A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

I had a quick Tweet where I suggested, “If you communicate with someone in a way that makes them shut down, you’ve eliminated yourself as a source of feedback for that person.” I was about to contribute to the ensuing discussion with some additional thoughts, but it seemed easier to turn this into a blog post.

Changing minds happens on the mental equivalent of peripheral vision. There are too many defense mechanisms in place if you try to go at it head on. First of all, you have to establish a relationship. And, I don’t mean this in a cynical way. Don’t establish the relationships to manipulate someone into changing their mind. Establish the relationship because the person has value. Even if you disagree with someone in major ways, there will be points of common interest or common cause among people of good will. Talk about sports, beer, kids, the challenges of work, the wonder of nature and the stars, anxieties about the future  . . . whatever.  While you’re talking about these things, chances are that you can move each other on the other stuff indirectly or subtly.

If someone knows you as a person, they can very well disagree with you strongly, but they’re a lot less likely to write you off as delusional or malicious (unless you’re, in fact, delusional or malicious). Coming at someone you barely know and demanding that they agree with you because [citations] just isn’t going to work.

This is slow, often unsatisfying, and, if the need is urgent, impractical in a lot of cases. But, even if it’s not sufficiently effective, it’s still more effective than shouting at someone then calling them dishonest or malicious or stupid for not agreeing with you. Even if you have the most iron clad citations of all time.

And it only works when you’re talking about people of good will. There is, of course, malice in the world. But I think it’s less prevalent than we imagine. (As I say, over and over, everyone is the hero in their own mental narrative.) This doesn’t work for the malicious. You’re just going to have to persuade enough people of good will, then organize them to steamroll the malicious people of the world.

Some people take offense because they have legitimate grievances. Others seem to take offense because doing so gives them a kind of currency and at least momentary significance. A lot of offense taken and/or expressed probably has some mix of the two.  What prompted this post was online debate over Tina Fey’s “sheet cake” skit. Some are calling it a tone-deaf response to the legitimate problems of Trump by a privileged white woman. Others are calling it incisive satire by a woman aware both of real problems and her privileged position.

I’m an educated white male professional and United States citizen with just about any kind of privilege you’d care to name. So, I’m in a uniquely bad position to judge where one stops and the other begins. I don’t have any particular take on the Fey skit. All I can say is that I was mildly amused by it.

In some sense, I think the complaints about “political correctness” is a flip side of the same coin. Some folks making this complaint are just assholes who are mad that someone is calling them out on being jerks. Others are people of good will who legitimately feel like, despite the best of intentions, they are scorned by people who put what seem like arbitrary landmines everywhere in the culture. A lot of the complaints probably have some mix of the two.

(No doubt I have given offense here by engaging in an impermissible degree of “both sides”ism.)

I’ve been hearing a lot about “Antifa” lately. Well, let me tell you about Antifa.

Antifa is a ten-foot-tall, two-ton son of a bitch who could eat a hammer and take a shotgun blast standing!

Did I ever tell you about the time I went horseback riding with Antifa, but there weren’t any horses around? Well, Antifa throws a saddle on my back and rides me around Wyoming for three days. Well, wouldn’t you know it, my stamina increases with each day and I develop tremendous leg muscles. So anyway, Antifa decides to enter me in the Breeders’ Cup, right, under the name Turkish Delight. And I’m running in second place, and I’m running and I break my ankle! They’re about to shoot me. Then someone from the crowd yells out, God bless him, ‘Don’t shoot him, he’s a human.’”

Antifa is a son of a bitch! He would eat a homeless person if you dared him!

I went camping with Antifa … I’m in the back of a pickup with Antifa and a live deer. Well, Antifa, he grabs the deer by the antlers, looks at it and says, ‘I’m Antifa! Say it!’ Then he squeezes the deer in such a way that a sound comes out of its mouth — “Annifa!” It wasn’t exactly it, but it was pretty good for a deer.

I once saw Antifa scissor-kick Angela Lansbury.

Did I ever tell you about the time Antifa was in a production of ‘The King and I’? On opening night, Antifa chloroformed the entire cast and slowly eats them in front of the audience for two hours. The production got pretty good reviews.

Antifa sheds its skin once a year.

Did I ever tell you about the time Antifa went hunting? He decides he’s going to hunt down all four of the Banana Splits. He stalks and kills every one of them with a machette. They all begged for their lives…except Fleagle.

Oh, wait. My mistake. That was Bill Brasky.

“Antifa” is the latest right wing boogeyman. It got a Wikipedia page on August 8, 2017, following an Atlantic article by Peter Beinhart on August 7, 2017. But, judging by right-wingers casting about for false equivalence to Klansmen, Nazis, and Confederate sympathizers, Antifa is legion.

I’m happy to condemn violence as a political tool. Here: “Violence should not be condoned as a political tool.” But it’s not a deep concern for pacifism that motivates the Antifa panic. It’s a desire to always focus on how bad liberals are.

Let’s not pretend there is any equivalency between a movement that didn’t even rate a Wikipedia page last month and movements that have plagued our country for a century and more. At one point in the 1920s, the Klan counted something like 1/3 of white protestant Hoosier men as members. Confederate monuments erupted over the Jim Crow south in public spaces as a way of demonstrating who was in control. Nazis killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and embroiled the world in a war that would kill about 60 million people. Condemning the Nazis, the Klan, and the Confederates isn’t based on a desire to focus on how bad conservatives are — at least it shouldn’t be.

It should be dead easy for conservatives to join in the chorus of unequivocal condemnation for history’s assholes. And for many it is. George H.W. Bush spoke out against David Duke in 1991, and he and his son spoke out against the Charlottesville groups today. That’s what makes Trump’s hesitation so confounding. This should be a softball for any public leader. Trump is not a man known for weighing his words. The fact that he hesitates to condemn these guys tells you what you need to know about how he views them.

A lot of people are spilling ink on the violence in Charlottesville where white supremacists gathered to “Unite the Right,” ostensibly in protest of the removal of Confederate statues. I’m not sure I can do much better, but I feel like I ought to post something here anyway.  Those who feel some affinity for the movement but aren’t ready to go full on Nazi are espousing some variant of a “Both Sides” argument. Either they want to blame violence that erupted on the counter-protesters or they point to some incidence of violence that took place at an event with a message they did not favor.

It’s fine and appropriate to be against violence. However, it’s a little telling if “All Violence Matters” flies out of your mouth easily but you choke a little bit when trying to spit out the idea that white supremacists have uniquely bad and dangerous ideas and they are bad people for holding those ideas. If you’re a Quaker or a pacifist or something and messages of nonviolence are a passion of yours, I’ll give you a pass — but that’s not what I’m seeing.

And it’s no surprise that these guys (and it seems to be almost entirely male) had an event that came to violence. White supremacists like to talk tough and invoke violent metaphors. Judging from the things you see out of the broad overlap between “Men’s Rights” activists and white supremacists, you see a toxic view of masculinity that regards nonviolent responses to challenges as emasculating. Their beliefs and fragile egos make them almost uniquely unable to co-exist with other ideas or turn the other cheek when confronted.

So, sure, violence is bad. That can be, and perhaps should be, said every day. But this event gives us a particularly relevant opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to opposing fascists like the ones we saw trying to “Unite the Right.” People celebrating the Nazis in defense of statues of rebel traitors are uniquely un-American.

So, Sen. John McCain never should have cast the vote to proceed with the House’s healthcare repeal bill. It was passed under a make-shift process with only the most cursory of committee hearings. And it was not a policy recommended by anyone of substance in the healthcare community. But, credit where it is due, he cast the deciding vote against a Senate measure that was even more slap-dash than the House bill. And that’s saying something. The other two Republican votes against McConnell’s cocktail napkin overhaul of 1/6 of the nation’s economy were Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. Indiana’s Senators were split. Joe Donnelly voted against it. Todd Young voted in favor.

For years, we’ve heard opponents of Obamacare howling bitterly about how unfair and rushed they thought that process was. Despite the Pelosi quote we’ve all heard taken out of context ad nauseam, with Obamacare, there were extensive committee hearings over the better part of a year with a great deal of open, bipartisan debate and members of Congress returning to grueling town halls during the process. President Obama was knowledgeable about the bill and went out in public a defended it at length.

[T]he ACA was debated in three House committees and two Senate committees, and subject to hours of bipartisan debate that allowed for the introduction of amendments.

In June and July 2009, with Democrats in charge, the Senate health committee spent nearly 60 hours over 13 days marking up the bill that became the Affordable Care Act. That September and October, the Senate Finance Committee worked on the legislation for eight days — its longest markup in two decades. It considered more than 130 amendments and held 79 roll-call votes. The full Senate debated the health care bill for 25 straight days before passing it on Dec. 24, 2009.

Detractors decried this process as Obamacare having been “rammed down their throats.” What we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks and particularly last night was that this complaint was utterly insincere.

I’m obviously not a fan of the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare – not so much because I love Obamacare which has a lot of problems but because the alternate proposals that have been put forward have been a lot worse. But last night’s maneuvering was something else again. As I probably remind you all too often, I have a legislative background — having spent a couple of my early work years at Indiana’s Legislative Services Agency. While I was there, those who had been around a lot longer spoke reverently of Senator Bob Garton who led the Senate and had cleaned up and opened up its processes and was a stickler for its traditions.

There is value in those traditions. Even though the process can be more illusory than real sometimes, they help maintain the consensus that legislation is something more than a bunch of words slapped on to paper. The process is  what transforms those words into law. McConnell and those who voted for his proposal did not even give a nod to that process. He slopped about eight pages together (25% of which had to do with Planned Parenthood) and released the language at about 10:00 p.m. last night.

The measure would increase the number of people lacking insurance over a decade by 16 million, raising the total to 43 million. CBO also estimated that premiums for policies in the nongroup market, or individual plans, would increase by roughly 20 percent relative to current law in all years between 2018 and 2026.

A little over 3 hours after McConnell’s proposal was released, the Senate was voting on whether to send it to the House. The House would then have the option of taking the law to conference or concurring and sending it to the President. In other words, there were no guarantees that the Senate would ever get another chance to consider the merits of the legislation. Forty-eight Democrats along with Collins, Murkowski, and McCain voted “no.” Forty-nine Republicans, including Indiana Senator Todd Young, thought this was an acceptable process and voted “yes.”

A rushed, dead of the night vote on major legislation with no chance for review, debate, or constituent feedback is simply no way to run the Senate. Obamacare was passed after months of consideration. This was voted on in a matter of hours.