Wanted: nuanced, thoughtful, well-reasoned reactions to stuff

 

The new Georgia election law is pretty awful- even though, as no less a source than the Washington Post points out, it isn't quite as bad as President Biden and many others to the left of dead-center claim. I have no problem with Georgia-based companies like Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola condemning it.

And it's hard to resist the urge to cheer Major League Baseball for moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to the passage of a law whose primary effect (intent?) is to disenfranchise people. Except for one thing: the Georgia legislature isn't going to be hurt by that decision. If anything, it gives the loony right politicians responsible for the new law a useful issue to feed their poor, persecuted, white constituents about how picked on they are.

The people it will hurt are the ordinary Georgians who work in the restaurants and hotels that will lose anticipated business because of the MLB decision, or who would have sold souvenirs, or benefited in other ways from the increased tourism the All-Star Game would have brought to Atlanta. Many of them are the very African-American voters the new law is intended to discriminate against. 

Ok. I grant that due to COVID, all that is less true this year than it would be in ordinary years. But in principle, the point still stands. I am not a fan of politically-inspired boycotts precisely because the people they end up hurting the most are not the people whose behavior inspires them but innocent folks who haven't done anything wrong. I grant, however, that it makes those who engage in those boycotts feel righteous and smug. 

Occasionally- not always- they may also, I grant, generate sufficient economic pressure to actually achieve results. But they always hurt innocent people who are just trying to make a living the most. Such boycotts are generally the tools of the left. However, the hypocritical Trumpian counter-cancel-culture exemplified by our disgraced former president's attempts to start boycotts of Delta and Coke proves that conservatives and reactionaries, too, are prone to engage in them at times. Still, it would be a wonderful thing if "progressives" would react to situations like this with as much concern for the damage boycotts do to innocent people, including many of the very people the Georgia law discriminates against, as they have for virtue-signaling and smug if ultimately impotent self-righteousness.

Predictably, the Trumpist right is treating the whole matter at something like a second-grade intellectual level. I really don't think Donald Trump realized- or cared- that his proposal to make journalists and news media subject to lawsuits for "intentionally false" stories would effectively eliminate freedom of the press. After all, it would require judges or juries or somebody to rule not only on whether a story was false but whether it was intentionally so. As a practical matter, that would give them the power to penalize and even bankrupt any writer or publication they disagreed with!

On the other hand, maybe Trump did realize that. Given the authoritarian values he has displayed throughout his public career, that may even have been the point- if one grants the questionable premise that he's smart enough to have even thought of that.

Now Trump sycophant Josh Hawley has mooted the similarly hare-brained idea of requiring the government to pass on the impartiality of social media moderation and to revoke the legal immunity of platforms that fail that inherently biased test for the things people who use them say. In fact, Hawley has actually introduced a bill to do that. The same question applies here as with Trump's idea: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ("Who guards the guards themselves?" or "Who watches the watchmen?").

Not that Trump and Hawley and the right are engaged in promoting a "cancel culture," or anything.

Like many (most?) political controversies these days, everybody is wrong on this one. Yeah, President Biden and the left are probably less wrong than the folks who want to disenfranchise people who are unlikely to vote for them and want the power to legally penalize people who criticize or disagree with them. But one of the many serious consequences of our political polarization is that nuanced positions are out of style, and nobody bothers to think things through anymore.

In Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy told the story of a congressman who walked onto the House one day to find it enmeshed in a credentials battle between two men who each claimed to be the duly-elected representative from the same district. Being unfamiliar with the details, he asked a trusted colleague about it.

"It's a case of two damned scoundrels," the other congressman replied. "Yes," the first one rejoined. "But which one is our damned scoundrel?"

Yeah, I chuckled, too, when I read that story. But at the same time, I can't help but think that there ought to be more substantial and carefully considered reactions to political events. And when our response to pretty much any issue that comes up is to ask not what is intelligent or just or reasonable but what constitutes a win for our side, we as a nation are in big, big trouble.