Links and Comments: Republicans are Now the Cult of Trump

Posted on Tuesday 25 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

It’s official.

Washington Post: The Republican Party announces that it stands for nothing.

There is no Republican Party platform announced for its convention this year. No platform; no principles, no standards, no ideals. It’s all about supporting Trump. Virtually the definition of a cult. Whatever Fearless Leader wants.

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And Slate: Republicans Announce Their 2020 Platform Consists of Supporting Whatever Trump Wants.

Republicans have no ideals anymore; they just want to follow an authoritarian leader.

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And yet, at The Atlantic, David Frum (a former speechwriter for George W. Bush!), perceives The Platform the GOP Is Too Scared to Publish, subtitled, What the Republican Party actually stands for, in 13 points.

These include (of course) tax cuts for the rich; denial of the science behind the coronavirus and climate change, and so on. Frum does a good job about characterizing these in the terms Republicans would use, e.g.

3) Climate change is a much-overhyped problem. It’s probably not happening. If it is happening, it’s not worth worrying about. If it’s worth worrying about, it’s certainly not worth paying trillions of dollars to amend. To the extent it is real, it will be dealt with in the fullness of time by the technologies of tomorrow. Regulations to protect the environment unnecessarily impede economic growth.

The one point Frum misses, it seems to me, is Republicans’ undying support for the military. We can never spend too much on the military, they think, despite that the US spends more on its military than the next dozen or so nations combined. This reveals the overriding motivating factor of conservatives, and Republicans: fear.

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The overwhelming impression of Republican talking points, and their convention so far, is of *fear*. Paranoid fear. Their convention so far has been, not about the promise of American, as they said, but about stoking fear. And lying.

Washington Post: These 7 cultish moments at Trump’s convention add up to one Big Lie

Slate: The Republican Coronavirus Strategy: Lie About Everything, subtitled, The party is following Trump’s pattern of deceit.

Slate’s William Saletan identifies the points about lies, with many links to documented examples: about 1, Travel Bans; 2, Emergency Declartions; 3, Testing; 4, Medical Supplies, 5, Vaccines, and 6, Speed. For example, keeping links:

Trump has lied about the virus all along. He’s still lying. “We just have to make this China virus go away. And it’s happening,” he declared in a convention video, even as thousands of Americans continue to die. But the president is no longer alone in his fictional universe. He’s backed by a party that glorifies him with fabrications: that he stood up to North Korea, that his impeachment was “fake,” and that he “ended once and for all the policy of incarceration of Black people.” The tale of his struggle against the virus is just another heroic myth. Trump “is a visionary,” Rep. Matt Gaetz explained to the audience. What’s “built in the mind is even more powerful” than reality, said Gaetz. That’s the message from the first night of the convention: This is no longer a party of limited government, national security, or the rule of law. It’s a party of lies.

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Finally, for perspective, Business Insider compiles a list of Who’s not at the RNC?.

There have been respectable Republicans before the party turned into a Trump cult. Remember… Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell? None of them welcome at this year’s convention.

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And of course, this current political theme dovetails with some of my other recent blog posts.

Posted in Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Republicans are Now the Cult of Trump

Notes for the Book: The Future of Enlightenment

Posted on Monday 24 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

More thoughts coming together. A famous quote is this from SF author William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” (There are variants of this phrase around the web also.)

Then there was a video I saw on YouTube that presented legitimate and dumb-ass reasons for not wearing masks. Here it is: https://www.facebook.com/brittlestar/videos/639264403614751. (For some reason it plays twice. It’s less than 90 seconds long.) The former reasons include rare skin conditions, being a small child, etc.; the latter are the familiar knee-jerk reactions against science or expertise, the fetishization of personal freedom, just being a jerk, and so on.

The specific reasons aren’t the point; it’s that in general these attitudes will never go away. They are part of human nature; they are manifestations of group identities, tribal identities, the priority for most to conform rather think independently, which risks mistrust or ostracization from one’s community or social group.

And my thought from these extends some of my earlier posts, some tagged “notes for the book,” about hierarchies of knowledge and awareness, how we are living in a modern in world in which most of the answers to most of the big questions are now *known*… yet most people don’t care, or actively reject them. So this could be formulated, let’s see…

No matter how far science advances, no matter how fully the big questions about the universe and human existence are known, this knowledge will extend to only a tiny fraction of the human race. It will never be evenly distributed. There will never be a future enlightened state of humanity in which all the old superstitions and prejudices have been overcome or set aside in favor of a common, mature understanding of humanity’s place in the universe. Rather, most people will be happy, thank you very much, to live lives that prioritize their own group’s place and status (inside a bubble, so to speak), and outside of that, consider everything else as irrelevant, or to be explicitly rejected as threatening that privileged status.

It’s those who have so little grip on actual reality, as revealed by millennia and centuries of systematic investigation, who are most attracted to various outrageous ideologies, it seems, whether it’s Scientology, Christianity, or QAnon, that have (quite apparently) superficial naive appeal but that fall apart into incoherency on close examination.

Posted in Lunacy, Science, The Book | Comments Off on Notes for the Book: The Future of Enlightenment

Links and Comments: Thinking, or Not

Posted on Wednesday 19 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Scientific American: Nine COVID-19 Myths That Just Won’t Go Away. Subtitle: From a human-made virus to vaccine conspiracy theories, we rounded up the most persistent false claims about the pandemic.

I’m beginning to think that many, perhaps most, people, do not truly *think* and draw conclusions in the way rationalists and scientists — including all those who have built the modern technological world (which ironically allows the conspiracy theorists to spread their ideas) — do. How is it all these religious loonies claims to *know* this or that, with no evidence or rationale? (QAnon.) They clearly can’t *know* these things, because they are demonstrably not true. My take, for the moment, is that these people are — like Trump — transactional. They imagine what they would like to be true, and say it to the world, because many of their listeners will believe them. They can get away with it, because day to day life for virtually everyone does not depend on the truth or falsity of bizarre conspiracy theories about the actual world.

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Links and Comments: Benedictine Option; Pandemic Spread; Economic Stabilizers; Ed Yong; Evangelicals and Trump

Posted on Tuesday 18 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

The Atlantic: The Christian Withdrawal Experiment. Subtitle: Feeling out of step with the mores of contemporary life, members of a conservative-Catholic group have built a thriving community in rural Kansas. Could their flight from mainstream society be a harbinger for the nation?

An example of the Benedictine Option that I mentioned earlier: a religious community sealing itself into a self-sustaining bubble that rejects the reality and influence of the outside world.

I’m sure it works! It sustains the community! (As in that M. Night Shyamalon film The Village, which worked to a point.) It’s analogous to how virtually every other animal species on the planet, engaged with its environment only to the extent it needs to survive, does survive, with no understanding of the bigger world, of the universe. Humans *can* perceive the bigger world and universe, and to me it seems a shame to renounce that ability… a renunciation of the supposedly God-given ability to think, reason, perceive. (If you believe God gave humans those powers of reason and perception, why deny them and seal yourself into a reality-denying bubble?)

Still, science fiction writers have speculated that such insular societies might survive a global catastrophe when globalist elitist city-dwellers might not. (A mixed case is presented in a book I recently re-read, John Wyndham’s 1955 novel The Chrysalids.)

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A few more with fewer comments (but more quotes perhaps).

Salon, 31 July: The year of dark magical thinking: Trump’s petty revenge fantasies have killed thousands. Subtitle: Trump believed the virus would only hit blue states, which would work out great. So he let tens of thousands die.

Partly about Jared Kushner, who advised Trump that, since the virus was hitting the big cities [because of population density], and big cities tend to be Democratic [because they are not sealed into small-town bubbles], and since the Democrats didn’t vote for Trump… it wasn’t a problem. Let them die. This is contemptible, of course, but seemingly routine for the Trump administration.

Of course this administration are all idiots with no understanding of how pandemics spread. Currently, the areas of highest new outbreaks in the US is in the rural areas of California and in the southern states, those initially relatively unaffected.

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Slate, 31 July: The Extremely Boring Idea That Could Save the Economy. Subtitle: They’re called automatic stabilizers — and we need them to stop Republicans from screwing up another recovery.

About ways to manage the economy a bit more complex that the Republicans’ go-to strategy of cutting taxes for the rich, no matter the state of the economy.

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The Atlantic: here’s Ed Yong’s long article about How the Pandemic Defeated America. Subtitle: A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.

Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. “The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.

A couple final paragraphs:

It is hard to stare directly at the biggest problems of our age. Pandemics, climate change, the sixth extinction of wildlife, food and water shortages—their scope is planetary, and their stakes are overwhelming. We have no choice, though, but to grapple with them. It is now abundantly clear what happens when global disasters collide with historical negligence.

COVID‑19 is an assault on America’s body, and a referendum on the ideas that animate its culture. Recovery is possible, but it demands radical introspection. America would be wise to help reverse the ruination of the natural world, a process that continues to shunt animal diseases into human bodies. It should strive to prevent sickness instead of profiting from it. It should build a health-care system that prizes resilience over brittle efficiency, and an information system that favors light over heat. It should rebuild its international alliances, its social safety net, and its trust in empiricism. It should address the health inequities that flow from its history. Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judgment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason.

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Alternet: Neuroscientist explains why Christian evangelicals are wired to believe Donald Trump’s lies.

For Christian fundamentalists, being taught to suppress critical thinking begins at a very early age. It is the combination of the brain’s vulnerability to believing unsupported facts and aggressive indoctrination that create the perfect storm for gullibility. Due to the brain’s neuroplasticity, or ability to be sculpted by lived experiences, evangelicals literally become hardwired to believe far-fetched statements.

This wiring begins when they are first taught to accept Biblical stories not as metaphors for living life practically and purposefully, but as objective truth. Mystical explanations for natural events train young minds to not demand evidence for beliefs. As a result, the neural pathways that promote healthy skepticism and rational thought are not properly developed. This inevitably leads to a greater susceptibility to lying and gaslighting by manipulative politicians, and greater suggestibility in general.

Posted in Culture, Lunacy, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Benedictine Option; Pandemic Spread; Economic Stabilizers; Ed Yong; Evangelicals and Trump

Links and Comments: Living in History

Posted on Monday 17 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

People have a tendency to feel pleased they are living in history, experiencing the thrill of witnessing grand, momentous events. This partly explains I think the ever-recurring belief by some that they are living in the “end times.” How special one must be to witness the end of history! Instead of just one among another generation of humanity, a million-year old species of hundreds of thousands of generations who’ve lived and died and who are mostly forgotten. As most of us will be.

Of course people have been thinking the end is near (that aliens will arrive to save us; that someone who promised his followers that he would return in their lifetimes, 2000 years ago, might eventually reappear), forever, perhaps. Prophecies of doom, often tagged to specific dates, get explained away when the date passes and we’re all still here.

But one can make a case, on two or three counts, that we are now living in very unusual times. First, that the United States has never had a worse president, and the concern about whether enough people will realize this, without slavishly behaving like a cult whose leader can do no wrong, when the election comes in 10 weeks or so. Second, the global threat of climate change, the perfect example of the frog-boiling-in-water slow motion change that human nature isn’t equipped to perceive or understand, except by the minority who have been educated to understand the implications of slow-moving, long-term trends…

CNN: Greenland’s ice sheet has melted to a point of no return, according to new study

And third, the relatively near-term threat of the current pandemic, a global plague such as occurs every century or two, and will happen more and more often as humanity expands into previously untouched wilderness — a collateral effect of the “sixth extinction.”

Thinking big, my take is to realize that, should some existential threat really occur, most people won’t notice. Or care. Some who notice will deny it’s happening, or refute the claims from smarty-pants who think themselves better. Human nature.

The communities who deny the virus will die at higher rates. Evolution in action.

So just a few links on this theme today.

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Rolling Stone, Wade Davis: The Unraveling of America. Subtitle: Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.

The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.

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In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

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The New Yorker, Howard Markel: America’s Coronavirus Endurance Test. Subtitle: To defeat the virus, we will have to start thinking in years, not months.

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The Atlantic, Sarah Zhang: The Coronavirus Is Never Going Away. Subtitle: No matter what happens now, the virus will continue to circulate around the world.

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The Atlantic, Ed Yong (author of the well-received I Contain Multitudes): How the Pandemic Defeated America. Subtitle: A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.

Slate’s Mike Pesca comments about this: “We Should Absolutely Expect More Pandemics”. Subtitle: The Atlantic’s Ed Yong on what we need to learn from the coronavirus to prepare for the next global health crisis.

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And here’s a bottom line. Contrary to those (conservatives) thinking the coronavirus deaths overstated, indirect evidence – the typical death rate month to month, year to year – suggests they’re vastly understated.

NYT: The True Coronavirus Toll in the U.S. Has Already Surpassed 200,000.

You just have to look at the counts of *all* deaths, over the past few months, compared to similar months over the past few years. If the increase in deaths isn’t due to Coronavirus, what else could it be?

Posted in Culture, Lunacy | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Living in History

Links and Comments: Republicans Embracing QAnon

Posted on Saturday 15 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon, Amanda Marcotte: Is QAnon the new Christian right? With evangelicals fading, a new insanity rises. Subtitle: “Right-wingers desperately need a myth that turns them into the good guys. With QAnon, they’ve outdone themselves”

Amanda Marcotte pulls no punches.

White evangelicalism is in decline, but another movement is rising to take its place, a movement that scratches that same right-wing itch towards false piety and elaborate tribalist mythologies that are incomprehensible to outsiders: QAnon.

Yes, QAnon, the bizarre paranoid conspiracy theory that holds (more or less) that behind the scenes of observable reality lies a shadowy worldwide pedophile ring run by Democrats and prominent celebrities, and that Trump’s bizarre and self-serving authoritarian behavior is actually an elaborate ruse to hide his secret fight to destroy this elite child-abuse conspiracy.

Seriously? How in the 21st century, hundreds of years since the Enlightenment, hundreds of years of building a global civilization based on science and technology (which incidentally enables no-nothings like QAnon followers, and religious fundamentalists, to spread their conspiracies and theological fantasies), that has led to so many incredible discoveries about the age and extent of our universe, are so many people still so ignorant and uninformed and credulous? Well, I have no quick easy answer. I need to account for such a phenomenon, in the big scheme of things. Partly it’s my observation that ordinary people don’t need to understand reality in order to live their lives, raise their children, and provide the next generation; communities and tribes are built on shared theories about the world, no matter how outlandish. It seems to be only a tiny fraction of the entire population that is smart enough, or cares enough, to try to understand how the universe actually works. (This is perhaps a luxury of mature cultures.)

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Slate: House Republicans Get Cranked Up, subtitle, “QAnon is headed for Capitol Hill.”

After winning a runoff for the Republican nomination in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District Tuesday night, Marjorie Taylor Greene delivered a message for her soon-to-be colleague in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“She’s a hypocrite,” Greene said. “She’s anti-American. And we’re going to kick that bitch out of Congress!”

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Where Greene has broken new ground, though, is in her support for QAnon, a vast and ever-morphing conspiracy that holds that Donald Trump is secretly combating a cabal of globalist and Democratic elites who run a pedophile ring and worship Satan. “I’m very excited about that now there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out,” Greene—who, again, will almost certainly serve in the United States House of Representatives next year—said in 2017. “And I think we have the president to do it.”

My take: she’s insane. Or slightly better: she’s a Trump cultist. Or at best, severely uneducated about the real world works.

I’m always trying to understand these issues in the bigger picture. There have been crackpots throughout history. How is it crackpots are becoming significant political forces now? Because internet?

Posted in Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Republicans Embracing QAnon

Links and Comments: Kamala Harris

Posted on Saturday 15 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

So Biden chose a non-white, non-male Vice Presidential candidate. Cue the Republican misogyny and racism. It’s everywhere.

NY Times: I Hope This Is Not Another Lie About the Republican Party. Subtitle: But it might be lost forever.

I saw the warning signs but ignored them and chose to believe what I wanted to believe: The party wasn’t just a white grievance party; there was still a big tent; the others guys were worse. Many of us in the party saw this dark side and told ourselves it was a recessive gene. We were wrong. It turned out to be the dominant gene.

NY Times: Trump Encourages Racist Conspiracy Theory About Kamala Harris “President Trump said he heard that Ms. Harris, the presumptive Democratic vice-presidential nominee born in California, was not eligible for the ticket, repeating a theory that is rampant among his followers. Constitutional scholars quickly called his words false and irresponsible.”

NY Times: Kamala Harris Crystallizes Trump’s View of Women: They’re ‘Nasty’ or Housewives. “As Ms. Harris joined the Democratic ticket, the president wasted no time calling her ‘nasty’ and praising the ‘suburban housewife’ he says will vote for him. His views are out of step with reality.”

NY Times: Her Voice? Her Name? G.O.P.’s Raw Personal Attacks on Kamala Harris. “‘Radical leftist’ or not progressive enough? In the hours after Ms. Harris’s announcement as Joe Biden’s vice president, the Trump campaign struggled to launch a clear attack on the Biden-Harris ticket.” Quote from the article, stating things very politely:

One right-wing commentator, Dinesh D’Souza, appeared on Fox News to question whether Ms. Harris, the junior senator from California and a child of immigrants from Jamaica and India, could truly claim she was Black. And on Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, mispronounced her first name, even growing angry when corrected.

“So what?” he said, when a guest told him it was pronounced “Comma-la.” (Fox News declined to comment on the exchange.)

On Twitter, Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, favorited a tweet, which was later deleted, that referred to Ms. Harris as a “whorendous pick.”

Republicans, classy as always.

My provisional conclusion about why conservatives, right-wingers, Republicans, whatever set of overlapping Venn circles are appropriate, so often resort to ad hominem attacks is because they know they don’t have a case for their political policies based on any kind of merit. All they can do is scare their cultish base into fearing the opposition.

Posted in Politics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Kamala Harris

Links and Comments: Recent links, August 2020

Posted on Wednesday 12 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Too many recently for detailed comments. Here are a bunch.

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CNN: Tucker Carlson upset that he’s told how to correctly pronounce Kamala Harris’ name. Why are conservatives upset by being asked to observe simple standards of decency and respect?

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NYT: A Bible Burning, a Russian News Agency and a Story Too Good to Check Out. Conservatives are quick to assume the worst about their supposed political foes, in this case Black Lives Matter protestors, and only show themselves to be dupes for Russian propaganda.

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Washington Post: brilliant (sarcastic) op-ed by George T. Conway III (Kellyanne Conways’s husband!): I believe the president, and in the president. Random excerpt:

I believe the president didn’t know Michael Cohen was paying off porn star Stormy Daniels, and that Cohen did it on his own, because the president had no reason to pay her off. I believe the president was reimbursing Cohen for his legal expertise.

I believe the president is a good Christian, because TV pastors say so, and that it’s okay he doesn’t ask for God’s forgiveness, because he doesn’t need to, since he’s the Chosen One. I believe the president knows the Bible, and that two Corinthians are better than one.

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Alternet: Experts explain the 4 main psychological factors that drive Trump’s rabid fan base. Rebelliousness and Chaos; Shared Irrationality; Fear; and Safety and Order.

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Salon: Man-baby smashes democracy: Daniel Drezner on our “Toddler in Chief”. “Tantrums, poor impulse control, short attention span, oppositional behavior — unfortunately, it all fits.”

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Washington Post: Sally Yates blows up Republican conspiracies and falsehoods.

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Washington Post: Republicans don’t seem to grasp cause and effect.

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Washington Post: The spread of covid-19 in the South shows the risks of anti-intellectualism. Subtitle: “Skepticism about science and expertise has long permeated the Bible Belt”

Where did this anti-science bias come from? It became rooted in Southern culture and politics with the Scopes Trial, popularly known as the Monkey Trial, in 1925 in Dayton, Tenn.

The trial stemmed from the modernism rising in the post-World War I era. Southern whites felt that these changes challenged their way of life, including seeing the teaching of evolution as an attack on traditional values. They moved aggressively to retain socio-cultural control in a time of transformative change by limiting modern influences.

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Following the trial, anti-intellectualism became more acceptable. This was solidified with the establishment in Dayton of William Jennings Bryan College in 1930, where students and faculty must annually affirm their belief in the story of Genesis. Anti-intellectualism drew strength from the gathering of religious fundamentalists whose mission to spread their beliefs became more public as southern Whites responded to changes that occurred as the result of the civil rights movement.

When Southern conservatives lost the battle for civil rights, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they turned their attention to abortion, previously virtually a non-issue even in the Catholic Church, as a new issue to unite conservatives. But that’s a topic for another post.

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And if you believe in one conspiracy theory, why not believe them all?!! (Because — shh — they’re all connected, you know. Just ask Q.)

Vice: The Conspiracy Singularity Has Arrived.

Posted in Culture, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Recent links, August 2020

Favorite Film: Magnolia

Posted on Tuesday 11 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Sunday night we caught, on one of the cable channels, the 1999 film by Paul Thomas Anderson, Magnolia (all but the first few minutes; we caught up on those the next night, since I have the DVD). It’s one of my favorite films of all time. I like the interwoven plot lines, the connections between them (that take a couple viewings to entirely perceive), and especially the film score by Jon Brion, propulsive and delicate and tad minimalistic, that does as much work as the writing and directing to indicate that all those plot lines are in some way similar and connected.

On the other hand, I reject the explicit message, suggested by the documentary-like prologue in the first few minutes, that mysterious coincidental events have some kind of deep intended meaning or intent; I on the other hand see all these interwoven plot threads as about the kinds of problems most people have in their lives, what some may characterize as sins and redemption, others simply as mistakes and attempts to do better and reform (since I think that all people think they are being good, in their different ways), that are all, ultimately, overwhelmed by random events of the universe that cannot be anticipated. Like frogs falling from the sky. The gun falls from the sky. We don’t notice the many similar events that might have happened; the random one that does happen is taken to mean something deep. That’s human nature.

Anderson’s idea is indicated by the the Aimee Mann song “Save Me”; the many characters are all broken (or see themselves as broken) in some way and need saving. It’s a different take on the same issue.

Wikipedia

The score is beautiful and one of my favorite things about the film. Start here and let it autoplay through the entire soundtrack.

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Link and Comments: Challenge to Conventional Wisdom: About the Nuclear Family

Posted on Monday 10 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

That long NYT news story about the religious heartland that I posted a couple days ago included this quote from a Mr. Driesen, a utility company worker:

“Unfortunately, there’s just more divorce than there used to be,” he said. “There’s more cohabitating. I think it is detrimental to the family. I just think kids do better in a two-parent home, with a mom and a dad.”

This is an example not so much of conservative myopia, but of general myopia, thinking that the way things have been, in one’s life, represent the default best way to live. (Aside from the fact that, why do conservatives presume to tell other people how to live? If more people get divorced, so what? What business is it of theirs?)

In fact, I gather, the nuclear family with two parents and their kids in a home isolated from other relatives is a relatively recent social development of the past century or two. Throughout most of human history, people lived in multi-generational, extended families, and so arguably *they* are better for kids than households with a single mom and dad.

(As an aside, the conservative insistence that children are better off with a mother (female) and father (male), as opposed to two females or two males, is bogus. Young children don’t care or understand about sex or gender; much more important to the development of children is to *how many* caregivers they are raised by, how many different adults and role-models they learn from.

On the other hand, *family* connections matter, which is why the Israeli Kibbutzes of the ’60s failed.

And even then, there isn’t actually any evidence that children raised by single parents are in any way socially or intellectually disabled.

This recalls an article in The Atlantic, that I don’t think I’ve linked to before, by David Brooks, an op-ed writer for the New York Times (this piece is longer than a NYT op-ed).

The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake. Subtitle: “The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.”

Now, the subject of the dissolution of social networks, of extended families and communities, is something of a hobby horse of Brooks; he writes about variations on this theme many times. I think he has a limited point, but that point doesn’t account for how people have gotten along, for millennia, in big cities, where such networks are looser than they are in small towns. But let’s just quote a bit from this Atlantic essay.

This is the story of our times—the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

It’s a long article — about 50 screens. With sections about “The Era of Extended Clans”; “The Short, Happy Life of the Nuclear Family” in the 1950s, presumably the era MAGA cultists revere; “Disintegration”; and then “Redefining Kinship” and “From Nuclear Families to Forged Families”. I’ll quote his final paragraphs.

When we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don’t talk about family enough. It feels too judgmental. Too uncomfortable. Maybe even too religious. But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin.

It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.

The bottom line, I think, is that, despite David Brooks, despite the converatives, there is no single, right, best way to live. (Conservatives always default to what they know, thinking it the best.) There are many ways to live; it’s a feature of the resilience of our species. Let it be. Let people live their own lives, as they see fit.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Social Progress | Comments Off on Link and Comments: Challenge to Conventional Wisdom: About the Nuclear Family