Tag: conservatives

Categories
asides

The Lie About the Supreme Court Everyone Pretends to Believe

From The Lie About the Supreme Court Everyone Pretends to Believe:

The day Thurgood Marshall retired, he issued a furious dissent to a decision that strengthened the death penalty. “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decisionmaking,” Marshall wrote, dissenting from the majority opinion in Payne v. Tennessee. “Neither the law nor the facts … underwent any change in the last four years, only the personnel of this court did.” The same is true of every precedent overturned by the Roberts Court.

Categories
politics

Andrew McCarthy Demands Proof But Denies Reality

I follow The National Review on Facebook because I like to keep an eye on what passes for intellectualism on the right. I don’t read every article, but I read the headlines, and if something seems particularly saucy, I’ll dive in.

They recently published an essay by Andrew McCarthy titled, Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It, in which he argues that systemic racism does not exist, and if it does, it is the fault of progressives, since “they are the system.”

The judges, the top prosecutors, the defense bar, the experts who craft the sentencing guidelines and the standards of confinement — overwhelmingly, they are political progressives.

To be sure, he doesn’t accuse these political progressives of racism; instead, he sees them as “professionals [who are] doing the best they can.”

He continues:

Still, the legal elites will insist there is systemic racism…because the outcomes the system produces are not “equal” — equality being a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the same rates.

I had to stop reading at that point. 

Notice how McCarthy conflates arrests, convictions, and sentencing with the committal of crimes as if the former somehow gives us a real sense of the latter.

We currently have a President of the United States who brazenly violated the Hatch Act and certainly obstructed justice (not to mention the complete catalog of his criminal acts and cruelties), and yet, after 50+ years of criminal activity, this bonafide conman and historically recognized practitioner of systemic racism has never been charged with a felony. 

No member of Big Tobacco spent a night in jail for knowingly giving cancer to millions upon millions of customers. No member of Big Oil will do time for lying to consumers about the economic realities of recycling, thereby encouraging the continual production of virgin plastic and the continuing degradation of our planet.

You don’t have to look any further than the FinCEN Files to see the vast criminal activity taking place in the financial sector ($2 trillion worth of dirty transactions), and yet how many felony convictions will this scandal likely result in? None.

McCarthy’s conflation reveals his deep misunderstanding of systemic racism. He’s incapable of noticing the crimes that don’t result in arrests, convictions, and sentencing, the crimes that the dominant caste generally gets away with. 

McCarthy wants to force progressives to prove systemic racism (and to be sure, it’s easy to prove), but for evidence, he’s only willing to accept information produced by the system as it exists, which is racist. If a white-collar criminal destroys the lives of thousands of people, as President Trump did with Trump University, the chance of them being arrested, convicted, and sentenced is next to zero, but a black man selling loose cigarettes can be murdered on camera by law-enforcement officers who in turn will not be charged with a crime.

Unfortunately for those who want to rebut Mr. McCarthy, it is impossible to provide reliable information regarding the commitment of criminal acts broken down by race. If no one is arrested and charged with a crime, or no accusation is made to a reporting authority (as is the case for most sexual violence), how could we know a crime was committed? 

The charge of systemic racism comes from a 400-year-long collection of lived experiences. It comes from anecdotes, memories, past and present traumas, cell phone footage, investigative journalism, documentary films, songs, and local, state, and federal policies (past and present). It is supported by a wide range of statistical evidence relating to the different (and sometimes starkly tragic) challenges a person is likely to face in their life simply because of the color of their skin. 

According to the systemic racism argument, law enforcement in the United States (as well as other systems and institutions) reinforces the unwritten rules of our racially divided caste system. It argues, among other things, that rich, white men generally get away with committing whatever crime they want, while poor persons of color get arrested, charged, and sentenced for crimes they did not commit.    

But to prove such an argument, Mr. McCarthy would like progressives to produce evidence that rich, white men commit just as many crimes as poor, black men. The only way to do that would be to interrogate their priests for confession rates, and I recall a papal law against that.

Mr. McCarthy writes that, for progressives, “equality [is] a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the same rates.”

While he doesn’t say it outright, his statement implies an affinity for the countering thesis: racial and ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates. He doesn’t develop this counter thesis, however, because: a) it’s racist as fuck, and b) he can’t demonstrate evidence for it. Like me, all he can do is demonstrate evidence of convictions and not the committed acts. 

Instead of supporting his terrible, racist counter-thesis with evidence he can’t provide, he transitions to accusations of systemic racism in academia, calling the Middlebury College President a “doyen of higher education” whose observation that racism occurs on her campus seems to have really troubled Mr. McCarthy.

He asserts that those who claim to see evidence of systemic racism are practicing “Marxism and voodoo, mainly.” This is how he denies the concept of disparate impact, which recognizes that a system designed to be neutral can still have discriminatory effects. 

For an example of disparate impacts, look at the Fair Housing Act of 1934. A creation of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the act was designed to make homeownership more accessible to Americans,  but it did so in ways that reinforced the 300-year-old caste system. Nothing in the Fair Housing Act of 1934 would have predicted this effect. The act is, in essence, race-neutral, but in effect, it was incredibly harmful to black Americans.

Though Mr. McCarthy writes for a supposedly intellectually rigorous publication, his argument misunderstands the basic premises of systemic racism and reveals his desire to maintain a status quo where “professionals [who are] doing the best they can” continue to be given the benefit of the doubt over the subordinate caste members who have been crying out for 400 years for relief. 

Categories
life politics

Change the Channel

This is all just a TV show. That’s what I learned from this great article in Current Affairs magazine. Moderate conservatives and liberals prefer President Jed Bartlett of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, while the right prefers Donald Trump of The Apprentice and FOX News. Hilary Clinton, supported by the media, ran on Jed Bartlett’s platform of intelligence, competence, and moral smugness, while Donald Trump ran on FOX News‘ platform of cynicism, xenophobia, and aggression (read as “security”).

The election wasn’t an election as much as it was a study in what kind of TV shows we like to watch. Those who prefer scripted dramas voted differently from those who prefer “reality” TV.

Except, and this is what’s important from the Current Affairs article, that analysis isn’t true at all. Because reality is neither a scripted drama nor a reality TV show. It sounds trite, and no one would ever argue that it was, but it’s also important to remember: reality is neither a scripted drama nor a reality TV show.

It’s reality, with real live consequences. The people in Syria are not characters in some postmodern multimedia text; transgender people are not characters who’ll soon disappear from some screen; and ex-miners are not going hungry just for the chance to star in some capitalist’s propaganda poster. This shit is real, and it really matters to persons. Decisions made in New York, Washington D.C., London, Paris, Berlin, Beijing, etc. affects real change in the daily experiences of individuals all over the planet and not just in the power dynamics of a popular TV show called Watch the Throne.

In Our Climate Future is Actually Our Climate Present, Jon Mooallem explains that we will not experience climate change as some great calamity, but as a kind of gentrification, with human beings doing what human beings are already doing: putting our heads down and continuing to trudge on, day by day, until we die.

But it’s the job of politics to make trudging through this life just a little bit easier, not just for me and you, but for everyone.

And why wouldn’t it be? If the political truly is personal, then politics is the act of living among your fellow human beings. It’s not a game to be played at the highest professional level; the Democrats and the Republicans are not the Red Sox and the Yankees. They’re two groups of people who claim to stand for specific ways of treating other people.

The Democrats claim to stand for treating each human being with dignity and respect, and they extend that claim to embrace the moral obligation it recommends, that is, to protect and advocate for those who cannot protect or advocate for themselves. This stance does not allow for bullying, but it does allow for righteous indignation, civil (not to be read as peaceful) protest, and a willingness to engage in defensive combat.

It recommends this not just as a form of politics, but as a form of living a life. It accepts the complexity that comes from living in a democratic society where your neighbors, not to mention the millions upon millions of other people whom you don’t know and will never meet, all get a say (at some level) as to how you live your life (if you want to live your life among them, anyway).

In a democratic society as large as ours, where we can’t come to a consensus on a statement as objectively true as “The Earth is not flat,” Democrats claim the only way to interact with each other, in our homes or outside of them, is with dignity and respect and the moral obligation to defend those who cannot defend themselves.

This is not how actual Democrats behave. This is their claim as to the right way to live among your fellow human beings.

The Republicans claim the proper way to act among others is to say Fuck them. This is not the same thing as Fuck you — Republicans are Christians, after all, and good Christians don’t say “Fuck you” to one another. They will say “Fuck you” to them though, just as God said “Fuck you” to all the other thems in the Old Testament: The first-born sons of Egypt? Fuck them. The Sodom and Gomorrah? Fuck them. The Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites? Fuck them. King Ahazia? You’re fired!

But as for the rest of us — those of us who are not them — the Republicans claim we can pretty much do whatever we want.

Want to shoot someone? Make sure they’re not one of us or that you can claim you were protecting yourself; and if you can’t find someone to shoot, join the army and we’ll point your gun in the right direction.

Want to get rich? Go for it, and the best of luck to you. If someone gets in your way, fuck them.

Want to screw a girl? Don’t worry, because they secretly really want it; and if they don’t, well…fuck them.

Heard that there’s someone with an unwanted pregnancy? Fuck them for not being more responsible.

Do what you want. Do what you’re good at. And fuck them if they can’t take it.

Based on everything I’ve seen or read or experienced, that’s what the Republican Party claims is the way we should act among our fellow human beings (again, not fuck you but fuck them).

It sounds like I’m saying the Democrats are angels and the Republicans are devils. I’m not. There are plenty of Democrats who stomp on the backs of the underprivileged and plenty of Republicans who spend their days providing crucial services to those who are suffering, regardless of what the victims look like or believe.

What I am saying is that there is both a Democratic and a Republican claim about how we should act, and they differ from one another. Both are attractive, but for different reasons.

It’s a lot easier to live in a Fuck them world, and it promises to be more interesting: there’s obvious conflict in a Fuck them worldview, and as the ratings for Honey Boo Boo demonstrate, conflict itself is exciting, regardless of its content.

Living in a world where everyone is treated with dignity and respect, and where the only sanctioned conflict is against an act of injustice? That sounds predictable and boring.

Except reality is never predictable and boring. It’s difficult to treat people with dignity and respect, and the world is filled with acts of injustice. Ultimately, as the Buddhists have long argued, all life, regardless of race, class, or even species, is struggle, and it provides a near-constant engagement with both internal and external conflicts. If conflict is exciting, then nothing could be more exciting than deeply living one’s life, and at the end of the day, isn’t every life lived deeply by the one who is living it?

This conception of reality, where everyone is fighting both internal and external conflicts almost all the time, founds the Democratic claim that everyone deserves dignity and respect. If everyone is in the middle of some conflict, the last thing we should do is add to their troubles by making them the them of our Fuck them.

The Republicans, on the other hand, tell us not to worry about what they’re going through. Worry about us becoming more safe or economically better off, and fuck them if they get in the way.

Again, I’m not talking about actual Democrats and Republicans here. I’m talking about their advertisements for the way we should live our lives.

Unfortunately, too many people would rather watch Donald Trump say Fuck them than engage with the complexity of trying to actually understand them. And right now, those people are holding the remote control.

Jed Bartlett thinks we should persuade them to give it to us instead. But you can’t persuade someone out of a remote control. There’s only one thing we can do: take it by force, and fuck them if they get in the way.