Category: reason

Religion, we’ve been warned, divides us and leads to conflict. It stands to reason, then, that as the country becomes less religious, conflict should fade away. Instead, it’s clear people are eager to fight one another at all costs, and they’ll find new reasons to do so if the old ones become irrelevant. Forget religious wars; Americans now wage their fanatical crusades over politics.

As in the past, to avoid endless strife we’re going to have to learn to peacefully coexist.

“Religion poisons everything,” warned the late Christopher Hitchens. He was perfectly willing to respect the right of the faithful to celebrate their traditions, he said, but he argued that believers were incapable of “the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone.”

So, life should be growing more peaceful as the years pass, right? After all, “Gallup finds the percentage of Americans who report belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque at an all-time low” and “as older, more religiously observant generations die out, they are being replaced by far less religious young adults,” Pew Research tells us.

But anybody who has even accidentally glanced at recent headlines knows that life is not growing more peaceful. Americans are as divided as ever and engaged in increasingly violent conflict not just to win, but to destroy perceived enemies. Religion may be going away, but new causes have arisen to excite the passions of true believers.

“American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever; it’s just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief,” Shadi Hamid argues in The Atlantic. “Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what religion without religion looks like.”

Worse, of course, is that political true believers are, if anything, even less inclined than the theologically motivated to “leave me alone” as Hitchens justifiably wanted. Religious fanatics all too often harness state power to force their visions on the unwilling, but political fanatics don’t know any other way to express their beliefs. And they are fanatics.

“On the left, the ‘woke’ take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends,” adds Hamid. “On the right, adherents of a Trump-centric ethno-nationalism still drape themselves in some of the trappings of organized religion, but the result is a movement that often looks like a tent revival stripped of Christian witness.”

Hamid isn’t the first observer to conclude that America’s deepening political divisions look just like religious zealotry.

“In the early days of Christianity, believers would rather be thrown to Roman lions than reject their Savior,” Jon Gabriel wrote in the Arizona Republic in December. “Now, we’re supposed to hold that same devotion so some flawed politician can have four more years in Washington, D.C.”

“[T]he American left has lost its mind,” Matt Taibbi complained last summer. “Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics.”

“The need for meaning hasn’t gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction,” Andrew Sullivan observed in 2018. “We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical.”

America’s bitter polarization makes much more sense when you see political fervor as a substitute for religious fanaticism. Pollsters’ findings that “55% of Republicans say Democrats are ‘more immoral’ when compared with other Americans; 47% of Democrats say the same about Republicans” seem bizarre in the context of policy debates. So do warnings from scholars that an election “could generate violence and bloodshed.” But they take on a new light when you realize that adherents of the major political factions see their clashes as contests between good and evil. Apocalyptic language, purges of opponents, and street violence aren’t about advancing ideological agendas; they’re exercises in punishing heretics and sinners.

If the woke and the Trumpist alike are devotees of modern cults, can they learn to share the same country in peace? Hamid isn’t optimistic.

“Can religiosity be effectively channeled into political belief without the structures of actual religion to temper and postpone judgment?” he asks. “There is little sign, so far, that it can.”

But, if there is hope, it’s in the tool that theologically divided Americans adopted in the past so that diverse religious sects could coexist without eternal strife: tolerance.

Earlier this month, in Scientific American, three scholars rejected President Joe Biden’s call for “unity” because it’s “often understood to be an argument for uniformity or assimilation to specific values and beliefs—which is not particularly realistic.” Instead, they argue, “a more practical solution to the current partisan divide is though tolerance of our differences.”

“Tolerance does not imply compromising our values, beliefs or way of life, but rather allowing others to live life as they wish because our reasons to endure these differences (such as a respect for others’ freedom of expression) outweigh our reasons for objection,” add authors Kumar Yogeeswaran of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, Levi Adelman of the European Research Center on Migration and Ethnic Relation, and Maykel Verkuyten of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

The authors acknowledge that tolerance is challenging because it requires admitting that those horrible other people have an equal right to abide by their beliefs. But “[i]n a nation divided between two almost equally powerful political factions, tolerance is a necessity for avoiding future conflict.”

We’ve done it before, after all. Americans learned through hard experience that it was better to tolerate religious dissenters and their differing ways of life, however imperfectly, than to engage in endless conflict and risk our own destruction. With ideological crusades replacing theological battles, we will again have to learn to live and let live.

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3/19/1891: Chief Justice Earl Warren’s birthday.

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The latest offering from the Swedish game developer Oskar Stålberg might loosely be described as a city-building game. There are no missions to complete or resources to gather. There isn’t even a menu of buildings to pick from. Instead, Townscraper players add one block at a time atop a placid sea and watch as the structures they’re creating morph automatically into streets, homes, apartments, and towers. That barebones simplicity, objective-free gameplay, and calming setting will make you feel less like a city administrator and more like you’ve been administered a digital Valium.

It’s hardly a thrilling experience. But there’s still a lot of Zen fun to be had in seeing your individual mouse clicks snowball into city blocks or castle-like complexes. That organic, incremental growth makes Townscraper a refreshing change from other city simulators, which typically revolve around zoning vast tracts of land and laying down miles of infrastructure.

Less appealing is the game’s lack of people to populate the player’s creations. Their absence can make the game feel sterile after a while. In the era of coronavirus, when dead downtowns are depressingly common, it can even feel a little eerily familiar.

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March 23 marks the anniversary of Britain’s lockdown. It’s not that memorable a milestone, admittedly, as it’s hardly the only country in that position. But the U.K. has one big difference from most countries, not least the United States: We’re still in a strict lockdown.

This often goes underappreciated on the American side of the pond. Many point to indoor dining bans and the like in the U.S. as evidence that lockdowns endure on both sides of the Atlantic. But as irritating as those laws might be, they’re not the same as the U.K. lockdown.

Since the beginning of January, the U.K. has had the real deal (just as we did for all of last spring and winter): an indefinite stay-at-home order coupled with on-the-spot fines for anyone going outdoors without good reason or visiting a family member. Bars, gyms, churches, and “non-essential” retailers (the majority of which were already shut thanks to the “local” lockdowns that engulfed much of England last winter) have all been closed for months.

Eleven weeks in and we’ve seen only the most minor relaxations. Since March 8, it’s been permitted for two people to meet outside for a coffee—provided it’s in a public space. From March 29, this limit will be extended to six people, and to private gardens. Meeting indoors will remain illegal until the middle of May.

The enduring lockdown is quite surprising. Goodness knows that if you’d said this time last year the U.K. would still be in lockdown—and all under “freedom-loving” Prime Minister Boris Johnson—you’d have been laughed out of town. That’s before you factor in the vaccines, of which some 50 percent of U.K. adults (and virtually all seniors) have now received at least one dose.

Yet here we are: 12 months into restrictions and our once-cherished approach to liberty has been totally inverted. Lockdown, once a temporary aberration, has instead become the default. The burden of proof is placed on those arguing for freedom, rather than those wanting to remain in lockdown.

What went wrong? One ongoing, and unexpected, factor has been the astounding popularity of lockdowns. Ever since spring 2020, opinion polling has shown previously unthinkable majorities in favor of restrictions. Last month, for example, 72 percent of those asked backed the idea of a 10-day hotel quarantine for all international arrivals. Meanwhile, 59 percent of Brits want a ban on all protests and demonstrations during the pandemic.

It’s no secret that the Boris Johnson administration is even more preoccupied with polling than its predecessors. Sometimes he appears reluctant to speak on an issue before consulting the polls. Witness his slowness last summer, for example, to speak out on the issue of whether anti-racism protesters were right to target a statue of Winston Churchill, a question that should have been an open goal for any Conservative Party prime minister.

But why do Brits back lockdown in the first place? The U.K.’s heightened fear of the virus plays a big role, as does the affinity for our National Health Service (which did, it’s true, come under serious strain in January). That some of our doom-mongering modelers are already catastrophizing about a deadly “third wave” this summer doesn’t help either.

Much of the country remains scarred by what many regard as a botched opening up last summer, when the government finally decided to reopen hospitality (albeit with strict physical distancing) after three and a half months of total closure. It was a decision that, at the time, was largely cheered by the British press. But nine months on from what the papers dubbed “super Saturday” and the reopening is being held up as the moment at which Britain began its headfirst march into a deadly second wave. 

It’s an argument that ignores the fact that, at the time of reopening, COVID-19 cases had plunged to miniscule levels in Britain; a level at which they remained all summer. Never mind, too, that the U.K.’s services-led economy had slumped by a record 20 percent at this point, and that human vaccine trials were still in their earliest stages. What was the alternative? Staying shut indefinitely?

None of this, unfortunately, has stopped this argument from catching on with a public whose approach to reopening now resembles that old Chinese proverb about the man bitten by a snake being scared of rope. In fact, more than a quarter of Britons say the current reopening plan—stores in April; bars with masks in May; freedom in June—is too quick, even with mass vaccination having driven down our case levels to the second lowest in Europe.

It’s all a far cry from January, when our health secretary promised to “cry freedom” once the over-50s were vaccinated and, by extension, 95 percent of deaths eliminated. Instead, the goal posts have shifted, with the new line being that even a small rise in cases might lead to a rogue vaccine-resistant strain.

In some ways, the U.K. has been a victim of its own vaccine success. The expedited timeline of the rollout, well beyond original expectations, now means that we should have jabbed all willing adults by June. But rather than enabling the reopening of society, our vaccine success has crystallized a different proposition: What’s another few weeks of house arrest if it removes that final scintilla of risk?

Like many lockdown critics, I have dozens of answers to that question. But it’s too late: The battle is lost, and thanks largely to a half-truth. They told us vaccines would be our ticket to freedom—they didn’t tell us we’d be taking the slow train.

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A New Jersey woman is suing the borough of Penns Grove and its former police chief, Patrick Riley Sr., claiming that Riley mistakenly outed her as a confidential informant to a member of a violent street gang. The suit claims Riley called what he thought was her number a left a message containing details of a confidential investigation that misrepresented the woman as a cooperating witness. The number actually belonged to someone associated with the gang. Riley was suspended over the incident but ultimately not punished. He retired six months later on full pension and with a $150,000 payout. The woman says she is now in fear for her life.

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On January 6, a number of Republican Representatives and Senators sought to challenge the electoral votes submitted by several states, relying upon provisions of the Electoral Vote Count Act, which purports to give Congress the authority to reject electoral votes that were “irregularly given.” The EVCA was adopted after the contested election of 1876, with the aim of creating a process to handle such contests in the future. But is the EVCA constitutional?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Judge Michael Luttig and conservative attorney David Rivkin argues that Congress had no authority to enact the EVCA, and there is no constitutional basis for Congress to reject a state’s electoral votes. They write:

Congress gave itself more authority than the Constitution allows, by establishing a labyrinthine process to resolve state electoral-vote challenges. The most constitutionally offensive provision gave Congress the absolute power to invalidate electoral votes as “irregularly given,” a process that a single representative and senator can trigger by filing an objection.

Fortunately, this provision has seldom been invoked—only twice before 2021—and no objection has ever been sustained. But this year Republican lawmakers vowed to contest the results in six swing states that Joe Biden carried. Although the objections had no prospect of success in a Democratic House and those that were filed (for Arizona and Pennsylvania) were voted down overwhelmingly in both chambers, the law put Congress smack in the middle, where it uncomfortably found itself in 1876.

That’s not what the Framers intended. The Constitution’s Electors Clause gives state legislatures plenary authority over the manner of choosing electors and relegates Congress to determining on what day the Electoral College would cast its votes. The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, reformed the Electoral College by providing for separate votes for president and vice president. It also reiterates the Article II, Section 1 language that the certified state electoral results are to be transmitted to Washington, opened by the president of the Senate, and counted in the presence of both congressional houses.

Luttig and Rivkin are not alone. Boston University law professors Gary Lawson and Jack Beermann have a draft paper, “The Electoral Count Mess: The Electoral Count Act of 1887 Is Unconstitutional, and Other Fun Facts (Plus a Few Random Academic Speculations) about Counting Electoral Votes,” also arguing that the EVCA exceeds Congress’s powers. Here is the abstract:

In this essay, and in light of the controversy that arose in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, we explain the constitutional process for counting electoral votes. In short, every four years, the Twelfth Amendment requires the President of the Senate (usually the Vice President of the United States) to open certificates provided by state presidential electors and count the votes contained therein. The Constitution allows no role for Congress in this process, and thus, the provisions of the Electoral Count Act purporting to grant Congress the power, by concurrent resolution, to reject a state’s electoral votes, is unconstitutional. Further, the objections raised to two states’ electoral votes on January 6, 2021, were not proper within the terms of the Act, and therefore, even if Congress has the power specified in the Act, congressional action rejecting states’ electoral votes would have been contrary to law. While state executive or state judicially-ordered departures from the requirements of state election laws in presidential elections might violate the federal Constitution’s requirement that electors be chosen as specified by state legislatures, determining whether this has taken place is much more complicated than simply examining the language of state election statutes. We suggest that making this determination requires a careful examination of state interpretation traditions that we decline to undertake in this brief essay on the constitutional process for counting electoral votes.

While Lawson and BEermann may not agree with Luttig and Rivkin on every particular, they agree on a central point: Congress does not have the authority to second-guess the electoral votes submitted by states, and those members of the House and Senate who sought to argue otherwise were endeavoring to violate the Constitution.

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