Trumpian National Emergency

The moment the president declares a “national emergency” — a decision that is entirely within his discretion — he is able to set aside many of the legal limits on his authority. — DefenseOne.com 8 Dec. 2018

"You know, they have a word – it’s sort of became old-fashioned – it’s called a nationalist. And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, okay? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word." — Donald J. Trump, October 2018

Donald Trump should be taken literally and seriously, if for no other reasons than that key portions of his core supporters take him literally and seriously. So a wall at the US-Mexico border means a wall, and a national emergency means an emergency of the Nation.

This is important.

There is no "crisis of the Republic," except that posed by Mr. Trump and that hard core of authoritarian-populist followers. There is no emergency of the American State. There is, though, an emergency-level threat to the American Nation if, if only if, you see that Nation with its traditional modifiers: in fullest form, "White, Christian (i.e.,) Protestant, Anglo-Saxon Nation" — with recent wishy-washiness allowing in some conservative Catholics and even right-wing "White Jews" (yes, Virginia, that once was a fairly common term; check out Lenny Bruce). 

The slow-motion threat to that Nation is in the demographic trend that will have White a US minority within a couple generations (2050 in one projection). The more immediate threats can be seen in the 2018/19 Frosh class in the US Congress and the religious composition of the US Supreme Court: until recently lacking a single real (Protestant) Christian, and now having one only ambiguously, depending on how "Papist" one sees a Catholic-raised Episcopalian like Justice Neil Gorsuch. Plus, of course, ethnicity of both the Supreme Court and that Congress, and, spectacularly, the color-coding — African-American — of the US Presidency 2008-16. 

And we haven't even considered gender yet, with women on the Supreme Court and second in line of succession to the Presidency and, if she knows how to use the office, the second most powerful politician in the United States: the Speaker of the House, the Honorable Nancy Pelosi. 

And what people see in the media. White "hegemony" is certainly gone, but more important — and this is a serious complaint — is the handling of religion. Outside of specials and The Religion Ghetto (and serious animation satire such as The Simpsons and South Park), religion and religious people are pretty much invisible. To recycle a formula of mine on TV characters, ordinarily, as far as we see, "They don't piss, and they don't pray." 

Now there's really little President Trump can do about the larger, reality issues here. Dictator Trump, maybe. President Trump must deal with the edges of the issues and with symbols. 

As symbols go, the Wall is great.
• A monument to Donald J. Trump, in its expense and uselessness all the more potent as an image of power (cf. pyramids).
• A symbol of American holiness as separation, preserving the purity of that American Nation from penetration by all the evils Trump can remember to name. 
• A dike against inundation by the wog-gish flood, the horrifying Brownish Hordes, the embodiments of the forces of the post-Communist world that would, at least figuratively, "sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids".

And if Trump gets away with a National Emergency declaration over the Great Wall, there's a chance he'll keep pushing until he gets the powers to make real changes in the American State and remove the inconveniences of the Republic. There is justification (so to speak) in the arguments of authoritarian populism as a form of pure democracy, using the Leader-Principle to around convention, tradition, bureaucratic inertia, and institutional conservatism. And there are precedents; God knows, within living memory, there have been Nationalist precedents. 

As Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us in The Dispossessed (1974), all walls are "ambiguous, two-faced"; and the Berlin Wall made the point very well that walls can keep in as well as keep out. If Donald Trump rides a continuing National Emergency from President of the United States to Leader of the American Nation, some of us citizens of the Republic, people in the United States but not of the Nation — some of us may find that Wall a barrier to escape from another round of ethnic cleansing, National purification.


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If you're curious, my oath is to the Republic and the Constitution establishing it. If my courage holds, I'll defend both against all enemies, foreign, and domestic.

The U.S.A.: A Secular Federal Republic (Not a Nation)

The classics scholar William Arrowsmith said that the major ancient Greek tragedies dealt with the meaning of key terms politically-involved Athenians "contested," argued over.

We in the U.S. also have profound disagreements over basic terms. Case in point: America as a "Christian nation" (or a "White Christian nation") vs. the U.S. as a "secular Federal Republic" and not in a meaningful sense a nation at all.

We have no established church (synagog, mosque, or whatever), and Amendment One in our Bill of Rights forbids "an establishment of religion"; and, in a significant omission, "God" isn't mentioned in our Constitution. As a matter of official state policy, we're a secular establishment (which has been quite good for the various religions in American society: they're stronger than in most places with established religion).

And we're not a nation: one "ethnos" — people — with one origin and culture, and a history beginning "back in the mists of time" or even in an origin myth, all united by "blood and soil."

We're a hodgepodge; if you want a fancy image, a mosaic, the one I prefer, that thoroughly American dish, chop suey: one thing, sort of, but in complex ways. Collin Woodard counts "Eleven Regional Cultures of North America," and there are good historical reasons for that kind of regional analysis. For one thing, we're not only still kind of fighting the U.S. Civil War, but also the English struggles of the 17th century that separated out Puritans from less radical Christians.

Plus other ways that we're sliced and diced and divide ourselves up, which on balance is a good thing — *IF*

Our diversity is a good thing if, but only if, most Americans can see ourselves as «One Republic (if we can keep it)», with citizens unified by some agreement on basic terms, plus consciousness of what it's important for us to argue about and dedication to rules of civil contention and competition

Reprint: Yo, Secular Leftists — Arguing with Religious People (an Introduction)

From Richard D. Erlich, Views from a Jagged Orbit (before 2014)

De Gustibus & Intelligent Argument

A fair number of people are familiar with the idea that you really can't have a useful argument over tastes ("De gustibus non est disputandum"), and a quick check of what people think neat to put up on YouTube — or a quicker check of YouTube's pornographic spawn — will point to the truth of that assertion.

Less well known in the injunction from the Hebrew Fathers to, not surprisingly, "Be diligent in the study of Torah, and," relevant here, "know how to answer an Epicurean." That is, at least for my purposes, the old rabbis enjoined knowing one's own tradition and premises and being able to argue with someone with very different ideas. A religious follower of Scriptures, the rabbis taught, should know how to argue with — the rabbis would want you to defeat — a materialist philosopher.

In arguing with an "Epicurean," a religious person could not use the final formulation of more recent rabbis and their more authoritarian followers: "Er steht!" — "It's written"; "It's a commandment!" The obvious Epicurean response to that would be, "So what?" To answer effectively a materialist, a secularist — then and now — one would have to argue from premises you can both agree on.

And, more important in our time, vice versa — for a secularist arguing with a religious person.

For a secularist to argue effectively with a religious person, the secular person must know "Torah": i.e., what the religious person at least claims to hold authoritative. It's nice that Protestants and Catholics are no longer burning one another at the stake nor taking turns burning Baptists and flogging Quakers. And it's nice that atheists are coming out of the closet and arguing for their position.

The danger to my beliefs, though, is an alliance of Believers against not just strident atheists but secularists in general, and against those of us who want to follow a religious tradition in a society that welcomes us and (aiding that welcome) runs a thoroughly secular state. The danger to my political positions, and that of many, is a Left that becomes increasingly militant in its secularism and (therefore) increasingly politically marginalized among an American public composed largely of various kinds of cooperating Believers.

So, my atheist friends: a bit of advice. Recall the great principle of Occam's Razor and the story of the mathematician-astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace and Napoleon. When Napoleon asked Laplace how he, Laplace, could write a substantial book "on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator," Laplace replied that he "had no need of that hypothesis." Even so, American atheists, when an argument comes up about God, just say, "I have no need of that hypothesis" — and let it go at that. More generally on the Left: gals and guys, "Know how to work with religious people" — including at times with religious people with whom you have profound disagreements.

If some apocalyptically-minded Christians are right, it's important to get Jews in control of all of what was ancient Israel and Judea and (even) Samaria to bring on the End of Days, at which time those Jews will either submit to Jesus or burn forever in the Lake of Fire. No Jews like that idea, but if they're Likudnik Jews or even further to the Right, they can ally with Right-wing Christians on Zionist issues. And they have allied, and not just regarding Israel.

So it shouldn't be so goddamn difficult for today's secular Leftists to learn the history of effective political movements in the USA, bone up on the more radical teachings of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, and renew the old alliances for peace, social justice, and the equitable distribution of the world's resources and wealth.

"The Earth is the Lord's / and the fullness thereof, / The sea and all that in them is" saith the 24th Psalm, and the psalmist goes on to justify God's ownership by a labor theory of property: "for he founded [the world] upon the seas / And established it upon the waters." If you're trying to get people to make the U.S. economy more fair, that's a good place to start — and you can omit arguing that the true story of creation is Big-Bang Cosmology.

Et bloody cetera for the divinity of Jesus if you want allies against militarism and against coddling the rich. You, my Liberal-Leftist-Peacenik friend, want a more humble U.S. foreign policy; Jesus enjoined downright pacifism. Use that!

And if anyone accuses you, correctly, of "cherry-picking" teachings, point out that there are not ten commandments in Torah but, by traditional count, 613. Moses was just the beginning. Selecting, emphasizing, de-emphasizing, rationalizing, modifying, allegorizing, and sensibly gentling (and sometimes just ignoring) religious doctrines has been the name of the game since the old rabbis decided that "an eye for an eye" meant equitable compensation, Jesus healed chronic medical problems on the Sabbath, and St. Paul said a guy could be a saved follower of Messiah without circumcision and that nobody needed to follow all those finicky Jewish food regulations.

So, devout religious folk, "Know how to answer" us materialists — or at least talk with us politely. My fellow Leftist-pinko-peacenik sorts (including small "b" believers): If you want to effect change, learn how to talk to and with religious people. Effective politics are coalition politics, and as of now the Right is kicking our asses at it.

The Most Important Thing, He Said, He Learned in College ...

I've been thinking about a line by one of my students at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), probably in the late 1980s. I've forgotten what the context was, but there was a context; this wasn't off the wall. Anyway, the student said "The most important thing I've learned at college is, 'Not everybody is Catholic.'" And this was at Miami U at Oxford, a school with a lot of conservative Irish (and some Polish) Catholics.

Not everyone is Christian or monotheist or theist either.

Good for him. However woefully ignorant many American Christians are of their religion(s), however much the US of A is a (revolutionary, secular) Republic, and not a nation, Christian or otherwise — there's still an issue with us of "Do fish know they're in water?" Much of American culture is strongly inflected by Christianity, and the Christianity of the Western, Roman Church and its dissenting (and agreeing) descendants. E.g., what I as an outsider see as an otherwise strangely strong concern with beliefs and attitudes and "state of mind" is understandable among people who must seriously deal with the line "By Faith and Faith alone shall ye be saved" (unless it's irresistible Grace or the Sacraments of Holy Church).

That may be the most important thing going away to college teaches. The Truth is out there, but we see it from different angles and with different suppositions, right down to differences in training in different sub-fields. (The one time I did real science in what came down to a classic physiology lab, our data sets were a few dogs or maybe a few dozen rats. Things were different in microbiology, where we usually dealt with bacteria and such by the millions and billions. You asked different kinds of questions.)

Back in the 1980s, the State of Ohio was still pitching in a bit to subsidize the education at public schools like Miami of Ohio residents; with this student, the taxpayers got their money's worth.

W.E.I.R.D. Science — and Ethics and Politics

            The joke on campus when I was "in the academy" was that our colleagues in the Psych Biz had given us (largely) the psychology of the American college sophomore. American and other academic psychologists are starting to take the joke more seriously, trying to figure out how to adjust to having a subject pool from backgrounds that are largely W.E.I.R.D.: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. Most people in the world are not WEIRD; indeed, large numbers of Americans don't hit all those elements. Among the majority of people — historically a substantial majority — the "R" wouldn't be "Rich" but "Religious (more or less)."

            Being oblivious to religion can have results ranging from silly to disastrous.

            Local example: Southern California Edison Electric Company scheduled a power outage for my neighborhood for 10 PM Saturday, 15 April 2017, through 6 AM on the 16th. Sunday, 16 April 2017 was Easter Sunday, and apparently the schedulers at SoCal Edison were ignorant of the custom among many Ventura County natives to have family and friends over for Easter eating and would have refrigerators loaded with food that weekend, in some cases too much food to tolerate up to 8 hours without power — if everything went well during the maintenance work and to say nothing about having a crew working extra hours on Easter weekend.

            So come on, SoCal Ed! There'd be an excuse if you had to calculate on your own Easter's falling on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. But you don't; nowadays you check a calendar a month or so after you spot Easter stuff sprouting up at Kroger's or six weeks after those dumb-ass Cadbury Crème Egg commercials start showing up on television.

            California Christians can't complain about persecution, but there's definitely insensitivity, indifference, and ignorance.

            More significant example: No plan for "peace in the Mideast" will work that assumes that Jerusalem is just a city and that the key issues in the conflicts are rational interests in land, water, resources generally and so forth— and ignores religion, ethnic identities, self-respect, and self-respect's sinful sibling, Pride.

            Significant for capital "D" Democrats in the United States: No plan to regain majority-party power — not membership or sympathies or numbers in polling, but power — will work unless it gets more people to vote Democratic who are Western(ized)/White or White-ish, schooled a bit but not overly Educated, recently de-industrialized, and far less Rich by world standards than Religious.

            So come on, Democrats! You should know this stuff at least for the Abrahamic religions — and if you're culturally educated, not just schooled, you should know which ones the "Abrahamic religions" are. For example: in the Hebrew Bible, the 24^th Psalm begins, "The Earth is the Eternal's, and all that it contains, / The sea and all that dwell therein; / For He has founded it upon the ocean, and upon the flood." The psalmist assumes a labor theory of property: something is yours if you make it, with your labor, not as an investment or because you're Pharaoh ordering around forced labor by your peasants in the off-season, and slaves. And from there you can go on to the Prophets on social justice and, explicitly with Christians, indirectly with others get to the parts on basic decency spelled out in Matthew 25.

            We are all "values" voters, and if people accept those basics on our absolute human duties — and Jews, Christians, and Muslims damn well should — you ought to be able to get them to vote those values.

"Pronatalism": Explaining Sex Rules and Getting Down to Nationalism's Biological Basics

"We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies."

— Steven King, (R-Iowa)

Then a new king […] came to power in Egypt. “Look,” he said

to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us.

Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become

even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join

our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”

 So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, […]  

But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied

and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites

(Exodus 1.8-12)

            "Pronatalism" is a word we don't hear much any more, not for a generation or so, but it's an important word — increasingly important in a time of heightened nationalism — and needs to be recycled (recycled here from a couple of my essays from 2008 f.).

            "Pronatalism" refers to social policies encouraging the production and successful raising of children. Often these policies have included conscious policies on population; more often, pronatalism has been incorporated into religious beliefs and from there into law and custom.

            It doesn't matter much where pronatalist practices come from. "Cultural evolution" is more than a figure of speech: customs that function to help cultures survive will tend to be retained the way useful genetic traits are retained--and pronatalism, by its nature, has been useful for survival.

            Until recently. Until humankind's population went into the billions, and the unchecked reproduction of humans became a threat to human species-survival. Until some cultures became somewhat democratic and individualistic, and the press of population put stresses on democratic principles and individuality. It has always been difficult to argue that any individual human is special; the argument becomes almost impossible when there are over seven billion other human individuals. "Freedom" has been defined informally as the right to swing your arms until you endanger someone else's nose; some place along the line, population density gets to where there's little room for figurative arm swinging.

            Alternatively, an individual human has the same right as any other animal to urinate in the local stream; the people of a small village probably have the right to put their excrement in the river; towns and cities, however, have no right to dump in the river untreated sewage, poisoning decreasing supplies of water.

            More of that later. For now keep in mind that surviving societies often have built in a strong degree of pronatalism.

            You need to know this if you're to understand the underpinning of the sex laws and "morēs" of the United States, including our rules on marriage and attitudes toward the wide range of sexual activities.

            Start with obvious questions: Why would people care about occasional or even frequent masturbation in private? Why were there ever laws against oral or anal sex, or just about anything done between or among two or more consenting adults in private? The short and most basic answer, one that underlies both religious and secular, official and popular-culture prohibitions, is "pronatalism."

            Humans are highly sexual animals, and across a significant population people will practice all sorts of sexuality. Cultures, though, can evolve ideologies and customs that tend to direct sexuality into practices that are reproductive and nurturing. Consciously or unconsciously, societies can try to limit sex to vaginal sexual intercourse between fertile couples who are likely to conceive, bear, and then raise babies.

            Cultures can try to limit sex to "making babies" by people who'll stick around to raise babies: for a very important example, limiting approved sex to married heterosexual couples who have conception as a goal--and, hence, don't try to prevent conception and who avoid sex when the woman is menstruating.

            Sound familiar? It should if you know the traditional rules for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews.

            Under a doctrine of pronatalism, such rules make sense, and pronatalism itself makes a lot of sense in military, nationalistic, and economic terms.

            Pronatalism becomes a bad idea when it's a game many societies play and the human population rises rapidly, when the standard of living rises enough among many of those societies that they strain the environment.

            Think of a billion or two Chinese and Indians starting to live like rich Americans.

            Pronatalism in our time makes sense for individual countries that want to maintain their eminence; pronatalism makes sense for older generations who want to retire and be supported by lots of young workers.

            For the human species, and for humans who like freedom, pronatalism is a problem.

            "Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it" (Genesis 1.28) was good doctrine when humans were pretty powerless to master much, and it may be the one commandment we humans have fulfilled; but it is fulfilled now, and it's time to cut back.

            We--we humans generally--need to move rapidly toward zero growth in our population, which means rethinking the laws, policies, customs, and attitudes based in pronatalism.

            People are going to have sex, but it doesn't have to be reproductive sex; and contraception can be very low-tech, inexpensive, and almost as effective as abstinence in preventing sexually-transmitted diseases. To start, we need a campaign to "Wrap that Willy," making condoms readily available and condom-use a manly thing to do, and a womanly thing to demand.

            For other things to do, look at the pronatalists aspects of human cultures, and try to figure out practical ways to encourage contraception and reproductive restraint.