Did the Christo-Fascist Court pull the trigger on Roe before their Coup was secured?

The old GOP had a problem. How do they sustain power while serving the interests of only 1-2%? The answer: stir the hornet's nest, then build a coalition of the angry who will, in their fury, look past their own interests and support a plutocracy. The quid pro quo? White, working class conservatives who felt rejected by identity politics, anxious about abortion, and squeamish about non-normative sexuality were weaponized by the GOP to fight their irrational culture and restroom wars.

But the lynchpin to the old GOP's success was Roe v Wade. The abortion issue allowed the plutocracy to be the party of extraordinary immorality on one hundred issues but still win so-called "morals voters" on this single issue.

The sine qua non of the plutocratic GOP was that the abortion issue was alive. They told voters they'd end abortion, but that was never their intention. With abortion gone, millions of self-described morals voters could turn to other value issues and to self-interest and the old GOP would be unable to win.

If the votes were counted.

When the hard Christian right, the Handmaid's Tale folks, found an authoritarian, sociopathic, instrumental Kleptocrat (Trump) who would sell his soul and his country for a dollar, they joined forces. They drove out the old GOP, a party thriving on bitter disappointment and anxiety, replacing it with a vastly accelerated brand of overwhelming hate. Trump's macho and aggressive campaign histrionics and his unwillingness to leave office in 2020 suited their temperaments well.

The old GOP assumed they had to win elections by counting votes, so they needed the abortion issue alive. The Christo-Fascists got to work burning down civil rights knowing the only way they could sustain power would be by suspending democracy.

To be clear: a plutocratic party used the abortion issue to string along tens of millions, with no intention of ever actually ending abortion rights and their gravy train. The Christo-Fascists that have replaced them have no such qualms: they imagine divine power, they find democracy and the Bill of Rights repugnant (their backward interpretation of the 2nd the exception), and they have no intention of counting votes.

A plutocracy serving the 1% does not give up its biggest political asset while it plans to honor democracy.

This path has been trodden by many authoritarians before them. Their latest buddy, Putin, became unconstitutional in 2008 (or at least in 2012, when the puppet administration passed from power), for instance. The Christo-Fascist cabal on SCOTUS did not pull this trigger before being assured that 2022/2024 and beyond have been secured.

The Christo-Fascists do have an Achilles heel and this may be our best hope: they are filled with hubris despite the astonishing gaps in their understanding of the world. 2022 and 2024 may not in fact be a done deal. The American Republic may not yet be dead. Honorable men and women insinuated into corrupted GOP state election machines in AZ, GA, MI, WI, and PA may have a moment of conscience. They may not prove willing to toss aside millions of black and student ballots. They may not be able to set aside entire election results and replace them with a corrosive, entirely corrupted GOP machine.

This may be even more likely if the votes cast are overwhelming. Many corruptible men and women may justify stealing or hiding a few votes, perhaps even 1% of the vote, but some of them may not stomach a wholesale theft, a blatantly transparent Christo-Fascist Coup.

That's our silver lining. That they pulled the trigger on Roe and the totalitarian devastation of civil rights before they had fully secured their Coup. That Americans wake up, turn out the fascists at the polls in overwhelming numbers, and a couple of dozen quiet heroes counting votes say

"Hell, no, GOP. I won't be part of a Coup. Today, I choose to honor my oath to the Constitution, instead."

The "case" for capitalism -- or socialism -- is out of reach. The proponents of competing systems are advancing ideologies built upon inadequate understanding

 

 

From Adam Smith (1776) to Leon Walras (late 19th and very early 20th century), an astonishing case was made for market-based systems.  The mathematics is deep and extensive, the theory massive, and the assumptions strong.  The argument in favor of markets was made by thousands of political economists.  There were detractors, of course, and some of them quite serious.  (Marx thought capitalism would replace feudalism but be replaced by socialism, and thought this a good thing while Schumpeter, much later, thought Marx was right that socialism would win out but thought that result terrible.)  But it is fair to say that the result of all that work was A CASE FOR CAPITALISM.

 

The gist of it was that IF a nation or global market system met certain essential assumptions, markets allocate labor, products and services better than any other system.  That is rather extraordinary, as it involved a deep and complex set of assumptions and then follow-on proofs about how people think and behave, and how production is organized and marketed most efficiently, and finally how resources are allocated across products, firms, markets, sectors and even nations.

 

I suppose in our current milieu in which millions of ignorant people argue for capitalism and against socialism, communism, fascism, etc., for essentially random reasons, the idea that there might be a case for capitalism over the others is not considered remarkable.  But this feat of logic and mathematics is a Mount Everest in the history of scholarly efforts, as it was not just ideological puffery, but honest, brilliant argument.

A few of the key assumptions are:

1.    Markets are competitive (no firms have large market shares and thus market power over pricing of inputs, including wages, and output prices) and in so doing set their private marginal costs equal to the private marginal benefits,

2.    Everyone is equally and perfectly well informed (suppliers do not know that their products will break down and hide it from buyers, for example), 

3.    Governments understand and are effective at properly regulating businesses, taxing and subsidizing them so that when they set their after-regulatory private marginal costs equal to their after-regulatory private marginal benefits, they choose to set social marginal costs equal to social marginal benefits.  This last maximizes social economic well being and is absolutely fundamental to the case for capitalism.

4.    The alternative – social planners directly set social marginal costs equal to social marginal benefits (central planning at the root of socialism) – in theory an easier system – is too hard because the informational demands of complex economic systems will overwhelm even the best social planners.  (Note that this theory was worked out long before super-computers and massive data processing power.)

Let’s stop with these big four.

1.    First, we all know that markets are not perfectly competitive.  Some have tried to salvage the case for capitalism by arguing that it is “workably competitive.”  In theory, this is not a save, because of something called the theory of the second best, in which it was shown in the 50s that capitalist systems are theoretically chaotic, so small deviations from perfection in one variable can disturb all the other variables, and the results, in unpredictable ways.

2.    Second, we know that information is not perfect and not perfectly shared.  This appears to be another breakdown in the case for capitalism.

3.    Third, regulators have not always shown themselves to be up to the task of regulating business well – and the very ideologues who shout to the hilltops that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds actually make it much harder for regulators to do their jobs.  (Because our policy is now woefully incoherent.)  Thus, some of the most vocal supporters of capitalism actually do it grave harm, making both regulation and capitalism itself less effective.

4.    Fourth, in an age of supercomputers the case for central planning is surely stronger than it once was.

The bottom line is that the case for capitalism – which requires at a minimum competitive markets, perfect information, and excellent regulation – is weaker because we fail to deliver on those requirements and because central planning is theoretically a better option than it was before the modern information age.  (Some find the idea that the case for capitalism rests on excellent regulation surprising because they have failed to understand that markets cannot optimize the social marginal conditions without help.)

Does this mean that socialism is to be preferred?  No.  The case for socialism – one I will not make here, but is, in summary, dependent upon the good will of extraordinary social planners and astonishing information processing technology – is also quite problematic.

What do we do about it if we are honest?

1.    We stop lying about the economic case for capitalism versus socialism.  We just don’t know which, in the imperfect forms we now experience them, is the economic system with the most promise. (Although a strong case can be made against the more extreme forms of socialism the 20^th century experienced.)

2.    We do what we can to make whatever system is in place work as well as possible for the people it is supposed to serve.  The European model of democratic socialism, which is more a market-based capitalist system than a socialist system, seems to perform best, especially when labor is organized, legally protected, and is a true partner (sharing authority but also responsibility for corporate and policy outcomes).  But, once again, the proof is inadequate.  Economic theory describes models that do not exist in the real world.

3.    Educated people acknowledge that both those asserting the superiority of capitalism and those asserting the superiority of socialism are doing so without adequate proof, and usually at the behest of ideological compatriots.  The unfortunate truth is that despite a century of economic theory, for practical purposes we are in the dark – the reality is too complex for current human understanding – and we must do our best to muddle through without hope of anyone turning on the lights when it comes to these issues.  Picking a system is not a practical course of action.  Picking and refining workable policy, even radical policy, is far more promising.

We must regrow a true Conservative movement to displace the Party of Sedition (Part II)

Conservatives respect processes that devolve from the law, including the Constitution. But it is the Reactionary who is focused on original intent.

Originalism is a theocratic sentiment. To regard ancient texts as the embodiment of enduring truth assumes an omniscient mind at the origin. This is neither rational nor reasonable, whether it be applied to old men in a middle eastern desert 2500 years ago or "founding fathers" 250 years ago.

Reactionaries may be, but need not be, theocratic, but originalism suits their desire to block all change, to retard progress, to reject all proposals for renewal. Hence, they are rhetorically aligned.

There is no valid role for originalists in politics or on the Courts. Their rightful place is in the academy, to teach us the role of our origins in our intellectual history. It is fair to wish to know what we once thought, but not to force us to never evolve.

There is no valid role for reactionaries anywhere in a functioning society. Truth is never their goal. Rejection of all proposals for change, independent of merit, is their MO. Sometimes this goal is subsumed in a fervent antigovernment or anti-regulation bias; sometimes it is well disguised. But it has no productive role.

There is a valid role for true Conservatism, however. In a functioning society, Progressives are unrelenting in the advancement of a vision for, and strategies for achieving, a just society, and Conservatives are useful in demanding to see the feasibility study, the implementation plan, and the financing. Conservatives trust the tried and true, understand there are sometimes unintended consequences. Conservatives help us avoid costly mistakes or ill-planned ventures that signal more virtue than they achieve.

Of course, there are few Conservatives left in the GOP. Even their SCOTUS appointees are largely reactionary or originalist or both. The GOP spends with reckless disregard for the consequences. Their rhetoric is reactionary, often authoritarian. Until recently, the GOP was predominately fascistic (wedding reactionary and corporate interests) until the pragmatics of evolving and rational corporate leadership (Coke, Delta, MLB) prevented them from drinking the insurrectionist, Jim Crow (i.e., Confederate) Kool Aid. When fascism tears apart, the next stage is usually tyranny. When secession and tyranny blend, we have sedition and treason. This is where they are now.

While the current GOP is to be feared and ostracized, this cannot be allowed to confuse us. An organization with a visionary must have a disciplined chief financial officer to survive. A just society needs powerful Progressives but it also needs skeptical Conservatives. Fiscally responsible conservatives (almost unknown for a generation) would raise the top marginal tax rates far higher than Biden will propose. Eisenhower was at 90% and even Reagan at 50% for seven of his eight years. We need the Lincoln Republicans now more than ever.

We must regrow a true Conservative movement to displace the Party of Sedition (Part I)

There's no turning back to the Party of Sedition and Treason. Therein would lie tragedy and ruin.

But a single party system is also untenable. No party, unchallenged, is truly accountable.

We desperately need the Lincoln Republicans, Schmidt, Navarro, Romney, Cheney, Kinzinger, Chafee, Flake, Powell, Ridge, Gerson, Hagel, Hayden, Mattis, Whitman, Bush, McRaven, Comey, Mueller, Bolton, Kristol and others -- and yes, they're not all heroes -- to announce the formation of the Lincoln Republican Party. We need them to assert true conservative values -- accountability and lawfulness for everyone, fiscal integrity, the belief that something new needs to be thoroughly tested, respect for the tried and true but not the tried and failed, respect for Constitutional process without being wedded to original and outdated intent.

None of these values are part of the Party of Sedition. That is, conservatives still clinging to the seditionists may say they believe in personal accountability and other conservative values, but that has nothing to do with their vote.

Further, these values cannot all be healthfully incorporated into a Progressive movement which must be driven by a vision of a just society above all else.

A healthy society uses a conservative countervailing power bloc to double check progressive proposals for change. Like reactionaries, conservatives are aware that government solutions can have negative, unintended consequences and we count on them to "do the math." Unlike reactionaries, conservatives know that not all government initiatives fail. Further, conservatives understand that the Constitution itself is of no use ("promote the general welfare") if reactionary anti-change and antigovernment bias flourishes.

In an ideal society, the progressives push hard for change and the conservative double-checks the plan, including the finances.

Again, the Party of Sedition is neither interested nor capable of doing any of this. And fringe Ayn Randian libertarian reactionaries are as useful as a broken clock, repeating the same message at all times for all problems.

The primary danger of Trump's continued influence is that he, like Hitler after the Beer Hall Putsch of late 1923, continues to threaten obliteration. But a secondary danger is that his vile vision for a gilded fascist state led by lawless authoritarianism is so captivating to so many horrible or horribly-deluded Americans, that there appears to be too little fertile soil to regrow a true Conservative movement in the US. And that is actually needed for long term survival.

You've been intentionally confused into conflating democracy and this brand of unfettered capitalism

Koch fully understands what the vast majority of Americans do not: that democracy is in opposition to unfettered, capitalism and its kleptocratic equilibrium. And he and his kind choose the latter.

Many on the Right fully conflate democracy and capitalism, imagining, or choosing to imagine, that they are the same thing (idiotic) or complementary (an hypothesis worth examining). The conflation is not without some history: the advocates of a capital based system have employed rhetoric to confuse the masses. "Free" enterprise is meant to sound like political "freedom," when of course it means no such thing.

Democracy is a political system -- an act of genius invented by classical Athenians, reinvented and applied by the British, the French, early Americans, and others. The US Constitution is not notable for its contribution to democracy as ordinarily understood, but for its protection of the rights of all, even when in the minority -- a valuable step forward, of course, and one to be admired when we live up to it.

The market-based system that grew up in the Industrial Revolution, and evolved into this complex system in which investors allocate our resources according to the optimization of their investment returns, has its merits, but it is not entirely consistent with democracy. One dollar, one vote versus one citizen, one vote. If you pay attention, it's not hard to see the difference.

The confusion -- and the intentional rhetoric aimed at confusing people into supporting this insane brand of unfettered capitalism that has enriched the Kleptocratic class beyond imagination because they reject totalitarianism -- has its roots, according to some scholars, in the Cold War.* As Soviet-style socialism was totalitarian and post-war capitalist systems were more democratic, the war against totalitarianism provided ideological cover for capitalism (as it was working hand-in-hand with democracy).

But socialism around the world today is much more democratic than ever before, and the world's most unfettered capitalist economies (China and the US) are now quasi-totalitarian or on the cusp, so this argument has lost its impact. Further, many of those who reject democracy (e.g., the American GOP and their Kleptocratic puppet masters) are the biggest advocates of unfettered capitalism -- fighting to kill off all democratic voice in regulating business, and thus challenging our sovereignty over our lives, our health, our air, our water, our values. As well, in the US, advocates of capitalism have become authoritarians, thus standing in direct opposition to democracy.

As social movements are more push-and-shove than coherent, this means that much of the American Left, seeing that the totalitarian right is invested in killing democracy and saving capitalism, have chosen not to point out that we could have both, as long we honored democratic processes and imposed social values on business, regulating them as do all civilized societies, but have instead decided that if they are to oppose the Right, they should oppose capitalism. There is some legitimate tradition here -- the far left has long been more sympathetic to the values of communism and less critical of its flaws -- but we are observing is not a nuanced critique of the Right's anti-democratic, pro-unfettered-and-brutal-version of capitalism men like Koch advance. Instead many on the far Left have just jumped into the fight with blunt and uncritical attacks on all market-based systems. When they are forced to acknowledge that a democratic market-system like Sweden's has its merits, they just call it socialism.

To be clear, the far Right knows that full-blooded democracy would never allow their brutal, unfettered version of Kleptocratic capitalism. The exploitation of the 99% since 1980 in the US has been an astonishing success for them. Even folks like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, characterized by the Right as socialists, are offering tiny, tepid solutions; just to recover the sort of society and system we had when the US was an exemplar for the world (say the level of inequality we had from 1950-1966), we'd have to impose wealth and income taxes that no one can offer without political death.

Yet, some version of a market-based system, doing what it does well, with a rational, economic regulatory process to impose both EFFICIENCY and EQUITY, is probably optimal. Because of our history, this centrist idea -- if applied objectively -- is now too far left to be palatable to the majority, not interesting to those on the far left who want the system dismantled, and of course horrifying to the Right, although it would be better for the vast majority of them.

And so we are left with an unfettered brand of capitalism -- a horrible, inequitable and unsustainable version that the brilliant Karl Polanyi, understanding its deadly appeal, called "a stark utopia." This system, dressed up in red, white and blue, and stripped of all civility, decency and effectuality, is our Aegean Sea, home to our sirens, whose song is too strong for us to resist.

Unless we find our own Orpheus to resist them, we will all drown.

___

* E.g.,

Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy

THE COLD WAR ORIGINS OF RATIONAL CHOICE LIBERALISM

S.M. AMADAE

Everyone has a story to tell

When some historians noted that orthodox histories did not truly tell the stories of racial minorities, some set out to tell those stories.

And many whites reacted badly.

When some historians noted that orthodox histories did not truly tell the stories of women, some set out to tell those stories.

And many men reacted badly.

When some historians noted that orthodox histories did not truly tell the stories of indigenous peoples, some set out to tell those stories,

And many desdendants of colonizers reacted badly.

When some historians noted that orthodox histories did not truly tell the stories of religious minorities, some set out to tell those stories.

And many Christians reacted badly.

The leftist claims and reactionary counter-claims you experience on social media are nothing new. The heterodoxy has been trying to tell its stories for a long time -- not always perfectly, of course -- and the orthodoxy, fearful of claims of privilege or reparations, has long resisted giving oxygen to those stories.

And that is a terrible reality.

But all disagreements have not been acrimonious. For example, during the anti-war demonstrations at Columbia during Vietnam, Richard Hofstadter was against them while one of his prize doctoral students, Mike Wallace, supported them -- yet they remained lifelong friends.

The only thing new is that every Tom, Dick and Harry now has an opinion about it all. And more heat than light leaves little room for finding common ground. Of course, the stories of everyone must be told and heard respectfully, but the first stories must be respected, too.

We must be patient for everyone to tell his or her story, but we must also be firm in acknowledging that everyone has a story to tell.

Calm reflection is now guilty by association and the implications are not good

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

--Yeats

There was a time when calm reflection was a better sign of moral character than accusing, disgusted outbursts and cries of moral calamity.

But something has happened.

The ascendance of sociopathy in the US has revealed a ruling class of calm and cold-blooded killers leading a clan of angry, violent ignoramuses. Men like Ben Schapiro and Steven Miller and Mitch McConnell act without conscience but also without fever. (Lindsay Graham, Donald Trump, Jim Jordan and their ilk are sociopaths, but not fully socialized sociopaths, so their outbursts put them in a second tier.)

What this has meant, it appears to me, is that many on the left, especially many liberals who once valued independence of thought, honest reflection, and respectful discourse, have come to associate cold-bloodedness with evil, and this seems to have loosed the tide of frenzied blood-letting in leftwing discourse. That is, once the liberal class started to associate calm discussions of painful, social problems with reactionary rhetoric and immoral character, respectful interaction became guilty by association, and the feeding frenzy was fed steroids.

Social media is now a piranha tank. Piranhas don't kill each other, but when another fish tries to navigate through, it is bloodied in an instant.

Facebook has explicitly or inadvertently tried to incentivize balkanization. If someone who disagrees with you reports you -- I have been "canceled" by Fox Viewers three times (and yes I appreciate their hypocrisy)-- FB banishes you. It makes their business model work best if we all block anyone who disagrees with us, and swim in homogeneous pools of like-minded souls who confirm our biases and support our craziness.

As confirmation bias is one of the key flaws of an irrational mind, Americans have taken up a challenge, and social media has supported that effort, to become as ignorant and irrational in as short time frame as possible.

While most are reading with the idea of emotional tagging -- they're in a mad race to decide if the meme is something to applaud or attack -- the few who are left trying to figure out whether the idea is right, wrong, or in need of amendment are criticized for lacking revolutionary zeal of one sort or another. The Left is famous for its tests of loyalty -- and it is clear today that there is little room for respectful disagreement on the Left --- but the Alt Right has done great work becoming all clan and no mind, with proclamations of RINO and brutal attacks whenever a Republican wakes up with a conscience. With few exceptions, Republicans who spend 24 hours afraid of going straight to hell are so lambasted by the Alt Right ideologues that they rush back into their putrid dens as fast as Punxsutawney Phil after seeing his shadow.

Trump's defeat in 2020 means 10 million of us will not be dying of Covid-19 and sucked dry of any future by Plutocratic thieves, but even sans Trump we can't actually survive as stupid as we are. For example, the 1.9T relief package needs to be paid for eventually -- and if we don't return to pre-1987 tax rates we will have essentially crippled our children's future in this country. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The arguments on social media are, frankly, so poor that fewer than 1% of the time the proponent of an idea has actually organized his or her logic and evidence to make an honest claim. Critiques are about as well organized, so most disagreements degenerate into nonsense.

Further, everything is out of proportion. In New York State, for example, we have suffered a serious and tragic setback with covid-19: many deaths and economic devastation. I am skeptical that NYS can survive fiscally. Our governor is doing 2-3 crisis jobs, most above his head, frankly. He is clearly overwhelmed by the impossible budget crisis he must solve over the next month. It is discouraging that people who imagine themselves to be morally mature think that the lives lost and the damage done by distracting him in the midst of these crises are justified by their moral absolutism. He should be investigated, as most moral people will agree, but if Trump's prosecutions could wait years, Cuomo's can wait until we are out of the fire. Attacking Cuomo at this moment is akin to slapping the driver of the car because you learned that he was guilty of something upsetting and you cannot wait until the car arrives at its destination.

Until we learn to interact with those we disagree with and learn from one another much more effectively, we will not grow. Further, until we learn to cooperate with one another, we will not be ready to solve the existentially-threatening climate crisis which is about to reach a lost endgame from which there is no coming back.