Political Civilian

It seems to have gone down the memory hole a bit, but at the very beginning of the pandemic back in March, there was a short burst of the "rally around the flag" effect directed at the Trump administration. They were acting decisively! Fauci! Special task forces! We like task forces!  It lasted about a week, but there isn't much denying that the Trump administration's approval ticked up just a bit because there was a mighty ENEMY in COVID that AMERICA needed to DEFEAT and partisan politics could surely take a break. Seriously. It was a thing. But what happened next is history - they started goofing about PPE and masks, refused to negotiate with the Democrats in the House on stimulus, Jared Kushner got involved somehow, and our nation's leading science - doing guys were shown the door. It was an opportunity squandered.  It certainly didn’t have to be that way. And it wasn’t that way 20 years ago. With hindsight, the period just after 9/11 was terrifying for a lot

  What do I know? I’m not a lawyer. Whenever I talk about complex animals like “the law”, I tend to just... not to. I know enough to know how much I don’t know. The basic idea behind a “political civilian” is that one shouldn’t have to be a super - expert in a field in order to properly participate in a representative democracy. Ipso facto ( you heard me ), we should have more faith in our experts and our credentialing systems. That’s not a fallacious appeal to authority, just an acknowledgement of the usefulness of expertise and institutions - something we’re clearly having trouble with. Wear a mask. When a bunch of people get together over the course of a decade and say “this person is a doctor”, we should probably take their word for it. But it seems that the same mechanism is hopelessly broken for the legal profession. Like most jobs that involve rarified expertise, it takes years of post - graduate work to be a lawyer, plus a rigorous credentialing system. Beyond that, to be succe

The answer is no, we don’t have an adequate safety net, just in case it wasn't obvious. But what's remarkable is that the people who are dead set on keeping our safety net inadequate have the worst excuses for doing so and they almost never have to seriously defend those excuses.  The most common excuse of course is the idea that people won't go out and get jobs if unemployment insurance and programs like TANF and SNAP exist. Because it's clear that subsistence is the best existence and feeding your kids via charitable donations feels really great. It’s certainly more fun than “working”. And that awful idea has engendered just enough popular support from confused people who think that being on “welfare” is the bee’s knees and anyone getting any public help makes suckers out of those who are employed. Also, SOCIALISM! A common refrain during the pandemic was that a lockdown would destroy the economy, so an inordinate amount of frothy energy went towards downplaying the s

Undecided voters are not deliberative and thoughtful people trying mightily to make a hard choice. But they are also not ignorant goons who can’t be bothered to learn the first thing about politics. They’re creatures of privilege. There is a fairly large cohort of people out there for whom "politics" as a concept just doesn’t interest them. And public policy functionally doesn't affect them beyond a trip to the DMV and (maybe) paying their taxes. As much as activists and politicians try to convince people otherwise, politics is… a nuisance to be overcome, and a fundamental fact of life not dissimilar to a rainy day. It’s not a “real” interest, and should take up as little head-space as humanly possible. This is where I usually segway into something about “40 years of anti - government propaganda has consequences”. But it’s more than that. The trappings of modern life - from modern tech, to the 40 hour work week, to sports, entertainment, and the lottery, are all configure

  Why wouldn’t a Supreme Court nominee just… lie? The (short) list of takeaways from the Justice Barrett Senate hearings reveal the following: She couldn’t answer “should there be a peaceful transfer of power?” She claimed that climate change was “ a very contentious matter of public debate ”. She thinks that Roe isn’t a “super - precedent”. She deflected a question about the Civil Rights Act. She can’t name the five freedoms protected by the first amendment . She wouldn’t say that women were allowed to have birth control. She wouldn’t recuse herself from any election - related cases . But I haven’t seen anyone argue persuasively that Judge Barrett isn’t smart enough to know that those are “hot button” questions in need of more cohesive responses. They were questions that could have been handled with some fairly simple rhetorical jujitsu. But between her inability to effectively DO that, and the substance of the answers themselves there is now an extremely easy case to be made just fro

Missing in the " if Barrett is appointed to the court, the ACA is doomed, doomed, I say " argument is the fact that the American health care system is still a privately run enterprise.  I know that we're 10 years after the passing of the ACA, but despite the (loud) protests of the right about "socialism", we still have the only privately - run, for profit health insurance system in the developed world. It's terrible, it's exploitative, and it's maybe the only reason that conservatives have been (marginally) successful at ginning up rage at "Obamacare". It remains absurd that we still have a multi - billion dollar industry specifically making profits off of NOT giving people medicine. So that being said (again!), if the protections of the ACA are struck down, it won't be because the president picked the first female name off of a list from the Federalist Society , or because of conscienceless GOP Senators, or because their powers combine

Aside from the whole  projection of toxic masculinity  into a world and onto an electoral base desperately afraid of "feminization" and the loss of "America as we know it", I'm really having trouble understanding the WHY of mask - denial and COVID downplaying among the right. Convincing mask wearers (and billion dollar companies) to abandon safety precautions embraced by the entire legitimate medical community would accomplish what, exactly? Presuming we collectively "open things up" and don't let a virus "dominate our lives", what exactly is gained?  As recently as a few months ago, anti - mask wearing and the denial of COVID's severity was a matter of improving the GOP’s electoral prospects.  If the pandemic was really subsiding, the broader Trump administration “strategy” will have worked. “The economy” could be opened back up, and the resulting growth and bounceback would strengthen the broader case for electing GOP candidates. Th

Melania Trump’s leaked phone calls were a small part of the avalanche of the last few days' worth of news, but they shouldn’t go overlooked and under-analyzed. Particularly this bit: TRUMP: I'm driving liberals crazy, that's for sure. And they deserve it, you understand? And everybody's like "Oh, my God, this is the worst, this is the worst." After, I mean come on. They are crazy, okay? I'm megaloathe to write about political families in any way, even when they make national news like this. We don't elect politicians' families, and they should be allowed to do what they will with their notoriety, including staying as private as they want to be. I don’t begrudge them using their fame and position to do as they see fit. But we’ve sort of made “First Lady” a semi - official position in our government and the way they utilize tax dollars and their platform matters, even if we often dismiss it as trivia. Last week was basically a long series of “told y