Month: April 2018

And Then What?

This piece is an analysis of a David Roberts article in Vox  from last Tuesday which is itself an analysis of a piece from the Niskanen Center’s Jerry Taylor, “Whither Never Trump?”

Roberts addresses the concept of “Never Trump Republicans” (whom he calls NTRs) who clearly do not have influence with the Republican Party in operation but are still there as free agents in the media and political culture. The question is what they’re supposed to do. Roberts brings up Taylor’s article, because Taylor concludes that launching a competitive third party is that much harder than “(scrubbing) the GOP clean of the toxins now surging through its base.” Roberts instead proposes a “pretty obvious” solution: NTRs should vote Democrat. “There are, for all intents and purposes, two parties contending in the American system. If you believe one of them is an existential threat to that system … you should vote for the other one. Because one of them is going to win.”

The obvious point here is that there are no NeverTrump conservatives. There are conservatives (meaning, Trump cultists) and NeverTrumpers (meaning, everybody else). But that NeverTrump group includes libertarians, mainstream liberals, “progressives” who thought Hillary Clinton was problematic or not leftist enough, and a few folks who would have been deemed conservative in the not-too-distant past before “conservatism” meant only blind loyalty to Donald Trump and his Know-Nothing psychology.

That in itself ought to reveal the problem with the argument: You can’t get all of those people into the same party. In the final analysis, Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 is a question of whether you can even get liberals and progressives into the same party.

The other issue with Roberts’ logic- that accepting one of the two parties as an “existential threat” necessarily means voting for the other one in a two-party system- is that it was no less valid in 2016. We didn’t know then what Trump would be like in office, but everybody already knew that Donald Trump was a loathsome, dysfunctional personality with no relevant experience and destructive ideas, and yet he got just enough people in just the right states to get the Electoral College. Now, the anti-charismatic Hillary Clinton is not on the ballot for the midterms and will not be on the ballot in 2020 (we only hope), and Republicans in Congress might have pissed off enough people to overcome right-wing loyalties to that party or hatred of liberals. Still, if your best case for voting Democratic is “the other party is like Satan, only racist”, well, we already knew that, and it still was not enough in itself. And then what?

This means that while non-leftists might need to sit out or vote for the Democrats this time, it does not address the long-term issue. Taylor writes: “Even if self-imposed exile were a comfortable option, it’s probably a self-defeating one for those alarmed about the direction of the Republican Party. Granted, a steady string of decisive electoral defeats would eventually force the GOP to change course or die (the fate of the party in California). But despite what some bullish progressives are beginning to think, a generation-long series of electoral beatings is unlikely. Donald Trump may lose in 2020, but if the party continues along its current path, he would simply be replaced by new and better “Trumps” on the horizon. If past is prologue (and we see no signs that it will be otherwise), Democratic overreach will trigger a Republican resurgence. Only two years after Richard Nixon resigned, after all, the GOP nearly held the White House in an electoral cliffhanger.” (This point by Taylor is conspicuously absent from Roberts’ analysis.)

Roberts also might not have considered that the Republicans he’s asking to just give up and vote Democratic could already be doing so, sotto voce. Several of them, notably Paul Ryan, have announced they’re not even running this year. That does not guarantee a Democratic victory for those seats, but the main thing that guarantees a Republican victory is an incumbent candidate. As for the various political columnists, “real” conservatives already think that anybody who isn’t with the cult is The Enemy, so right-wing pundits have already in effect declared their allegiance by taking pundit jobs with CNN (formerly nicknamed the Clinton News Network) and MSNBC (which is the Clinton News Network).

But Roberts moves on towards the conclusion of his thesis: “America’s dwindling white Protestant majority, facing off against an unwieldy coalition of challengers, increasingly driven to ‘authoritarian, blood and soil politics’ in defense of privilege. … That battle must play itself out. The GOP will only change when white-grievance politics is consistently rejected at the ballot box, as it is in California. Only if that happens will the party be open to change. And if the party wants to change, it will seek reformers willing to return home.

That battle could take years, even decades. But by Taylor’s own reckoning, if the blood-and-soil contingent wins, American democracy could be lost. There is only one alternative to that outcome: the other side winning. Like it or not, there are only two parties that matter in the US. For a Trumpist GOP to lose, the Democratic Party must win. ‘Tis math. So Taylor should suck it up and vote for Democrats — not because he likes their policies, but because the alternative is an existential threat.”

Wrong.

This is exactly the wrong tack to take with people who couldn’t stand your party even when Republicans were sane. For a Democratic partisan to look at the current situation and say that the only solution is to vote for the party that he likes is a bit… convenient.

What isn’t being considered is that perhaps the Democratic Party is the less ugly side of the existential threat. I have said this to liberals many times already, and I’m gonna keep saying it til they finally listen: The problem is that your candidates suck and nobody likes them, including a lot of people on the Left. We can see how awful Republicans are. And in the last election Democrats made the stakes very clear. And they still couldn’t get enough people to vote for them in the right states. Which should have only brought home the point that since the start of the Obama Administration, Democrats lost a record number of state and Congressional races where the Electoral College was not a factor. You’ve established that the Republicans are an existential threat, Democrats. And you lost anyway. And then what?

Blame the rest of the country for not listening to you instead of the other way around?

Yeah, that makes sense.

In dealing with Republican “conservatives”, it has become painfully clear to me that the truth will not penetrate some people’s skulls even if you wrapped it in barbed wire and called it Lucille. But it’s also become clear that even the superficially reasonable liberals aren’t capable of learning from experience. Telling the rest of us to “suck it up” and be good little robots is exactly why the Democrats are not able to take advantage of Republicans’ self-created hell, even if (especially if) everyone already knows that there are only two parties that are worth voting for. But what if neither is worth voting for and the best you can offer is not being an existential threat?

Then what?

The fact that the two-party system was broken even before Trump showed up, and will remain so after he’s gone, is why voting for Democrats or getting rid of Trump isn’t nearly enough (which is a point at the heart of another Vox article from last Monday).

As much as I rag on Roberts, he’s only half wrong. Which is to say he’s half right. But so is Taylor. Roberts is correct to say that in the short term, this broken system can only correct by tilting back towards the Democrats. He is incorrect to imply that that will be enough in the long term (or that the long term doesn’t matter). That is because Taylor is right when he says you cannot depend on the rest of the country to stay with the Democrats for anything but the most imperative reasons (and in the last election, not even then). But Taylor is wrong to say that the vehicle of opposition must be the Republican Party.

As I said last time, anybody who wants something besides the Democratic Party either needs to invest in the Libertarian Party, invest in a whole new right-wing party, or somehow get the Republicans to pull out of the Abyss. Well, we already have a Libertarian Party, and its organization, however small, is still greater than a party that has to be created out of whole cloth. As for the Republicans, you wouldn’t even have a Libertarian Party if people like me thought that the Republicans could be saved. We tried reforming it from within. Gary Johnson tried. Charlie Sykes tried. Jeff Flake tried. They don’t want us. And the various people who don’t like the Democrats but are getting more and more offended by the Party of Trump are asking themselves whether it’s still worth voting for. Just as 2016 was not as much a case of Trump winning as Clinton losing, Democratic coups in states like Alabama and Pennsylvania add up to a growing case of Trump fatigue. And Trump gets as far as he does because he’s actually less repellent to the average voter than congressional Republicans. Support for Republicans among those under 30 is lower than it’s ever been. How are we supposed to claim that this is the Party of Lincoln when they would rather be the Party of Trump? Exactly how damaged and blasted is the party supposed to get before they finally conclude that neo-Confederate authoritarianism won’t pay off? And will they be in any better shape than the Libertarians by that point? The Republican Party is already shrinking. We really ought to let it die.

It can’t die, of course, because we’re effectively allowed only two parties. Someone is always going to prop up this zombie, no matter how many brains it eats, because without the Republicans, we’ll only get to vote for Democrats.

For that to be the long-term solution, the liberal apologists proposing it must assume that the rest of the country will accept the implication that “the only rational choice” is the only choice that they deserve to have. In a democracy.

It might just be the case that the rest of the country will not accept that proposition.

And then what?

More Thoughts On Taxation

“Uncle Sam, I want to know what you doing with my fucking tax money.”

-Cardi B

Last week of course was Tax Day, and I made the mistake of getting into another political discussion on Facebook. I posted one of those memes that quoted on top, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society” and at the bottom it said: “WRONG – Taxes are the price we pay to avoid getting kidnapped by government.”

So one of my liberal friends responded, “No- taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”

And I responded with two words: “Or else.”

As I’d said last April 15th, I can’t agree with the premise that “taxation is theft,” but I get the logic behind it. It makes more sense than saying “paying taxes is patriotic.” Patriotism has nothing to do with it. Resident aliens have to pay federal taxes without being American patriots, and everybody has to pay local sales taxes. As for taxes creating a civilized society, clearly that’s a matter of opinion. What is unquestionably true is that we have never been able to fund a government through purely voluntary contributions, and so for government to exist and do those things that we deem necessary, it has to use law enforcement to get revenue. The main difference between private force and government force is the public’s assumption of government legitimacy. That is the only thing that makes taxation not theft.

If we acknowledge a need for government, that does not mean we all agree that that necessity makes everything government does a necessity. Was the Transportation Security Agency absolutely necessary to our existence before 9/11? And is it actually doing anything productive now?

There is a difference between supporting the government because it is legitimate and treating it as legitimate simply because it IS the government.

On this score, liberals broadly assume that the government is justified in itself, and therefore its actions are assumed to have necessary purpose, and if it acts egregiously, that only proves that The Right People need to be in charge of an ever-expanding system, not that the system has exceeded its justifications.

By contrast, if libertarians act as though taxation is theft, or government is inherently wrong, they are acting on the classical-liberal assumption that government is not infinitely justified in its actions, that it is necessary insofar as it is an improvement on the “state of nature” or rule by the local gang, and that when there is no distinction between the rule of law and rule by force, government loses its necessary claim to superiority over other armed groups.

The problem is that the current state of affairs is neither a case of liberals trying to make government do good things nor right-libertarians trying to impose limits on government. We currently have Republicans in power, and while they have in the past embraced both a Hamiltonian approach to big government and a libertarian sympathy to “small government” and business-friendly law enforcement, what we are seeing from the current Administration is the brazen declaration of conservatism as nothing better than the use of big government for the material benefit of those already in power.

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is used by critics as the go-to example of this psychology, for good reason. Among other things, Pruitt used his position to charge the government for repeated travel expenses including a four-day trip to Morocco, ostensibly to promote gas exports when that is not in the purview of the EPA. He is even more famous for charging the government to fly first-class on most of these trips, and for creating a detail of security guards that previous EPA heads did not consider necessary. (In his defense, Pruitt needs to travel separately from the common folk because he’s intensely unpopular.)  More recently, the Washington Post reported that Pruitt charged $25,000 to have a secured phone service or “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility” built in his office. The article says, “according to former agency employees, the EPA has long maintained a SCIF on a separate floor from the administrator’s office, where officials with proper clearances can go to share information classified as secret. The agency did not specify what aspects of that facility were outdated, or whether the unit inside Pruitt’s office would meet the physical and technical specifications a SCIF generally is required to have. ”

Your tax dollars at work, liberals.

Not only that, while Pruitt might even exceed his boss’ level of taxpayer-funded decadence, Pruitt as administrator is a very typical example of a Trump appointee maintaining the agency that he was appointed to while serving the opposite of its purpose. Both Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have used their positions to promote the coal industry and other polluters. Perry of course, became famous in 2011 for a presidential candidates’ debate in which he had promised to eliminate three federal agencies including the Department of Energy, except he couldn’t remember the name of that Department.

Now, liberals might consider the conservative-libertarian drive to kill federal agencies to be counterproductive or even crazy. But an Energy Department that did not exist would not be acting as a souped-up Chamber of Commerce and doing so on the public dime and with government authority.

This is not simply a case of reducing the scope (or budget) of a regulatory agency, but preserving its existence (against libertarian ideology) in order to enact policy to the benefit of private groups. Thus the premises of liberal regulatory government are turned against themselves in order to make government actively benefit the people who are supposed to be regulated.

Critics of government, both liberals and libertarians, have used the terms “rent-seeking” and “regulatory capture” to describe how elites turn government’s regulatory power to their benefit, but the modern Republican Party goes far beyond this. Regulatory capture is redundant when you can just BE the government.

Moreover, this is not justified in terms of any free-market ideology, including Randian selfishness. The so-called Captains of Industry are the people most dependent on government for their lifestyle. That which can be granted by government – like, unlimited vacation junkets – can be taken away by government.

And the only way these appointees and corporate beneficiaries can justify a government-sponsored lifestyle is to assume that this is the normal and permanent state of affairs.

When the ruling class considers the rest of the country to be not the source of sovereignty, but an economic resource to be exploited by force, and all parties involved conclude that government is serving no other purpose, that is when revolutions start.

Now, let us all work to make sure that never happens, but if it does, would liberals stand in front of the mob and say, “but without government, who would fix the roads?”

The point is not whether or not we want government to fix the roads or maintain public services. The point is that acceptance of those services is not a blanket justification of government institutions. Justification of government as such is exploited by the same conservatives who say government shouldn’t be spending on poor people, so that they can redistribute income upward and use government force to benefit themselves.

If leftists can’t grasp this distinction between libertarianism and conservatism, let alone the difference between ideal conservatism and what passes for it now, then they can’t complain when the rest of us question the difference between Stalinism and socialism.

Nevertheless, this means that the ultimate burden is on the Right. Because if the “official” right-wing party is going to embrace a level of villainy that Snidely Whiplash would find implausible, it threatens to render any opposition to the Democratic Party establishment illegitimate. Which means that anybody who wants a real opposition either has to invest in the Libertarian Party, create a new center-right party (the new Whigs, maybe?) or convince the “moderate” Republicans in Congress to volunteer for spine implants.

 

Paulie Numbnuts and Liddle Donnie Clown Boy

It is appropriate that on official Tax Day, I look over the legacy of Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who this week announced he would not run for re-election. This links to Paul Ryan’s mostly consistent support for Donald Trump, since Trump as president was instrumental to Ryan’s long-term goals of cutting taxes and government. Thus Ryan’s decision stands as a verdict on how well his loyalty to Trump paid off for himself and the Republican Party.

The first point, which most pundits haven’t spelled out, is that Ryan’s decision means it is no longer a matter of whether Republicans will lose the House in the 2018 midterms, it is just a matter of how badly. Prior to this decision one could argue that the matter was up in the air. But Ryan’s value to the Republican rank-and-file was his formidable fund-raising ability, and that has been undermined. If Ryan had kept his decision to himself and only retired after the November election results (whether Republicans kept the House or not) he would have been a more credible spokesman for other candidates on the campaign trail. Now even though he’s still going to stump for other Republicans, everyone is going to know that he’s campaigning for them when he won’t run himself.

That in itself leads to a broader implication. The fact that Ryan did not conceal his position until after the election (when he probably would have won his own seat) implies that he saw no point in fighting for the House. This is what gets to the question of Donald Trump’s real effect on Republican policy and its chances of long-term survival. The press has noted for some time that even before the primary process is finished, many Republicans are simply not running for re-election. Including House members who are running for other offices, only 19 House Democrats are resigning or leaving after 2018, compared to 40 Republicans. Democrats need 23 more seats to take the House. Normally the majority party would have the edge because incumbents usually win re-election. By not contesting certain seats, Republicans render them open and thus increase the chances that they’ll go to Democrats. But given the stakes of the last Republican Congress, where Paul Ryan and his caucus gutted many of the regulations on Obamacare and passed a surprisingly unpopular tax cut whose benefits went mostly to the party’s donor class, the stakes for retaining control of the chamber are dire. Why then is Paul Ryan doing something that will do more to hurt the Republican majority than any other single act?

Well, let’s just consider This Week in Trumpworld.

On Monday April 9, the FBI raided the home, hotel room and law office of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, on the recommendation of Robert Mueller and the specific permission of Mueller’s supervisor, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. It has since been reported that several of Trump’s confidants are afraid that Cohen may have taped conversations that prosecutors could use against both him and his boss. And since this (and several other cases) are being processed through state offices in New York, firing Rosenstein or Mueller, or giving a federal pardon to Cohen or other confidants, would not make the cases go away. Then it turned out that Cohen and Stormy Daniels’ former lawyer, Keith Davidson, had also handled a hush-money settlement to a former Playboy Playmate who had an affair with Elliot Broidy, deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. (This was a position also held at one point by Cohen.) Then towards the end of the week, Jim Comey, the FBI director that Trump fired after handing him the election, previewed his new tell-all book by leaking copies to the press, excerpts saying things like  “As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the mob. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and the truth”, and that when he mentioned the possibility that Russians had taped Trump in a room with two prostitutes, Trump “began discussing cases where women had accused him of sexual assault, a subject I had not raised. He mentioned a number of women, and seemed to have memorized their allegations.”

It’s not looking good. So what do you do if you’re Trump?
Yep, you bomb another country!

As I said after Trump’s last missile wank, almost exactly a year ago, Trump wasn’t trying to send a message to Syria and Russia over Syria’s chemical warfare. He was trying to send a message to gullible American establishment types, including the liberal media, that he was trying to be serious. If he was serious, then there would be more of a broad-based policy for achieving a peace in Syria. The fact that Chump tossed off one missile strike and pronounced “Mission Accomplished” demonstrates that the whole thing is just a diversion.

So why does he need a diversion? And again, why did Paul Ryan throw away the last chance to maintain control of Congress when they and Trump rely on each other for mutual protection?

Maybe it has something to do with what conservative Erick Erickson posted this week as the latest set of catastrophes were coming to light. He talked with a local Republican Congressman who told him “If we’re going to lose because of (Trump), we might as well impeach the motherf**ker”. Erickson goes, “What’s the problem, though? Well, get ready…

“It’s like Forrest Gump won the presidency, but an evil, really f*cking stupid Forrest Gump. He can’t help himself. He’s just a f**king idiot who thinks he’s winning when people are b*tching about him. He really does see the world as ratings and attention. I hate Forrest Gump. I listen to your podcast and heard you hate it too. What an overrated piece of sh*t movie. Can you believe it beat the Shawshank Redemption?'”

Then consider that for some time, long-time Trumpnik Ann Coulter has been calling herself a “Former Trumper.” She has gone so far as to do an interview with Teh Failing New York Times admitting, among other things, that a $1.3 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill that had hardly any money for Trump’s (alleged) immigration agenda sent her over the edge. “I don’t know what more horrible thing you could come up with than violating your central campaign promise that became the chant and the theme of the campaign that he promised at every single rally. I mean, implementing the principles of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ wouldn’t be more of a betrayal than that.”

Wow, the Jersey casino boss who went bankrupt four times couldn’t follow through on his commitments, and you’re surprised?

It goes to show how damn stupid the Trumpniks are. And by that I’m not just referring to the rednecks on social media who commit eight grammatical errors in a five-word sentence. I’m referring to the articulate people like Coulter, and the Billionaire Stringpullers like the Mercers and the Koch Brothers, who are supposed to be smart enough to know better. And of course I’m referring to Paul Ryan, the supposed “policy wonk.” All of these people wanted to believe that Trump was something other than what he was. And it just ties into the point that while Republicans have spent some time appealing only to a certain section of the country, their long-term problem is that they can’t appeal to everyone in their coalition at once.

Libertarian-adjacent writer Will Wilkerson had a great autopsy in the Times where he went over Ryan’s Faustian bargain with Trump: “Politics isn’t physics, but a governing Republican philosophy that sees it as a moral imperative to slash the budgets of social programs that benefit mainly older and working-class white people is bound, sooner or later, to drive a party of mainly older and working-class white people off a cliff.” The only way Ryan could accomplish his legislative goals was to get a Republican in the White House, and the only one who could get in the White House was the one who least hewed to Republican orthodoxy. “Mr. Trump spotted opportunity in the injured dignity of the Republican base and the feckless irrelevance of the establishment’s agenda. He told Republicans shaken by the reality and risk of downward mobility that they were the only Americans who counted, and that they had been cheated and betrayed. He promised never to cut their Social Security or Medicare, and expressed admiration for single-payer health care. He took their side against immigrant rapists, murderous jihadis, plundering trade deals, dangerous city people and disloyal, condescending elites of all parties and persuasions. He promised to use his billionaire superpowers to rig the economy to their advantage. It didn’t matter that he is a transparently corrupt, bigoted, sexually abusive, compulsive liar. He offered the dignity of recognition, promised to fight, and won. … As soon as Mr. Trump clinched the nomination, Mr. Ryan became as tame as a poodle (but) the Republican majority was crippled from the start by the fundamental conflict between a government-shrinking agenda and the immediate material interests of Republican voters.”

It comes down to the point that the fundamental dynamic of the Republican Party is the conflict between a financial elite that sponsors the politicians and a populist voter base that actually elects them. And there’s only one person who can credibly be listed as both a populist and a member of the financial elite: Donald Trump. (And yes, that means that the policies of the Trump Administration in practice are unbelievably schizoid, but what would you expect?)

The end result is that the “conservative” Republican Party has become a personality cult that invests itself in the whims and vagaries of one man who is well into the second half of his lifespan, rather than in philosophical principles that are supposed to stand the test of time against political fashion. In other words, the opposite of conservatism in theory.

This explains why the various groups in the current Republican tent don’t just prep Mike Pence for the White House (apart from the fact that he may be tainted, too). While the Religious Right guys would love Pence, neither the Koch-style “economic libertarians” nor the Roseanne types who think the Kochs are trying to rob them care all that much about fundamentalist priorities, such as gay rights or what trans people call themselves. (They don’t care that much about queer people, but by the same token, they aren’t strongly motivated to disenfranchise them.) But what the plutocrats, the fundies and the Tea Party working class all want is someone who’s going to fulfill their dreams by cutting through all the dross of the democratic republic and run things the right way – even when they have different ideas as to what that means. They are all desperate for a strongman, even if he isn’t really strong. Or smart. Or politically skilled. And might be compromised by organized crime and the Russians.

Poor little Trumpniks. They wanted a Leader. They wanted a great man on horseback. What they got was Liddle Donnie Clown Boy.

And while Trump retains some popularity in the Heartland, those policy wonks who may disagree with liberals but know how Washington actually works day-to-day have gotten to see how Trump operates day-to-day. And they’re coming around to the realization that he is doing to their party what he did to the Atlantic City gambling industry.

But now that they finally have the White House and both houses of Congress, they’re all in on the philosophy that there is no rule of law and all that matters is being in the biggest gang. There’s just one problem with that attitude.

Republicans aren’t the biggest gang.

Indeed, the deliberate Republican strategy for the past few election cycles has been to game the federal system and their own primary election process to marginalize everyone outside a few set opinions so that anyone who isn’t “politically correct” can’t get nominated and voter ID laws and other schemes limit the potential voter pool for general elections. Rather than try to appeal to the broadest possible group (the way Democrats have been), Republicans purge their own ranks for purity, run on issues that appeal only to the hardcore, then try to make sure that only the “right” people vote for them. And then some of them wake up and realize they’re screwed because no one will vote for them.

This is a serious lesson for any group, Left or Right, that wants to change the system. The knowledge that not everyone is going to agree with you ought to indicate that you aren’t going to retain power indefinitely, and thus you should start with the changes that everyone can agree with and have a chance at enduring, rather than deliberately making radical changes that are guaranteed to piss off everybody who isn’t you. Otherwise, antagonizing the rest of the country on the premise that you’ll get away with it forever not only reduces the chance of you staying a majority, it increases the chance that the opposition will try to roll back everything you did when, NOT if, they take the government back.

So Much For First Principles

Nothing in democratic politics is given — or rather, the things we consider given at any moment enjoy this status for no more exalted reason than that public opinion (expressed primarily through elections) favors treating it as such. But the settlement or consensus in its favor is always temporary and contingent. The contestation of politics, the struggle over power and ideas, over the Constitution and the law and who we are as a political community, never ends. It’s always possible for a settlement or consensus at one moment of history to be rethought, overturned, or reversed. Rights granted can later be rescinded — and there’s no way to prevent that from happening beyond continuing the fight, day after day.

-Damon Linker, The Week

It’s time for me to introduce another of my personal axioms. The first was: “It is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.” The second was: “Every new president somehow lowers the bar.” The third is: There are no a priori concepts.

A priori (Latin for ‘from the prior’) is a phrase that is frequently invoked in philosophy but was popularized by Immanuel Kant in the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason. Without getting way too technical and over-involved (like Kant), the author was writing in reaction to contemporary philosophy, the one extreme being radical empiricism (example: David Hume) and the other being rationalism divorced from experience (ex: Bishop George Berkeley). While Kant asserted the reality of the material world and “experience”, philosophers ultimately count him as an idealist who distinguished knowledge gained after experience (knowledge a posteriori) from knowledge a priori, universal truths existing prior to experience of phenomena. “But although all our cognition commences with experience, yet it does not on that account all arise from experience.” Philosophers ever since have been gnawing over the merits of Kant’s work, so I don’t think people will assume that it’s easy for me to blast his thesis to bits. It seems, however, that problems can easily be deduced. For instance, in asserting “that certain cognitions even abandon the field of all possible experiences”, Kant cited as primary examples the concepts of God, Free Will and Immortality. But for these three to be truly independent and transcendent of culture and experience, they would have to be common elements in all philosophy, not just the heritage of Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture. In Eastern philosophy by contrast, a Supreme Being exists in Hinduism but is not necessarily inherent in Buddhism, Free Will implies a concept of self that both Hinduism and Buddhism are opposed to, and Immortality exists only in a concept of samsara, or cyclical existence and reincarnation, in which the individual comes to see the phenomenal world as futility and ultimately seeks to end the cycle rather than preserve it.

What does this have to do with anything at all?

Because in the realm of politics, Americans, specifically liberals, are acting as though certain elements of the political debate are a priori assumptions and not to be questioned. But in the above example, Kant declared that Western philosophy pointed to theism because theism was at the basis of philosophy. But if one goes outside that philosophical perspective, it becomes clear that not everyone holds those beliefs as the given.

I bring this up due to a couple of subjects.

The Atlantic magazine recently hired National Review columnist Kevin Williamson, which is in line with other controversial decisions from center-left media (like The New York Times) hiring right-wing columnists like Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens for the sake of “perspective.” The very fact of these selections is a tacit admission that the readers of such media are only getting one side of the debate. But the ink wasn’t dry on Williamson’s first Atlantic piece before liberals brought up remarks he made on a conservative podcast where he said: “And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, ‘If you really thought it was a crime, you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide.’ And I do support that. In fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging.” This was known at the time, yet Williamson got hired by The Atlantic, and Thursday April 5, Williamson got fired, editor Jeffrey Goldberg declaring: “The language he used in this podcast—and in my conversations with him in recent days—made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views. The tweet was not merely an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post, as Kevin had explained it.” (As of the 5th, Williamson’s one column is still up on the Atlantic website, where he was still listed as a staff writer.)

It was in fact another Atlantic piece that pointed to a National Review article of March 2016 where Williamson said in regard to White Working Class Trump Voters:  “There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” So I’m a bit surprised that anybody there is surprised at what they were getting.

As Reason Magazine’s Katherine Mangu-Ward says, “the underlying logic of Williamson’s position is a view shared by roughly half or at least 40 percent of Americans.” It is a position one can argue with, but the opposite (pro-abortion rights) position is not necessarily the accepted wisdom, unless you are a liberal. Mangu-Ward continues: “I have personally been the beneficiary of this doublethink on ideological diversity for years. When institutions recognize the need to have a nonliberal somewhere in their midst, they look across the landscape and discover that the closest thing to conservatism that they can tolerate is a relatively mild-mannered, young(ish), female, pro-choice libertarian. Which is to say, not a conservative at all.”

More broadly, this is part of why the abortion debate can’t be simply resolved by an appeal to logic or first principles, because the first principles of each side are radically different, as are their implications, depending on how far you want to go. As I grow older and the fragility of life becomes more obvious to me, I am more inclined towards the Catholic position, which is pro-life on both abortion AND the death penalty. Nevertheless, I have to define myself as pro-choice, because if we actually defined abortion as murder, Williamson’s posture would be less of a posture and more of a possibility.

See, Kant’s other famous idea was the thought experiment called the categorical imperative. Having eliminated the possibility of deriving truth from empirical data (or rather, asserting that it only applied to the ‘phenomenal realm’), Kant sought a device by which one could determine the morality of an action in a given situation. He defined this categorical imperative in action thus: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Translated, Kant is expecting the individual to take responsibility for every choice as an example of a universal principle.

When challenged on this by the Frenchman Benjamin Constant, who said that if lying goes against the categorical imperative, this would mean that there is a duty not to lie to a murderer seeking a target, Kant replied that (while one might simply withhold any statement and keep silent) it is nevertheless a greater duty to be truthful to the murderer than to protect a potential target: “Although in telling a certain lie, I do not actually do anyone a wrong, I formally but not materially violate the principle of right with respect to all unavoidably necessary utterances. And this is much worse than to do injustice to any particular person, because such a deed against an individual does not always presuppose the existence of a principle in the subject which produces such an act.”

This gets to the real issue with Kantian idealism. With the categorical imperative, and in a much broader respect with the Critique of Pure Reason and subsequent work, Kant was trying to act against the philosophy of “consequentialism”, and define a universal moral law that was not undermined by “self-love” or ulterior motives. Yet, to apply the categorical imperative, one has to apply consequences on the most abstract level, and limit one’s action on the principle that a particular action sets a universal example. To Kant, to lie in any circumstance is to justify lying in all circumstances, and thus the abstract consequence of violating philosophy is used to dismiss the practical consequence of making that maxim a universal.

Most people, of course, don’t think like this. Unless you’re in politics.

This in a roundabout way gets to the other topic I am thinking about.

One of the reasons that gun crime remains an issue is that every time a firearms massacre occurs, liberals can’t get the “common-sense gun safety” legislation they want, because even when it is common-sense and supported by the public (national background checks, for instance), it gets shot down in the Congress and state legislatures. This is mostly because of the NRA and its commercial priorities, but the NRA itself is representing a larger gun culture, and I would say that a huge reason for their success in resisting political pressure is that they are as inflexible in compromising gun rights as Planned Parenthood and liberal organizations are in resisting compromise on abortion rights. Just as pro-choice people resist conservative attempts to restrict abortion access as a transparent ploy towards ending abortion rights altogether, the gun lobby presents any gun control legislation as a slippery slope towards total gun prohibition.

At this point, liberals might object. We’ve established that there really are some conservatives who not only want to ban abortion but want to prosecute it as murder. But surely being anti-gun isn’t the same thing. The argument being proffered by liberals is that they aren’t trying to end gun rights, just establish proper security procedures. “Nobody’s saying we need to get rid of the Second Amendment.”

Except, some people are.

On March 27, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens attracted headlines with a New York Times column in which he stated that the only solution to gun violence was the repeal of the Second Amendment. Stevens points out that the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights because of a fear that a national standing army would threaten the security of the separate states, thus the default assumption that defense was a matter for state militia. But to Stevens, “that concern is a relic of the 18th century.” Stevens states that his concern stems from the 2008 Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller, in which he was one of four dissenters, and which he asserts “has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power.” Removing the Second Amendment, Stevens says, “would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States – unlike every other market in the world.” Blanking out of course, that by Stevens’ own argument, we’d had the Second since the signing of the Constitution, and the prior standard of its interpretation before Heller was more to his liking, and it would be much easier and more practical to appoint more justices who agreed with him than it would be to go through the whole process of amending the Constitution.

Keep in mind, when Antonin Scalia wrote his opinion in Heller, he specifically stated: “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those ‘in common use at the time’ finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Not to mention, liberals have never fussed about applying the First Amendment towards a general category of individual freedom of expression that applies far beyond 18th-century artefacts like “the press.”

All Heller did was to knock away the specious rationale that the Constitution says anything about a “collective right” that is inherent in the government and not the people. Liberals wail that Scalia’s opinion arbitrarily blew away the previous consensus on what the American legal standard of gun ownership is supposed to be, eliding the point that said standard was a precedent that did not date back to the founding documents, and is most strongly based in US vs. Miller.

Nevertheless, Stevens’ piece is worthwhile in that someone is at least approaching the matter honestly. The main fact in Stevens’ opinion was that we haven’t actually needed state militia units since the Civil War, and their domestic security purpose is effectively taken over by the National Guard. But that gets to the general point that much of the government’s “rules as written” (the Constitution) have little to do with how the US government works in practice. Challenging the Second Amendment simply forces us to admit that the government hasn’t operated according to its original principles for quite some time, but it doesn’t answer the question as to whether that is really a good thing.

For example, the Third Amendment says that the government is not allowed to quarter troops in private homes. “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” We haven’t even needed to consider this, because since the constitutional government was founded, the government has always provided for troops and had the money to do so, thus the option has never been necessary. That being the case, why do we still need the Third Amendment?

Because, we all know that if we didn’t have the Third Amendment, Republicans would force wealthy Democrats to quarter troops on their property so they could raid the defense budget for their personal vacations.

This is why it doesn’t help liberals to say that “the Constitution is a living document.” Because if “conservatives” press their current advantage, and get multiple justices on the Supreme Court, they could repeal Roe v. Wade, or Brown v. Board of Education. And at that point, asserting that the Constitution is a “living document” won’t sound quite so cute.

So this is what I’m getting at: First, Immanuel Kant sucks. But that’s not directly relevant. Secondly, we do not all share the same first principles, which is made clear by American political history in general and the current trend of politics in particular. Third, even beyond first principles, the real reason that liberals and conservatives can’t trust each other these days is that they both assume the worst of each other when they get into power. Which is eminently justified.

GAME REVIEW: Starfinder

 

I’m going to take a different tack with this blog for a bit.

I play role-playing games – as in, tabletop, dice rolling, role-playing games – and in my hobby I’d done a few reviews for a couple of RPG forums, enough to where a few game publishers actually forwarded me free material to review. Ironically, I got turned off to those sites because of the non-gaming, political discussions, after one of those forums got taken over by the kind of SJWs who think anybody to the right of Che Guevara is a Nazi, and the other site went in the opposite direction, being so disgusted with “social justice” movements that they think Donald Trump is a hero. And much of the reason I got into those political discussions is that the gaming discussions bored me. I already knew what I liked, and the commentary seemed to be mostly fixed opinions on various games, which became too predictable to be worthwhile. I still did reviews, but I noticed that not too many people read them, and in the case of one of those sites, not too many people were even contributing reviews anymore. It was a point of diminishing returns.

Which didn’t stop me from actually playing games with my friends. I have two separate groups playing on two different nights. One of them frequently runs Pathfinder, a Dungeons & Dragons offshoot that became popular after the owners of the actual D&D brand temporarily decided to turn their product into the gaming version of New Coke. Recently, the host of our game wanted to try being Game Master of the new spinoff game, Starfinder, which is Pathfinder in space. Sorta.

In light of both our game experience and my study of the core rulebook, I wanted to do a review of Starfinder, because it actually differs in some respects from the original Pathfinder, and in light of the recent news that after almost 10 years of Paizo Publishing making the Pathfinder RPG, they’ve decided to playtest a second edition of the rules – for which Starfinder helped serve as a model.

Starfinder, like Pathfinder, is set in its own fictional universe, like the D&D settings of Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms. In this case, Pathfinder is set on the Earth-like world of Golarion, which is established to be in a solar system with other planets, most of which have their own humanoid races, akin to early 20th Century science fiction. The premise of Starfinder is that it occurs some point in the far future in the Pathfinder universe, but for some reason, Golarion no longer exists. Or is in another dimension. Or something. No one knows why. In fact, whatever it is that removed planet Golarion also removed everyone’s memory of exactly what happened, an event now known to the interplanetary civilization as “the Gap.” (Supposedly this was done to prevent Pathfinder players from changing the established history of the setting, though given the severe difference in tech levels, no Pathfinder player characters should have lived long enough to see the Gap.)

Likewise, the Starfinder setting still technically has the Tolkien-like races such as Elves and Halflings, but stats for them are in the back of the book. The core rules focus on Humans and the inhabitants of those other worlds in the solar system, such as Androids, the four-armed Kasathas and the telepathic Lashuntas. It also features the Vesk, a warlike reptilian race who tried to conquer the solar system before both sides had to ally against a greater threat. Most of these races (including Androids but not Vesk) had game stats in Pathfinder material that was previously published for sci-fi crossover scenarios. What’s different, and where you have the first change from the prior Pathfinder game, is that each race (including Humans) has their own stat for Hit Points. Hit Points of course are the D&D stat that determines how much damage a character takes before getting taken out. Traditionally, though, players rolled their hit points on “Hit Dice” randomly depending on their character class, with warrior classes getting more hit points (rolled on a 10-sided die, or d10) and scholarly wizards getting less (rolling a d6 or even a d4). In Starfinder, Hit Points are a set number coming from both a character’s class and race, the two values being added together at 1st level and every new experience level. Starfinder also gives characters the “Stamina Points” stat, which is related but not quite the same thing, and the Resolve Points stat, which is pretty important in play (see below).

Character classes are different from the set given in Pathfinder and most D&D games. Pathfinder is infamous for taking the base assumptions of D&D classes – the “martial” fighters and rogues, with clerics and wizards – and exploding them with various options in new sourcebooks such that there are now at least twenty. Starfinder, at least in its corebook, only has seven classes. Some cases are obvious analogs to D&D/Pathfinder style classes. The Soldier, for instance, is the equivalent of the Fighter, only a good deal more versatile. In this regard, there’s another clear difference between Starfinder and the edition of D&D that Pathfinder was based on: Soldiers get twice the skill points of D&D/PF Fighters. (Spellcasters also got screwed on skill points in Pathfinder, whereas in this game most people are assumed to be technically skilled, so each class gets at least 4 skill points per level.) You also have the Envoy, who uses Charisma to outmaneuver enemies and help friends (basically a Bard, or what some games would call a Noble), the Operative (read: a Rogue, or Thief), the Mystic (Cleric) and Technomancer (Wizard or Sorcerer). However there is also a Mechanic class that deals specifically with the technical issues that you would get in a space science fiction game, with options like cyberware and drones. There’s also the Solarian, a melee warrior class which for reasons unexplained is able to “manipulate the forces of the stars themselves.” This gives access to some pretty cool comic-book type powers, but most of them require the solarian to already be in combat over a period of rounds in order to be “attuned” to stellar energy.

Furthermore, there’s a step in character creation that’s actually introduced before the rules for races and classes. It’s called the theme. There are actually more character themes (ten) than there are classes, ranging from Ace Pilot to Themeless (as in, if you don’t want to pick one of the other themes). Each adds +1 to a favored attribute, creates a “theme knowledge” (reducing the difficulty number of checks to recall a favored subject, and adds to a favored skill, like Piloting for the Ace Pilot theme), and adds three other abilities at 6th, 12th and 18th levels. The themes usually link up to a certain class – for instance, the Priest theme adds +1 to Wisdom and aligns perfectly with the Mystic class – but the thing is that each theme could combine with any class. So if you combined Mystic with the Mercenary theme, you could define your character as a military chaplain.

Again, while skills work much as they do in other D&D/D20 System games, the Starfinder skill list includes the things that would be necessary in this setting, namely Computers, Engineering and Piloting, which don’t have analogs in fantasy games. All three of these skills are needed for different crew positions in starship combat, which is another common element in this game that doesn’t exist in Pathfinder. This also means that some skill functions got absorbed into other skills. Survival is still a skill, for instance, but most people use vehicles, so Riding isn’t its own skill in Starfinder. Instead, one uses Survival skill to ride a creature.

In practice the main difference between Starfinder and Pathfinder is the array of equipment available through technology, although most of it will not be available to 1st-level characters due to sheer cost. One feature of this game is that equipment items (including armor and weapons but also computers) have a level, like spells or characters. This is on a scale where a survival knife does 1 to 4 hit points damage, costs 95 credits and is level 1. By contrast, an elite gyrojet rifle does 6 to 72 (6 12-sided dice) in damage, is level 17 and costs 242,500 credits. The range of non-magical weapons available due to technology is greatly increased, including lasers, cryo (cold) weapons and electric stunners, among others, although again the damage at low levels isn’t much. You can also mix magic and technology, which in this setting frequently involves “weapon fusions”, commercially available, advanced enchantments that can be applied to an existing weapon or can, with difficulty, be transferred from one weapon to another. (So if you wanted a Holy or Dragon Bane Shotgun, this is your game.) Also, similar to cyberpunk games, cybernetics and bio-systems can be installed in a character’s body, although this is also expensive in relation to the item level. (A standard datajack that can be attached to one’s skull for computer interface is 625 credits. One with bonuses to the Computer roll is up to 8525 credits.)

While the equipment list is necessarily expanded for a science fiction game, the magic spells list (for what is still a fantasy game) is actually compressed. This might be because the technology that is available to everybody (with enough credits) makes magic less unique. For instance, a medical lab can install an item called a regeneration table, which uses nanites to effectively duplicate any heal spell up to Raise Dead, although the need to attune to a given creature’s biology means it can only be used once. In any case, both Mystics and Technomancers only get 6 levels of spells as opposed to D&D’s traditional 9. Various spells with similar but progressive effects are grouped into one spell with various levels, thus the Cure Wounds spells become one “Mystic Cure” spell at levels 1 to 6, and the 1st level “Feather Fall” in D&D simply becomes the 1st level spell version of Flight. The book says that spellcasters don’t care too much about the distinction between “arcane” vs. “divine” magic, but in practice, mystics seem to focus on psychic and healing powers, while technomancers “hack” physical processes. Notably, while Wish (or Miracle) is still on the spell list, it isn’t given a spell level, rather a spellcaster needs to be 20th level to cast it (once a week for a mystic to use Miracle, whereas a technomancer needs to spend 2 Resolve Points and ‘fuse’ two 6th level spells to use Wish).

In Play

The Starfinder game my Gamemaster is running has gotten our characters up to 3rd level after about 5 or so adventures. We have a Technomancer (me), a Mechanic, a Mystic, an Operative, a Soldier and an Envoy. I believe the GM is using a published series of adventures (what the company calls an ‘adventure path’) and it does a fairly good job of introducing the players to successive elements of the game setting. For example, when our team was hired to explore a certain asteroid, we had to use a rented shuttle, which for reasons still unknown got attacked by a fighter craft, thus leading to low-level starship combat. The corebook’s section on Starships explains that various crew positions each require certain skills, which in turn make certain classes better suited to certain bridge stations. For instance while the Envoy is not great in direct combat, most of the actions assigned to the captain in starship combat are best performed by the Envoy or other high-Charisma character (this game seems to go with the Captain Kirk concept of ship command). Attacks are based on the gunner’s base attack bonus, which means that the gunnery role always goes to the soldier (or solarian). Otherwise I have noticed that most classes are flexible in regard to holding ship positions. The Technomancer, for instance, is likewise not good in direct combat and doesn’t have all the engineering tricks of the Mechanic, but has several of the Mechanic’s core skills (including Engineering and Piloting) and thus while best suited to be science officer can serve well as a pilot or engineer. By contrast the Mystic class doesn’t have either of those skills, and while it does have several Charisma skills the character would only be a good captain if it were built around such skills. In practice the mystic is very much a “healbot” in the D&D mode, and as it turns out, healing is at least as important in this game as it is in Pathfinder.

In regular (non-starship) combat, characters not only use Hit Points but the aforementioned Stamina Points, which are similar to concepts from some other d20 games (like Wizards of the Coast’s licensed Star Wars game). The difference is that while Hit Points only recover with Cure spells or an 8-hour period of rest, Stamina Points can be recovered with a 10 minute rest, but that requires the expenditure of a Resolve Point. In character creation, each race gets its own base hit points (from 2 to 6) at first level, plus a similar number of hit points at 1st level and every level thereafter due to character class. Each class provides a certain number of stamina points (plus a Constitution modifier) per level. Resolve Points are “an intrinsic reservoir of grit and luck tied to your talents and often enchanced by your class.” Each character has a number of Resolve Points equal to half character level (round down, minimum 1) plus the character’s key ability score modifier (e.g. Wisdom for Mystic). Stamina Points and Resolve Points normally refresh entirely after 8 hours of uninterrupted rest. Without magic, hit points only recover at the rate of 1 per character level each 8 hours, or twice that with 24 hours of complete bed rest. The kicker is that while stamina points give each character an extra layer of durability compared to D&D characters, once they’re burned off, you take damage to hit points. Once hit points are gone, you don’t go into negative hit points. Rather, each round you lose 1 Resolve Point until your character is medically stabilized. If that doesn’t happen and you would be brought below 0 Resolve Points, you die. So this is the Resolve Point economy in combat: You can use Resolve Points to stretch your character’s stamina points (with a 10-minute rest), but you don’t want to use them all, because if you should go down to hit points (which is likely if grevious damage causes the character to lose both stamina and hit points in the same battle) and are in danger of going to 0 HP, your remaining Resolve Points are the only thing standing between your character and death. This is complicated still further because Resolve Points are the “hero point” mechanic of the game. At mid to higher levels, certain class features either require spending a Resolve Point or require the character to have at least 1 Resolve Point still unspent. So while the Starfinder character is twice as tough as the D&D/PF character on paper, in practice you have to budget the use of Resolve Points very carefully in order for that critical situation to not sneak up on you.

In Conclusion

There were some things about the Starfinder game I didn’t like, such as being rather vague in how certain abilities translate from SF to Pathfinder and vice versa. For instance, Small characters in Pathfinder (like Gnomes and Halflings) are treated as having a slower movement rate than Humans, but this isn’t mentioned here, even though it is mentioned that Starfinder Dwarves have a movement rate of 20 feet that is not affected by encumbrance (just as in Pathfinder). The layout and font resembles a tech manual (whereas the Pathfinder Core Rulebook has pages resembling yellowing parchment), but unfortunately it also reads like a tech manual, and not only does the smaller font make the work physically harder to read, the layout also makes it harder to get information on healing lost damage points, how solarian class powers work, and other non-trivial bits.

Nevertheless, the game at least provides the sort of skills and equipment that would be necessary to run a science fiction (or even contemporary) setting using D20 rules. (It’s certainly better for that than D20 Modern.) And as I mentioned, it might give us a peek at the Paizo Publishing design philosophy as they playtest Pathfinder 2nd Edition. Like, if the Pathfinder Fighter more resembled the Starfighter Soldier, it would probably work better. From what I’ve seen from Paizo’s site, the Pathfinder notes seem to be fairly similar to my experience with Starfinder: A lot of good ideas that aren’t clearly expressed. I like Starfinder from what I’ve played so far, but your mileage may vary.

And on that note…

HAPPY EASTER!