A tale of two tales: Are we fucked, or is everything awesome?

 In order to motivate this morning's post, I have two interview links for you.  One, you can read in short order.  The other is a youtube link, which is about an hour.  First, from Vox, Sean Illing interviews David Faris about the state of democracy in America.  Next, John Wood Jr. interviews Steven Pinker about a lot of things, including the quality of human life today, the scope of history, perspective, and he even touches on cancel culture.  The Pinker interview is worth your time, but of course, an hour is a long time, so I'll give you the basic points relevant to this post.

Anyway, Faris makes the basic claim that American democracy is kind of fucked.  As our latest demonstration, consider the failure of the January 6 Commission.  Why did it fail?  Republicans don't want an investigation of any kind, they don't want to talk about it, they don't want to talk about their complicity, and... they're gonna do it again.  You know that, right?  Faris's basic point is that a lot of people are complacent about the state of American democracy, and insufficiently concerned about what the Republicans will do the next time they lose, which is... steal the election straight-up, incite massive riots on a larger scale than January 6, or both.  Look around at what the states are doing.  Treat this like a chess game.  Pieces are being put into place.

I don't think that Faris holds any answers.  He's peddling a book, and while I have not read the book, the proposals in his book are old-fashioned ones.  They won't cure what's happening, which is a party gone mad.  No institutional approach, no policy and no rule change will make Republicans sane.

And then there's Steven Pinker.  Always listen to Steven Pinker.  Remember that no-hero-worship rule, and that applies.  He is, however, very smart.  Here's the gist of what he's saying these days.  If you look at the raw data, life these days, on the grand scale, is pretty good.  What you have to do is separate the quantitative data from the news stories that grab the headlines.  And that may sound familiar, because I have a similar line that I've been peddling for years:  the paradox of news.  If an event gets covered by the news, that is because it is a deviation from the ordinary, but when you see it in the news, that tricks your statistically disinclined brain into thinking that it is normal and ordinary because you see it, which is exactly the opposite of the process that gets it into the news.

Pinker applies a similar line of reasoning to explain why people have more negative views of reality than the quantitative data justify.  Bad events get covered because they grab headlines, but slow-moving progress does not because it is not a discrete event.  So Pinker basically says, chill.  It's cool, man!  And that's pretty much my response to a lot of those news stories where you see something bad happening and everyone freaks the fuck out.

So a tale of two tales.  Pinker and Faris.  Faris says we're fucked.  Democracy is spiraling down towards the abyss.  Pinker says life is awesome, just look at the quantitative data.  And I look at both arguments and...

I like both.

Democracy is on very shaky ground.  And quantitatively, Pinker's right.

Is everything awesome?  Are we fucked?  Is there a contradiction?

Let's see if we can reconcile Pinker and Faris.

First, it must be noted that Pinker's analysis is retrospective, whereas Faris's claim here is primarily prospective.  The evidence for the downward spiral is retrospective-- what Republicans have been doing-- but the facts of those actions are not inconsistent with modern life being objectively, quantitatively better than at any point in history.  Can those actions exist in a state of economic and social health (fluctuations notwithstanding)?  Of course.

One of the political science puzzles has been the fact that the Republican Party turned so strongly against democracy when the country was doin' fine.  In 2016, when the Republican Party nominated and elected a would-be autocratic, psychopathic, lying piece of shit who tore down as many small-d democratic institutions as he could manage, while undermining belief in the concept of democracy among his dupe-followers, social scientists could not fall back on that old trope of laziness, the Hitler-hypothesis.  The country's economy was in shambles!  They were bereft of economic opportunity!  Or some such horseshit.  People tried, of course.  It was not difficult to find pseudoscientific analysis claiming that the Trump phenomenon was about people feeling like they didn't have economic opportunity, or something.  Yet the 2016 economy was quite good, and getting better.  And, as has historically been the case, higher incomes were associated with higher likelihoods of voting Republican.  Mostly, this kind of bullshit was just people looking for excuses to avoid talking about Trump using racist and xenophobic appeals to rednecks.  Look, I'm done making excuses for the woke crowd, but that doesn't mean we should paper over what Trump actually said and did.

But the Hitler line was always that it was a response to the collapse of the German economy, and the general blather one would get about fascism and all that was that people would turn to that kind of idiocy when everything fell to shit.  Well... in 2016, not only were we fine in Pinker's terms, putting the country on the broad swath of history, the economic trends in narrow terms were pretty good.

So yes.  In answer to my pre-rant question, the GOP's actions against democracy can take place in the context of an economy and general social situation that meet Pinker's data-driven assessment of life.

What this means is that what has happened is a "moving pieces on the board in preparation" phenomenon.

I'm going to return to an analogy I made regularly as the 2020 election approached.  'Mate in three.  This is a phrase one uses in chess, indicating that checkmate is now inevitable in three moves.  You can attempt to evade it, but I have set up my pieces such that no matter what you do, I'll checkmate you in three moves.  This is how chess works.  I'm moving my pieces into position, and while doing so, I may not be taking pieces.  I may actually decline to take pieces, sacrifice pieces, etc.  It's all about setting up the board for the checkmate.  If you are counting points-- one point per pawn, three points for knights and bishops, and so forth-- you are missing the point.  Watch the positions.

In a sense, then, Pinker's analysis is counting points.  Faris is looking at the position.  One may say, then, that Pinker is irrelevant, but when "points" include things like life expectancy, literacy rates, and such, I'm gonna say points matter.  And then the question is, what happens as we get closer and closer to that endpoint?

I will admit that I thought the Republicans would successfully steal 2020.  I was wrong.  But they are regrouping.  This is looking very, very scary.  They are moving towards replacing state-level election administrators, preparing to have state legislatures overturn state level election results...

I don't give a flying fuck about most of what the Democrats are doing.  This is fucking terrifying.

Two tales.  Quantitatively, things are awesome.  Looking at the pieces on the board... we're goin' nowhere good.  And until someone figures out how to talk sense to crazy people, I don't know how that changes.

Do I quote Emerson?  Whitman?  Nah, fuck it.  Let's have some music.  Roscoe Holcomb, "Trouble In Mind."  A classic song, with so many versions, but I'm feeling Appalachian this morning.