Endorsing Tribalism and Gay Rights

I submitted a brief editorial to AND Magazine regarding the liberal reaction to President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality.  Hopefully it will go up tomorrow.  Having thought about the topic a little more, I feel I would like to use this space to post something of a supplement to my previous comments.  In my AND piece, I pointed out that there was a tumblr blog launched almost immediately after Obama’s television interview, which consists entirely of animated gifs emphasizing celebration of the newfound vocal support for gay marriage.

My first criticism of this sort of reaction is that it’s making a celebration out of something that doesn’t really warrant it.  It shouldn’t have taken this long to get President Obama to make a basic statement of support for the gay community, and even now that he did, that is now what they need; they need legislative and judicial action, which the President can push for and support.

But apart from the fact that their singing and dancing is an overzealous response by some liberals to a very modest change, what may actually be more significant is that it demonstrates a hideous tendency in private citizens’ engagement with the political process.  The people making the gifs for tumblr and otherwise celebrating yesterday’s announcement must be aware of the fact that nothing has substantially changed.  The celebration, then, isn’t about progress; it’s about popularity.  The sad fact is that in the modern political landscape, we are so caught up in the excitement of the process that we consider high-profile endorsements to be tantamount to actual political victories.

The most damnable feature of our typical approach to social issues and governmental procedure is the impulse towards tribalism.  There are few better examples of such tribalism than widespread rejoicing over the affirmation that our ideas have a place among the powerful and the popular.  That is something much different from cheering over the affirmation that our ideas are correct.  But the more we indulge this impulse to gloat over demographics rather than substance, the less clear that distinction will be to us.

I hope that as gay activists continue to express this misplaced pride in who is coming over to their side, they will approach a breaking point whereby they realize that the fallacies of appealing to popularity and authority only serve to make them more like their irrational political opponents.  Hell, anti-gay activists largely believe that they have Jehovah and most of human civilization on their side.  Even if that were true, it wouldn’t make them any more correct, and it wouldn’t prevent progress towards equality.  That kind of certitude provides nothing other than a sense of self-congratulations, which has no place in politics if politics is to be a rational, productive endeavor.

Of course, it is thoroughly at home amidst the sort of politics that we actually do have in this country.

My Contribution to the Obama Campaign

Last night, I donated three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign.  I didn’t do it because I believe in the transformative potential of a second term for the current president, or because I expect good things to come of an emphasis on small-donor contributions to political causes.  I didn’t even do it because I can afford it, because there’s some legitimate doubt about that, even at the three dollar level.

In fact, my donation wasn’t in answer to my conscience; it was in violation of it.  And given what three dollars might otherwise have bought, it was an irrational violation of my conscience.  That is characteristic of playing the lottery.  Yes, I donated three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign last night because that was the minimum amount and the deadline that allowed donors to be entered for a chance to win a trip to Los Angeles to have dinner with Barack Obama and George Clooney.

I put off the donation all the way to the last half-hour before the FEC fundraising deadline, because this involved a complex economic and ethical calculation for me.  It took until after 11:30 to hit that breaking point, but ultimately, I decided that even in the faces of virtually infinitesimal chances and the certainty of being left with a bad taste in my mouth, three dollars was well-worth the long shot of being chosen to be able to have a conversation with the president.  (I wouldn’t really care about meeting Clooney – I’d shake his hand and tell him I admire his body of work, but I want to talk to policymakers.)

The economic calculation was significantly influenced by what I know about the president.  The current occupant of the highest office in the land has an admirable sense of empathy, to the extent that he has been responsible for some instances of helping private citizens to get jobs when they had spoken to him of their difficulties.  He has also been known to occasionally write personal checks in response to letters detailing hardships which the president felt he had no other way of addressing in the moment.

I wrote about those facts in the past, and though they still impress me with regards to the kind of man that citizen Barack Obama is, as I expressed then, I don’t like what it says about him as an occupant of the presidential office.  And to be perfectly frank about my own motivations, I want to have dinner with President Barack Obama so I can exploit the ear of the man and criticize the actions and policies of the president.

Donating money to his campaign for the sake of a shot at dinner in L.A. constituted an ethical compromise for me, because I recognized that I was contributing to an unfortunate trend in American politics.  We complain a great deal about the influence of big money in campaigns and policy making, the quid pro quo involved.  But as with everything else, the broader tendencies, the impulses among the powerful, have their groundwork in private, on-the-ground attitudes.

Regardless of whether it relies on three dollar donations from across the country or one terrifyingly wealthy Super PAC, no campaign and no political apparatus should be set up to encourage people to contribute their resources to it in hopes that they will be delivered some personal reward in return.  And that’s exactly what I’ve done.

I didn’t donate my three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign because I believe that he represents my views and can be trusted to carry out the policies that I think would be legitimately best for the country as a whole; I did it in hopes of gaining access to the president so that I could try to influence his policies.  And more than that, I gave my money to the campaign in the interest of trying to influence a private individual to help me personally.

I want to have dinner with the president so that I can raise questions about his education policy, about the flawed common wisdom that government cannot create jobs, and about the victim-blaming rhetoric that dominates political explanations of joblessness, poverty, and loss.  But I want to have dinner with a man with a vast network of high-level connections so that I can impress upon him the desperation of my need for a decent job, the reality of my qualifications and talents, and the fact that nothing I do on my own can connect those thing to actual employment.

I know that there have been a handful of other people who have been in similar situations, found themselves in circumstances that allowed them to bend the ear of the president, and acquired job leads by virtue of his influence.  I think it’s wrong that anyone gets that chance, but the fact is that so long as someone does, I hope it’s me.

For the time being, money in politics is a reality that we have to work with.  But the money should follow the political causes, and the system that is accepted now by both parties and at all levels encourages money to precede politics and to demand that weakly malleable views on policy answer to purchased influence.  I doubt, though, that my three dollars will buy sufficient influence to demand that that system be questioned.

Speechless: Why Citizens United and Its Critics Are Both Wrong

[Author's Note: I wrote this essay a while ago, and I had hoped to actually publish it somewhere so that it could reach a wider audience, because I think this angle on the question of corporate personhood is important. But I now believe I'm unlikely to find a market for it, because it's too lengthy and rigidly philosophical to have a place in any popular magazine, but too brief, playful and topical to have a place in a philosophical journal, which I have no access to anyway. So I'm just putting it out as a blog post, instead, and hoping for the best. Fair warning: at five thousand words, it's longer (and perhaps drier) than blogs are supposed to be.]

Time and Place

Having had no plans for celebration on New Year’s Eve and no genuine cause for celebration, I undertook a long and meandering walk late that evening, stretching from my home to downtown Buffalo some six miles away. Holidays like that one are not at all my scene, and in observing the crowds, I alternate between enjoyment and derision. Whether centered in the Elmwood Village, or Allentown, or the ball-drop festivities along Main Street, most of what I saw at the close of 2011 seemed quite run-of-the-mill. So when I plunged into the crowd at Buffalo’s one major public event for the evening, I was made exceptionally upset by just one thing.

It didn’t take long after arriving until I noticed a cluster of signs being held in the air in part of the crowd. I think it’s pretty natural that my first thought was that they might simply be homemade slogans regarding the start of the New Year. It took me just another moment to see what they were. Every one of the eight or ten signs read “Ron Paul 2012,” with not an ounce of variation in phrasing, font, or color scheme. A couple of minutes later, I realized why they were clustered in exactly the location they were. It was just behind their group that the local ABC affiliate had set up its tent with elevated cameras in fixed positions for coverage of the event.

The families at home in the area who tuned in to watch a carefree, universal gathering of other locals were treated instead to what I can only assume was two solid hours of bobbing campaign signs, and little else. I actually made an effort to yell out to the Ron Paul devotees the question of whether people at home might have been interested in something other than a small group’s political message, but I don’t think I was heard over the noise of the crowd. There is some saving grace in that, I suppose. It’s good to know that the people encircling that contingent of misplaced advocates were having a good time, even if the ones at home were being prevented that.

If I’d had the opportunity to engage in a discussion with those people, I can only assume that I would have gotten some sort of response along the lines that it’s a free country and that I had no business trying to stifle their free speech. What bombastic people seem frequently to forget about the Constitution is that the guarantee of free speech rights doesn’t mean that it’s always right to use your speech to be a complete asshole.

I’m all for standing up for what one believes in and broadcasting one’s message through whatever channels are available, and I’ll encourage anyone to do so, even if his views are ones that I don’t remotely agree with. But there’s a time and a place for everything; and a completely apolitical, celebratory local event is nearly as inappropriate a place for group advocacy of a national political cause as is a veteran’s funeral.

It made me terrifically sad to see so many people ringing in the New Year with such a complete lack of self-awareness, ethics, and restraint. If there’s one good thing to be said for it, it’s that such a public show of obtuse behavior may drive away large numbers of people, not necessarily from Ron Paul’s candidacy, but certainly from such aggressively intrusive activism.

It's Election Day!

My lack of enthusiasm about Election Day belies my faith in the electoral process. I hesitate to say this, but I may actually waive my right to participate in democracy this time around. Uninformed people are better off avoiding the polls, and frankly uninformed is just what I am with respect to local politics. In my defense, it’s not for lack of interest, or for a complete deficiency of effort. But since I don’t read local newspapers, don’t have television, don’t really associate with people, and can’t find any local campaign information online, I had actually found it impossible to get a complete account of who is running.

Of course, I have been aware of the major race, the one being discussed by anyone who’s talking about local politics. But I haven’t been able to discern any reason why I’m supposed to vote for one candidate or the other, other than on account of the parenthetical letters that follow their names on the ballot. I attended a terrible play in the last weekend of October, and before it began the director spoke to the audience about his company’s season and then brought up election season as a final comment, and instructed the small audience to “vote Poloncarz.” Most of those sitting around me applauded vigorously, and I felt sort of left out thinking that these people all shared some kind of firm opinion about the office of County Executive, the job that the incumbent has been doing, and the changes that the challenger could bring about.

Despising partisan politics, I was alienated by the tribalism surrounding me in that room. If a person on stage wants to turn the topic to politics, I think the least he can do is say something substantive. I would have actually been really happy with that bit of grandstanding if it hadn’t followed the formula: mention a popular personality; hold for applause; depart the stage. The assumption seems to have been that everyone in that crowd already agreed with him, and that the reason for mentioning it was just to reinforce how right everyone was. Of course, if they all have such a firm basis for confidence that theirs is the winning horse, surely it would have been pretty easy to mention any one particular thing that we could expect to actually change if Poloncarz takes over as County Executive. In absence of any such statement about the issues, I can only assume that they simply weren’t on the speaker’s mind.

His comment probably had about the political effectiveness of a campaign sign, which is a phenomenon I just don’t understand. I’d be all for campaign signs if there was implicit in them an invitation to knock on the door in front of which they’re displayed and ask, “Why?” But lawn signs are never an invitation to court discussion; they just stand there, broadcasting a name that is probably well familiar to all the passersby already, and conveying no information. Each one is purely a declaration of support – a function which I thought was already fulfilled by voting. Every election season in this area, in addition to the wide array of carbon-copied lawn signs, I encounter a handful that are something like six feet tall and eight feet wide. Are these, I wonder, more effective at their purpose than the normal, non-monstrous signs? I can’t help but look at them as an obnoxious testament to the idea that the physical dimensions of one’s political viewpoints are more important than what they are grounded in.

Since I think so much about the social significance of campaign styles and perspectives on electoral politics, I naturally feel bad about my civic engagement apparently being limited or only intermittent, but I think I ought to take ownership of that situation and allow myself a little pride at the fact that I’m not interested in voting for district judges or comptrollers unless I’m personally invested in or exceptionally well-informed about those races. I’m okay with it being a personal rule that I don’t participate in the elections that are based on nothing other than name recognition and party affiliation.

It seems explicit to me that that is the case with at least the current batch of Erie County elections. The term “negative campaign” is tossed around a great deal, so the deeper meanings that might be conveyed by it are sometimes lost. What little exposure I have had to the local elections has been negative campaigning through and through, and of an especially cynical sort. I’ve received a handful of robocalls over the last week or so, and I’ve found that they tend to place all of their focus on the mission of ousting an incumbent or repelling a challenger, to the extent that whom they are running against is presented as being irrelevant.

I’m not exaggerating. The last such call that I received actually discussed how important it was that we keep a particular candidate out of Erie County government and then ended without ever mentioning the name of a challenger. That was the most stunning example of this skewed emphasis, but it’s typical of what I’ve been subjected to during this election season. I receive these calls, listen carefully to them because I’m interested in the platforms (not to mention the damn names) of the persons on the ballot, and when the recorded voice says “thank you,” I’m left listening to silence for a few seconds, like an idiot, wondering “Is that it? Is there any reason why I should want candidate x other than because I’m supposed to hate candidate y?” The kind of negative campaigning that I remember from television ads for national campaigns at least tended to conclude with a statement about what the alternative was.

I’m curious as to whether the exclusive kind of negative campaigning is specifically designed to exploit the culture of Buffalo and its surrounding areas. I don’t see a lot of nuanced political or developmental thinking around here. Instead, the persistent attitudes of both politicians and their constituents appear to be based on the belief that each of the region’s myriad problems have one solitary cause, and that getting rid of it will in itself provide an all-encompassing solution. Is it any wonder that amidst this thinking our local political campaigns treat getting rid of the incumbent as important in its own right, regardless of whether the person who replaces him has any actual solutions?

Of course, my cynical attitude toward Buffalo is showing through, as I know it’s not fair to suggest that that’s any different from the logic that tends to operate on a national level. Whenever things seem bad, we figure we need to get rid of whoever is currently in charge, and when delivering the country from the hands of party A into the hands of party B doesn’t fix everything, we switch back to party A and apparently never collectively wonder if our limited choices or methods of selection are problematic.

Buffalo seems to be taking the myopia and present bias to another level, though, by only running challengers in cases where there is already enough preexisting public frustration. All eight of the district judges that are up for reelection in the region are running uncontested today, except for one who has to content with a challenge from a write-in campaign. There are also no challengers in the races for County Legislator, City Comptroller, and District Council Member. In the last mayoral election, Buffalo’s terrible, terrible Mayor Byron Brown won election at the point of the primary, because the Republican Party put forth no challenger, despite being petitioned for endorsement by at least one would-be candidate.

Call me naïve, but shouldn’t the opposition party at least put someone’s name on the freaking ballot, even if they have no interest in spending money on a campaign? Why not allow an ambitious member of the party, in this information age, put his platform up online, shake hands at a polling place, start a political career, and give people an opportunity to express their support for alternative ideas, even if by voting for a candidate that has no chance? I recognize that I am being presumptuous again, but the message that I get from this repeated agreement to not oppose incumbents is that if the person currently holding the job hasn’t caused outrage or demonstrated incompetence, there’s no point to trying to come up with better ideas.

If both politicians and constituents think that there’s no point to that and that there’s no point to campaigning on the basis of ideas in the first place, I just can’t see what the point is of voting today.

Disingenuous Comment of the Week: Mitch Daniels

On Wednesday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart conducted an excellent interview with Mitch Daniels, mostly focused on wealth disparity and economic policy. After talking at length about the value of consensus-building, the Indiana Governor almost immediately launched into a stream of divisive language, referring to “the president’s obsession with wealthy people,” and his “constant bashing” of them. Daniels then stated that “You could confiscate the wealth of all those people, and it wouldn’t do any good.”

When Jon Stewart pointed out that Daniels might thus be contradicting his own advice about “the language of unity,” Daniels looked introspective for a brief moment before coming up with a very unique and creative excuse. “If I got a little defensive,” he said, “it’s because you’re asking me to defend positions I haven’t taken.”

Sure, Mitch, I understand; I do that all the time! Like if somebody were to ask me to defend the death penalty, my first impulse would be to describe those who oppose it as weak-willed anarchists who want to see murders roaming our streets with impunity. Of course, I don’t believe that, but that’s just the kind of thing you say when you’re called upon to play devil’s advocate, right? Any time that somebody misidentifies my social or political views as being more extreme than they are, I make certain that appropriate their language and launch ad hominem attacks against the opposing viewpoint. I mean, that’s the only natural way to defend oneself, right?

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a public statement that sounded quite so baldly disingenuous. The only thing more stunning than the fact that he attempted to defend his aggressive rhetoric by claiming that it was a consequence of his views actually being more moderate than they seemed was that in the context of the interview the strategy apparently worked. Rather than cutting it down, Jon Stewart adopted that point and took to defending himself against the baseless charge that he was arguing on the basis of straw men. He ended the interview by saying that he hoped the governor didn’t feel that he was asking him to defend positions that didn’t represent him.

If this sort of defense was acceptable when Daniels was caught in his own hypocrisy, can it be used by anyone, anytime their own behavior doesn’t match the expectations they set for their opponents? If I catch criticism for describing corporate CEOs as wealthy parasites profiting off the painful labors of people far below them, can I then demand more civility from them by saying that I only said what I did because somebody was asking me to defend that view? If a politician publicly uses racist language, can he keep his job by saying that he doesn’t really believe those things, but was backed into a corner by minority critics who mistakenly insisted that he did?

Whatever the spontaneous strategy a professional talker comes up with, any attempt to reverse a statement that you have just made in perfectly plain terms should be met with derisive laughter. Nobody should get away with such a thing, and it should be obvious that the gauge of a person’s real views and his actual respect for his opponents is what he says when he’s not prepared to censor his own remarks, when his pressured by being asked to defend a view that he may or may not hold. And if your job is to serve the public according to your personal views of what is right and wrong, it should be obvious that if someone challenges you to defend a view that you don’t hold, you simply don’t do that. You tell them exactly what you do believe, instead. It goes a long way towards avoiding perfectly absurd backpedaling and mind-bending rhetoric. I simply can’t imagine that someone could fail to understand that after more than six years as governor. But retaining a strong tendency for hypocrisy through that much time in office? That I understand.