Personal rights vs. public health: individualism reborn as common good fades

 

Gordon L. Weil

Something big just happened in Canada.

It was far more than truckers protesting a vaccination mandate.  It was a message about a fundamental change that seems to be spreading worldwide.

Shakespeare wrote, “There is a tide in the affairs of men.”  What happened in Canada was a sign of the tide turning.

Canada differs from the U.S.  Americans give the highest priority to individual rights.  Canada and some European democracies focus on the common good.

As a result of the global Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War of the 1940s, many democracies moved toward a greater emphasis on the common good.  In the U.S., Social Security and the huge war effort moved the country in that direction.

Later, Medicare and Food Stamps would be adopted. Britain’s National Health Service and Canadian national health care were both signs of this change of emphasis. 

After World War II, North American and European economies grew.  As personal wealth grew, citizens more willingly accepted increased government action to care for less fortunate people.

Even on the diplomatic level, the focus on common interests expanded.  The United Nations, NATO and the European Union reflected a willingness to contribute some national political independent action for what was seen as a higher common purpose.

The change was broad and widely accepted, leading to an unspoken belief that the tide had turned.  Society’s values may have changed for good after the Depression.  The political question became not whether to undertake action for the common good, but how far to go. 

The world seemed to be moving in the direction Canada had chosen rather than toward American individualism.  But resistance would grow.

The U.S. began to reverse the tide under the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.  Mental health care was cut and homelessness grew. Americans were increasingly unwilling to sacrifice their individual progress for collective effort.

The tidal change in attitudes about an enlarged government role, mistakenly called socialism by its critics, finally fully hit under the presidency of Donald Trump. His greatest political skill was in exploiting the growing discontent.  But similar leaders were emerging in places as different as the U.K., Hungary and Poland.

The new wave has been called “populism.”  Many people have become restive with government setting standards, redistributing income and placing limits on their conduct. 

The essence of individual rights is that each person should live as free of governmental restraint as possible.  This freedom should be limited only by the condition that a person’s exercise of their rights should not limit another’s rights, not by a notion of the common good.

Here is the problem with fighting Covid-19.  An article in the latest issue of Scientific American magazine concludes that the virus has hit harder in the U.S. than in other countries because of our putting individualism above the community interest. 

Most people don’t like being forced to wear a mask or have a shot. Protecting themselves at the price of some loss of personal choice should be left to them.  What about the possible effect of their choice on other people, even if it involved their contracting the illness?

Political opposition to Covid-19 protective measures was misplaced when the risks of the virus were high.  Concern about the physical threat may have justifiably pushed aside concern about the sense of isolation and the disruption of public education that resulted.  But that is changing as people seek to regain greater control over their lives.

Progress in dealing with the virus has led to more attention being paid to its social and personal effects.  Government has begun recognizing these costs, while public health officials pursue their necessarily more narrow approach.  Mandates are being relaxed and more responsibility is being left to individuals.

Unfortunately, reasonable consideration of Covid-19 is difficult when it has become highly politicized. The difficult search for a balanced handling of the physical and mental health threats has been packaged as simply a matter of rights and has been taken over by partisan politics.

The struggle for balance has turned into a near war over individual rights versus the common good.  In the U.S., political opposition to even limited protective measures replaces leadership with pandering.  This problem is not limited to the U.S.

The latest sign of the turn of the tide – the trucker’s uprising in Canada – is caused by a belief that individual rights should not only be protected, but that they are absolute.  Any hope of balance disappears when truckers harass you for simply wearing a mask.

The assertion of absolute rights that allow no protection for the rights of others undermines the ability of government to function on any issue.  In the U.S., it contributes to a political divide that seems to be beyond closing.

 

George Washington favored big government, debt reduction

Gordon L. Weil

The president agreed to meet the demands of a ruthless foreign leader rather than to fight back against his aggression.

That’s not “breaking news.”   But it is true.  A U.S. president paid yearly to a despot to reduce attacks on Americans rather than launching a counterattack, because he believed it was the better option.

The president was George Washington.  The nation celebrates his birthday, a legal federal holiday. (“President’s Day” has no official standing.)  As I do every year, I recall aspects of the historic contribution to the country he led.

Three Barbary States in North Africa were high-jacking American and other countries’ commercial vessels and seizing their crews.  The pirate states demanded ransom and annual payments to cease their aggression and return American sailors. Washington strongly opposed paying such tribute.

But Congress would fund only the most limited federal government. Washington favored a larger federal budget that would allow the country to have a navy.  Without one, the U.S. lacked the means to respond to the pirate nations. 

Faced with a choice between a lengthy legislative fight to build the U.S. Navy and abandoning captive Americans or paying ransom, Washington unhappily chose to bribe the enemy.

Much as today, the government was split between two new parties that refused to compromise.  The Federalists backed commerce and a larger government and the Republicans supported agriculture and limited government. Given his stature, Washington hoped to remain above this split but came under attack by Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans.

Though his own views were more closely aligned with the Federalists, he tried to remain independent.  He favored policies that would produce results not political wins.  He risked his reputation and fortunately felt no need to posture to pursue any political ambition.  He was pragmatic, what some today call a “problem solver.” 

His method of governing is missing today.  Politics lack people who seek solutions whatever their parties may favor and are willing to risk political defeat for putting practical solutions above party loyalty.  Washington had the benefit of being a man without a party.

Washington invented term limits. Earlier, when as general he resigned his commission and relinquished power, King George III, his former foe, reportedly said that if Washington could do that, he was the greatest man in the world.  As president, he decided to serve only two terms.  His decision eventually became a constitutional amendment.

He risked being a “lame duck” in his second term, perhaps losing influence because he would soon be gone.  But he could show that he was more committed to doing his job as well as he could than to holding onto to his office and political control. 

Washington was a rare leader. No other elected federal official is subject to term limits. Most members of Congress make political survival their highest priority. Maine’s version of term limits is so weak it amounts to a revolving door.

Along with other historic figures, Washington has been criticized for owning slaves. Though slavery was common during his lifetime, he surely knew it was wrong.  Still, he believed he could not disrupt that “peculiar institution” without tearing the fragile new country apart.  For him, allowing slavery was a pragmatic choice, He knew it could not last.

Unlike others, he tried to keep his slave families intact. Long before any other prominent slave-owning leader acted, he provided that his widow should free his 120 slaves, which Martha Washington did soon after his death.  Slavery was not officially ended for another 65 years.

His life teaches lessons, still valuable today.  His experience with what amounted to an all-volunteer army during the Revolutionary War revealed to him that the U.S. could not become a major world power, able to develop its territory, without a strong, well-financed federal government.

By today’s standards, he would be the target of both parties.  He favored what was considered a large and powerful central government, financed by taxes from the commerce and agriculture it protected and promoted.  He aimed to pay down the national debt and not finance normal government operations by more borrowing.

Perhaps even more important and certainly missing in government today, he sought solutions that would work not merely serve political ends.  Public service was not meant to be a career, but rather to be a way of lending your skills to helping your community for a limited period.

A wit once wrote that politics is about two parties – the “Ins” who want to stay in and the “Outs” who want to get in.  That quip seems never to have been more true than it is now.  That was not Washington’s view of public service.

Regrettably, George Washington’s record as a political leader has faded.  His independent leadership produced results and set an example still worth following. 

World aligns into two blocs over Russia’s Ukraine threat

 

Gordon L. Weil

“War is peace.”

“Freedom is slavery.”

“Ignorance is strength.”

In 1949, George Orwell wrote a cautionary story of a huge nation with these declarations as its mottos.  The novel was called “1984” and it was a somber warning of a possible future world dominated only by ruthless superpowers.

Somewhat surprisingly, the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine has pushed the world closer to a version of Orwell’s view of the future – China-Russia versus America-Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to reassert his country’s influence over neighboring nations, replacing the domination by the Soviet Union before it disintegrated in 1991, leaving Russia as its principal survivor.  Ukraine, formerly a Soviet republic, worries him as it moves away from Russian influence.

Massed Russian forces on the Russia-Ukraine border back up Putin’s demand that NATO withdraw its forces from Eastern European countries formerly under Soviet domination and keep Ukraine from joining the alliance. In return, Russia might pull troops away from the border.

By using coercive diplomacy, Putin may have thought he could boost Russian security and regain influence over Eastern Europe.  His threat of war might bring a diplomatic result.  Clearly, this would be a variation on Orwell’s “War is peace.”

He might have assumed that NATO had accepted Russia’s 2014 takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea region.  Though that aggression had spurred the NATO buildup he disliked, he may have thought the alliance was now ripe to be pushed back.

NATO was created in 1949 to counter any new Soviet expansion.  It had grown somewhat slack as Russian pressure faded, but it was refocused by the Crimea invasion.  The Russian military buildup on the Ukraine border brought it fully back to life.

In effect, Putin’s policy may have backfired.  With a relatively small economy and a population increasingly acquiring a middle class lifestyle, he might be limited in launching war.  Frustrated, he turned to China, led by Xi Jinping, who shares his authoritarian views and hostility to the U.S.

The Chinese population and economy are far larger than Russia’s.  Xi could now pick up the support of his weaker and embattled neighbor. They issued a joint statement, which has been dangerously ignored.  It is the China-Russia manifesto for undermining the U.S. as a world power.

Both leaders claim they support democracy, but they say each country can have its own definition of what it means.  For them, it means one-party rule. 

China’s holding Uighurs in what amount to prison camps, supposedly for their own good, is its version of “Freedom is slavery.”  But for Xi, despite saying he supports the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that’s acceptable.

Orwell defined “doublethink” as the ability to hold two opposing views and believe both of them.  The China-Russia manifesto is full of it.

Apparently Xi and Putin share the belief that the seizure of Crimea has nothing to do with NATO’s current response to the current Russian build-up.   They want to keep world opinion focused on the alliance’s protective moves, not Russia’s aggression.  That’s a new twist on “Ignorance is power.”

Meanwhile, they ignore opposition in the U.S. and most of the West to Russia’s Crimea invasion plus China’s ending of Hong Kong’s democracy and threatening to take over Taiwan.

If the China-Russia manifesto, proclaiming there are “no limits” on their cooperation, means anything, the world has moved closer to the Orwellian struggle between superpowers.  This new alliance directly challenges the western concept of democracy, which requires that every election is decided by the people not by the ruling party.

Orwell’s superpowers had no agendas beyond the Party holding onto power. Democracy is intentionally messy, allowing for disagreement and change.  Yet differences between the U.S. and some European countries in dealing with Russia could produce a better policy than the uniformity of a dictatorship.

Putin may have single-handedly and unintentionally reshaped world politics.  NATO, the alliance of democratic countries aligned against aggression, has been brought back to life.  Russia, receding in superpower status, may have chosen to attach itself to China’s rising star.

The China-Russia manifesto makes a direct appeal to the leading unaligned countries. Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia all have governments leaning toward authoritarian rule.  The manifesto proposes closer relationships with countries that assert their own definitions of democracy and human rights.

The conflict, despite Russia’s saber-rattling, will play out mainly in economic competition. Will national goals be better promoted by the free enterprise that is a feature of democracy or by state economies under authoritarian parties?

The U.S. has lost much of its leadership of the West and its influence on the world economy because of weakened confidence in the dollar and a reduced commitment to NATO.  The China-Russia manifesto is a warning that time is running short to repair the damage.

Demand for ‘most qualified’ judge means ‘no Black woman’

 

Gordon L. Weil

In the celebrated movie “Casablanca,” the police chief makes a show of exclaiming that he is “shocked” to find gambling at Rick’s bar.  He orders it closed just as an officer hurriedly hands him his winnings.

That looks pretty close to Republican criticism of President Joe Biden keeping his campaign promise to nominate an African American woman to the Supreme Court.

Some Republicans suggest his intent is shocking, overlooking anything shocking about their having blocked any consideration of one of President Obama’s nominees and zipping through the review of then-President Trump’s choice of Amy Coney Barrett.  Biden’s choice will likely be confirmed under the GOP’s own short-cut rules, so posturing is the best they can do.

They assert that Biden is playing politics with the appointment instead of picking the most  qualified person available, regardless of race or sex.  Some people are likely to swallow the line that past nominees were selected purely on merit, while Biden is playing politics.

Let’s face it. The selection of Supreme Court justices has always been political.  And throughout history, Obama aside, presidents proposed and the Senate confirmed nominations heavily favoring people like themselves – white men.  In short, sex and race have always been a factor.

Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, sees it differently.  “The irony is the Supreme Court, at the very same time, is hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination and while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota," he told an interviewer.  He assumed that any Black woman nominee would have enjoyed affirmative action.

Contrast that statement with the remarks of GOP Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina.  “We’ve only had five women serve and two African American men.  So let’s make the court more like America.”  That’s affirmative action.  Graham has usually accepted the nominees of either party’s president. 

Sen. Susan Collins, Maine’s GOP senator, has said Biden’s promise to pick a Black woman, an appointment she could accept, is unusually “political.” She’s in her fifth term in the Senate and surely knows that judicial nominations are political.  In fact, she rejected Trump’s Barrett rush.  She has merely condemned Biden for being “clumsy.”   

All Supreme Court justices are lawyers.  For most of American history, the political system kept women and African Americans from becoming lawyers. The obvious result was a small pool of possible candidates to draw from, even if there were no discrimination in judicial picks.

Dean Erwin Griswold asked each female member of Harvard Law School first year classes why they were taking the place of a man.  The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of those women and, having become a lawyer, she could not get a job in a law firm.

An American Bar Association report reveals the relative standing of Blacks and women among lawyers and judges.  The numbers tell a story of racism and sexism.

Of all lawyers, 85 percent are white, while 5 percent are Black.  New lawyers are joining the profession in just about the same ratio.

Women are about 37 percent of all lawyers, while 63 percent are men. In law schools today, the division between men and women is about equal.  When Ginsburg was a law student in the 1950s, less than two percent of her classmates were women.

Appointments to the federal courts lag behind the ratio among all lawyers.  In the latest three years for which information is available, 76 percent of those named have been men and 24 percent have been women.  By race, 84 percent of the appointments have been white and 4 percent Black.   

Using the latest 30-year rate of female judicial appointments, it would take about 40 more years until the number of women and men named to federal courts were equal.  Nominations of Black judges are more difficult to forecast because of their limited numbers.

The ABA data also suggest that increases in the number of federal judicial appointments of both women and Blacks have occurred under Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and the rate has slowed under Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump.  That puts Biden’s move in historical perspective.  Elections have consequences.

Wicker forecast: “This new justice will probably not get a single Republican vote.”  Every senator should consider the merits of any nominee. But Wicker was saying that a still unnamed Black woman, whatever her record, could fail to get the support of a single GOP senator.  That’s the reverse of affirmative action.

Would such a denial of even minimal bipartisanship simply be caused by automatic Republican opposition to any Supreme Court nominee of a Democratic president? 

Or would GOP opposition amount to placing a seal of approval on a federal court system that could for many more decades feel the slowly dying grasp of the past?