'That's politics'

This part of Paul Waldman's column alarms me:

And unlike the zillions of investigations of Democrats that Republicans have mounted whenever they had the opportunity, these wouldn’t be undertaken solely to gain political advantage. But so what if they were? That’s politics. If there’s actual wrongdoing to be exposed, then the investigation is justified.

Investigations shouldn't be undertaken solely for political advantage. Period. There's plenty to investigate about the Trump years. But it's wrong to use the powers of government just to usurp your rivals. It was wrong when Trump tried to pressure Ukraine into investigating Biden. It was wrong when Republicans investigated Benghazi forever. Democrats might help themselves by playing the same game, but it would still be wrong and corrosive to what's left of our idea of "the rule of law."

A note about grace

About a decade ago, when I was undergoing a series of surgeries that saved my life but also left me broken, I was struck that several people reached out to me -- people with whom I thought I had burnt bridges, people I didn't expect or have any right to expect to show me kindness -- to express well-wishes and a speedy recovery for me.

I received a lot of grace, in other words.

Grace isn't something you earn or deserve, as a recipient. But it is wonderful to receive, and it can relieve the burden of hurt feelings and wrongdoings left unrighted.

I mention this because I ran into an old friend on the river trail today -- somebody whose entrance into my life a few decades ago caused a lot of anguish for people I deeply cared about. And I realized that, as the recipient of grace, I also needed to try and give it.

There's a quasi-spiritual dimension to all of this, I realize, that not everybody will buy into. I recognize that my understanding of all this is probably shaped by my Christian upbringing. What's more, I'm not in a position to expect anybody to show grace to others, especially when they've been wronged. All I know is that receiving grace humbled me. And for me, the proper response to that is to pay it forward.

About guns and suicide

 This piece in the NYT is frustrating:

Clark Aposhian, chairman of a lobbying group for gun owners in Utah, where suicides outnumber homicides by a factor of eight, said he did not believe the numbers when he first heard them: “How did we not know?” Mr. Aposhian blamed the media for hiding the truth and fostering an impression that most gun deaths are murders.

There has been lots of coverage of guns-as-a-major-tool-of-suicide, though. (Those links are all examples from within the last year.) The "media" has covered murders quite a bit, yes, but there has been a lot of reporting about the gun-suicide link.

There has been a problem with gun-rights activists playing down those suicide numbers, though, for fear it will increase pressure to restrict gun sales somehow.

In counting down top-three fake news stories about guns from 2017, NRATV host Grant Stinchfield asserted that suicides by firearms shouldn't be counted as "gun deaths," even though they very clearly are deaths by gun. Fancy that.

"The final fake news of the year comes in the form of a statistic, the overused 30,000 gun deaths a year," Stinchfield said. "The left never mentions that two-thirds of those include suicides. Yet it is a number thrown around like confetti. And it’s deceptive to say the least. From The Washington Post to The New York Times, they all use it to wage war on gun ownership."

This just happened last month:

The Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act, now awaiting the president’s signature, still does things the commander’s family says he would be proud of: funding community organizations that work with veterans, and scholarships to train more mental health professionals.

But before it was modified, the bill would also have required health care workers who treat veterans to be trained on how to talk with at-risk patients about the danger of having guns in the house and about how to reduce that risk — a strategy known as lethal-means safety.

The provision was stripped out "because the provision in question touched a third rail in Washington politics: the danger posed by firearms."

The link between the availability of guns and completed suicides isn't a secret, and hasn't been for years. There are a few people, though, who have been invested in playing down that link. 

The problem with the Substack revolution

Matt Yglesias is leaving Vox to start his own Substack blog. There is part of me that really likes this -- my preference would be to get off social media and return to the blog glory days of the late aughts. I've tried doing it a couple of times, but I always fail to stick with it -- partly because people are on social media instead of blogs, and it gets to feeling very lonely around here.

I'll subscribe to Yglesias' free tier. But I won't spend money on him, or Andrew Sullivan, or Matt Taibbi or any of the other, um, independent thinkers who have abandoned big publications in the last year or so to strike out on their own for Substack and its subscription model.

My subscription dollars are finite. So I have to make them work efficiently. Which means they'll go to publications where I can get news and multiplicity of voices. I simply can't afford to support every writer I want to read who decides to strike out on their own. I can't imagine I am the only person in this position.

And this strikes me as a problem, both for the writers and the larger discourse.

A number of observers have already noted that rise of newspaper paywalls, while absolutely necessary to sustaining what's left of the news media, is a problem for democracy. You can get all the misinformation you want for free, but it increasingly takes cash to get reported, reliable news. Somebody's got to pay for the reporters, writers and editors -- but that means that people who can't or won't pay for that news are vulnerable to misinformation.

Similarly, if -- as appears to be the case -- somewhat independent writers increasingly feel uncomfortable or unable to exist within the framework of a larger publication where their coworkers don't all love their views, and they follow Yglesias et al to Substack and its paywall, it might also be the cases their voices go missing from the national conversation. It'll be easy not to pay to hear ideas you don't want to hear, and if you don't pay, it's less likely you'll be forced to encounter them.

I don't love everything about Yglesias, Sullivan or Taibbi, but it is also true that the three have done valuable work over the years. People are complicated! And sometimes it's good to have complicated people complicating the discourse, even if it's also irritating. It worries me that the complications are disappearing behind a paywall.

Book Review: "Divided We Fall" by David French

I like David French.

Oh, I don't much agree with David French. He has a more pro-gun sensibility than I do, and a more restrictive sense of what sexuality and orientation is proper. But he strikes me as being thoughtful and independent -- he doesn't just follow the crowd, even when it's "his" crowd -- and having integrity: He won't call an evil thing good even if his side is for it. That has cost him professional relationships on the right, and his family has endured fierce criticism and ugly threats for it. He remains who he is, a conservative Christian -- but not in the sense the phrase "conservative Christian" has come to mean during the Trump years. In those respects, French is a writer whose way of thinking I personally would do well to emulate.

So I was interested to check out his new book, "Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation," in which he worries that United States is coming apart, driven by increasing polarization in which both sides don't just want to see their side win, but to see the other side broken and dominated -- and, ultimately silenced. Americans have mostly given up on pluralism and classical liberalism, French writes.

Instead, he says, we've mostly retreated into tribalism. "There is no anguished choice between truth and tribe," he writes, critically, about the ideological wars that consume the country's political class. "The truth was never an option. When push comes to shove, they place self-interest and partisan interest over even the most basic of virtues."

French is at his best when diagnosing this problem -- he is unabashedly conservative, but he's lived among liberals, and he can speak their language (I'm guessing not many conservatives use variations on the phrase "marginalized people" as much as he does in this book.) and can fairly, accurately sum up their perspective even when he disagrees with them. (And liberals would benefit from reading this book to get a sympathetic account of some of the things conservatives believe.) I am reminded of Alan Jacobs' book, "How to Think," in which Jacobs challenges readers to do just that. French, meanwhile, describes how Americans are increasingly clustered: Left-leaning people live among left-leaning people and right-leaning people do the same. And polarization has a cascading effect -- being around liberal people tends to make liberals more liberal, and so on.The more we cluster among like-minded folks, the less familiar we are with people who think differently -- and, perhaps more importantly, makes it easier for us to dehumanize them.

"There is a vast difference between disagreeing with your opponent and believing their views are outside the realm of acceptable discourse," he writes. "And if you believe your opponent’s views are outside short trip to conclude that they shouldn’t enjoy the right to speak at all." One poll of college students, he notes, found that "when asked to choose between free speech and inclusivity, the students chose inclusivity by a 53–46 percent margin."

French argues that's a false choice. "I remember once asking the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, an early member of the Congressional Black Caucus, why he believed the movement for African American equality made such rapid legal gains once it was able to fully mobilize. 'Almighty God and the First Amendment,' he responded."

If French is good at diagnosing, though, the worst part -- or, at least, the most-distressing and least-readable -- is the middle portion, in which he writes fictional scenarios envisioning America's slide into disunion. I'll leave that portion to other readers for comment.

The solution to these problems, he argues, is twofold. First, America would do well to commit itself to a "healthy federalism" in which states are allowed to make vastly different policy choices while still adhering to the Bill of Rights. He doesn't think that is likely to happen, though, because both sides of the ideological divide are so committed to ideological domination they won't let the other have a win, even if that win is contained to the state of Tennessee.

There is some truth to that, but it is limited in its explanatory power. "Just stick to the Bill of Rights" seems like a clean instruction to states until you realize that we're still arguing about what those rights encompass. Sometimes it's clear, sometimes it's not. The Second Amendment, for example, is read by folks like French as guaranteeing an individual right to bear arms. Many on the left, though, see that right as being tied to a "well-regulated militia." And let's not even get started on abortion! The problems that divide us don't entirely reside in our collective bad attitudes, but in a real disagreement over what the Constitution even means and requries of us.

French's second solution -- a bit more ephemeral, but also difficult to achieve -- is that we have to aspire again to be able to disagree without hating each other for it. This isn't a call for moderation, he makes clear, but a rededication to the idea that we have to allow other people to be wrong about stuff. 

...mercy and humility, are indispensable to our national life. Mercy is the quality we display when We treat them not with contempt but with compassion. In the aftermath of political victory, we seek reconciliation. We operate with 'malice towards none.'

Humility reminds us that we are not perfect. Indeed, we are often wrong and will ourselves need mercy.

What can I say to that but, 'Amen.'

In the end, French argues that the big conflict in American culture is less between left and right than between decency and indecency, between "those people of all political persuasions who continue to believe in constitutional processes and basic democratic norms, on the one hand, and those people who’ve adopted the anything-goes, end-justifies-the-means tactics of the campus social justice warrior or the “Flight 93” Trump populist, on the other."

Right now, it looks like the latter group is winning. And like French, I'm dubious that will change -- I worry, in fact, we're already too far down the road toward division. That might not be all bad, but it will probably be painful. The last few years have challenged my commitment to seeing many conservatives as essentially good people -- I'm speaking more of my neighbors here in Kansas, not so much Donald Trump and his immediate enablers-- even if I disagree with them on stuff. French's book is a reminder to me to keep trying. 

Bag O' Books: CASTE

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

There's a question that pops up now and again. About whether, if you lived in the era of slavery, or as a German during the Third Reich, if you would be the kind of person to go against the grain-- to stand for human dignity and freedom.

We like to think we'd be the exception.

But most of us would be the rule.

I think I shared this book's overall viewpoint, but I learned things new to me about the history of racism and slavery in America, some ugly and breath-taking details about the immense evils done to black people in this country. You can know it's bad and still get sucker-punched with a fresh realization of just how bad it is. And it is distressing to know how difficult, how dangerous it was for people of goodwill to step outside that system.

I worry there are evils that I am now complicit with that I don't even recognize because I am immersed in them. All I can try to do is evaluate the day-to-day details of my own life and work to act as humanely as possible in every situation -- even when doing so isn't to my advantage.

Wilkerson writes:

"We are, each of us, responsible for every decision we make that hurts or harms another human being. We are responsible for recognizing that what happened in previous generations at the hands of or to people who look like us set the stage for the world we now live in and that what has gone before us grants us advantages or burdens through no effort or fault of our own, gains or deficits that others who do not look like us often do not share."

I must try to do better.

(Via Goodreads)

Bag O' Books: THE ROUND HOUSE

The Round House by Louise Erdrich


This is the first Louise Erdrich novel I've read from beginning to end (I started "The Night Watchman" right when the pandemic started and got distracted) and I am utterly devastated.

This novel plays like an update of "Stand By Me," only set on a reservation. But the indigenous setting aside, I was about the age of the protagonist, Joe, in the precise era of this story, and shared Joe's obsession with "Star Trek: The Next Generation" at the time. I am stunned out how clearly and precisely Erdrich nails the interior life of an early teen nerdy boy -- I feel completely seen.

But I don't just love this novel because it reminds me of, well, me, but for how well it transports me into a real but unfamiliar world, it's details so closely observed, its storytelling so readable. I learned things from "The Round House." But I was captured by it, too.

Utterly absorbing. Heart-breaking. This is my favorite book I've read this year.

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