Category: reason

Over and over in the past decade, we have seen students, usually left-wing, respond to the presence or expected presence of right-of-center speakers with attempts to stop them from speaking, either by threatening to show up in force or by demonstrating in large, often unruly groups. These scenes have tended to feature raucous activists disrupting orderly and peaceful proceedings. And while they rarely result in serious violence, they frequently devolve into tense, seemingly out-of-control situations where the speakers and those who gathered to hear them have legitimate reason to fear for their physical safety. 

Typically, this has limited immediate effect. The targeted speakers might delay their speeches or appear off campus. Even if they cancel entirely, they can still get their message out through social media and other forums.

But over time, this has a corrosive effect on campus culture. Colleges are institutions founded on open debate and intellectual inquiry. Mobs undermine that foundation by chilling the speech of students, professors, and others who don’t wish to risk face their wrath. The direct results may not always be visible, but over time, the chilling effect can degrade an institution’s values and capabilities, rendering it unable to fulfill its mission. And while the physical threats are often modest, sometimes people are injured. 

These mob tactics have been lumped in with an array of speech-squelching activities that have come to be called “cancel culture.” As Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, has noted, the rise of campus cancel culture has been driven in large part by students, who in the early 2010s began to demand strict speech codes and the disinvitation of unwanted speakers. But although the demands originated with students, administrators played a key role in encouraging them, supporting cancel mobs through explicit policies and implicit support. The administrators may not have participated directly in the mobs, but they shared some culpability for coddling and even encouraging their obnoxious and destructive behavior. 

There has been some debate about what to call the scene at the United States Capitol yesterday, in which hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the building, vandalized offices, stole equipment, and caused Congress—which was in the middle of certifying Joe Biden’s election as president—to drop its official proceedings and flee the legislative floor out in fear. Is it sedition? A coup? An insurrection? A riot? 

One or more of those labels may be correct, but I think I have another answer: This was a right-wing cancel mob. Except instead of coming for a campus speaker or a controversial newspaper column, they came for the symbolic heart of democracy itself. They came to the Capitol to exercise a heckler’s veto over the results of a presidential election. This was cancel culture on a national political scale. 

The attack on the Capitol yesterday was an attack on the foundation of democracy: the peaceful transition of political power following a legitimate election. Democratic self-governance, in which large groups of people work to make political decisions on their own rather than have them handed down by unelected rulers, is the necessary precondition for ensuring the individual rights and liberties that are the (oft-unmet) American ideal. And a baseline requirement for democratic self-governance is a fair and transparent system for agreeing to accept that sometimes, people you disagree with have won political power. Yesterday’s riot was an attempt—a lame and disorganized one, but an attempt nonetheless—to cancel a core democratic function. 

As with campus mobs, the immediate effect may seem limited, and those sympathetic to the rioters may downplay its consequences. The House and Senate reconvened in the evening to finish their business, voting to confirm the election result. The Capitol was damaged and vandalized, but not burned to the ground. The building and all it represents still stands. 

But yesterday was far from harmless. Four people reportedly died, including one shot by Capitol Police. The property destruction was not insignificant. The necessary precondition for democratic governance—the peaceful transition of power—was not met. Power will transfer, but it has not been peaceful. 

Over time, if this mob and its beliefs are not firmly rejected, there will be a chilling effect on the values and systems that are designed to promote peaceful power-sharing, the institutions that are designed to make productive self-governance possible. These effects may not be obvious or apparent in the short run; over the next year or two, Congress is likely to proceed in a way that looks a lot like business as usual. But without a firm rejection of the mob and what it stands for, there will be a cost, even if that cost is largely invisible. 

Yet like campus administrators, much of the Republican Party continues to indulge the mob. Indeed, President Trump began yesterday by spurring on the crowd that would go on to storm the Capitol. Despite having his legal challenges to the election outcome repeatedly and often brusquely rebuked in court, including by judges he appointed, he called the outcome an “egregious assault on our democracy” and told his assembled supporters to “walk down to the Capitol.” 

“We are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” he said, “and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them—because you will never take back our country with weakness.” Later, after the mob had crashed into the building and halted legislative business, he posted a video repeatedly reiterating the false claim that the election had been stolen, and a tweet seeming to express sympathy for those who had overrun the Capitol: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

At the beginning of the day, a large contingent of Republicans, including more than a dozen senators, planned to use the certification of Joe Biden to object to the vote on spurious grounds designed to comfort, if not explicitly validate, the conspiracy theories surrounding the election results.

While some of the senators changed their plans, more than half of House Republicans voted to reject the election results. Just hours after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), who led the Senate GOP effort to reject the election outcome, used the certification vote as an opportunity to give a speech condemning violence—and questioning the election’s legitimacy.

These Republicans didn’t participate in the mob, and in some cases they offered pro forma rejections of its violent impulses. But they coddled it, treating its fallacious and dangerous beliefs as essentially justifiable, contorting themselves to embrace the unfounded feeling that the election was somehow illegitimate despite all evidence to the contrary.

They gave comfort to the mob’s animating beliefs, tacitly encouraged its delusions, and built a permission structure for those delusions to continue. And in doing so, they failed their most basic responsibility to both their voters and to the ideals they supposedly serve. In the process, they have degraded their institution and embarrassed themselves. They have proven themselves cowards unworthy of their positions. And like those campus administrators caving to student cancel mobs, they share some culpability for what happened yesterday, and some blame for whatever happens next.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2LzCRWQ
via IFTTT

President Donald Trump may have a shot at becoming the first president in American history to be impeached twice.

In a Thursday afternoon announcement, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) said Congress “may be prepared to move forward with impeachment” unless the president’s cabinet moves quickly to remove him via the 25th Amendment. Pelosi said Trump committed “an act of sedition” by inciting a riot on Wednesday afternoon that led hundreds of the president’s supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol.

“The president has committed an unspeakable assault on our nation and our people,” Pelosi said.

Earlier on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called for Trump to be removed from office by the 25th Amendment, which includes a mechanism allowing a majority of the president’s executive cabinet, with the support of the vice president, to remove a president from power. That part of the 25th Amendment has never been invoked.

It’s not clear whether there would be time for Congress to impeach Trump for a second time before the president leaves office on January 20—to say nothing of the Senate trial necessary for removal from office. Both chambers of Congress recessed after finishing the final certification of the Electoral College votes in the early hours of Thursday morning and are not scheduled to reconvene until January 19.

But there are increasing calls for Trump to be removed from office via one constitutional mechanism or another—and not just from Democrats.

In a video posted to Twitter on Thursday, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R–Ill.) called on the cabinet to “invoke the 25th Amendment and end this nightmare.”

The National Association of Manufacturers on Wednesday became probably the first trade association in American history to call for the removal of a president. In a statement released yesterday, the group said Trump’s actions amounted to “sedition and should be treated as such” and said Pence should “seriously consider” invoking the 25th Amendment.

Former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.), one of just two then-Republican legislators to support Trump’s impeachment last year, has also called for the president “to resign or be removed from office.”

Donald Trump needs to resign or be removed from office. America has endured enough.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) January 7, 2021

One major procedural difference between the use of the 25th Amendment and the possibility of impeachment is what it could mean for Trump’s political future. If the House voted to impeach Trump and the Senate agreed to convict him, he could be barred from holding federal office again.

Unlike last year, when Trump was impeachment for a phone call in which he sought electoral assistance from Ukrainian leaders, the facts of the current situation are not in much doubt. “This need not be a lengthy process. The evidence of the president’s actions are clear and available to all,” writes Keith Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University. “The House does not need an elaborate inquiry. The Senate does not need a lengthy trial.”

Even so, the timing makes it unlikely that Trump will be impeached or removed. It is far more likely that the cabinet will choose to stagger through the next two weeks with Vice President Mike Pence as the country’s de facto leader and that Congress will, as usual, do nothing. Still, as Gene Healy, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote for Reason in 2017, Congress should be willing to invoke its impeachment power on a more regular basis.

Impeaching Trump for his general bad behavior and recklessness, Healy wrote, “wouldn’t just remove a bad president from office; it would set a precedent that might keep future leaders in line.”

That’s still true—maybe even more true—today.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2MAJ3OA
via IFTTT

As Americans deal with the aftermath of the Trumpist riot and invasion of the Capitol on January 6, a difficult question looms for the citizens of a troubled republic: How do you maintain a political system when much of the population ceases to believe in its underlying principles? The problem is not just President Donald Trump—whose petulant refusal to accept his loss at the polls set the grounds for the violence that disrupted Congress’s count of Electoral College votes—but also his cultists who are more interested in maintaining one thuggish politician in power than they are in how power is acquired and used. Beyond them are all too many Americans who have come to believe they can’t afford to lose elections.

This moment didn’t drop out of the blue. The country has suffered growing political polarization, harsh feelings between the political factions, and an increase in political violence in recent years. We saw that in the 2017 ambush of Republican members of Congress and their protective police detail, the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the litany of riots that started as demonstrations against abusive law enforcement before taking on a life of their own.

Those concerns grew as the election loomed. “We are increasingly anxious that this country is headed toward the worst post-election crisis in a century and a half,” wrote Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, Lee Drutman of New America, Tod Lindberg of the Hudson Institute, Nathan P. Kalmoe of Louisiana State University, and Lilliana Mason the University of Maryland in an October 1 piece in Politico. “Our biggest concern is that a disputed presidential election—especially if there are close contests in a few swing states, or if one candidate denounces the legitimacy of the process—could generate violence and bloodshed.”

They had good reason to fear a disputed election. “About three in 10 (29 percent) Republicans say it would be appropriate for President Trump to refuse to leave office because he claims that he has credible evidence of illegal voting,” the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group warned last summer. “On the other hand, 57 percent of Democrats say that it would be appropriate for a Democratic candidate to call for a do-over election because they claim to have credible evidence of interference by a foreign government.”

The election results didn’t exactly sweep in an era of good feelings. Twenty-four percent of likely U.S. voters “think Biden voters are America’s biggest enemy as 2020 draws to a close,” Rasmussen Reports noted early in December. “Nearly as many (22%) regard Trump voters as the biggest enemy.”

It’s tempting to suggest that the Trumpist rioters in D.C. did a credible job of fulfilling their detractors’ fears. But that overlooks the evidence from sources like the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group that neither dominant political tribe was prepared to accept a loss. Even the Biden-aligned Transition Integrity Project—which anticipated Trump’s bogus claims of electoral fraud and unwillingness to concede—also warned of political chaos if Biden’s supporters were disappointed. In the end it was the current president’s fans who rioted, but an uneventful tally of ballots didn’t appear to be in the cards.

Elected officials, like Trump, who defy constitutional constraints and sheer reason can be removed from office at the polls, by impeachment, or by processes such as those outlined in the 25th Amendment. But what do you do when many voters themselves think the only legitimate elections are those that they win?

One important step would be to make elections less consequential so that Americans aren’t so fearful of the instruments of government in the hands of their enemies.

“It is more and more dangerous to lose an election,” economist John Cochrane, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, wrote in September. “Regulation has supplanted legislation, and dear colleague letters, interpretations, and executive orders have supplanted regulation… The vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed is the core reason for increased partisan vitriol and astounding violation of basic norms on both sides of our political divide.”

For example, Trump threatened that companies which displease him “will be taxed like never before” as punishment. He led supporters in chants of “lock her up” aimed at his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. His opponents have had every reason to fear that his tenure in office constitutes a real danger.

On the same note, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo strong-armed financial institutions into denying services to his political opponents in what the American Civil Liberties Union called a threat to “the First Amendment rights of all organizations to engage in political advocacy without fear that the state will use its regulatory authority to penalize them for doing so.” The vast power he wields is perilous to people with whom he disagrees.

In its reach into all areas of life, government in modern America increasingly resembles what the Israeli historian J. L. Talmon called “totalitarian democracy.” This approach “treats all human thought and action as having social significance, and therefore as falling within the orbit of political action.” Since there’s no room for going your own way, contests for political power necessarily become existential fights that nobody can afford to lose.

By contrast, wrote Talmon, liberal democracy “recognizes a variety of levels of personal and collective endeavour, which are altogether outside the sphere of politics.” If most of life is under the control of the people living it rather than subject to the whims of government officials, losing elections is disappointing, but not catastrophic. To lower the political stakes, we need much more of our thought and action to be “altogether outside the sphere of politics.”

What does remain within the political sphere should be decided as locally as possible. Centralized decision making sets the stage for conflict in a vast country of diverse values and preferences. During the Trump presidency, his opponents spent much time and energy complaining that the Constitution gives his rural supporters too much power through the Electoral College and the Senate. With Biden in the White House, we’re bound to hear renewed griping about the cultural and economic dominance of urban liberals. While tension between dissimilar groups is inevitable, it doesn’t have to be poisonous—if those groups aren’t battling to dominate each other.

So, while we’re expanding the realm of human life that’s beyond the reach of government, much of what it does should be devolved down the political food chain, closer to the people who are affected, to reduce the likelihood of subjecting them to policies they despise. Ideally, as much decision-making as possible should be returned to individuals.

None of this guarantees that the Trumpists who stormed the Capitol, or any other Americans who no longer believe in the peaceful transition of power, will suddenly regain faith in vote counts. But making election wins and losses less important should lower the political tensions that are consuming the country. And that might give us all a little necessary breathing room while we figure out, once again, how to get along with one another.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/39aqFnh
via IFTTT

I recently upgraded my camera setup for the spring semester. No, I did not add any more monitors. I am still at eight. I did consider adding an iPad as an additional touch display through the OS X “Sidecar” feature, but ultimately decided against it–for now.

I am now using the Logitech Brio 4K camera. This model has been around since 2018, but it is the best web camera on the market, short of an DSLR. It is also massively backordered, due to the pandemic. I was able to obtain one from BestBuy.com.

The image quality is fantastic. And you can zoom in and out to get just the right angle. Here is an interview I streamed over Skype:

And here is a recording I did locally, without any compression:

Alas, Zoom still compresses the image quality to crap. See the brief clip of me here:

Regrettably, my students will see the poor image quality on Zoom. But I will simulcast my classes this semester over YouTube at full 720p. (I am not confident my bandwidth can handle 1080p or 4K without buffering issues).

The Logitech camera also comes with Logitech Capture software. It allows you to seamlessly switched between the web camera, and screen sharing. I need to experiment with it a bit more for class. If my plan works, I will never have to click the “screen share” button in Zoom again.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3pSiLpo
via IFTTT

There is a lot of blame to go around for the poisonous delusions that led to yesterday’s riot at the Capitol, starting with a president who incited his followers with loony conspiracy theories and wild tales of a stolen election. But the disgraceful performance of Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) should figure prominently in histories of this shameful incident. By contrast, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), who also has reinforced some of Donald Trump’s fraud claims and even toyed with the idea of objecting to electoral votes, stared into the constitutional abyss and stepped back.

Cruz was one of six senators who voted against recognizing Arizona’s electoral votes for President-elect Joe Biden last night and one of seven who supported the challenge to Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. Ostensibly, these objections were based on the claim that the votes were not “regularly given,” as required by the Electoral Count Act. Yet Cruz offered no reason to think that was true, meaning he had no legal basis for his objections.

Cruz presented his challenges as an attempt to assuage the doubts of Americans who think the election was “rigged” by appointing an “electoral commission” charged with conducting “a 10-day emergency audit” to investigate unfounded claims of systematic fraud that have been decisively rejected by state officials and the courts. He knew there was no way that was going to happen, but he pursued his objections anyway, even after yesterday’s pro-Trump chaos, vandalism, and violence led several of his erstwhile allies to reconsider their support for his plan. His pointless grandstanding lent credence to the unfounded accusations underlying the riot—accusations recklessly hurled by the same man Cruz himself has described as a “pathological liar” who “doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies”—while forsaking his oath to support and defend the Constitution.

“Recent polling shows that 39 percent of Americans believe the election that just occurred was ‘rigged,'” Cruz said when it was his turn to explain why he was objecting to Arizona’s electoral votes. “You may not agree with that assessment, but it is nonetheless a reality for nearly half the country….Even if you do not share that conviction, it is the responsibility, I believe, of this office to acknowledge that it is a profound threat to this country and to the legitimacy of any administrations that will come in the future.”

Cruz insisted that he wasn’t “arguing for setting aside this election.” His concern, he claimed, was that “tens of millions of Americans will see a vote against the objection as a statement that voter fraud doesn’t matter, isn’t real, and shouldn’t be taken seriously.” Dismissing their concerns, he said, “jeopardizes, I believe, the legitimacy of this and subsequent elections.”

What was missing from Cruz’s little speech? Any mention of evidence indicating that Arizona’s electoral votes were not properly certified, which is the only legal justification for rejecting them. A senator who takes his responsibilities seriously does not lodge an objection under the Electoral Count Act simply as an excuse for outlining a cockamamie scheme that supposedly will alleviate the doubts sown by a president whose fantasy that he actually won the election by a landslide is impervious to evidence.

Cruz’s maneuver was cowardly as well as legally groundless. Eager to appease the Republicans who live in Trump’s alternate universe without seeming like a kook, Cruz refuses to endorse or reject their beliefs. More than two months after the election, the closest he can come to admitting that Biden won is his concession that “our candidate may not have prevailed.” At the same time, he presents the widespread “conviction” that Trump won not as his personal belief but as a “reality” that somehow justifies setting aside duly certified electoral votes.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) shares Cruz’s concerns about voter fraud and election “irregularities.” But as he noted before Cruz spoke, “nothing before us proves illegality anywhere near the massive scale…that would have tipped the entire election.” He added that “public doubt alone” cannot “justify a radical break” from historical practice “when the doubt itself was incited without evidence.”

McConnell rejected the notion that humoring conspiracy theorists will somehow bring the nation together. “We cannot keep drifting apart into two separate tribes,” he said, “with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.”

McConnell warned that “if this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral” and “we would never see the whole nation accept an election again.” Instead, “every four years would be a scramble for power at all cost.”

Cruz’s claim that he was not trying to overturn the election results is impossible to reconcile with his original plan, which involved objecting to electoral votes from six swing states, enough to change the outcome. “This objection is for the state of Arizona, but it is broader than that,” he said last night. “It is an objection for all six of the states.” In point of fact, it wasn’t. But if the Capitol Hill riot had not persuaded Cruz and his collaborators to scale back their objections, their efforts, if successful, would have done precisely what Cruz insisted he did not want to do.

Now consider what Rand Paul had to say about Cruz’s machinations:

Should Congress override the certified results from the states and nullify the states’ right to conduct elections? The vote today is not a protest; the vote today is literally to overturn the election!

Voting to overturn state-certified elections would be the opposite of what states’ rights Republicans have always advocated for. This would doom the Electoral College forever. It was never intended by our founders that Congress have the power to overturn state-certified elections.

My oath to the Constitution doesn’t allow me to disobey the law. I cannot vote to overturn the verdict of the states. Such a vote would be to overturn everything held dear by those of us who support the rights of states in this great system of federalism bequeathed to us by our founders.

The Electoral College was created to devolve the power of selecting presidential electors to the states. The Electoral College is, without question, an inseparable friend to those who believe that every American across our vast country deserves to be heard. If Congress were given the power to overturn the states’ elections…what terrible chaos would ensue. Imagine the furor against the Electoral College if Congress becomes a forum to overturn states’ Electoral College slates.

It is one thing to be angry. It is another to focus one’s anger in a constructive way. That hasn’t happened today, to say the least. We simply cannot destroy the Constitution, our laws, and the Electoral College in the process. I hope as the nation’s anger cools, we can channel that energy into essential electoral reforms in every state.

Paul is by no means blameless when it comes to vague allegations of election fraud. During a December 16 Senate hearing on election “irregularities,” he accepted the testimony of Christopher Krebs, who ran the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency until Trump fired him in a fit of pique on November 17, that vote-tabulating machines were not compromised, as the president has repeatedly alleged. But Paul said that does not mean “there was no problem in the elections.” He said he was concerned that “people broke the absentee [ballot] rules.” He also worried about votes by noncitizens and “dead people,” both of which are rare.

Later Paul declared that “fraud happened,” which no doubt is true, and “the election in many ways was stolen,” which is quite a leap. He added that “the only way it will be fixed is by in the future reinforcing the laws.”

In short, Paul has flirted with rhetoric similar to Trump’s but nevertheless agreed with McConnell that fraud was not pervasive enough to justify rejecting electoral votes. Cruz, by contrast, wanted to throw out electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania without even bothering to allege that they were legally invalid. Whether or not you agree with Paul’s views about the merits of the Electoral College, his refusal to compromise his principles by going along with Cruz’s scheme shows that even loyal Trump supporters can find the courage to defy the president’s demands.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3hTyX6V
via IFTTT