a bonobo humanity?

the mind’s new minefield

The main problem with the US Federal political system, it seems to me, is that far too many United Staters, including the nation’s political pundits, think there’s nothing much wrong with their political system. Jingoism doesn’t tend to foster a reformist agenda.

Here’s a simple example. On MSNBC, during a discussion of the two failed impeachment proceedings against then President Trump, Chuck Rosenberg, a lawyer and NBC pundit, referred to the resignation of Britain’s former PM Boris Johnson. ‘Removing a President should be hard’, he said with much gravitas, ‘we certainly don’t want to be able to dump our political leaders the way they do in Britain’. I felt a very strong urge to scream at the screen “YES YOU DO!” It should be policies and effective governance that counts, not pumped-up individuals.

It has since become clear that even a clear-cut federal election loss isn’t enough to convince some that their time of leadership has come to an end. This isn’t particularly surprising in the case of Trump, who ‘always wins’ in spite of losing the 2016 election to Hilary Clinton by almost 3 million votes. But of course he ‘won’ that year by virtue of a bizarre system known as the Electoral College. In fact he was the fifth candidate in US history to win only by virtue of this system after losing the popular vote. Even so, we have to ask how such a profoundly ignorant, lazy, corrupt, habitually duplicitous buffoon could have managed to score anything like enough votes to take over the running of the wealthiest, most heavily armed and internationally dominant country on the planet.

Well, needless to say, the problem lies with the USA’s socio-political system, not with Trump, who likely hasn’t added a single neuron to his pre-frontal cortex since the age of seven.

Firstly, that impeachment issue, and the concept of Presidential immunity. Impeachment, which either doesn’t exist or is never used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK or Ireland (and I think that’s all of the other majority-English speaking democracies), is an overly politicised weapon, best abandoned. If a President has broken a law – and he (it’s aways been a he) or she should be subject to all the laws that other citizens are subject to – then they should be tried by the courts, not by any political body. And it goes without saying that court justices and magistrates should not be appointed by political bodies but by independent authorities, insofar as this is possible.

Secondly, on immunity. The British monarch is immune from prosecution, a hangover from the days of Divine Rights. Fortunately, these monarchs today have no political power, and I’m not opposed to vestigial monarchies, such as exist in Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium, as a link to the past, an anchoring national symbol and a tourist drawcard, though I do think they should all be as subject to the nation’s laws as all other citizens. US Presidential immunity, however, is far more disturbing, as Trump’s attempts to utilise it reveals. So, in some respects, Trump is an asset, in that he’s exposed the gaping holes in the US Presidential system. Will United Staters unite to fix their system? I very much doubt it. Recall that their nation’s Attorney-General, or chief law enforcement officer, is chosen by the President himself, and recall that William Barr, realising full well that Trump was looking for a potential A-G that would protect him from the consequences of his own crimes, wrote an ‘unsolicited memo’, which some lawyers (non-Republicans of course), criticised for

its sweeping views of the president’s constitutional role and prerogatives, including the notion that the president has “absolute” and “all-encompassing” constitutional authority over actions by executive branch officers in carrying out law enforcement powers given to them by Congress, including decisions about criminal investigation and prosecution.

and so forth (this from the ACLU) . Barr went on to become Attorney-General and to suppress any action based on the Mueller report’s damning findings. Since then, Presidential immunity has been argued with immense tediousness by people who should know better. Of course there should be no immunity for politicians of any kind. Their actions can have huge effects, so it stands to reason that a whole suite of laws should regulate their behaviour, above and beyond the behaviour of others. And the greater the politician’s power, the more it should be constrained by law. But of course, much better not to give your political leader so much power in the first place. These people are public servants after all.

This brings me to the USA’s attitude to their Presidents, which strikes me as quasi-religious. They even, rather bizarrely, remember them by number.

Here’s a bit of my view on this. The USA is the land of the super-hero. Make no mistake, Batman, Superman,  Spider-Man, Wonderwoman, The Justice League of America, all these I alone can fix it guys are US-born aliens. And not only do they defeat all the bad guys, they clean up or go over the heads of all the corrupt or incompetent local officials. It’s a childish fantasy but it seems the USA’s great unwashed are full of these childish fantasists

In the USA, the President gets to choose many powerful figures apart from the A-G and the Vice President, who have never been elected by the people. Unlike in the Westminster system, none of these powerful figures have to show up in Parliament/Congress, to face opposition or questioning of their actions. They seem more like Presidential courtiers than government ministers. Here’s a quote from the White House website:

The President also appoints the heads of more than 50 independent federal commissions, such as the Federal Reserve Board or the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as federal judges, ambassadors, and other federal offices.

Of course, in Australia and other Westminster-based nations, the Prime Minister (primus inter pares) gets to select and reshuffle her cabinet, but all are elected officials who must work within the parliament and within spitting distance of the opposition. I’ve written elsewhere about my – discomfort, shall we say – with adversarial systems, and I would like to see more of a multi-party system in all of the countries of the WEIRD world. The USA has become more of an Us v Them system than most, to its detriment, I think. After all, governments usually ‘get in’ by relatively slender margins and will be ousted by slender margins in their turn, and yet we constantly see the incoming government overturning the best work of the previous government, and then having their changes overturned in their turn. Surely we can do better than this.

Under Trump, of course, the partisanship has become more extreme, and the Republican Party itself has become bewitched, bothered and bewildered by their nation’s laziest and most corrupt and deceitful leader. And surely, to understand this you have to understand his appeal, for the non-cognoscenti in particular.

Voting isn’t compulsory in the Land of Freedom, so it’s not surprising that millions don’t give a damn about their government, but many of those people must be feeling the squeeze. The USA has the largest per capita imprisonment rate in the WEIRD world (3.5 times higher than here in Australia), as well as the death penalty in many states (Australia abandoned the death penalty nationwide nearly 60 years ago). It has the lowest federal minimum wage, and a rich-poor divide much larger than ours (Australia has the highest minimum wage, federally, outside of Luxembourg). It also fares poorly in terms of basic healthcare and education, and its high levels of Christian religiosity – only about 5% of United Staters identify themselves as atheists – helps explain the current disastrous situation regarding women’s control of their bodies. And with the USA’s more or less never-ending ‘war on drugs’, the country’s poor would be ill-advised to find relief in that area.

And yet. Even with all these problems and disaffections, I find it hard to credit the public gullibility vis-a-vis Trump. Reading history helps, sort of. Hitler had millions of admirers, both inside and outside of Germany, before his downfall, and the same could be said for countless dictators of nations large and small – they’re not called populist leaders for nothing. How do we explain this? – by looking at the situation, and most notably the economic situation, of the dictator’s followers, learning about their grievances, their fears, their group dynamics, sharpened nowadays by social media….

Here’s another anecdote. A few years ago, shortly after the 2020 Presidential election, in an attempt to get out of the house and meet real people I decided to go to a meet-up (here in South Australia) with the impressive name ‘Deep Thinkers’, with decidedly mixed results. After a couple of pleasant chats I moved on to buttonhole a bloke sitting at the bar. As he looked Middle-Eastern, I asked him where he was from (I didn’t say he looked Middle-Eastern). ‘Port Pirie’, he said, naming a small industrial town about 250 kilometres north of Adelaide. I felt as if I’d made a blunder, but we went on to talk about infotech, his field of work, and computer literacy. Then, during a lull, apropos of nothing, he said, ‘I think Trump is one of the greatest Presidents the USA has ever had’. Well, needless to say, things went downhill fast after that (though on the whole, relations remained amicable), but on later reflection, I felt the effects of trepverter, a Yiddish word, supposedly meaning ‘a witty comeback you think of too late’, but which I think of more broadly, as a response I only come up with when I’m alone and my head is clear (I seem to live most of my life in this broadly defined trepverter world). So instead of rabbiting on about Trump’s ignorance and incompetence, I’d have done better to inquire how my interlocutor had arrived at this conclusion. Was he perchance a historian of the US Presidency? Would he be able to name any of the other great US Presidents? Provide me with a top ten, along with a bottom ten? The point being that it was obvious that he was not an authority on US politics, which was confirmed by other remarks he subsequently made, that he was a ‘conservative Christian’, and that he ‘never listens to the mainstream’ (a particularly telling remark). His ‘opinion’ of Trump was purely a parroting of a social media meme, and I rests my case.

This social media phenomenon is quite powerful, and it’s relatively new, and certainly has disturbing elements. To be explored in future posts.