Tag: election 2018

Some Thoughts In the Wake of This Week’s Election

Results of Tuesday’s election were not conclusive enough for anyone to feel particularly triumphant, nor entirely defeated. We must move past “us” and “them” if we are to move forward as a country. How do we do that?

While it may not have been a resounding victory for either of the country’s two major political “tribes,” I consider the 2018 election to be about as positive a result as we could have hoped for. We remain a deeply divided country. The election results reflect that. Any result that went farther in one direction or the other would have been seen by the other side as unjust.

Even so, the current status quo satisfies no one. Both of our major ideological camps suffer from groupthink and blind spots, and both sides view the other as not dealing with reality. I see that both sides use critical thinking, but selectively: only to question the opposition’s narrative, never the one they subscribe to.

President Trump manufactures a constant string of lies (6420 untruths documented in his first 649 days as President.) He uses anti-press rhetoric as a smoke screen. It’s a strategy that’s proven effective with those that already agree with him. Trump does have a point about the press, yet completely obliterates it with his deliberate lying. Still, the mainstream press is not innocent, and is subject to the wishes and demands of its corporate ownership.

The charge “fake news!” resonates because there’s some validity to it. The media exhibits pro-corporate bias, constantly offers up false equivalencies, oversimplifies complex issues, and ignores important stories that contradict the accepted narrative the media is at pains to keep intact. Over the years, the press has done enough damage to its own credibility that the president’s protests fall on some sympathetic ears, even though he sources much of his information from a television news outlet that falsifies information more than almost any other.

Not that the competing opposite-partisan cable news outlet fares all that much better when fact-checked.

No wonder trust in the news media is so low. Yet those who consume news invariably choose sources that confirm their biases rather than posting the complicated and sometimes even contradictory truth. The cost of this is as we see: a democracy that functions less and less well, and a population that increasingly fails to realize that we are all in the same leaky boat.

We shut each other out when we should be listening most intently to the voices we disagree with. We decide that those who can’t even accept what we know are facts are just not worth talking to. Without the ability to reason with each other, we subject those we disagree with to dehumanizing ad hominem assumptions. The only response we see as valid in these circumstances is force. We have to win our victories at the polls, and when we don’t win there, we don’t accept defeat, we just become more bitterly entrenched, because they won’t see what we maintain is simple common sense. How can anything but tragedy result?

My suggestion is that we try something new… well, actually old, as old as the age of reason, as old as Socrates, as old as the Buddha. Let’s try dialogue. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s look for the ways we agree rather than the ways our position is superior to those we disagree with.

Dialogue begins with humility and compassion: two things sorely lacking in our current environment, and which we desperately need to cultivate. It’s important to understand that dialogue isn’t surrender, it isn’t weakness. Dialogue actually requires great personal strength and integrity, along with a willingness to be vulnerable. Dialogue has a lot in common with love. You could say that it’s a way of loving humanity, because it seeks uplift in a dynamic way, as opposed to debate, which seeks to declare a winner and a loser.

I think we’ve had enough of picking winners at others’ expense.

Election Jitters 2018

A meditation

As a transgender person and a Green, I’m viewing the trends in US culture and politics with increasing concern. In the days leading up to next week’s election, I monitor polling at FiveThirtyEight and elsewhere, looking for signs of what’s to come.

That FiveThirtyEight was less than accurate in the 2016 election cycle means that  I can’t trust what I see in those maps and charts. I honestly have no idea what this country will wake up to this coming Wednesday morning. Like many of my friends, I can neither look away nor stop fretting about it. It’s difficult not to feel that the future of this country — that my own future — hangs in the balance.

My hunch is that things are going to go a little better than expected for the left. I’ve seen signs that point in other directions: I also recognize that living in Massachusetts puts me in a liberal bubble; things in Texas or Indiana may fail to conform to my expectations. The polling aggregators show the conventional wisdom, that the Democratic party will retake the House of Representatives, but that the Senate is most likely to continue in Republican hands. That’s not the best of all possible worlds, but it would at least slow down the rapid slide towards fascism the country may currently be in.

Many of the more vulnerable folks in this country won’t fare well, even under the stasis of a partial Democratic victory, but the status quo is better in the short run than the regression towards darkness that I fear. The problem is that the status quo is not nearly good enough. Protecting and uplifting our most vulnerable citizens will still not be done as it should given the best possible results of Tuesday’s vote.

I have a sneaking hope that the Democrats will take back control of the Senate as well as the House, because the effects of recent events may not be showing up yet in current polling. There is some Republican backlash against the Trump contingent, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the establishment media overemphasizes this.

Should the Republican Party maintain control of all branches of government as a result of Tuesday’s election, I fear that some Americans may not be safe. There have been threats made, and recent events have underlined those threats: for instance the MAGAbomber attacks on prominent Trump critics and two racially-motivated mass shootings, all in the last week. Trump himself has said that there will be violence if the Democrats should fare well instead, though he falsely claims that leftists will instigate it.

I’m trying to keep my optimism, and hoping we all find our way past the delusional tendencies of these times. May the country move towards justice come Tuesday.

The End of an Empire

In the example of the medieval Roman Empire, I see lessons for us in the modern era.

It took centuries for the Byzantine Empire to fall. In fact, Constantinople was sacked on 4 separate occasions: in 1081 when Alexios I Komnenos wrested power from Nykephoros III Botaneiates, in 1204 when the Latins — agents of the Holy Roman Emperor in Rome — took the city from the Byzantines, in 1261 when the Nicaeans under Michael VII Palaiologos retook the city and made it once again the seat of the Empire, and then in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed II finally ended the Roman Empire for once and all time.

I have been thinking about the process by which the Empire failed, and trying to contextualize what happened nearly six hundred years ago against what is happening here and now, in the US. There are a few points I linger over: things that cause me both trepidation and hope.

When Alexios came to power, some of the factors that led to the demise of the Empire were already in place. The Empire had been stable for centuries in part because succession to the throne was generally orderly. Alexios took power by coup: he had been a successful general, and from that platform was able to raise enough support from the army to mount an attack on the capital. For most of the history of the Empire to that point, civilian and military leadership had been kept separate. Alexios was one of a stream of Generals to have risen to power in the years preceding his ascension to the throne. One thing that can be said of Alexios is that he fostered a period of apparent stability: he himself held power for almost 40 years, and his next two successors had similar reigns.

In addition to altering the power structure of the Empire, Alexios also created a situation, out of apparent necessity, which contributed greatly to the eventual demise of the Empire. The Emperor Nykephoros, whom he had supplanted, had drained the Empire’s finances. At the time that Alexios took power, the Empire was facing an invasion threat from Robert Guiscard, a Norman who had risen to power on the Italian peninsula and then set his sites on the throne of the Byzantine Empire. In order for Alexios to meet the threat of invasion by Guiscard, he had to negotiate help from another foreign power: the Venetians, who had a substantial navy. He made certain promises to them, including the privilege of importing and exporting goods to Constantinople without paying any tax. The Venetians also gained control of a section of the capital. Eventually, similar deals were made with other Italian city-states, including the Genoans, and the Pisans. This caused the Empire to lose a crucial revenue stream, and they were never able to recover from the loss. In the end, it also gave the Latins entrée into the city so that they could take it from the Byzantines themselves in 1204: the second sacking of Constantinople.

Yet even from this, the Empire was eventually able to reconstitute itself for a time. Remember: they were Romans. That identity sustained them through some serious crises, and even an apparent collapse. I don’t wish to draw the parallel too closely, but my take on this story includes the suggestion that a great country like the Byzantine Empire, or the United States, does not fall easily or quickly.

That demise the Byzantines ultimately faced at the hands of the Ottoman Turks was centuries in the making. Perhaps the alarmists and naysayers in our own time are too pessimistic. Perhaps this country is not so near its end as they might suspect. And perhaps, given the will and the force of commitment to our better natures and our strengths as a nation, we might yet survive and even thrive in the coming centuries.