American Fallacies

 

The Republican Party is being taken over by an extremist fringe.

Among Republicans, the Party’s extremist fringe is not represented by Matt Gaetz, Paul Goslar, or Marjorie Taylor Greene. They are Republican heroes. The Republican fringe is Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the only Republicans willing to investigate the January 6 insurrection. The Republican fringe is the minority of 64 Representatives who voted, just after that mob had been dispersed, to accept the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania, as against the 138 who objected to accepting the November results. Only 2 of the Republican Representatives who had announced that they would object changed their minds after the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.

 

Conservatives are concerned about a liberal “war on Christmas”.

Traditional American Christmas is well represented by two postwar Hollywood movies, “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) and “Miracle on 34^th Street” (1947). These iconic films portray a Christmas of secular generosity, love of neighbors, and belief in the goodness of humanity, redeeming harsh capitalism through love and kindness. Today’s American conservatives reject these virtues as typical liberal weaknesses, which they label socialism. Although they complain about a war on Christmas, the phrase has no meaning for them, because, as the Christmas cards of Reps. Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert demonstrate, Christmas is politics and politics is war.

 

Race is just one of the issues that motivate conservative unhappiness with American life.

Racial fear is the overriding source of conservative hatred for liberals. Long before Barack Obama embodied the danger of Black power, conservatives chafed at the political correction of racist language. The fight against traditional American white supremacy always required government intervention. When presidential candidate Ronald Reagan said, “I believe in states’ rights,” at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980, and asserted that government was the problem, not the solution, he offered the latent supremacist beliefs of white Americans, especially in southern and rural communities, a political home, where their traditional discriminatory prejudices would be respected and encouraged. Trump rose to political prominence because white racists thrilled at his dishonest attacks on Obama. Now nearly half of Republican voters say that Trump was an even greater President than Reagan. Trump’s open racism is one of his greatest attractions.

 

There is a partisan battle about how to tell American history.

Historians of the American past have never offered a more accurate and truthful historical narrative than they do now. Conservatives do not want to debate history – they want to substitute the discredited myths that made white people feel good for real history. Concern for how white children might feel about themselves, their families, and America is behind the racial focus on critical race theory and the 1619 project. In his final year in office, Trump charged that American education is “left-wing indoctrination” which led to the widespread urban protests against racism. His 1776 Commission was designed to promote teaching about “miracle of American history”, not the history itself. The Commission is dead, but Republican politicians across America are legislating patriotic stories into public school curricula.

 

America is the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Americans of color were never free and the Americans who violently, often murderously persecuted them were never brave. Now that certain elements of American government are working to realize that anthemic promise, millions of Americans are arming themselves against their elected government. Freedom for many, maybe most white Americans has always meant freedom to dominate and exploit other Americans, and to use force to destroy the brave Americans who opposed them. Conservatives are amassing an unprecedented arsenal to assure the survival of traditional white power.

 

As Joe Biden said in his inaugural address, “We have never, ever failed in America when we have acted together.”

The fallacy there is not in the literal meaning of those words, but in what Biden claimed to be success. Americans acted together to successfully preserve slavery in 1789. Americans acted together after the Civil War to successfully preserve racial disenfranchisement and segregation. Americans acted together to successfully preserve racial discrimination for a half-century after the Civil Rights movement. Now that such success finally appears to be threatened, conservative Americans once again are acting together to preserve white power.

 

Thus far, Americans have failed miserably at the ultimate task of surviving today’s two greatest natural disasters, climate change and COVID. We show no sign of acting together in either case. COVID has both revealed the depth of our national delusions and exacerbated them. The fallacies of American political thinking are killing Americans now and threatening our futures.

 

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

13 January 2022

Thou Shalt Not Kill

The Republican Party promotes itself as “pro-life” and the Party of God. But contemporary Republicans are the Party of Death.

Every year about 15,000 Americans die from gun murders. The multiplication of mass murders and school shootings in recent years has had no impact on Republican refusal to consider restrictions on guns, even though a majority of Americans support stricter gun control laws. Republican legislators are now removing the last vestiges of regulation on the public brandishing of guns: in Texas, adults can carry a handgun without a license, training or background check. The most extreme Republicans deride survivors of mass shootings as “actors” and reporting of those massacres as “false flag operations”, while the rest of the Party tolerates them.

The National Academy of Sciences estimated in 2019 that each year over 100,000 Americans die prematurely from air pollution that Republicans refuse to prevent or even mitigate. The Party allowed the Trump administration to reduce regulation of lead in household water supplies, even though Republican politicians in Michigan were criminally charged, some for involuntary manslaughter, for refusing to deal with the lead crisis in Flint.

As deaths caused by hurricanes, heat waves, and flooding pile up across America, Republican continue their denial of climate science. Climate change causes about 1000 deaths annually from heat. Hurricane Ida killed over 40 people in the Northeast through flooding early in September, while Tennessee suffered more flooding deaths in 2021 than ever before.

Estimates of the number of Americans who died annually because of inadequate health insurance before Obamacare went into effect range from 25,000 to 45,000. Republican policy since 2010 has paired unrelenting efforts to get rid of the ACA and refusal to create anything in its place. Party policy under Paul Ryan’s leadership tried unsuccessfully for years to cut Medicare, while Republicans at the state level consistently refuse to expand Medicaid.

Death from environmental pollution, climate disasters and inadequate health insurance is concentrated among minorities and the poor, Americans whose welfare the Republican Party has disdained for decades. Their assumption that these less deserving Americans are Democratic voters is now being demonstrated again by nationwide Republican efforts to limit their votes.

Unlike the more murderous parties of death in modern history, such as the Committee of Union and Progress in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and the Argentine junta and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s, Republicans could rely on the defense that they didn’t kill anyone. Many people may have died, but ideology is more important.

COVID changed everything, raising the stakes of both conventional daily behavior and national policy. Unified Republican adherence to lies about science, opposition to the regulation of destructive business practices, and disdain for Americans who aren’t rich continued right into the onset of pandemic. The early news focused on the disproportionate deaths of urban minorities.

But this year, Republican politicians ventured into new, possibly unprecedented territory. Every day, more than one thousand unvaccinated conservative Americans die of COVID, while the Republican Party insists ever more strongly on anti-vaccination, anti-mask, and anti-life policies which are killing off their own voters.

The blinkered view of life and death common among so-called “pro-lifers” was illustrated in the September 9 NYT op-ed by Prof. Karen Swallow Prior, which argued for the virtues of Texas’ new anti-abortion law. She wrote: “The highest purpose of human law is the protection of human life, from its beginning to its natural end.... A law preserving the life of a human being at any stage can be considered ‘extreme’ only within a distorted social context.” In the distorted politics of Republican “pro-lifers”, the beginning counts much more than the end.

Led by the most extreme death-dealers, Republican politicians, with few exceptions, have transformed themselves into a unique party of death. The vaccinated Republican elite hides behind a perverted rephrasing of Patrick Henry’s courageous motto: “In the name of liberty, we’ll give you death.”

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Fear of the Shot

 

Getting a COVID-vaccine is now totally politicized. The anti-vaxxers, from rural towns to the halls of Congress, gleefully claim that their opposition to vaccination is a principled political position. I think it’s about fear. They are afraid of the shot.

There are good reasons to be afraid. The shot only hurts for seconds, but some people are deeply afraid of all shots. The prospect of getting a needle in the arm genuinely alarms about 1 out of every 20 adults, whose fears have been labeled “blood-injection-injury phobia”. It doesn’t help that the real experience of getting an injection results in no injury, just a pin-prick.

Some people are specifically afraid of the COVID-vaccine. While American medicine has done wonders for most of the population, with new wonders occurring every year, the medical establishment has been especially unkind, even deadly, to some specific groups of people. Black Americans have good reason to distrust the care they might get from the overwhelmingly white and historically racist medical profession, and that mistrust was documented long before anyone knew about COVID. In surveys, the proportion of Black Americans who said they “would definitely or probably get a coronavirus vaccine if it were available” has hovered below half. That legacy of systemic racism is so strong that it can overcome the knowledge that the COVID pandemic has had twice the deadly impact on African Americans as on whites.

People I know have inquired fearfully about side effects, which nearly everyone experiences. Feeling awful when you still have to perform, losing a day of work or child care that you can’t afford, is an obstacle. Assurances that getting the disease is much worse than any side effects don’t help much to allay this fear.

But the loud voices against the vaccine don’t proclaim their own fears. They say that the rest of us shouldn’t be persuaded to get the vaccine, that we are dupes to be vaccinated, that they are righteous patriots to resist the idea of a vaccination program. They obviously have much greater fears.

The anti-vaxxers say that the whole vaccination discussion is political, because for them the decision can have life-altering political consequences. Accepting the vaccine means rejecting their whole political orientation about fake science and fake news and Trump love. It means realizing that the voices they have trusted, Republican leaders and conservative media heroes, have been lying about the disease since the beginning. Maybe they have been lying about other things, too. Maybe about everything.

That is something to be afraid of.

The political fears of Republicans are being tested in real time as the Delta variant causes rising death rates in red states, and by the confusing argument among prominent Republicans. Mitch McConnell said,“These shots need to get in everybody’s arm as rapidly as possible. I want to encourage everybody to do that and to ignore all of these other voices that are giving demonstrably bad advice.” That bad advice comes from other Republicans, who invite anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists to testify in state houses, or try to ban the military from requiring vaccinations, as part of their new blend of anti-government propaganda and Trump cult membership.

Most Republicans who refuse to get vaccinated even think Trump was lying when he revealed that he and Melania were vaccinated. In this case, cognitive dissonance can be deadly.

Conservative politics revolves around promoting fear of imaginary enemies, who are often real people. They have been remarkably successful in driving the rational faculties of their white Christian supporters into submission to fears of mythical beasts. Q is the letter of fear, whether it is carried like the Olympic torch or hidden behind a veil of gibberish.

Fearful people commit dangerous acts against imagined enemies. The rest of us will play the role of those enemies in the minds of red America for some time.

Steve Hochstadt

Boston, MA

July 25, 2021

The End

 Dear Friends and Relatives,

I’m done. For now anyway.

As much as I regret this, I realize that without making any decision, I have been deciding by omission. Here it is Tuesday, and I haven’t done any work on an essay for today and don’t see how I could complete one.

I had to stop temporarily in order to become Nurse Steve. We are going to move to Boston some time this year and the job of preparing our house for sale is also taking time and focus.

I think the end of Trump has also changed my drive to write in ways that I don’t fully understand. There is still much to say, but I don’t feel the strong motivation to say anything lately about politics. I find myself skimming the news without much interest.

I think that my focus has narrowed lately to our own lives. When I retired, I decided that stressing myself with tasks and deadlines was over, but of course that was illusion. Nevertheless, I am trying to maintain an equilibrium by keeping control over the number of things I am doing at once, which leads me to recognize that writing my weekly essays is too much now.

I am not complaining, because I have nothing to complain about. I am just trying to explain to loyal readers why nothing is coming today or in the near future. In some sense, I am taking back my life.

I have been touched so many times by your interest in my thoughts. You have given me confidence and motivation, the necessities for any writer. I am grateful.

I still have some copies of my book begging for new homes.

Stopping for now means that I can decide later what I want to do without the coercion of momentum, the inner demand to keep going. Perhaps I will find a new format, a different set of subjects, an altered timing. Or maybe I’ll just play with my granddaughters.

Best wishes,
Steve