Colorado Confluence

A reader’s comment on the Denver Post article (http://www.denverpost.com/politics/ci_16245276) about my friend John Flerlage’s race against Republican incumbent Mike Coffman in CD 6 got me thinking about the title question. The reader wrote that the journalists at the Denver Post looked like fools for pretending that Mike Coffman and Diana DeGette had credible opponents. Which raises the question: Should the post ignore opponents in races where the odds are heavily against them? What should the threshold be?What criteria should be employed? Should news media acknowledge major party (i.e., Democratic and Republican) candidates regardless of the odds they face, but not long-shot minor party or independent candidates? Should the news media acknowledge all candidates, including every self-annointed outlier who manages to declare and file?

If any candidate merits comparable attention to any other just for declaring and filing, that invites a very high noise-to-signal ratio (i.e., the reporting of a lot of news that isn’t news worthy). But if major party candidates challenging incumbents in what are considered “safe seats” don’t merit attention, then the news media become complicit in an anointment of the incumbent, signalling through inattention that the challenger isn’t worthy of anyone’s consideration. As I wrote in response to that Denver Post reader, we don’t call elections before they’re held based on a projection of the odds; we actually hold them, and do not assume they are ever irrelevant. In fact, the news media should report on any candidate that represents a significant faction of the population in that jurisdiction, as major party candidates always do, and as others sometimes do.

Democracy is not just, or even primarily, about who wins elections. This is something that almost no one seems to understand, and least of all many of those who think they are the most politically savvy (i.e., political bloggers). Democracy is about a far more complex set of interrelated dynamics, of which electoral outcomes are just one facet. It is about the right of each to express their will in the political arena, regardless of whether that will is likely to prevail. It is about organizing, and communicating, and competing, affecting minds and hearts. And it is about minorities -some admirable, some reprehensible- fighting to prevail over majorities -some admirable, some reprehensible- against overwhelming odds, and over long periods of time.

The people whose ancestors were brought here in shackles to serve as chattel faced long odds every step of the way to emancipation and then, after another century of egregious institutionalized discrimination, civil rights protections. But that doesn’t mean that they, or their aspirations, were irrelevant until they won, or even until they had a good chance of winning. The outcome of that struggle depended as much on those who kept it alive through long generations of defeat as upon those who were eventually victorious.

Democracy is about a competition of ideas, of aspirations, of visions for the future. When a long-shot candidate runs in an almost impossible to win race, win or lose, that candidate, if successful, advances the ideas and aspirations and visions for the future that he or she holds dear. That candidate provides a rallying point for those ideas, those aspirations, those visions for the future. That candidate is the symbol of their persistence against the odds, of their unwillingness to die just because they are unpopular. And, if and when the tide ever turns, and that minority ever becomes a majority (or persuades a majority), or even gains enough numbers to influence policy in their district, it may, in some small measure, be due to the efforts of those previous candidates who couldn’t win, and didn’t.

Like John Flerlage, I’m running in a district (state house, in my case) in which the odds are overwhelmingly against me. I hate having to pretend that I don’t know the odds, and, in fact, rarely do. The numbers are worse in my district, by a considerable margin, than they are in any other that the Democrats have recently won against the odds. In 2010, it  really is all but impossible for me to win (2012 may be another story). And I’m running with that knowledge, not against it.

I’m running to move ideas, to move the center of gravity of my district, to sow the seeds of an eventual victory, and to cultivate the ideas and values that I so passionately believe best serve our collective interests. I’m not running just to engage in an empty ritual, going through motions that are not the best way to use my candidacy to maximum effect just because “that’s what candidates are supposed to do.” I’m running because by doing so, along with blogging and speaking and meeting people and engaging in various on-the-ground efforts, I can have a meaningful and positive impact on the distribution of beliefs and understandings both in my district and beyond. I’m running because unless those who are facing impossible odds continue to face them, reason and justice can never prevail against those odds. 

And that’s what democracy is really all about.

As I was reading today’s Denver Post article (http://www.denverpost.com/news/marijuana/ci_16239152) on the journey of Medical Marijuana legalization in California, Colorado, and elsewhere, and the journey of Proposition 19, to outright legalize and tax small quantities of marijuana possession or growth, on this year’s ballot in California, I was struck by one surprising parallel: That between the current illegal growers, and the 18th century American colonial tea smugglers who were major catalysts of the original “tea parties” in major cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard. You see, many illegal growers (particularly those in Humbolt County in the north, long a major haven of illegal pot cultivation) oppose Proposition 19, because, though it serves everyone’s interests but their own, it promises to cut into their profits and alter their familiar and preferred way of life. And that’s exactly what motivated the smugglers (closely intertwined with the original “pirates of the Caribbean”), who happily smuggled Dutch East India Tea Company (“Dutch”) tea to the colonies, in order to avoid the taxes and mark-ups that accumulated on British East India Tea Company (“British”) tea on its journey from India to London, and from London to America, passing through various brokers’ hands. It was when the British cut out the London middlemen, and lowered (not raised) the taxes on British tea (which the colonists had always been legally obligated to buy), that the smugglers helped stir up the more idealistic rebels (like Sam Adams), and whip the coastal elites, with which the smugglers had close ties, into a frenzy.

I doubt that the Humboldt County growers will have quite the same impact, but the similarities are striking.

That’s not the only thing I noticed about the article. I also noticed another example of the ecology of human social institutional change (see “The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia”). You see, once medical marijuana became legalized, it became big business, creating “money and friends,” as the Post article put it. And once it became big business, it meant jobs, creating union friends. And the promise of profits and jobs while still mired in “the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression” means hope, political hay, and a lot of others saying “what the hey.” On top of that, the NAACP got on board, reasonably enough seeing the unnecessary and destructive incarceration of (often African American) youths for a crime that shouldn’t be a crime as an afront to civil rights and the creation rather than deprivation of opportunity. With a “budding” industry promising profits and jobs, a growing familiarity with legal marijuana in more and more communities, and a potentially robust economic activity and public revenue generator, what seemed very distant in the mid-90’s became close-at-hand at the end of the 00’s. Such is the nature of realignments; dominoes falling in branching succession, as more and more people find change to be in their own interests.

But such ecosystems of mutual reinforcing interests aren’t without predators and prey, and other conflicting interests in competition. And so we come back to our Humboldt County growers, who are concerned that legalization will put them out of business, or at the very least depress prices and reduce profits. Like the real interests behind those face-painted Sons of Liberty before them, their fortunes lie with the illegal and untaxed T, not with the legal and taxed variety.

“This Week” is having a town hall this morning (I’m watching it now), addressing the question, “Should America fear Islam?” There are panelists on both sides of the question, including, on each side, people who lost loved ones on 9/11. One woman, Islamic, said, “America shouldn’t fear any religion. They should fear those who try to make them afraid.”

A woman who lost her pregnant daughter on 9/11 said that she can’t raise her remaining children to fear their neighbors, and that she lost her daughter and doesn’t want to now lose her country. The irony, of course, is that she fears losing her country to those who trade in the fear of losing our country (The same woman said, “I think we should not get into a discussion of whose religion has created more horror on Earth”).

A reverend who thinks that Christianity is the one truth agreed with a radical Muslim that Muslims who don’t practice Sharia law are not real Muslims. To the radical Muslim, that’s an indictment; to the reverend, it’s the justification of his hatred. Another commentator came on to say that the two, the radical Muslim and the radical Christian, are almost identical, flip sides of the same coin of intolerance and hatred.

The reverend had earlier said that he believed that Christianity was the one truth, and that Islam was a lie, and then went on to list the Islamic beliefs and history that he considers justification for his fear of Islam (Sharia law). But, of course, if we exposed Christianity to the same kind of critical examination, we would arrive at much the same kind of realization, that archaic religions fanatically adhered to today do not embrace the advances in our humanity that have transcended their former militancy. To use either of these religions (or any other) as a vehicle for the militancy that is historically embedded within it is the same crime against humanity dressed in different clothes; to use either of these religions (or any other) as a vehicle for compassion and goodwill, as a tolerant lens through which to focus a commitment to humanity, as a social force through which to do good in the world, is an admirable mission.

An FBI agent was brought on to discuss the legitimate terrorist threats, particularly home-grown Islamic terrorism. But he emphasized that the numbers are not dramatic, that the threat of home-grown terrorism does not rise to the level of the threat of mundane violent crime in America. He did not mention what Time Magazine did in its most recent issue (see “American Terrorists in Training”: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=622), the three-fold rise in a single year in the number of radical right-wing militias training to fight their own holy war here on American soil.

One right-winger on the panel said that Islamic law requires that loyal Muslims must lie to advance their religion, and that, therefore, he could not trust the moderate Islamic panelist’s assurance that she is a proud American committed to preserving and promoting a tolerant, peaceful society.

The debate went on to compare the relative levels of violence committed by radical Christianity and radical Islam, whether the building of the Islamic Center in Manhattan is insensitive. Right after Gary Bower insisted that Christians don’t commit acts of violence when they’re upset, a Muslim cleric told of his mosque in a non-controversial location in the heartland of America being destroyed by arson.

A debate broke out whether rising hate crimes against Muslims are real, or committed by Muslims themseves in order to exploit a fabricated victimhood. (Robert?) Spencer cited what a well-informed participant called debunked data (and cited the organizations that had debunked it, including the FBI).

The right-wing extremists on the panel and in the audience kept returning to exaggerated claims of a radicalization that every specifically and professionally informed person (including law enforcement officials) on the panel and in the audience completely debunked. The right-wing man who lost his son insisted that we cannot tolerate Islam in this country, because it is inherently radical and violent. The moderate woman who lost her daughter spoke with the voice of reason and tolerance.

You should link to the video or transcript, and watch or read the whole thing, for the all of it, but most of all for Daisy’s brilliant contribution. Here are two (not necessarily the best) examples: “I believe that in this nation we hold people accountable for crimes after they commit them, and not before.” “They could be sensitive and move the mosque farther away from ground zero; how far away is far enough?”

At the close of the panel discussion, the wife of the Imam behind the cultural center was asked “should you move the center?” She answered, “No. I think American values should prevail.”

So do I.

This week’s Time magazine cover story is a chilling reminder that those mad hatter’s sipping their insanity-laced tea are no laughing matter (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601101011,00.html). The number armed and very dangerous militias, training to defeat all of us not-completely-insane (sometimes inexcusably Jewish or African American or Hispanic) people who are to them the devil incarnate, with live rounds, and grease paint, and enough loose screws rattle a civilization.

The number of active anti-government militias in America trippled in 2009, from 42 to 127. In one recent training exercise in Ohio, the scenario at which they shot live rounds, including from a belt-fed M-60 machine gun, was that Islamic terrorists were marauding over America because the current pro-Muslim president “had ordered a stand-down against Islamic troops”. One of them opines that he doesn’t know who the Redcoats will be; could be U.N. troops, federal troops, or Mexicans coming across the border (okay, he said “Mexican troops,” but given our current southern-border-xenophobia, and his complete insanity, if I were a bit more Chihuahuan in appearance, that statement would make me even more uncomfortable than I would undoubtedly already be).

These people are linked by “self-described Patriot beliefs,” including the notion that the federal government is a foreign tyrant. Some groups are white supremacists, some are members of a violent branch of  Christianity. Obama the non-white, “non-American”, “non-Christian”, non-Neanderthal alien is their catalyst, their symbol of having lost ground to the “other” that they rally, and rail, against. Some end up walking the walk, as well as talking the talk.

James Von Brunn, the 88 year old white supremacist who shot and killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, was also an anti-government “patriot,” who had taken hostages at the Federal Reserve in 1981, had complained on his website that “the American right-wing (is) nothing but talk”, had originally intended to assassinate David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior White House advisor. Von Brunn had written “Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew masters tell him to do.”

The Time article has more stories of similar wackos, of swastikas and proclaimed desires to assassinate Obama, all simmering and seething through this morass of hatred and ignorance. Most of the Tea Party isn’t so extreme, so violent, though they speak in the metaphors of war and violence. But, to me, they are implicated in this, because they too are a coalescence of ignorance and anger, of a senseless rage toward some despised “other” (see “The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party,” posted just before this).

America, for all of its very real wonders and triumphs as a society and a nation, has always had a certain defective cultural gene, one not quite matched (though not entirely avoided, either) by the post-World War II Western European nations (maybe because they had seen that gene come to fruition right in their midst immediately before and during World War II, and were shocked into enough sense not to let it fester into malignancy again), whose right-wing extremists were never quite what defined them, as they too often are in America.

As absurd as the folks with misspelled signs and internally inconsistent beliefs, relying on a semi-informed “constitutional idolatry,” railing against the government whose services they are relying on to do so, they, and the frothing crests of the waves atop their sea that form these militias and plot these acts of domestic terrorism, are no laughing matter. We need to figure out how to restore some measure of rationality to this country, and we need to do it soon.

The October 15 issue of Rolling Stone includes a nice little article which explores the tangle of internal inconsistencies, pure irrationalities, simmering hypocrisies, and just plain random folly of the ultimately elusive Tea Party “ideology” (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904?RS_show_page=0). The Kentucky seniors community, many blithely mounted on Medicare funded scooters or sucking on Medicare funded oxygen tanks, raptly worshiping at the anti-government alter while suckling at government’s teat; Rand Paul followers not batting an eye at their candidate, who wants to cut every government program but is indignant that the government might cut Medicaid payments to doctors such as himself, because, after all, “physicians should be allowed to make a comfortable living”; the life-long government employee who thinks it’s okay that he’s taken money from the government all his life (but that it’s not okay for anyone else to) because he doesn’t earn too much. All willing to take their share of the pie, but all eager to deny it to those far more in need.

But the author sums this mess up with a very cogent observation: The Tea Party isn’t really about issues; it’s about “us-versus-them,” about opposing those out-group members that they revile because they revile them, those “socialists” who are somehow inchoately evil and committed to a policy that will cause all that is good and holy to shrivel up and blow away. They are about “taking back their country” from whoever stole it, from whoever contributed to the discovery of electricity and the freeing of the slaves and the relative equality of women and, most of all, the invention of Velcro. It’s just blind, irrational, angry, ignorant rage. And it’s coming to a theater of culture war near you.

The Denver Post reported today that Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado has teamed up with conservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein to make the filibuster more difficult to implement (as it once was, not so very long ago), and only available one time (rather than at multiple stages of a bill’s journey through Congress) (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16208174). 

Despite the backing of a conservative luminary, and despite Udall’s crafting of the bill as a compromise to the minority party, he has thus far been unable to find a Republican co-sponsor, again underscoring President Obama’s observations in his recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, and what everyone but the thoroughly self-deceived have known for some time (and what I wrote early today when commenting on Obama’s interview, http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=575): The Republicans in Congress have no intention of serving the interests of the American people. Their raison d’etre is to hamstring the government, blame the consequences on the Democratic majority, regain control of Congress by doing so, and continue to serve the short-term interests of the few, by cultivating and exploiting the compatible blind dogma of a large information-deprived faction, at the expense of us all in the long run.

The phrase is mine, of course. President Obama wouldn’t, and couldn’t, use it. But in his recent, candid interview in Rolling Stone magazine (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/209395), President Obama very cogently captured the essence of the dilemma: The current divide between a Democratic Party primarily (though not universally), and in its leadership, characterized by a sincere desire to get it right, to pass the laws which best serve the interests of the American people, against a Republican Party primarily (though not universally), and in its leadership, characterized by a cynical willingness to act in ways which purposely harm the American people in order to be able to blame it on the Democrats who are currently in power, and win an electoral victory this year as a result.

There are two groups to be strongly rebuked in this narrative: The Republican Party, which has demonstrated its single-minded commitment to acquiring and retaining power, in order to serve the interests of the wealthiest Americans and continue the historically record-breaking concentration of American wealth into fewer and fewer hands (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=548); and the majority of the populace itself, which allowed itself to be a puppet on these bastards’ strings, blaming the president and the Democrats in Congress for the Republican obstructionism designed to accomplish exactly that end, at the expense of the American people themselves.

It’s time to side decisively with reasonable people of goodwill, in whatever political party they are found, with whatever ideological predispositions they may have. And it’s time to relegate these cynical enemies of the public interest, most resoundingly exemplified by the current Republican leadership and their fellow-travelers, to the dustbin of history, once and for all.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

A conservative recently wrote (though hasn’t yet published) that my statement that this blog is committed to our collective welfare is what’s wrong with this blog, this preconceived notion I am imposing on the discourse here, promoting a collectivist rather than individualist orientation. But what individualist orientation, that is even vaguely consistent with our fundamental shared values, does not privilege our collective welfare? For what is our collective welfare, other than some function of our combined individual welfares?

If someone is not advocating for our collective welfare, even if a social system that benefits some at the expense of others, or that leaves some to suffer horribly, then what are they advocating for? Consider, for instance, the argument, that I consider erroneous but that certainly is a valid argument to make, that we are all better off in an uncompromised lottery of life’s fortune, each left to his or her own fate, or to whatever non-governmental alliances they can form, all pursing only their own interests by any and all means that they can, unfettered by any collectively imposed constraints, than in any more equitable system, because at least, in such a lottery, each has some chance of winning, whereas in a more equitable order everyone loses (or so the argument goes). Even that erroneous argument is an argument about why such a lottery is in our collective interest. So who would refuse to engage in discourse about what is in our collective interest, if even the argument that a Hobbesian war of all against all is the best of all possible worlds is admissible in such discourse?

The answer: People whose ideology is inherently absurd. Those who argue against working toward having a functioning society, including a functioning government which constrains individual freedom in ways which serve our collective interests (as our Founding Fathers knew was a necessary part of the challenge, and as our Constitution set out to do), can’t frame it as an argument about what is in our collective interests, because their position is ultimately absurd if they do. And they can’t frame it in any other way, because, again, their position is absurd if they do.

If one is not arguing that their preferred policy is in our collective interest, then why should anyone care about their argument, or favor their policy? If they’re arguing for something other than our collective interest, what is it? Their own individual interests, which serve no one else’s interests? Some group’s interests, which serve no other group’s interests? No one’s interests at all? Some blind bit of dogma that privileges some other dehumanized social value over our collective interest? Why would any rational person taking an interest in social policy prefer any of these over our collective welfare?

The problem with extreme individualism is that it obfuscates this self-evident truth, and privileges a bizarrely inconsistent insistence that only extreme individualism is acceptable, not because it is in our collective interest, but because our collective interest doesn’t matter. And by that argument, if made consistently, we need no laws, no protections, nothing but the Hobbesian war of all against all that I have long considered the far right to covet, which no sane person can argue is in our collective interest. And so no sane person does.

So we have a robust ideology, a movement, in America, that argues against our collective interest, and tries by an alchemy of irrationality to convince itself that that makes sense. And this is why I think we have reached the final distillation of the great struggle of human history, the one that really counts: The struggle between reasonable people of goodwill, and irrational belligerents who argue a socially self-destructive absurdity, pursued with fanatical determination.

But why, then, should any decent human being react in any way other than disgust at this notion that we should dissolve as a society, and be only a jungle of conflict and mutual predation? And how can we be anything else without discussing the parameters of what that something else should look like, to best serve our collective interests? Why should anyone embrace an agenda seeking, stupidly, the lose-lose outcome of absolute conflict, rather than the win-win outcome of a well ordered society, perhaps one characterized by well-framed cooperative competition?

Extreme individualists are literally “enemies of society”.  Well, here’s my olive branch: Let’s rid ourselves of this absurdity, and agree that we are always discussing what is in our collective interests, regardless of what you think it is. And, by recognizing this, maybe we can finally engage in some rational and constructive public discourse.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

If America ever was an enlightened country, it hasn’t been in my lifetime. Shortly before I was born, we had congressional hearings and blacklistings to destroy lives on the mere insinuation that someone believed in a particular political economic theory. During my childhood, we had the hippy movement that, while more hopeful and positive in outlook, almost immediately became just another pretext for a symbiosis of glassy-eyed and opportunistic human folly (even more so in the case of its progeny, the “New Age” movement). Then we (over-)reacted to such utopianism with the Reagan years, which put into place an astronomical bloating of the national debt (while claiming to represent fiscal conservativism), a renewed (self-delusional) sense of moral superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world, a cynical promotion of religious fanaticism and cultural tyranny for political strategic purposes, a deregulatory frenzy that we are still paying for in numerous ways, and a set of policies that created more economic polarization in this country than existed in the 19th century “gilded age” of the “Robber Barons.” (As of 2007, 34.6% of net worth and financial wealth, 42.7 % of financial wealth alone, was concentrated into the hands of the wealthiest 1% of the American population. The bottom 80% of the American population were left to divide among them 15% of net worth and wealth combined, and just 7% of financial wealth alone. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html).

After a brief respite under Clinton, we returned to insanity with redoubled enthusiasm. Like a reverse John the Baptist to Bush’s reverse Jesus, Newt Gingrich regaled us with his “Contract With America,” a grandstanding promise to be indifferent to the needs of our most vulnerable citizens. Then came George W. Bush himself, not merely an embarrassing dimwit, but the first president in American history to both engage in and try to advance as our national values the torture of prisoners, the pre-emptive military bombardments of other sovereign nations, the kidnapping of foreign citizens off of foreign streets on the barest wisps of evidence against them (a mere accusation from a neighbor perhaps miffed about some private dispute) and then holding them in secret compounds and torturing them, even after concluding that they’re innocent of any crime, or “rendering” them to other countries that will torture them with even less self-restraint. After eight years of that president who morally and financially bankrupted the country, squandering the economic surplus left by Clinton, catalyzing the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression, we finally, in a rare glimmer of sanity, elected Barack Obama.

But sanity never lasts long in America. Since after a year and a half he has failed to erase the mess that Bush (and his Republican predecessors) created, since though he stopped the hemorrhaging of jobs (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/02/a_very_revealing_chart.php) he has not turned around what economists almost universally admit no one can, since he has tried to address the disgraceful fact that the richest country in the world had the most expensive and least efficient health care system in the developed world (the only one that failed to cover a significant portion of the population), since he addressed the lack of financial regulation (insisted upon and advanced by all preceding Republican executives and legislators) that led to the financial sector meltdown in the first place, he is the devil incarnate (born elsewhere, foreign in every way), and we must return to the insanity that preceded him (and is reacting to him).

Yesterday, on “This Week” (http://abcnews.go.com/thisweek), Queen Rania of Jordan very eloquently and moderately captured the corrosive role of religious extremism, both at home (in the United States) and abroad, the multiple folly of opposition to the Muslim cultural center in Manhattan (which stands in opposition to the intolerance and extremism of 9/11, and which in turn is opposed by the parallel intolerance and extremism at home), and the need not to surrender to cynicism and pessimism regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Such a voice of reason! So certain to fall on deaf ears….

After all, she is speaking to the America of Florida pastor Terry Jones, who felt that responding to the hopeful building of a Muslim interfaith center in Manhattan (not at “ground zero”, in fact) by threatening to burn the Koran was the epitome of what it means to be an American (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100907/ap_on_re_us/quran_burning). While many even on the right denounced him (only because they knew it would end up costing American lives), the ironic similarity of such intolerant ethnocentric escalators of hatred to the terrorists whose acts they abhor, and the dissimilarity to those who preach tolerance rather than interethnic hatred, is lost on them.

The Republican “Pledge to America”, which even conservative economists admit will further increase the deficit (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=534), is being aggressively and successfully marketed by the right as fiscal responsibility which no rational person could oppose (though virtually all rational people oppose it). And it imposes debt on future generations only to benefit the wealthiest Americans, rather than those who need assistance, or to improve our human or material infrastructure. We should incur debt only as an investment in the future, not as a redistribution of wealth, across generations, to the uber-wealthy of today.

At South Jeffco’s Summerset Festival the weekend before last, for instance, I had numerous encounters which drove home the zeitgeist. One pleasant young woman told me she was a Republican, and responded to my suggestion that we should all agree to be reasonable people of goodwill and build on that by saying, “yes, just look at health care reform, that ruined the best health care system in the world.” Was she referring to the same health care system that, by every statistical measure, underperformed the systems of every other developed nation on Earth, and did so at far greater expense, while managing to cover a smaller percentage of the population than any other developed nation’s health care system? And another woman insisted that illegal immigrants never pay taxes and are purely a sap on our economy, though many pay taxes, often for services they can never collect on, and by all economic analyses are either an economic wash or a slight benefit nationally. Truth is the first casualty of war, and there is currently a war being waged on truth itself in America.

Examples abound. There are the Colorado ballot initiatives, 60, 61, and 101, that even fiscally conservative Republican politicians in Colorado oppose (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16158190), but that have a chance of passing, and are defended by earnest pseudo-economic arguments such as those presented by Debbie Schum in yesterdays Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16158191). This is what happens when insanity is cultivated, in the hope of it being harnessed for political gain. Those who cultivate it eventually lose control of it, and it is the insanity unleashed that prevails.

As I’ve often said, there are legitimate debates to be had, legitimate disputes based on the differing conclusions of sound reasoning applied to reliable data in service to mutual goodwill. But we’re not having those debates. Instead, public discourse and the political process that simultaneously tracks and exploits it, have been hijacked by the need to incessantly debunk the unsound reasoning, fabricated facts, and fundamental inhumanity of what is perhaps the most powerful social movement in America today. We are too busy fighting the sheer human folly incarnate among us to get to the legitimate debates, and the hard, information-intensive work of governing ourselves wisely and effectively.

I have long noted that, in many ways, America is Ancient Rome to Europe’s Ancient Greece, the more brutish inheritor of a cultural, economic, and political fluorescence. Unlike Rome, however, which coveted Greek slaves to tutor their children, America has come to disparage rather than respect the still more civilized originators of modernity across the Atlantic. We look at countries that have almost completely eliminated poverty, have universal health care, low infant mortality, a far more successful and higher functioning public education system, greater social mobility, and higher rates of self-reported happiness, and many among us dismiss them as “socialist” countries, which we arbitrarily claim, by definition, must be failures. (As one individual quoted in yesterday’s Denver Post said, health care reform is “a communist, socialist scheme. All the other countries that have tried this, they’re billions in debt, and they admit this doesn’t work” (http://www.denverpost.com/commented/ci_16175215?source=commented-news).

The western European countries have their defects, to be sure, and America has done better than them on some dimensions, but this absolute rejection of the possibility that we have something to learn from others, who have fared better than us on numerous dimensions, is the epitome of combined arrogance and ignorance, that unholy marriage that dooms any individual or social entity to self-destructive irrelevance. We are a country very much like the one we were when Elmer Gantry was written a century ago, a country of small-minded yahoos and those that exploit them, with the marginalized voices of sincere and well-informed analysts shouting desperately across the sound-proofed barrier that has been erected against us.

But the question remains: How do we defeat this persistent, deeply embedded insanity that has come to define us as a people? In a conversation with Adam Schrager (Colorado’s pre-eminent political broadcast journalist) last week, we both voiced our disgust that politics has become far too much about the acquisition of power, and far too little about the challenge of devising intelligent public policies. But I shared with him this thought: Politics is almost inevitably hostage to an evolutionary logic. That which works (in the competition of policies and candidates) is that which is reproduced, while that which doesn’t work is abandoned. As a result, politics has devolved into a competition of marketing strategies and raising the funds necessary to their effectiveness. It isn’t enough to bemoan this fact, because any attempt to reject it, unless embracing an alternative simultaneously less cynical and more effective (which, as much as we’d like to be the case, almost never is), is doomed to failure, and thus obsolescence.

The ironic challenge we face, then, is how to use what works to create a context in which it is no longer what works, or no longer an option. For, while extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice for the public good by political leaders are both admirable and meaningful, they are not a sustainable strategy. Ralph Carr (Adam Schrager’s favorite example), the Republican governor of Colorado during WWII, who refused to comply with Japanese interment, despite such refusal being political suicide, might be a great example to follow, but if universally followed by all reasonable people of goodwill in all instances, would succeed only in ensuring that only irrational people of ill-will ever remain in office once confronted with the choice to do what’s right or do what’s politically expedient. The somewhat empty admonition that elected officials (like the rest of us) should always do what’s right rather than what’s in their own interests does not get us very far, both because of human nature (one’s own interests are going to remain a powerful incentive, whether we like it or not), and because of the evolutionary logic of politics (to paraphrase a famous quote from Henry Kissinger, in politics, always doing what’s right rather than what’s politically expedient or strategically superior merely cedes the world to the less scrupulous).

We can afford neither to be “above politics,” nor to surrender completely to its dysfunctional logic. But here is the limit of my own cynicism: We most certainly can’t afford to make ourselves morally indistinguishable from those we oppose. We must find successful strategies, in pursuit of raw political power, but by finding resonance between our own better angels and those of the electorate, rather than bringing both us and them down by resorting to the same old political cynicism as a first rather than last resort.

People criticize Obama for having tried to take the political high road rather than jamming through whatever we could any way that we could, but I do not. He is looking at a longer-term agenda, and a deeper necessity, than his critics are. There is a balance to be struck between what reality demands of us, and what our ideals demand of us, and we must always subordinate the former to the latter in the final analysis. Health care reform may have been critically important to our collective welfare, but there are deeper and more essential reforms that should not be sacrificed in every instance to the exigencies of the moment. We cannot defeat our own ignorance by surrendering to a political strategic system that exploits and cultivates it.

Tina Griego wrote about The Dream Act’s latest rude awakening in today’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/griego). Despite her support for it, she actually exaggerated the ability of a child brought here in infancy to gain legal permanent residence (LPR) status. She said, “To get back in you must have an immediate family member who is a U.S. citizen or have a permanent legal resident as your sponsor.” Actually, only in some very rare circumstances are either of those possibilities. More often, the best you could hope for is to get at the back end of a twenty-something year waiting list for family members of various categories, and as for an LPR sponsor, not so much.

But the point is that the kids in question have no legal path to citizenship, or even legal residency. They are Americans in all but name, often with no real connection to any other country, no knowledge of the Spanish language, no more affinity for life in Mexico than a suddenly impoverished and deported Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck would have. We deprive them of opportunity, despite, in these cases, their having been model citizens, served in the military or attended college, stayed out of trouble, in short, been good Americans.

Some Americans thrive on turning the world into in-groups and out-groups, and managing to just not give a damn about those in the out-groups. And then they are eager to cut off our own national nose to spite our own national face. If we provide a path to LPR status for these people who are on the path to being productive citizens, we end up with productive citizens, contributing to our shared wealth, not contributing to crime rates and other social problems. If we don’t, we continue to breed a festering social illness within our borders, a group of undocumented people with little opportunity to succeed, a group that, despite the mythologies of the right-wing demagogues, can’t be removed to any significant degree at a price even those demagogues would be willing to pay, and will, in many instances, end up with little choice but to become predators rather than the productive members of society that they had worked hard to become.

The truth is, the Dream Act isn’t just good for those kids who some would rather throw under the bus; it’s good for all of us.