is a defining characteristic of the current era, and I tend to be far more sanguine about its effects than most. But I have started to think that the BMP presents a serious challenge to my optimism.

Most of my peers tend to be very possessive about their personal information. They feel like they own their beliefs, ideas, tastes, interests and habits. Consequently, they regard those who acquire knowledge of such without their permission as thieves. They are also haunted by Orwellian metaphors, and tend to react to increasing levels of social transparency in the public sphere with alarm as well. The idea of cameras at every street corner, shop window and traffic intersection feels dirty to them, despite its obvious value for public safety.

I dislike snoops as much as they do, but I distinguish between my preferences and my rights. I see unrestricted access to information as a cornerstone of liberal democracy. For me, the most fundamental human right is the right to learn. Whenever we choose to prevent or punish learning of any kind, there has to be an excellent reason for it. For some kinds of highly sensitive information these reasons exist, but they are consequentialist by nature and do not spring from any fundamental right to control information about ourselves.

I like glass houses. I think a world in which it is nearly impossible to hide the fact that you are an abusive husband or a pederast cleric is clearly preferable to one in which what goes on behind closed doors is nobody else’s business. In a liberal society, there is no greater disincentive to such transgressions than the certainty of others finding out. My friends are all yesbut. As in yes, but this is exactly what concerns them. They follow Orwell in thinking that a socially transparent society is fundamentally an informant society, conformist by nature.

But the evidence is that they are just wrong about this. We are living in a time of unprecedented tolerance for diversity and self-regarding eccentricities. This has not been achieved in spite of increasing social transparency. As long as homosexuals, transgenders, apostates, recreational drug users and the mentally disabled were confined to the darkness of the closet we could ridicule them with impunity. But it is difficult to continue in this vein when the clear light of day reveals that many of them are people we love.

Now here is my concern.

If increasing social transparency is not managed very carefully, it could backfire spectacularly, thanks to the BMP. When social transparency increases quickly, we suddenly become aware of the many intolerable things that have been happening right under our noses. Consequently, we get the impression that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and we become receptive to irrationally harsh responses.

What do I mean by careful management? Two things, at least.

First, it means creating future generations of adults who are more epistemologically sophisticated than mine. We grew up thinking that being responsible and informed citizens meant paying careful attention to reliable news sources, caring about the less fortunate and following our conscience. But that is a serious error.

The news is almost entirely about relating recent interesting events; it rarely provides a statistical context in virtue of which the general significance of these events may be responsibly evaluated. This is why it is possible to be an informed and conscientious citizen by the standards of my generation and still be completely unaware of essential global facts, such as that we are living in a period of unprecedented world peace or that the global poverty rate has been cut in half during the last 20 years.

If we aren’t aware of the role BMP plays in our reaction to constant reports of police brutality against minorities in the U.S, gang rapes of girls in India, the persecution of homosexuals in Russia, the public whipping of atheists in the Third World, and terrorism everywhere, then our reactions are likely to be intemperate and counterproductive.

Second, we are going to need to find the moral strength to punish wrongdoing less severely. What? Yes. To see why, consider that whenever someone decides whether to do wrong she makes an implicit expected value calculation in which the probability of being caught figures centrally. For this reason, the severity of the current punishment is itself a function of the probability of detection. In an increasingly transparent society, the probability of detection rises. Hence the previous levels of punishment are now intemperate and must be recalibrated.

As an example, consider new surveillance capabilities which can detect every single traffic light violation. Many people oppose the proliferation of this kind of technology, despite its obvious ability to save lives. Why? I think it is partly because they foresee an intolerable rise in the cost of innocent mistakes. In this sense, Orwellian concerns are absolutely on point. If we are unwilling to attenuate the severity of our punishments, applying the technology of transparency to crime detection is the road to the police state.

Social transparency has so far been part of the recipe for a more tolerant society, but so far it is tolerance for things that we are learning to hate less. Adopting more temperate responses to crimes we perhaps hate even more than before is a whole nother thing.

I hope future generations will be enlightened enough to do it, but in the meantime some apotropaic magic would come in real handy.

– Randy Mayes is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Sacramento State University. His main teaching and research interests are naturalism, moral psychology and the nature of rational inquiry, and he has published work on the the concepts of explanation, privacy and cruelty (bio credit: Sacramento State University Department of Philosophy). This piece was originally published at The Dance of Reason blog.

Really, America? Ban the Refugees, Let the Troops Do All the Work?!?

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Amy M Cools

Like so many of you, I’m sure, I’ve been dismayed, though not really surprised, at the vitriol aimed at Syrian refugees and Muslims in general, following the shootings in Paris and San Bernardino. Much of it is voiced in the form of inflammatory but silly memes, but now, even some of our presidential candidates are chiming in. Reactionary religious and ethnic hatred are at least as old as human history, and so are political capitalizations on them.

These memes and the anti-Islamic proposals they promote, such as calls for the U.S. to stop taking in Syrian refugees, to ban all Muslims from entering the country, or to force all Muslims to register with the government, as far as I can tell, are mostly coming from some on the conservative end of the political spectrum. However, the backlash against all this reactionary hate-mongering is coming from both liberals and conservatives, and their arguments are bolstered by the best in our political system and its founding documents, focused, if not always perfectly, on the protection and expansion of human rights.

Besides the basic problem of the xenophobic, anti-human-rights nature of the anti-refugee and anti-Muslim rhetoric, there’s something about the whole thing that’s been bothering me, something that I hadn’t really seen addressed in so many words. I jotted down this thought in the notes for this piece, and I hadn’t had the chance to finish it until tonight.

Then, today, just a few hours before I planned to write this, I heard a re-broadcast of a news story that appears to confirm my suspicions. A recent poll from Harvard revealed that the majority of millennials, age 18-29, say we should send more troops to fight ISIS and say they wouldn’t even consider enlisting.

This was my thought before I heard that story: for all the rhetoric calling for an increase in the war effort against Islamist violent extremism, and all the preaching about supporting our troops, it seemed to me that many of the same people who want to send more military abroad to fight to protect people’s freedoms want little or nothing to do with the effort themselves. They want others, namely our soldiers, to take all the risks, shoulder all the burdens, and do all the work of defending and promoting American values, but don’t want to participate even in a relatively small way by helping out the people who are most victimized by Islamic radicalism, who vote with their feet by fleeing from violent Islamist groups to ethnically diverse, religiously free nations.

It looks as if this poll reveals that this ‘you go do it, brave soldiers in uniform, but leave us out of it!’ attitude is likely true for at least for one significant slice of the population.

What happened to the idea that if we, the people, decide to go to war, it’s we, the people, who should fight it? Makes me feel nostalgic, in the way that you can feel nostalgic for a time you’ve never experienced yourself and are not sure ever really existed, for the ‘greatest generation’ of World War II and earlier wars. Wasn’t it the case back then that most ordinary citizens felt duty-bound to participate in the war effort that their nation was fighting, even if in some small way at home? Didn’t they involve themselves, if necessary, in the work, the sacrifice, and the danger of doing the right thing, even if doing so meant some risk to themselves? It’s not even that they have to worry about conscription anymore! Isn’t the mission of promoting the American values of multiculturalism and religious freedom, protecting the innocents that flee for sanctuary to our shores and in our neighborhoods, worth our support and participation, even if we do face the risk that a few terrorists might sneak in among the innocents?

It seems that decades of complacent materialism and the all-volunteer military, among other things, have eroded some of that true civic pride and moral courage it takes to show the world that Americans are willing to do the right thing, no matter what.

*Listen to the podcast version here or on iTunes

*Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and is ad-free, entirely supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

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Sources and inspiration:

Gabriel, Trip. ‘Donald Trump Says He’d ‘Absolutely’ Require Muslims to Register’. New York Times website, Politics: First Draft. Nov 20th, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/20…

Khalid, Asma. ‘Millennials Want To Send Troops To Fight ISIS, But Don’t Want To Serve’. NPR.com. Dec 11, 2015. http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459111960/millennials-want-to-send-tro…

Walsh, Deirdre, Jeremy Diamond, and Ted Barrett. ‘Priebus, Ryan and McConnell rip Trump anti-Muslim proposal’. CNN.com. Dec 8, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/08/politics/paul-ryan-tru…

A Moral and Political Critique of Republican Primary Debate 2015 Arguments, Part 2

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Amy M Cools

This is the third installment of my examination of the arguments presented by presidential primary candidates of both major parties. So far, this series includes critique and commentary on selections from the second Republican debate and the first Democratic one.

As with the first two, the debate transcript selections are in red, and my own remarks in black. I leave out introductions, banter, moderator comments, lines which indicate audience response, some purely empirical claims, and other parts that don’t directly pertain to the political and moral ideas considered here. The parts I leave out are indicated, as usual, by ellipses.

CNBC Republican presidential primary debate, October 28th 2015

The source of the debate transcript which follows is the New York Times, which is in turn as transcribed by the Federal News Service.

Participants: Governor John Kasich, Governor Mike Huckabee, Governor Jeb Bush, Senator Marco Rubio, Mr. Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson, Mrs. Carly Fiorina, Senator Ted Cruz, Governor Chris Christie, and Senator Rand Paul.
Moderators: Carl Quintanilla, Becky Quick, John Harwood, Sharon Epperson, Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer.

….HUCKABEE: …I’ll tell you what a weakness is of this country: there are a lot of people who are sick and tired because Washington does not play by the same rules that the American people have to play by.

Hear, hear. Let’s see if the candidates propose concrete reforms that will ensure everyone has to play by the same rules. And as long as we’re using the analogy of a game, let’s hope that if one of these candidates are successful, they’ll also try to make sure that everyone gets to start out with at least roughly equivalent equipment: access to the same information as to how the game is played, a ball that can hold air, a tennis racket with all its strings in place, a pair of athletic shoes with intact soles, so that they have a chance to successfully compete with those who grow up receiving the best equipment money can buy.

RUBIO: …I would begin by saying that I’m not sure it’s a weakness, but I do believe that I share a sense of optimism for America’s future that, today, is eroding from too many of our people. I think there’s a sense in this country today that somehow our best days are behind us. And that doesn’t have to be true. Our greatest days lie ahead if we are willing to do what it takes now…

Many on Rubio’s side of the aisle are convinced that such things as high taxes, possible (they say inevitable) future insolvency of the Medicare system, illegal immigration, and over-regulation are what’s mainly holding America back and making us feel pessimistic about the future. While some of this might be true and especially for some people, I suspect that the seeming hopelessness of reforming our political system, bought and paid for through crony capitalism, corruptive campaign finance laws, and the revolving door between Washington and Big Finance / Big Business, informs American pessimism more than anything else. In short, we no longer feel like the government is of, by, and for the people. There are a few leading Republicans once again paying lip service to the idea that government could actually be a noble and worthy institution if we reform it. Yet the idea that now pervades the Republican party, that government is little else than a necessary evil and an inherently oppressive busybody, does not help in the least to inspire confidence or a feeling of civic unity and national (not nationalistic!) pride.

CARSON: ….we’re talking about America for the people versus America for the government.

…aaand there goes Carson, chiming in with that anti-government rhetoric. Maybe if those seeking to lead that government would identify it with the people, and in a hopeful and confident manner, portray it as capable of reform and of doing good instead of wishing it were so small and weak that it could be ‘drowned in a bathtub’ (a charming little Grover Norquist-ism) Americans would be better served, and the promise of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights could be more fully realized.

FIORINA: But I also think that these are very serious times; 75 percent of the American people think the federal government is corrupt. I agree with them. And this big powerful, corrupt bureaucracy works now only for the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well-connected…. Ours was intended to be a citizen government…

Now that’s a good start. Now let’s see if you want to keep government big enough to actually be useful. Remember, we started out with a small, weak government under the Articles of Confederation, and that didn’t work out so well, to say the least.

CHRISTIE: I don’t see a lot of weakness on this stage, quite frankly. Where I see the weakness is in those three people that are left on the Democratic stage. You know, I see a socialist, an isolationist and a pessimist. And for the sake of me, I can’t figure out which one is which.

I’m halfway with him on the isolationist part, but not militarily: I’m referring to the economic isolationism of protectionism, which removes vital opportunities for the improvement of human lives and for the exchange of ideas. That’s my primary complaint about Bernie Sanders, who appears an extreme and unapologetic protectionist, which is a deal-breaker for me. But more on that when I return to the Democratic debates.

HARWOOD: … You [Kasich] said yesterday that you were hearing proposals that were just crazy from your colleagues. Who were you talking about?

KASICH: Well, I mean …to talk about we’re just gonna have a 10 percent tithe and that’s how we’re gonna fund the government? And we’re going to just fix everything with waste, fraud, and abuse? Or that we’re just going to be great? Or we’re going to ship 10 million Americans — or 10 million people out of this country, leaving their children here in this country and dividing families?

Here, as in the previous debate, Kasich’s taking on the role of the realistic, practical, get-it-done politician, criticizing some of the extremist, crowd-pleasing, but impossible solutions offered by his rivals. Here, he’s challenging his fellow debaters to be responsible and accountable in their rhetoric, and to offer workable solutions, that hold up under scrutiny, for real problems, and not to pander to the reactionaries in the party.

FIORINA: Let me just say on taxes, how long have we been talking about tax reform in Washington, D.C.? …We now have a 73,000-page tax code. …There are loads of great ideas, great conservative ideas from wonderful think tanks about how to reform the tax code. The problem is we never get it done…

QUINTANILLA: You want to bring 70,000 pages to three?

FIORINA: That’s right, three pages …You know why three? Because only if it’s about three pages are you leveling the playing field between the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well-connected who can hire the armies of lawyers and accountants and, yes, lobbyists to help them navigate their way through 73,000 pages.

Fiorina picks up on the analogy of the game here, and makes a very good point: if the tax code that everyone has to adhere to is too long and complex, it gives the wealthy an unfair advantage over average citizens who can’t afford to hire specialists to help navigate its requirements and discover obscure loopholes and tax breaks to take advantage of. Three pages sounds unrealistically short to me, and her claim that it’s now 73,000 pages sounds exaggerated, but her basic objection to the length and complexity of the current tax code is fair and reasonable. Our tax code should not automatically give any special advantages to the wealthy if we are truly dedicated to the principle of equal rights for all.

HARWOOD: ….[Governor Bush,] Ben Bernanke, who was appointed Fed chairman by your brother, recently wrote a book in which he said he no longer considers himself a Republican because the Republican Party has given in to know- nothingism. Is that why you’re having a difficult time in this race?

BUSH: (inaudible), the great majority of Republicans and Americans believe in a hopeful future. They don’t believe in building walls and a pessimistic view of the future.

The Know-Nothings, later called the American Party, was a political party in the mid-1800’s centered around anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, pro-Protestant, nativist sentiments. While most mainstream Republicans might object to the comparison, it seems a fair one when leveled at many leaders of the Republican party prominently featured in the media today. For example, in response to the attacks in Paris, many leading Republicans predictably reacted with calls for an immediate halt in accepting Syrian refugees. They portray this as a common-sense, defensive policy to protect the American people from terrorists trying to sneak in among the refugees, but it appears to me that they’re jumping on this as they would any other excuse to keep Muslims and other non-white, non-wealthy, non-advanced-degree-holding people out. While it’s true that most terrorists around the world today are Muslim, it’s also true that the actual percentage of Muslims who actually are terrorists or who support terrorism is very small, that the Paris attacks were not carried out by Syrian nationals but by citizens of the E.U., and that the refugees they want to turn away are fleeing from the terrorists and other violent Islamist extremist groups. I compare keeping these refugees out, as I have compared deporting Mexican people who entered this country illegally to escape the drug war, to our old policy of keeping Jews out who were fleeing the Holocaust, forcing them to return at peril of their lives. If we really want to show the world a shining example of the nobility of our values and the strength of our commitment to them, I think we need to accept the risks that come with doing the right thing, and to do it anyway.

…. To be continued….

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Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and is ad-free, entirely supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

On Free Speech and Political Correctness: A Response to Lindy West

Posted on November 21, 2015 by Amy M Cools

In reading a recent op-ed in The Guardian, ‘‘Political Correctness’ Doesn’t Hinder Free Speech – It Expands It’ by Lindy West, I was initially intensely annoyed.

Free speech, political correctness, and whether the two necessarily conflict are hot topics of debate at the moment, as they perennially are in this nation of ours. The right to freely express ourselves is foundational, among the first rights specified in our Constitution’s Bill of Rights, yet the full enjoyment of this right in our country was hard-won. It was only several decades ago that one could be prosecuted under the obscenity laws of the time for informing people about birth control and the workings of their own reproductive systems, for example, or for expressing certain political views (we now recall McCarthyism with a shudder). With a few exceptions mostly relating to public safety, any infringement of our right to free speech still has the power to make us fearful of that old, tried-and-true, oft-used method of social and political oppression.

My first impression of West’s piece was that it was yet another misguided liberal misapplying traditionally liberal values to make a perhaps well-intentioned, but ultimately illiberal argument.

When I re-read the piece, more slowly this time, I was still annoyed and in overall disagreement, but found myself at least sympathizing with some of her arguments, and in full agreement with others. As West points out, when people routinely hear derogatory, discriminatory, or insensitive remarks, even if relatively minor or unintentional, it can and does undermine their sense of confidence, dignity, and worth over time. And there are many groups in this country, such as black people, Jewish people, gay people, and religious minorities among others, who have had to deal with these slights as they struggle to get by in a historically racist, intolerant, and zenophobic country. It is incumbent on all of us, as West points out, to realize that the things we say have an effect other people, and therefore we should govern our tongues responsibly. We should strive to remain courteous and respectful in our speech, especially towards those who have suffered, and still do suffer, these slights and insults the most. And we should definitely call each other out when we are cruel, rude, or careless enough to use offensive language gratuitously.

Yet when it came to the central argument of her piece, the ‘silencing’ argument, she lost me. And when she went from disagreeing with to railing against Jonathan Chait, a columnist with New York Magazine who explains why he thinks free speech is being threatened on college campuses, to the extent that she accuses him, no, downright slanders him, of ‘imply[ing] that black Americans being shot in the streets by agents of the state are the real puppetmasters of an authoritarian regime’, she really lost me.

When West equates expressing disagreement with ‘silencing’, she makes me doubt that she has enough respect for the immense value of free speech, or grasps the true horror and dire ramifications of actual attempts to ‘silence’ it. She gives many example of what she considers ‘silencing tactics’: ‘white students parading around campus in blackface’, ‘telling rape victims that they’re “coddled”’, and ‘teaching marginalised people that their concerns will always be imperiously dismissed, always subordinated to some decontextualised free-speech absolutism’.

I just don’t agree that these things can be reasonably construed as ‘silencing’, not unless we stretch the meaning of the world out so broadly that it loses shape and force. Laws and regulations which threaten expulsion, arrest, and prosecution for expressing unpopular ideas are ‘silencing’ people. Police driving civil rights protesters from the streets with clubs, dogs, and fire hoses are ‘silencing’ people; the Cuban and North Korean governments’ imprisonment of political dissenters are ‘silencing’ people; issuing fatwas against Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are ‘silencing’ people; shooting Medgar Evers for his human rights activism and stabbing atheist bloggers and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh to death for their religious dissent are ‘silencing’ people. There’s a very real sense in which applying the term ‘silencing’ to any use of insensitive, politically incorrect, and offensive speech sounds like indulgent grandstanding that minimizes the horror of what people suffer when they are really being silenced. In that sense, the over-application of the term ‘silencing’ can be offensive in itself.

First, of course students putting on blackface for a Halloween party are doing the wrong thing; they are idiotically out of touch at best, or are behaving disgustingly, insultingly, even cruelly assholish at worst. Sometimes these sorts of behaviors, especially by bullies, may discourage some people from speaking out. But charging these misguided students with ‘silencing’ people? Since when? I’ve heard volumes of speech, free speech, vigorously criticizing this bad behavior, properly shaming people who are ignorant or jerkish enough to indulge in it. Second, I’m not sure if rape victims are generally accused of being “coddled” so I don’t know exactly what she’s referring to; I really hope she’s not equating this with any open discussion of rape without a ‘trigger warning’ preceding it. While some believe trigger warnings are appropriate in some circumstances, showing appropriate regard for the feelings of someone known to be wounded by past events, others believe that trigger warnings are intellectually insulting, implying that others are not strong or capable enough for open, honest, and challenging discussions of important issues. Third, reasoned debate over whether regulating forms of speech many people find offensive really promotes greater understanding and protects human rights is not the same thing as ‘imperially dismissing marginalized people’. And lastly, I don’t find that proponents of unfettered free speech routinely ‘decontextualize’ it either; rather, their arguments usually focus on the historical fact that suppression of free speech has always been a favored tool of social and political oppression (a very specific and important context) and therefore, we must protect this right at nearly all costs, even if people are sometimes offended and inconvenienced as a result.

When re-reading West’s article, a striking counterexample to her argument that political correctness expands free speech came to mind. As I write this, I’m also in the process of researching the life and thought of Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became one of America’s greatest antislavery activists and orators (this is for an upcoming O.P. Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series, stay tuned!). In his autobiographies, Douglass recounts the episode that he credits with setting the course of his life. When he was a child, his mistress thought it would be a good idea to teach him how to read, since he was companion and body servant to the young son of the household, and could thus aid in his education. When her husband came into the room and saw what she was doing, he stopped her, telling her in Frederick’s hearing, that ‘[he] should know nothing but how to obey his master …if you teach [him] how to read, there will be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave…’ As Douglass tells it, this is the moment he realized the full inhumanity of the slave system, and learned exactly what he needed to do. Knowledge equals freedom, so he must learn to read and educate himself, at all costs. And not only does slavery inflict physical suffering and the loss of every kind of personal liberty, its most dehumanizing element is its reliance on forced ignorance, so that even the mind is completely subjected. In the end, it was precisely because Douglass heard his slaveowner express that cruel, offensive, and inhumane idea that he learned the truth and became the great man he was. And like Douglass, we must observe the effects of evil and hear its arguments if we are to combat it.

Of course, the flip side is true too: people free to express bad ideas influence and convince others to believe them. But, repressing speech rarely stops this: it just drives the ideas underground, to be shared in secret, shielded from the healthy and corrective criticism of public discourse. And as we can see from our vibrant history of ever-increasing freedom of speech, bad ideas that are subjected to vigorous and open public debate are refuted and ultimately rejected, one by one. While I think that bad ideas will always remain with us, I have much, much more faith that the market of ideas will weed out bad ones than repression will, again, as history has shown us. Name me one oppressive institution that has not been ultimately overthrown because of the power of speech, because people chose to liberate themselves through dissent, to offer better arguments than those of their ideological opponents and to back up them up with action, and I’ll gladly reconsider.

Unlike the case with guns, the only one who can defeat someone with a bad argument is someone with a better one. Only when speech is unfettered can it reveal its true power to liberate us from the grasp of bad ideas. The good ideas of Frederick Douglass ultimately triumphed over the bad ideas of Stephen Douglas, pro-slavery advocate whose series of heated exchanges with Abraham Lincoln were dubbed The Great Debate, because Douglass spoke out on the evils of slavery though it was contrary to mores and laws of his time. Likewise, we must rely on ourselves and on one another to overcome bad ideas by speaking out, as Erika Christakis recommends in the email that started the Yale free speech controversy, and not by co-opting the power of governing bodies to silence our ideological opponents for us.

*Listen to the podcast version here or on iTunes

*This piece is also published at Darrow

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Sources and inspiration:

Douglass, Frederick. ‘My Bondage and My Freedom.’, Mineola, NY: Dover, 1969, originally published 1855. https://books.google.com/books?id=b4aQY9jPkm0C&dq=My+Bondage+and+My+Freedom…

West, Lindy. ‘Political correctness’ doesn’t hinder free speech – it expands it’. The Guardian, Nov 15th, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/15/political-correctness-free-speech-racism…

A Moral and Political Critique of the Democratic Primary Debates of 2015, Part 1

Posted on November 19, 2015 by Amy M Cools

This is the second installment of my examination of the arguments presented by presidential primary candidates of both major parties. I began the series with selections from the second Republican debate (I decided to skip the first mostly because there are so many debates to consider, I thought I’d wait until the polls had settled in, so to speak, indicating the field of candidates more likely to succeed), and I continue here with the first Democratic one.

As with the first, the debate transcript selections are in red, and my own remarks in black. I leave out introductions, banter, moderator comments, lines which indicate audience response, some purely empirical claims, and other parts that don’t directly pertain to the political and moral ideas considered here. The parts I leave out are indicated, as usual, by ellipses.

From the CNN Democratic presidential primary debate, October 14th 2015

The source of the debate transcript which follows is the New York Times, at nytimes.com
Participants: former Governor Lincoln Chafee, former Governor Martin O’Malley, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders, and former Senator Jim Webb
Moderators: Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash, Juan Carlos Lopez, and Don Lemon

COOPER: Welcome. I’m Anderson Cooper. Thanks for joining us….

WEBB: …You know, people are disgusted with the way that money has corrupted our political process, intimidating incumbents and empowering Wall Street every day, the turnstile government that we see, and also the power of the financial sector in both parties. They’re looking for a leader who understands how the system works, who has not been co-opted by it, and also has a proven record of accomplishing different things....

As you many remember from Huckabee’s comments in the first Republican debate examined here, mainstream Republican politicians are joining Democrats in denunciation of the corrupting influence of vast amounts of money flooding into the political system from a relatively few special interests and extremely wealthy individuals, and of the revolving-door relationships between our political institutions, lobbyist groups, and the finance industry. Many say that just because individuals and businesses freely decide to donate money, and that ex-politicians are routinely offered lucrative jobs by the same firms that lobbied them and donated to their campaigns, that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily corrupted, guided by the will of their donors and potential employers instead of their constituents and their own best judgment.

But even if it’s true that most politicians are not purposefully corrupt, it’s already a well researched, well documented fact that gifts and donations have much more influence over one’s decisions than one might realize, even if one’s honestly trying not to let it happen. A few years ago, I read up on various studies of the ways that funding, gifts, and personal visits from sales representatives of pharmaceutical companies influence what physicians are more likely to prescribe and even worse, influence the outcome of clinical drug trials. And while the studies generally failed to find direct evidence that most researchers or physicians purposefully tailored their decisions or research to the financial interests of the funders, donors, or sales reps, the influence was clearly indicated, likely based on the unconscious desire to reciprocate real or perceive goodwill, and / or the bias in favor of perceived expertise. If you have a large amount of money to invest, or a team of sales reps with a convincing story to tell on your payroll, you have to know what you’re doing, right?

Human psychology being remarkably consistent, it’s nearly certain that politicians are subject to the same psychological phenomena. Lobbyists can be considered the political analogues of the sales reps, and donors the analogues of the research funders and pharmaceutical company gift-givers. And while the sales reps, lobbyists, funders, and donors may have good arguments, may be in the possession of good information, or may be driven by entirely noble motives, it’s still the case that their influence can crowd out other arguments, other evidence, and other interests which should have equal consideration.

COOPER: …Secretary Clinton …plenty of politicians evolve on issues, but even some Democrats believe you change your positions based on political expediency. You were against same-sex marriage. Now you’re for it. You defended President Obama’s immigration policies. Now you say they’re too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the “gold standard”. Now, suddenly, last week, you’re against it. Will you say anything to get elected?

CLINTON: Well, actually, I have been very consistent. Over the course of my entire life, I have always fought for the same values and principles, but, like most human beings — including those of us who run for office — I do absorb new information. I do look at what’s happening in the world….

Clinton is right to point out that politicians, like all human beings, should remain ready and willing to learn, be open to new evidence, consider new and better arguments as they are presented, and be able to change their minds as warranted. Charges of ‘flip-flopping’ are often hurled at political candidates to portray their changes of mind as signs of dishonest maneuvering and weakness of will. But this isn’t always the case. A famous examples of a politician changing their mind on an important issue is Abraham Lincoln, who originally thought that preserving the political Union between the states took priority over the abolition of slavery. Another is Barack Obama, who originally thought that legal marriage should exclusively remain heterosexual, with civil union being an acceptable separate but equal institution for gay couples.

This being as it may, when a politician changes their mind, just like anyone else, it should be for very good reasons. And because they represent the people, they need to explain these changes of mind, to be open and honest to their constituents, especially when the change of mind might affect the voters’ choice of representative.

COOPER: Secretary Clinton, though, with all due respect, the question is really about political expediency. Just in July, New Hampshire, you told the crowd you’d, quote, “take a back seat to no one when it comes to progressive values.” Last month in Ohio, you said you plead guilty to, quote, “being kind of moderate and center.” Do you change your political identity based on who you’re talking to?

CLINTON: No. I think that, like most people that I know, I have a range of views, but they are rooted in my values and my experience…

COOPER: Just for the record, are you a progressive, or are you a moderate?

CLINTON: I’m a progressive. But I’m a progressive who likes to get things done.

Clinton is not only representing herself as a practical politician, she’s making a larger point: while it’s important to be idealistic and to remain committed to one’s values, it’s also important to remember that if you can’t compromise when necessary, those ideals and those values will do no practical good because they’ll never be realized in public policy.

While I’m more than halfway with her on this, I still think we need a president, a Congress, and a Supreme Court who demonstrate a stronger commitment to a nobler political vision. With the notable exception of legalizing gay marriage, it’s been too long since our elected leaders exuded the moral strength necessary to lead us in accomplishing spectacular things like ending slavery, giving women the vote, establishing worker’s rights, instituting a New Deal, building a comprehensive and cutting-edge infrastructure, taking us to the moon. We’ve become cynical, expecting our politicians to squabble and block one another’s efforts at every turn while our infrastructure crumbles, healthcare costs soar, our middle-class dwindles, gun violence runs rampant, the earth warms as we continue to generate energy with old polluting technology, our education system becomes ever less effective, special interests take over our political system with enticements of massive amounts of money and cushy job offers, costly American military interventions take out bad leaders only to have worse ones rush in to fill the power gap, the war on drugs continues to fail while encouraging the rampant growth of violent cartels here and abroad, and more Americans are incarcerated than in any other nation.

As a result of this cynicism, too many of us have become hopeless and apathetic, staying away from the polls, content with venting our discontent and disillusion on social media. I’m not totally with those who hold a bleak view of the loss of civic engagement in our country: young people volunteer and donate at encouragingly high rates, and are vocal about their opposition to social ills such as racism, sexism, greed, violence, rampant incarceration, and so on. Still, if we care about doing the most good systematically and in the long run, I think it more important to begin with taking our political system back. A lot of the volunteering and donating is needed precisely because our political system is failing so many people.

COOPER: …Senator Sanders. A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?

SANDERS: Well, we’re gonna win because first, we’re gonna explain what democratic socialism is. And what democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own almost …as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. That it is wrong, today, in a rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent…

COOPER: …You don’t consider yourself a capitalist, though?

SANDERS: Do I consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little by which Wall Street’s greed and recklessness wrecked this economy? No, I don’t. I believe in a society where all people do well. Not just a handful of billionaires….

For all Sander’s optimism on this point, socialism remains a hated word in the United States, and not for bad reasons. The largest socialist states of the 20th century did not act in the interests of their people as much as they acted in the interest of their leaders and their political ideology, with some exceptions. Yes, the Cuban health care system did and does better by their people, as a whole, than that of the United States: more people have access to good affordable health care, more people live healthier lives, and less people are financially ruined by a diagnosis of a serious disease. Yet the political rights of those in most socialist states are severely restricted if existent at all, and the average citizen remains relatively poor as their economies stagnate and the wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few. We can say the same historically of most modern socialist states, past and present: Cuba, the Soviet Union, China, East Germany, and so on.

However, here’s the key point about democratic socialism as Sanders describes it: all of those oppressive socialist states lack the ‘democracy’ element, even though it’s often part of the government’s official name. In those states, most people have no political voice or representation whatsoever, and their nations’ social, political, and economic systems are organized strictly along ‘top-down’ lines. A few political elites impose their will on the people unopposed, and any opposition is quashed with the justification that it was motivated by disloyalty ‘to the people’ or to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Those that wield the power may describe lofty goals and proclaim that everything they do is according to the abstracted will of the people, but the actual people themselves are not allowed to participate in their own governance.

Democratic socialism is very different in principle and practice than socialism as commonly understood, if carried out as Sanders describes. Its public institutions are required to remain accountable to the people and its elected leaders subject to voter recall. It’s not a top-down system in the way authoritarian socialist regimes are for two reasons: there’s many points of view and sources of information that are brought to bear, not just the ideology of a single person or small political elite, and its policies and projects are implemented, constrained, and carried out by elected representatives and/or more directly by voters. Ostensibly, the democratic republican system we already have is this sort of government, but democratic socialists disagree because of the outsize influence of a few wealthy, powerful private interests. The reason why Sander’s party emphasizes ‘socialism’ in their name is because, they say, political systems dedicated more to individual liberty than to the well-being of its people inevitably fail in both.

In a market system, according to this view, the individual pursuit of profit will inevitably often work to the public’s detriment, whether or not individual capitalists have good or bad motives, because of the inherent incentives. Keeping an eye always on the bottom line keeps them off the plight of others, including that of the underpaid worker, or of the community’s lands being polluted, or those who can’t afford a necessary good or service (such as healthcare) because of price fixing, or the citizen who’s not being represented because of the money and influence that rigged the political system in the capitalist’s favor. Throughout history, both before and after regulations were put in place to protect the rights, health, and safety of citizens and the environment, there have always been a large percentage of capitalists who are greedy, who don’t care how the way they do business affects others, and they will always ruin it for everyone else, overrunning the system in their ruthlessness and making bad practice par for the course: exploiting those who need jobs but can’t find good ones, setting up grossly polluting factories wherever they’re not prevented from doing so, colluding with other businesses to fix prices and wages, forming monopolies, co-opting government to make laws in their favor, gambling in financial markets until they crash, and so on. And because these bad actors take over the system, other businesses must adopt these same bad practices in order to remain competitive and survive. That’s why, democratic socialists say, we need certain key goods and services to be controlled by public institutions that are accountable to the people, not just to the balance sheet, to investors, or the conscience (or lack thereof) of one individual.

Whether or not a well-run, truly democratic socialist state as would be more successful than a market-driven one remains to be seen. There are encouraging results in nations with mixed economies, such as the Scandinavian countries that Sanders hold up as his models, but the United States presents two important challenges these countries don’t face: it’s way more ideologically and ethnically diverse, and it’s way, way bigger. There are other much larger and more diverse countries who’ve nationalized a few but very important goods and services such as healthcare, like Canada and most modern European states, with very good results. Of course, they have their problems too, but that’s true of every system that has ever been devised. So the question’s not whether which system is perfect, it’s which one is better, and which one comes with a set of problems we find more tolerable to live with.

COOPER: We’re going to have a lot more on these issues. But I do want to just quickly get everybody in on the question of electability. Governor Chafee, you’ve been everything but a socialist. When you were senator from Rhode Island, you were a Republican. When you were elected governor, you were an independent. You’ve only been a Democrat for little more than two years. Why should Democratic voters trust you won’t change again?

CHAFEE: …I have not changed on the issues. I was a liberal Republican, then I was an independent, and now I’m a proud Democrat. But I have not changed on the issues…

COOPER: ….Senator Webb, in 2006, you called affirmative action “state-sponsored racism.” In 2010, you wrote an op/ed saying it discriminates against whites. Given that nearly half the Democratic Party is non-white, aren’t you out of step with where the Democratic Party is now?

WEBB: No, actually I believe that I am where the Democratic Party traditionally has been. The Democratic Party, and the reason I’ve decided to run as a Democrat, has been the party that gives people who otherwise have no voice in the corridors of power a voice….

I’ve been hearing the argument a lot: the Republican party is moving ever farther right, so the Democratic party feels compelled to keep moving more to the center in order to appear the moderate, reasonable choice. Clinton’s platform is the model of this, and it looks like Chafee and Webb agree. Sanders appears to be the one candidate who’s an unapologetic, leftist liberal.

COOPER: Senator Webb, thank you very much. Let’s move on to some of the most pressing issues facing our country right now…. We’re going to start with guns. The shooting in Oregon earlier this month, once again it brought the issue of guns into the national conversation. …Senator Sanders, you voted against the Brady bill that mandated background checks and a waiting period. You also supported allowing riders to bring guns in checked bags on Amtrak trains. For a decade, you said that holding gun manufacturers legally responsible for mass shootings is a bad idea. Now, you say you’re reconsidering that. Which is it: shield the gun companies from lawsuits or not?

SANDERS: …Let’s also understand that back in 1988 when I first ran for the United States Congress …I told the gun owners of the state of Vermont…, a state which has virtually no gun control, that I supported a ban on assault weapons. And over the years, I have strongly avoided [supported?] instant background checks, doing away with this terrible gun show loophole. And I think we’ve got to move aggressively at the federal level in dealing with the straw man purchasers. Also I believe, and I’ve fought for, to understand that there are thousands of people in this country today who are suicidal, who are homicidal, but can’t get the healthcare that they need, the mental healthcare, because they don’t have insurance or they’re too poor. I believe that everybody in this country who has a mental crisis has got to get mental health counseling immediately.

Sanders is making the same argument here as most Republican candidates are now making, that when it comes to dealing with certain categories of gun violence, we should turn our focus to mental health and economic issues and away from gun control. While it’s true that there’s a lot of gun violence associated with mental illness and poverty, I think it’s a distraction. In fact, I don’t believe that Sanders and the Republicans would make this argument if they didn’t feel politically compelled to concoct some ad hoc justification for gun-friendly policies they ascribe to for other reasons. Even for people who believe in expansive rights to gun ownership, the fact that there’s far more gun violence in the United States than in all other first-world countries demands a more comprehensive explanation to be convincing.

So why don’t I buy the argument blaming lack of mental health care? For one thing, many or even most of the people known to have some kind of mental issue before the shootings were receiving treatment, or had access to it they were not availing themselves of, so far as I could tell from the news reports. In other cases, others only discover that people are violently mentally ill after they’ve shot up a theater or killed themselves. I agree wholeheartedly that everyone should have access to mental healthcare and to decent-paying jobs, and that it’s likely that gun violence would be somewhat mitigated if that were the case: some people’s mental illnesses would be discovered and hopefully successfully treated before resorting to violence, and others would be able to live in safer neighborhoods and stay out of the illicit drug trade, for example.

But all the free mental healthcare and jobs in the world will not solve the one problem that we all face when in comes to gun violence: when people have easy access to guns when they’re under the sway of some emotion, be it insanity, greed, anger, fear, excitement, zealotry, vengefulness, territorialism, or just carried away by the fun they’re having at the time, they are easily able to wreak death and destruction with the simple squeeze of a trigger, especially in a culture where guns are regarded as the best and only solution to so many problems. And other times, these deaths arise out of nothing more than sheer carelessness, ignorance, or bad luck while a gun was in hand. The trick is to mitigate the harm we can do each other out of the excesses of our variable human nature by limiting access to guns, and by changing our cultural attitudes to them. The former may very well lead to the latter.

COOPER: Do you want to shield gun companies from lawsuits?

SANDERS: Of course not. This was a large and complicated bill. There were provisions in it that I think made sense. For example, do I think that a gun shop in the state of Vermont that sells legally a gun to somebody, and that somebody goes out and does something crazy, that that gun shop owner should be held responsible? I don’t. On the other hand, where you have manufacturers and where you have gun shops knowingly giving guns to criminals or aiding and abetting that, of course we should take action.

COOPER: Secretary Clinton, is Bernie Sanders tough enough on guns?

CLINTON: No, not at all. I think that we have to look at the fact that we lose 90 people a day from gun violence. This has gone on too long and it’s time the entire country stood up against the NRA. The majority of our country supports background checks, and even the majority of gun owners do. Senator Sanders did vote … for this immunity provision. I voted against it. …It wasn’t that complicated to me. It was pretty straightforward to me that he was going to give immunity to the only industry in America. Everybody else has to be accountable, but not the gun manufacturers….

O’MALLEY: … here tonight in our audience are two people that make this issue very, very real. Sandy and Lonnie Phillips’… daughter, Jessie, was one of those who lost their lives in that awful mass shooting in Aurora. …A man had sold 4,000 rounds of military ammunition to this — this person that killed their daughter, riddled her body with five bullets, and he didn’t even ask where it was going. And not only did their case get thrown out of court, they were slapped with $200,000 in court fees because of the way that the NRA gets its way in our Congress…

While I laud the principle of personal responsibility of individual gun purchasers that seemingly informs the argument against increased liability for gun companies, it also has a serious practical downside: it removes one extra layer of protection for the public when gun manufacturers and sellers are not sufficiently motivated to ensure they operate reliably and have enough safety features, and to choose not to sell guns to people they have reason to believe won’t be a responsible sellers or owners. And, of course, it fails to apply the principle of personal responsibility to the gun manufacturers and sellers. Perhaps if everyone, not just the gun owners, but everyone involved was faced with the prospect of having to take responsibility for their part in contributing to gun violence, it would be substantially reduced.

I’ve offered a suggestion before that may sound oddly anachronistic, based as it is on the actual wording of and history behind the Second Amendment, but hear me out. The text of the Second Amendment reads: ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’ When we read this, we tend to mentally cast aside the militia part, since originally the Second Amendment was informed by the infant United States’ aversion to the institution of a standing army, relying on state militias instead, which is no longer the American system of defense. However, if the right to gun ownership was contingent on belonging to a militia, or to modern equivalents such as the military, its reserves, and police forces, than all lawful gun owners would be, if the institution was well-regulated as it should be, publicly accountable and suitably trained. Maybe, then, a literal reading of the actual wording of the Constitution can offer a solution to our dilemma. As written, the phrase ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms’ is a subordinate clause to ‘A well regulated Militia’. So maybe we should likewise subordinate the right to keep and bear arms to whether one does belong to a modern equivalent of a militia.

SANDERS: …We can raise our voices, but I come from a rural state, and the views on gun control in rural states are different than in urban states…

O’MALLEY: …Senator, it is not about rural — Senator, it was not about rural and urban …We were able to pass this [in Maryland] and still respect the hunting traditions of people who live in our rural areas….

WEBB: …We need to keep the people who should not have guns away from them. But we have to respect the tradition in this country of people who want to defend themselves and their family from violence…

The right to self-protection is emphasized the most, on both sides, in arguments about gun rights, with the possible exception of deterrence, emphasized by many conservatives. I have serious doubts about both of these, mostly based on lack of evidence in its favor. We have higher gun ownership rates than most countries in the world, yet we have higher levels of gun violence. Even controlling for cultural attitudes (such as in Canada, which also has a high level of gun ownership rates but much lower levels of gun violence), we should see a general, consistent correlation over time and place between high levels of gun ownership and low levels of violence. Yet when we compare the United States with other countries, and we compare states with each other, we find that higher levels of gun ownership almost always correlate with higher levels of gun violence. There are a few exceptions, such as Germany and South Dakota, but when these are the exception rather than the rule, the explanation is almost certainly to be found elsewhere.

So, if protection of the life of citizens is the goal, it is not accomplished by instituting policies which usually lead to more deaths. I think, again, the real reasons so many Americans cling to the right to own guns have entirely to do with cultural and historically based norms.

I’ll go ahead and end this first critique of the Democratic debates here. In the next installment, I’ll skip the foreign policy part of this debate since it’s covered more thoroughly in a later one, and pick back up where the discussion turns to civil rights issues and the Black Lives Matter movement.

To be continued….

* Listen to the podcast reading of this piece here or on iTunes

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