Glenn Kirschner – Trump is indicted in Georgia for RICO conspiracy for trying to steal the 2020 presidential election
Thom Hartmann – God Wants Immigrants To Suffer & Die Says GOP
Robert Reich – 5 Facts About Trump’s Indictments
[There’s more after the VPN commercial]
Liberal Redneck – Ohio and the Future of Democracy
Wild Child Kitten Grows Up Looking After Rescue Puppies
[I chose this basically for one sentence – near the end – you’ll recognie it – it’s the one that ends “and it’s never failed me yet.”
Beau – Let’s talk about Texas, Paxton, the feds, and assumptions….
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Originalism. It’s become associated with people like Scalia, and Alito, and the Federalist Society – and, accordingly, with racism, misogyny, and plutocratic capitalism. Not that all the Founders thought that way – and even fewer would have thought that way had it occurred to them to examine that thinking. Just as they didn’t live in ancient Athens, or pre-conquest Anglo-Saxon England – or the Aztec Empire – or the Ottoman Empire – you get the point, I’m sure – they also did not live in the 21st century. What might they have done differently if they had, or if they could have foreseeen it? Might we benefit from the thought experiment of trying to design a more perfect union as if we had no constitution in place and no precedents of any kind, just us and our principles (and technology)? That’s the question the author of this article and his colleagues continue to address.
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Re-imagining democracy for the 21st century, possibly without the trappings of the 18th century
Imagine that we’ve all – all of us, all of society – landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We don’t have any legacy systems from the U.S. or any other country. We don’t have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking.
How would we govern ourselves?
It’s unlikely that we would use the systems we have today. The modern representative democracy was the best form of government that mid-18th-century technology could conceive of. The 21st century is a different place scientifically, technically and socially.
For example, the mid-18th-century democracies were designed under the assumption that both travel and communications were hard. Does it still make sense for all of us living in the same place to organize every few years and choose one of us to go to a big room far away and create laws in our name?
Representative districts are organized around geography, because that’s the only way that made sense 200-plus years ago. But we don’t have to do it that way. We can organize representation by age: one representative for the 31-year-olds, another for the 32-year-olds, and so on. We can organize representation randomly: by birthday, perhaps. We can organize any way we want.
U.S. citizens currently elect people for terms ranging from two to six years. Is 10 years better? Is 10 days better? Again, we have more technology and therefor more options.
Indeed, as a technologist who studies complex systems and their security, I believe the very idea of representative government is a hack to get around the technological limitations of the past. Voting at scale is easier now than it was 200 year ago. Certainly we don’t want to all have to vote on every amendment to every bill, but what’s the optimal balance between votes made in our name and ballot measures that we all vote on?
Rethinking the options
In December 2022, I organized a workshop to discuss these and other questions. I brought together 50 people from around the world: political scientists, economists, law professors, AI experts, activists, government officials, historians, science fiction writers and more. We spent two days talking about these ideas. Several themes emerged from the event.
Misinformation and propaganda were themes, of course – and the inability to engage in rational policy discussions when people can’t agree on the facts.
Another theme was the harms of creating a political system whose primary goals are economic. Given the ability to start over, would anyone create a system of government that optimizes the near-term financial interest of the wealthiest few? Or whose laws benefit corporations at the expense of people?
Another theme was capitalism, and how it is or isn’t intertwined with democracy. And while the modern market economy made a lot of sense in the industrial age, it’s starting to fray in the information age. What comes after capitalism, and how does it affect how we govern ourselves?
Many participants examined the effects of technology, especially artificial intelligence. We looked at whether – and when – we might be comfortable ceding power to an AI. Sometimes it’s easy. I’m happy for an AI to figure out the optimal timing of traffic lights to ensure the smoothest flow of cars through the city. When will we be able to say the same thing about setting interest rates? Or designing tax policies?
How would we feel about an AI device in our pocket that voted in our name, thousands of times per day, based on preferences that it inferred from our actions? If an AI system could determine optimal policy solutions that balanced every voter’s preferences, would it still make sense to have representatives? Maybe we should vote directly for ideas and goals instead, and leave the details to the computers. On the other hand, technological solutionism regularly fails.
Choosing representatives
Scale was another theme. The size of modern governments reflects the technology at the time of their founding. European countries and the early American states are a particular size because that’s what was governable in the 18th and 19th centuries. Larger governments – the U.S. as a whole, the European Union – reflect a world in which travel and communications are easier. The problems we have today are primarily either local, at the scale of cities and towns, or global – even if they are currently regulated at state, regional or national levels. This mismatch is especially acute when we try to tackle global problems. In the future, do we really have a need for political units the size of France or Virginia? Or is it a mixture of scales that we really need, one that moves effectively between the local and the global?
As to other forms of democracy, we discussed one from history and another made possible by today’s technology.
Sortition is a system of choosing political officials randomly to deliberate on a particular issue. We use it today when we pick juries, but both the ancient Greeks and some cities in Renaissance Italy used it to select major political officials. Today, several countries – largely in Europe – are using sortition for some policy decisions. We might randomly choose a few hundred people, representative of the population, to spend a few weeks being briefed by experts and debating the problem – and then decide on environmental regulations, or a budget, or pretty much anything.
Liquid democracy does away with elections altogether. Everyone has a vote, and they can keep the power to cast it themselves or assign it to another person as a proxy. There are no set elections; anyone can reassign their proxy at any time. And there’s no reason to make this assignment all or nothing. Perhaps proxies could specialize: one set of people focused on economic issues, another group on health and a third bunch on national defense. Then regular people could assign their votes to whichever of the proxies most closely matched their views on each individual matter – or step forward with their own views and begin collecting proxy support from other people.
This all brings up another question: Who gets to participate? And, more generally, whose interests are taken into account? Early democracies were really nothing of the sort: They limited participation by gender, race and land ownership.
We should debate lowering the voting age, but even without voting we recognize that children too young to vote have rights – and, in some cases, so do other species. Should future generations get a “voice,” whatever that means? What about nonhumans or whole ecosystems?
Should everyone get the same voice? Right now in the U.S., the outsize effect of money in politics gives the wealthy disproportionate influence. Should we encode that explicitly? Maybe younger people should get a more powerful vote than everyone else. Or maybe older people should.
Those questions lead to ones about the limits of democracy. All democracies have boundaries limiting what the majority can decide. We all have rights: the things that cannot be taken away from us. We cannot vote to put someone in jail, for example.
But while we can’t vote a particular publication out of existence, we can to some degree regulate speech. In this hypothetical community, what are our rights as individuals? What are the rights of society that supersede those of individuals?
Reducing the risk of failure
Personally, I was most interested in how these systems fail. As a security technologist, I study how complex systems are subverted – hacked, in my parlance – for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many. Think tax loopholes, or tricks to avoid government regulation. I want any government system to be resilient in the face of that kind of trickery.
Or, to put it another way, I want the interests of each individual to align with the interests of the group at every level. We’ve never had a system of government with that property before – even equal protection guarantees and First Amendment rights exist in a competitive framework that puts individuals’ interests in opposition to one another. But – in the age of such existential risks as climate and biotechnology and maybe AI – aligning interests is more important than ever.
Our workshop didn’t produce any answers; that wasn’t the point. Our current discourse is filled with suggestions on how to patch our political system. People regularly debate changes to the Electoral College, or the process of creating voting districts, or term limits. But those are incremental changes.
It’s hard to find people who are thinking more radically: looking beyond the horizon for what’s possible eventually. And while true innovation in politics is a lot harder than innovation in technology, especially without a violent revolution forcing change, it’s something that we as a species are going to have to get good at – one way or another.
+============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, this is really radical – radical in the best, the original, sense – go all the way to the root because everything stems from it. I invite y’all to try it – empty your minds of present politics – how would you design the system? For instance, I know I would not want one suggestion – AI voting for me on a minute-by-minute basis, based on analysis of my actions. Because, for one thing, my actions are not always my best self. If it were going to vote on my behalf based on my principles, I might consider it. But then I’d hve to figure out how I wanted my principles to be determined by the AI. And then there’s the fact that I change my mind when I learn I am wrong. Not everyone does. And there are a number of radical thoughts here – for example, haveing representation, but having it be on a different basis than geography – for example, by birth year. Maybe you have ideas that are completely different from anything mentioned.
Yesterday, it had snowed and there was plenty of cloud cover, but a little after 2 pm there was already a clear path to the mailbox. BUT it was NOT a dry path. Wet concrete is darker than dry concrete and this was quite dark. So no trip to the mailbox. A couple of packages came, but neither would fit in the mailbox, so they were left on my porch, and I got them in anyway. It had snowed more by then, also. I am sharing a non-weather story from Colorado, because even if I believed in coincidence, this one is way too big to believe in – and apparently it has happened elsewhere, and could happen anywhere. I don’t quite know how to prepare for it, other than to be able to recognize it if it comes.
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Short Takes –
Washington Post (no paywall) – Opinion – Biden’s Kyiv visit shows Putin seriously misjudged his courage
Quote – What many people fail to understand about Biden, the oldest president in our history, is the extent to which he is guided by a sense of mission. He came out of retirement and ran for the White House only because he believed he had the unique ability, and thus the obligation, to save the nation from another four years of Donald Trump. And he has faced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the same burden of duty imposed by history. Click through for full opinion. I don’t often get to see Eugene Robinson, but I always learn something, even if it’s just a new way of saying something I knew, or a position I hadn’t considered looking from. There’s a lot in here – I picked what I quoted because it made me think of “Rule 303,” which is the way Beau expresses duty. “If you have the means at hand, you have the responsibility to act.”
The New Yorker – Russia, One Year After the Invasion of Ukraine
Quote – I had immigrated to the U.S. as a child, in the early eighties. Since the mid-nineties, I’d been coming back to Moscow about once a year. During that time, the city kept getting nicer, and the political situation kept getting worse. It was as if, in Russia, more prosperity meant less freedom…. I asked [my friend Alexander] Baunov how long he thought it would be before he returned to Russia. He said that he didn’t know, but it was possible that he would never return. There was no going back to February 23rd [2022]—not for him, not for Russia, and especially not for the Putin regime. “The country has undergone a moral catastrophe,” Baunov said. “Going back, in the future, would mean living with people who supported this catastrophe; who think they had taken part in a great project; who are proud of their participation in it.” Click through for full article. Every week in Everday Erinyes I quuote Masha Gessen on autocracy and autocrats. Keith, who wrote this, is her brother.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
I’ve been saying that democracy requires trust. That doesn’t just mean that citizens should (and should confidently be able to) trust the government – it also means that we need to ba able to trust each other, and the government needs to trust us. There are governments which can function without all of this mutual trust (Hungary, Turkey), but they canot keep it up forever (Russia), and in any case, a government which can function without trust is not worth having. That’s no way to live. I realize there are people who think those governments are worth having, and I don’t trust them. Do you?
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Healthy democracy requires trust – these 3 things could start to restore voters’ declining faith in US elections
Election workers sort ballots at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center on Nov. 9, 2022, in Phoenix. John Moore/Getty Images
The 2022 U.S. midterm elections ran relatively smoothly and faced few consequential accusations of fraud or mismanagement. Yet many Americans don’t trust this essential element of a democracy.
Study after study – in both the U.S. and around the world – make clear that trust in elections predicts whether a person votes and decides to participate in politics in other ways, like attending peaceful demonstrations or even discussing politics. If people don’t think that elections are fair, then they don’t see the point in taking the steps that maintain democracy.
Healthy democracies are countries where regular elections lead to peaceful transfers of power. Citizens are essential to this process, especially as their votes and peaceful protests hold politicians accountable. Their beliefs about election credibility determine whether they are willing and able to play this role.
Voters cast their ballots at the Madison Senior Center on Nov. 8, 2022, in Madison, Wisconsin. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
Winners trust elections – losers don’t
The consequences of the Capitol riot continue to loom large. The congressional hearings investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection have revealed the extent of then-President Trump’s desire to challenge the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory. In behind-the-scenes footage from his address on Jan. 7, 2021, to the nation, Trump said, “I don’t want to say the election is over.”
Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, were hardly the first time he sowed distrust in American elections. While campaigning in 2016, he warned the election could be “rigged” and called on his supporters to be “Trump Election Observers.” Trump built on the claims of earlier Republican politicians who for years stoked fears about what they called “voter fraud,” even though nonpartisan experts demonstrate such fraud is rare in American elections.
Waning trust in elections not only turns off voters, but it also leads to other problems. Trump supporters deliberately overwhelmed local election officials before the midterms with information requests related to 2020 voting records. Other voters were “angry and confused,” uncertain about how to vote by mail and voting machines.
Polarization widens the gap in trust between election winners and losers because partisans rely on different news sources, and some of them may even start to care more about their party winning than about democracy.
In 2016, for example, our surveys of Americans showed that Hillary Clinton’s supporters went into the presidential election thinking it would be significantly more credible than Trump’s supporters thought it would be. Prior to the election, Clinton’s supporters gave the election an average of 7.5 on a 10-point scale of credibility; Trump supporters gave the election an average of 5.4 on a 10-point scale of credibility.
After the election, Trump supporters were much more confident than Clinton supporters in the credibility of the election. Trump supporters gave an average 8.4 vs. Clinton supporters’ 5.4 on the same 10-point scale.
There was an even larger partisan gap after the 2020 presidential election, with Biden’s supporters expressing twice as much confidence in the election than Trump supporters. And the aftermath of that election is well known – the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Fostering faith
Can Americans’ trust in elections be rebuilt?
Answering that question is complicated by the country’s decentralized system of election management. Researchers have found that trust can be enhanced when whole countries reform their electoral systems to make them fairer and more transparent. Although American elections are democratic, it is difficult to highlight specific qualities – or implement reforms that would make elections even better – because election administration varies from state to state.
Another way that countries help the public understand election quality is through positive reports from trusted election observers, both domestic and international. More than 80% of national elections in the world have international monitors present. But, according to a study by the Carter Center and the National Conference of State Legislatures, 15 American states do not allow nonpartisan election observers to monitor polling stations. These states generally do allow partisan election observers, so that means citizens will be able to rely only on party-aligned reports – which citizens may not trust.
Giving monitors access to more state elections and publicizing their work is a step toward rebuilding Americans’ trust in elections. We know this from national surveys of the American public we conducted around the 2016, 2018 and 2020 elections. We consistently found that telling Americans that monitors reported the elections were fair increased citizens’ trust.
What happens when people don’t trust elections? They can get violent, as they did on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Politicizing election administration
Steps like allowing nonpartisan monitors and publicizing their positive assessments can only go so far toward reversing Americans’ declining trust in elections.
If politicians continue to express doubt about the fairness and legitimacy of American elections, whether warranted or unwarranted, the damaging effect of their messages will be difficult to correct.
And some elected officials are taking steps to actively undermine not just perceptions of election credibility, but election integrity itself. For example, the nonpartisan organizations States United Democracy Center and Protect Democracy in August 2022 identified 24 bills that have been enacted across 17 states that politicize and interfere with professional election administration.
The politicization of election administration threatens to further erode public trust in election integrity. Democracy depends on the public’s active participation in elections and acceptance of their results.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, this article is an excellent start. It addresses trust in the government and its institutions,and that is necessary – but ot suffivient. And, of course, the other two legs of mutual trust are much harder to establish and strengthen. How does one go about buiding, from outside, trust in people who apparently don’t even trust themselves?
Yesterday, I managed to get in a grocery order. It came within the first ten minutes of the two-hour window, and I had it all put away before that window was half over. No substitutions, and only two things missing – one I had ordered as an afterthought just because the website had it (they so often don’t), and the other was one flavor of something I had ordered nine flavors of. Eight out of nine is even better than two out of three. So that’s all good. I think I’ll throw in Robert Reich’s latest caption contest above the TC cartoon, because the winner, Harry Sanderford, must have worked so hard to get it just right.
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The New Yorker – Donald Trump, January 6th, and the Elusive Search for Accountability
Quote – So did any of the committee’s work matter? When the January 6th hearings began, on June 9th, Trump’s average approval rating in the polls was 41.9 per cent, and his average disapproval rating was 53.5 per cent, according to FiveThirtyEight. As the hearings ended, Trump’s average approval rating stood at 40.4 per cent. All that damning evidence, and the polls were basically unchanged. The straight line in the former President’s approval rating is the literal representation of the crisis in American democracy. There is an essentially immovable forty per cent of the country whose loyalty to Donald Trump cannot be shaken by anything. Click through for article. Not for the Committee, but for our Deomcratic Republic – vote like your life depends on it.
ProPublica – A User’s Guide to Democracy
Quote – Sign up for a series of personalized emails in which our journalists will help you answer questions like:
What are my current representatives doing about the issues I care about?
Who’s running for office in my district?
How can I hold my representatives accountable?
How does Congress even work, exactly?
How can I safely vote during this pandemic? Click through for details. This is less an article than a signup for a newsletter. And you likely do not need it. But you may know someone who does. I was unable to put in my address (I tried two browsers), but of course, I know my district.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
I assume it’s no news to anyone here that “Conservative” principles and government, far from being conservative, are reactionary and will make our country a worse – and a poorer – place to live. MAGA should stand for “Make America Garbage Again.” Well, we now have hard statistics and hard math to prove that – to prove, not just that it will happen, but that it is already happening (has already happened.)
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US is becoming a ‘developing country’ on global rankings that measure democracy, inequality
People wait in line for a free morning meal in Los Angeles in April 2020. High and rising inequality is one reason the U.S. ranks badly on some international measures of development. Frederic J. Brown/ AFP via Getty Images
The United States may regard itself as a “leader of the free world,” but an index of development released in July 2022 places the country much farther down the list.
In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development dropped the U.S. to 41st worldwide, down from its previous ranking of 32nd. Under this methodology – an expansive model of 17 categories, or “goals,” many of them focused on the environment and equity – the U.S. ranks between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are widely regarded as developing countries.
As a political historian who studies U.S. institutional development, I recognize these dismal ratings as the inevitable result of two problems. Racism has cheated many Americans out of the health care, education, economic security and environment they deserve. At the same time, as threats to democracy become more serious, a devotion to “American exceptionalism” keeps the country from candid appraisals and course corrections.
‘The other America’
The Office of Sustainable Development’s rankings differ from more traditional development measures in that they are more focused on the experiences of ordinary people, including their ability to enjoy clean air and water, than the creation of wealth.
So while the gigantic size of the American economy counts in its scoring, so too does unequal access to the wealth it produces. When judged by accepted measures like the Gini coefficient, income inequality in the U.S. has risen markedly over the past 30 years. By the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s measurement, the U.S. has the biggest wealth gap among G-7 nations.
These results reflect structural disparities in the United States, which are most pronounced for African Americans. Such differences have persisted well beyond the demise of chattel slavery and the repeal of Jim Crow laws.
Scholar W.E.B. Du Bois first exposed this kind of structural inequality in his 1899 analysis of Black life in the urban north, “The Philadelphia Negro.” Though he noted distinctions of affluence and status within Black society, Du Bois found the lives of African Americans to be a world apart from white residents: a “city within a city.” Du Bois traced the high rates of poverty, crime and illiteracy prevalent in Philadelphia’s Black community to discrimination, divestment and residential segregation – not to Black people’s degree of ambition or talent.
More than a half-century later, with characteristic eloquence, Martin Luther King Jr. similarly decried the persistence of the “other America,” one where “the buoyancy of hope” was transformed into “the fatigue of despair.”
To illustrate his point, King referred to many of the same factors studied by Du Bois: the condition of housing and household wealth, education, social mobility and literacy rates, health outcomes and employment. On all of these metrics, Black Americans fared worse than whites. But as King noted, “Many people of various backgrounds live in this other America.”
The benchmarks of development invoked by these men also featured prominently in the 1962 book “The Other America,” by political scientist Michael Harrington, founder of a group that eventually became the Democratic Socialists of America. Harrington’s work so unsettled President John F. Kennedy that it reportedly galvanized him into formulating a “war on poverty.”
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, waged this metaphorical war. But poverty bound to discrete places. Rural areas and segregated neighborhoods stayed poor well beyond mid-20th-century federal efforts.
Camp Laykay Nou, a homeless encampment in Philadelphia. High and rising inequality is one reason the US rates badly on some international development rankings. Cory Clark/NurPhoto via Getty Images
In large part that is because federal efforts during that critical time accommodated rather than confronted the forces of racism, according to my research.
Across a number of policy domains, the sustained efforts of segregationist Democrats in Congress resulted in an incomplete and patchwork system of social policy. Democrats from the South cooperated with Republicans to doom to failure efforts to achieve universalhealth care or unionized workforces. Rejecting proposals for strong federal intervention, they left a checkered legacy of local funding for education and public health.
Today, many years later, the effects of a welfare state tailored to racism is evident — though perhaps less visibly so — in the inadequate health policies driving a shocking decline in average American life expectancy.
Declining democracy
There are other ways to measure a country’s level of development, and on some of them the U.S. fares better.
The U.S. currently ranks 21st on the United Nations Development Program’s index, which measures fewer factors than the sustainable development index. Good results in average income per person – $64,765 – and an average 13.7 years of schooling situate the United States squarely in the developed world.
Its ranking suffers, however, on appraisals that place greater weight on political systems.
The Economist’s democracy index now groups the U.S. among “flawed democracies,” with an overall score that ranks between Estonia and Chile. It falls short of being a top-rated “full democracy” in large part because of a fractured political culture. This growing divide is most apparent in the divergent paths between “red” and “blue” states.
Although the analysts from The Economist applaud the peaceful transfer of power in the face of an insurrection intended to disrupt it, their report laments that, according to a January 2022 poll, “only 55% of Americans believe that Mr. Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”
Election denialism carries with it the threat that election officials in Republican-controlled jurisdictions will reject or alter vote tallies that do not favor the Republican Party in upcoming elections, further jeopardizing the score of the U.S. on the democracy index.
Red and blue America also differ on access to modern reproductive care for women. This hurts the U.S. gender equality rating, one aspect of the United Nations’ sustainable development index.
I believe that, when paired with structural inequalities and fractured social policy, the dwindling Republican commitment to democracy lends weight to the classification of the U.S. as a developing country.
American exceptionalism
To address the poor showing of the United States on a variety of global surveys, one must also contend with the idea of American exceptionalism, a belief in American superiority over the rest of the world.
Both political parties have long promoted this belief, at home and abroad, but “exceptionalism” receives a more formal treatment from Republicans. It was the first line of the Republican Party’s national platform of 2016 and 2020 (“we believe in American exceptionalism”). And it served as the organizing principle behind Donald Trump’s vow to restore “patriotic education” to America’s schools.
In Florida, after lobbying by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state board of education in July 2022 approved standards rooted in American exceptionalism while barring instruction in critical race theory, an academic framework teaching the kind of structural racism Du Bois exposed long ago.
With a tendency to proclaim excellence rather than pursue it, the peddling of American exceptionalism encourages Americans to maintain a robust sense of national achievement – despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, We are going to need all the help we can get to break enough of the American people out of their comfortable denial of reality and into a place where they are willing to work – and fight (hopefully not with weapons, but even that if necessary), not only to preserve our democracy, but to raise it to the status of a true and inclusive democracy. Because, if that doesn’t happen, we will all lose everything.
Yesterday, I added a video to the video thread after it had already published, because the breaking news in it appeared to me to be significant at lease. It was regarding an unplanned trip to DC made by Trump, in his jet, oddly dressed, with no publicity. The trip was late Sunday afternoon, and as of late Monday afternoon, there was still no word about it from the Trump** camp. The way Trump** broadcasts all of his movements down to the tiniest detail, the absence of publicity alone suggests that, whatever the trip was for, it must have been for some reason that was bad news for Trump**. And bad news for him is good news for us. That and one other thing inspired me so that I finished the September cartoons. (The other thing that cheered me was what Nameless posted about.)
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Short Takes –
Salon – Biden’s speech worked: Nearly 6 in 10 Americans agree MAGA is a threat to democracy
Quote – President Joe Biden gave a speech… [which] led to a great deal of media worrying about whether Biden’s speech was “divisive” or could backfire by recasting the fight to save democracy in “partisan” terms. There was reason to be worried. Americans tend to distrust politicians, viewing their public proclamations as political noise better dismissed than taken seriously. But in this case, it appears Biden’s choice to give the speech worked to focus voter attention on the very real threat to democracy posed by Trump and the MAGA movement. Click through – Of course he wasn’t going to reach active MAGA pushers, and eventually we shall have to deal with them. For now, the important thing is to get ALL non-MAGAs aware of the clear and present danger it reppresents.
CPR News – 4 things we learned from the first-ever release of data that shows how Colorado DAs prosecute cases
Quote – Eight district attorneys across the state — some representing rural areas, some from suburban districts and two representing Denver and Aurora — voluntarily participated in a year-long data project to shed some light on the secrecy behind prosecutions across the state in hopes of seeing how their offices could improve how they operate. The data, linked on eight different prosecutor websites, reveals some differences in how prosecutors treat white defendants and defendants of color, including Black and Hispanic. Click through for full story. To me,though the results are predictiable (and not great), the most hopeful thing about this story is that the participants instigated it themselves because that wanted to/thought they should be more transparent. That is hopeful.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” This quote is credibly attributed to Mark Twain (since he said it, I’m sure he would not object to me doubting the attribution a little. So much is attributed to so few apeakers.) This is at least as true in politics as it is in any other endeavor. All one needs to do is look at any habitual Fox viewer to recognize that. And I’m sure no one will be surprised to learn that Dunning-Kruger also applies. But what people think and do in their life in general usually affects no one but themselves, and possibly a few people close to them whether personally or professionally. What people do in the voting booth affscts everyone else in the nation, as well as many all over the world.
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Americans think they know a lot about politics – and it’s bad for democracy that they’re so often wrong in their confidence
As statewide primaries continue through the summer, many Americans are beginning to think about which candidates they will support in the 2022 general election.
Voters must navigate angry, emotion-laden conversations about politics when trying to sort out whom to vote for. Americans are more likely than ever to view politics in moral terms, meaning their political conversations sometimes feel like epic battles between good and evil.
But political conversations are also shaped by, obviously, what Americans know – and, less obviously, what they think they know – about politics.
In recent research, I studied how Americans’ perceptions of their own political knowledge shape their political attitudes. My results show that many Americans think they know much more about politics than they really do.
Voters arrive to cast their primary ballots at a polling place on Aug. 9, 2022, in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Knowledge deficit, confidence surplus
Over the past five years, I have studied the phenomenon of what I call “political overconfidence.” My work, in tandem with other researchers’ studies, reveals the ways it thwarts democratic politics.
Political overconfidence can make people more defensive of factually wrong beliefs about politics. It also causes Americans to underestimate the political skill of their peers. And those who believe themselves to be political experts often dismiss the guidance of real experts.
Political overconfidence also interacts with political partisanship, making partisans less willing to listen to peers across the aisle.
The result is a breakdown in the ability to learn from one another about political issues and events.
A ‘reality check’ experiment
In my most recent study on the subject, I tried to find out what would happen when politically overconfident people found out they were mistaken about political facts.
To do this, I recruited a sample of Americans to participate in a survey experiment via the Lucid recruitment platform. In the experiment, some respondents were shown a series of statements that taught them to avoid common political falsehoods. For instance, one statement explained that while many people believe that Social Security will soon run out of money, the reality is less dire than it seems.
My hypothesis was that most people would learn from the statements, and become more wary of repeating common political falsehoods. However, as I have found in my previous studies, a problem quickly emerged.
The problem
First, I asked respondents a series of basic questions about American politics. This quiz included topics like which party controls the House of Representatives – the Democrats – and who the current Secretary of Energy is – Jennifer Granholm. Then, I asked them how well they thought they did on the quiz.
Many respondents who believed they were top performers were actually among those who scored the worst. Much akin to the results of a famous study by Dunning and Kruger, the poorest performers did not generally realize that they lagged behind their peers.
Of the 1,209 people who participated, around 70% were overconfident about their knowledge of politics. But this basic pattern was not the most worrying part of the results.
The overconfident respondents failed to change their attitudes in response to my warnings about political falsehoods. My investigation showed that they did read the statements, and could report details about what they said. But their attitudes toward falsehoods remained inflexible, likely because they – wrongly – considered themselves political experts.
But if I could make overconfident respondents more humble, would they actually take my warnings about political falsehoods to heart?
Poor self-assessment
My experiment sought to examine what happens when overconfident people are told their political knowledge is lacking. To do this, I randomly assigned respondents to receive one of three experimental treatments after taking the political knowledge quiz. These were as follows:
Respondents received statements teaching them to avoid political falsehoods.
Respondents did not receive the statements.
Respondents received both the statements and a “reality check” treatment. The reality check showed how respondents fared on the political quiz they took at the beginning of the survey. Along with their raw score, the report showed how respondents ranked among 1,000 of their peers.
For example, respondents who thought they had aced the quiz might have learned that they got one out of five questions right, and that they scored worse than 82% of their peers. For many overconfident respondents, this “reality check” treatment brought them down to earth. They reported much less overconfidence on average when I followed up with them.
Finally, I asked all the respondents in the study to report their levels of skepticism toward five statements. These statements are all common political falsehoods. One statement, for example, asserted that violent crime had risen over the prior decade – it hadn’t. Another claimed the U.S. spent 18% of the federal budget on foreign aid – the real number was less than 1%.
I expected most respondents who had received my cautionary statements to become more skeptical of these misinformed statements. On average, they did. But did overconfident respondents learn this lesson too?
Those who believe themselves to be political experts often dismiss the guidance of real experts. IvelinRadkov/iStock/Getty Images
Reality check: Mission accomplished
The results of the study showed that overconfident respondents began to take political falsehoods seriously only if they had experienced my “reality check” treatment first.
While overconfident respondents in other conditions showed no reaction, the humbling nature of the “reality check,” when they realized how wrong they had been, led overconfident participants in that condition to revise their beliefs. They increased their skepticism of political falsehoods by a statistically significant margin.
Overall, this “reality check” experiment was a success. But it reveals that outside of the experiment, political overconfidence stands in the way of many Americans’ ability to accurately perceive political reality.
The problem of political overconfidence
What, if anything, can be done about the widespread phenomenon of political overconfidence?
While my research cannot determine whether political overconfidence is increasing over time, it makes intuitive sense that this problem would be growing in importance in an era of online political discourse. In the online realm, it is often difficult to appraise the credibility of anonymous users. This means that false claims are easily spread by uninformed people who merely sound confident.
To combat this problem, social media companies and opinion leaders could seek ways to promote discourse that emphasizes humility and self-correction. Because confident, mistaken self-expression can easily drown out more credible voices in the online realm, social media apps could consider promoting humility by reminding posters to reconsider the “stance,” or assertiveness, of their posts.
While this may seem far-fetched, recent developments show that small nudges can lead to powerful shifts in social media users’ online behavior.
For example, Twitter’s recent inclusion of a pop-up message that asks would-be posters of news articles to “read before tweeting” caused users to rethink their willingness to share potentially misleading content.
A gentle reminder to avoid posting bold claims without evidence is just one possible way that social media companies could encourage good online behavior. With another election season soon upon us, such a corrective is urgently needed.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, the real estate business is supposed to come down to three things – location, location, and location. I’m tempted to say that fixing this issue comes down to civics, civics, and civics – but actually it would probably be more accurate to cite general education, critical thinking, and fact checking. Everything that the authoritarian right wing does not want.
In a sense, it is true that voting is not the only way, and in some ways not even the best way, to bring about progress. Before progress can happen, public opinion must be changed. But we are at a time in the history of our nation when pubic opinion is mostly with us, but the elected officials are not. In that impasse, only voting can help. We must, in spite of gerrymanding and other legal or even constitutional ways of rigging, vote people in who actually represent majority views, and vote people out who oppose them. Then perhaps we can make some actual progress.
