One cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian

Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos discussed a recent document from the General Accounting Office on the millions of Americans whose low wages mean they use federal assistance to get by. Conservatives like to blame poverty on laziness, but 70% of those on federal assistance also work full time. Most work in the private sector – for the “job creators.” A Washington Post discussion of the GAO report notes (as Einenkel wrote):

Walmart and McDonald’s are at the top of list of employers with business models that rely on the American taxpayer to pay for their workers’ health, food, and housing. … A reminder here is that these are the Americans who work all of the jobs Americans rely on, so that we can use drive-thrus and eat things, walk into stores and buy things, and rush oneself or one’s kids into public bathrooms that have been cleaned. Not coincidentally, these are all of the companies run by some of the wealthiest people in our country and the world. Besides Walmart and McDonalds, “Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Amazon, Burger King and FedEx” also relied on underpaying large swaths of their workforce.

Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about one aspect of the nasty guy’s claims of election fraud. These claims of fraud have focused on black cities such as Detroit and Philadelphia. The nasty guy did a little bit better, certainly no worse, in these cities than he did in 2016. But he did significantly worse in the white suburbs surrounding those cities. Dartagnan wrote that we won’t hear the nasty guy accuse the suburbs of fraud.

Because they don’t fit the narrative he’s fed to his credulous, susceptible voting base. The fact that people wealthier, more educated, and worst of all (to them)—mostly of the same race as that base—flushed Trump’s hopes of reelection down the proverbial toilet is just too inconvenient for Trump to face.

These voters would have to admit the nasty guy’s claims of voter fraud are fraudulent. And that would bring the nasty guy’s con job crashing down. Meteor Blades, in his Saturday Snippets column for Kos wrote summarized an article in Bloomberg discussing the nasty guy’s efforts to sell oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve before he leaves office. Thankfully, it isn’t going well. Oil companies would need the price of oil to be $80 a barrel or higher for this to make sense. Prices are currently $46 a barrel and won’t get back up to $80 anytime soon. Oil companies have an option of getting financing from banks, but environmentalist and Alaska Native tribes have persuaded lenders – including five top banks – that oil investments are a risk because of climate change. Activists have also sent the same message to the top insurance companies. A quote for the day:

A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend. ~~Sen. J. William Fullbright, The Arrogance of Power (1967)

This particular item has been in my browser tabs for about two months (even restored when I lost the tabs) so I don’t remember how I came across it – probably spotted it on my way to finding something else. Michael Sandel is a political philosophy professor at Harvard University. He wrote the book The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel was the guest of Robin Young for NPR’s Here & Now. The website summarizes the book with this:

Those with advantages like money and education have been taught that they succeed on their own merit, while those without advantages and support are raised to believe that their struggles are borne of their own failings. And for those among the minority of Americans who do attend a four-year college, claiming superiority is among the country's last acceptable prejudices.

I didn’t listen to the audio. Instead, I read the first chapter of the book on the Here & Now page. This chapter is titled “Winners and Losers” and here are my thoughts: The populist protest that brought the nasty guy to the White House four years ago is real, but its source is usually described incorrectly. It isn’t just racism and a reaction to immigrants supposedly taking their jobs. It isn’t just job losses in a global economy. The nasty guy tapped into both of those ideas to get elected. The first explanation is this is racism, that white male working-class voters see a growing racial, ethnic, and gender diversity and feel they will become a minority in “their” country, “strangers in their own land.” They feel they are the ones most victimized by discrimination. They second explanation is they can’t, or don’t want to, adapt to an economic world where a job for life is no longer the norm. Jobs and skills need to be renewed frequently. They lash out at the global economy, which cannot be changed. Their anger would be best addressed by job-training programs. While both explanations are true, they aren’t the whole truth. And missing the rest of the truth allows elites, which created these conditions, to avoid responsibility. Two faults of the elites are behind the rest of the truth. There is a technocratic concept of politics bound up in the faith that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving public good. It is technocratic in that it drains public discourse of moral arguments. But this brought growing inequality and blurred national identities. The political divided came to be between closed borders, meaning closed-minded and tribal, or open-minded and global. The technocratic approach meant that governing required technocrats – issues couldn’t be understood by mere citizens. This was embraced by both the left and the right. The policies enacted by this model by both presidents Reagan and Clinton had benefits that flowed up. Democrats did little to address widening inequality and taming capitalism. Obama spoke of progressive politics that included moral and spiritual purpose. But he didn’t govern that way. Anger over the Wall Street bailout fueled populist protest creating both the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement. Democrats need to rethink (I think a better word is drop) their market-oriented approach to governing. The second fault has to do with the social recognition and esteem. It isn’t just the explosion of inequality. Politicians on the left and right have called for greater equality of opportunity.

This rhetoric of opportunity is summed up in the slogan that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise “as far as their talents will take them.”

But this rings hollow. It’s not easy to rise. And it is at odds with our faith that mobility is the answer to inequality. But the ability to rise depends on access to education, health care, and resources to equip people for work. And those resources no longer seem available. The rhetoric of opportunity no longer inspires. We can’t just help people scramble up a ladder whose rungs grow farther apart. There are moral problems with meritocracy. First, central to meritocracy is that factors beyond our control should make no difference. But they clearly do. Second, why should a talented person deserve greater rewards than a person who works equally hard? Third, meritocracy generates hubris among the winners and humiliation among the losers. It is the belief that those at the top deserve their fate. And those at the bottom do too. Humility – There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of fortune, go I.” – is banished because meritocracy banishes grace. We no longer feel we share a common fate. The belief that those at the bottom deserve their fate also leads to humiliation. The populist complaint is against the tyranny of merit. And it is justified. Alas, that is the end of the excerpt. The working man has been given a choice between Democrats who do nothing about inequality and Republicans who actively increase inequality as they exploit worker’s anger. Workers see Republicans are at least acknowledging their anger.