Phoney Fears

According to Niccolò Machiavelli, fear is better than love for getting people to do your bidding. This is because, at least in Niccolò’s view, we are basically all a pack of losers:

 

For of men it may generally be affirmed that they are thankless, fickle, false, studious to avoid danger, greedy of gain, devoted to you while you are able to confer benefits upon them…but in the hour of need they turn against you…Moreover, men are less careful how they offend him who makes himself loved than him who makes himself feared.

 

        Niccolò Machiavelli: “You people suck.”

 

Ouch. But is Machiavelli right? Are we more effectively governed by fear than by benevolence? Well, Republicans clearly believe we are. Case in point, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who, on the day he was sworn in, signed a bunch of squirrelly executive orders including one that bans critical race theory and other “divisive concepts” in public schools. For the moment, I’ll leave aside the threat imposed by heavy-handed gubernatorial intrusion into domains where honest scholarship should prevail - even though that threat is a serious one. Instead, I want to focus on GOP fearmongering, the Machiavellian flavor of this election season.

 

Republicans detest democracy. We can see it in their flurry of state laws that stifle or undermine voters’ rights, their failure to thoroughly denounce and hold accountable the January 6 insurrectionists, and their enduring effort to divide us by stoking fear against harmless and innocent people. The harmless and innocent people in Youngkin’s case are the handful of legal scholars that teach critical race theory or CRT, in Virginia’s law schools. I’m pretty sure there are damn few, if any, CRT advocates in Virginia’s public high schools. But if there are any, why doesn’t Youngkin choose to debate them honestly? Because Republicans detest democracy.

 

They detest it because in honest, straight-up debate, they lose. Voters don’t want to keep siphoning off the nation’s wealth into the hands of a privileged few, they don’t want assault weapons to flood our streets and schools, and they don’t want women being subject to humiliating and painful entanglements when they have to consider the option of abortion. Since so many of their policies are unpopular, Republicans have decided to abandon democracy and go for Machiavellian fearmongering.

 

Some things are genuinely frightening and against them we should stand guard. In addition to Republicans, I would say genuinely dangerous entities include aggressive dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un as well as viruses that spread like wildfire and can kill millions. But Republicans don’t want us to worry about those genuinely worrisome bits of reality. They want us to fear people that are in no way scary – like Youngin’s mythical CRT teachers.

 

Florida’s own State Senator Joe Gruters has even managed to outdo Glenn Youngkin in the GOP’s “scare the voters” campaign. According to the Orlando Sentinel’s Scott Maxwell, Gruters has introduced a bill that threatens to cut off funding for sports stadiums where the national anthem isn’t sung before games.

 

Maxwell focuses on the very sensible question of why voters should be subsidizing sports stadiums anyway, when most sports enterprises are rolling in cash. A good question but not the one I’m going to ask here, which is, Who are these sports teams that refuse to sing the national anthem? Are they hanging out in some secret lair with Glenn Youngkin’s CRT teachers, or what?

 

Of course, there is no People’s Republic of Un-American Footballers refusing to sing the national anthem. But Senator Gruters wants voters to think there is, because snollygosters like him want us to believe that our very way of life is under threat. In response to these imaginary fears, voters - he hopes - will be distracted from thinking about why more of the nation’s wealth keeps going to the super-rich, why more schools keep having to go into lockdown, and why the government keeps closing in on a woman’s right to choose. It’s an old strategy for sure, but it can be an effective one, as evidenced by current GOP hopes of taking over Congress this year.

 

What Is the Fight Really About?

I had never heard Randall Kennedy speak until last week when he appeared on Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square. I was impressed. Until then, I had only a vague notion of who he was - a prominent African-American public intellectual. I now understand that he is a law professor at Harvard University and the author of a number of books, including, memorably, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002).

 

Like any white person with at least a minimal sense of decency, I feel a certain measure of discomfort writing that title, given the prominence of the racial slur that is its subject. But I decided to write it out despite my discomfort. And I think I’m going to have to read the book in its entirety, given my interest in sociolinguistics and racial relations.

 

The n-word (by which I will identify it from now on) is peculiarly harsh in its impact. No other racial or ethnic slur carries the nasty punch that the n-word does. I’ve long believed its uniquely nasty quality reflects the viciousness of racial oppression itself. The reason for this, as far as I can tell, is that when used by a white person, it automatically calls up the cruelty and injustice of racial oppression and does so approvingly. To use that slur is to say through subtext, “You, black person, are stuck in a lowly category that allows me to look down on you every time I glance your way, and you have to accept it because that’s just the way things are. So, screw you.”

 

The word, in other words, is not simply an insult in the way that words like scumbag, dipshit, and asshole are. It’s an ethnic slur that echoes the dark spirit of an entire social order, a grossly unjust and cruel social order. This order is the source of the word’s poison. Those who use it are, consciously or not, strutting and preening themselves while trampling on the injured limbs and pummeled bodies of the system’s victims.

 

I have noticed in my lifetime that the n-word has replaced the f-word as the most unacceptable item in polite conversation. This is a good thing, and it reflects some of the positive changes that Professor Kennedy noted in his GPS remarks. Kennedy also noted that many of the phrases we use today have been weaponized and so have lost their usefulness in our current efforts to push social improvements further along. According to him these no longer useful terms include racism, structural racism, and, of course, critical race theory.

 

I agree.

 

It seems to me that the biggest issue facing us since the upheaval of the Trump years is best framed not as black vs. white, but as fair play and decency vs. malpractice. The key issue is the survival of the democratic institutions that we rely on to promote justice. The central political question should be, “Is your party for democracy and fair play or against them?”

 

If I were advising Democratic party leaders on future elections, I would recommend putting more emphasis on America’s longstanding promise of democracy and justice for everyone, and less emphasis on fighting racism per se. The Republican party is trying to cast Democrats as anti-white by coughing up the idea of critical race theory and claiming it lies at the heart of the Democratic party. For Republican propagandists the hope is that they can make white Americans feel inherently criticized by the Democrats. Their scheme is aimed at driving moderate whites away from the Democrats and into the GOP.

Let’s not take the bait. The real issues are not race, nor criticism about race relations, but justice and democracy. The Republicans have aligned themselves against both of these with their slew of new restrictive voting laws. Let’s fight them with all we have, not across the black-white seam, but on the front where we are sure to win, the fair play and decency divide. The Republicans have rejected these American values and that’s where we should be hitting them hardest. I can’t speak for Professor Kennedy, of course, but my sense is that he would agree with this approach.

 

                 Professor Randall Kennedy

 

 

 

Clash of Civilizations

On his show last night, Bill Maher had a mini-debate with Fareed Zakaria about the China-US rivalry. Both agreed, as I do, that this relationship is the most important one of the mid-twenty-first-century. Beyond that, Maher claimed that he expected China would out-compete the US because of its impressive record in constructing such things as high-speed rail systems. Zakaria argued that the US has some important advantages, including an open society with lots of talented incoming immigrants and a strong network of international relationships. China’s population, on the other hand, is set to decrease, and its only international treaty is with North Korea. I’m inclined to agree with Zakaria in this debate.

 

At one point Maher suggested that the US could be like Britain, a country that accepted second place after the US overtook it in political and economic influence. Well, sure, why not. Except that I see the China-US rivalry not as country vs. country but as ideology vs. ideology. The real contest is between authoritarianism and democracy. I’m hoping for a victory by democracy in this clash, and I wouldn’t mind if China were to become democratic and then suddenly outpace the US on every front. Unfortunately, current indications are that democracy is not in the cards for China.

 

President Xi Jinping is pushing hard to tighten authoritarian controls and in doing this is reversing that China’s recent liberalizing trends. Furthermore, his aggressive stance abroad has pissed off (Zakaria’s words) Japan, India, Vietnam, and other Asian neighbors with its new concept of itself as a “Wolf Warrior.” China’s Wolf Warrior ideal, widespread today in films and popular culture, is like a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude that you’d expect from an adolescent with wounded pride, not from a great nation. It’s kind of like Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series with its ethos of hurt feelings. Of course, American militarism is a problem of its own, but one I won’t deal with here beyond acknowledging its existence.

 

The emergence of China’s Wolf Warrior spirit is not too surprising given that the Communist government has long promoted a national myth-history that focuses on China’s wounded pride from “a century of humiliation” at the hands of the western powers and the Japanese. The past bullying by westerners and the Japanese is real, but the promotion of a sense of hurt feelings over this past is kind of pathetic. It’s obviously part of the Communist authority’s effort to control the thinking of its citizens. By making people feel victimized about past bullying and at the same time promoting the idea that the Chinese Communist Party represents the essence China, the leaders are able to twist criticism of its policies into criticism of China itself. In this way they tap into the wounded pride ethos and stir up popular resentment against criticism of the party. 

 

The Chinese Communist Party has been stoking resentment over China’s past for 70 years now and through this resentment has cultivated an attitude of nationalistic belligerence. It’s a belligerence that the government sometimes finds hard to control and could eventually push Chinese leaders into confrontations that are dangerously provocative to the US or to its Asian neighbors. China’s insistence on absorbing Taiwan into its authoritarian orbit - by violent force if they deem it necessary - is one area in particular where danger lies.

 

China would be so much better off if it were to reject the Leninist idea of party thought-control and reach instead into its own deep roots for a sense of identity. According to a longstanding Confucian ideal, good rulers strive to gain followers and influence through wisdom and benevolence. Grabbing territory by military conquest was regarded as immoral. Following a Confucian path, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could, without military threat, draw Taiwan so powerfully into its orbit that the issue of violent reunification would seem pointless, even downright idiotic. It wouldn’t be hard, if the PRC were only willing to open its society to a free press, guaranteed freedom of expression generally, and transparency in governance. Such a transformation would enable the government to act with confidence and benevolence on the world stage.The people of Taiwan already enjoy democratic freedoms, why does Beijing pretend that the Chinese people can’t be allowed the same?

 

Xi Jinping is no fan of an open or transparent society. One indication of Mainland China’s stifling restrictions is the recent disappearance of tennis star Peng Shuai. About three weeks ago, Ms. Peng posted on social media an accusation of sexual harassment by a government official. Her post was quickly taken down. Following this came further notices claiming to be hers which denied the original accusation and insisted that she was doing fine. I don’t believe she is, and neither does the world of women’s tennis. One short, simple gesture indicating that it respects its own deeply rooted Confucian morality would be for the Chinese government to allow Ms. Peng to travel internationally and be interviewed by those who are concerned about her fate. The fact that this is not happening is a measure of the Chinese government’s lack of self-confidence. The world would be a much better place if the U.S. were to restrain its global militarism and China were to open its society to free expression and thereby assume an honored place in the international community of like-minded nations.

 

                                  Peng Shuai

      

(By the way, here’s a plug for Fareed, who is presenting a special on CNN Sunday evening: China's Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America.)