Hostile to accountability

Yesterday I wrote:

Sarah Kendzior has lamented that Democrats promised to investigate the nasty guy administration as part of the 2018 campaign. Kendzior has also said the failure to do that (the first impeachment trial could have been about so much more) was a big reason why Democrats lost seats last November.

My friend and debate partner sent an email objecting to the second sentence. He makes an important point. He’s drilled this point into me several times, and I’ve caught others at it several times. I missed this one.

Sarah Kendzior gets a flagrant foul for violating "correlation is not causation". Yes, Democrats set out to investigate many dimensions of Trump's perfidy and in fact investigated few of them (for many reasons, foremost among them Trump's unprecedented obstruction of all Congressional oversight). And this all happened in the same time frame in which they lost seats in the House of Representatives. We have reasonable time-correlation. She presents (you describe) no evidence that the lack of effective oversight is to any degree the cause of the electoral loss. She may "lament" (as you write) all she wishes about nearly anything -- she has freedom of speech. But lacks credibility.

A couple points from me: My friend is right. I did not include any of Kendzior’s evidence that because the Democrats did not investigate and prosecute the nasty guy’s crimes they lost seats in the House. I do not know whether Kendzior actually has evidence. The evidence could be such things as voter polls linking disgust at the lack of investigation with a choice of candidate. I don’t remember Kendzior saying such evidence exists. Though Kendzior, or maybe I, lack credibility on this one point, I will continue to quote from her Twitter feed and Gaslit Nation podcasts as I feel appropriate because to me she has a proven record of correctly predicting and identifying aspects of the nasty guy and the GOP well before others do. Though she may not have mastered correlation/causation, she has mastered how authoritarian regimes work. Hami, a multi-disciplined graphic designer, tweeted about CPAC, the conservative political conference about to start:

Having worked with Norse and Elder Futhark iconography for years, I’m quite alert to the glyph shapes and their associations in the modern world and history. So, why is the #CPAC2021 stage an Odal rune, and specifically one with serifs (or wings) that was used by the SS?

Hami’s tweet includes a photo. The first reply to Hami’s post included a photo of a Nazi SS officer with the Odal rune on his collar. A reply from BlaqkPhoenix quoted from Wikipedia:

In November 2016, the leadership of the National Socialist Movement announced their intention to replace the Nazi-pattern swastika with the Odal rune on their uniforms and party regalia in an attempt to enter mainstream politics.

In a post from a week ago David Neiwert of Daily Kos discussed a conundrum over right-wing violence after the Capitol attack:

How can law enforcement effectively curtail the illegal activities of right-wing extremists when so many officers are themselves participants in these movements? The answer—which is that it cannot—suggests that effectively confronting far-right extremism must begin with police reform, and particularly the task of weeding extremists out of our police forces. The public cannot expect agencies tasked with enforcing the laws that prohibit extremist violence to do so seriously when those same extremists permeate their ranks. … The most difficult aspect of the problem for police is the extent to which far-right views have been normalized within the mainstream, and particularly within the ranks of police officers. The issue gets to the heart of a police culture that has become increasingly politicized by right-wing politics and is simultaneously hostile to accountability for its own behavior. When cops are also far-right extremists who engage in discriminatory policing, American police officials have a history of closing ranks and defending the status quo. … Extremism within the ranks of law enforcement, however, is not just a community relations problem. Much more broadly, it also affects what laws are enforced and how. And it has a direct impact on the broader national effort to push back the incoming tide of white nationalist and other far-right extremist violence. The primary problem with domestic terrorism in America is that our law-enforcement apparatus at every level—federal, state, and local—has failed to enforce the laws already on the books that provide them with more than enough ability to confront it. The ongoing presence of officers sympathetic to their cause—and for whom, in fact, their radical extremism is invisible—is one of the major proximate causes of this failure. … [Georgetown Law professor Vida Johnson] observed to the [LA] Times it should be a cause for concern when officers become followers of such conspiracy theories as QAnon, or the claim that COVID-19 is a hoax, or theories that Trump’s reelection was fraudulently stolen from him. “People who can’t separate fact from fiction probably shouldn’t be the ones enforcing laws with guns,” Johnson said. Johnson has a roadmap for rooting extremists out of police departments: stricter and more diligent hiring practices, social media checks that could reveal extremist beliefs or organizational membership, periodic background checkups for all police veterans, and a review apparatus that is fully independent. “They’re supposed to be protecting and serving us,” Johnson told Mother Jones. “But unfortunately it seems like a lot of departments see themselves at odds with or even at war with the rest of the community. That’s a culture within policing that needs to change.”

I’ve been hearing the term “cancel culture” a lot lately. It has been hard for me to figure out what it exactly means, and that’s probably because it means different things depending on who is saying it. John Stoehr and his Editorial Board, which tries to explain politics in plain English, discussed it. I see a basic definition now. Conservatives accuse liberals of using cancel culture to cancel them, to erase what conservatives are saying.

Critics of “cancel culture” are doing the same thing critics of liberalism have done since forever. While liberals complain about problems, critics complain about liberals. And they go to great lengths to get the liberals to shut the hell up. While “cancel culture” is a fiction invented by critics of liberalization for the purpose of attacking liberals, there is such a thing as cancel culture. We just don’t call it that, because real cancel culture has plagued human relations since the dawn of human history—it’s when the politically powerful stomp the politically weak. Maltreatment on such a vast and historical scale is so normal, pervasive and ubiquitous that it’s almost entirely invisible to those of us lucky enough to have been born on the giving end of it. Those of us unlucky enough to have been born on the receiving end of it, however, can see real cancel culture quite clearly. Again, the difference should be a familiar one. Those with the power to name, name. Those without the power to name, don’t name. Those with the power call it “cancel culture.” Those without the power sit in silence.

Stoehr told the story of a black student claiming to be the target of discrimination. White people claimed cancel culture. Stoehr wrote:

The problem for critics of “cancel culture” was not, however, the abuse of power. … It was the abuse of power by a Black person who isn’t supposed to have any power to abuse.