Endgame: Virus spreads, Trump tweets conspiracy.

The optics on this are terrible.  Is it possible there is some subtle genius at work?  

Or, maybe, he is looking ahead to the next job.

There are two big things happening in the news.  One is that the COVID virus is spreading rapidly now. The other is that Trump is bunkered, playing golf and otherwise busy trying to overturn the election. 

What is going on?

First, the virus. Truth is, containing the virus is a lost cause and Trump knows it. He let the genie out of the bottle and the only way to stop it now is to do things Americans are unwilling to do and will complain bitterly about and which Trump has already said he won't call for. So Trump is doing the cynical thing. He is disassociating himself from a losing cause, and ignoring the explosion in the case and death rate. Let Rachel Maddow talk about how worried she is about her dear sick partner, and let Biden deal with the fact that now 2,000 people a day are dying. His problem. Let young people take their chances. Let old folks shelter. 

There is no benefit to Trump for being associated with COVID deaths and bemoaning them beyond a brief courtesy "every death a tragedy" comment if he cares to bother. News reports of deaths in my community yesterday described seven new deaths, a record. The victims were ages 91, 74, 77, 89, 94, 86, and 81. The news stories about them mentioned "underlying conditions." The media doesn't say it outright, but they absorbed the Trump message, whether they know it or not.  

Going viral

The big Trump meaning in all this is clear: COVID is no big deal, unless you are already old and sick, in which case, gosh, sorry, but you were going to die pretty soon anyhow. That is why ages and underlying conditions are listed.

Trump says it's not It's not his fault people are dying, and not the reason to change national policy. Trump does not say this in words, but that is the message. It cannot be said explicitly, but it is communicated by what he is not doing. No more COVID briefings. No urging people to use masks. No more bemoaning the spread or doing anything about it. He is golfing, and tweeting.

Meanwhile, Trump says that he is responsible for creating the vaccine. That is what people should associate with Trump. Fox News host Geraldo Rivera says it should be named after Trump. 

Second, the effort to get battleground state legislatures to void the election and have them cast electoral votes for him. As of this morning, Trump now looks intransigent and petulant. It could have worked, but the election was just not quite close enough and the disruptions that could have happened--a Post Office strike, election day riots disrupting polling places, strategic power outages--did not happen.  People were prepared, but maybe we just got lucky. Activists on either side could have imagined themselves to be doing good work by disrupting the election and given reason for people to consider the election unfair. Trump had a plan that he announced: Call the election fatally flawed, void the election in key states, and have the legislatures award the electoral votes to him. The circumstances on the ground confounded him.

There were heroes, many unnamed and unknown in county courthouses. One, in the office of Georgia Secretary of State Republican Brad Raffensberger, got his back up when Republican Senate candidates who now face a run-off election said he had screwed up managing the election. After all, they expected to win and didn't.  He said the election was well run and would withstand an audit, and it did. Republican Governor Kemp backed him up. Trump had appointed Republican Chris Krebs to run the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security division of the Department of Homeland Security. His job was to protect the election and he said he oversaw "the most secure election in American history." That directly contradicted Trump. Krebs had secured the support of Republican Senators, including Cornyn, Sasse, Rubio, Cruz, Kennedy, and others, which included people who had just won election. They backed Krebs up. Trump fired Krebs by tweet. The overall optics were bad. Trump looks like he is suppressing a courageous truth-teller.

There was an anti-hero to compare to. Rudy Giuliani looked clownish. He raised claims of widespread fraud and a conspiracy involving Venezuela, George Soros, and switched votes. His hair dye dripped, which shouldn't be relevant but it is, giving Trump's cause an amateur look. It all seemed too overblown and fanciful--the claim of a landslide win stolen in dozens of states--too much even for news anchors on Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and Tucker Carlson. Trump's base was sliding away, from semi-mainstream Fox to Newsmax and One America.

"Trump vaccine"

Trump realizes he has lost the presidency but he has not lost his pride nor his brand. Trump is establishing himself as the point person for continued grievance. Trump-oriented Republicans are less interested in governing than they are in grievance and opposition to Democrats, and Trump is in the perfect position to do both. This is the new "birtherism," the complaint that something--something--is rotten. People who want to believe it can believe it. It sets Trump up with a permanent frame for the future political effort to undermine Biden in the short run, to set himself or his children up for a future run for president, and to have an organizing theme and mood for any future media business he creates.

Trump comes out of this with what he wanted and needed: a marketable brand for the post presidency.

Shameless. Trump attempts to void the election

 

In 2020, even the cynical pessimists are too optimistic.

I predicted Trump would attempt to overturn the election. He is giving it a shot.

Today's news demonstrates how fragile democracy is. It counts on the integrity of people we never hear of simply doing their jobs honorably, people like the county clerks in courthouses all over America. 

Trump told us in advance he would ignore and overturn the election if he lost. He said that absentee voting in states other than Florida, where he voted absentee, would be completely fraudulent and the vote could not be trusted. He said it repeatedly. He tweeted it. He pre-sold the idea that if he won, the election was OK, but if he lost it would have been stolen. 

Trump pre-announced his plan. It required others to get on board. His campaign urged the legislatures of battleground states not to open ballots as they came in, so there would be a big backlog that would take a couple of days to open and count. They were urged to do otherwise, but they complied with Trump's request. Then he said he would announce on election night that he had won, based on the early, very incomplete count. (Trump did just that, at 2:30 a.m. election night) Then he would say that ballots that were counted the next days--which timing was inevitable, since they had not been done as they came in--would be absolutely illegitimate because anything that was not announced early on election night would be fraudulent. (Trump did just that)

Then, with the votes called fraudulent, stop the vote from being counted or if counted from being certified and ask--demand--that Republican election officials, and then legislators, ignore the election result and award him the electoral votes. He is doing that now.

At first it appeared that the Biden margin of victory was big enough that local officials could not ignore the reality of the vote. Georgia is working out that way. It has a Republican Secretary of State who refused to be bullied and an audit shows the original count was almost perfectly correct.

Trump lobbied the local election officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania that we know of. (Lindsay Graham called and lobbied Republican officeholders in multiple states.) Two Republican election officials, with the ministerial job of submitting the Wayne County results to the state, rescinded their vote to do so after hearing from Trump, thus putting a cloud of inclusion of the vote in the largest county in Michigan. Now Trump has invited the Republican legislative leadership of Michigan to the White House. Michigan leaders had previously said that, of course, they were not going to overturn an election that Biden had won by 150,000 votes. That was before the White House visit. Now the pressure is on them. The members of the legislature have the power to do what 160 million American voters cannot do: make Trump president. That is an awesome opportunity. Mr. Legislator, didn't you personally vote for Trump in the election? Don't you think Trump is better than Biden? This isn't sabotage of an election. Do your duty and retain Trump in office and Make America Great Again.

Meanwhile, Trump is lobbying the Pennsylvania legislature to do the same thing: Ignore the vote count and simply award the votes to Trump.

Will this work?  We will see.

What we already know, though, is that this is an open, transparent effort to delegitimize an election and for a sitting president to retain office notwithstanding the election where his opponent won elections in states with 306 electoral votes and the popular vote by some five million votes. That fact won't go away. Americans have seen it. Elections can be overturned by a few partisans in the right spots, and a president who says not to trust an election to express the will of the people.

Trump has a superpower. He has no shame.

 

Democrats need to do something.

White voters turned out. So did minority voters.

Minority turnout won the election for Biden. 

Democrats have a problem going forward. How to address the needs of minority voters without creating a bigger White backlash vote.

Economist Jim Stodder spent most of his twenties as a union worker on oil rigs. He has real world, hands-on experience with the White Working Class, a group that gets its own initials--WWC--in pundit discussions of the 2020 election, and now with what Biden needs to do to re-connect Democrats to that group.

Somehow, Democrats pulled the 2020 election out with a combination of votes from minorities, educated people living in suburbs, and people who wanted to be rid of Trump. That is the Democratic coalition, enough to elect Biden, barely, but not enough to elect a robust majority in Congress. 

Jim Stodder favors "re-distributive" economic policies. Technology, automation, globalism--and for some people racial prejudice--have combined to create a large and growing pool of people who are falling behind, and they know it and don't like it. Blue collar workers in the 1970s could afford a middle-class life; now they cannot. 

Democratic messaging about racial justice sent a message to the WWC that Democrats think the most pressing problem facing struggling people is that they face prejudice from White Americans, especially the WWC. Not surprisingly, Democrats lost those votes. Stodder thinks the right policies and messages can get them back. He was a college classmate. He returned to college after a decade, finished, then got a Ph.D. in economics from Yale, and now he teaches at Boston University.

Guest Post by James Stodder

There has been a steady stream of articles, including one from Michael Cohen and the NY TImes decrying the drop-off in the Democratic margin among Black and Latino voters. 

Stodder

A few percent drop in 'minority margin' was swamped by the increase in minority turnout -- and these are people who vote overwhelmingly Democratic and did again this year. Biden-Harris turnout increased by 17% among Asians, by Blacks by 20%, and by Latinos by 63% over the 2016 election. The increase in overall turnout was more important in increasing the net margin of votes for Biden than was the slightly lower percentage share of the votes. Biden knows he owes them.

Trump also benefited from the larger turnout. The white margin for Trump decreased slightly, thank goodness. Trump's margin over Biden among Whites fell from 20 to 17%, so down by 3%. White turnout was up by 5.6% overall. That nets out that the number of White votes for Trump increased by about 5.6 - 3 = 2.6%. White turnout is not going to change very much, so Democrats need to chip away at that Republican margin among Whites.

This dual-track focus: higher turnout for Democrats among minorities, while boosting our margin with the White voters, is why Biden won. But a dual-track also leads to a dual-message tension for the party. The messages that can fire up minority voters are not the ones that can turn Republicans into Democrats in the suburbs, or worse, by mobilizing a vast conservative reaction by the WWC .

Some reaction did take place. Anyone who thinks that "Defund the Police" and "Socialism" didn't add to that 5.6% didn't watch the Republican ads where these slogans were intoned ominously over scenes of urban fires and looting. Tucker Carlson on Fox warned that urban rioters are "coming for you." Whatever policies Democrats promote cannot be called "Socialism."

So can we do it? Can we mobilize minorities while assuring suburban voters that Democrats don't really want socialism? I have my doubts. It just barely worked this time, and would not have without Trump's displays of madness and incompetence. Trump has charisma and his fans love him, but Democrats need to recognize that they benefitted from Trump's craziness. The surprising strength shown by Republicans in the House, Senate, and state races show that this was a rejection of Trump personally, but not a rejection of Republicans nor an endorsement of some, clear Democratic agenda.

How can Democrats thread the needle and let minorities know that Democrats care about them, without simultaneously sending the message to the White suburbs minorities are stepping to the front of the line? t can be done, with a focus on redistributive and opportunity-creating programs to aid the whole working and lower-middle-class. Universal health care is one way. It redistributes value from federal taxpayers to individual citizens, from richer to poorer. COVID makes a point Democrats have had a hard time making, that we all share an interest in the health of others. That would help working people and poor people disproportionately, and therefore minorities--in the name of fairness, saving rural hospitals, and the health of all of us. Don't call it socialism.

As we saw from the California vote rejecting affirmative action, Democrats need to recognize that many minority Americans identify as Americans with an interest in higher wages and better health care, not as a racial category with a primary interest in talk of racial justice seeking some sort of boost. Affirmative action lost even in minority-dominated precincts and counties.

I'm with Thomas Piketty that we need more than just a redistribution of income. What can be doled out can be tamped down or taken away. There should indeed be minimum income standards, but--and here's the part that will be impossible in this current political environment--we need a redistribution of capital ownership, with secure property rights. This can be done gradually, through pensions and inheritance taxes. 

I wouldn't go even-steven. I am not trying to make "everyone equal." I would still want people to have an incentive to accumulate wealth. But I'd make inheritance taxes very progressive, to limit the power of dynasties. There will still be plenty of dynasties based on talent and social connections, as there always have been.

If Democrats put that into place we will have a better, more just world, and Democrats would deserve the votes of working people of all races.

Tough guys wear masks

     “Things that come from the national level down generally engender a bit of pushback.  . . .[We have] a reluctant populace that doesn't like to be told what to do."

     Dr. Anthony Fauci

He was explaining why he was reluctant to call for a national mask mandate.

Masks are a partisan symbol of Democratic tyranny. President Biden must change the meaning of masks. It won't be easy, but I suggest an approach.

Anthony Fauci adds to the stories that are emerging in the national press about people who deny that COVID is real, or that the deaths we are seeing are coming from COVID. A South Dakota nurse got national attention with her frustration over seeing people suffocating, on oxygen, and then sometimes intubated, all while insisting that it simply must be something other than COVID because the virus was a hoax. Fauci said "in certain areas of the country, even though the devastation of the outbreak is clear, some people are still saying it’s fake news."

I get angry comments sent to me questioning the COVID death count. Surely I am blaming COVID for deaths that were from other things, they write. Trump carries that message. The COVID numbers are exaggerated, he says, because doctors make more money when they use COVID as cause of death. 

If COVID is a hoax--or at least a huge exaggeration and overkill--then efforts to suppress its spread aren't really about health and safety. They are symbols of tyranny. Democratic Party tyranny. That, too, is Trump's message.

Trump made COVID partisan, and that is the reality Biden will face as president. Trump's policy at the beginning was to hope this COVID thing was not going to interrupt the strong economy in the 2020 election year. America was on the "right track."  Trump has a consistent message. Keep the economy up and running, which means downplay the virus. If COVID is not a big problem it is pointless to hurt schoolchildren, damage the economy, and inconvenience ourselves with a visible symbol that COVID is real in the form of empty restaurants, cancelled events, closed churches, and masks on faces. 

Click: AP story

Here in Medford, Republican county commissioners oppose enforcement of masks, even as the case count is accelerating here. The local news is of Christian schools where masks aren't required and impersonal learning is allowed while public schools are forced to use distance learning. Nationally, a state with a dramatic increase in cases and hospitalizations, South Dakota, has a Republican governor on TV this morning saying she opposes a mask mandate for her state. "The facts are simple: mask mandates, harsh lockdowns, massive testing and contact tracing haven't worked -- in the United states or abroad." She is applauded by Republican officeholders.

This isn't surprising. Masks are new and a nuisance. Social distancing, especially at Thanksgiving, is another irritation. Democrats are trying to sell the value of something that a great many Americans think just isn't that big a deal. Meanwhile, the virus is spreading. Biden has a transition team working on what to do and say about masks, shutdown, "pauses," and mandates after he is sworn in.

Here is what will not work: Joe Biden says we should do it for America. 

That message of patriotism might have worked, Churchill style, had Trump employed it eight months ago, but he didn't. He went the other way, saying COVID was an overdone hoax and that people should rebel against Democratic governors who try to take away your liberty. That message is here, locked in, and further reinforced by the campaign, election, and Trump's subsequent behavior. Biden is defined as illegitimate, a thief, a socialist, a tyrant out to destroy your religion, your economy, your liberty to decide whether to wear an uncomfortable and useless mask. Republican voters have heard that message, and more or less agree. Trump ruined it for Biden. 

What might work to change the image of masks and social distancing rules? Manliness. Sell mask wearing and shutdowns the way car companies sell heavy duty pickup trucks, where deep-voiced men talk about horsepower and getting tough jobs done. Ads like this: Click: Capable Truck

Click Here: Lead or be Led

There are links to two ads here, 30 seconds each. I urge readers to click. Observe them. Pick up the vibe. The real message is the sensibility, the tone. These vehicles are for good, strong, can-do men.

This recommendation on how to present masks may strike some readers as phony or improbable. A Democrat can't run an ad like that. This seems too, well, Montana-ish. It seems too Republican.  That is my point.

Masks don't have that masculine-tough-outdoorsy vibe, nor do Democrats. 

Masks represent civilization and politeness. Democrats are the Party that appeals to women more than men, to office workers, not people who operate backhoes and do construction and drive trucks. The fact that these two ads seem "Republican" in tone tells us what has caused Democrats to lose 5-to-1 in some rural counties, and to have an almost 2-to-1 disadvantage among White working class men, and a 3-2 gender gap generally. Democrats lose elections because they lose the vote of men. That is a matter of political life and death for Democrats. A matter of literal life and death is the public attitude toward efforts to stop the virus. 

There is a reason Trump focuses on criticizing female Democratic governors like Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer. Trump has keen instincts into marketing messages. He is reinforcing the notion of mask-wearing as feminine tyranny, of the sort that readers may remember Huck Finn rebelled against, the civilizing effects of Aunt Sally. He would rather run away than be stifled by her.

There is another, possible message. Tough guys wear masks around other people so they can keep working. Tough guys wear masks because there are jobs to get done. Tough guys don't get pushed around by squirrelly little piss-ants who screw up jobs by being careless. 

Who can carry that message? Marines. Navy Seals. A bouncer at a bar who tells some jerk that if he wants to enter, he wears the mask and keeps it on. They aren't wearing masks because some governor said they must, even if she has done just that. They are wearing it because they want to. Because real men can do hard things.

Won't women be put off by an image of strong masculinity promoting mask-wearing? No. Quite the opposite, I think. Women seem to like  strong, masculine guys, when they seem to care about loving and protecting the people around them. 

Trump the vandal.

There will not be a return to normal.   Trump changed America. 

He changed Americans.

There has been a vandal in the house. Voters chased the vandal out, but the damage is done. We are a nation of vandal survivors. We are different now. We know that political vandalism is a policy that works.

Cleanup after the vandal will be hard because the country has gotten accustomed to vandalism. The vandal also changed the people who chased him out. They are coarsened -educated--by the experience. To fight one you need to become one.

The Constitution's grand design to stop self-government from becoming lawless tyranny was checks and balances. Ambition would counter ambition. It doesn't work well to stop a politician as talented as Donald Trump. The founders understood the danger of a bold man of action claiming to govern lawlessly on behalf of the popular will and thought the ambition of House Members and Senators would restrain a demagogue. We saw, though, that a president with enough popularity will not be checked by either body. He delivers what a loyal block of voters want, he dislikes who they dislike, and he says things that ring true to them. 

Trump isn't the symbol of virtue. He symbolizes the power that comes from shameless lack of self restraint. He does what he wants and nobody can stop him. He vandalized the norms of the presidency, and does it without apology. There is something heroic about that.  We elect to office generals who win wars.

The real check on Constitutional vandalism is the self restraint and sense of honor and shame of people in office. Trump has no apparent sense of hypocrisy or the need for consistency. That is his superpower. No shame. He defends the indefensible, asserts things which his own appointees say aren't true.

 

Trump does not demand good government. He demands personal loyalty. Trump commands attention, and gets it.  Democrats complain Republicans are "enablers" of Trump. They need to be. The public demands it. 

Democrats have fought the battle against Trump and paid the traditional price. They have enabled people who want them to become more like their enemy. Biden himself is oriented toward restoring norms of bipartisanship and institutional power of the Congress to check the president. He is a Senate veteran. He is an institutionalist. Biden--just look at him and hear him--is obviously not a bold, action-oriented leader. Trump called him Sleepy Joe. Isn't that exactly the corrective action America needs, the full oscillation of the pendulum away from Trump?

Yes, but it won't matter. Trump caused Americans to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of the power of lawless executive power. Republican saw that it worked. It was popular. It fits the current media environment. Amid the muddle of Congress with all its debating and compromising and procedures, there was Trump, ignoring all the fussing. He was on center stage and set the agenda, exercising power fearlessly and ruthlessly. 

Sleepy, bi-partisan Joe is already getting pressure from the left to duplicate Trump. Restraint is weak, for losers. If a president does less than he can get away with, then he isn't really performing for the team. As Trump said, when you are president you can do anything you want. Anything. The laws don't apply. The goalposts of what is possible have moved, and therefore the goalposts of what is expected have moved. It cannot be done legislatively so it will need to be done with the same tool Trump used, executive power.

The real division within the left was not evident in the campaign. They unified to get rid of Trump. Now both the moderates and the left supposedly have power. The left wants action. The institution of checks and balances and self restraint were shown to be meaningless, and therefore a politician who sacrifices a policy opportunity in service to norms and traditions is a sentimental fool. 

Biden-the-candidate was relief from the manic Trump presidency, but he will find himself misplaced and uncomfortable as an officeholder. He will want to make-nice and re-establish the expectations of the old system of senatorial courtesies. Too late. Republicans and Democrats both ate the fruit. 

Republicans will want an all out fight. So will Democrats.

[Note to commenters: Comments have a better chance of being published if they are signed with ones own name and if they have substantial comments on the subject of that day's post. Anonymous comments that simply cheer or boo Biden or Trump are worthless. Please go to Twitter to do that.]

The political left: People of Faith

"What's it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give."

Bert Bacharach, songwriter. Musical theme for the movie "Alfie," 1966

We are living in the Age of Faith.

Historian Will Durant termed the period from year 1000 to year 1300 as the Age of Faith, looking at the Catholic Church as the great unifying institution that gave structure to how people in Western Civilization understood reality: the Judeo-Christian tradition. Today in political speech we reference a "Faith Community" which combines the heirs to that tradition, or sometimes more broadly people observant of any religion, including Islam, Buddhism, anything. If you practice a religion, you are in it.

In the US, "people of faith" have a political interest in preserving their right to the "free exercise" of that faith, and a Bill of Rights Amendment back it up--within limits. A religion that permits--demands--a person smoke peyote, a controlled substance, is a gray area. A religion that demanded human sacrifice or killing strangers would be prohibited. You can pray, but you cannot murder.

Today an issue front and center is the right of a government to limit two First Amendment rights, the right of peaceable assembly and the free exercise of religion. Is a gathering of a hundred people, indoors in close quarters, a "peaceable assembly," even if it risks spreading a deadly virus within that group and to people outside it? Does it go from illegal to legal if the purpose of the assembly is to worship a God whose reality is assumed by a significant majority of the total population, and that gathering to pray and sing is a long-standing religious practice?

Love thy neighbor

State governors have been stopping those assemblies, including here in Oregon. They don't cite a "love your neighbor" justification and argue it on the basis of religion. They cite public health and safety--their police power. Some members of the faith community and their political supporters call it tyranny, an unfair and unjust abridgment of their rights to gather and worship freely. 

A political divide. People thinking about the political environment amid COVID conveniently divide the population between "people of faith" and everyone else, which generally means people who do worship in some organized community with a name, a doctrine, rituals--a brand--do not. It is believers vs. non-believers. They vote differently.

That is a false divide, according to Michael Trigoboff, who observed that everybody has to understand the world in some way. It is what humans do. Religion, properly understood, is a far wider and inclusive idea than just "Christianity" or "Judaism." Religion is a whole set of interlocking beliefs and values. It may look like mere politics, but an environmentalist is a "person of faith." He or she has a notion of the world and the space beyond, has a set of values, and practices that religion. The person who recycles and picks up litter can be considered carrying out a religious practice just as certainly as is a person kneeling and praying. 

Michael Trigoboff has written Guest Posts here, pushing against what he considers the new puritanism of "woke" politics. Today he puts that into the broader context of the human need for a religious belief system. He studied Computer Science at Rutgers University, had a long career in the private sector, and now teaches at Portland Community College.

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff

I have felt for many years that one thing that might pull us together is something like a new religion.

Trigoboff,  recently

Doris Lessing once said that Christianity held the mind of The West in its grip for 1,000 years, and when that grip dissipated it left behind a religion-shaped hole in that mind which has since been filled by opportunistic belief systems that more or less matched the shape of that hole.

Marxism/Communism, for instance.

I was part of one of those, the 60s. The 60s was an actual religion which came to us in the form of music and psychedelic drugs. We hippies had “prophets“ like Ken Kesey, Ram Dass, and Jerry Garcia. Ram Dass once said that the 60s was such a secular era that LSD and the other psychedelics were the only way that God could manifest to us. Read Monday Night Class by Stephen Gaskin for an extensive description of this.

Grateful Dead concerts were basically “church.” Bill Graham once said that “The Dead aren’t the best at what they do, they’re the only ones who do what they do.“ Jerry Garcia was the “preacher,” a humble conduit for what was coming down to us from “up there.” There are lines from their song Stella Blue about Jerry’s role:

      All the years combine
     They melt into a dream
     A broken angel sings
     From a guitar

That “broken angel” and the other prophets swept up a lot of us, but clearly not the whole country.

In the 1990s, Michael Crichton pointed out that environmentalism had taken on aspects of a religion.

          "I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You cannot believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Trigoboff, NYC taxi driver

     Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

     There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Trigoboff in graduate school

     Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

     And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them."

Climate change/global warming is a related one: there was an initial state of grace/Garden of Eden (the state of the world in 1750); a fall from grac due to eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (the Industrial Revolution); the establishment of a dogma (“the science is settled”); the persecution of heretics (calling them “deniers,” implicitly associating them with Holocaust deniers, getting them fired as happened to former Oregon state climatologist George Taylor); and even the selling of “indulgences" (the Catholic Church used to allow sinners to pay the Church to have their sins forgiven — now we have carbon credits).

Woke-ness is a new religious phenomenon. People who disagree are treated as heretics. Woke Twitter mobs’ persecution of heretics is reminiscent of The Salem Witch Trials. Woke-ness is too divisive to bring the country together.

If we’re lucky, a newer unifying religion may come along and fill that hole in our collective consciousness. That’s what I’m hoping.

People want to take their chances on COVID

The simple truth is that people are sick and tired of being careful.  Trump knows it. Oregon Republicans know it.

People will die. Other people, probably. A lot of people think It's worth the risk.

Headlines:

"Oregon Republicans blast Governor's two-week coronavirus freeze."

"Business organizations oppose Brown's new COVID-19 restrictions."

Oregon has joined the nation in seeing a big spike in the virus caseload, with a record 1,122 cases on Thursday. In Jackson County--my home area that includes Medford--cases went to 429, up from 246, up from 174.  If this were a stock, I would say it has "gone parabolic," and if I owned it I would be thrilled. 

What this measures is something I had seen in markets: a value  feeding on itself. It was going up because people were buying it because it was going up. In the case of a virus or a nuclear reaction, it means a chain reaction. More people are catching it because more people have it, so more people catch it.

Going parabolic

Wake up call to Democrats: There is a reason Republicans at the national and state level are resisting Democratic governors and seizing political opportunity. Masks, social distancing, travel restrictions, business shutdowns, occupancy restrictions, and warnings about social gatherings are unpopular with a giant set of people roughly similar to people who voted for Trump, plus some others. 

Some are skeptical of the significance of the virus itself. They hear enough about it from enough people who say it is all a semi-hoax and overblown, just the flu. This is their basis for questioning whether we ought to do anything. They are skeptical, too, of the motives of leaders they don't support for other reasons, i.e. party affiliation, so they are happy to protest whatever measures are taken. Why close restaurants and not Thanksgiving dinners? Why restrict bars more than stores. Some of these are judgement calls. There is plenty of opportunity to criticize where lines are drawn. It is always politically safe harbor to criticize the application of lines in gray areas.

But there is a big underlying problem that makes skepticism possible: Enough people aren't all that worried about getting sick, getting hospitalized, or dying. And the truth is--the science, the data--that most people who catch COVID apparently don't get terribly sick and don't die from it, not immediately anyway. Some do, but not anyone most people actually know. People get killed in car accidents, but they drive cars anyway. People want to take their chances. People do risky things. They know people will die, but it won't be them.

Biden and Democratic officeholders are going to be pressured by their own beliefs, prior words, and constituents to pursue more coercive measures to try to stop the virus and gain time before the vaccines are ready. It might be the right thing to do--I personally think so--but they should not expect to be thanked for it.

They will pay a political price. No good deed goes unpunished.