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Of Pockets, Legs, and Polarization

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Kouros of Flerio, broken legs, Naxos, 6th c BC. Photo by Zde. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Kouros of Flerio, broken legs, Naxos, 6th c BC. Photo by Zde. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

“For the people who actually study the origins of civil wars, not just in the US, but as a class of events,” says Dr. Timothy Snyder, who does just that as the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, “America doesn’t look good right now, with its high degree of polarization, with its alternative reality, with the celebration of violence.”

While Snyder’s remarks are specific in context — they concern a prospective attempt to steal the 2024 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump — he does seem to have a point.

America is certainly “polarized,” or at least most Americans seem to think so. And since polarization is about what people think, it amounts to the same thing.

Alternative realities and celebrations of violence are both symptoms and causes of such polarization, but the polarization itself seems to be the big problem.

What can we do about polarization, though?

So long as there are issues, people will hold different opinions on those issues and “polarize” on — that is, flock to opposite and mutually exclusive sides of — those issues.

As the number of contentious issues grows and larger groups coalesce around bundles of those positions, a more general polarization springs up  and scales up in intensity from single-issue polarizations.

You and I may disagree on whether Paul McCartney died in 1965 and was replaced by a body double, yet still get along quite well. We might also disagree on whether Val Kilmer should have received an Oscar for his portrayal of Doc Holliday in “Tombstone,” and be able to have a beer together without it devolving into a brawl. But sooner or later you’ll cross some final red line, probably by suggesting that pineapple is a legitimate pizza topping, and then, well, we’re just done with each other, aren’t we?

When it comes to political issues, Thomas Jefferson offered a useful standard: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

The way to reduce political polarization is to reduce the number and kind of issues subject to politics. Jefferson marked out a useful starting point, but Henry David Thoreau went him one better:

“I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — ‘That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”

As a wordsmith, I’m nowhere near Jefferson or Thoreau in skill, but let me offer my own unworthy summary of the dual lesson:

The way to reduce political polarization is to give up politics as an instrument through which each of us claims an entitlement to run the lives of others.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Vladimir Putin Is Not the Neville Chamberlain the US/NATO is Looking For

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NATO countries international expansion. Graphic by Honge. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
NATO countries international expansion. Graphic by Honge. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

“I think one lesson in recent history,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on January 7, referring to the entry of Russian troops into Kazakhstan to save that country’s allied regime from an uprising of dissatisfied serfs, “is that once Russians are in your house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave.”

That’s the pot calling the kettle black. More than 30 years after the Warsaw Pact’s dissolution, 77 years after the end of World War Two, the US still keeps 40,000 troops in Germany.

For 45 years, the justification was to defend Germany from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. As Germany moved toward reunification, US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization wouldn’t expand so much as “one inch eastward” into the former Soviet sphere of influence it was created to contain.

That assurance, codified in various negotiations and subsequently declassified documents, was far from “informal” as supporters of an expanding NATO pretend. It may well have kept eastern Europe’s transition toward independence from devolving into the third general European war in a century.

But NATO broke its word. In 1999, the alliance began an eastward march into Russia’s  still considerable sphere of influence and toward its borders — the precise outcome Gorbachev feared and was promised wouldn’t happen. Since 1999, NATO has nearly doubled its number of member states instead of dissolving as it should have.

Suppose the Warsaw Pact had admitted Nicaragua in the 1980s, then begun adding states in central America, culminating in a  coup in Mexico (like the one sponsored by the US in Ukraine in 2014) to replace a pro-US regime with a pro-Russian regime, followed by entertaining Mexican membership in the Pact and saber-rattling over the US “massing troops near the Mexican border.”

I suspect the US/NATO response would look rather like the Russian response to current US/NATO follies in eastern Europe and Ukraine: A stern warning to back off or suffer severe consequences.

The US and NATO could have embraced an opportunity for long-term peace and increased general prosperity. Instead, they decided to play the role of perpetually aggrieved sore winner.

Some US hawks liken the situation to Munich in 1938, and they’re not wrong — but they’ve reversed the roles. It’s NATO that’s gobbled up Czechoslovakia after Czechoslovakia, and Vladimir Putin whom they’re trying to cast as Neville Chamberlain. He seems disinclined to accept the role.

We may be closer to large-scale war between “great powers” now than at any time since 1945, this time with nuclear weapons ready at hand. Expecting Putin to bail the US and NATO out of a bad situation of their own making with abject submission isn’t a strategy for peace, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Photo ID to Vote? Well, OK, But …

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A bunch of guys without photo ID getting ready to vote.
A bunch of guys without photo ID getting ready to vote.

One perennial proposal in the ongoing “fight” (actually more a set of dueling theatrical productions a la professional wrestling) over “election integrity” is a requirement that voters produce official, government-issued identification documents, complete with photo, at polling places.

Anyone who’s ever worked door security at a nightclub (yes, I have) knows that possession of a card with a photo vaguely resembling the person possessing it is no guarantee of identity.  And polling places have a built-in advantage over nightclubs: EVERYONE has to be on the guest list to get in.

Having individuals pretend to be voters when they aren’t doesn’t seem to be a real problem, if for no other reason than that it’s an incredibly labor-intensive way to fraudulently swing an election outcome.

In reality, the photo ID requirement drives seem to be more about making sure that only the “right” people — those who have the time and money to sit around government offices waiting for those very special cards — get to vote.  There being, probably not coincidentally, a strong correlation between being one of those “right” people and possessing a skin tone that matches one of the lighter shades on the Pantone Matching System Color Chart.

But it seems to me that there’s room for a compromise here — a way to take the supposed concern seriously, and do something about it, in return for something that naturally follows from doing so.

Side A of this grand bargain proposal is simple: Give the “photo ID to vote” advocates what they want. You don’t get to vote without showing government-issued photo ID.

Side B is a little messier: Since photo ID is so important that it’s impossible to trust the results of an election not requiring it, all past elections not requiring it are deemed null, void, and of no effect. Every political official chosen in an election without photo ID requirements is automatically recalled, and every law passed by those officials — or by voters in a non-photo-ID election — is rescinded.

Yes, all of them, all the way back.

I have it on good authority that not a single member of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, or any of the legislators or convention delegates ratifying the Constitution, possessed government-issued photo identification documents.

How can we possibly know that the gentlemen purporting to be James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, et al. weren’t just  a gaggle of randos in borrowed wigs and waistcoats who fraudulently passed themselves off as the genuine personages?

If, as its advocates claim, photo ID is necessary to “election integrity,” we can’t trust that any past election was properly conducted or properly decided, and should therefore not consider ourselves bound by those elections’ results.

Your move, “election integrity” panic-mongers.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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