Principle and the 2016 Presidential election

We Democrats can learn from the Republicans' mistakes this year. The Republican Party is at war with itself, and it's not just the Establishment vs. Trump. The Evangelical wing is also battling Trump. His conservatism is not pure enough, and his lifestyle is not approved. All but the dimmest among them recognize his "New York values."

I have noted previously that, in the race for purity, the Republicans who rational people would assume could not be farther to the right are displaced and distrusted by ever purer politicians. For example, Grover Norquist, architect of the slashing-of-spending pledge that once marked the true conservative is now distrusted by people to his right. Solidly right-wing congressmen, such as Paul Ryan and John Boehner are unable to control their party members.

Purity is poisonous.

There are Democrats who, citing principle, cannot vote for Hillary Clinton. Principle is a fine thing, but sometimes fidelity to one principle can blind the faithful to another, higher principle. The higher principle of which I speak will surprise nobody: We must defeat the Republicans in 2016, and beat them decisively. I want to run up the score to LBJ-Goldwater proportions.

If this election amounted to a contest between Hillary and one of the reasonable Republicans (who, unfortunately, seem only to have existed in the past), the "Hillary is a corporate shill" principle would hold up under scrutiny.

But 2016 is no ordinary election.

"Science is the record of dead religions." -- Oscar Wilde

Humans are blessed, or perhaps cursed, with the need to know the how and why of everything. Hence, science. But when you think about it, wasn't religion an early attempt at science? How did the world begin? Well, let's see, it could have happened like this... Why are humans so crazy? Well, let's think up a possible story to explain that.

The trouble starts when a better narrative comes along, but people won't let go of the old one(s). So many people have clung to pre-scientific beliefs, some of which are thousands of years out of date. This has potentially disastrous consequences in the real world. Physicist Sean Carroll, in his "Preposterous Universe" blog, points out that the preponderance of outmoded beliefs severely inhibits our ability to work out our problems.

Over the last four hundred or so years, human beings have achieved something truly amazing: we understand the basic rules governing the operation of the world around us. Everything we see in our everyday lives is simply a combination of three particles — protons, neutrons, and electrons — interacting through three forces — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. That is it; there are no other forms of matter needed to describe what we see, and no other forces that affect how they interact in any noticeable way.

.

.

.

As far as our immediate world is concerned, we know what the rules are. A staggeringly impressive accomplishment, that somehow remains uncommunicated to the overwhelming majority of educated human beings.

Knowing these rules should prompt us to throw out a lot of silliness:

[T]here’s no question that this knowledge has crucial implications for how we think about our lives. Astrology does not work; there is no such thing as telekinesis; quantum mechanics does not tell you that you can change reality just by thinking about it. There is no life after death; there’s no spiritual essence that can preserve a human consciousness outside its physical body. Life is a chemical reaction; there is no moment at conception or otherwise when a soul is implanted in a body. We evolved as a result of natural processes over the history of the Earth; there is no supernatural intelligence that created us and maintains an interest in our behavior. There is no Natural Law that specifies how human beings should live, including who they should marry. There is no strong conception of free will, in the sense that we are laws unto ourselves over and above the laws of nature. The world follows rules, and we are part of the world.

At the risk of quoting more from Carroll's blog entry than is ethical, he goes on to imagine what sorts of discussions we could have about living in the world if people could let go of the religious outlook. He lists many of our pressing moral questions and concludes:

I understand the reluctance to let go of religion as the lens through which we view questions of meaning and morality. For thousands of years it was the best we could do; it provided social structures and a framework for thinking about our place in the world. But that framework turns out not to be right, and it’s time to move on.

Rather than opening our eyes and having the courage and clarity to accept the world as it is, and to tackle some of the real challenges it presents, as a society we insist on clinging to ideas that were once perfectly reasonable, but have long since outlived their usefulness. Nature obeys laws, we are part of nature, and our job is to understand our lives in the context of reality as it really is. Once that attitude goes from being “extremist” to being mainstream, we might start seeing some real progress.

Sean Carroll has a book coming out in May, called The Big Picture, in which he makes an attempt to answer the big questions in light of our current knowledge. I look forward to reading it.

Trump would be the nation's Misery-Dealer-in-Chief.

Donald Trump has attracted to him a gang of ready-made thugs who would like nothing better than to bust some non-white heads and not suffer any consequences.

Now, I tell myself that not enough Americans are stupid enough to make this fascist President, but this is as close as we've come in a long time to doing serious damage to our republic, and I worry about the actions of two kinds of voter: the low information voter, and the high misinformation voter.

The high misinformation voter is Trump's bread and butter, because this voter is willfully misinformed, and is really not interested in real, observable facts. The high misinformation voter is nearly impossible to reach, but I am confident that such voters do not exist in sufficient numbers to win an election.

But so many people in this country are not sufficiently engaged in the process of Democracy or the study of history to know a good candidate from a bad one. Donald Trump is attractive to many of these voters because of his very candor. They think, "He's not a politician. I know where he's coming from. How refreshing!" (To the detriment of career politicians, they certainly have mastered the technique of not answering any question they don't want to, and therefore have narrowed acceptable discourse way too much, and they don't display much backbone during the election season, but...)

The low information voter likes the candor, but does not seem to understand the ugliness and danger of this particular candidate's plans. White supremacist goons are made bold by the way Donald Trump encourages them to rough up brown people at his rallies. It is not as long a distance from a Trump candidacy to a fascist state as the ignorant voter thinks, if he thinks about it at all. And I've been wondering lately, now that World War II is seventy years in the past, whether younger voters are connected with its memory enough to know just what miseries Hitler and Mussolini inflicted on the people of Europe. The Jews, of course, were the main target of Fascism. That said, almost no Europeans avoided suffering in the ensuing war.

Donald Trump is a bully and a liar, and his supporters don't care. They have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew, what it means to be an American--what it means to be America.

A Donald Trump presidency would make more people suffer than an ignorant voter might think. It is not long before a government that persecutes "them" gets around to persecuting "us," too.