True or False, Are Always Revealing

Every now and then, when the stars align, the internet gives us the chance to gain some actual insight amidst all the cacophony we subject ourselves to.  Over the last week-and-a-half, there've been three articles published that give us a rather unguarded look into the current conservative mindset, so it's worth taking a look into them.

The first is an article from the Tucker Carlson owned Daily Caller, where one its editors, Virginia Kruta, went to Missouri rally for gubernatorial candidate Cori Bush with special guest star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  By now, you may have the seen Kruta's hilarious money quote where she says,

"But then Ocasio-Cortez spoke, followed by Bush, and I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.
I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.
I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.
Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided."

We'll get to the full unpacking of this in a second, but I think it's also important to note how Kruta closes the piece: "I left the rally with a photo — in part to remind myself of that time I crashed a rally headlined by a socialist, but also in part to remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, go I."  Kruta's been the butt of many a joke over her gut reaction to hearing that the government could indeed see to it that she could live a life free of the suffering caused by not being paid enough for her work so she wouldn't struggle to pay her bills, or that she would have to stress out over whether she'll go bankrupt if she has a medical emergency, or if her children want to go on to higher education they wouldn't have to take on a crippling amount of debt to do so is sheer abject terror, but, while she deserves all of that, it's important to note why she feels that way.

See, the amount of of suffering people experience in today's economy isn't an accident, it's the whole point of it.  If a student comes out of college with an advanced degree but mountains of debt that means they can't leverage their education to get better pay because they need whatever they can get to start paying back those loans.  The threat of medical bankruptcy is used as a way to keep workers stuck at whatever job they have because if they leave that job, they lose their insurance.  The whole point is to create a meager existence that keeps people obedient and cowed out of fear of losing what little they have if they stand up for themselves.

So why do people who are products of that system want to keep it going?  Why wouldn't they want to change things for the better?  Because in this style of system, the brutality of it is legitimized when one generation passes the suffering they went through down to the next.  This is sold as a way to reclaim a sense of  agency- they survived this world and became tougher for it so they now get to pass it on to their children and their children after them.   If younger people seek to end or change they system that causes all that suffering, then its treated like older generations- like Kruta's - are being cheated because if it's proven that all that suffering is entirely meaningless and unnecessary then, well, maybe all those times she sacrificed or went without so she could scrape by one week to the next, were unnecessary and meaningless as well.

In this system, suffering is the point.  The whole point of that "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" nonsense is that you know you've "made it" when you stop being the recipient of beatings and degradation and start administering those things to other people.  If, all of sudden, people have the means to live without the indignity of working full-time living paycheck-to-paycheck or the stress of staying at a shitty job because they'll lose their benefits or they'll get the same shit pay everywhere else, then all of a sudden people like Kruta and her ideological brethren lose a lot of their power.  They don't know what to do in the face of someone legitimately offering a better way forward, all they have is that fear and a feeling of "Thank god I don't believe people should live with dignity like those whackos."  It does really go to show that they don't think that a fair days work should come with a fair days pay, or whatever other platitude about the value of hard work that drizzles out their mouth is true, at the end of the day, they just want to make sure as many people as possible are absolutely miserable so they can condescend to them when they dare think they deserve better.

Next up is this hilariously incompetent polemic against single-payer from The Hill.  Written by Dr. Deane Waldman from a Texas think-tank, Waldman's piece is a greatest hits of anti-single-payer arguments conservatives have trotted out for years now.  Classics like "it costs too much!" make their early and obligatory appearance: "Most people thought the cost of Obamacare, $1.34 trillion, was excessive, but that’s peanuts compared to the $18 trillion price tag for Bernie Sanders’ — and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s — Medicare-for-All."  True, recent analysis has put the price tag of Bernie's plan at $32 trillion over ten years.  Considering that we spend about $3.2 trillion right now on healthcare, keeping our current level of spending with even more coverage is actually a pretty successful plan.  If we keep the law as is, then by 2026 we'll be spending $5.7 trillion a year so... tell me again how single-payer is too expensive?

Next up, Waldman trots out the oldie-but-goodie "people die waiting for care" scare chord,

"There is death-by-queueing in single payer systems, where sick persons die from treatable conditions because they could not get care in time and succumb “waiting in line” for care. You don’t even have to go outside the U.S. to see these avoidable deaths. In our own single payer or Medicare-for-All system, the VA, “307,000 veterans may have died waiting for medical care.”

Yes, it is an unfortunate reality that, especially in recent years, more people are dying because the NHS cannot handle the sheer amount of people they need to treat. Likewise with the VA, that 307k number was the cumulative total of veterans who died while they were waiting for their applications to be processed.  That number came from a 2015 report detailing problems with the VA's patient intake process and some of the deaths go as far back as 1988.  Obviously this presents a lot of problems for how VA documented and kept track of the veterans seeking to get care which do need to be solved, but just dropping the number without any context over how many years it took to reach it is misleading to say the least.  That Waldman also tries to make the problem of patients dying because they can't get access to care an exclusively single-payer problem by omitting the 50,000 people who die a year here because they don't have insurance is a signal that he's not using these numbers in good faith.  Lastly, a significant reason why the NHS and VA have these problems keeping pace with their patients needs is that they have been subject to massive budget cuts and under-funding for years on end.  Apparently when you don't give doctors or hospitals the resources they need to keep track of or properly care for their patients, those patients end up dying.  Odd, that.

But we haven't gotten to the best part of Waldman's little screed.  Here's Waldman's utopia healthcare scenario:

"In 2017, the U.S. spent $3.4 trillion on healthcare for 323 million Americans, or $10,526 for every man, woman and child. Imagine if every family of four put $42,105 in an HSA every year! and simply shopped for and paid for their health care. No government stealing our money to pay its bureaucracy. No insurance company delaying or denying care. Just the old but right doctor-patient relationship with no one and nothing in between.

The answer isn’t Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rebranded socialism. The answer is for us to turn away from government dependence and rely on ourselves."

This is fantasy.  It'd be like if Waldman said that if men wanted to save money on their colonoscopy's, they should look into alien abduction because they don't bill for their time.  Even if we indulged the absurd notion that the average family of four just has $40k laying around doing absolutely nothing, let's see how far that actually gets people.  The average stay in a hospital here runs people $5,220.  So, if you stay in a hospital for eight of the 365 days out of the year, hope you don't need any other care.  Keep in mind, that's just the cost for laying in bed.  You want even more bundles of joy for your family?  Be prepared to pay $10 grand if you go the natural route or $16k if you need a C-Section.  Need a heart bypass?  Kiss $28,000 of those savings goodbye.

Reading this idiocy, I was reminded of this article by The American Conservative from last year which said that within five years conservatives will either directly offer or quietly assent to a universal healthcare policy.  The reason, they said, was because it was the only way to effectively cover everyone at the lowest possible price.  Which, yes, that's true as any Google search comparing our healthcare costs with the rest of the world will tell you.  As far as they where concerned, "[t]he objections to socialized healthcare crumble upon impact with the reality."  Which, again, is 100% true.  My objection to this article is that it assumes that the conservative movement as a whole actually gives a shit about reality or is capable of recognizing it.  Because right here, in the face of ever-growing popularity for Medicare-For-All single-payer system, we have a man contorting himself to put forward a solution which depends on not only turning away from government health programs but the entire concept of insurance itself.  He's committed to something so abjectly ridiculous because that is what he is paid to do so.  Waldman, and all the other hacks along with him, will only double-down on their farcical positions opposing single-payer healthcare the more popular and inevitable it  becomes, expecting them to examine their beliefs and adjust them in response to evidence is a fools errand.

Which brings me to the last article I wanted to talk about, because when it comes to ignoring reality in all its forms, no one has anything on religious fundamentalists.  This story from the Washington Post covers one evangelical congregation in Alabama and how they handle the supposed moral crisis that would come from being a Christian and a Trump supporter.  Their pastor, a guy named Clay Crum, is even doing a sermon series on the Ten Commandments and just got to the one about adultery.  I guess there's supposed to be some sort of tension in whether or not Crum will say something in his sermon condemning Trump as an adulterer, but if you're able to remember a year back when the good Christian white folk of Alabama did their damnedest to elect a child rapist, it won't come as a surprise when Crum says nothing or how easily the congregation is able to wave away something as petty as philandary.

The article does try really, really hard to act like there is a serious conundrum that Christians are trying to solve, which, I guess they get points for trying?  The Post sets things up like this:

"In poll after poll, they have said that Trump has kept his promises to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, fight for religious liberty, adopt pro-life policies and deliver on other issues that are high priorities for them.

At the same time, many have acknowledged the awkwardness of being both self-proclaimed followers of Jesus and the No. 1 champions of a president whose character has been defined not just by alleged infidelity but accusations of sexual harassment, advancing conspiracy theories popular with white supremacists, using language that swaths of Americans find racist, routinely spreading falsehoods and an array of casual cruelties and immoderate behaviors that amount to a roll call of the seven deadly sins."

All I can really say here is that "awkward" is one hell of a word choice here.  Maybe if we have a sit down with Sheilia Butler, a member of Crum's church, we can better understand this issue, (apologies for the wall of text)

"we’re moving toward the annihilation of Christians...

“Obama was acting at the behest of the Islamic nation,” she began one afternoon when she was getting her nails done with her friend Linda. She was referring to allegations that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian — allegations that are false. “He carried a Koran and it was not for literary purposes. If you look at it, the number of Christians is decreasing, the number of Muslims has grown. We allowed them to come in."

 She continues:

Linda nodded. It wasn’t just Muslims that posed a threat, she said, but all kinds of immigrants coming into the country.
“Unpapered people,” Sheila said, adding that she had seen them in the county emergency room and they got treated before her. “And then the Americans are not served.”
Love thy neighbor, she said, meant “love thy American neighbor.”
Welcome the stranger, she said, meant the “legal immigrant stranger.”
“The Bible says, ‘If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,’ ” Sheila said, quoting Jesus. “But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border.”
            To her, this was a moral threat far greater than any character flaw Trump might have, as was what she called “the racial divide,” which she believed was getting worse. The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”
“I think they are promoting violence,” Sheila said, thinking about the 800 weathered, steel monoliths hanging from a roof to evoke the lynchings, one for each American county where the violence was carried out, including Crenshaw County, where a man named Jesse Thornton was lynched in 1940 in downtown Luverne.
“How do you think a young black man would feel looking at that?” Linda asked. “Wouldn’t you feel a sickness in your stomach?”
“I think it would only make you have more violent feelings — feelings of revenge,” said Sheila.
It reminded her of a time when she was a girl in Montgomery, when the now-famous civil rights march from Selma was heading to town and her parents, fearing violence, had sent her to the country to stay with relatives.
“It’s almost like we’re going to live that Rosa Parks time again,” she said, referring to the civil rights activist. “It was just a scary time, having lived through it.”
She thought an all-out race war was now in the realm of possibility."

So let's just do a quick run down, shall we?  Here we have conspiracies popular with white supremacists (the idea that Obama was a Muslim), language that swaths of America would find racist/spreading falsehoods (the slavery wasn't that bad trope, citing the time of  Montgomery Bus Protests as a bad thing), and casual cruelty (the complete dismissal of even the idea that she should show compassion to immigrants).  Huh, it's almost as if she supports Trump because she's exactly like him.  Weird.

What makes this unintentionally hilarious is that the congregation is under the umbrella of the Southern Baptists, whose leadership is a little sensitive to the faith's staunch support of Trump since they have a history of- as the article so euphemistically puts it- "whiffing" on major social issues of the time.  During the Civil Rights era, for example,  the Southern Baptists either supported or said nothing against segregation, so when it comes to supporting a man who's putting people in concentration camps, you could see how they might be aware of history repeating itself.  Not that they're going to so anything, mind you, but they're aware this time that supporting Trump makes them look bad, which I guess counts as growth, if you want to really abuse the term.

What really gets me about all this though is how just painfully obtuse all of these people are.  They honestly believe that because they live in a world where black men get to be president, gays can get married, and they're called out for being the hypocritical pieces of shit that they are, that all of that somehow makes them oppressed.  Crum says of the election that "[i]t encouraged them that we do still have some political power in this country," which, my only response to this is: Are you fucking kidding me? Conservative Christians have been the bedrock and sole dictator of Republican's social policy for almost forty years.  You can't be a Republican politician at any level without mentioning how much you love Jesus, every presidential candidate has to make the obligatory promise to nominate judges who will strike down Roe vs Wade; these people have one of the two major political parties in this country by the balls and they still think they're disenfranchised? Honestly, what world are these people living in? (That's not a hard one- they live in the world where Muslims are coming to kill them in the night by sneaking in with Mexicans while simultaneously stirring up black unrest to keep the police busy and since Democrats took all their guns away, they'll be helpless to defend themselves in the religious war waging all around us)

What's ironic about all of this is that Crum left the church for a time when he realized how morally bankrupt it was.  As he put it,

"He saw the pastor of his childhood church stealing money, and as he got older, he saw deacons having affairs, Christians behaving in hateful ways and finally he came to see it all as a big sham.

“I thought it was very hypocritical,” he said. “That they pretend. That it’s all a show.”

Unfortunately, Crum is now just another cast member.  He's taken to wearing this lapel pin of tiny baby feet with the tagline that the pin is the size of a fetus' feet at ten weeks. It's all part of his (and the churches) commitment to being Pro-Life.  But that's just as hypocritical, pretend, and performative as everything else that lead Crum to leave the church in the first place.  It's easy to care about a fetus- it's not a real person yet so it hasn't had a chance to do anything disagreeable like being black and angry, or being born on the wrong side of a border, or gay, or pro-gun control, or for whatever other reason these people come up with to say that they don't have to follow through on their god's commandment to love their enemy as they love themselves.  That hypocrisy isn't unique to this one congregation- it's the cornerstone of the Pro-Life movement, after all- but it serves one of my larger points that you can't expect people to turn away from Trump when he gives them everything they want.

Christianity for these people ultimately isn't a philosophy for them to live their own lives by or seek comfort in during troubled times; at the end of the day, their faith is a weapon to bludgeon everyone else into submission.  It's why they don't mind that Trump denigrates every other aspect of society while telling them that they're the rightful heirs of America, it's why they don't care when he throws non-white people into cages or tears children from their parents arms.  This is the world they want to live in, where they're told over and over again how special they are and all the threats to their power-real or imagined- are mercilessly crushed by the state.  All Trump has done is remove the illusion that they were ever anything else.  I can understand why they would want to perpetuate that illusion, but we're not under any obligation to go along with it.

And Now You Know

It's been a running thing between my brother and I for the last two years that, whenever Trump does something, to say "If you ever wondered how the Nazi's sold their ideas, well, now you know." From his wholesale demonization of an entire minority group from literally day one of his campaign, to his talk about how the press is the enemy of the people, to his promising to use official state power to go after the supposed enemies of "righteous" white conservatives, all of it has followed a very predictable pattern. He jumped the gun a little on concentration camps, but we all make mistakes when we're eager to get things done. Right now, we're in the period were the Administration is actively trying to expel immigrants from as many aspects of public life as they can- like purging the military of immigrant service members or having ICE find whatever pretext it can to strip naturalized citizens of their green cards so they can then be deported to countries they haven't lived in for decades.

For anyone still asking, "How could this happen here?" well, hate to break it to you, but the lines dividing America from the Reich were always much thinner than we've been lead to believe. For one thing, the U.S. was a direct model that the Reich copied on their way to gassing millions of people. The Jim Crow segregation laws were what the Nazi's used as a baseline for the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of their property, businesses, homes, establishing curfews and the ghettos they were then forcibly moved into. The eugenics movement that started in America provided the language of what a "pure" society looked like once it had been purged of all undesirables. And Goebbels learned most of the propaganda techniques he would use from American advertising. Considering how fervently America clung (then and now) to the idea that the only "real" citizens are the white ones, it's not too surprising that the Nazi's would find a lot to appreciate in a culture like that.

We've kept other aspects of fascism alive and well in our culture, too. The unquestioning, compulsory patriotism and fetishistic worship our military are both easily exploitable for anyone with Fuhrer ambitions. After all, how weird would it really be to for kids to say a pledge of allegiance to the flag and a picture of the Beloved Leader every morning? How strange is really to "force" public displays of national pride and servitude when the National Anthem plays before literally every single sporting event, and at almost every public gathering in general? Add to that the Republican party has spent the last 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act slowly but surely turning itself into a haven of white nationalism with its own media ecosystem that actively gaslights its consumers into believing that the "Mainstream Media" is merely a front for leftists to undermine their culture by letting the blacks, women, Mexicans, gays, and the (((globalists))) but they were safe now, safe to hear how the Feminazis, and the PC Police where all working to implement the gay agenda of a Islamic Communist New World Order. All in all, we were a country that kept itself primed to accept a fascist paradigm, all we needed was the right circumstances.

And then the 2008 crash happened. The pillaging of the middle class to feed the rich that started under Reagan and refined under the Clintons finally came due as all the credit funding the gambling racket that had become the housing market collapsed under its own weight. Suddenly there were millions of people jobless, homeless, and coming to the quick realization that the government would only give them half-hearted and poorly executed mortgage relief plans while it was busy dumping trillions into rescuing the banks that broke the world in the first place. With the economy so terrible for so long, I figured it was only a question of "When" Republicans would cough up something like Trump, not "If."

So, while America becoming the fascist hell-hole it secretly wanted to be is depressing but not all that surprising to me, what I underestimated was how strong the "civility" response would be. I mean, I've read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail a lot, had shaken my head at the false empathy King lays out when he talks about the White Moderate and how their council to the Civil Rights movement was to suffer their indignities until they, the White Moderates, deemed the appropriate time, place, and methods for black people to be treated as actual people. It made sense on an intellectual level that society would be made up of people who were complacent with the way the world was set up and didn't want to rock the boat because, hey, they got the perks of being automatically higher in social hierarchies and if they had to actually earn that spot, they might not be able to. Even then, seeing these people up close and personal is a hell of thing to behold.

What makes them so dangerous is that these are the people that autocratic and repressive systems depend on the most to sustain themselves, but they get to pass themselves off, both in their minds eye and to the public at large, as the voices of reason, people who are just trying to find a way for all the disparate pieces of society to come together and comprise on their differences. This is fine when you're trying to figure out what movie to go see or what kind of food you want for dinner, but when you have a group on one side saying, "we think immigrants are an infection that needs to be eradicated to keep our country pure" and the other is saying "This is literally how shipping people to gas chambers starts," it's somewhat... lacking.

Their plays at compassion are nothing more than cowardice, no exceptions. If you think that a woman who speaks for the administration who is taking people's children away by saying they're just going to give the child a bath, or that their children will be in a camp nearby where they'll be able to visit, then whisk those children away never to return- again, exactly the same thing the Nazi's did- if you honestly believe that the woman who defends and justifies the administration that does this suffers the same indignity because a restaurant wouldn't serve her, then your moral compass is downright pathetic. The separation  policy- and the straight indefinite detention plan that replaced it- are  monstrous things that makes anyone who supports them, carries them out, or defends them monstrous in turn if they weren't already. Hemming and hawing your way out of condemning those actions and those who champion them isn't a mark of highly developed sense of empathy, it's just complicity.

Part of this stems from how we're taught about the evils of the past, or, more specifically, the kind of people who perpetrate them. We’re taught that the Nazi’s or the racists in power during the Civil Rights Era were always cut from obviously evil cloth who used their power to stomp down all who would oppose them until finally, heroic virtue had its rightful triumph. The image of screaming crowds surrounding black children while they walk into school or the cheering crowds at Hitler’s speeches have all been used to make us think that the only people who openly support these things are the virulent, frothing hordes that we can then safely Other.

What gets left out is all the seemingly perfectly polite people who treated the denigration or extermination of entire sections of society as natural as the sunrise. They are otherwise perfectly sociable, naturally bigoted without any of the obvious stink that comes with say, marching around with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Again, these are the people oppressive regimes live and die by because, when push comes to shove, they’ll be the ones fighting to block any measure of progress or reform by tut-tutting protests as being too disruptive and how they’d be much more effective if people conducted their marches in such a way that they’d be easily ignored. Deep down, these people understand they benefit greatly from “the way things are” and that if they change, they run the risk of losing those benefits which they'd rather not do, thank you.

The other part of this comes from the White Moderates friends, the ones who go to the same clubs and dinner parties but who feel a stronger urge that Something Should Be Done when they watch the news. These are usually the people bemoaning the lack of civility because they don’t like seeing their social circle lumped in with the open bigotry of people in Make America Great Again hats. These are the people who have “Injustice anywhere is a threat to Justice, everywhere” on at least one placard in their home or office and always told themselves that, if they ever lived through a time of moral crisis, they would no doubt be on the side of justice and freedom etc. etc. Now that they find themselves in the that position, they’ve found out that calling out the villainous Other means calling out their mimosa brunch clubs, suddenly standing up for the equality of all mankind against bigotry gets slightly awkward or, horror of horrors, possibly even rude.

So instead of living through that dreadful reality, they start chanting out America is and always has been a land of great compromise; we should all learn to see things from each other’s point of view to find the hallowed middle ground. They keep pushing this idea so that they never have to confront how they’re much more comfortable defending the despotic people than they ever wanted to believe. They think there’s some way to go back to the time where the subtle bigotries and quiet authoritarianism of their social circles could be easily ignored.

Except that’s not going to happen. ICE has already separated an American family by “accident” in their rush to be the new Gestapo, and the time will come where that isn’t a mistake anymore. Don’t brush off the idea that it would never happen because it already has. We’ve already been the land where one ethnic group monolithically ruled over everyone else through direct or state sanctioned violence and executions. Returning us to a time where the state would actively punish or suppress anyone who threatened the white hegemony was the explicit platform of candidate Trump which he’s spent the last year-and-a-half carrying that promise through. You can’t shut the door on that now that the people who wanted to live in that world again know it’s perfectly acceptable to demand it loudly and publicly with the hope that they’ll back off once they rediscover their alleged decency.

Yes, I know the policy was shut down by the courts, as was part of Trump's new plan to hold families together indefinitely. but these will be talked about as obstacles to be overcome by finding judges and Congressmen who will alter the laws so that they can punish these criminals as they deserve. When that moment comes, it'll come to cheers, it'll be made into a galvanizing force for the Republican base, which they will respond to. There isn't going to be a moment where they go "Wait, are we the baddies?" Anyone still riding the Trump train is in it for the long haul, wherever it takes them.

I’m sure someone somewhere will say that I should still give all these people the benefit of the doubt, but, what doubts am I or anyone supposed to have this point? Trump has been doing all his Trump things for three years; everyone by now has had a chance to figure out where they stand. If literal concentration camps aren’t enough of a warning bell that maybe we’re headed in a bad direction and that we shouldn’t be willing to extend so many good graces to the people who support that, I don’t know what will be. There aren't any complicated reasons or motives left for us to discover, there's just the question of what are we going to do.

My bet is that we'll try to sweep all this under the rug of hyper-partisan polarization so we can pretend there's nothing to worry about, or anything to do, because it's just the usual Democrats and Republicans, always calling each other names. We'll retreat into complaining about how the internet has made everyone so much more disconnected, more willing to be mean to one another rather than connect to find a compromise like we did in mythic days of yore. And then, when someone worse than Trump gets the nomination and possibly the presidency, we'll start to wonder all over again how our strategy of doing absolutely nothing to fix our problems could have gone so wrong.

Fallout: New Vegas

Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas is my favorite game of all time. After playing through it a few times I think the reason I love it so much is that has a pretty sophisticated philosophical underpinning and some pretty neat historical parallels for a post-apocalyptic revenge game.

The plot revolves around you, the nameless Courier, hunting down the man who shot you in the head and stole the platinum chip you were hired to deliver. As you make your way through a post-apocalyptic Mojave desert, you find out what the chip does and how it fits into the machinations of the three main factions fighting for control of the Hoover Dam, and consequently, the Mojave desert as a whole: Caesar's Legion, the New California Republic, and the enigmatic ruler of New Vegas, Mr. House.

What really draws me to this game is just how deep the game draws from Roman history and its various political eras. The most obvious is Caesar's Legion, who use football gear and red shirts to do the best they can to mimic the Legionnaire image of yore. They're led by a man named Edward Sallow who calls himself Caesar and who claims to have structured the marauding army and its principles after the ancient Republic/Empire after he found a history book detailing the accomplishments of the society. The only problem is that the Legion resembles exactly none of the aspects of the Rome it claims to.

See, the Legion isn't really a state, or a government. They have no civil or legislative power structure to speak of, their hierarchy is strictly military. Why this clashes is that even in the death throes of the Roman republic, a.k.a when real-life Caesar was in his prime, the whole point of getting to the top of the Roman power structure was to be Consul, or, the chief executive of the state. Commanding your own legions was prestigious, no doubt, but command over a military unit was still just the means to the commanding the civil state. 

There's also the issue of how the Legion treats the people they conquered. The republic, and even the Empire for most of its run, sought to incorporate and integrate the people they conquered into the Roman system. They took a massive amount of slaves (the only legacy the Legion faithfully continues), but for anyone left behind the deal usually was they could keep their own customs and traditions as long as they didn't interfere with or cause any trouble for their new overlords. 

The Legion, by contrast, annihilates the culture and tradition of every tribe they conquer. Any tribe "incorporated" into the Legion is purged of its adult fighting men, the women are forced into sex slavery while the children are put into chattel service or brainwashed into becoming new Legionnaires.

At its heart, the old Roman system that the New Vegas Caesar claims to be so inspired by is a system designed to direct every aspect of society towards optimizing itself to function under a civil, republican state. The Roman Republic is specifically designed to push ambitious Romans into serving the wider goals of the state with an extreme deference to tradition through complex networks of patronage while the Cursus Honorum provided a clear, if cut throat, proscribed path to climb the civic ladder into greater positions of of power. The Legion being a strictly military operation with no civil state to speak of with a general acting as a permanent dictator sort of makes them antithetical to the legacy they claim to carry on.  But, it does line them up pretty well with a later imperial dynasty, the Severans.

The Severan dynasty was started by a man named Septimius Severus. Proclaimed Emperor by his legions after the death of Commodus in 193, Severus fully established himself as Emperor in 197 after, for Rome, a light period of civil warring. The man Sallow has the strongest analogue to though is Septimius' son, Caracalla.  

Caracalla, born Lucuis Septimius Bassianus, was Severus' eldest son, and when his father died control of the empire was split between Caracalla and his younger brother, Geta. Septimius' parting advice to his sons was "be harmonious, enrich the army, scorn all other men." Given that Septimius died in February of 211 with Geta following him in December of that year, you can see which parts of that motto Caracalla was more interested in following. To be fair, the parts of his father's creed Caracalla was committed to he carried out in spectacular fashion, killing up to 20,000 people who had supported his brother after Caracalla assassinated him, he let his soldiers plunder and murder the city of Alexandria to their hearts content after the city staged a play mocking Caracalla's story that he killed Geta in self-defense. Caracalla spent most of his short reign campaigning against barbarian tribes in Germany and gave the army such a significant raise he debased the currency with the all the money he was creating to pay them.

Sallow, likewise, pays no heed to anyone or anything that isn't directly related to his army, and is constantly keeping them on the move conquering and plundering so they don't get antsy and revolt against him. And since Sallow wants to bring as much of the world as he can under the yoke of his slaving and raping army, I think it's fair to say that he can also inherit Edward Gibbon's characterization of Caracalla as the common enemy of mankind on top of everything else.

Ironically enough, if you want to see a truer representation of the Roman Republic, you just need to look over to the Legion's archenemy, the New California Republic. The NCR is actually a better analogue to Rome in pretty much every way; it started out as a small, independent city-state that grew, through military prowess and diplomacy, to become the dominant power of its state. It is also endlessly expansionist as the late Republic became, and unlike the Legion, works to fully incorporate the territories it conquers into its wider political system. (Before I go further, it should be noted that the creators of the games based the NCR on the early version of America in the games.  Since the U.S. follows a similar pattern to the republic as well, the transfer isn't much of a fuss.)

But the NCR is very much the end stage Roman Republic, so while they have a very high value on political enfranchisement and democracy, the actual voting process is driven and manipulated by small, powerful interests groups, most noticeably the brahmin (basically cattle) ranchers, and the various trade companies looking to establish monopolies on trading routes new and old. While the NCR does for the most part let their new territories do as they did before, most of those territories are acquired by force because they have something the NCR finds desirable or they are simply "along the way" to a goal of the NCR, like control of the Hoover Dam or New Vegas. There's also the problem that their expansion is drawing in abundant resources that filter primarily to the elite factions I mentioned earlier, making the system more reliant on the spoils of conquest to function and funneling the wealth and power from said conquests into narrower segments of society.

This, in a greatly overstuffed nutshell, is exactly what happened to the Roman Republic after it started its era of major expansion after they defeated Carthage in the Second Punic War. As they were able to bring more and more of the Mediterranean world under their control, they brought in raw materials (gold, silver, timber, and slaves) and all the material wealth of the people they conquered back to Rome.  The problem was that since only men of Senatorial (already the richest men in the country, by default) could command legions, all that wealth went straight into the very top of the Roman world.

Since Rome didn't have a professional army at this time, all their soldiers were citizen farmers (you had to own land to be eligible to serve), but since the campaigns were lasting for years at a time, these soldiers farms went fallow while they were off fighting Rome's "enemies." Their families, in order to not starve, would often be forced to sell their land to richer Senatorial citizens, who then incorporated those farms into ever increasing estates. When all the wars were over and the soldiers came home, they found they had no home to return to, and instead of being able to work what used to be their farms under the auspice of the new landlord, they found their land being worked by the hordes of slaves the brought back from the places they conquered.

Naturally, this created something of a problem among the Roman citizenry. Tiberius Gracchus and then his younger brother Gaius would be the first to try to reform the Roman system and try to make sure the spoils of Rome's wars trickled down to the people who fought them, but they were both murdered on behalf of the Senate, and the question of who should have what and how much power in Rome would eventually lead to more people like the Gracchi's coming to power who were also murdered by the Senate, to civil wars, to finally a point where Octavian could kill the last vestiges of the Republic dead and start the Empire we all know and love.

The NCR stands right on the precipice of that whole, sad story. The expansion has made them more reliant on the success of the military to maintain the government's legitimacy, they need the resources that would come from controlling Hoover Dam and the money generated from New Vegas to recoup the expenses of winning the war, and since they are becoming more militaristic, the focus of governmental power shifts away from the amorphous blob of the legislature to the more dynamic, singular personalities of the executive. If the NCR wins, they'll have no other rival to focus on, and all their political and military machinations, like Rome's, will turn inward, until there's so much chaos that the people will be happy to forget their republican roots just to have one, singular personality in charge of everything if for no other reason than that one person will be able to restore some semblance of order to their lives.

Which brings us to Mr. Robert House, billionaire, ruler of New Vegas, and robot-builder extraordinaire. House is actually one of the characters I'm most impressed by in the game since it would've been easy to make him the obviously evil overlord looking to crush everyone under his heel for his own gain. House survived the nuclear apocalypse that made the Fallout world into what it is and has spent the 250 years or so since the bombs fell trying to reestablish his Vegas as the Old World getaway it once was. He is unabashedly in favor of autocracy, doesn't think of anyone outside of how he can use them to advance his own agenda, and casually disposes of anyone who becomes a hindrance or useless to him. Instead, he's an interesting exploration of a Benevolent Despot and, in our Roman analogues, fits best with Octavian and a lesser known emperor named Diocletian. Octavian, of course, was the first proper emperor of the newly established Roman Empire.

Just a side note here, I'm not using the name Augustus as is convention because I think it's important to remember that while Octavian took on a seemingly more noble and softer approach to his rule than his wild and ambitious younger days which saw him killing off literally every enemy he could think of in the proscriptions or his sacrilegious break in to the vaults of the Temple of Vesta to read Marc Antony's will so he could expose Antony's even bigger crime of disinheriting his Roman children for the ones he had with Cleopatra. The softer, subtler, more mature strategy Octavian used in his later years is based off the same ruthless philosophy he used from the very beginning; adopting the name Augustus was very much a strategy to make people forget the bloodletting of his youth, that he had left all that thinking behind, but it's important to understanding the man himself and his place in Roman history to take whatever steps are necessary to not let that strategy work. Hence, Octavian.

Anyway, Octavian learned from his adoptive father Julius Caesar that going around openly acting like a king while your enemies are very much alive and well is a good way to get yourself murdered and not much else. So, to solve that problem, he made the previously mentioned to-do list of everyone he wanted dead, and then went about acting like the Republic was thriving and he was in no way, at all, a king or an emperor.

After Octavian beat Antony in the last civil war of the Republic, Octavian went about propping up the old Republican order in public as much as he possibly could. He had the Senate "award" him powers and privileges that by sheer coincidence made him the head of the army, the civil government, and the religious order. This wasn't so hard to do, since most of the people on Octavian's old kill list were prominent Senators, so all the ones still breathing were doing so because they either didn't possess the capability to pose a threat to Octavian's power or were very dedicated to appeasing him. The second prong of Octavian's strategy was still holding Consular elections and elections all down the line to maintain the illusion of the old Republic; he portrayed himself as nothing more than just the first citizen among equals, or Princep. It was a beautifully orchestrated and executed lie; plus the Romans loved him for ending the constant civil wars and bloodshed that came with them. As a result, all the honors that placed every aspect of Roman life under his direct control where seen not as a tyrannical seizure of power but rather as rewards justly and honorably earned by Rome's most prestigious citizen.
 

 Where Octavian sought to hide his autocracy, Diocletian openly celebrated it so he could use that power to completely remake the Roman world. Diocletian coming to power ended what is now known as the Crisis of the Third Century, a period of fifty years where, after the end of the Severan dynasty, Rome was plagued by famines, invasions, and even split up into three separate entities at one point. Diocletian came to power in 284 A.D. and went about crushing every problem the Empire faced at the time. He beat back the various Germanic tribes attacking the Empire from across the Rhine and Danube, he defeated Sassinad Persia to the East them negotiated a peace treaty with them, he established what became known as the Tetrarchy, where he and co-Emperor Maximian, along with two junior emperors, split the Empire into four areas each was responsible for. He changed the borders of the Empire's various districts and how the army was garrisoned in them so they could better respond to threats (this also made them smaller so no ambitious general could have enough military power to proclaim themselves emperor, which happened a lot in the 3rd century). Put simply, Diocletian is the number one reason the Empire survived long enough to collapse a hundred years later.

Like I said earlier, House is a mix-and-match of the two emperors, and takes what I think are the best aspects of each. From Diocletian he takes the sheer will and capability of taking a shattered and broken patch of the world and rebuilding it brick-by-brick into something vibrant again while his ruthless pursuit of his goal using all avenues available is pure Octavian. 

House's main goal requires that the world be functional enough that the people in it have enough the income to make New Vegas rich and have enough protected infrastructure to get them there safely to deposit said income. It makes no sense to him to wage a war against the people who he wants as customers, so he entices them instead, with all the glamour and allure that Vegas can provide.  But he is adamant that Vegas is his, and anyone wanting to business with it or in it is going to do so on his non-negotiable terms. In his ending, he uses his robot army to kick the NCR out of New Vegas and its surrounding areas. Well, the military branch of the NCR, anyway, the civilian population is welcome if not encouraged to make their way to New Vegas whenever they see fit. House also does away with the two main flaws of his inspirations; he doesn't have any desire to enact any morality laws like Octavian did and he pointedly refuses the divine aspects of power that Diocletian brought into the Imperial fold with its accompanying religious persecutions.

Underpinning all the historical notes is the theme that mindlessly clinging to old ideas will doom us to the ennui and destruction their adherents want to save themselves from. In the DLC Dead Money, the phrase "Let Go, and Begin Again" is hammered home at every possible moment just in case you don't pick up on the fact that it's the theme of the entire game.

Seriously, if you want to find the best solution to almost every single moral conundrum in the game, figuring out to best apply the phrase "Let Go, and Begin Again" is gonna be the way to go.  The game is rife with examples of how when people don't do this it ruins every aspect of their lives and the people around them. We've already gone over how the Legion using the edifice of Rome but without any of Rome's actual governing philosophy makes them less an agent of governance and more a force of tyrannical brutality. But the poster child for obstinate, damn-the-consequences adherence goes to the Brotherhood of Steel.

For non-players, the Brotherhood is a paramilitary organization that follows a rigid Codex whose primary purpose is hunting down and collecting technology - specifically weapons technology - so that people in the wider world can't use it. They do this because they believe that the unfettered pursuit and use of technology is directly responsible for the destruction of the Old World and humanity can't be trusted with that level of technology ever again. Like pretty much every faction in Fallout, they have a point, but pursue it too far. By the time of New Vegas, the organization is going through a rough time. They're quarantined in an underground bunker that only a select few can leave. The actual strength of the chapter is dwindling; they lost most of their forces in a disastrous pre-game battle under their old leader and they don't have enough people left to replenish their numbers. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that the Codex also forbids them from admitting people into the organization who weren't already born into it.

One of your companions, Veronica, is a member of the Brotherhood and her personal quest is about you trying to convince the new Elder that they need to modify how they do things or else their entire way of life will literally die out. In the end, the Elder recognizes the necessity of adapting how they do things and the ultimate futility of strict adherence to the Codex, but he refuses. The only outcomes for Veronica is to willfully go into exile or stay and suffer in silence as everything she holds dear suffers a long, slow, pointless death.

This theme of being stuck in limbo between difficult choices isn't unique to Veronica. Almost every quest of the sentient members who can tag along for your journey through the wasteland involve putting something from their past behind them and moving on with their life. Whether it's helping Boone overcome the guilt from a lifetime of killing in the NCR, including having to kill his wife to save her from a fate of sexual slavery in the Legion or helping Cass wreck bloody vengeance on the people who destroyed her family's caravan business, to convincing Raul that it's still worth it to fight for things in the world even, especially, when you've lost something precious before, or getting Arcade to finally come to terms with his father's legacy in the Enclave by helping him put together his father's old team and realize that he can exist on his own terms.

The game does give you the chance to use the past as inspiration, as well. One of the factions you come into contact with is a tribe called the Great Khans, a Mongol-inspired outlaw tribe that's existed from the very first Fallout game. They're currently courted by the Legion to attack the NCR in the upcoming rematch for control of Hoover Dam. You can break the alliance by convincing the leader that the Legion won't treat them as equals if they win but will make them all chattel slaves instead. But even with that, it's still not enough. Papa Khan needs something, a path for his people to follow to stave off extinction. And you can give it to them, by finding a book detailing the history of the Mongols, which inspires the Khans to head to Wyoming and create a pretty respectable empire of their own by incorporating the forgotten social sciences back into their society.

While this theme is a through line in the vanilla game, the DLC's go out of their way to make it as explicit as possible. In Honest Hearts, you meet Joshua Graham, a former general in the Legion who was banished and burned alive after he failed to win the first battle of the Hoover Dam. Graham is a brutal and terrifying warrior, and again, to get the best ending available, you have to convince him to let go of all the anger that fuels his violence so he can have a sense of inner peace and tranquility to finally put his blood-lust and shame behind him. In Dead Money, you have to convince your three heist companions to put aside their own vendettas or literally all of you are going to die.  There's even a chance of you dying a humiliating death locked in a vault if you don't resist the temptation of greed that's driven everybody to the casino in the first place. Old World Blues has you convince a conclave of mad scientists to stop using their passion for Science! as an excuse to cut things up and put them back together for no reason and instead use their discoveries to positively shape the future of mankind.

But it's the last DLC, Lonesome Road, where the game uses this theme to best effect. In this DLC, you are drawn to a place called the Divide by another Courier named Ulysses (as in the general, not the Greek hero). As the story goes on, you find out that Ulysses used to be a member of the Legion as well, his role as a courier was a cover for him to be an advance scout and a spy. You also learn that his breaking point came when he helped a tribe called the White Legs wipe out the settlement of New Canaan, a refuge of Mormons who had rebuilt their culture after the bombs fell. The guilt he faces over wiping out a culture that survived for so long and against so much breaks something inside Ulysses, who, to put it lightly, is obsessed with symbols and their meanings

If you pick up all the audio diaries he left behind in the Divide, you can talk him down from his plan to use nuclear warheads to wipe out the NCR and the Legion simultaneously. Why I think this DLC uses the theme of letting go of the past so well is that Ulysses wraps himself up in the ideologies and symbols of worlds and places that are dead and gone and the conclusion he draws from this is that since symbols and the people who give them meaning all inevitably die, well, then it doesn't really matter if that end comes sooner rather than later. But by collecting his history and using it to tell him that he can and has grown out and adapted the beliefs he has out a variety of symbols and experiences. And by doing so, you get him to realize that while ideologies don't always survive intact, they don't really need to, they can be molded into something new and used in more ways than anybody knew they could be.

And that, at its core, is the point of the game. It's actually what makes it an optimistic game. The past shapes us and we're never really done with it, but we aren't beholden to it. We can move on, we can choose to be something other than what our pasts have made us into. It's painful and always more work than we thought, but it can be done. More importantly though, if you do everything right in the game, you can heal pretty much every wound you come across and make the world a better place than you found it.

Which, think about that.

The game is saying that no matter how broken, how terrible the world is, if you do the work, you can still fix yourself and the people around you. But you have to do the work to make that happen. You'll have to give up a lot, and do a lot of things for a lot of people that you will probably hate doing, but, in the end, it can still fix the world for the better.

Which, all in all, is a pretty comforting thought, right now.


Notes:

If you want to dive into the history of Rome a bit more, my suggestions are read The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan, Rubicon and Dynasty by Tom Holland, and check out Duncan's History of Rome podcast and Dan Carlin's Death Throes of the Republic.

On Jordan Peterson

I've never been impressed by Jordan Peterson. When he first started making the rounds on the internet a few years ago, I just figured him as just the latest in the large and never ending category of public thinkers who make their money by telling shiftless white dudes that the world really does belong to them by right and that women and minorities are stealing it from them. It's a nice and well worn path to success, and now that he's at the point where more people actually know of him, I just wanted to go over some of the things from his profile in The New York Times that highlight for me just how empty a vessel Petersen's intellect really is.

The thing that can't be stressed enough about Peterson's ethos is that is embarrassingly lazy. For example, a foundational principle of Peterson's philosophy is that women are an inherently chaotic force that, unless properly contained and directed, are a threat to functioning society. As evidence for why we should just accept this, Peterson says this:

"You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else.
They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”

Never mind cultures that didn't portray women as chaotic forces of evil, but just examine the reasoning on display. Here is a supposed public intellectual saying that we cannot critically examine why cultures throughout time and all over the planet have done everything they can to keep women out of power and realms of influence even and especially when they proved more competent than their male competitors (Hatshepsut being a prime example). We're supposed to just automatically accept these portrayals as unvarnished truth that we as a modern society are ashamed to admit because of political correctness.

Also keep in mind that Peterson is a psychologist whose entire job is to dig into where people's preconceived mental notions and behaviors come from and why we continue them. Apparently, investigating the motives behind thousands of years of concentrated effort to denigrate and subjugate half of the population is not only a waste of time but also a fundamental threat to what makes us human.

This is just stupid. It's nothing more than Peterson refusing to question his own assumptions and trying to pass it off as ancient wisdom that's keeping us from spiraling off into some kind of Philip K. Dick dystopia. I guess we should all be grateful that he's doing such important work.

The next thing I want to delve into is why Peterson's entire message of self-reliance and self-determination is hypocritical bullshit. Here's his response:

"He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end."

He goes on to say:

"But aside from interventions that would redistribute sex, Mr. Peterson is staunchly against what he calls “equality of outcomes,” or efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological or evil.

He agrees that this is inconsistent. But preventing hordes of single men from violence, he believes, is necessary for the stability of society. Enforced monogamy helps neutralize that."

Peterson would write on his own blog that when he's talking about the enforced monogamy he's talking about isn't some police state where the government forcibly pairs women with incels, he just means enforced monogamy in the cultural and societal sense where women are just expected to marry and have sex with men so they don't get angry at the world and start killing people.

Again, this is complete and utter nonsense.  Peterson, like so many libertarians before him, wants to set up some kind of demarcation between culture and government where cultural norms just enforce themselves. This is a smoke screen that stupid people mistake for substance.  

 

Back in the good old days of socially enforced monogamy, you know what kept women from owning property, having control of their inheritances, and working jobs where they could build significant independent income? Laws. Cultural norms have been, and always will be, enforced by the state- pretending that setting up a culture that mandates women grow up to become wives won't come with complementing government action to ensure that's the path they take is either ignorance, obfuscation, or some mix of the two. With Peterson, it's hard to tell the bullshit he's merely selling from the bullshit he earnestly believes.

But let's look at another portion of the interview, where Peterson is talking to a fan and brings up The Feminine Mystique

"I read Betty Friedan’s book because I was very curious about it, and it’s so whiny, it’s just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late ’50s ensconced in their comfortable secure lives complaining about the fact that they’re bored because they don’t have enough opportunity. It’s like, Jesus get a hobby."

Let's break down a couple of things here.  Remember, Peterson's whole message revolves around the fact that the world is going the way it's going because men are being robbed of their ability to successfully determine what their own lives are going to be, that society is deeming them useless, dooming them to lives of ennui and dissatisfaction. And yet, when reading a book by a woman who describes exactly this same phenomenon, he doesn't understand why they're so upset. He genuinely doesn't seem to understand why women stuck in lives they have no control over would be so dissatisfied living them simply because they have material comfort.

On top of all that, remember that Peterson's solution to violent men is to remake society we live in so women have less independent opportunity so there are more of them to be sexually available for the "lesser" men who can't compete with the opportunities women create for themselves and leave those men in the lurch. In Peterson's world, women are simply the means for men to lead more fulfilling lives and all the self-reliance, deterministic messages that spew out of his mouth just don't apply to them.

Lastly, I want to dive in to why Peterson has earned a reputation for being the Deepak Chopra to budding fascists. At one point in the interview, Peterson says this

"The left, he believes, refuses to admit that men might be in charge because they are better at it. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence."

So, here's the rub in all this. For Peterson, white privilege doesn't exist, which creates a bit of a problem since in virtually every aspect of society, from income to wealth to job opportunities to even prison sentences, being white and male gives a person perks that can't be accounted for by education, ability, or really any other factor. This presents a problem because you can't ignore the preferential treatment given to white men because 1. It robs white men of their supposed victim-hood that Peterson is capitalizing off of (basically, you can't be robbed of your privileges by feminists if those privileges don't exist) and 2. If he acknowledges that race and gender confer undeserved advantages to his audience, well, there goes his audience. So what's a hack to do? Well, obviously, he squares this circle by saying that those privileges were earned by men being just that competent.

How this ties into fascism is that the base of all fascistic thought is that current hierarchies and the societies that built them are the natural and superior ways of being, that all of those who are at the top are there because of merit, and anyone clamoring to rise above their station is a threat to the system and must be subjugated or destroyed. 

When Peterson talks in those vague generalities about how we need to make culture more Christian because Christianity has been around for so long and is the "root" of Western civilization, about how men are at the top of societies hierarchies because they're just simply the best people to be in charge of things, he's very careful to not say that other religions or women are inherently inferior. That's the the thing that separates him from more explicit fascists like Milo Yiannopoulus or Richard Spencer, which isn't an accident. I'm sure Peterson can see how Milo went from being a media darling to hawking supplements on InfoWars or how Spencer went from a hotshit college provocateur to begging for money to fund the lawsuits against him after the Charlestown rally last August.

By avoiding the explicit condemnations of inferiority that other alt-right thinkers engage in, Peterson gets to keep his hands clean, so to speak, with the veneer of respectability and all the money that comes with it. If members of his audience drift towards more explicit speakers advocating the superiority of white men who call for more extreme suppression of women, minorities, and Jews, Peterson can throw his hands up and say "Not my fault. I never said anything like that." 

 

And sure, he may be technically right, but Peterson is the well-dressed, well-spoken doorman for a whole slew of vile, reactionary politics that are growing in popular and political power across the world right now.  And we shouldn't let his suits or manicured speech patterns get in the way of us recognizing that and calling him out as such.

By the Promise of These Things

On the one hand, living under the Trump administration is something of a god-send to a political and historical junkie like me. I've always been fascinated by how republics devolve into dictatorships; from Rome to the Weimar Republic, the line between representative democracy and a totalitarian regime has always been thinner than it's made out to be. On the other, there's the fact that the U.S. is becoming the tinpot dictatorship it always wanted to be in its heart-of-hearts and there's only so much that can be done to stave off that sense of disappointment and dread.

Take for example the recent decision of the NFL in regards to players protesting the national anthem. On Wednesday the NFL said that it would fine any club that had players kneeling during the national anthem and if any players felt the need to protest, they could do so by staying in the locker room.  Remember, the whole reason this started is that Colin Kaepernick wanted to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and protest the dismissive way the media and government treated the victims of police shootings and other state violence. So now, two years later, the NFL's official response is that anyone who wants to protest the erasure of black people's humanity when the state kills them must do so off camera, out of sight and out of mind.  Irony is a doozie sometimes.

Of course, this was entirely predictable. There's nothing the NFL hates more than its image of the perfect American past time being punctured by the reality of how it behaves and manages its players, so of course their response would be to shunt any player who wanted to express their conscience into the darkest corner they could get away with. But there's a deeper part to this, which is why I'm focusing on a seemingly irrelevant thing like a sports league telling its athletes to know their place and stay in it.

 In terms of cultural relevance, football as supplanted baseball as America's nationalistic sport. The NFL has done all it can to wrap itself in the symbols of America- namely, the flag and the military- at every opportunity to get fans to associate the feelings of loyalty, fealty, and admiration they have for the flag with the game itself. And it's been widely successful in doing so.

What the NFL is tapping into is something called the American civil religion, which, in a nutshell, treats the symbols of civil government with religious fervor. The Constitution is the bible as given to the holy disciples the Founding Fathers, the military are the priests with the rank of the soldier being equivalent to the rank in the church (i.e. a private is a local pastor, generals are cardinals), and the flag is the Crucifix. 

So when Kaepernick takes a knee during the anthem, he isn't expressing a political point by exercising his 1st-amendment right, no, he's a heretic, a blasphemer, a vandal desecrating all that is sacred, forcing the faithful to take in all the gory details of his defilement. That is why the immediate reaction of all the people who buy into this type of brainwashing is to tell people "If you don't like it, get the hell out of America!" To them, there's no disconnect or hypocrisy in lauding America has the Greatest Country To Ever Exist because they can do things like criticize the government whenever they want to foaming at the mouth when someone actually uses that right to meaningfully criticize the government.

Because to them, and that mode of of thinking, the Bill of Rights aren't political franchises to be enthusiastically exercised, they're symbols of a magnanimous government handing them their freedoms, the best expression of which is for the citizenry to hand them right back, to agree not to exercise them or use those rights too diligently, because the government willing to grant those freedoms is proof enough that it is deserving of an unquestioning fealty.  K

Kaepernick and anyone else who make a point of loudly and insistently proclaiming all the ways America chooses to fail its promises of liberty and justice for all are traitors, violators of the sacrament and has such must be shunned, discredited, or exiled so their heresy will not corrupt the faithful.

If this all seems too outlandish on my part, think about this: When the President said that any player who took a knee should be fired and called them sons of bitches, he got immediate cheering from a group of thousands. Think about how any time you've had a conversation about this there's always that one person who immediately and furiously insists that the protest is disrespectful to the flag and the military and refuses to consider any other opinion. And then think about how you would feel if someone started talking in derogatory terms about whatever faith you belong to and see if the feelings you have towards that imaginary person don't seem really familiar to those conversations about football.

The other thing that has my wheels spinning is the Trump administration's announcement that from here on out they'll be separating children from their parents if the family is found to be crossing the border illegally. The parents would be detained, prosecuted, and serve prison sentences if convicted while the children are whisked off to wherever the government can dump them. 

The whole point of this, obviously, is to send the message to anyone thinking of coming here to stay home because if they get caught, we'll take their children away for years on end while they languish in prison and detention centers before they get booted back to wherever they came from. This is cruelty for cruelty's sake, to make the U.S. so barbaric a place to make anyone thinking they'll find a better life here seriously reconsider that. And, of course, his supporters love this.

Which brings me to a point that's been long-simmering in my mind. I've always been highly skeptical of remaining friendly or affable to Trump supporters and to act like they support him for reasons that don't involve bigotry. Economic anxiety got tossed around a lot in the early days, but when reporters talked to coal miners and other blue-collar workers that were supposedly swayed by Trump's economic message that they were left behind by uncaring elites and he would bring their jobs back, they were all decidedly nonplussed about that and were especially upfront about the fact that they never expected Trump to bring their jobs back and didn't expect anything to change for the better. So, if the people who were allegedly won over by Trump's economic populism are throwing cold water over that idea, what does that leave us with?

Well, as multiple studies have shown, the primary reason people voted for Trump was out of racial resentment and a loss of status. This is an important fact to reckon with because pretty much every strategy I've seen with people trying to win over Trump supporters is to get them to empathize with the targets of his bigotries or point out that his economic policies like the tax cuts and deregulation don't provide any material benefit to them. 

As we've seen though, the economic aspect is irrelevant when push comes to shove, and asking his supporter's if they think he's going too far in his disparagement of black athletes, Hispanics, and all immigrants, well the answer, by default, is going to be "No."

All the things that any decent person would stop and think "Wow, these are terrible things to do/say about people" are exactly what his supporters want him to be doing. Obviously, this has a lot of implications for how we handle things right now, but gets even more troubling when you think about what it means going forward.

The biggest reason I've ever heard for trying to maintain relationships with Trump supporters is the refrain that he won't be President forever and we need to hold on to those people for the time after Trump. Again, I've always been dismissive of this because, in a word, there is no after. From the moment he came down that escalator and declared his intent to run for the Presidency, Trump has been held in awe of the Republican voter base.  Currently, his approval rating among Republicans sits at 85%, and has floated up and down the 80's all through his presidency.  So if his base voted for him out racial resentments, and overwhelmingly approve of what he's doing and how he's doing it, why, exactly, would anyone believe those attitudes would just disappear when he's no longer in office?

This delusion stems from something much deeper though, the lie that is at the heart of Trump's political career. It's not any of the multitudes that have come out of his mouth, no. Rather, it's one that we've told ourselves from the moment it became clear he would win the Republican nomination and one that is still carried over and repeated to this day.  

That lie is that Trump is an aberration, an outlier, a corruption of what we stand for and what our politics is meant to accomplish. Which, as I've gone over more than once on this blog, just isn't true. Obama separated families that crossed the border illegally and kept them in abysmal prison condition with limited access to medical and legal services in an attempt to deter other Central American refugees to make the trek North, so, uh, points for being quiet about it, I guess? Also, it's hard to take seriously Trump's "unprecedented" assault on the press when Obama and Bush both locked up reporters and their sources when it came to damaging national security stories. Breaking the Iran deal is just another in the international laws we helped create that we then abandoned.

So, yeah, you can pretty easily argue that Trump is escalating some of the worst trends about how our government functions, but doing so means you have to admit that those problems existed before Trump and our main objections to the Trump era are driven more by our disgust at Trump's boorish personality than any deep-seated ethical concerns.

This is actually what I think is the most insidious aspect of Trump's legacy, that the country as a whole allows itself to be pulled into his narcissism and pretend that everything about his campaign and election win just materialized out of nowhere, has nothing to do with anything that's ever happened before, and is solely the result of Trump and Trump alone. And since there's nothing America loves doing more than letting itself off the hook for its bullshit, I think that's exactly what we're going to do and then be dumbfounded when it happens all over again. If we were more honest with ourselves, I'd consider that a tragedy, but, since we insist on being as dumb as humanly possible, well, I guess we'll just get what we deserve.

There's Not Much Left to Lose

It's been a while since I've picked on someone writing something stupid in The New York Times so I feel like I have to thank  Greg Weiner's and his terrible op-ed "When Liberals Become Progressives, Much Is Lost" for giving me such a great opportunity.

The basic theme of the article is that the trend of Leftists in recent years to identify as "progressive" rather than as "liberal" is a bad and unfortunate trend, since it leads to a more dogmatic political stance that makes people less interested in Compromise.  He argues that since progressives view progress as an unmitigated and unlimited good, it means they'll stop at nothing to achieve said progress and will pay whatever price they need to get it, regardless of who is hurt in paying the cost.  

He tries, limply, to cite historical examples like Woodrow Wilson as the "bad" example of what progressivism looks like and compares him to the "good" liberal that is FDR.  This is weird because if you wanted to cite a historical figure of what devil-may-care, turn the system upside down kind of attitude, FDR's cousin Theodore is a much better pick than Wilson.  Seriously, there's hardly any other President who went to work dismantling the monopolies of big business than Theodore Roosevelt, so for Weiner to pick the rather staid in comparison Wilson is just, odd.  There's also the small problem that FDR's contemporaries didn't view the New Deal as some sort of safe, middle-of-the-road political exercise; rather, they viewed it as yet another Roosevelt taking dangerous government action to upend the natural order of things (he wasn't called a traitor to his class for nothing). But what I think is the more relevant issue here is that Weiner is able to come to these conclusions- like everyone else who writes "the left shouldn't be too leftist, because Compromise" pieces- because he insists on making his analysis in a vacuum of context.

For example, he writes that "[n]othing structurally impedes compromise between conservatives, who hold that the accumulated wisdom of tradition is a better guide than the hypercharged rationality of the present, and liberals, because both philosophies exist on a spectrum."  Once you get past Weiner's exquisite ability to state the obvious, you may began to realize that he apparently hasn't gotten out much in the last say, thirty years or so.  Because you know what does seem like a structural impediment to conservatives and liberals compromising with each other?  Mitch McConnell refusing to even hold a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee in the last year of Obama's presidency.  Or a then-minority leader McConnell saying that his most important goal was to make Obama  a one-term president and then proceeded to obstruct every initiative the president put forth.  

On top of all that, you know what really helps in the whole building compromise industry? A shared understanding of reality and facts.  So when you have an entire media landscape that study after study has found left its consumers less informed of the world around them, or as a significant determinator in whether or not a person will believe climate change and evolution are real or fake.  It's sort of difficult to build consensus on the best way to deal with a problem when the other half of the political spectrum believes that the problem you're trying to solve is either a Chinese hoax or a secret plot of the New World Order to take away their freedom. Apparently for Weiner  these rather obvious structural impediments aren't important because as long as you insist on looking at Left and Right as points on a spectrum and not how they actually exist in the real world, it's much easier to make the point that identifying as progressive is the most pertinent threat to the country's political order.

Just as a quick diversion, I want to touch on 4Weiner's romantic definition of conservatism.  Saying that they believe the accumulated wisdom of tradition is better than any current philosophy makes them seem like they're kicking their legs up in a hay barn singing the word "Tradition!" over and over again; but that's heavily misleading.  The thing that conservatives are conserving is traditional economic, social, and political hierarchies.  So that's why in the late-18th century and up to the revolutions of 1848 when citizens began demanding things like constitutions and guaranteed rights from the monarchies they lived under, conservatives responded by crushing them with all the force they could muster to protect the royal crowns.  The whole idea of conservatism is that the people who already have power should keep that power and that any enfranchisement of marginalized peoples should come in piecemeal, insignificant ways if it ever comes at all.  To pretend like conservatism is some benign, "we just want to use traditional methods to solve new problems" ideology is grossly misleading and just flat out lazy.

Anyway, the other big problem that Weiner has in this column is that he never really engages in what the progressive movement he's taking so much time to demonize actually wants to do.  He drones on and on about how the unimpeded search for progress is dangerous because it makes people who oppose it enemies of the common good who need to be destroyed rather than listened to or reasoned with.  There's also the obligatory reference to progressives driving conservatives away by calling them prejudiced and forcing PC culture onto them via self-righteous condescension.  And sure, people can go too far with that sometimes, but the only thing I'll say in response to that is that if conservatives didn't want to be seen as bigots, they shouldn't be so happy to embrace people who say white people where the only race to ever contribute to civilization or stay silent about a president who defends  the "good people" that make up the KKK and Neo-Nazi's

Weiner says that the best thing about liberalism is that at its core it is just the belief in the "capacity of government to do good, especially in ameliorating economic ills" rather than progressivism which he says suffers from the tunnel vision of "[identifying] a destination, grip the wheel and depress the accelerator."  Notably, Weiner declines to actually use any examples of what current progressive policy options are, so let's just do that work for him.  The main policy goals you could point to for the current progressive movement is a single payer healthcare system (Medicare-for-all) the elimination of student debt and creation of tuition-free colleges, higher minimum wages, and a general restructuring of the tax code that doesn't funnel 90% of income and wealth to the top .01% of the country.  I think enacting policies that eliminate the number one cause of bankruptcy, paying workers a wage they can actually live off of, and getting rid of the debt that is holding the economy back are all pretty solid examples of the government doing good to ameliorate the economic ills that plague its citizenry.

Weiner also makes the point that progressives drive for progress also makes them favor a strong executive that destroys the balance of powers in the Constitution. That all the goals listed above can only happen via Congress passing the laws to make them happen and that progressives explicitly call for them to do so is just another thing he has to conveniently pretend doesn't exist for his analysis to have any weight.  There's also the small wrinkle that the primary reason progressives reflexively dismiss conservative positions about well, pretty much everything is that Republicans have implemented their agenda pretty successfully at the federal and state level and left a long legacy of failure in its wake.  It seems like a relevant thing to bring up when you want to portray progressives as dangerously averse to compromise, but, relevant examples just don't quite seem to be Weiner's strong suit.

At heart, the real issue I have with Weiner's argument and all the others of its kind is that it boils down to advocating that when we look out at the problems that plague our society, we should prioritize the solutions that don't upset too many people rather the ones that would actually solve our problems.  This, in a word, is bullshit.  To borrow the New Deal example again, if FDR had followed Weiner's advice that he shouldn't do something which the conservatives did because it would make them and their precious traditions feel attacked, he would've done absolutely nothing and the Great Depression would've been even worse.  When the society you live in has the kind of deep, structural problems that ours does, you need a solution just has big to fix it.  At this point, looking at all the failure that being the centrist, modest party has gotten them, why would anyone seriously want to argue that the Democrats should fight to keep that strategy?  More importantly, why would anyone be dumb enough to listen and think it's a good idea?

But If I Know You, I'll Know What You Do

Something I've been thinking about lately is that we don't really live in a society has much as we do in the intersections of vicious cycles.

There's been another shooting, this time 17 dead teenagers in Florida, and that's playing out as all the rest before it have.  By summer I think we'll have worn out our current mass shooting response down to a couple hours and then we'll have to come up with a brand new script or else the whole performance will just get stale.  The more likely way I see this going is the whole national crying game will finally come to an end, having served its purpose to drill into the national psyche that nothing will be done about this and to just move along and maybe donate to a Kickstarter or GoFundMe when the parents are looking for help to pay the medical bills if they're lucky or pitch in for some nice flowers or a casket for the ones who aren't.  

At this point I'm just waiting for the consulting company staffed by ex-military, feds, and cops to spring up and start a YouTube channel offering sample lectures on how to react in a mass shooting and how your business, school, movie theater, softball game, or music festival can have a comprehensive security package prepared just for them.  Hell, with a premium service, they'll even screen your employees for the ones most optimal to be covert security- secret guards given full weapons and crisis management training that spring into action when the need arises.  Soon they'll have sister architectural companies who design public and private spaces with an emphasis on easy evacuation and accommodating a tactical response. Taking away such a lucrative entrepreneurial opportunities from those bold enough to claim is just down right un-American.

Luckily, we have a president who does his damnedest to at least bring some razzle-dazzle to the death spirals around him, even if all he can usually do is cough up some spittle. For an irrelevant yet illustrative example, we have the whole Stormy Daniels brouhaha.  Trump's scandals, or more specifically, their cover-ups, typically follow the pattern of "Complete Denial-Partial Denial-Partial but unincriminating Admission-Full Disclosure Proving Original Claim"  Right now, his "I payed porn star hush money" saga is currently in the Partial, yet unincriminating Admission.  Trump's lawyer Micheal Cohen issued a statement saying while, yes, there was a payment to Ms. Daniels to keep her quiet regarding her affair with Trump, the money used to make that payment came out of his personal account and not from the Trump campaign.

If that seems like an incredibly specific denial to throw in it's because Cohen presumably doesn't want his client to be indicted like John Edwards was when his whole love child mishap came to light.  The core legal issue is that if Cohen is telling the truth- that he paid Daniels to keep quiet and avoid further scandal for then-candidate Trump, then that would qualify as an undisclosed campaign donation, which is sort of illegal.  The full legal breakdown and exploration of possible outcomes can be found at The Harvard Law Review and it's a fascinating read; one of the things the author mentions is that things are actually a little easier for Trump if the money came directly from him.

It'd still be a campaign contribution, sure, but if the money was Trump's it'd be easier to say that he was trying to spare himself the personal hassle of this controversy first rather with the political implications has a secondary consequence.  The governments case against Edwards fell apart under similar lines, so what makes this doubly hilarious to me is that Cohen taking the fall for this is unnecessary and also not all that helpful since it doesn't really make any sense for a lawyer to cough up $130k to stop an old mistress from talking to the press two weeks before said client is up for election for nothing but pure, personal reasons.  It just amazes me how willingly people will throw themselves under the bus for a guy who will crack a joke at the skid marks they leave behind or turn tail and run if they ever needed him to repay them in kind.  Some people can't lose weight, others dedicate their lives to garbage people born richer than they were.  We all have crosses to bear.

Which should come as no comfort to Mike Pence, stuck as he is in South Korea for the Winter Olympics.  Since he can't dramatically walk out because the athletes want nothing to do with him, he just has to sit there and be miserable.  Then, to top it all off, he gets upstaged by Kim Yo-jong, sister of North Korean dictator King Jong-Un.  To the bewilderment of many, Yo-jong got pretty favorable headlines over her "humility" and she was "stealing the show."  This isn't too far out of character for the American media, though, since our press corps loves to normalize autocratic or dictatorial behaviors of pretty much everyone so they don't have to reckon with their actions.  They did with W. Bush and his terrible paintings, they did it with Obama and his ability to engage in pop culture, and they've tried so, so hard to do it for Trump.

Remember how after the election and in early 2017 there was all that commentary about how the demands and rigors of the job would smooth out Trump's edges and make him more Presidential?  Or how after that disastrous raid in Yemen and Van Jones said "[h]e became President of the United States in that moment, period" when he said some nice words about the soldier who died because of his orders?  That's what a dedicated effort not to be confrontational or upsetting looks like. The whole thing came crashing down in the wake of Charlottesville because there's just nothing you can do to spin away a president defending Neo-Nazis not once but twice.  So when a photogenic propaganda official from a brutal authoritarian regime showed up, it's not all that surprising that the press was positively giddy to exercise those muscles again.  The rebuttals for why no one should be doing any of this are already coming in, but, seriously, that they even have to be written is embarrassing all on its own.

Personally, I think if Trump wasn't such a baby and didn't insist on acting like he was pus seeping out of an infection, the press would trip over themselves saying that his "controversial and confrontational" style was just a different direction for the country to go in.  They'd even do it now if someone just took Trump's phone away and kept a muzzle on him at all times so he could only speak during scripted events.  The headlines would go something like "Radical Approach as Trump Works to Limit Distractions, Stay On Message."  Ah the Fourth Estate, what pitiful things you've become. Again, it makes sense when you think about it- media companies need eyeballs now more than ever, and the daily meltdown of the Trump administration is the best thing to happen to televised news media in years.  So a vain and insecure president constantly lashes out at the world which deservedly mocks and belittles him, and allowing the  media to sit back, shake the can a little harder, and then huff the fumes of higher ratings and advertising dollars until the next time Trump opens his mouth or tweets something stupid.

And of course we can't talk about cyclical black holes without including Russia, which has moved back to it's indictment phase. The 37-page indictment  lays out how Russian operatives working under a company called Internet Research Agency stole the identities of U.S. citizens, maintained several social media accounts to disparage Hillary Clinton and promote Donald Trump, and how they evaded federal officials by lying about their intentions to work as unregistered agents of a foreign government.  Basically, reading over the indictment is just seeing social engineering done by government actors, every government does it, but there's a reason it's illegal and every government should protect themselves against it.  Couple things I want to make clear before we go forward: The only mention of the Trump campaign in the indictment is how the defendants contacted unwitting individuals connected with the campaign.  So, no bombshells there, for now.  This doesn't mean that this indictment vindicates or clears Trump or anyone associated with his campaign, so, make sure you don't fall for that, either.  Oh, also, the indictment makes it clear that the company and its agents where up and running in early 2014, a full year before Trump even declared his intention to run.  So while these people ended up operating with a pro-Trump agenda, they weren't created to do that specifically.

All that out of the way, the main thing I want to talk about here is how much of the work these people allegedly did was straight up plagiarism.  The indictment includes excerpts from some of the ads the company bought, the most illustrative to me were "Donald wants to defeat terrorism . . . Hillary wants to sponsor it" from May 10th, 2016,  "Vote Republican, vote Trump, and support the Second Amendment" from May 19th, "Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote" from May 24th, "Among all the candidates Donald Trump is the one and only who can defend the police from terrorists" from October 14th and finally, "Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is" from October 19th.  If you've spent any time around right wing media like Fox News, Alex Jones, or anything published by the NRA, you've heard these arguments before.  The foundation of the Blue Lives Matter movement is that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is made up of criminals and thugs who would stop getting killed if they stopped being criminals and anyone who stands by BLM is complicit or an active accessory to their crimes.  The trope that Hillary and the Democrats are enslaving black America through welfare and affirmative action is decades old, and the whole "Hillary is a Satan" thing is Alex Jones almost verbatim.

I don't bring this up to say that all of these people have been infiltrated by Russian agents or have been co-opted by the Kremlin to further their villainous plans of villainy; rather, I point them out because for all the scare-mongering and flag-thumping liberals and others do when we talk about the Russia investigation is that at most, Russian agents are just reaping from the culture of ignorance we sowed ourselves.  It's not an accident that most of the groups activity targeted the conservative side of the country;  Trump supporters consume and share fake news more than any other segment of the population. Should that be surprising to us?  Well, no.  Remember, these are the same people who primarily get their news from Fox News, a demographic who consistently proves it knows less about the world than people who get their news from anywhere else.  I'm just going to steal from a guy named William Poundstone who broke down Fox's oeuvre this way:

"There's a lot that goes on in the world that doesn't easily fit the Fox template. There are important stories that don't make anyone angry, prove liberals are evil or otherwise carry an emotional punch. Fox viewers get less of them. Fox News is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, serving up red meat."

Here's the thing though, an organization that only tells or manipulates stories to fit a narrow political or ideological narrative isn't a news network, it's propaganda.  Instead of saying that and dealing with the implications of millions of people weaning themselves into the information age on deliberate ignorance and lies, we just said "Well, people are going to agree to disagree."  When we're talking about things like "Islam is a fundamentally violent religion whose true adherents are all terrorists," or, "Climate Change is an Al Gore hoax meant to increase government taxation," or, "The Iraq War was a successful endeavor (which later morphed into it was an honest mistake based on bad intelligence)" we should be a little firmer in holding people accountable for being wrong. But no, pointing out that nothing someone said is true in any way shape or form is rude and we shouldn't judge people based on their willingness to wholeheartedly believe things that are demonstrably untrue.

Except, it appears, when they get similar talking points from Russian agents.  When that happens it's a subversion of our national integrity, on our democracy, on our grip of reality itself.  So yeah, sure, get rid of them.  Lock them away so they can't manage their dozens of social media accounts.  Pretend that our failings are solely the result of foreign meddling and that they aren't doing anything other than jumping on bandwagons we constructed.  I'm sure everything will turn out well in the end.  Until the next turn comes, at least.