Politics and Such

David Bernell Amidst the immediate concerns of the Biden transition, runoff elections in Georgia, and the necessity of pursuing public health and economic stimulus measures to combat COVID and its impacts, there are also questions of making our democracy stronger and our political climate less divisive. These are the types of goals President-elect Biden has espoused in his speeches both during and after the campaign, but the proposed solutions, like just about everything else in our politics, have been divided among party lines, and they derive in part from competing visions of what constitutes a good society. One way I think of this is that we’re having a problem with freedom in the United States. We can’t agree on what it means and how to pursue it. And this is one of the things that makes our politics increasingly hostile, and our society increasingly divided. On the one hand, there is a view that freedom means that the reach of government is limited. The achievement of freedom, ...

David Bernell   On Friday, No vember 20 the state of Georgia certified its election results. So it’s now official that Joe Biden won the state by about 12,500 votes. Al so on the same day two Republican legislative leaders from Michigan visited President Trump in the White House. He is asking the Michigan GOP to find some way to delay their election certification and reverse the outcome of the vote, which Biden won by about 150,000 votes.   There are five states that Donald Trump won in 2016 and Joe Biden has won in 2020: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. In all of these states there are Republican controlled legislatures. In all but Arizona, large numbers of Black voters concentrated in large urban areas voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. In Arizona, it was Latinx voters around Phoenix that voted largely for Biden. The Trump strategy is to call into question these votes and the outcomes they produced, as these all provided more than enough votes to ...

David Bernell   During the election campaign, Joe Biden avoided providing a clear “yes or no” answer on the question of whether he supported expanding the Supreme Court if he were to be elected, and if Democrats were to gain control of both houses of Congress. The question of control of the Senate is still undecided, and I expect Republicans will win one or both seats in the Georgia runoffs. So I don’t think the question is going to invite an answer anytime soon.    Still, at some point, maybe we will get to address the Supreme Court, which would be a benefit to the country. Our judicial branch is becoming increasingly politicized and polarized. We would be well-served by changing this. Every Supreme Court vacancy has come to be considered a matter of life and death for many people in this country, and the fights to fill these seats have become angrier and more bitter. This further fuels the divisiveness of American politics, and weakens the legitimacy of the Suprem...

David Bernell   My second entry in this blog is about why I write and what I'm trying to do here. The first entry was about the immediate problem that was moving me to write something down to begin with: the political dysfunction in our country. So, what am I doing here? It's what I tell my students their job is after they're done with my classes at the end of the term. Ideally, they leave with some added knowledge about the subject we studied -- international relations, nuclear weapons and arms control, energy policy -- and also some improved skills, like writing about and analyzing what they read and hear. But I also want them to leave with something more, a sense that they have to pay close attention to the world around them so they notice what's not obvious, what takes a little extra effort to find out, what I call the "barking dogs" and the "missing bullet holes." The "barking dogs" come from an economist named Hernando de Soto, who te...

David Bernell    I have a request. Would some decent, thoughtful, principled, truth-telling Republicans please form a new political partly? Call it the Conservative Party or the Freedom party, whatever works.    John Kasich, Lisa Murkowski, Michael Steele, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Steve Schmitt, Condoleeza Rice, Bill Weld, Joe Scarborough, William Kristol, somebody, please?          The Republican party has demonstrated over the past few years that it will eagerly abandon truth and reality for power, and live in fear of Donald Trump (and his supporters/voters) as a guide for action. Now it is showing that its fear and desire for power are stronger than its commitment to democracy. By refusing to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, and by claiming that votes for Democrats must be considered illegal if they constitute a majority, Republicans undermine democracy itself. It’s time to sweep them aside. The part...