This newsletter will always be free, but paid subscribers help make this work possible. Please consider a contribution if you can! Coming Soon: Don't think of book club!A public reading and study of "The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant"
What are Republicans for?" asked President Joe Biden during his recent one-year press conference. "What are they for?" I spent most of my career trying to answer this question. Several of my books – including "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think" and "The ALL NEW Don't Think of An Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame The Debate" – deal with the question in clear and direct terms. Yet Democratic leaders appear to remain in the dark about the fact that most Republicans have a completely different worldview, one that is increasingly incompatible with the outdated notion of bipartisanship or the crucial idea of democracy. Today's Republican Party has no interest in compromise or collaboration. The GOP has bloomed into a full-fledged enemy of the American idea of government and become an aspiring authoritarian organization. Fearing the power of the majority vote, Republicans are working feverishly to dismantle the machinery of democracy and make it harder for Americans to exercise the basic right to vote. The GOP has replaced loyalty to the country with the worship of one man, Donald Trump, who considers himself more important than the nation. Trump and his party demand that the Republican faithful be willing to sacrifice their lives on the altar of lies (as we have seen with the attempted insurrection of January 6 and the anti-scientific campaign against COVID vaccines). This is all happening in public view, with full-throated participation from all but a handful of Republican leaders. In fact, one of the most terrifying aspects of today's Republican Party is the utter shamelessness with which it peddles lies, conspiracies and anti-democratic ideas (with help from the Fox channel and other propaganda operations). This is not a political party that is planning for a future in which it must reach "across the aisle" to build coalitions and find agreement with the opposition. Today's GOP seeks to destroy democracy. It wants a future in which voters, laws and the Constitution no longer matter. If these Republicans get their way, the only thing that will matter is the opinion of an authoritarian leader who will dictate the definitions of right and wrong, legal and illegal, true and false. This authoritarian outlook has already devoured the GOP. The only question now is whether it can conquer the rest of the country. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with how Republicans think, which is based on a specific moral framework that has been fully exposed in the Trump era. I have written about this moral framework in seven books and have tried to get Democratic leaders and progressives to pay attention to the logic behind strict conservative thought. Unfortunately, the hour is getting late, American authoritarianism is on the march and we are living the consequences. What are Republicans for? A world in which voters wield no power over political outcomes. A world in which the law is whatever the strongman leader says it is. A world in which lies become truth and truth becomes lies. A world in which the rights and freedoms of the majority are systematically stripped away to empower the tyranny of the few. A world in which the white, the male, the Christian, the rich, the straight and the old wield maximal power over everyone else. This explains many things about today's Republican Party – including the reason why GOP leaders have no interest in collaborating with President Biden or helping him — or any Democratic leader — to succeed. So, what can we do about it? The first step is to understand what we're dealing with so that we can understand the dynamics at play. Unless we understand the frames behind conservative political thought, we will be unable to counteract their strategies and tactics. And the only way to understand them is through study and discussion. During February and March, we will be hosting a virtual but interactive book club to review and discuss the ideas set out in "The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate." The book has five parts and an introduction, and we will go through it part-by-part over the span of a few weeks. I will answer questions and provide commentary to help readers understand the book in the greatest depth possible. Answers will be provided via the FrameLab podcast and this newsletter. The book is available to buy in many books stores and through outlets like Bookshop, East Bay Booksellers, Powell's and Amazon. Or you can support your local bookstore or public library, which may even offer a free e-book or audiobook for use. We will plan to start the discussion and Q&A sometime in mid-February, so this gives everyone a chance to acquire a copy of the book and read the intro and Part One. Are you in? Please let us know in the comments section, subscribe to the FrameLab newsletter and be on the lookout for further instructions in the coming weeks. (And a big Thank You to the hundreds of readers who have already expressed an interest in participating!)
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Sunday, January 30, 2022
Fw: Coming Soon: Don't think of book club!
Dear ANS group -- I apologize for sending this message that includes a request for money, but I felt the concepts he brings up in his explanation are important. George Lakoff is a really good guy, and he's trying to help, but the Democrats don't seem to want to be successful or to accept help. It's very frustrating because I think he really knows what he's talking about. It's really about how people think, so that's why it interests me.
--Kim
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: FrameLab <framelab@substack.com>
To: "kimc0240@yahoo.com" <kimc0240@yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2022, 12:52:07 PM PST
Subject: Coming Soon: Don't think of book club!
Saturday, January 29, 2022
ANS -- "A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOE REPUBLICAN" plus
This is an old piece -- with a new addition. It's just for fun. Enjoy....
--Kim
"A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOE REPUBLICAN"
Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.
All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance - now Joe gets it too.
He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.
Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for the laws to stop industries from polluting our air.
He walks on the government-provided sidewalk to subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.
Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe's employer pays these standards because Joe's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union.
If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he'll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn't think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.
It is noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.
Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe also forgets that his in addition to his federally subsidized student loans, he attended a state funded university.
Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards to go along with the tax-payer funded roads.
He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers' Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans.
The house didn't have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification.
He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn't have to.
Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn't mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: "We don't need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I'm a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have."
Added in January 2022:
Of all the deniers, it's the pilots who make me the craziest.
When you fly, you are totally in the hands of the government. You fly aircraft that are FAA-certified for safety, and maintained by FAA-certified mechanics to FAA-mandated standards. You are relying on FCC-regulated radio frequencies to communicate with FAA-trained controllers to navigate FAA-designated airspace. If, in spite of all of this, bad things happen, FAA investigators will arrive on scene and generate the official report.
We are trained by FAA-licensed instructors, pass FAA-mandated exams, and are signed off by FAA-designated examiners. Our health is closely monitored by FAA-accredited flight doctors. In every aspect of flight, we follow the Federal Air Regulations and a complex ballet of procedures that are required by custom and government fiat.
While we're in the air, we're utterly dependent on a government-built network of GPS satellites and VOR stations for navigation; USGS-generated charts for terrain, route, and waypoint info; and NOAA weather data to stay out of weather that could kill us. If we go down, odds are good it will be a government somewhere responding to our rescue beacon.
While all of us bitch about this, there's not one of us who'd rather be in a sky that didn't include it — even the biggest Trumper. Every one of those air regulations was written in human blood. Conservative pilots who think they'd be better off without Big Gummint on their back have not thought this one all the way through.
Friday, January 28, 2022
ANS -- a statistic.
This was on Facebook. Mind you, he is comparing to global income, which is pretty low, but still....
Thursday, January 27, 2022
ANS -- A Sermon: Renewing My Unitarian Universalism by Doug Muder
Here is a sermon about the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. It's by Doug Muder, so you know it's good.
--Kim
About Me
- DOUG MUDER
- Doug Muder blogs about religion (Free and Responsible Search) and politics (The Weekly Sift). He writes a bimonthly column for the magazine UU World. Doug lives in Nashua, NH with his wife Deb Bodeau.
Wednesday, January 26, 2022
Fwd: Why does this not surprise me..........
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From:
Date: Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 9:53 AM
Subject: Why does this not surprise me..........
To:
ANS group -- I got this from one of our members. I thought you might like to see it. From:
Date: Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 9:53 AM
Subject: Why does this not surprise me..........
To:
--Kim
What do you think of Trump and Melania's snub of the Bidens by leaving beforehand, and without formally welcoming them into the White House?
It was worse than bad manners. Trump sacked the staff members whose job it would have been to welcome the Bidens just as he was leaving the building. Those staff members were obliged to go home immediately - after years of loyal service working in the White House, include serving Trump for the previous 4 years. People losing their jobs just because Trump wanted to make things awkward for Biden. Utterly reprehensible behaviour.
All previous presidents when leaving the White House for the last time in office gather the staff together to say a few warm words thanking them for their service during their time in the White House. They don't expect to be fired like that. I hope that they subsequently got their jobs back.
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and more Sunday, January 23, 2022
ANS -- Human History Gets a Rewrite
Here is an article, a book review really, about human possibilities. Have we ended our own freedom to choose something else?
--Kim
Human History Gets a Rewrite
A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change.
OCTOBER 18, 2021
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral. Sources: Hugh Sitton / Getty; Been There YB / ShutterstockMany years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on. I didn't know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk.
Five minutes into our lunch, I realized that I was in the presence of a genius. Not an extremely intelligent person—a genius. There's a qualitative difference. The individual across the table seemed to belong to a different order of being from me, like a visitor from a higher dimension. I had never experienced anything like it before. I quickly went from trying to keep up with him, to hanging on for dear life, to simply sitting there in wonder.
That person was David Graeber. In the 20 years after our lunch, he published two books; was let go by Yale despite a stellar record (a move universally attributed to his radical politics); published two more books; got a job at Goldsmiths, University of London; published four more books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a magisterial revisionary history of human society from Sumer to the present; got a job at the London School of Economics; published two more books and co-wrote a third; and established himself not only as among the foremost social thinkers of our time—blazingly original, stunningly wide-ranging, impossibly well read—but also as an organizer and intellectual leader of the activist left on both sides of the Atlantic, credited, among other things, with helping launch the Occupy movement and coin its slogan, "We are the 99 percent."
On September 2, 2020, at the age of 59, David Graeber died of necrotizing pancreatitis while on vacation in Venice. The news hit me like a blow. How many books have we lost, I thought, that will never get written now? How many insights, how much wisdom, will remain forever unexpressed? The appearance of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is thus bittersweet, at once a final, unexpected gift and a reminder of what might have been. In his foreword, Graeber's co-author, David Wengrow, an archaeologist at University College London, mentions that the two had planned no fewer than three sequels.
And what a gift it is, no less ambitious a project than its subtitle claims. The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.
Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are "stages" in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).
RECOMMENDED READING
It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong. Drawing on a wealth of recent archaeological discoveries that span the globe, as well as deep reading in often neglected historical sources (their bibliography runs to 63 pages), the two dismantle not only every element of the received account but also the assumptions that it rests on. Yes, we've had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the next—all this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We've had choices, they show, and we've made them. Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we're used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring.
The bulk of the book (which weighs in at more than 500 pages) takes us from the Ice Age to the early states (Egypt, China, Mexico, Peru). In fact, it starts by glancing back before the Ice Age to the dawn of the species. Homo sapiens developed in Africa, but it did so across the continent, from Morocco to the Cape, not just in the eastern savannas, and in a great variety of regional forms that only later coalesced into modern humans. There was no anthropological Garden of Eden, in other words—no Tanzanian plain inhabited by "mitochondrial Eve" and her offspring. As for the apparent delay between our biological emergence, and therefore the emergence of our cognitive capacity for culture, and the actual development of culture—a gap of many tens of thousands of years—that, the authors tell us, is an illusion. The more we look, especially in Africa (rather than mainly in Europe, where humans showed up relatively late), the older the evidence we find of complex symbolic behavior.
That evidence and more—from the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groups—demonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a "hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state." They describe an indigenous Amazonian society that shifted seasonally between two entirely different forms of social organization (small, authoritarian nomadic bands during the dry months; large, consensual horticultural settlements during the rainy season). They speak of the kingdom of Calusa, a monarchy of hunter-gatherers the Spanish found when they arrived in Florida. All of these scenarios are unthinkable within the conventional narrative.
Five minutes into my lunch with David Graeber, I realized that I was in the presence of a genius. Not an extremely intelligent person—a genius.The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn't worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, "puritans" who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of HumanityDAVID GRAEBER AND DAVID WENGROW,FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The authors carry this perspective forward to the ages that saw the emergence of farming, of cities, and of kings. In the locations where it first developed, about 10,000 years ago, agriculture did not take over all at once, uniformly and inexorably. (It also didn't start in only a handful of centers—Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, Peru, the same places where empires would first appear—but more like 15 or 20.) Early farming was typically flood-retreat farming, conducted seasonally in river valleys and wetlands, a process that is much less labor-intensive than the more familiar kind and does not conduce to the development of private property. It was also what the authors call "play farming": farming as merely one element within a mix of food-producing activities that might include hunting, herding, foraging, and horticulture.
Settlements, in other words, preceded agriculture—not, as we've thought, the reverse. What's more, it took some 3,000 years for the Fertile Crescent to go from the first cultivation of wild grains to the completion of the domestication process—about 10 times as long as necessary, recent analyses have shown, had biological considerations been the only ones. Early farming embodied what Graeber and Wengrow call "the ecology of freedom": the freedom to move in and out of farming, to avoid getting trapped by its demands or endangered by the ecological fragility that it entails.
The authors write their chapters on cities against the idea that large populations need layers of bureaucracy to govern them—that scale leads inevitably to political inequality. Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth. This is the case with what may be the earliest cities of all, Ukrainian sites like Taljanky, which were discovered only in the 1970s and which date from as early as roughly 4100 B.C., hundreds of years before Uruk, the oldest known city in Mesopotamia. Even in that "land of kings," urbanism antedated monarchy by centuries. And even after kings arose, "popular councils and citizen assemblies," Graeber and Wengrow write, "were stable features of government," with real power and autonomy. Despite what we like to believe, democratic institutions did not begin just once, millennia later, in Athens.
If anything, aristocracy emerged in smaller settlements, the warrior societies that flourished in the highlands of the Levant and elsewhere, and that are known to us from epic poetry—a form of existence that remained in tension with agricultural states throughout the history of Eurasia, from Homer to the Mongols and beyond. But the authors' most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. "Many citizens," the authors write, "enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own."
And so we arrive at the state, with its structures of central authority, exemplified variously by large-scale kingdoms, by empires, by modern republics—supposedly the climax form, to borrow a term from ecology, of human social organization. What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that's persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics). Some states have displayed just two, some only one—which means the union of all three, as in the modern state, is not inevitable (and may indeed, with the rise of planetary bureaucracies like the World Trade Organization, be already decomposing). More to the point, the state itself may not be inevitable. For most of the past 5,000 years, the authors write, kingdoms and empires were "exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants … systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority."
Is "civilization" worth it, the authors want to know, if civilization—ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, imperial Rome, the modern regime of bureaucratic capitalism enforced by state violence—means the loss of what they see as our three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? Or does civilization rather mean "mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others"?
These are questions that Graeber, a committed anarchist—an exponent not of anarchy but of anarchism, the idea that people can get along perfectly well without governments—asked throughout his career. The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the "indigenous critique." In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as "generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty."
The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom. The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition). They go further, making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We're richer, went the logic, so we're better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.
The Dawn of Everything is not a brief for anarchism, though anarchist values—antiauthoritarianism, participatory democracy, small-c communism—are everywhere implicit in it. Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity.
"How did we get stuck?" the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of "war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others' suffering"? It's a pretty good question. "If something did go terribly wrong in human history," they write, "then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence." It isn't clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.
This article appears in the November 2021 print edition with the headline "It Didn't Have to Be This Way." When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of HumanityDAVID GRAEBER AND DAVID WENGROW, FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
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