The latest public opinion on gun control, white nationalism and the future of democracy –

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

Here’s a novel theory: What if people at least tried to be nicer?

Boring, I know.

And of course it won’t work, because so many people are, let’s face it, basically dumbasses and/or assholes.

But if we tried it, on a mass scale, we might not have so many mass shootings. That should be the lead editorial in the Sunday New York Times, and come out of the mouth of some expert on the Sunday morning news talk shows.

But it won’t. The polls don’t reflect this either, because the pollsters didn’t think to ask.

There is something in the polls to report, and a couple of new books out to discuss with intellectuals trying to wrangle with the problem of whether democracy can or will survive. They are inextricably related.

First let’s take the latest Morning Consult poll, which indicates that a majority of voters believe stricter gun control measures might help with the mass shootings, while 40 percent say they see “White Nationalism” as a “critical threat” to our future and democracy. Another name for it is Fascism.

Of course the poll also indicates that “most” Republicans see “white replacement theory” as more of a threat than “white nationalism,” which just shows how confused Republicans are these days with all the conflicting propaganda floating around on cable television and the internet.

White replacement is not a “theory,” as in an academic supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles, independent of the thing to be explained, such as “Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

Poof, that just flew right over their heads.

This is what happens when politicians and preachers bash science for years for their own selfish purposes, to impose their own delusional thoughts as scientific “theories” and appease their clientele.

Take “creationism” for example, a notion some Christian ministers and the politicians who follow them try to equate with Darwin’s “natural selection” theory. Creationism is not a scientific theory. It is religion masquerading as science to try to fool or comfort the masses.

White replacement in the U.S. is no theory. It’s just a fact of demographics. Educated, White Americans — like their European counterparts — are smartly having fewer babies than generations past. Not because of legalized abortion. But because we don’t need a bunch of kids to work the farm anymore. Duh.

African Americans and Hispanics are having more, along with Asians who immigrate to America, maybe because there are so many people in China the government has imposed a strict limit on the number of babies its citizens can have, for example. Some might call that “Communist overreach.”

If the White nationalists were smart, they would encourage more abortions, not fight to the death to outlaw the practice. You see the contradiction, right? If your political goal is a White Christian nation, you would want to allow all the races to have abortions, use contraception, etc.

You might appropriately ask: What’s this country coming to? What’s wrong with people?

The Numbers

So overall, 60 percent of registered voters in the United States favor stricter gun control laws, which would be enough to overcome a Senate filibuster if the same number existed in the United States Senate.

Of course 32 percent oppose tougher gun control laws, and don’t believe it would help with mass shootings anyway. Most mass shooters obtain their guns legally.

But 99 percent of Republican politicians in Washington and many states are against gun control, so the rule by majority be damned. Nothing will happen in Congress or Washington as a result, and those gun crazy states will remain, well, just crazy. There’s no more politically correct way to state it.

You don’t have to believe me. The New York Times and Washington Post have stories out about it already, albeit superficial.

The same poll found that 40 percent of voters say “White nationalism” represents “a critical threat” to the vital interests of the United States in the next 10 years, and 75 percent of voters say combating the spread of racist ideologies and beliefs is important for curbing future massacres.

Are the producers on cable news talk shows and the hacker-programmers at social media companies listening?

Doubtful.

It’s much easier to get traffic and make money spreading lies than telling the boring, factual truth.

Following Saturday’s mass shooting in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y., that authorities say was racially motivated, the new Morning Consult survey shows most voters continue to support stricter gun-control measures, although that level of backing has actually declined since President Joe Biden took office last year.

What?

It turns out support for stricter gun control laws is weaker when Democrats occupy the White House, and this is apparently driven by the great political divide, since some Republican voters only support gun control when a Republican is in the White House?

You can shake your head now.

Also confusing, the level of anxiety over White nationalism and the threat it poses to the country is down from where it was in late 2019 after another racially motivated mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.

Or maybe it’s down because Joe Biden, a White middle-of-the-road Democrat, somehow managed to eke out a victory over the White nationalist president Donald Trump in 2020, and many Democrats have retreated from the political arena thinking they are safe now, and maybe taking a break from the news after two years of Covid.

Of course much like the Qanon conspiracy theory that once only existed on the fringes of American political discourse, this White replacement idea has been embraced by Republican “influencers” such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance of Ohio and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, and according to the pollsters, that messaging has filtered downward to the party’s voters, “despite just 22 percent saying … they’d heard of the term.”

Most people don’t pay attention to such things, and don’t watch Fox News either. Far more people find out what Fox News is doing when the rest of the media reports on it and people talk about what they said on social media. We used to call that an “echo chamber,” but I’ve not see anyone use the term lately. But even MSNBC viewers know all about what’s on Fox, and talk about it constantly on Facebook. Wouldn’t their side be better off ignoring it? Not spreading it further?

Sigh.

Shake your head up and down now if you understand.

According to the same poll, 3 in 5 Republican voters say they are more worried about politicians and government officials using U.S. immigration policy to try to lessen the influence of White Americans on the country’s economics, politics and culture. This is far less than those who say they are worried about mass violence by White supremacists. Duh.

Most Democrats, 78 percent, and a plurality of independents, 47 percent, identified racist mass violence as more of a concern going forward. It seems there is not much doubt about it.

Only 40 percent of voters — including two-thirds of Democrats, over a third of independents and 16 percent of Republicans — say “White nationalism” represents “a critical threat” to the vital interests of the United States in the next 10 years. The figures are similar to a Morning Consult survey conducted after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol that included supporters of then-President Donald Trump aligned with the racist ideology, but are still several percentage points below the 47 percent who reported that threat level after the El Paso shooting.

Go figure.

The Politics

Given the narrowly divided House and the evenly split Senate, Democratic leaders have conceded that federal action on gun control is unlikely despite two-thirds support among the electorate for bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines, both of which authorities say Gendron used in Buffalo.

In the face of that inaction on Capitol Hill, many Democrats have taken to lambasting the normalization of racist ideologies that are believed to have fueled the shooter. They say the ideology itself should come under scrutiny and be discredited to prevent future violence.

Are you listening press?

Three-quarters of voters say combating the spread of racist ideologies and beliefs should be a priority for curbing future massacres. This is more than the 67 percent who advocate stricter gun laws.

The majority of voters of all political stripes said stricter enforcement of existing gun control laws should be prioritized, while there was near unanimity on the importance of better mental health screening and support, since 90 percent of voters believe mental illness is to blame for mass shootings. This is far more than the 42 percent who point their finger at the National Rifle Association, which fights gun control measures, or the 37 percent who blame Fox News, which hosts Carlson’s program and a range of conservative characters who have promoted the ideology as a “theory.”

Again, what if we made it a national priority to promote something the National Park Service promotes in the parks, America’s Best Idea: Just be nice to people, even if they are breaking the rules?

Nah. Let’s privatize that too. Let’s make it mean and all about profit.

Right.

No.

The Great Experiment in Democracy and Its Future

This is related content as you will see in the end. But let’s take the reading level up a notch.

Meanwhile, as Stephen Colbert likes to say on his CBS show on late night broadcast TV, Joe Klein has a couple of book reviews in the New York Times under the headline that is sure to be ignored by most readers, and hidden by Facebook: Francis Fukuyama and Yascha Mounk Wonder, Is Democracy Finished?

Let’s discuss.

The philosopher Francis Fukuyama is probably best known for a misinterpretation of his book from 1992, Klein says. “The End of History and the Last Man,” was assumed to be a statement of fact rather than the description of a process, Klein writes, “and he has been defending himself ever since.”

Let’s admit it. The end of history title was a sensational framing to sell books, and it worked. He got famous and had a major best seller.

“The word ‘end’ was not meant in the sense of ‘termination’ but ‘target’ or ‘objective,’” he wrote in 2019.

The Soviet Union had collapsed; Marxist collectivism wasn’t the “end” of history.

Liberal democracy was supposed to be, and he wasn’t expecting another round of Communist or Fascist autocracies to rise, certainly not in these United States.

“Fukuyama thus committed the sin of optimism, a dicey destination for a serious thinker,” Klein writes.

In his new book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Fukuyama acknowledges that we’re in a rocky patch on the road toward that “end.”

Rocky patch is an understatement.

And of course “the end” could look a lot different now, as climate change threatens more than democracy.

“There are serious threats from right-wing populism and left-wing identity politics,” they say. “Illiberal democracy — autocracy — is on the rise.”

This is a conclusion shared by another prominent political philosopher, Yascha Mounk, in “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.”

“Both books raise serious challenges, from the political center, to the way liberal democracy has been operating for the past several generations in America and the world,” Klein writes. “They are a rare thing: academic treatises that may actually have influence in the arena of practical politics.”

I’m not so sure. People don’t read serious works like this anymore. Unless they see a meme about it on Facebook or a tweet, or someone on cable talks about it — or it gets banned in schools and libraries. Then everybody would want to read it.

Most people won’t even learn about it.

Both authors use the word “liberal” in its classical sense, according to Klein. He defines liberalism as “government by the rule of law, with the goal of protecting individual rights, equality and enterprise, built on a structure of rational, objective facts.”

“Democracy,” he oversimplifies, “is the process by which the law is agreed upon.”

He says both these authors assume that liberal democracy is the best way to manage competing interests in a diverse society.

But the tensions are constant and, Mounk writes, “the history of diverse societies is grim.”

“American institutions have decayed over time, becoming rigid and hard to reform, and are suffering from capture by the elites,” Fukuyama adds.

He identifies “neoliberalism” on the right and “critical theory” on the left as the primary threats to the American Republic.

“Neoliberalism” refers to the Chicago and Austrian schools of economics, Klein says, which “sharply denigrated the role of the state in the economy.” This was the philosophy popularized by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, he says.

I’m not sure that’s how leftist liberals and socialist democrats define it these days when they bash it as the modern day boogeyman responsible for all things bad in the world. Bill Clinton’s pro-business “New Democrat” movement is more like it. Now there’s the New Democrat Coalition in Congress. Just got an email about that from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Greenbelt, Maryland, celebrating 25 years as a member of the New Democrat Caucus.

At least that’s how the leftists I know think about it, the “Bernie Bros” from 2016. Of course they got their news mostly from YouTube then. They are not deep readers, like you and me.

Klein says Fukuyama believes neoliberalism was a legitimate response to the “excessive state control” of the late industrial age, “a valid insight into the superior efficiency of markets” that “evolved into something of a religion” and led to “grotesque inequalities.”

There was an undue libertarian emphasis on “personal responsibility,” or unfettered individualism you might say. The father of this movement, Economist Milton Friedman, used to go on television and talk about Adam Smith’s the “invisible hand,” a metaphor for how, in a free market economy, self-interested individuals operate through a system of mutual interdependence.

That was well before Michael Douglas played Michael Milken in the movie “Wall Street,” and popularized the phrase “Greed is Good.”

Fukuyama believes, as any sane person would, that individuals need to be protected from “adverse circumstances beyond their control.” Markets need to be REGULATED by the state. And not just markets.

Economic efficiency isn’t the sole purpose of human life; there is a social component as well. People crave respect, not just as individuals, but as members of groups with distinct “religious beliefs, social rules and traditions.”

In other words, man cannot live by bread alone, or economics or political science for that matter. It’s not just all about the money, stupid, as they used to say. It’s sociology. The study of groups. You can quote me on that.

From the left, the backlash comes in the form of an attack on libertarian and capitalist excesses, the “primordial” individualist tendencies of neoliberalism.

Let’s call it “run amok corporate capitalism,” okay?

“Critical” theory, according to Klein’s interpretation, argues that individual and economic freedoms were just a “smoke screen” for the basic power arrangements that underpin capitalist society. The system is rigged.

Power derives from groups, what is now being called “identity politics,” a fancy phrase for the old saw, “birds of a feather flock together.”

That can be White, Christian, male dominated, pro business groups, like your local chamber of commerce types, where patriarchy wants to rule and the matriarchy rebels, again and again.

There is some truth to this: “Real world societies are organized into involuntary groups,” Fukuyama writes, which is not an original thought. Biologists like E.O. Wilson have talked about it in genetic terms for decades. Fukuyama is a political scientist in the political economy school. He’s not even a sociologist.

The critical theorists, he apparently argues, if Klein knows that he’s talking about, believe liberalism “sought to impose a society based on European values on diverse populations with other traditions.” There is some truth to that, too, Klein says. He’s a historian and writer. Not a biologist or a sociologist.

“Critical theory — as practiced by French deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida — became an assault on the objective realities that provided the ballast for liberal democracy,” they say.

“The search for human universals fundamental to liberalism was simply an exercise of power,” the critical theorists argued, according to Fukuyama, and who Klein describes as espousing “a radical subjectivism” rooted in knowledge based on “lived experience and emotion.”

Well, that’s close, anyway.

In Sociology, the critical theory method to study this behavior is not quantitative studies, like public opinion surveys, but long-term qualitative studies, in-depth interviews and focus groups, documenting the lived experiences much like how historians work. Both methods generate knowledge, and can work hand in hand.

This critical theory school ascendance in the academic community led to notional academic exercises like “critical race theory,” they argue, in which society was defined by immutable racial groups, the whites “privileged” and “people of color” oppressed.

“Enter Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the British Brexiteers — the right-wing populists of the past decade. If academics could traffic in radical subjectivity, so could demagogues,” the argument goes.

Even if the idea that a divorced white woman with two kids, working three jobs, was “privileged” is utterly ridiculous. This idea that American society is divided between Caucasians and “people of color” is simplistic and inaccurate.

Remember, the French were sleeping with the Native Americans even before the Brits showed up.

“Broad swaths of the recent immigrant populations, Latinos and Asians, want no part of that,” Klein writes.

Who speaks for these groups?

“The loudest voices,” they say.

What happened to legitimacy? If truth was purely subjective, then, where do you draw the line for reality?

“Liberal societies,” Fukuyama concludes, “cannot survive if they are unable to establish a hierarchy of factual truths.”

If that’s the case, we are done, because we have lost the ability to do this. My thoughts. We must find a way to remain in the political majority until this wave passes. If we want to have any chance of surviving as a species.

Yascha Mounk’s analysis of the difficulties facing the “Great Experiment” of liberal democracy is very similar to Fukuyama’s, but he is a different sort of writer, Klein says, “more passionate and personal. He is Jewish, born and raised in Germany, a proud American citizen now. He is accessible in ways Fukuyama is not.”

“My political values are left of center,” Mounk admits. “The American politician of the past 50 years I most admire is Barack Obama.”

So it is no surprise that he agrees with Fukuyama about the economic inequalities imposed over the past 40 years by the neoliberal regime; and it is also no surprise that he is frightened by right-wing populism.

His last book, The People vs. Democracy, explored that threat. But he is equally appalled by the “challenger ideology” — his term for critical theorists. He believes that “entitlement programs that are explicitly targeted at members of particular ethnic groups, for example, provide a strong incentive for members of all ethnicities, including whites, to identity with their racial groups and organize along sectarian lines.”

Furthermore: “Diverse democracies should never waver from a vision of the future in which ascriptive identities play a smaller, not a larger, role.”

Let’s add the real kicker from the hard sciences: The mixing of races feared by the racist, White nationalist politicians of the world, whether it’s Trump or George Wallace, have it all wrong according to “natural law.” Every biologist, geneticist and economist knows that a diversified gene pool is like a diversified portfolio. It only makes the species — and the retirement account – stronger.

The math proves it.

Mounk, Klein says, is a meliorist, not a radical. He understands that racial enslavement is an enduring American stain and burden. He doesn’t directly propose the elimination of race-based programs like affirmative action — and his argument is universal, encompassing and criticizing the anti-immigrant politics of his native Europe.

Fukuyama agrees: “Social policies should seek to equalize outcomes across the whole society but they should be directed at fluid categories like CLASS rather than fixed ones like race or ethnicity.”

On that we seem to agree with Fukuyama.

Then both Mounk and Fukuyama pose a practical challenge to looming battles over identity politics in the Democratic Party and economic elitism among the Republicans. An effective liberal democracy, Mounk writes, “should oppose monopolies that allow inefficient corporations to quash would-be competitors.”

This is “easier said than done,” according to Klein. Another understatement.

What practical answers do Mounk and Fukuyama provide? It’s a joke, but both these books have 10 chapters. Mounk playfully refers to “the Chapter 10 problem.” Tenth chapters tend to be thin: It’s easier to diagnose the problems of liberal democracy than to propose solutions.

Both authors suggest that some form of national service might be a way to bind the national wounds. Sorry, folks, but that’s just weak.

I have offered a better solution: Forming a better communications system with an actual understanding of evolution. How to Create a Functioning Communications System to Save Democracy and the Planet.

Why is Klein not writing about that in The New York Times?

Mounk includes a section on Gordon Allport, the 20th-century sociologist whose work suggested that it is harder to hate someone when you know them; “interaction among tribes lowers the friction.”

Again diversity is good. That’s the real lesson. My opinion. The only solution is to embrace it.

Fukuyama disdains what he calls “a laundry list” of policy proposals and, rather elegantly, settles on a plea for simple MODERATION, which is “not a bad political principle in general and especially for a liberal order that was meant to calm political passions from the start. … Recovering a sense of moderation, both individual and communal, is therefore the key to the revival — indeed, to the survival — of liberalism itself.”

Sounds like Buddha, moderation in all things. If only we could sell that on Facebook.

Mounk comes to a more inspiring and unexpected conclusion: He makes the case for optimism.

I mean who wants to be seen as a pessimist?

“Most diverse democracies around the world are vastly more just and inclusive today than they were 50 or 100 years ago,” he writes. Indeed, these years have seen the greatest advances in human rights in the history of our species — for Blacks, for women, for members of the gay community. Latinos and Asians are assimilating into American society in the same way that other immigrant groups have. Intermarriage is taking place at unprecedented rates. Cultural “appropriation” — a loathsome term — is taking place, too, as a beautiful and incredibly creative multicultural tapestry emerges from a multiplicity of American sources.

Racism remains a scourge, of course. The cultural aftereffects of enslavement — including high levels of Black crime — remain a problem, but Mounk argues persuasively that progress has been made, especially in income (if not the accumulation of wealth) and education. He cites a New York Times report that “from 2000 to 2019, the percentage of African Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree rose from 15 to 23 percent.” (The college graduation rates for Black women have been particularly impressive.) Over the same period, “the share of African Americans without a high school degree was cut by more than half.”

A significant Black middle and professional class has emerged. In fact, Blacks “are more likely than their white fellow citizens to ‘believe in the American dream’ or to say that the country’s best days still lie ahead.”

“And yet a fashionable cloud of pessimism prevails, amplified by a sensationalist media that foghorns the loudest and most extreme and least tolerant voices,” they say. “No doubt, it will be a challenge to overcome the encrustations of monopoly power and racial enmity, political gridlock and media cynicism.”

But a sense of helplessness is essential to the enemies of liberalism. It is their political life support. Remember when I wrote about existential anxiety?

Related: How Existential Anxiety Leads to Authoritarianism: From George Wallace to Donald Trump

Supporters of diverse democracies, Mounk writes, “will also have to keep in check the pessimists in their own midst.”

“The advocates of enlightened liberalism may not be noisy. But, as the people of Ukraine are proving, they can be stubborn,” Klein writes. “We can only hope that Fukuyama was right the first time: that humanity is stumbling — against its worst instincts — toward a modest state of grace, a society that seeks the balance between economic freedom and inequality, that secures individual rights while promoting justice for all.

It will not be easy; an active, “engaged citizenry” will be necessary.

“But any other fate is unimaginable,” they say.

There it is, the nugget we are looking for. Not just an “engaged citizenry,” but an “educated citizenry” — something that used to be seen as the job of a free press with the power of the First Amendment behind it. Yes, a public education system is critical too, as well as informed families that do not take pictures of themselves by the Christmas tree with even their young kids in possession of assault rifles.

Can any form of this press remain viable when all the money and attention has redirected elsewhere?

If the press wants to retain any of it’s power, what cannot be tolerated is a wild, ignorant mob — run amok on the land with huge caches of weapons in private hands — thinking they are fighting for individual freedom when they are actually doing the dirty work of the tyrant, the narcissist dictator who will trample their freedoms in every heartbeat on the golf course.

Oh you poor, sore “losers and suckers.”

Open your eyes and see the damn light.

Will what’s left of the press pound this message on every channel? Or kowtow to the masses for profit by reporting “both sides” as if they are equally valid?

White replacement theory is NOT a theory. Why is it being called one in newspapers on the web and on TeeVee?

Stop it!

___

If you support truth in reporting with no paywall, and fearless writing with no popup ads or sponsored content, consider making a contribution today with GoFundMe or Patreon or PayPal.