Month: October 2017

Extremism In Defense of Lunacy

Vieux

The public square has been overrun by the village idiots.

We are trying to function at a time when right-wing fringe propagandist Steve Bannon is a close advisor and confidant to the President; when the President goes on the InfoWars show with extremist screamer Alex Jones; when the right-wing media environment spews nonsense like Hillary Clinton running a child porn ring out of a D.C. pizza parlor and an armed N.C. man opens fire while investigating.

This environment has been building for years. When many Americans believed that a President of the United States was using a military exercise to declare martial law in Texas as a pretense to seize people’s guns, we really shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves in our current situation.

Arizona  Senator Jeff Flake, in his broadside against Trump as he announced his retirement from the Senate identified it as “a sickness in our system — and it is contagious.”

E.J. Dionne addressed this in a recent Washington Post column, “The mainstreaming of right-wing extremism.”

“Why have our politics gone haywire, why have our political arguments turned so bitter, and why was Donald Trump able to win the Republican nomination and, eventually, the presidency? A central reason has been the mainstreaming of a style of extremist conservative politics that for decades was regarded as unacceptable by most in the GOP…

“The extremist approach is built on a belief in dreadful conspiracies and hidden motives. It indulges the wildest charges aimed at associating political foes with evil and subversive forces… Ordinary political acts are painted as diabolical. Dark plots are invented out of whole cloth. They are first circulated on websites that traffic in angry wackiness, and are eventually echoed by elected officials.”

This extremism has both fed and been nourished by the digital and social media culture of the past decade or so.

It is important to understand this context and background, this idea that the John Birch Society-types have become mainstream. That understanding helps to see the deeper extent of Russian meddling in our election. They very effectively used our divisions against us. The question remains whether they had any internal help in this.

The absolute must read here is “What Facebook Did to American Democracy; And why it was so hard to see it coming,” in The Atlantic. The extent to which ads could be/were targeted, and the way that advertising and targeting could be hidden is essential knowledge to prepare for our elections in the future. Mother Jones had covered the topic earlier as well.

The Atlantic also gave us some hope that maybe our fellow Americans aren’t as bad as they seem on social media, reminding us “Don’t forget to adjust for Russian Trolls.”

Even the guy who’s administration told us the world doesn’t really work as part of a reality-based community anymore has had enough. In a speech George W. Bush delivered earlier this month he said, “We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty.”

Senator John McCain spoke to the lunacy of extreme rhetoric when he accepted the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal.

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

“We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil… We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.”

This is not a “MAGA” statement, but we need to bring a civility back to our politics. This won’t be easy. Politics is adversarial by nature, but we can’t let forces like homegrown Nazis or hostile foreign powers like Russia use our disagreements to create divisions that tear us apart.

We need to return to an old way of politics, where a dispute over health care policy is unlikely to involve treason, but helping a foreign power meddle in our elections probably does and should at least be vigorously investigated.

While we contemplate ways to return sanity to our public forum, enjoy a Vieux Carré cocktail. The translation of Vieux Carré is appropriately “Old Square” even though it technically referred to the French Quarter in New Orleans, the birthplace of the cocktail.

Via Brad Thomas Parsons in his book Bitters, the Vieux Carré  is:

1 oz rye

1 oz Cognac

1 oz sweet vermouth

.25 oz Bénédictine

2 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters

2 dashes Angostura bitters (or Dr. Adam’s Orinoco Bitters)

Garnish: lemon peel

Stir over ice and strain into a double old-fashioned glass over a large ice cube.

Cheers!

 

 

The Fix Is In, Can We Fix It?

Ward 8

Gill v. Whitford, the case now before the Supreme Court about whether Wisconsin’s state legislative districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered, cannot alone bring democracy back to the USA, but it can certainly help.

Gerrymandering, the drawing of electoral districts for partisan advantage, has been around a long time (and has benefited both parties). The SCOTUS is looking at whether Wisconsin crossed a line in drawing their lines. Within this question is the fact that in 2012, Republicans received only 48.6% of the vote but took 60 of 99 seats in the State Assembly.

This same “seat bonus” can be seen at the national level. In 2016, Republicans received a plurality of votes cast for Congress nationwide, 49.9%, but they received a greater share, 55.2%, of the seats. Democrats, as a result, won a smaller share of seats than they did votes: 44.8 percent of seats as compared to 47.3 percent of the votes.

Our system of representative democracy in Washington is broken, and it is showing up on issues like gun control. E.J. Dionne Jr., Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann, in their new book One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported, said the United States is now a non-majoritarian democracy.

They note that our democracy is “undermined by a system that vastly overrepresents the interests of rural areas and small states. This leaves the large share of Americans in metropolitan areas with limited influence over national policy.” A key break they point out is with the Senate.

Even if a bipartisan group of Senators from the most populous states heeded the will of popular majorities to enact some elements of gun control (background checks or measures to prevent the mentally ill and those on no-fly lists from buying guns), they will lose if all 50 senators from the 25 smallest states voted for a bill and Vice President Pence cast his lot with them, senators representing just 16% of Americans could overrule those representing 84%.

“And this problem will only deepen. David Birdsell, a Baruch College political scientist, has calculated that by 2040, 70% of Americans will live in 15 states — and be represented by only 30 of the 100 senators,” Dionne noted.

The Senate, however, was never meant to be particularly representative. Fixing it structurally would likely require a Constitutional Convention. But we can still do something to address what Dionne called “the failure of our institutions to account for the movement to metropolitan areas is the culprit. In 1960, 63 percent of Americans lived in metros; by 2010, 84 percent did.”

As I mentioned in “No Taxation Without Representation,” we need to remove the cap on the number of representatives in Congress. Our 435 representatives is based on the population of the U.S. in 1911, and the cap was designed to support Prohibition and serve as a bulwark against all those immigrants from southern Europe.

Adding more members of Congress will make it harder for anyone to control – whether the Koch brothers, George Soros, or Vladimir Putin. It would also change the game of gerrymandering, making it harder to simply lump one party into the same district.

As we watch SCOTUS wrestle with this gerrymandering case, I can’t think of a better cocktail than the Ward Eight. According Gary Regan, in his book The Joy of Mixology, the cocktail was created at the Locke-Ober Café in Boston around 1898 to celebrate the victory of Martin Lomasney to the state legislature. Lomasney was known as the Czar of Ward Eight, who was well known for his methods of getting votes. This victory cocktail was created before the results were in.

The Ward Eight recipe taken from the Savoy Cocktail Book as I used it is:

1.5 oz rye (FEW rye with its Prohibition tie, also it’s really good, seemed appropriate)

.75 oz orange juice

.75 oz lemon juice

3 teaspoons grenadine

Shake over ice, strain into a cocktail glass

Cheers!