Sometimes you can legislate tolerance with broad popular support. Any time you try to push it beyond that, people get resentful. Bear that in mind as you plan your resistance to the tsunami of bad stuff that's about to happen. You're certainly not going to need to think about policy, but when you do, hopefully you will have learned your lesson.
I'm not holding my breath.
The Biden Administration plans to strengthen regulations controlling methane emissions from oil and gas wells, pipelines, and refinery infrastructure. This is a good action. It reduces a lot of greenhouse gas emissions very cheaply and quickly. The costs to the oil and gas industry--and therefore to the consumer--are tiny.
It fits in well with what I think should be the global strategy for managing climate change as well as we can, as cheaply as we can. If climate change can't be managed cheaply, then it won't be managed. We'll regret that, but there's simply no way to force half the planet to forgo the benefits of an industrial economy to mitigate something that hasn't really happened yet. Humans are vulnerable to Boiling Frog Syndrome.
If you go back far enough in this blog, you'll probably find me expressing skepticism that climate change is a problem that needed to be addressed immediately. I'm now convinced. There's enough data that the medium-to-worst-case predictions from the IPCC are correct. We need to act.
The question is how to act. I believe that there are four overlapping phases of climate action:
Gasify. The lowest-hanging fruit for reducing GHG is to replace coal with gas. Coal is still the largest worldwide source of energy production, and it's by far the most greenhouse gas-intensive source of energy. Getting rid of it is essential.
Retrofitting coal-fired electricity generation with gas is incredibly cheap, and gas emits less than half the CO2 of coal. Replacing all coal-fired generation with gas would reduce US emissions by half a billion metric tonnes of CO2. I don't know what the worldwide number for coal emissions is, but I'd be surprised if replacing coal with gas didn't reduce world GHG emissions by at least 20%.
But this only helps if the natural gas infrastructure doesn't leak. If methane leaks into the atmosphere, it has 80x the warming potential of CO2. So a thorough inventory of leaking infrastructure and regulations requiring the leaks to be fixed are essential.
This isn't hard. Big methane leaks can be detected by satellite. Smaller leaks require some labor and detector infrastructure, but a small amount of labor yields a large amount of detection. Then you have to fix the leaks, but that's mostly to the producer or distributor's advantage. It's as close to a policy no-brainer as we'll get.
The time horizon on gasification could be as short as a decade. That would require beating up on the coal industry pretty aggressively, but even modest incentives for gas conversion should crater demand for coal even more than has already happened.
Outside the US, this will be harder, because the regulatory landscape is rockier, and the gas distribution infrastructure is less mature. It'll be a tough sell to convince developing countries to install pipelines that should only be used for 10-20 years, then eliminated. That seems like an area where the developing world can provide some policy help. But first, the developing world need to understand that short-term reliance on gas does the whole world a giant favor. I can't say that I'm sanguine for this happening, but it'll give us a decent amount of breathing room if it does.
Decarbonize. Ten years ago, I would've told you that nuclear power was going to be cheaper than renewables. For existing nukes, that is still overwhelmingly true, and we should be doing everything we can to extend licenses on existing plants. Only an idiot would shut one down if it can still operate safely. But, sadly, the cost of new nuclear (greater than $5500/kW in overnight costs in the US), and the management of that construction, is so bad that the carrying costs during construction make them uneconomical.
The knock against renewables is that they're intermittent, and the cost of storing their overproduction to even out the periods of underproduction makes the levelized cost of a mostly-renewable grid higher than a fossil grid, and quite a bit higher than a gas-dominant grid.
That's still true, but it probably won't be in five years. The levelized cost of storage is plummeting, not only because battery costs are plummeting, but because the market is starting to adjust to the idea of a grid with massive overproduction at some times of the day. This makes the business case for things like green hydrogen (and green methane--more on this in a moment) start to look rosy.
Then the big barrier to the roll-out of renewables will be permitting costs, NIMBY and environmental delays, and grid upgrades (which come with their own permitting costs and NIMBY/environmental delays.)
Decarbonization requires more than just producing a decarbonized grid. There are still industrial applications that require massive amounts of process heat (e.g. metals production, concrete, ceramics), and of course there's transportation, where electric vehicles are dropping in cost but still nowhere near competitive with internal combustion. And there's space heating.
There's a massive infrastructure of piping for carrying gasoline, fuel oil, aviation fuels, and, most importantly, natural gas. Replacing that infrastructure will take decades, and doing it much quicker will be unaffordable (cf. Boiling Frog Syndrome, above).
But we can stop pulling new fossil fuels out of the ground, and replace them with green synfuels.
You can make hydrogen by electrolyzing water. It's not particularly efficient, but if you have terawatts of excess solar capacity that costs almost nothing, you don't particularly care how efficient it is. And once you have the hydrogen, you can use it as a primary fuel, for turning turbines to make electricity when renewables aren't available, or as a feedstock to make carbon-based fuels. Pull CO2 from the atmosphere, run it and hydrogen over a catalyst, and you get green methane (no fossil fuels involved) through the Sabatier process, which has been in use since the late nineteenth century. And with methane, you can use additional incredibly cheap energy to convert it to alkanes for transportation fuels and petrochemicals.
Note that this doesn't reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because you're going to burn the green methane to make things go. But it doesn't increase it either. It's carbon-neutral.
This is all a bigger deal than gasification, but it's the road to zero net carbon emissions. It'll take 20-40 years to do this. There are substantial policy problems, with two standing out:
First, the fossil fuel industry will hate this, and will resist it with their substantial political clout. This will be further complicated by the fact that we need their cooperation to get the gasification effort to work. That's not straightforward, but it does have a political divide-and-conquer play built in: get the oil and gas people to gang up on the coal people and wipe them out. But that devil's bargain needs to be made explicit in policy: Oil and gas gets a brief reprieve to beat up on coal, but they're expected to manage their portfolio of assets so they're in the synfuel business in 20-40 years, and their assets in the ground stay there, pretty much forever.
Second, we simply can't afford the NIMBYism any longer. The people who don't want giant solar and wind farms down the street are going to have to get over themselves. Some people are going to have to live with high-voltage transmission lines on or near their property. And all the environmental crap and litigiousness associated with building ridiculously cheap intermittent capacity--the kind that can be used by the synfuel business, as well as any other set of applications that require lots of energy but don't particularly care when it arrives--needs to be eliminated. This requires legislative courage and leadership.
No problem there, eh?
If all of this goes well, humanity will have performed one of the greatest feats in history: for the first time since the industrial revolution, the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere will return to pre-industrial levels.
But the ones already there will remain. And that'll eventually destroy civilization. I believe that we're already past the point of no return. It may take 50-100 years for things to unravel, but they will eventually. 2ºC warming, which is likely, even with fairly aggressive action, is too much stress for a civilization as complex as ours to withstand. Do you think our politics are messed up now? Just wait until we have another ¾ of a ºC baked into the system and see where we are. There are going to be a lot more have-nots than haves, and they're not going to sit by idly and watch the lives they know disappear.
Mitigate. The Paris agreement and the IPCC are all trying to get to carbon neutrality by 2040. They'll fail. And even if they could do so, the carbon in the atmosphere will produce significant economic hardship, which will result in mass migrations from the global south to the north, which will foment even more unrest than we've seen already. And that can end civilization just as effectively as massive crop failures and temperatures so high that large chunks of the Earth become uninhabitable.
Typically, when we talk about climate mitigation, most people think of building dikes and flood-control systems, engineering crops that can withstand new climates, and otherwise learning to adapt to a bad situation. All of those things are fine, but they won't be sufficient.
We need to invest in geoengineering.
Unlike adaptation, geoengineering makes the world artificially cooler than it would be if left to naturally warm with the burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It's an imperfect band-aid, largely for three reasons:
But not forever. Bad things happen between now and forever. If we wait long enough, there will be a termination shock, and it'll kill a stressed civilization.
Restore. So, eventually, we need to take the carbon we've put into the atmosphere over the last 200 years out of it, and fix it into limestone, where it can't come bubbling up out of old oil and gas wells, or rot away to produce methane, or otherwise sneak back into the atmosphere when we're in one of our periods when we're too stupid to keep our eyes on the ball.
This is a problem we don't know how to solve. There are some proposals. Some of them might be quite cheap, but in my view they're long-shots.
We should count on the problem only being tractable through the expenditure of massive amounts of energy.
The world generated 29 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022. Let's double that for process and space heating and call it 60GWh. As the rest of the world industrializes and becomes used to first-world living standards, we should count on that tripling in the next 50 years. Call it 200GWh. But that's without any estimate for how much energy will be needed to pull out the CO2.
We've put 1.1 teratonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began. The thermodynamic requirement for removing CO2 comes out to about 250kWh/t. We might be able to do better than that with artificial weathering and other geoengineering techniques, but let's use this as a worst case and plan to remove all 1.1Tt by brute force. That'll require 2.75 x 10^17Wh of energy. (For those of you playing along at home, that's 275 petawatt-hours of energy.) If we amortize that over 200 years, that requires increasing yearly world energy consumption by a factor of roughly 7000.
That's sobering.
Is it physically possible to produce that much energy? Sure. It requires science fiction, but not magical science fiction: solar power satellites beaming energy from space, fusion reactors, terrestrial solar panels with deployed costs of pennies per megawatt, geothermal energy available anywhere on Earth, supplied by shafts that cost a few hundred dollars per kilometer to drill and stabilize.
All of this is within the capability of a Kardashev Type I civilization. If we don't destroy our civilization, either through a climate catastrophe or another of the existential threats we face, this is eminently doable in the next 200 years. But that's the kind of timescale we're looking at before we can put the climate crisis behind us.
Putting it all together:
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You'll note that I've been extremely vague about costs. That's largely because they're unknowable. However, I'll rephrase what I said at the beginning: If people notice that the costs of climate mitigation affect them, they'll resist it. On the other hand, it'll be very hard for them to attribute the costs of climate change to any one event in their lives that causes them loss. It's irrational, but people are irrational about lots of things.
The thing that can save us is technology. One of the reasons why I used to be a climate skeptic was that it didn't really matter, because there was a hierarchy of things that had to happen to care one way or another:
I'm still not sure that we've gotten over the "what can we do?" hurdle. We can sprinkle photovoltaics all over the place pretty cheaply, but can't create instant infrastructure out of them, and the developing world wants the benefits of industrial society now. If they can't get those benefits using renewables or some other non-emitting energy source, they'll use coal, gas, and oil.
So there are scaling problems with the technology we have, even though the cost curve looks good. And the mitigation technologies are going to be insanely complicated to sell, and they're basically a problem in global collective action, which is, to say the least, an immature technology.
Through all of this, however, should be one overarching goal: Make energy as cheap and plentiful as possible. Only the profligate expenditure of energy can save us. With enough of it, all problems are solvable.
I would very much like to see Trump taken off the table. Having him in federal prison would do nicely. Not as nicely as if he would do us the favor of dying in an overtly non-suspicious way, but well enough. So from a naive standpoint, throwing the book at him would be very handy.
But if the DoJ is going to prosecute Trump, it has to win. Having him acquitted is considerably more catastrophic than declining to prosecute him in the first place. So here's what I think is the key question:
How do you pick a jury?
I would assume that "how did you vote" is probably a no-no as a voir dire question. Could you ask jurors if they're Republicans, Democrats, or independents? Could you restrict the jury pool only to independents?
And even if you could, how would you be able to tell if you hadn't empaneled a hard-core MAGA Trumpkin who was nominally independent? It only takes one for a hung jury--which is as bad as an acquittal, from a political and public policy standpoint.
It would be fine to screen thousands of jurors if you could find a genuinely impartial one. But I have grave doubts that there is a (legally acceptable) set of screening questions you could ask to be certain of your screening.
That makes the risks of prosecution huge. It may make prosecuting him at all a non-starter.
Old fuddy-duddy conservatives (the fussy, boring kind, rather than the racist, authoritarian kind) have long harped on the necessity for members of a free society to govern their own passions. Either free people do this for themselves or somebody has to step in and do it for them. Allowing everybody simply to indulge whatever anti-social whim that pops into their heads simply doesn't work.
That governing, self-guided or otherwise imposed, is called civilization, and it's a genuinely good thing. This should not be in dispute by either side, even in this horrific period of national life.
But a whole bunch of people seem to need a quick refresher on a few points of public etiquette that collectively produce this "civilization" thing:
Physical confrontation is for life-or-death situations. If you're living your life by the credo, "Punch back twice as hard," you're not being heroic; you're being an asshole.
If you think that destroying other people's property is justified because you feel aggrieved, you're mistaken. You're also an asshole.
Bullying people you've never met in real life is barbaric. Barbarians are assholes.
If you don't really care about ideas in public life but you care passionately about power, you're not engaged in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger justification of your ends over your means, because you don't have ends. You're just being a thug, and thugs are assholes.
Modesty is a virtue most of the time. If you insist on constantly jumping up and down, shouting, "Lookit me! Lookit me!" you're not promoting your brand; you're being an asshole.
On the rare occasions when you thrust your opinions upon others, it really helps if they're well informed, concisely delivered, and part of a dialogue where you listen to your interlocutor's response, rather than just steamrolling the other person with nonsense. If you don't do this, you're not only a poor debater but also a poor conversationalist; in short; you're an asshole.
And above all: Rejoicing in others' pain and discomfort is a fleeting joy, and it's notoriously bad karma, because others will be happy to rejoice in your pain and discomfort in short order. That's because nobody roots for the success of an asshole.
This all used to be stuff that your mother would teach you. It was reinforced by your teachers, and your friends' parents, and pretty much every adult who influenced you. The vast majority of kids emulated the adults--as they still do--and grew up to be decent. It didn't work for everybody, but the decent-people-to-assholes ratio was high.
Sometimes kids had absent parents or grew up within a poor social network, and they had serious disadvantages. A larger-than-average number of them grew up to be assholes. But by and large, civilization mattered. Culture mattered. It didn't have to be the culture of a particular race or identity; all that was necessary was that each culture acknowledged that we owed each other a modicum of respect, and if we couldn't muster the respect, we could fake it.
I don't wish to whitewash the past. A lot of bad stuff occurred in the past, and much of it was baked into the culture. It produced vast inequities and pain. In some cases, the cover of good manners and civilized behavior in the most visible parts of the public allowed people to perpetrate truly barbaric acts just off the public stage. That stuff needed--needs--to be eliminated. But you don't tear everything down because it isn't perfect. You recognize the good stuff and cultivate it, and you work on identifying the bad stuff and fixing it. If you think that everything about your society is evil, you probably live a fairly miserable existence. That kind of misery can turn you into an asshole.
We have become a nation of assholes.
This has been a long time coming. Maybe it's an inevitable consequence of growing up in a society where things are easy, and easiness breeds decadence. Maybe it's because, while the bedrock civilizational parts of a culture are essential, there's a lot of other ugly stuff around the edges. If you're uncomfortable with the ugly stuff, it's easy to forget about the essential stuff. But if you stop paying attention to it, it's a perishable skill if you don't practice it.
As usual, I'm not sure how we restore the essential parts of the formula. Fuddy-duddy conservatism doesn't help any more, because we failed to conserve the important stuff. It's gone. What we need is some very selective restoration. Normally, restoration and reaction are kissin' cousins, but that presupposes that conservation has done its job and prevented the civilizational baby from being thrown out with the antiquated bathwater during the march of progress. Progress without conservation leads to disaster. Conservation without progress leads to stagnation. We seem to have had both of these pathologies, simultaneously.
Finding our way back may require more skill and patience than we know how to muster. But we have to try, and we have to do it pretty soon or we'll find out that civilization may be annoying but it sure beats the alternative. In the alternative, everbody's an asshole.
Trump's recent de-platforming is of course controversial and has stirred up the usual furious "Is not! Is so!" yammering by one side shouting past the other, and vice versa. FWIW, I'm glad Trump got de-platformed, at least for a while, but I'm pretty squeamish about allowing private companies with natural monopolies to wield this amount of power over public discourse. I think I favor some kind of public utilities model, or at least a set of public regulations that codify what behavior will result in a user's ejection, and some kind of public appeal process.
That's an important discussion, but it's not the one I want to have today.
The interaction that users have with their social platforms represents the first large-scale experiment in the symbiosis between humans and AIs with a specific objective function. The results are simply horrible, but there may be reason to be encouraged.
All social platform AIs have essentially the same objective function: maximize engagement. The more minutes a user spends interacting with it, the more data can be harvested, and the more valuable that user's digital persona becomes to advertisers. To do this, the AI, which is a fairly straightforward machine learning system, recognizes patterns in what motivates a user to interact more strongly (i.e. longer, faster, with more posting, etc.), compares those patterns to those of other users with strong interactions, and feeds the user the same sort of content.
It works really well. But the process is completely amoral, because the objective function is amoral. The unanticipated consequence of this amorality is that the machine learning system optimizes for content that generates strong emotions because they generate the largest degree of engagement. Unfortunately, for a particular type of person, the strongest emotion is rage, or self-righteousness, or some other emotion that leads to craziness and danger.
In the course of maximizing engagement for these people, the AI has essentially become the perfect vehicle to send them down the rabbit hole, spiraling tighter and tighter into a community of like-minded crazies who, because they've also been led down the same hole by the same AI, reinforce each other with progressively crazier and crazier ideas. It's perfect for driving engagement levels even higher.
But it's terrible for the people in the hole, and it's even more terrible for civil society. In the Olden Times (ca. 2010), people with these predilections were strongly discouraged by their friends, neighbors, and civic leaders. But now those people don't have friends, neighbors, and leaders outside of the rabbit hole.
So the platform makes lots of money at the expense of civility.
There's a fairly famous thought experiment concerning poor choice of AI objective function. In it, we give a super-intelligent AI the objective function to maximize the production of paperclips. It starts out optimizing manufacturing and supply chains. Then it goes looking for more iron supplies because it needs more steel, and it ignores the environmental damage--that's not part of the objective function. Then it goes looking for more power for manufacturing and notices that people are consuming a lot of power that could otherwise go toward paperclip production, so it eliminates the people. It ends with the AI spreading out over the galaxy, converting entire solar systems to paperclips. Mind you, the AI is extremely smart. But it still has a purpose, and it uses its intelligence in service to that purpose.
Compared to a super-intelligent AI, the social platforms' AIs are dumber than stumps. But they've still managed to worm their ways into our behavior to an unprecedented degree. If there were ever a better illustration of how a poor choice of objective function can have disastrous consequences, this one gives the paperclip AI a run for its money.
Up at the top, I mentioned that there might be something encouraging here: You can change an objective function. If, instead of "maximize engagement", you can choose "maximize engagement without allowing users to fall down a rabbit hole". This is slightly more complex from a machine learning standpoint, but well within the state of the art. In doing so, there's a possibility that a lot of the insanity might abate.
Note, however, that this objective function does not maximize revenue for the social platforms. I think it doesn't do huge damage to their bottom lines, but if you gently guide people away from armed insurrection--or quilting fanaticism, or an unhealthy obsession with cat videos, or whatever--then you can still push maximum engagement across a sufficiently broad set of interests to mitigate the worst effects and still have a fine business model. Who knows? The platforms might even discover that by broadening the interests of their users, they found new advertising niches that could be more lucrative. After all, there's only so much camo gear and 5.56mm ammunition you can sell.
If you're getting a creepy-crawly feeling that's whispering "miiiiiiiind controooolll" in the back of your head: good. It's not a slam-dunk to engineer this sort of thing so that it's neutral about people's... enthusiasms. But we're already seeing the results of a different, brute-force kind of mind control. Doing better than that seems like it ought to be pretty easy.
Well, we're in deep trouble.
This post is going to be a mess, because I'm having a huge amount of trouble wrapping my head around this. So maybe I ought to start with a bunch of things that I'm pretty sure are true:
It seems that we need answers--solutions--to three huge questions:
Let's take 'em one at a time:
Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that it wasn't stolen (that's a topic for huge question #2). Instead, let's ask a simple question: Is stealing an election grounds for violence?
We have lots of examples of stolen elections in any number of countries in which I am pleased not to live. But in most of those countries, stolen elections are merely a symptom, not a cause, of an extremely bad government.
I would agree that governments in Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, etc. are bad enough that a moral case can be made for attempting their violent overthrow. I'm not sure it's the best tactic, but I'm not on the ground and can't make a judgement. These places are far gone, but the lack of free and fair elections is the least of their problems.
We have a few recent examples of places that were well on their way to needing violent corrections, and in those places an obviously rigged election seems to have been the last straw. However, in those places peaceful demonstrations seem to have been much more successful in backing governments away from the edge than violent ones.
The United States is not currently Syria or Venezuela. If an election were stolen, it's highly likely that peaceful demonstrations would be more effective than violence. What we saw at the Capitol was violent. As such it is more likely to make things worse than better.
A quick aside here: I'm sure that there were many peaceful protesters at the Capitol. Similarly, I'm sure that there were violent incidents fomented by protesters in Kiev and Tahrir Square. Even more to the point, we know that there were violent incidents during the BLM protests. So it's important to recognize that the line between peaceful and violent is fuzzy. For me, the BLM protests were largely peaceful, but I admit that's a judgement call and it's a debatable topic. However, there's no question that the overall character of the Capitol "protest" was violent.
Of course, we wouldn't have to make judgement calls about peaceful vs. violent if a whole bunch of people hadn't believed something that was full-blown batshit crazy. I'm not going to litigate the overwhelming likelihood that the election was honest, because then I'd be writing a 20,000 word post instead of a simple 3000 word one.
People aren't evil. They're not stupid. But they are ignorant. Even worse, they're untrained in how to approach novel situations. I'm not going to hold myself up as a paragon of Reason in the face of new, scary stuff, but I do know how to do at least informal research. I know to check sources. On my better days, I can entertain the idea that some of my beliefs and assumptions are wrong, even though I'll fight to preserve them right up until the moment when they're no longer tenable.
A first-order explanation for why things have gone so wrong is that ordinary people have suddenly had massive loads of information shoved down their throats via social media, and conspiracy theories are a simple way of making sense of the confusion. A conspiracy theory has a narrative. The outline of the story is simple and compelling, while the ramifications make it feel complex enough to mimic the complexity of the real world.
I don't know how to make this stop. Tens of millions of words by deeper thinkers and better writers than I have been devoted to this. However, I do have a few unorganized thoughts on a few parts of the solution:
The following is not an excuse; it's an explanation.
Back in the 80's I was young and a pretty vanilla-flavored Reagan Republican. Even then, you could hear the dog whistle to the right-wing crazies and racists, but it was faint, and they were effectively suppressed from having any power in the party. Meanwhile, the Democrats were still recovering from having gone full-blown batshit crazy in the 60's and early 70's. (Nixon played dirty, but he probably didn't need to.)
In the 90's I was disillusioned with the whole system. I wasn't super happy with Clinton, but Bush was unexciting and Dole was a nonentity.
By the end of the 90's the dog whistle was a lot louder, but I could still justify voting for conservative policies, even if the unsavory types were starting to ooze out of the cracks. I voted for Obama in 2008 because McCain clearly didn't know what he was doing, but for Romney in 2012. By this point, I couldn't in good conscience call myself a Republican, because the crazies were, if not actively driving the bus, at least whispering instructions to the driver. Still, I was right of center, and when push came to shove I voted more Republican than not.
(An aside: The Massachusetts governor version of Romney is pretty much my dream candidate. It's a shame that the only thing he couldn't manage was a presidential campaign, and it's a shame that that version didn't run.)
Which brings us to Trump.
I was just as shocked--and horrified--as anyone that Trump beat Hillary. I didn't see it coming, and reckoning with the fact that that many people would vote for him under any circumstances was sobering, to say the least. Still, I thought that the lesson to learn was that there were a whole bunch of desperate people who weren't being listened to. The backup lesson was that they were furiously angry for being actively hated by half the country, and lashing out was poor form but possibly understandable. At this point, I was still willing to entertain the idea that I could vote for decent conservatives at some point in the future, after the insanity had abated. I still considered myself a right-leaning independent.
That the 2020 election was as close as it was has really shaken my faith in humanity. That so many people were willing to vote for the Worst Person in the World after seeing him oozing along the national and international stage for 4 years is simply incomprehensible. Still, in the days following the election, even with Trump doing his full-up Pennywise the Clown act, I thought that we were still mostly dealing with people who had voted for policies they liked, and were willing to extend the deal they'd made with the Devil to get them. At this point, I'd pretty much resolved never to vote for any officeholder who had ever supported Trump, but I still thought that eventually the insanity would break.
Well, that's out the window now. When three quarters of Republicans think that an obviously normal election was somehow fixed because their guy didn't win, and are willing to engage in extra-legal means to reverse the outcome, we're no longer dealing with fringe insanity. Instead, we're dealing with insanity as the very core of the GOP.
I am deeply ashamed that I voted for these guys, ever. I am deeply ashamed that I didn't see the seed of the rotting tree that they would become. I will never vote for another candidate with an (R) next to his or her name.
I am a Democrat.
I can't say I'm happy about this, because I still think that moderate conservative policies are better than liberal policies, and the Democrats are pretty far left of center these days. But the policies simply don't matter when you're dealing with crazy people. Yes, the Democrats have crazy people as well, but they're so much better managed than the Republican managed their crazies that there's no longer basis for comparison.
Of course, that's what I thought of the Republicans in the 80's. The difference is that I'm reasonably confident that I'll be dead before the craziness gets bad enough on the Left to have to weigh it against whatever happens next on the Right.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to believe that there's an explanation for why the Right went nuts. So far, I can't find it. I really want to find it, because it means that there might be rational people with whom reasonable discussions can occur. And without reason, I'm very frightened that the nation will be a howling wasteland for quite a while.
I'm sorry.
It's going to be hard for the modest majority who voted for Biden to forgive the substantial minority who voted for Trump. It is also essential that they find some way of doing so.
By far the most common sentiment I've heard from Biden voters is that they simply don't understand how anybody can vote for the Worst Person in the World. The prevailing theory seems to be that half the country has gone full-blown batshit crazy. That's a theory with dark implications, because you don't reason or negotiate with crazy people; you defeat and contain them. Needless to say, the Trump side will resist that. This is a fine recipe for at least a cold civil war, with more than an outside chance at a hot one.
So it'd be nice to have an alternate theory. I think I have one.
First, because I live in Texas, and have children who live in Georgia and Florida, I'm exposed to Trump people. Most of them aren't crazy. They are, by and large, perfectly decent, intelligent citizens. So I'm forced to the conclusion that they've made rational decisions. That doesn't mean that I agree with those decisions, but they shouldn't be dismissed as illegitimate.
People judge political leaders, either explicitly or implicitly, based on their own priorities and how well the candidate performs with respect to those priorities. I and most of Biden voters have put an extremely high priority on the president not being the Worst Person in the World. As a moderate conservative, if Trump had been semi-normal, I would have still had trouble with a lot of his accomplishments (or lack thereof), but I am, in principle, in favor of a government that's as small as possible but no smaller, with only essential regulations, and with a fairly conservative view of the law. That these policies were implemented by an incompetent, in a fashion that provided minimum benefit for maximum pain, causes me to score Trump below average on them. But I suspect that I would have scored potential Biden policies even lower. But I didn't even consider any of this when I voted, because Trump's loathsome and alarming character meant that he was instantly disqualified. Similarly, I voted almost straight Democratic, because people who enable the Worst Person in the World also score low enough on the character scale not to be trusted.
But reasonable people can disagree about the importance of character.
We've had plenty of presidents with less than sterling personalities. None of them (including Nixon) have been nearly as bad as Trump, but that's a matter of degree, not kind. It is a rational decision to rank character lower than policy in your own personal presidential calculus.
I think that this is what 60% of Trump World did. They knew they were making a deal with the Devil, and they decided that it was worth it. We may view that as an incredibly bad decision, but it's not an irrational one. We have a fine process for working through opposing views on decisions: it's called participating in a democratic republic. That process is still there. It's been battered and bruised, but it can heal. The political operators in it can decide to allow their norms to revert closer to the mean, and things will be... if not okay, at least better.
But it leaves two big questions.
First, what do we do with the 40% of TrumpWorld that really isn't rational? That's roughly 20% of the country. That's... unfortunate. But we've always had 20%-30% of the country that was pretty much crazy, arrayed in varying proportions on the two extremes of the political spectrum, and we've done okay until recently. My first approximation to an answer to the problem posed by those people is that we try to understand the reality behind what makes them crazy, address it as best as possible, and treat them with respect, even if we don't feel that they've completely earned it.
The more troubling question is this: How could we have gotten to a point where 30% of the country could make the moral calculation that Trump's policy ends justified his loathsome means? How could so many people discount character as an important quality in a president?
And there, I don't have a good answer. The best one I have is that this is what happens when you stop valuing a common culture that has at least a few unquestioned norms.
This is of course a fairly mainstream conservative argument. After all, the root of conservatism is to conserve. When we stop valuing cultural traditions, they wither. When they wither, the vacuum they leave behind is going to be filled by something. That "something" is a lot more chaotic than what it replaced.
Sometimes that chaos is necessary. There's always been a balance in America between forcing diverse cultures into the American consensus and embracing the diversity of those cultures (and appropriating the bejeezus out of the interesting parts to make the consensus culture better). There's no question that the knob has been turned much farther to the left for the past sixty years than it was before that. There are good reasons to have done that, but there are also good reasons to think that you can only force change like this so quickly before things either crumble or there's a terrific backlash. In our case, both of those things are happening.
I'll go out on an absolutist limb and state that that's bad.
But there is a balance to this. Full-blown reaction won't work, but neither will cramming cultural chaos down the throats of a near-majority that hates it. That balance can be negotiated. But it requires acknowledging that the two poles requiring balance are both legitimate, and then capitalizing on the good will that comes from acknowledging that legitimacy.
There is no greater priority than getting Trump out of office. Yes, it's a bummer that SCOTUS is going to be seriously out of balance. (Truth in advertising: I'm what used to be called a moderate conservative, so this bothers me less than it will a lot of you.) But there's ultimately nothing to be done, unless at least four Republicans are sufficiently bothered by the prospect of establishing precedents and then blowing through them the very next time the issue comes up, or at least if they think that moderating can give them more swing votes than it loses from the base. (Hint: they probably won't think that.)
If Trump and McConnell want to ram this through, they can. The Democrats can probably drag it out past the election with procedural tricks if they want to, but that's about it.
They should absolutely not drag it out. That's an excellent way to lose the election.
I know it's like letting a particularly repulsive parasite run around inside your head, but think like Trump for a moment: How many juicy reality TV episodes is a scorched earth nomination fight worth to him? Now: How many episodes is an expedited confirmation process worth?
Given that, barring a miracle, all of the possible outcomes result in RBG's seat being filled by a conservative, let's go through the sub-outcomes. There are really only two of them:
Another thing the Democrats can do to blow their own feet off: Threaten to pack the court, or add four more states, or otherwise drink the whole pitcher of Norm-Shattering Kool-Aid. Note that the argument that "we're just doing what you guys did" has absolutely zero impact on anything, and the Trumpkins will be perfectly happy to be outraged at the radical erosion of societal norms. As a rule, people aren't good at self-awareness on things like this.
Moral of the story: In the immortal words of your former leader, "Don't do stupid shit."
Some things the Democrats can do, which will actually help them:
Please don't be stupid.
