Save America. Vote GOP.

In the real world HRC is President and the GOP is beginning a painful reform process that will lead to a far better conservative party and a healthy American democracy.

In our consensus hallucination a walking tire fire is President, the GOP is further from reform than ever, and smart Dems are reading Josh Marshall’s advice. Oh, and the wake-up button isn’t working.

While we’re waiting for wakefulness we might as well come up with a plan or two. Plan one is to address the root cause of non-college misery. That will be useful if we survive (hint: avoid war with China) to get a sane government again.

Plan two is about getting a sane government. Towards that end we need to save the GOP from its addiction to the unreal. Unreality is a dangerous drug, after decades of abuse the GOP is in desperate need of rehab …

From Tabloids to Facebook: the Reality Wars (revised from my original)

I’ve been thinking about Russia’s successful hacking of the 2016 US election. It shouldn’t be seen in isolation.

It should be understood as part of the ancient human struggle with delusion and illusion — the reality wars.

In the US the reality wars were once bipartisan; each party struggled to separate fact from fantasy. Over the past few decades the GOP stopped fighting, they embraced the unreal. From Reagan to Gingrich to the Tea Party to Trump. By the 21st century we began seeing books like “The Republican War on Science”.

Unreality spread like a virus. AM talk radio was infested. Then came Drudge and Fox. Later Breitbart and finally the Facebook fake news stream. From the Clinton “murders” to birtherism to child pizza porn slaves.

This wasn’t bipartisan. The anti-reality meme, a core historic component of fascism, became concentrated in the GOP. Russia jumped on board, but Russia is more of a plague carrier than an intelligent agent. They lost their reality-war in the 90s. All their news is unreal now. Putin, like Trump, takes the fakes.

Trump’s victory is a triumph of the unreal. Of Will, I suppose. Now it threatens us all.

The rebellion against reason, against the perception of the real, is old. It’s a core component of fascism, but it’s much older than fascism. The Enlightenment was a setback for the unreal, but it wasn’t a final defeat. Now, in our troubled 3rd millennium, anti-reason is strong. It has taken over Russia. It has taken over the GOP, and Trump’s GOP has taken over America.

Somehow we have to rescue the GOP from it’s addiction to the unreal. That would be hard if it had been defeated. Now it seems impossible.

But there is a way. We need to vote GOP.

Vote GOP … in the primaries that is. In my home of Minnesota the Dem contenders are all pretty reasonable. I can send some money and volunteer to support the party, but my primary/caucus vote isn’t needed. On the other hand, the Minnesota GOP has lots of reality denialists running for office. I can use my primary vote to favor relatively sane GOP contenders.

If even half of Dems vote GOP in primaries we can ally with sane conservatives to pull the GOP back from the brink. Yes, there are a few sane conservatives. They are a dying breed, but there is room to ally with them here.

Then, in the election, we vote Dem. If America is lucky the Dems win. If America is unwise the GOP wins — but it’s a saner GOP. A setback, but not a catastrophe.

Work for a sane GOP. As a good Dem, vote GOP. 

The most vile societies in human history...

Adam Goodheart is blogging the Civil War ...

A Senator Secedes – Reluctantly - NYTimes.com

... The imperious, aristocratic senator was no bleeding heart, to say the least. Master of more than 300 slaves, he did not hesitate to flog them when they transgressed, wielding the whip with his own hand. Nor did he hesitate to take sexual advantage of the women under his power, fathering several children with them. (In one instance, he did so with a household servant, and then with her teenage daughter.) In politics, he had popularized the phrase ‘cotton is king,’ and gave a notorious speech in 1858 arguing that every society, even a republic, needed an inferior ‘mud-sill’ class to ‘do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life...

White South Carolina was "wild for secession" after the election of Lincoln. However we may see the early Lincoln now, white Southerners believed he would end the slavery they seemed to love.

How much, I wonder, was their passion driven by shame and guilt? The greatest anger I see comes from men and women (and children!) accused of crimes they deny to themselves. Crimes they deny to themselves, even as they know they are guilty.

The white southern United States of 1860 was a vile society, among the most vile of the past three hundred years.

Which others belong in that hall of shame?

Nazi Germany, of course. But who else? The obvious other examples, such as Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's China, and Stalin's Russia were all essentially medieval tyrannies in modern times. They were as much evil regimes as evil societies.

Are the only contenders 1930s Germany and 1860s American South?

Rwandan genocide and the Zani score

I made up the "Zani score" as "... a measure of how concerned one should be about nascent entities or organizations. It tries to measure social structures that, 999/1000 times go nowhere, but 1/1000 times lead, given chance and circumstance, to very bad things..."

I imagined it in the context of an industrial society, but I asked a friend who's an expert on the Rwandan genocide to try to apply the metric to that setting:

1. A belief that the ends justify the means, or, in other words, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice". NOT SURE.
2. A sense of grievance and injustice. YES.
3. A charismatic leader. NOT REALLY. NO ONE WAS CHARISMATIC, BUT AUTHORITY WAS TOTAL.
4. Celebration and admiration of violence. WELL, SINCE 1990. IT WAS SPECTACLE FOR SOME.
5. Tribal or ethnic boundaries; a division into the "chosen" and the "other". YES.
6. Anti-intellectual, in particular anti-geek. YES, INTELLECTUALS WERE AMONG THE FIRST KILLED.
7. Denial of skepticism. Skeptics are outcast, dissent is forbidden. NOT SURE.
8. Welcoming and affirmation of the convert. NONCONFORMITY WAS NEVER ENCOURAGED GENERALLY.
9. Membership alone is proof of virtue. IN TERMS OF ETHNICITY.
10. Scorn for the weak; denial of pity or sympathy for the other. NOT SURE.

The only real conflict to the model was that the leader of the genocide was not particularly charismatic -- but since he had total authority that wasn't much of an obstacle. There are a number of unknowns, but not bad for something that was designed with a very different society in mind.

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Three NYT OpEds on the latest American extremism

Shortly after writing my post on the Zani score, the NYT has published 3 OpEds over 3 days on the latest Zani-score bumps in American culture:

• Krugman - Going to Extreme - March 25 NYTimes.com
• Charles Blow - Whose Country Is It? - March 26 NYTimes.com
• tFrank Rich - The Rage Is Not About Health Care - NYTimes.com

The GOP's Zani score is probably about five. We should really worry if it hits 8.

Incidentally, Palin's Facebook page still uses gun sight cross hairs to mark our her enemies.
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Miep Gies and the Zani score

At age 50, at a local theater, I attended a performance of The Diary of Ann Frank.

I knew the story of course, but, until now I'd missed the book, the movie and the play. Seeing it at this point in my life I am awed by the endurance and compassion of Otto and Edith Franck, sympathetic to the less favorably portrayed refugees, and curious about the heroes Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Jan and Miep Gies, and Johannes and Bep Voskuijl. Curious too about what kind of man Otto Franck was to create such love and loyalty in his employees.

Of the heroes we know the most about Miep Gies, in part because of her astounding longevity. She passed for an ordinary person before and after World War II. She claimed, somewhat convincingly, that she was motivated not by courage but by a fear of unbearable guilt should she fail to perform her duty. It may be relevant that she was, by necessity, given up for adoption by her birth mother.

I wondered then, and wonder now, how extraordinary Gies was. In coverage of her death this past January I recall that of 81 people asked by the Dutch resistance to shelter Jews, 7 accepted. Clearly they did not ask just anyone; if we guess that only 1/10 were considered candidates, and 7/81 of those accepted, then Gies-class heroes were, and are, perhaps 1/100. Unusual certainly, but more common than world class athletes.

That feels right. I can believe that somewhere between 1/30 and 1/100 of humans are heroes born, and another 1/10 to 1/20 heroically inclined. Likewise it feels like 1/5 of us are Nazi-capable and 1/50 Nazi born.  The rest of us, in most circumstances, favor the good. Which is why civilization is possible.

I expect the epidemiology of heroism has been studied by scholars of later genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. I know one such, so maybe I'll update my post with some real data.

Do the demographics of hero and villain vary by society? Obviously some societies are far more evil than others; Germany of 2010 is not Germany of 1940. I would not be surprised to learn, however, that the frequency of fundamental human heroism and villainy is fairly constant. It might instead be chance and circumstance that leads to the rare, but cataclysmic, ascendance of the villainous.

Could villains win in modern America? Obviously yes. Even if there had been any past doubts, the recent widespread public support for governmental torture has put them to rest. We, like most nations, are quite capable of industrial evil.

Given that we Americans, like most nations, have a low but real risk of repeating the worst of modern human history, shouldn't we put some measure in place so we can estimate and track our risk?

We can't call this the "Nazi score" because the word Nazi has too much baggage. It cannot, for example, be applied to readily applied to Israel and it is historically bound to a peculiar form of industrial organization. In any event  a Nazimeter score would be a Godwin's Law violation.

Still, the lessons of Nazism are so powerful, and so often studied, that it would be insane to ignore them. So I'll permute some characters and name this metric the Zani score.

It only remains then, to assemble the metric. Tradition dictates a 10 point scale, so we need to come up with 10 distinct indicators of roughly equal weight. As a rough guide we can assume that the National Socialists get 9-10 points and the American Tea Party movement must score less than 5.

Given that rough outline here's my start on the 10 indicators that sum to a Zani score for any social movement or organization. Suggestions are most welcome and I hope to refine the scale over time.

1. A belief that the ends justify the means, or, in other words, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice".
2. A sense of grievance and injustice.
3. A charismatic leader.
4. Celebration and admiration of violence.
5. Tribal or ethnic boundaries; a division into the "chosen" and the "other".
6. Anti-intellectual, in particular anti-geek.
7. Denial of skepticism. Skeptics are outcast, dissent is forbidden.
8. Welcoming and affirmation of the convert.
9. Membership alone is proof of virtue.
10. Scorn for the weak; denial of pity or sympathy for the other.

Any suggestions on additions or deletions? Does anyone know of a genuine, empirically tested, Zani metric?