The most recent form of Catch-22 is this: They had a right to do anything they could prevent us from preventing. We couldn't prevent them from lying, cheating, and stealing, as long at that kept them in power. This held for a number of values of "they", like the now-failing NRA, the shrinking bigoted churches, and the voter suppressionists. And for them, the flip side of Catch-22 is this: We have a right to prevent them from thwarting the will of our increasing majority. And about time, too.
Six years ago, I wrote The Constitution as Catch-22, arguing that you don't have rights unless you have effective remedies in case those rights are violated. Rights do not come from Nature or from Nature's God (although those were useful political claims in the 18th century), or from being included in a Constitution or the laws of a state or nation. They come from a complex system of institutions, all of which in turn come from the political will of the people, organized and expressed in a multitude of ways. This is not new, but it is coming together now in a way we have never seen before.
The Republican "remedies" for violation of their bogus States Rights (to oppress their own citizens) are lying, cheating, and stealing. Our remedies begin with the political will to create and support Constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law (when it can function), the General Welfare, and the rest of our institutions, and to vote the rascals out when it becomes necessary.
Theory of Rights
The various notions of natural rights and civil rights are historically quite tangled and confused. A good review is available in HUMAN RIGHTS: CHIMERAS IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING? I reject any notion that you can have rights. I maintain that we can only give each other rights, by creating institutions that provide remedies against violations of the rights that enough of us agree on.
Practice of Wrongs
The modern Conservative is engaged in one of mankind's oldest philosophical pursuits—that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The liars, cheaters, and ganefs include
- The gun lobby—gun manufacturers, the NRA and Gun Owners of America
- Bigoted, misogynistic, Mammonite, Dominionist, and Armageddonist churches
- The Too Big To Fail/Jail kleptocracy.
- Conspiracy Theorists
- Christian and White Supremacist terrorists
- The Supreme Court "Conservatives"
- The Bosses generally and banksters in particular
- The Military-Industrial Complex, and the warmongers
Hence the requirement for Better and More Democrats, to prevent them from preventing us from preventing the crimes in question. You know who you are. People who care about public safety, the environment, the economy, and human rights generally. How do we counter those methods without becoming like the enemy?
4 Don’t respond to the stupidity of a fool;
you’ll only look foolish yourself.
5 Answer a fool in simple terms
so he doesn’t get a swelled head.
Proverbs 26, The Message, a modern Bible translation
4 Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest thou also be like unto him.
5 Answer a fool according to his folly,
lest he be wise in his own conceit.
Authorized (King James) Version
The Democrats are doing a great job on both ends of that koan, BTW.
So how do we go about all that? Better and More Democrats isn't self-evident or self-executing any more than human rights are. What are the remedies? I don't have all of those answers. But I have some. I can start by suggesting some of the right questions, and point you to some sources of some of the answers, and suggest how you can learn more and put it into practice.
Remedy #1 is acquiring information
We need to know our enemy. What are the enemy's goals, issues, and methods? I have put some effort into documenting them since I joined DK, and I appreciate the work of many others who have also done so.
Grokking Republicans Book List
Standing Our Ground
Sunzi analyzed the various types of ground that armies can find themselves on, and how to use them to greatest advantage. For the Republicans, it is too late for that. They are down to
On desperate ground, fight.
What are the pitfalls in the legal and political landscape? We have an extremely important advantage on this question. Our opponents like to scream "Liberty!" and "Tyranny!", and unskew the polls, and we like to examine the facts.
For decades now, however, the Republican Party of the Southern Strategy has had advantages in numbers, funding, and organization. So we need further remedies.
Remedy #2 is sharing that information
How can we inform the public about what the ganefs are up to?
How do we even get the public's attention?
Contrary to the Republican narrative, we can actually do this over time. The US population has been shifting away from racism, bigotry, misogyny, and the rest at about 1% of the population annually, due to both generational and demographic shifts.
Remedy #3 consists of breaking down the barriers to information
follows from having and spreading information, particularly with new technologies such as cable TV and the Internet that break down old barriers to information: Better and More Democrats. Everything else follows from that.
Undo the filibuster and the gerrymanders.
Replace Thomas on SCOTUS, even if you have to hold your nose and vote for our candidates to do it. Twice.
Tell the Republicans who are bent on their own destruction, "Please proceed."
Then we can have a debate over the differences the Democratic agenda and the Progressive agenda.
Anybody who is willing to make the effort can know a great deal about The Family and its C Street House, or about ALEC, or about the remaining Koch brother and Sheldon Adelson and the Mercers, or about Grover Norquist, or about the NRA and GOA, or about the misdeeds of Wall Street and the City of London, or any of the others concerned.
People who are not willing to take that trouble can be informed in other ways, including political campaigns that turn on particular people supporting or opposing particular measures on particular issues.
I have put a lot of my time into a different avenue for information, namely Open Educational Resources (OERs) for schools. These are digital replacements for printed textbooks under Free licenses, usually Creative Commons Sharealike. Computers cost much less than textbooks in the US and much of the rest of the world, except where textbooks are wholly inadequate. I have written or contributed to software manuals for educational software; math books; programming books; How to Bypass Internet Censorship.
As I diaried about the application of Catch-22 in Constitutional law and in issues of human rights generally. My thesis was that rights do not exist merely because they are asserted, but because there are remedies to punish violations or better still to prevent violations in the first place. We have to understand how such remedies can work, or fail to, and what to do about that. I then reviewed some of those remedies, all of which start from creating political will.
Political will for voting the rascals out, for passing laws with procedures and penalties to be followed, for repealing unjust laws and overturning unjust court rulings with new laws, for organizing in civil society to go to court on behalf of the oppressed and injured, for appointing better judges where necessary to get rulings in favor of the people and not the privileged, and in extreme cases for passing Constitutional amendments. We can discuss how to amplify political will through organization, funding, technology, and other means. We are winning on LGBT rights, but the fight did not end even when SCOTUS gove us Marriage Equality. We have to go on winning state by state until our majority is so big and so widespread that we can overcome the filibuster and put full LGBT rights into Federal law. Do you think we need a Constitutional amendment to protect those rights? Feel free to discuss.