Speak your mind, as though ready to be exiled for it

Lord, give us the courage to stand openly against a rebellious world: 

during the day while they are looking on,

prepare your baggage as though for exile, 

migrate from where you live to another place;

perhaps they will see that they are a rebellious house.

Ezekiel 12:3.

But, Lord, also give us the wisdom to know when we should evade detection: 

In the town of Elvira, Spain, in the year 309 AD, a council of early Christians convened to discuss their brothers and sisters who had been killed for openly defying Roman gods. The council decided they were not martyrs: 

"If someone smashes an idol and is then punished by death, he or she may not be placed in the list of martyrs, since such action is not sanctioned by the Scriptures or by the apostles." 

The courage of God compels us to witness to the truth, even unto exile. 

Yet the wisdom of God instructs we make an effort to avoid detection, when circumstances require. 

 

When living in the land of bloody pagans, spitting on their idols isn't martyrdom -- it's stupidity.

Speak your mind, as though ready to be exiled for it. 

‘Lawfare’ does not post corrections: A Response to McKinney, Sagan, and Weiner

 

Seth Barrett Tillman, A Response to McKinney, Sagan, and Weiner’s ‘Hiroshima and the Myths of Military Targets and Unconditional Surrender’ (submitted to Lawfare on Aug. 24, 2020).

 

In their August 21, 2020 article on Lawfare, Hiroshima and the Myths of Military Targets and Unconditional Surrender, Katie McKinney, Scott D. Sagan, and Allen S. Weiner wrote:

Evaluating the military advantage of an attack under jus in bello [rules for conduct during war] principles must be assessed in light of a state’s overall war aims, which are themselves subject to legal and moral constraints. Admittedly, the principles governing the terms that states may impose as conditions for ending war—whether under the framework of jus ad bellum [rules regarding the resort to force] proportionality or jus post bellum [rules regarding justice after war]—make up one of the least well-developed areas of the law of armed conflict. But there are limits on the ends states may seek in terminating wars. As the Defense Department Law of War Manual notes, “the overall goal of the State in resorting to war should not be outweighed by the harm that the war is expected to produce.” This principle applies at the end of a war as well. Because it would have entailed the awful human costs of an invasion, Truman’s demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender to end the war was indefensible. Seeking to avoid the larger losses that would flow from an unjust demand for unconditional surrender cannot justify the Hiroshima attack. (bold and underscore added.)

The passage marked in bold is used to support the prior proposition, which was “that there are limits on the ends states may seek in terminating wars.” But the specific quote extracted from the Law of War Manual, I suggest, means exactly the opposite of what the authors think it supports. As such, perhaps, some reconsideration may be in order?

For a view of the wider subject-matter different from the three authors, the careful reader might consider my 1-page 2015 article which appeared in the Claremont Review of Books.

Seth

Seth Barrett Tillman, ‘Lawfare’ does not post corrections: A Response to McKinney, Sagan, and Weiner, New Reform Club (Aug. 24, 2020, 8:53 PM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2020/08/lawfare-does-not-post-corrections.html>; 

Seth Barrett Tillman, Advice to the Allies—1945, 15(2) Claremont Review of Books 13, Spring 2015, <http://ssrn.com/abstract=2478600>, <http://tinyurl.com/pbhmrox/>;

The Doctor-Policeman Will See You Now

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." C.S. Lewis 

Sure enough, recent news on the health-guidelines enforcement front should see the robber barons' reputations improving by comparison:

• "Police have been forced into the extraordinary measure of smashing car windows to get Victorians to comply with second wave COVID-19 restrictions in Victoria. “On at least three or four occasions in the past week we’ve had to smash the windows of people in cars and pull them out of there so they could provide us their details because they weren’t telling us where they were going, they weren’t adhering to the chief health officer guidelines, they weren’t providing their name and their address,” Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton said." 
• "Police have been forced to shoot through a 64YO driver's window after he drove at them at an Altona Meadows servo. It was 1.20am & officers asked him to stop so they could question why he was out after curfew. He's now in hospital (medical cond) under guard."
• Completing a trifecta out of Victoria: Police officer chokes a 21-year-old woman and wrestles her to the ground for not wearing a face covering out of doors.
  
• Two women in Orange County reportedly were locked in a Mother's Market by the manager until police could arrive to arrest them. Mother's Market is a grocery chain offering vegan, organic, and fair-trade options. The women's crime: not wearing a face covering.
  
• Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti “deputized” thousands of “Karens” with his “snitches get rewards” program to encourage people to inform on companies not practicing social distancing or opening against local strictures.

• A woman with a medical condition preventing her from wearing a mask recently entered a Walmart in Summit County, Utah, where masks are mandatory. In that Utah county, residents are required to report on anyone seen without a mask so that the police can report to the scene.
  
• The French government is sending riot police to the Marseille region to help enforce mask requirements. 
  

If you don't like a doctor's advice, there are other doctors. If you don't like the laws, you may, at least, vote for new ones. But what relief is there from Doctor-Policeman? Doctor-Policeman brooks no exemptions. Accepts no substitutes. Suffers no dissent. And having deputized your neighbors, Doctor-Policeman has eyes everywhere.

 

A year ago, I shared this quote from Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, anticipating such a figure as Doctor Fauci and all his public health official colleagues who would impose their will upon us -- though we did not elect them -- on authority of their medical judgment -- though we are not their patients:

"Doctor and policeman, enhanced by the application of science to their endeavors, were to be the foundations of a wholly new political undertaking. If the pursuit of health and safety were to absorb men and they were led to recognize the connection between their preservation and science, the harmony between theory and practice would be established. The actual rulers, after a couple of centuries of astute propaganda directing popular passions against throne and altar, would in the long run be constrained by their subjects and would have to enact the scientists’ project. The scientists would, to use Harvey Mansfield’s formula, be the hidden rulers. The ends pursued by politicians and the means they use would be determined by philosophers. Scientists would be free and get support, and scientific progress would be identical to political progress so conceived."

In other words, the people cannot possibly understand the policies needed to enact utopianism, thus the people should be conditioned to just trust scientists, as they once trusted their priests and ministers, whose conclusions could then be enacted without fuss.

 

I commented that, while one may object that the interests of a recalcitrant people -- of Populists -- may not be very nice, and have led to endless wars throughout human history, the Populist at least may answer: we have survived. What we more nearly did not survive, and still might not survive, is the rule of the Philosopher, the hidden ruler...the Doctor-Policeman. "I doubt," said Tom Wolfe, "that any Calvinist of the sixteenth century ever believed so completely in predestination as these, the hottest and most intensely rational young scientists in the United States at the end of the twentieth."

 

Or as Andy Rooney said: "When I talk politics with a doctor, I wonder how they haven't killed all their patients."

Communism Kills.

One cannot expect total compliance from a free people. Particularly compliance to orders issued by persons that never appeared on a ballot. About 80 to 90% compliance is about the best one can ever hope to achieve. Oh, you will get close to 100% of pretended compliance, of gestures toward compliance: the shopkeeps will display the appropriate signs in the window to draw away suspicion, as the Jews of Europe, and the Armenians of Turkey, and the Czechs under communism, had learned to do. But all around there are glitches in the matrix: the man wearing his mask around his chin, or under his nose; the woman who, upon being asked by a clerk to wear a mask, feigns forgetfulness as she reaches, resignedly, into her purse; the mother who pretends not to see the "park closed" signs, and lets her children play in the sunshine anyway. 

At any rate, we have achieved sufficient compliance on the mask-wearing front. To insist on 100% compliance is to lead where people will not follow.

Nor should we wish to achieve better than that. You will not find agreement above 80 to 90% across all Americans on nearly any issue of significance. That is to the good. The absence of dissent should be more horrifying than the absence of a mask here or there. The absence of dissent implies the existence of speakeasies, of an underground. The absence of dissent implies the brewing of violence. A man will argue for his beliefs. But if a man may not argue for his beliefs, well... then he can only fight for them.

The zero-tolerance policy against breaking the advice of Dr. Fauci and all his regional mini-me health officials is not sound leadership. But then again, it is not intended as leadership. It is intended as power -- the final, perfected form of power: Power without review, without rival -- power without dissent. 

 

Ok now, you may feel a slight pinch....

DOJ Letter to Yale: Stop Racially Discriminating Against Asians

I mean, what would you expect from a school named after a slave trader? 

Re: Notice of Violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 

Dear Mr. Spivack: I write to notify you that the United States Department of Justice has determined that Yale University violated, and is continuing to violate, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., by discriminating on the basis of race and national origin (hereinafter “race”) in its undergraduate admissions with respect to domestic non-transfer applicants to Yale College. Yale’s discrimination is long-standing and ongoing. 

.... 

For example, the likelihood of admission for Asian American and White applicants who have similar academic credentials is significantly lower than for African American and Hispanic applicants to Yale College. For the great majority of applicants, Asian American and White applicants have only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials. 

.... 

For example, data produced by Yale show that Asian American applicants have a much lower chance of admission than do members of Yale’s preferred racial groups, even when those Asian Americans have much higher academic qualifications and comparable ratings by Yale’s admissions officers. Every year from 2000 to 2017, Yale offered admission to Asian American applicants to Yale College at rates below their proportion of the applicant pool. [Emphasis mine. -tk]

.... 

We would like to secure Yale’s compliance with Title VI by voluntary means. 28 C.F.R. §§ 42.107 & 42.108; see also 42 U.S.C. § 2000d-1. To that end, Yale must agree not to use race or national origin in its upcoming 2020-2021 undergraduate admissions cycle, and, if Yale proposes to consider race or national origin in future admissions cycles, it must first submit to the Department of Justice a plan demonstrating that its proposal is narrowly tailored as required by law. Any such proposal should include an end date to Yale’s use of race. 

PDF: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1304591/download?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

According to the “disparate impact” theory, Yale is prima facie guilty of racism because the rate of Asian admissions is much lower than the proportion of Asian applicants.

Are all arguments based on the Natural Born Citizen Clause racist?

The knives have come out (again) for my old law professor John Eastman for his piece setting up the legal analysis concerning the Natural Born Citizen Clause and Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. There was much heavy breathing about it on my Facebook feed; I hope they were wearing masks.

The overwhelming response to the constitutional argument? Racist. Obviously. It has never been considered a valid argument. So what else could it be? When has the Natural Born Citizen Clause ever been used against a white candidate? 

Let's ask Wikipedia: 

"The family's frequent moves later spawned accusations that Chester Arthur was not a native-born citizen of the United States. ... Had that been true, opponents might have argued that Arthur was constitutionally ineligible for the vice presidency under the United States Constitution's natural-born-citizen clause.".

We might find our history more interesting if we didn't find it merely racist.

The Origins of the "Grandfather Clause" Are Actually in Northern Anti-Immigrant Bias, Not Southern Racist Bias

(1850s Know-Nothing Cartoon Depicting Irish and German Immigrants Affecting the Election)

The Massachusetts Appeals Court last week says it will no longer use to use the term "grandfather clause." A grandfather clause is commonly used to refer to legal exceptions that allow nonconforming land uses that predate applicable zoning laws. The decision concerned a homeowner attempting to replace his dilapidated garage.

The court explains:

"We decline to use that term, however, because we acknowledge that it has racist origins. Specifically, the phrase "grandfather clause" originally referred to provisions adopted by some States after the Civil War in an effort to disenfranchise African-American voters by requiring voters to pass literacy tests or meet other significant qualifications, while exempting from such requirements those who were descendants of men who were eligible to vote prior to 1867."

Except, that is not actually correct, as NPR reported some years ago. The practice of "grandfathering" does not have its origins in anti-black sentiment in southern states. In fact, the term was used earlier, and in the north -- ironically, in Massachusetts -- against the surge of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Great Britain. Google's Ngram results also show pre-Civil War use: 

 

Discrimination against Irish, German, and British immigrants would have been based in anti-immigrant sentiment, and possibly ethnic sentiment. But to say the practice "has racist origins," particularly against blacks in the post-Civil War south, is historically inaccurate. 

The practice, of course, against whatever group, is inexcusable. But one hopes that we could learn to eschew bad government practices on their merits, and not on the basis of the race or class of their victims. 

But progress is progress, even if ahistorical, right? Sadly, no. U. Penn linguist Nicole R. Holliday (who, the NY Times deems relevant to note, is black), "said she would not correct her own mother if she used the term 'grandfathered' in casual conversation, because doing so would be 'actually rude, and it doesn’t accomplish the goal of creating a more equal society.'" Still, Prof. Holliday supports the decision. Replacing the term, she says, even if it won't accomplish anything, is "not too much to ask." 

The good professor is on to something. Our fellow Americans need only ask, in earnest, and we should only be too happy to find an alternative to words that make them uncomfortable. It is the litigious approach that one finds grating -- the approach that begins by mining the record for evidence and arguments (even if faulty); the approach that pits victim groups against oppressor groups; the approach that assumes all the work of justice lies in establishing guilt.

Besides, were I to advocate for a client seeking the protection of a "grandfather" zoning clause, I would have misgivings about associating it with statutes long-held to be illegitimate. (Not to mention we all know how racist grandfathers tend to be.)

And yet: the Massachusetts court does not question the land use practice formerly known as "grandfathering." So governments may still allow nonconforming preexisting land uses. Just don't call it grandfathering.

The Myth of "Human Progress"

 

The Various Translations of the Simple Plea, "Please Don't Hurt Us"

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, writing a message on a city street. What is he trying to say?

The parable of the shopkeep who placed a "Workers of the World, Unite!" sign in his window was published in 1978, after its author, Vaclav Havel, living in communist Czechoslovakia, was arrested. Zbygniew Bujak, a Solidarity activist, said that Havel's essay, which contained the parable, "maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later--in August 1980--it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered."

From “The Power of the Powerless,” by Vaclav Havel:

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.

Some immigrant and minority shopkeeps can't afford all that yellow paint. So they have to improvise:

Photo by Michael Tracey

 I am afraid that will not do. Pieties must be observed. The correct words and ceremonies must be invoked. Milan Kundera, another Czech writer, described this in his novel The Joke:

He said there were two great opposing institutions involved: the Catholic Church with its traditional thousand-year-old rites and the civil institutions that must supplant the thousand-year-old rites with their own. He said that people would stop going to church to have their children christened or to get married only when our civil ceremonies had as much dignity and beauty as the church ceremonies.

.... 

I asked my old classmate what he did with people who didn't want to take part in his ceremonies, whether there were any such people. He said of course there were, since not everybody had come round to the new way of thinking yet, but if they didn't attend, they kept receiving invitations, and most of them came in sooner or later, after a week or two. I asked him whether attendance at such ceremonies was compulsory. He replied with a smile that it wasn't, but that the National Committee used attendance as a touchstone for evaluating people's sense of citizenship and their attitude towards the State, and in the end people realized that and came.

In that case, I said, the National Committee was stricter with its believers than the Church was with theirs. Kovalik smiled and said that could not be helped.

Now you begin to see the problem. We have class solidarity, and gay marriage solidarity, and now of course LGBTQ+∞ solidarity, Black Lives Matter solidarity, climate solidarity. Why, the poor shopkeep's store will be utterly obscured behind all these signs!

The needful thing is an All-Purpose Solidarity Sign. I have fashioned a prototype, but some enterprising lefty signmaker is going to need to meet me halfway here.

Virtual America--A Twinkie Defense

I think it started in Miami Beach. 1981. The Twinkie Defense. Teenager Ronny Zamora had brutally murdered an 84-year-old grandmother; his lawyer pleaded that poor Ronny could not distinguish fantasy from reality because of an overconsumption of refined sugar. 

The Hostess cakebaking operation was to blame, and in a larger sense America itself, for its careless and destructive dietary habits.

1981. Not only were most of those manning [personing?] the current Children’s Crusade for Black Trans Lives Matter for Social, Economic, Racial, Sexual and Fundamental, Environmental and Just Mental Justice Reasons not even born yet, neither were some of their parents.

In 1981, the horrors of the real world and mankind’s most murderous century were still quite real. As America still struggled with a decade-long recession, the Soviet Union still existed, with its gulags and economic ruin. China was still under the thrall of its own Communist Party and its forced abortions, and of course the shadow of the murderous Chairman Mao.

And on Miami Beach itself, many of the last survivors of the Holocaust lived out the rest of days that providence had granted them [and mysteriously so few others].

The world that our current Children’s Crusade is protesting in 2020 is not that world.  The world they are inherit is a much better world, at least for now.  A world comfortably removed from the consequences of man’s true evil, the evils that reside in his very nature--not that the evil that men foster simply out of carelessness, inattention, and pique.

George Floyd’s death was not a product of any system, except perhaps a system that permits sometimes vain and intemperate men to carry our guns for us to keep us safe from the genuinely evil men.  Humanity has not yet come up with an alternate system or candidate class except the military draft. But there is no assurance or statistical proof that a random pool of draftees are any less capable of atrocities than volunteers.

“Defund The Police” is a Twinkie World based on nothing but fantasy.  So too is the economic program that is accompanying the current Children’s Crusade, that a person will work as hard for someone else’s family as hard as he will work for his own.

Zamora’s “Twinkie Defense” failed in court. He was found guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. We can only hope that the jury in November will come to the same verdict. The NEW Minneapolis is already becoming uninhabitable.

Olivia de Havilland, Commie Fighter

Olivia de Havilland, in Paris, at age 104. Great liberal patriot, RIP.




History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Just as solid liberals like Excitable Andy Sullivan and Bari Weiss are sent to the showers by an ascendant left today, liberals have always been on the left's hitlist when they think they have the upper hand, even the Democrat saint Harry S. Truman.

From The Daily Beast of all places. I guess there are still a few liberals left out there—at least enough to bury their own. Cancel culture, 1946. Plus ça change:

The break between the liberals and Communists finally came in a major speech delivered to HICAASP by Olivia de Havilland, at a Seattle rally in 1946.

It had been written for her by the Party’s most prolific and highest-paid screenwriter, the legendary Dalton Trumbo. He gave de Havilland the draft of his speech, that Americans had to condemn “the drive of certain interests toward a war against the Soviet Union,” and that the Truman administration’s policy was one supporting union-busting, anti-Semitism and bigotry against racial minorities.

Without telling anyone in advance, de Havilland, horrified by the words Trumbo wanted her to mouth—went to the podium, and substituted a speech of her own. “We believe in democracy,” she told the crowd, “and not in Communism.”

De Havilland was brave in breaking ranks so publicly. Communists controlled the Screenwriter’s Guild and were influential in the Screen Actors Guild as well, and were known to avoid giving roles to actors or scripts to writers whom they considered “fascist.”

Moreover, in breaking so publicly, she risked losing associates and friends who thought the Hollywood Reds were just “liberals in a hurry” and sincere anti-fascists—many of whom would ostracize someone they considered to be a “Red-baiter.” 

Trumbo exploded in a fit of rage when he heard what de Havilland had done...

[BF mine, lest the lede be lost.]

Requiescat in pace, Dame Olivia. You were Hollywood royalty, a good liberal and a great citizen of the American republic. A patriot, if may I say so, Ms. de Havilland, no offense.

Somehow, the celebrations of the 101-year-old two-time best actress Oscar winner overlooked her finest moment.

Letter to the Editor at The Economist, Charlemagne, ‘How Ireland gets its way’

26 July 2020

Letter to the Editor

The Economist

<letters@economist.com>

Re: Charlemagne, ‘How Ireland gets its way’ The Economist (London, 18 July 2020) at page 23, <https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/07/18/how-ireland-gets-its-way>.

Dear Letters Editor,

Notwithstanding the article’s title—How Ireland gets its way, the article does not mention even one example—not one!—where Ireland achieved a diplomatic goal when opposed. Instead, the article lists Ireland’s record of placing its people into high positions in the European Union and international institutions. In other words, the article is not really about diplomacy, it is about jobs. But if it is about jobs, then the costs to the Irish taxpayer should be reckoned against the financial benefits flowing to her people who score EU and other international posts. How exactly has Ireland fared? Ireland has been a net contributor to the EU since 2013 and is likely to remain so into the foreseeable future. Her obligation towards the EU’s Covid-19 fund has been pegged at over €3,000 per person—the second highest of any EU member.

If this is victory, then what would be defeat?

Sincerely,

Seth

Seth Barrett Tillman

Maynooth University Department of Law

Seth Barrett Tillman, Submitted as a Letter to the Editor at The Economist, Charlemagne, ‘How Ireland gets its way’, New Reform Club (July 26, 2020, 12:10 PM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2020/07/letter-to-editor-charlemagne-how.html>; 

Fox Dad, CNN Dad: Our Problems Remain Epistemological

True story.

Two dads are debating politics. The first dad describes himself as independent, but left of center. He gets most of his news from CNN. Let us call him CNN Dad.

The second dad also holds many independent views, but considers himself right of center. He gets news mostly from alternative news sources, as well as from Fox News. (Fox may be one of the few sources CNN Dad recognizes.) Let us call him Fox Dad.

As I said, CNN Dad and Fox Dad are debating politics. Actually, they are not really debating politics. They mostly agree on politics. What they are debating is Trump. CNN Dad and Fox Dad agree on the outsized influence of corporations on American politics. They agree that the upper-levels of both major parties are irrevocably craven with power and beholden to corporate donors and not responsive in any meaningful way to voters. They share an antipathy toward unnecessary foreign wars. They agree on the importance of the rule of law, and policing, and ensuring the integrity of elections. They both approach the subjects of trade and taxation pragmatically rather than ideologically. They agree China is a threat. Whenever they turn to a new issue, CNN Dad and Fox Dad are able to find common ground, the start of a compromise, if not substantial agreement.

But in the course of their conversations, each time CNN Dad and Fox Dad agree or find common ground on a topic, they quickly find themselves arguing about Trump. CNN Dad believes Trump is the principal impediment to the resolution of any given issue. The rise of corrupt corporatism? Trump is the most corrupt of all. The democratically unresponsive two-party system the corporations control? It may spell the end of the republican experiment, but it's better than Trump. Trump hasn't started any new wars? Trumpian diplomacy might as well be war. Google alone may have the ability to sway up to 10% of American voters? As long as it gets Trump out.

So despite the fact that they agree on issue after issue, so long as they disagree on Trump, CNN Dad concludes they must be on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Just another example of our intractable political divide.

CNN Dad is going to prove it to Fox Dad that this is why they cannot agree. That their dispute is over ideology, over tribal values to which Fox Dad bitterly clings.

So CNN Dad takes a Political Compass test. He shares his results with Fox Dad, and asks him to take the test as well. CNN Dad thinks the test will prove that Fox Dad is just too far to the right to ever hope to agree with a normal person on the center-left.

The results of the tests are below. As you can see, CNN Dad is moderately left of center. But to CNN Dad's surprise, Fox Dad's results are essentially in the center, and even in the same quadrant as CNN Dad's results:

Above: CNN Dad's Political Compass test results

Above: Fox Dad's Political Compass test results

And now the reveal: I am Fox Dad. CNN Dad is my dad.

My dad and I come out in the same political quadrant. Our differences on political ideas are slight to modest. Even if you identify as an economic conservative, as I do in the main, unless you believe all taxation is theft and every man is an island, you are in the mainstream of American politics. And even if you identify to the left, as my dad does, unless you want to topple statues of American presidents and unironically believe AOC's ideas would make for good national policy, you are going to be in the mainstream of American politics. 

For now, the extent of our differences is probably based more upon the adverbs we'd use to describe our opinions, than on any differences in the opinions themselves. 

But back to CNN Dad's dilemma: Why do CNN Dad and Fox Dad disagree so diametrically on Trump? Is CNN Dad's Trump-hatred to be explained in that small space between relatively slight differences in policy? The idea is risible. No: the fact that people can hold basically the same ideas, yet disagree so diametrically on an election about those ideas, has to do more with media diet -- on where they get their news.

No matter how many ideas, values, and predispositions my dad and I share, the way we vote will be decided by where we get our information.

I will make you a bet. I'll bet that our country is a lot like my dad and me. I'll bet that, as a country, we don't disagree all that much on what's important. I mean on real issues. Not fatuous abstractions like "national security," or "the environment," or "poverty." As if there were a "pro" and "con" side to such topics. But take any specific policy proposal -- before it is filtered through media outlets -- and put it to a left-leaning American, and a right-leaning American. And I suspect you will find they approach the issue the same way: they will both want to know what it costs, and whether it works. They might not ultimately agree, but no one will be tempted to deploy expletives or call each other names.

The average mainstream, middle-class American, is peaceable, and good-natured, and non-ideological. The average American does not walk around with an inventory of policy ideas he deems acceptable or unacceptable to his ideology. Americans are not ideological by nature.

But we have been habituated to ideological thinking. We have the journalist class to thank for that.

Ironically, Americans seem to realize we have a journalism problem. How we vote depends on where we get our information. My dad realizes this. Our problems, as co-blogger Tom Van Dyke used to put it, remain epistemological. We can't tell whether we agree if we are not even talking about the same facts. Is discussion between two voters about Trump possible when one of those voters believes what they heard on CNN -- or what they read in ABC, or CBS, or NBC, or NPR, or the New York Times, or the Washington Post -- that Trump thinks white nationalists are "very fine people"? Is discussion with a person possible when that person believes what mainstream journalists told them about Trump's colluding with Russia in the 2016 election -- which independent journalist Glenn Greenwald called "a scam and a fraud from the beginning"?

Our elections are not between blue America and red America. Or between Democrats and Republicans, or left and right, or liberals and conservatives. And certainly not between black and white. Our elections have become elections between CNN America and Fox America.

Perhaps you knew this already. If so, let me share with you my theory why CNN and the big news outlets command such outsized and unjustified authority over the minds of otherwise intelligent people.

My thesis is simple: CNN America is affluent. And affluent people, though they may be intelligent, are uncritical when it comes to politics.

That is because affluent people tend to be ideological. Not because the affluent voter is unintelligent or lacks critical faculties. Far from it. No, the affluent voter tends to be ideological because the affluent voter can afford to be ideological. Because the lives of affluent voters do not really depend on the outcomes of elections.

By contrast, the average voter -- the voter who works for a living, supports a family, sends children to public school, lives on a budget -- that voter is not ideological. That is because the average voter cannot afford to be ideological. The average voter is a working mother who does not ask whether a stimulus package offends her principles about the role of the federal government. The average voter is a working father who does not ask whether buying books for his children's suburban school constitutes systemic inequality in a faraway urban school district. The average voter is a black landlady who does not ask whether asking for more police presence in her crime-ridden neighborhood interferes with efforts for criminal justice reform. The average voter is an elderly man who, though he groused about paying into Social Security tax 20 years ago, could not live without it today.

These middle-class voters have an interest in the outcomes of elections. Such voters, who have concrete interests in a given election, will listen carefully to what each candidate proposes. These kinds of voters want to know what the candidates will do about their specific, concrete interests.

But candidates and journalists hate this kind of voter. Candidates do not know, or do not care, how money gets to schools, or how to stop crime, or how to continue supporting an increasingly aging population. Journalists might or might not know these things, but what they know for absolute certain is that talking about them is not going to earn them many readers. So what does the journalist make of how an election will serve these average Americans? Boring, that's what: an unclickable headline, ponderous prose -- no ad revenue. What else you got?

What the candidate and journalist need are BIG issues. Big changes! Systemic changes! What could be bigger than changing the whole system? The added bonus is there are no sleep-inducing policy details to be worked out when you're pulling up root and branch. You don't need a detail man on the bulldozer. And who can resist watching a demolition? Boom! Crash! Pft! Whee!

The only problem is systemic change is not what average Americans want. Systemic change was not a thing in America until the affluent age, the latter half of the 20th century. But by the 1990s and 2000s? Whoosh!

This is a Google Books Ngraph of instances of the terms "systemic change," "systemic racism," "systemic reform," and "systemic injustice" since 1950.

Examples of anti-"systemic" activities include violent destruction of police precincts, gas stations, CVS stores, Targets, Wendy's restaurants, auto parts stores, and large parts of major American cities across the nation. These activities are described by one affluent journalist at Slate as "reasonable" and "quintessentially American." Presumably, many affluent voters will agree. At any rate, it's not their neighborhood. When is the last time an affluent voter went to an AutoZone? How many affluent voters know what a Frosty is?

Systemic change might not be what average voters want. But it is positively titillating to affluent voters. Unlike average voters, affluent voters have no actual concrete interests in the outcomes of elections. When elections are decided by average voters, candidates and journalist are forced to employ more pragmatism in their political analysis. Will the ideas work? What will they cost? This is what makes democracy scientific (remember the term "political science"?), measuring political hypotheses against their results.

BO-RING! Fortunately for journalists, affluent voter-consumers are now in abundance, and they are not interested in measuring the results of their ideas. For the droves of affluent voter-consumers, policy proposals are limited only by their own intentions. And given the affluent enjoy a position of high self-approval, their policy proposals rate very high indeed.

Affluent people are dangerous voters. That is because affluent people are bored, and bored people are destructive.

But: affluent people make great journalism customers. American politics are just the broken eggs required to make a mainstream-media omelet.

Which brings me, at last, to Fox Dad's point to CNN Dad. And that is this: Bleating on about Trump-this and systemic-that is a privilege of the affluent. Trump and systemic change are the refrains of people who have nothing better to do, nothing at stake in a particular election, or in politics even more generally, except the stake a churchgoer has in showing up on Sunday. These affluent voters already have private security (e.g., gated communities), no dependents (or else the means to provide private education), private retirements, etc. The affluent need nothing from elections. So policy details don't really matter. Instead, for the affluent, politics serves a need to feel better about themselves. So intentions are all that matter.

Of course, making the affluent feel better comes at the expense of the concrete interests of the less affluent. This is a privilege of the affluent. You might say that Anti-Trumpism is, in the popular parlance, White Privilege.

That is why CNN America and Fox America cannot agree. We might share the same ideas about our country's problems. But while Fox America wants to make America become better, CNN America just wants to feel better. And those are two very different things.

Because no matter how much Trump might be able to "make America great again," he will never make CNN America feel great. And that, for the affluent CNN America, is what really counts.