Category: Politics

 

Asking “when was the last battle of the Civil War fought?” is a trick question; the last battle has yet to be fought. One example of a minor skirmish is when New Orleans began its removal of Confederate monuments. The removal of the first monument looked like a covert operation. Using equipment with hidden company names, the removal crews wore masks and body armor while operating under the cover of darkness and police sniper protection. These precautions were deemed necessary because of threats. In addition to being controversial, the removal of such monuments is philosophically interesting.

One argument commonly used to defend Confederate monuments is the historical argument: the monuments express and are part of history and their removal is claimed to be like tearing pages from the history books. This argument does have some appeal, at least for objects marking an historical event and presenting facts. However, monuments tend to be erected to bestow honors, and this goes beyond marking an historical event and presenting history.

One example is the Battle of Liberty Place Monument. It was erected in New Orleans in 1891 to honor the 1874 battle between the Crescent City White League and the racially integrated New Orleans Metropolitan police and state militia. The monument was modified by the city in 1932 with a plaque expressing support for white supremacy. The monument was modified again in 1993 when a new plaque was placed over the 1932 plaque, commemorating all those who died in the battle.

From a moral perspective, the problem with this sort of monument is that it is not an objective historical marker, but and endorsement of white supremacy and racism. As such, to keep such a memorial in place would be to say the city at least tolerates white supremacy and racism. If these values are still endorsed by the city, then the monument should remain as a warning label. That way people will know to expect white supremacy and racism.

 However, if the values are no longer endorsed by the city, then such a monument should be removed.  This would express the current views of the people of the city. It could be objected that such removal would be on par with purging historical records. Obviously, the records of the event should not be purged. Historical records should aim at recording the facts without praising (or condemning) what has occurred. In contrast, to erect and preserve an honoring monument is to take a stance on the matter; to praise or condemn it.

It could be argued that the 1993 change to the monument “redeems” it from its white supremacist and racist origins and it and similar monuments should remain in place. This does have some appeal, part of which is that the monument expresses the history of the (allegedly) changed values. To use an analogy, a building that once served an evil purpose can be refurbished and redeemed to serve a good purpose. This, it could be argued, sends a more powerful statement than simply razing the building.

However, the monument was originally created to honor white supremacy, and the recent modification could be justly seen as an effort to conceal this fact. Since the monument does have historical significance, it would be reasonable to preserve it. After all, historical artifacts can be kept without endorsing values associated with the artifact. For example, keeping artifacts that belonged to Stalin as historically significant items is not to endorse Stalinism. Keeping a monument in a place of honor, is an endorsement.

The matter can become more complicated in cases involving statues of individuals such as General Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General P.G.T. Beauregard. These men did shape the history of the United States. It also cannot be denied they possessed some personal virtues. Lee is often presented as a man of considerable virtue. P.G.T. Beauregard went on to advocate for civil rights and voting rights for blacks (though some might say this was due to political expediency).

Given their historical importance and roles, it can be argued that they were worthy of statues and that these statues should remain to honor them. The easy and obvious counter is that they engaged in treason against the United States and backed slavery. Whatever personal virtues they might have possessed, they should not be honored for their role in the Confederacy. Statues that honor people who were Confederates but who did laudable things after the Civil War should, of course, be evaluated based on the merits of those individuals. But to honor the Confederacy and its support of slavery would be a moral error.

It could also be argued that even though the Confederate cause of fighting for the right of some people to own other people is wicked, people like Lee and Beauregard earned their statues and their honor. As such, it would be unjust to remove their statues because of the political sensibilities of today. After all, as it should be pointed out, there are statues that honor the slave owners Washington and Jefferson for their laudable deeds within the context of the dishonor of slavery. If the principle of removing monuments that honored those who supported a rebellion aimed at creating an independent slave-owning nation was strictly followed, then there would need to be a rather extensive purge of American monuments. If honoring supporters of slavery and slave owners is acceptable, then perhaps the removal of the statues of the heroes of the Confederacy could be justified on the grounds of their rebellion against the United States. This would allow for a principled distinction to be made: statues of slavery supporters and slave owners can be acceptable, as long as they were not rebels against the United States. Alternative, the principle could be that statues of victorious rebel slavery supporters are acceptable, but those of losing rebel slavery supporters are not. Winning, it could be said, makes all the difference.

 

The idea that government should be more like a business is appealing to those whose education, experience and values are in the business world. People do see the world through the lens of their experiences and want to apply the methods they are most familiar with to as many areas as possible. For example, I am a philosophy professor and tend to see the world through the philosophical lens and want to apply critical thinking, logic and ethical reasoning whenever I can. Likewise, those who are educated and experienced in business see the world through a business lens and wish to broadly apply their business skills and methods.

A reasonable case can be made as to why a business focused approach has merit. One can point out that many skills developed in the context of business can be used in government. For example, negotiating and deal making skills can be applied to politics. As another example, business leadership and management skills can also be applied in government. It would be a mistake to claim that government is nothing like a business, but it can also be argued that it is mistaken to try to transform government into a business.

One mistake is to think that just because there are positive qualities of business that overlap with those of government, making government more like a business will thus make government better. Making one thing more like another only adds positive qualities if they are made alike in positive ways. Making them alike in other ways does not do this. For example, dressing like a runner makes one like a runner, but this does not confer the health benefits of running.

 There is also the fact that although things with similar positive qualities are similar, it does not follow they are otherwise alike in relevant ways. For example, efficiency is a positive quality of business and government, but merely making government like business does not necessarily make it more efficient. There are businesses that are very inefficient.

Also, the fact that efficiency can be a positive quality of both business and government does not mean they are alike in other ways or that the way business is made more efficient is the way to make government more efficient. To illustrate, a business might be very efficient at exploiting customers and workers while enriching the stockholders, but that is presumably not the sort of efficiency one should aim for in government.

Avoiding this mistake involves resisting the mythology and fetishizing of making things like businesses and giving due consideration to which skills, methods and approaches transfer well from business to government and which do not.

A second basic mistake is like that made by Ion in Plato’s dialogue Ion. The rhapsode Ion believes, at the start of the dialogue, that poets have knowledge and mastery about almost everything. His reasoning is that because poets write about, for example, military matters, they thus are experts in military matters. As such, poets should be able to teach people about everything and serve as leaders in all these areas.

Socrates shows that the poets (as poets) do not have such knowledge. The gist of his argument is that each area is mastered by mastering the subject of that area and all these areas “belong” to others and not to the poets. For example, knowledge of waging war belongs to soldiers. The poets touch but lightly on these other areas and understand only the appearances and not the depth. Socrates does note that a person can have multiple domains of mastery, so a medical doctor could, for example, also be skilled at mathematics or art history.

The error in the case of business is to think that because there are many types of business and almost everything has some connection to business, then an alleged mastery of business confers mastery over all these things. However, business skills are distinct from skills specific to types of businesses. To illustrate, while a manager might believe that their management skills are universal, managing a software company does not confer software skills nor does managing a hospital confer medical skills. One might pick up skills and knowledge, but this would not be as a businessperson. After all, while a businessperson might be a runner, that does not make running a business. The fact that there are businesses associated with running, such as Nike, does not entail that skill in business thus confers skill in running. As such, for someone to think that business skills thus confer mastery over government would be a mistake. They might believe that they have such mastery because government interacts with business and some businesses do things like what government does, but they would be as mistaken as someone who thinks that because they manage a Nike outlet, they are thus an athlete.

 

A way to argue the United States is obligated to provide health care is by contending it is analogous to its obligation to defend citizens from “enemies foreign and domestic.” While there is disagreement about the obligations of a country, most thinkers believe the state is required to provide a military defense against foreign threats and deploy the police against domestic threats. So, just as the United States is obligated to defend its citizens from foreign terrorists and domestic criminals, it is obligated to defend them against cancer.

Another approach is to forgo the analogy and argue the basis of the obligation to provide military defense and police services also extends to providing health care. The general principle is that the state is obligated to protect its citizens. Since anthrax and heart failure can kill a person just as dead as a bullet or a bomb, then the state is also obligated to provide medical protection. Otherwise, the citizens are left unguarded, and the state would fail in its duty as a protector. While these lines of reasoning are appealing, they can certainly be countered. This could be done by arguing that there are relevant differences between providing health care and providing armed defenses.

One way is to argue that the state is only obligated to protect its citizens from threats presented by humans and not from other threats, such as disease or accidents. So, the state is under no obligation to protect citizens from the ravages of natura disease. But, the state is obligated to protect citizens from foes using disease as a weapon.

This seems odd. From the standpoint of the victim, it does not matter whether their disease is natural or inflicted, since the effect on them is the same. What matters is the harm being inflicted on the citizen. To use an analogy, it would be like the police being willing to stop a human from trying to kill another human but shrugging and walking away if they see a wild animal tearing apart a human. As such, it does not matter whether the harm is caused by a human or, for example, a virus—the state’s obligation to protect citizens would still apply.

Another counter to my view is to argue that while the state is obligated to protect its citizens, it is only obligated to provide a certain type of defense. The psychology behind this approach can be made clear by the rhetoric of those supporting generous state funding of the military and police while being against state funding for medical care. The military is spoken of in terms of its importance in “degrading and destroying” the enemy and the police are spoken of in terms of their role in imposing “law and order.” These are very aggressive roles. One can appear tough while speaking about funding submarines, torpedoes, bullets and missiles.

In contrast, the rhetoric against state funding of health care speaks of “the nanny state” and how providing such support will make people “weak” and “dependent.” This is caring rather than clubbing, curing rather than killing. One does not look manly or tough when speaking about funding preventative care and wellness initiatives.

What lies behind this psychology and rhetoric is the principle that the state’s role in protecting its citizens is one of force and violence, not one of caring and curing. This does provide a potentially relevant difference; but the challenge is showing that this difference warrants providing armed defense while precluding providing medical care.

One way to argue against it is to use an analogy to a family. Family members are generally obligated to protect one another, but if it were claimed that this obligation was limited only to using force and not caring for family members, then this would be rightfully regarded as absurd. Imagine, for example, a parent who was willing to kill to protect their child, but unwilling to take care of their illnesses and injuries. They would be rightfully condemned as a bad parent.

An interesting rhetorical approach is to embrace the military and police metaphors. Just as the state should thrust its force against enemies within and without, it should use its medical might to crush foes that are literally within—within the citizens. So, the state could wage war on viruses, disease and such and thus make it more manly and less nanny. This should have some rhetorical appeal to those who love military and police spending but are loath to fund healthcare.

As far as the argument that health care should not be provided by the state because it will make people dependent and weak, the obvious reply is that providing military and police protection shoulf have the same impact. As such, if the dependency argument works against health care, it would also work against having state military and police. If people should go it on their own regarding health care, then they should do the same when it comes to their armed defense. If private health coverage would suffice, then citizens should just arm themselves and provide their own defense and policing. This, obviously enough, would be a return to the anarchy of the state of nature and that would be bad. If accepting military and police protection from the state does not make citizens weak and dependent, then the same should also hold true for accepting health care from the state.

As a final point, an easy way to counter the obligation argument for state health care is to argue that the state is not obligated to provide military and police protection to the citizens. Rather, the military and the military, it could be argued, exists to protect and advance the interests of the elites. Since the elites have excellent health care thanks to their wealth and power, there is no need for the state to provide it to them. Other than the elites in government, like the Republicans in congress, who get their health care from the state.  On this view, support for using public money for the military and police and not health care makes perfect sense.

 

While the right to free speech is fundamental to classical liberalism, contemporary liberals are often accused of being its enemy. Two examples include incidents at Berkeley and Middlebury. As always, the matter of free speech is philosophically interesting, especially when it involves higher education.

One important distinction in the context of rights is that of the negative versus the positive. A negative right is not an evil right; rather it is a freedom such that the possessor is not entitled to be provided with the means to exercise the right. It is a right to not be interfered with.

A positive right is an entitlement to the means needed to exercise the right. For example, the United States currently grants citizens a right to public K-12 education. In addition to having the liberty to seek this education, it is also provided (by the taxpayers). In contrast, college education is usually a negative right: students have the liberty to attend college but are (generally) not provided with free education.

The right to free speech is a negative right; it is intended as a protection from impediment rather than an entitlement to the means of expression. To use an obvious example, while I have the right to express my views no one is obligated to provide me with free radio or TV time in which to do so.

While university personnel have no right to unjustly interfere with free speech, they are usually under no moral obligation to provide people with speaking opportunities on campus. For example, while I might be invited to speak at Harvard, Harvard has no obligation to provide me with a room just because I might want to talk about philosophy.

Decisions about who to invite and who to allow to speak in official venues are often made on pragmatic grounds, such as which speakers will boost the reputation of the school or who happens to be friends with top administrators. There are also practical concerns about the cost of the speaker, the likelihood of trouble arising, and the extent of the interest in the speaker. While these practical concerns are important, decisions about who to invite (and who to exclude) should also be made on principled grounds.

One reasonable principle is that decisions should be made based on the educational value of the speaker campus, broadly understood. Since universities are supposed to educate students, it makes sense for them to operate on this principle. Speakers who offer little or nothing in the way of educational value could be justly denied invitations. Of course, education is not the only concern of a university in terms of what it offers to the students and the community. Speakers who offer things of artistic value or even mere entertainment value should also be given due consideration.

One concern about decisions based on these factors is that there can be good faith debate about which speakers have the merit to warrant their invitation. For example, the incident at Middlebury arose because some see Charles Murray’s co-authored controversial book The Bell Curve as  based on pseudoscience and bad methodology. While these matters can be clouded with ideology, there are established standards regarding educational merit regarding such things as methodology and legitimacy. The main problem lies in their application, but this is not a problem unique to picking speaker as it extends across the academy. Fortunately, the basic principle of merit is reasonable clear but the real fights take place over the particulars.

Another seemingly sensible principle is a moral one; that those invited should reflect the values of the institution and perhaps the broader society. At the very least, those invited should not be evil and should not be espousing evil.

This principle does have some problems. One is deciding what conflicts with the values of the institution. Another is that it is difficult to speak of the values of the broader society, given the considerable diversity of opinions on moral issues. When people use this approach, they usually refer to their own values and fall prey to the cognitive bias that leads them to assume their values are shared by society. There is the enduring problem in ethics of sorting out good and evil. There is also the concern about whether academic or artistic merit can offset moral concerns. For example, a Catholic university might see a pro-choice philosopher as endorsing a morally wrong position, yet think that having this philosopher engage a pro-life philosopher in a campus debate to have educational merit. As another example, a liberal institution might regard an extreme libertarian as having morally problematic views yet see educational merit in having them present their arguments as part of a series on American political philosophy.  As with the matter of merit, there are rational and principled ways to approach ethical concerns but this is even more fraught with controversy than questions of assessing educational merit.

While I agree that speech can cause harm, I hold to a presumption in favor of free expression. As a principle, this means that if there is reasonable doubt as to whether the merit of a speech outweighs moral concerns about the speaker or content, then the decision should favor free expression. This is based on the view that it is better to run the risk of tolerating possible evil than to risk silencing someone who has something worth saying. As such, I generally favor a liberal (in the classic sense) approach to inviting speakers to universities.

Americans tend to favor free expression for those they agree with and oppose it for those they dislike. When campuses attempted to exclude right wing speakers, the right expressed its devotion to free expression, speaking of the free market of ideas. As was expected, when college students and faculty recently protested the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel, the right supported a crack down on free expression and on some campuses riot police were turned lose on students and faculty. The right has also worked hard to restrict the content of college classes, enacting laws imposing what they call “reforms.” For example, my adopted state of Florida professes to be all about freedom, but this is only for the freedom to express views that accord with the ideology of the right. It could be countered that “the left” takes a similar approach when it is in power, allowing free speech it approves of. While such finger pointing might feel good, it also shows that Americans are not as committed to free speech as we claim.

 

While simple and ideologically appealing explanations for Harris’ loss are tempting, the truth is that the reasons are many and often complicated. While it is inarguably true that racism and sexism (two staples of American politics) were factors, the relationships between the two parties and the truth were also factors.

While politics often involves people in a dubious relation with the truth, Trump seems to have locked the Republican party into strategic deceit. The prime example is, of course, what was dubbed the “Big Lie” about Trump being robbed of his rightful victory in 2020. As would be expected, talk of issues with the election has ceased with Trump’s victory. While the Republican party has engaged in strategic lying broadly, I will focus on economic lies.

To be fair and balanced, both the Republicans and the Democrats are right when they claim that many Americans are suffering economically. Inflation, stagnating wages, the high cost of health care and the absurd price of housing have been hurting Americans. Even those who are relatively well off also seem to have felt that the economy was not working for them as it should. As such, both sides agreed on and were correct about the general claim that most Americans are facing economic woes. But they obviously differed in their explanations and proposed solutions. I will focus on the explanations.

While the Republican populist rhetoric did lay some of the blame on corporations, there was an emphasis on lying about the impact of migrants. In addition to the old lies that migrants are stealing jobs, spreading disease, committing crimes and sponging off the system, J.D. Vance also offered the false claim that migrants were responsible for the high cost of housing. While migrants do occupy housing, it is obviously not true that undocumented migrants are buying houses in the United States. In addition to the barrier of the high cost, there is also the fact that legally buying a house is a process that an undocumented person would not be able to complete. Trump and Vance ran hard on the migration issue, linking it to the economy and using racism and xenophobia to add rhetorical fuel to their false claims. The economic link is a smart rhetorical play for two reasons. First, it provides cover for people who are motivated by racism and xenophobia but who do not want to be seen for what they are. Second, it onboards people who are not racist or xenophobic but who are rightfully worried about their economic woes. In terms of how this can work, I need to present an analogy to tech support.

While I am a philosopher, I am also the guy that family, friends, and co-workers turn to when they have tech issues. While I do not work in IT, I was the editor of a Mac ezine in the 1990s, wrote shareware programs, and still build my own PCs. I also have those philosophical critical thinking skills that translate well into fixing tech problems.

When I first started helping people, I made some mistakes that were soon corrected by experience. These were not technical mistakes but psychological. The first was that I would try to explain the nature and the cause of the problem accurately and in some detail. I learned that no one cared much about a detailed explanation, even if they could understand it. The second was that when I tried to show them how to fix the problem as I fixed it, they did not want to know the details, nor did they care much about what I was doing as long as I solved their problem. As one friend put it, they didn’t need to know how to fix problems since they had me. Since learning that people only want their problems solved without caring much about the complicated why or how, since then I have fixed problems quietly. While I was initially annoyed by this and wondered how they could not love knowing about technology as I did, I realized that this was a biased view on my part. While I am interested in technology and solving problems and willing to expend my resources on this knowledge and skill, other people are not interested and prefer to expend their mental resources on other things. This is rational since a person has only so many resources to spend and it makes sense to rely on other people who have the needed knowledge and skill. This holds even when the problem is important and affecting a person.

While I am also interested in politics and economics, it makes sense that (just as with technology) most people are not. They do recognize when they feel things are not going as they would like, and they want someone else to offer them a simple explanation and be told that the problem will be fixed for them.

While we talk about “the economy”, it is obviously an incredibly complicated network of people, resources, made-up laws, made-up traditions, practices, relationships, and so on. As such, there are usually no simple explanations or fixes for economic problems (and one person’s problem is another person’s profit). But just as people notice when their PC is crashing, people notice when their grocery bills are higher, and their rent eats up an ever-larger chunk of their paycheck. Not being experts in the economy (and who really is?) they do not really know why this is happening and have no idea what complicated solutions are needed. Instead, just as my friends and relatives turn to me to fix their technology woes, voters look to politicians to offer simple explanations and easy to understand fixes. But there are obvious differences in that I am honest about technology problems, and I know how to fix them (only one partial failure in over thirty years). When it comes to the economy, as noted above, the Republicans have embraced strategic lying.

They offer simplistic and untrue explanations, such as blaming migrants. But this appeals to people since they are offering an explanation they can understand without being experts in economics: migrants are hurting the economy and hence hurting them. They can then offer a simple, easy to grasp solution (that will make things worse): the Republicans will round up and deport the migrants. This solution will not work for obvious reasons and will most likely make things work because a cornerstone of American food production and construction is cheap migrant labor. This means that the Republicans might suffer some loses when the economy does not improve (or gets worse) but perhaps they can use strategic lying to avoid blame for that. Given that the Republicans have adopted strategic lying, one might think that the Democrats could have won by telling the truth about the cause of Americans’ economic woes and offering real solutions. But Democrats will (mostly) not tell the truth about the economy.

While the Republican rhetoric accuses the Democrats of being socialists and communists, this is also part of strategic lying. While it is true that there are Democrats who have views that are left of the current center, the mainstream Democrats are committed to (or bought by) the same capitalist system (and capitalists) that the Republicans work hard to serve. There is, however, a meaningful difference in that the Democrats push back against some of the worst excesses and favor relatively timid and mild regulations and protections for the lower classes and the environment. In contrast, the Republican party seems to favor allowing the elites to do as they wish without regulation (as long as they do not wish to appear “woke” for marketing purposes, as Disney found out). While some Democrats might have laudable motives, there is also a practical reason to keep the excesses of capitalism in some degree of check, since failure to do so could result in social upheaval and revolt. But getting back to Democrats not telling the truth.

Harris decided to run from the center, making a show of embracing rebel Republicans such as Liz Cheney and “good” billionaires. Despite the claims that the Democrats lost because they were too “woke” or too into identity politics, Harris and her fellow Democrats steered away from “wokeness” and generally avoided identity politics. They even took harder lines on immigration and crime. While acknowledging the economic woes of the lower classes, the Democrats generally did not tell the truth about the cause of those woes nor did they offer any meaningful solutions. This is because telling the truth about these woes would reveal that they are the result of the actions of the elite classes and that significantly improving the conditions for the lower classes would require meaningful changes to the status quo and not just band aids. One of the many reasons that the Democrats cannot do this is that they are, like the Republicans, reliant on the economic elites for their re-election funding. There are also the financial rewards politicians receive for serving these interests, be they Democrats or Republicans. Congress has, to no one’s surprise, an abundance of millionaires. Democrats, I suppose, deserve some faint praise for not engaging in scapegoating migrants or the poor for the economic woes most Americans face. But they deserve criticism for not telling the truth.

While it can be pointed out the Republicans’ strategic lie beat the Democrats’ strategic silence, it can be argued that the Democrats could have won if they had adopted views like those of Bernie Sanders. While some pundits and liberal elites are quick to claim that people who voted for Trump did so because they are dumb racist misogynists, I recommend that people think about my tale about fixing technology: people rationally want someone who can explain complicated problems in simple terms and offer a promise that they will fix the problems. The Republicans did offer explanations, although they were mostly lies. They also offered simple solutions (albeit ones that will just make things work). The next election cycle the Democrats should heed my advice and take my approach: offer a simple but honest explanation and offer a simple explanation of the complicated fix that is needed. Then fix the problem and remember that people will forget you fixed it until they have another problem.

 

A well-established rhetorical tactic is to falsely accuse someone (such as transpeople) or something (such as television) of being a danger to children. Because humans tend to feel very protective of children, this accusation can easily create feelings of anger and fear that override rational assessment. Such accusations are even more effective when the target is someone or something the intended audience already fears or dislikes. For example, homosexuals have long been accused of being pedophiles.

One recent development has been the Republican strategy of accusing their opponents of pedophilia despite a lack of evidence. This typically takes the form of accusing them of being groomers. Transpeople and drag queens are among the most recent targets being accused of being pedophiles, despite the lack of evidence that these people are any more likely to be pedophiles than anyone else.

My adopted state of Florida has been on the frontlines of the culture wars, attacking LGBT+ people and going after anything labeled as “woke”, ‘DEI” or “critical race theory.” As would be expected, this has involved false claims about pedophiles and groomers. For example, it was claimed that books refereeing to LGBT+ people were corrupting or being used to groom children. But who is endangering the children?

It should not be surprising that marginalized people are not likely to be pedophiles or groomers. After all, pedophiles and groomers often rely on positions of power or authority to gain access to their victims and shield themselves from both suspicion and consequences. The Catholic Church provides an excellent illustration of this and has an entire Wikipedia page on is sexual abuse cases. As a single example, in 2024 the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to pay $880 million to settle sex abuse claims, bringing the current total to over $1.5 billion. Sexual abuse of minors is also a problem in other churches. For example, male pastors from Texas are at least eight times more likely to sexually assault minors than drag queens. While people might be inclined to doubt these claims, they can be confirmed. For example, a skeptic can investigate the Los Angeles settlement and review the documentation. One can also scour police reports nationwide to search for examples of transpeople and drag queens who are pedophiles or groomers, but this will turn up little or nothing.

My adopted state of Florida, which seems to be pushing towards theocratic authoritarianism, passed a law opening schools to volunteer chaplains. In response, the Satanic Temple announced its intention to send in volunteer chaplains, which seems to have paused the plan until it can be reworked to allow only Christian chaplains into schools. Those who rushed to “protect the children” from transpeople, drag queens and books should have opposed this proposal. After all, if the effectively nonexistent threat transpeople and drag queens present warrants such action, then the threat presented by chaplains should be terrifying to them. It is not being claimed that chaplains are likely to be pedophiles, just that statistically they are much more likely to be pedophiles than would a transperson or drag queen. Given the statistical data, it makes more sense to ban chaplains from schools than to go after transpeople, drag queens or books. I must note that I am friends with ministers, chaplains and other religious leaders that are good people. As such, my point is not that we should demonize religious leaders as pedophiles and groomers but that we should not demonize people such as transpeople, drag queens and Democrats. In addition to churches, pedophiles can also be found in police departments.

The Post conducted an analysis of Bowling Green’s The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database. To be clear, this is a database of crimes committed by police. This database is, as one would expect, incomplete because it relies on reported arrests and hence is certain to underreport police crimes. From 2005 to 2022 17,700 state and local officers were identified as having been charged with crimes. About 1,800 of these officers were charged with a crime involving child sexual abuse. As per the conservative narrative applied to marginalized groups accused of being groomers, the officers typically spent months befriending and grooming the children before sexually abusing them. As many of these officers were convicted, the court documents can usually be found online, and the Washington Post’s claims can be independently confirmed. Unless, of course, one believes that the police and legal system are themselves involved in a conspiracy to falsely claim that some police have sexually abused children.

Given that Republicans are the self-proclaimed protectors of children and enemies of pedophiles, it might be wondered why they are focusing their efforts against people who are not at likely to be pedophiles while seeming to ignore the sexual predators known to be in police departments. As the Washington Post investigation found, while schools, churches and youth programs usually take special effort to address the risk of child sexual abuse, police departments generally do not do this. It was found that police departments hired people despite their having been accused or convicted of child abuse and other serious crimes. It was also found that officers could resign after being accused of inappropriate behavior with children and move to another department. In some cases, accused officers were reinstated and then eventually convicted of abusing children. Police departments also often fail to notice or act on evidence of inappropriate behavior. I must also note that there are many excellent police officers and  I am glad to know some of them through running, gaming, and my recent experiences as a juror.

If Republicans really cared about protecting the children, they would do something to address this. After all, they have adequate energy to fight imaginary dangers in the culture war. Why not use that to address real threats? While this obviously requires speculation, there seem to be two likely reasons the Republican party does not actually care about protecting the children from real pedophiles and groomers.

The first is that the party is focused on using children as tools for political advantage. Accusing institutionalized authorities such as churches and the police of doing what they are in fact doing would not be politically advantageous. But demonizing their political opponents and marginalized people is advantageous.

The second is that the right seems to accept or even praise “transgressions” by the right type of authority figures. While this sounds horrific, it is not actually being a groomer or pedophile that matters but who is being accused. In line with the claim that “every accusation is a confession”, the right wing media has an established record of defending actual pedophiles and sexualizing children. As this is being written, Matt Gaetz is likely to become Attorney General, despite the existence of credible accusations that he had sex with an underage girl.

In closing, while the right professes to be concerned with protecting children from pedophiles and groomers, the evidence shows this is not true. They are, for the most part, focused on falsely accusing their opponents and marginalized groups while largely ignoring the real danger to the children.

 

While it is tempting to focus on a single reason why Harris lost, her defeat was due to the combined effects of various factors ranging from the large to the miniscule. In the run up to the election, Trump supporters posted relentlessly on social media that gas and groceries were cheaper under Trump, and many seem to have voted for Trump to punish Harris and Biden for their economic situation. Harris has also been criticized for being locked into the status quo and was perceived as being a mere continuation of the unpopular Biden presidency and Trump has been able to convey the impression that he will shake things up and damage the status quo, which proved appealing. Running as a moderate centrist who might make a few minor tweaks was not, it turns out, a winning strategy for Harris. Voters correctly believe they are being harmed by the status quo, but their only viable alternatives were voting for someone already presiding over their suffering or for Trump.

It is certainly reasonable to consider the impact of sexism and racism, subconscious or otherwise. As the polls noted, Trump did very well with men, while Harris did well with women (but not well enough). While young men are not a huge demographic, the Democrats seem to be losing the culture war for them. For example, in the popular culture realms of video games, movies and shows, social media influencers have been successful in advancing the narrative that games, shows and movies are bad because they are “woke” (anti-male and anti-white). Other influencers that target young men also tend to be on the right. These culture war victories no doubt helped Trump, especially since the Democrats do not seem inclined to engage much in trying to win that demographic.

An obvious reason why Harris lost is that she was running against Trump. To use a slightly out of date Halloween metaphor, Trump is like a werewolf in that he seems immune to things that would destroy mere humans. For other politicians, a scandal or engaging in weird behavior would end their career, but Trump has proven largely immune to consequences. In a real sense, nothing Trump did had any negative impact on his support. If Harris had been running against anyone else who did what Trump did or acted like him, she would have almost certainly won by a landslide by simply pointing out the scandals, crimes and weird behavior. But she was running against Trump and thus none of this harmed him. For Democrats, their best hope is that no other Republican has Trump’s magical immunity.

Lastly, there is the rhetorical advantage held by Trump. Trump and his supporters fully embraced lying as a strategy, advancing lies about the 2020 election, about Harris, about immigration and anything else they could think of. The “fire hose of falsehood” is almost impossible to defeat with the truth, especially if the lies are repeated across news media and social media. Trump also had an advantage in his focus on negative emotions, such as anger and fear. As a matter of psychology, people weigh the negative more heavily than the positive and this fuels various powerful fallacies and rhetorical devices. While hope and change can win, fear and anger win more often. This focus on lying and negative emotions provides Republicans with a strong rhetorical advantage which Democrats will be hard pressed to counter.

 

One of the many fears about AI is that it will be weaponized by political candidates. In a proactive move, some states have already created laws regulating its use. Michigan has a law aimed at the deceptive use of AI that requires a disclaimer when a political ad is “manipulated by technical means and depicts speech or conduct that did not occur.”  My adopted state of Florida has a similar law that political ads using generative AI requires a disclaimer. While the effect of disclaimers on elections remains to be seen, a study by New York University’s Center on Technology Policy found that research subjects saw candidates who used such disclaimers as “less trustworthy and less appealing.”

The subjects watched fictional political ads, some of which had AI disclaimers, and then rated the fictional candidates on trustworthiness, truthfulness and how likely they were to vote for them. The study showed that the disclaimers had a small but statistically significant negative impact on the perception of these fictional candidates. This occurred whether the AI use was deceptive or more harmless. The study subjects also expressed a preference for using disclaimers anytime AI was used in an ad, even when the use was harmless, and this held across party lines. As attack ads are a common strategy, it is interesting that the study found that such ads with an AI disclaimer backfired, and the study subjects evaluated the target as more trustworthy and appealing than the attacker.

If the study results hold for real ads, these findings might serve to deter the use of AI in political ads, especially attack ads. But it is worth noting that the study did not involve ads featuring actual candidates. Out in the wild, voters tend to be tolerant of lies or even like them when the lies support their political beliefs. If the disclaimer is seen as stating or implying that the ad contains untruths, it is likely that the negative impact of the disclaimer would be less or even nonexistent for certain candidates or messages. This is something that will need to be assessed in the wild.

The findings also suggest a diabolical strategy in which an attack ad with the AI disclaimer is created to target the candidate the creators support. These supporters would need to take care to conceal their connection to the candidate, but this is easy in the current dark money reality of American politics. They would, of course, need to calculate the risk that the ad might work better as an attack ad than a backfire ad. Speaking of diabolical, it might be wondered why there are disclaimer laws rather than bans.

The Florida law requires a disclaimer when AI is used to “depict a real person performing an action that did not actually occur, and was created with the intent to injure a candidate or to deceive regarding a ballot issue.” A possible example of such use seems to occur in an ad by DeSantis’s campaign falsely depicting Trump embracing Fauci in 2023.   It is noteworthy that the wording of the law entails that the intentional use of AI to harm and deceive in political advertising is allowed but merely requires a disclaimer. That is, an ad is allowed to lie but with a disclaimer. This might strike many as odd, but follows established law.

As the former head of the FCC under Obama Tom Wheeler notes, lies are allowed in political ads on federally regulated broadcast channels. As would be suspected, the arguments used to defend allowing lies in political ads are based on the First Amendment. This “right to lie” provides some explanation as to why these laws do not ban the use of AI. It might be wondered why there is not a more general law requiring a disclaimer for all intentional deceptions in political ads. A practical reason is that it is currently much easier to prove the use of AI than it is to prove intentional deception in general. That said, the Florida law specifies intent and the use of AI to depict something that did not occur and proving both does present a challenge, especially since people can legally lie in their ads and insist the depiction is of something real.

 Cable TV channels, such as CNN, can reject ads. In some cases, stations can reject ads from non-candidate outside groups, such as super PACs. Social media companies, such as X and Facebook, have considerable freedom in what they can reject. Those defending this right of rejection point out the oft forgotten fact that the First Amendment legal right applies to the actions of the government and not private businesses, such as CNN and Facebook. Broadcast TV, as noted above, is an exception to this. The companies that run political ads will need to develop their own AI policies while also following the relevant laws.

While some might think that a complete ban on AI would be best, the AI hype has made this a bad idea. This is because companies have rushed to include AI in as many products as possible and to rebrand existing technologies as AI. For example, the text of an ad might be written in Microsoft Word with Grammarly installed and Grammarly is pitching itself as providing AI writing assistance. Programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop also have AI features that have innocuous uses, such as automating the process of improving the quality of a real image or creating a background pattern that might be used in a print ad.  It would obviously be absurd to require a disclaimer for such uses of AI.

For more on cyber policy issues: Hewlett Foundation Cyber Policy Institute (famu.edu)

While the anti-abortion movement claimed a great victory when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party has learned that this victory proved deeply unpopular with the American people. While Democrats favor abortion rights more than Republicans, 64% of surveyed voters say abortion should be always or mostly legal. While some Republican controlled state legislatures have imposed extreme restrictions on abortion rights, abortion rights supporters have won in several state ballots. As this is being written several more states (including my adopted state of Florida) have abortion rights measures on the ballot. Given that the anti-abortion view is held by a minority of voters, it is likely that these measures will pass in many states.

Because the anti-abortion position of the Republican party has proven unpopular and has imposed a political cost, the party’s rhetoric has shifted. The current rhetorical spin is that the Republican party is not against abortion rights. Rather, the party is for states’ rights.  Those critical of this rhetoric like to point out that appeals to states’ rights was also a tactic employed by the southern states to defend slavery. While the analogy is imperfect, the comparison does have some merit.

The states’ rights argument for slavery amounts to contending that the states should have the freedom to decide whether they will allow slavery, and this is usually phrased in terms of an appeal to democracy. That is, the citizens of the state should vote to decide whether some people can be denied freedom and be owned. An obvious defect with this reasoning is that it rests on the assumption that it is a matter of freedom of choice to take away freedom of choice.

A similar defect arises with the states’ rights rhetoric in the abortion debate. If it is accepted that the citizens of the state have the right to decide the issue of abortion because they should be free of federal law, then it is problematic to argue that the state has the right to take away the freedom of women to decide whether they get an abortion. If choice is important, then having legal abortion allows women to choose: a woman is not mandated to have an abortion nor forbidden, so she can make the choice. Hence, this rhetorical move entails that abortion should be legal nationwide.

Someone might counter this by taking the anti-abortion stance that women should not be allowed that choice, perhaps by drawing an analogy with murder. After all, they might argue, we would not want people free to chose murder. But the problem with that reply is that by using the states’ rights rhetoric, the Republican party has acknowledged that the legality of abortion should be a matter of choice, and this makes it difficult to argue that abortion should not be a choice for individual women.

While intended to address the backlash from the unpopularity of the success of the anti-abortion movement, this rhetoric has caused backlash from that movement. Some anti-abortion activists have urged their followers to withdraw their support of Trump. There is the question of how much impact this will have on the election, given that anti-abortion voters will almost certainly not vote for Harris. But it might cause a few single-issue voters to stay home on election day or not vote for Trump.

Pro-abortion rights people are almost certainly not going to be fooled by this rhetoric, since they know this is a rhetorical shift and not a change in policy or goals. While it might win over a few of the undecided voters, it seems to have two effects. The first is that it gives Republicans an established rhetorical talking point to use whenever they are asked about abortion. The second is that it provides those who want to vote for anti-abortion Republicans but who are not anti-abortion themselves a way to rationalize their vote. They can insist the Republican party is “pro-choice” because their new rhetorical position is that the states should chose. But not that women should chose.

The states’ rights rhetorical move could be an effective strategy. While the anti-abortion movement would prefer a federal abortion ban, having the states decide is better for them than having abortion legal nationwide. After all, some states have put abortion bans in place and these have been wins for the movement. But the obvious downside for this movement is that some states have put in place protections for abortion rights, despite the anti-abortion movement’s desire to make the choice for everyone.

In closing, the states’ rights argument is a position that cannot be effectively defended, because its foundation is the principle of choice, and this entails that it is the women who should make the choice for themselves.