I have linked to lots of articles from fact-based media and think tanks that I’ve read over the past few months. Feel free to click out to them and read or watch them, all are important. Or just click here and see what else I’ve been writing!
There’s a massively important general election on Tuesday November 8 but because we don’t have a Trump vs. Biden or Johnson vs. Corbyn as top billing it somehow feels like the stakes are lower.
Far from it.
At the turn of the year I wrote that the three major issues for the U.K. and the U.S. this year were climate, COVID and democracy. It turns out that our tolerance for death is high — the U.S. will ignore up to 5,000 and the U.K. up to 2,000 COVID deaths a month as the price of doing business, and the third-choice Tories are still refusing to call a vote. So for this November here are the questions left for U.S. voters: “will you going to vote for democracy?” and “are you going to vote to confront climate change?”
However the ballots are cast, it is important to vote for American democracy — including that candidates should be bound by the rules of democratic elections and that every voter should have their vote count equally. It’s important that people vote for candidates who believe that women, Jews, Black people, migrants and LGBTQ+ people should not be discriminated against on the basis of sex, ethnicity, sexual or gender orientation, or country of birth.
It’s crucial that people vote for candidates who support the rights of people with wombs to have abortions. It’s important that people cast ballots for people who believe in science and that climate change is empirically verified. And, though it shouldn’t need to be said, it’s important that people don’t vote for the tribe that can grab the most before the apocalypse, but rather vote for candidates who believe we can still make the world a livable, sustainable place.
In the U.K., the illegal Brexit vote means that Conservatives are entrenched in their incompetence, acting in discredited ways, that hurt poor people and refugees most, though, in the end, it will hurt everyone but the billionaires. As a result, the Tories are getting a battering from the market. They won’t call a general election, even though it would be best for the country, because they would lose power. At least, though, they acknowledge the validity of elections, that women have a right to abortions and that human activity is causing climate change at an increasing rate.
In the U.S. things are slightly different. Elections are set, but only one party is committed to them. The Republicans have, despite losing the popular vote in every presidential election but one since 1988, stacked a Supreme Court that has denied women’s rights and, in taking up a case about the radical independent state legislature theory next year, may entrench a small bigoted republican faction in power over the whole nation.
That same party, funded by fossil fuel companies and billionaires has, for this election, entered a slate of election-deniers, while existing Republican officials have denied access to voters by gerrymandering an already unfair system, disenfranchising Black men, removing ballot drop boxes and shrinking mail-in voting.
The New York Times described the voter suppression this way, “Strict limits imposed on ballot drop boxes, voter rolls purged, harsh penalties created for election workers who might make mistakes on the job.” And the bend-over-backwards-to-pretend-the-GOP-isnt-crazy-NYTimes even made this video.
The Republicans have pretty much engaged in the definition of moving the goalposts.
It’s sometimes difficult to tell whether people are being partisan. “Oh, you only say that because you are taking sides.” Well, just as there are good mathematical ways of knowing whether a redistricting is unfairly gerrymandered, there are good philosophical ways to understand whether a political position is unfair.
People have used the phrase “love they neighbor” in trite ways but that doesn’t take away from the profound philosophical implications the phrase has for fairness. One of my favorite non-scriptural understandings of that phrase come from Rawls the philosopher who translated it into his theory of “ The veil of ignorance.“
According to this theory everyone has to make choices for society as if they did not know where in that society they would end up. That is, as if they were wearing a “veil of ignorance” as to their own position. Obviously societies should not be homogenous, but in making opportunities for diverse types of people, politicians wearing a “veil of ignorance” should make the bundles of opportunities that are laid out for their constituents equally appealing.
This means that the people who are in charge of making decisions for society — and in a democracy that should be the demos the people — should act to provide everyone with a bundle of goods, rights and opportunities that if anyone could choose they would choose.
The power of the model is that it doesn’t require everyone to be totally equal and homogenous just to give everyone a type of equality. By stepping outside of society we sidestep any question of group loyalty because favoring one group over another is fundamentally unfair. It’s “do as you would be done by” on a massive scale.
Kindergarten teachers have most of life’s answers: “play nicely with others,” “share your toys,” “think about other people, even if they are different from you.” Some politicians, like Ron DeSantis, want to stop that type of “woke” teaching. Maybe if we all stopped thinking about other people and what they wanted we could all start to amass our own toys no matter the cost.
Other Things I’ve Written Since the Last Time
Most notably
I interviewed Ken Burns about his “U.S. and the Holocaust” documentary.
Most excitingly
I wrote a new chapter for my novel (“Small Rooms” a darkly comic retelling of a Jewish Hamlet in the bathrooms of New York) and LABA presented it as a staged reading at the 14th St Y. Hopefully a video excerpt forthcoming.
For The Howler
I wrote about the deep global shame that is the fraudulent FIFA World Cup in murderous Qatar
For the Forward I reviewed
A fascinating film about Samaritans.
The 6 hour PBS documentary “U.S. and the Holocaust” to see whether it was the “Shoah” for our time?