THE FIRES ARE BANKED IN THE HOT STOVE

The comedy of errors called the Republican Primary is over, the actual major league baseball season has begun, and it is time to bank the fires and say farewell to the Hot Stove League for another year.  I am at the cusp of a possible major new gig, one that will, if it comes to pass, allow me once more to try to make a difference in the world, as opposed to merely offering opinions.  I cannot say more now, but quite possibly in the next two or three weeks I will be able to describe in some detail what I shall be doing.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Recently, I spoke with an old friend from Amherst, MA, whose occasional lunches with a circle of senior academics was, for me, a highlight of my rather low-key social life.  He reported that at a recent lunch, those present, several of whom, like my friend, are professional historians, expressed the opinion that not in a hundred years had an American political party moved so far and in so determined a fashion to the right.  That set me thinking, and I formulated two alternative and incompatible hypotheses to explain this movement, between which I am unable to choose.  I shall sketch them here, and invite any interested readers to offer their judgment.

One hypothesis is that the reality-denying conspiratorial crazies have always been a subordinate element in American politics, that there really are not more of them now than at previous times in the memory of those as old as myself, but that for a variety of structural reasons these types, of whom there are, after all, some scores of millions in this large country, have managed to take control of the Republican Party.  Their success is in part a consequence of a long stretch of redistricting exercises that has created unusually large numbers of safe seats, in which crazy views can survive;  in part a consequence of the election of a Black president, which has driven them wild; and in part a consequence of the rise of alternative communications media in which an "echo chamber" of reality-denying bizarreries flourishes.  In support of this hypothesis, one can cite Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which was first a lecture at Oxford, then a 1963 Harper's Magazine essay, and then the title essay of a collection of essays.

The alternative hypothesis is that something genuinely new is taking place, something unlike what has gone before in American politics.  A determined and deadly serious effort is under way to reverse three quarters of a century of social progress, to destroy the signature achievements of the New Deal, and to undo the successes of the Women's Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the LGBT Movement.  This effort is bankrolled by wealthy corporate types who seek to protect what they have already stolen from the American economy and to facilitate future thefts;  it is supported both by a large segment of the American population who have never accepted the consequences of the LIberation Movements;  and it derives its especial passion from participants in yet another of America's periodic Great Revivals, born again Evangelical Christians, many of whom genuinely expect the imminent arrival of the Rapture and the End Times.

So, same old same old. or something really new.  Which is it?

SPAM

Google has completely revamped its Blogger system, which I find massively irritating because things I used to be able to find are now hard to locate.  One thing that popped up is Spam.  I was totally unaware that Google was tagging some of the comments to my blog as Spam and segregating them.  When I took a look at what was in the Spam file, I found that almost all of the items are perfectly reasonable, intelligent comments.

Does anyone have any idea how I can turn off the Spam filter?

REVIEWING

This morning, after I had eaten my lemon poppy seed muffin at the Carolina Cafe and solved the NY TIMES crossword puzzle, I took a moment to read two reviews in the ARTS section where the puzzle appears.  The first was a review of a performance by a brilliant young pianist, Yuja Wang.  The second was a review of a new Memoir by the veteran actor Frank Langella.  Both were extremely positive and generous reviews.  The review of the Langella Memoir was particularly warm and supportive.  [Some of you may remember Langella from his performance as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon.  My own favorite moment in Langella's work occurs in the Kevin Kline movie Dave.  Langella plays the President's chief of staff.  At one point, he says to his aide that he is going to kill Kline, who has been recruited as a look-alike stand-in for the President, but goes off the reservation by actually espousing progressive, positive legislation.  "You can't just kill him," his aide remonstrates.  "Of course I can," Langella replies.  "I am the Chief of Staff. I can kill someone if I want to."  The insouciance with which Langella delivered that line won my heart.]

The two reviews got me thinking again about something that I have often reflected on -- how difficult it is these days to be a reviewer of musical performances.  As I have observed before on this blog, in the old days [i.e., when I was young, which is to say in the '40s and '50s of the last century], there only were a handful of truly great violinists, pianists, or singers.  If a reviewer was fortunate enough to be assigned to one of their performances, all the superlatives could come out of hiding and one could simply gush over Milstein or Rubinstein or Callas.  But today, the level of performance has risen so dramatically in virtually every area of music that a reviewer runs the risk of sounding like a flack or a rube unless he or she can find some point to quibble with in what was truly a miraculous performance.

A somewhat different problem arises in the field of academic book reviewing, especially in a field like Philosophy.  Not infrequently, it happens that the author has written a fine book on an important problem.  The reviewer could, if he or she chose, perform a valuable service simply by making the reader of the review aware of the book's new and suggestive ideas.  How else are the rest of us to decide whether it is a book worth our time and effort?  But the conventions of the field demand that the reviewer find some point to disagree with, and then devote most of the review to doing his or her best to demolish the author.

The same convention rules at conferences.  How rarely one hears a commentator say: "Professor Finklebaum has offered us a truly fascinating discourse.  Rather than quibble with her third subordinate observation on page thirteen, I should like to try to restate what I understand to be her central thesis, and then spend a few moments reflecting on how we all might learn from it."

Even if one disagrees with the author of the paper, would it not be friendlier, and more useful to say:  "Here is how I think Dr. Quincebottom might strengthen his conclusion," rather than treating the unfortunate Quincebottom as having committed a mortal sin that requires ritual shaming and public humiliation as the only appropriate atonement?

The Academy is too often conceived as the arena for the expression of barely concealed and marginally sublimated aggression, despite all the fine talk about the search for truth and contributions to knowledge.

I have on the very rarest of occasions written a genuinely hostile review, but only when I considered the author to be morally reprehensible as well as wrong.  [The two cases that come to mind are my classic review of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and a review of a forgettable book by the egregious Harvey Mansfield.]

Perhaps these reflections are merely evidence that I am, in my dotage, becoming senile.  I hope not.

CROWDFUNDING

Most of you, I would imagine, have heard of something called "crowdfunding, a technique for using the web to raise investment capital for small start-up enterprises by soliciting very large numbers of quite small donations -- "investments" -- from interested parties, wherever they may be.  It is not really investing because the donors do not get any sort of ownership share in the companies their donations help to get launched, but there can be a variety of perks that give the feeling of a reward. 

Petridish.org, a crowdfunding site that is limited to scientific efforts, places a $5000 minimum limit on the amount a scientist or laboratory or research group can aim for, with the recipient of the "investment" paying a 4% fee to the web owner if the goal is reached and a 9% fee if it is not.  "The Wolves of Isle Royale" is currently 87% funded, and "Language of the Wild Bonobos" is 85% funded.  I assume that means each has raised that percentage of the minimum $5000.  Other projects currently listed include "Decoding Hyena Calls in the Maasai Mara" and "Fawns and their Hiding Places."

Indiegogo.com is a business-oriented crowdfunding site offering opportunities to toss in a few bucks for "Help Get Norfolk Donut Supply Co. Rolling" or "Proper Flops -- Anti-Microbial Arch Supports" among many others.

What fascinates me about these web-based enterprises is the evidence they provide of just how much can be done through the internet without any deep-pocket donors or fat cat investors.  These operations are the polar opposites of the Bain Capitals of the world.  The implications for politics, it seems to me, are explosive.  Since it costs virtually nothing to go up on the web, and since the rate at which information flows approches the speed of light, in a country of 310 million, there are always more than enough like-minded people who can afford 5$, 10$, 25$, or even 100$ to support an effort with which they are sympathetic.

We are really only in the first decade of this transformation in information and organization.  During the current presidential cycle, attention has been focused on billionaires and their ability to influence political races.  But think about it:  a million dollars is merely fifty dollars each for 20,000 people, and there really are many times that many progressively inclined people in this country who can be approached for donations of that magnitude. 

Perhaps bottom-up democracy has a future in this benighted land.

BOOK STORES

A well-wishing reader suggests that I patronize bookstores instead of Amazon.com in order to help slow the seemingly unstoppable death of the old-fashioned bookstore.  I have a great fondness for the sort of bookstore he is referring to -- not the big flashy Barnes and Noble kind that seems to have more toys and coffee and tshachkes than real books, but the lovely little academic bookstore that could be counted on to carry all the latest serious works in a wide range of fields.

Now, as it happens, the copy of the GROUNDWORK I ordered was secondhand, so I was in fact patronizing one of the hundreds of bookstores whose stock is linked to Amazon's computers.  But that is not the nub of the problem.  I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home to the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina system.  UNC-Chapel Hill is a large and distinguished campus, with a great many faculty in residence and a large graduate student population.  And yet, there is not a decent book store in the entire town!  The closest bookstore that is even notionally like the sort of bookstore I remember is on 9th street in Durham, near Duke University, and it really is little more than a supplier of assigned texts in Duke courses.  The bookstore in the middle of Chapel Hill turns out to be almost entirely devoted to Tar Heel sports memoribilia.

Since I have only lived here for four years, I do not know whether there ever was a good bookstore in town, driven to the wall by the competition of Amazon.com, but as things are now, if I want an academic book, Amazon is really my only option.  The fact that it is incredibly convenient does not hurt.  [I mean, at two a.m., when I have arisen for a while, as most old guys do, I can with one click purchase any book Amazon and its network of second hand bookstores offers, and expect it to arrive by mail two or three days later.]

CHANGE OF PLANS

I have come down with a cold and sinus infection, and my doctor says I ought not to take long plane trips under those conditions, so our Paris trip has been postponed.  I have ordered a copy of the GROUNDWORK from Amazon.com [I think it is actually a book I edited many years ago], and when it arrives, I shall continue the tutorial on Kant's ethical theory from here.  Stay tuned.

I started to write a blog post on crowdfunding but I hit a key and it disappeared.  [rats]  I shall try to reconstruct it tomorrow.

THE THINGS YOU CAN LEARN ON TELEVISION

Contrary to what everyone says, it is actually possible to learn something by watching television.  Case in point:  I was watching Chuck Todd's hour long show on MSNBC this morning while I was making the bed [it comes on at nine a.m. after Morning Joe, which I enjoy on the rare occasions when Joe Scarborough is not there] and I listened to an interview with a rather dour individual who was a spokesperson for something called the National Popular Vote Bill.  This is a well-funded nation-wide effort to circumvent the Electoral College and institute the practice of choosing as president the person who gets the most votes in a national election.

The natural way to accomplish this is by a Constitutional Amendment, but that would be impossible to bring off, because there are enough small over-represented states in the nation to constitute a blocking one-third of the fifty states.  This is not exactly an accident.  The complicated political compromise that became our political system was originally designed explicitly to protect the institution of slavery -- the price the Southern states demanded for their participation in what today we call nation-building -- and to protect the smaller colonies from domination by the larger ones.  As time has passed and our politics have evolved, the Electoral College system has served quite well to magnify the power and influence of the relatively small numbers of people who live in the lightly populated states. 

Just to remind those of you who did not have the benefit of a Civics class in high school [mine was, as I recall, in my Freshman year, which is to say 1947], or who live abroad and find our curious political system too dense to penetrate, each state is assigned a number of Electors equal to the total number of its Members of the House of Representatives and Senate combined [hence a total of 535 in all].  The members of the House are allocated in a manner reasonably proportional to population, although the Constitution stipulates that each state must have at least one Representative, and there are actually several states so unpopulated that they do not even have 1/435th of the nation's population in their borders.  But each state has the same number of Senators, and this rather dramatically unbalances the relationship between population and Electoral Votes.

The strategy behind the National Popular Vote Bill campaign is to recruit state legislatures to make a provisional commitment to allocate their Electors in a presidential race to whichever candidate gets the most votes nationally, the commitment to take effect once states having in total 270 Electoral votes have signed on.  Once that happens, regardless of what the remaining states do, the states in the compact will be able to guarantee that the winner of the popular vote will get enough Electoral votes [i.e., 270] to win the election.  For those with short memories, the last time the loser of the popular vote won the presidency was in 2000. 

Because of the political complexion of the states with the most caches of Electoral votes, this effort is widely, and correctly, I think, seen as effectively an effort to push the country to the left, although of course nothing remotely like that is ever said by the proponents of the campaign.

Thus far, a dozen or more state legislatures have passed the bill [who knew?] representing about half of the 270 Electoral votes needed.  If the campaign manages to persuade enough additional state legislatures to enact the bill [and assuming that the Electors vote in the Electoral College as their state legislatures have instructed them to do, something they are not required to do by the U. S. Constitution], presidential elections will henceforward de facto be contests for popular votes alone, without a word of the Constitution having been altered.

The effect on presidential campaigns would be electric.  I think there is no doubt about that.  As things are now, campaigns virtually ignore safe states, even those having huge caches of Electoral votes.  No Democratic candidate is going to waste much time or money campaigning in New York or California, despite their size, because they are absolutely sure to vote Democratic, and a 55/45 victory yields exactly as many Electoral votes as a 60/40 or 65/35 victory.  But if it is total votes, and only total votes, that count, then it makes very good sense to spend scarce resources getting one's supporters to the polls in safe states, because there are likely to be large concentrations of such additional votes in safe districts.  If a ward or precinct regularly gives 85% of its votes to one party or the other, as happens in many places all over the country, the non-voters in that ward or precinct are likely to break in the same fashion.  Why labor to locate and persuade a so-called "independent" voter in a swing state when with much less effort and money, you can get a reliable supporter to the polls?

As a political junkie on the left, I find this campaign intriguing.  I can think of some powerful arguments against it, but I think I shan't mention them.  hem hem.