While Democrats regroup, they need to focus on more than just what it takes to win the next election

There are a couple of intellectual arguments out there that make me uncomfortable, because they seem to make at least a halfway convincing case for a belief I find disturbing, or one that complicates all my other beliefs. A friend of mine sent me an article several years ago that has proved, repeatedly, to be one of those trouble makers. It was Adrian Vermeule's "Liberalism and the Invisible Hand," from the Spring 2019 edition of American Affairs. Vermeule first summarizes--largely uncontroversially, I would believe--that the neo-liberal world order, including the U.S. for at least a century, has relied to a great degree on an extension of economist Adam Smith's belief in the invisible hand into other realms. That is, given a free market, the best ends will tend to naturally assert themselves, as competition between suppliers and the signals from consumers eventually find a happy point that is close to the ideal one. We all pretty much understand how this works economically, but Vermeule focuses more attention on how this faith in the invisible hand has been turned to other ideas, such as the "free marketplace of ideas." 

The world has definitely done a 180 on me in my lifetime, because it used to be conservatives arguing for free markets, and now a conservative like Vermeule isn't unusual at all when he's undermining them. He spends some time in his article highlighting weaknesses in Smith's belief in free markets, including how ideal free markets never exist and how they require constant intervention from a not-invisible-at-all authority to continue working. He spends a lot more time, though, critiquing other, non-economic forms of invisible-hand faith, or "fideism," in his terms, meaning not just faith, but unwarranted faith. 

He points out how just like with economic markets, the free marketplace of ideas never really has the ideal conditions that its adherents admit are necessary for the mechanism to work. To my mind, his most effective example is in the Western jurisprudential practice of having a prosecution and a defense slug it out, and presumably, the correct outcome will ensue. I think even people like me who try to avoid news about high-profile court cases have seen enough examples of justice not working that we would probably accept the prima facie case against our court system leading reliably to just outcomes. If resources put into the defense and prosecution are not equal, why should we expect the outcomes to be? 

Our entire political system has gradually moved in the direction of being more like our legal system, characterized by a primarily adversarial system between parties. Whereas in times past, there was some shared sense of, for lack of a better expression, being on the same team, this seems to have largely disappeared. We no longer think it important to be honest and admit when the other side has a point about something. Instead, we oppose everything the opposition does and think it's up to them to do a good job to convince people that we're wrong. What we call partisan politics is nearly as bitter--and may yet become as violent--as sectarian politics once were. Trump's one-time advisor and likely still-influential voice Steve Bannon often described politics as being war, flipping Carl von Clausewitz's old aphorism of war being politics by other means. If politics is primarily conflict, why should we think the outcome will lead to anything more just or right than what court outcomes lead to? Instead, the side with the most resources and the one that wages war best will have its interests met, whether those interests are just or not. 

There's a real danger of falling into circular logic with a system that involves fideism in competition. If one side is currently holding power, they will never think they might be wrong, because after all, they won, and doesn't our system ensure that the right side wins? This is the logic that allows Trump to deride all of his critics as losers. They did, in fact, lose elections. You can see where too much faith in the power of competition to produce the right answers can lead. If we think that someone isn't on top because they don't deserve to be, then we will never change our minds, either, because if that person was right, they'd have won already. 

Plato understood this to be an inherent danger in democracy. He feared the ability of Sophists to win arguments for bad causes by making a weak argument sound strong. He felt the only defense was solid philosophy. Vermeule apparently believes the answer is in a Catholic theocracy, or at the very least in some ideology that predates humanism. I disagree, but it is hard to argue that invisible hand systems don't require some ideals outside of invisible hand systems to make them work. 

A number of philosophers had a crack at rebutting Vermeule, with what I felt was varying success. To me, the best possible line of refutation is that if the free market of ideas has produced the idea that at least at times, collaboration and cooperation should moderate competition and conflict, then maybe the system works, although in a self-contradictory and ironic way. Even if Vermeule is right and the only hope to escape from eternal conflict--which will necessarily always go not to the side that is right, but the side that wins--lies in ideas outside of secular free market thinking, I don't really care. The idea came from somewhere, and if it at least in part comes from religious-based thinking, that doesn't bother me. It's a good idea, wherever it came from. But that doesn't change the fact that I find Vermeule's basic argument difficult to refute entirely, and this challenge to one of the most fundamental underlying assumptions our society is based on is unsettling. It's clear that if society is going to work toward beneficial ends, there has to be something more at work than just no-holds-barred competition. You can't just cynically use media to convince people you're right; you should actually be right. 

One reason I think politics should be at least mostly the art of trying to make sure all the stakeholders get something even if nobody gets everything is tied to my basic agnosticism. I don't know the answers to anything for sure, and I have a hard time believing anyone else does, either. If there are people who disagree with me about what ends society should be pursuing, it's possible they are right and I'm wrong. It's possible I'm right. It's possible neither of us is. It's very likely all of us are at least a little bit mistaken. 

To take one example, if conservatives generally dislike social welfare programs and liberals generally like them, I don't think that means that most conservatives think we should have no social welfare programs, or that liberals think we should have so many that ninety percent of all income goes to paying taxes to cover them. There's some kind of balance to strike, and conservatives need liberals to avoid letting their own impulses go too far as much as liberals need conservatives to prevent their own worst tendencies from going unchecked. I don't believe this will ever lead to a Utopian perfect harmony, but rather to an always moving tension that hopefully has just enough stability that society can function. One of the most basic facts of society that kind of sounds like hopeful hippie hogwash but is actually cold, hard fact is that nobody knows everything, so we kind of need each other. That includes conservatives and liberals. The more we can cooperate and work together, the more we can accomplish, but also the more we cooperate and work together, the harder it is to avoid conflict. That's the eternal struggle of politics. 

In addition to the fact that nobody's philosophy is so perfect it doesn't need correction, there is also the fact that the very disagreements we have point to some shared ideals we seem, however unlikely, to still have. Maybe we do still have something outside of invisible hand fideism as a founding belief that holds us together. 

Why I think we ought to model the behavior we want

Everyone nowadays seems to be settling into the politics as conflict model. Democrats, for all their talk of how Trump's aggressiveness is unprecedented, seem to be more and more willing to match it with their own brash talk. This has certainly spread to the general public as well. A number of personalities I follow, whose reasonableness I admire, nonetheless will never say a single word about Trump or Republicans that is anything except full of scorn. 

Liberals will say that it was the conservatives who started the scorn, or who at least have continually pushed it up a notch. They'll say it was Trump who took it to new and unprecedented levels in a chief executive. They are probably right, at least based on my half-awake observations of political discourse since the late 80s. But there is more than one way to express contempt. If conservatives have done it with epithets like "libtard," liberals have often done it with sneering disregard. In any case, since squawk-box news programming involving putting two or more personalities on screen and then having them joust at each other in short segments first appeared soon after the advent of cable news (my first sign that something was really wrong in American politics), news shows haven't been short of liberals willing to spar on them. Liberals may have felt like their position needed to be defended, even if the forum was not ideal for fully developing ideas, but if liberals really valued truth over simply winning the war, they would have refused to ever go on a screaming match-type debate. The screaming debate, where neither side is listening to the other, is bad for society, even if the right side "wins" an individual round (by convincing more viewers they're right, I guess) here and there. 

Most liberals would probably argue that it's naïve to model virtue with an unvirtuous opponent, just like it's foolish to try to treat a bully with kindness and think he's going to become nice himself. A bully only responds to strength, so you have to meet him blow for blow. Hence the calls for Democrats to get "meaner." (Here, here, and here are examples.) People love to compare Trump to Hitler, even when they're trying not to, and I think a lot of Democrats suffer from the belief that any kind of cooperation with Republicans is the same as Chamberlain giving away the Sudetenland to Germany. It's appeasement. The more progressive end of the Democratic spectrum particularly wants a guerilla campaign. They only people they hate more than Republicans are moderate Democrats who are willing to work with them. The circular firing squad is far more pronounced among liberals than conservatives right now. Maybe that's part of the stress of losing, but it's also because of the way that liberalism has come to mirror religion, which better minds than me have pointed out (like here, here, and here). The way that the greatest hate progressives have is not for conservatives, but for liberals who aren't pure enough recalls to mind Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan, in which she argues that Christians began seeing the devil in non-believers, but then started seeing him more in other Christians they disagreed with. 

Half the time, liberals conveniently do the work of conservatives for them, likes the orcs in LoTR.

I understand the pragmatic argument that it's an imperfect world and we sometimes have to use imperfect means to achieve the right ends. Maybe it would be better if presidential debates were Lincoln-Douglas style, allowing ideas more time to develop, rather than distilling everything down to easily digestible two-minute segments because we assume the public can't handle anything more. Maybe it would be better if discussions on news segments between people who disagree were respectful and slowed-down, rather than Springer-style arguments that only barely stop short of fistfights. Maybe it would be better if political speeches tried to take an objective view of events, including admitting one's own shortcomings, rather than only giving one-sided cant and assuming it's the other side's job to find your weaknesses in their own media minutes. But the world is the world and there's nothing we can do in the short term to change it, so for now, to win the battles at hand, we have to use the tools society is using in order to win. We have to get our hands dirty. But if we only think that we'll be able to practice Socrates' "true rhetoric" after we've first used cut-throat rhetoric to defeat our enemies and bring about a perfect world, then we'll end up being like communists who only treat humans well after they've destroyed all their enemies. That is, we'll never end up trying to say anything that's really true, we'll just keep trying to win by any means necessary. 

Isn't now the best time to think of changing philosophies?

It's possible that this moment of liberal defeat is an opportunity, as many have pointed out. There's a growing desire to push out the old guard in the Democratic Party. New ways forward are being offered, whether it's to be meaner or to go with more progressive leadership like Mamdani and AOC or to become less progressive and more moderate. Whatever the plan is, I'd like to suggest that now is the time to get off the ever-accelerating treadmill of politics-as-conflict rhetorical approaches. It's not just about being more conciliatory. It's about communicating in more than sound bytes, in demonstrating a rhetoric of thoughtfulness rather than always being in attack mode. I'd love to see an interview in which I don't already know what the political representative is going to say before they say it. I want to see politicians whose speech seems to be that of a person who is genuinely reflecting on the world in an earnest and humble way, not someone who is talking down to me about a world they think they already fully understand. 

I'd like to see honesty as a core principle of politics. It can't be that every news item of every day confirms your worldview. If Epstein conspiracies were hogwash a few years ago--and they were--then they're hogwash now, even if it seems like a hopeful source of problems for your opponent. Focus on what's real, rather than what you think might score you points and get you clicks on your Instagram today. Sacrifice winning a point here and there in the political struggle of the moment in order to have a winning strategy for the next hundred years. The answer isn't just to make better use of podcasts and social media to win elections. It's not to do what the folks in strategic communications want. It's to ignore the people in communications and focus on authenticity. You will never win by trying to follow trends, anymore than you will write a great movie by imitating a movie everyone liked last year. People can smell out cynical use of trends. The answer in a world run by conflict isn't to fight dirtier; it's to offer a way out of conflict. 

On being an unsuccessful writer two weeks before Trump takes office a second time

"Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?'" - from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Early in 2020, The New Yorker published a George Saunders story entitled "Love Letter." It's an epistolary tale of a grandfather and his grandson in a much-closer-to-a-totalitarian-state-than-before in the aftermath of a then-theoretical second Trump term. Trump is not mentioned, but it is very clear that's the context involved. The grandfather is conflicted. Part of him wants to counsel his grandson to lay low, to make his way in the dangerous new landscape of America the best he can, because doing this and putting himself in a stronger position socially and financially is his best chance for being able to help the people he cares about. Open resistance is not a good strategy, because it only leads to one becoming weak. At the same time, the grandfather knows that what the government is doing to the people his grandson cares about is wrong, and he wants there to be some way to fight back. There is an underlying current in the story of the grandfather feeling he needs to explain to the grandson how older people allowed the world to get like this. His explanations are the only ones a culpable generation can offer: we didn't know it would get this bad, we'd have done more if we knew, we did what we could, but what could we really do?

When Saunders reconsidered the story recently, he expressed his hope that it was more than "just an opinion piece dressed up as a piece of fiction." Of course, even if it was a little too "on the nose," as he put it, that wouldn't have necessarily ruined it. There are plenty of stories that come across as direct commentaries on contemporary political situations that are nonetheless masterpieces, from Wizard of Oz to the works of Aristophanes to Citizen Kane to All the President's Men and on and on. Heck, even Ayn Rand's novels have plenty of people who love them, and they're basically political theory dressed up as novels.  

Of course it was a good story. It was George Saunders. But there was still something that bothered me about it. Coming at the time it did, it couldn't help but be an admonition to its readers: In the fateful election of 2020, when democracy hangs in the balance, what will you do? Will you be able to face your grandchildren when they ask you about it? It was much more of a call to specific action than most stories are. That means that part of evaluating it should go beyond normal literary considerations, such as whether the characters were believable and affecting, and include questioning whether the piece was effective at one of its evident purposes, which was to persuade citizens to undertake political action. 

My perhaps somewhat peevish reaction to the story

Now that we have survived the election of 2020 only to lose in 2024, my reaction is not totally unlike that of the grandfather: What could I have done? What should I have done? Or even: I did what I could, but I wasn't in a position to do much, so my involvement didn't help, echoing a line of the grandfather to his grandson that getting involved would not help. If "Love Letter" is a challenge to its readers to do something, then my reaction to that injunction goes something like this:

• I voted for the right candidate, because I did the minimum that a citizen in a democracy can do, which is to fulfill what Lionel Trilling called the "moral responsibility to be intelligent." That is, I did enough work to vote for the right person.
• Of course, in our system, I get the same number of votes as people who didn't do the work. So my vote isn't worth that much.
• You could argue that I have a responsibility to try to persuade others, and I did, but persuading anyone of anything is very hard. Past a certain age, most people really don't change their minds about big stuff more than a handful of times in their lives. 
• And in any event, whom would I be persuading? I don't have much of a platform. I wish I had acquired a platform through my writing, but whether through lack of talent, lack of focus, or bad luck, I don't. 
• Even if I did have a platform, what would I do? If we consider "Love Letter" not as a detached work of art but as an attempt by a human writer named George Saunders to influence an election, what did Saunders really do with his platform? He wrote a story in the New Yorker, where the majority of readers probably already agreed with him.
• That story, rather than offer readers practical advice for how to get the outcome in the election that author and most of his readers alike agree would be the desirable one, did what literature often does. It didn't really propose a solution, but instead did a good job of describing the problem. Which is great for feeling seen, but not so great for getting the results one wants.
• Which is all to say that even if I had succeeded as an author enough to have significant numbers of people listen to what I have to say, I likely wouldn't have been able to do much with it. I can't even convince my sister-in-law in Ohio that Trump is bad for the country; what am I going to do to change the outcome of an election? 
• The story ultimately feels like a human author trying to pass the problem off to his readers, most of whom have far less ability to do anything that he does. It feels unfair.   

So that's one level of reaction I have to Saunders' story. The other level is somehow even more depressing. 

It's always frustrating to fail at writing, but it's especially so now

There is a weird feedback loop of circular logic in America whereby we assume that if someone is rich and famous, they deserve to be, so they tend to stay that way. And if someone isn't, they get dismissed, because if they knew what they were talking about, how come they aren't rich and famous? We assume winners win because they deserve to win, and losers lose because they are losers.

Faced with this kind of faith in the self-evidentiary logic of outcomes in America, the non-rich, non-famous class has only a couple of choices. We can accept our fate and turn inward, trying to focus on self-improvement in small and humble ways. We can practice a form of idolatry toward the chosen class and look up to them, following them on social media and hoping at most to be able to brush near their greatness, to one day get a like from them or to touch the hem of their garments as they pass by. Or we can press on with a quixotic quest to join their ranks, ignoring the odds and focusing only on the outliers, the occasional examples of people who cross the divide from the bungled and the botched into the successful.

Maybe I've been the bad reader all along, and this guy the good reader of the world, even if he hasn't read the book he's holding. 

Of course, many people have no desire to be rich or famous, and they live happy lives ignoring celebrities, politicians, and magnates alike. They are probably the wisest, and I'd be happy to join their ranks, except that what I most want to do in life is write, and I don't consider my writing to be successful if nobody reads it. There is an aspect of needing public cooperation to my goals in life. I don't want to be rich, and I don't need to be famous in the sense of being a household word in every home. I'm sure most Americans don't know who George Saunders is, either. Enough do, though, that he can rest assured his ideas have propagated in the world and will survive him. That may not matter in a political sense, but I do think that once ideas escape into the world, they never really go away. Saunders will live forever. I don't have that assurance. 

I live inside my head most of the time, and my head is full of stories and ideas that seem to me to have value, so I can't rest until I've gotten them outside my head and onto paper in the best way I can. I'm on the other side of fifty now, and it's increasingly unlikely anyone is ever going to read what I've written in sufficient numbers for it to matter. 

I should keep pressing on anyway, assured that even if I don't succeed at my goal, the presence of those stories and thoughts that won't go away is evidence that tending to them is what I should be doing with my time. I should have faith that they're there for a reason. But the election of Trump--again--and the concurrent existence of so many do-nothing celebrities and hangers-on and influencers and social media personalities, all of whom get to share their vapid ideas with so many, makes me think that there just is no reason or order or meaning to anything. The self-evidentiary logic of America is right. I'm not succeeding because I'm not chosen for success. I lack talent or charm or charisma or good looks or the right blood in my veins. The success of someone who seems to me to be so undeserving is proof that I have misread the world entirely. And if I can't read the world right, why should anyone want to read what I've written?  

Election eve special: Was I wrong? Is Trump a fascist?

A few days ago, the New York Times ran an article about a retired professor who is a leading expert on authoritarian governments who went from thinking that calling Trump a fascist was overblown and unhelpful to thinking it was the right term. I wouldn't have thought much of it, except that George Saunders, who runs a Substack dedicated to answering questions from writers, recently revisited his 2020 short story "Love Letter," in which a grandfather of the not-too-distant future answers questions from his grandson about how his generation let the fascist government his grandson lives with happen. I found the story a little irksome when I looked at it as part of Best American Short Stories in 2021. While Saunders did manage to make it more than just a political essay disguised as a story, I still felt it was too on-the-nose about Trump, and also too willing to do what I felt was a bit lazy, namely to call Trump a fascist.

I acknowledge Trump has fascist tendencies. The question is whether having fascist tendencies makes one a fascist. With Trump, I don't think it does. A fascist takes risks to obtain power. When supporters take over the Capitol, a fascist will call on all supporters everywhere to back him. He wouldn't lamely and dazedly say, "You're right, but also go home." Calling him a fascist essentializes and simplifies the complexity of his badness. Other descriptors that come to mind for him before fascist are con man and robber baron. If we switch from nouns to adjectives, undisciplined and simple come to mind before authoritarian. 

Let's look at a list of things Trump allegedly wants to accomplish, according to a New York Times article. It's broken down into objectives related to do illegal immigration (build camps, carry out mass deportations, reinstate a Muslim-country ban, and try to end birthright citizenship), using the Justice Department to go after his enemies (investigate Biden, indict those who challenge him politically, target journalists), using military force in Mexico and on American soil (declare war on drug cartels, use federal troops at border, deploy forces to Mexico), and increasing presidential power (strip employment protections from civil servants, bring independent agencies under presidential control, purge intelligence and law enforcement agencies as well as the Pentagon). 

The illegal immigration stuff might be objectionable, but it's not the stuff of a dictator. He'll almost certainly fail to end birthright citizenship, because the originalist Supreme Court he put in place would see that as changing the Constitution. Using American military force outside of the country isn't against the Constitution, either, even if he's saying he'd send it to Mexico, which would be politically disastrous. Saying he'd use it inside the country is hedging toward authoritarianism, although saying he'd use it to defend the border sounds to me a little more like defending the country from external threats than internal ones. So we're left with using the Justice Department to go after political enemies and taking power away from parts of the government he thinks don't serve his interests. 

If he uses the Justice Department to investigate Biden, the Obamas, or the Clintons for specious reasons, then that is a strongman action. It's moving in the direction of fascist. I admit that, and I hope it doesn't happen. I hope people understand that there is a difference between a guy who was always facing lawsuits before he was president continuing to face them afterwards on the one hand and cooking up charges out of revenge on the other. This is something we'll have to watch. He'll face the same headwinds as before, and even if he appoints Justice Department officials willing to do his bidding, he'll need enough lawyers willing to work the cases the department takes. That might be a challenge. 

Trump's relationship with the law is troubling, for sure, but to me, doesn't a fascist just throw enemies in jail and not worry about using the Justice Department or the FBI to carry out an investigation? 

As far as firing law, intelligence, and military officials goes, I can't help but be a little amused by liberal angst over this. It wasn't that long ago that liberals generally regarded these parts of the government as being ground zero for fomenting fascism. Now, they seem to secretly hope Trump is right and that they really are a deep state that can work against him. They seem to have discovered, to their surprise, the same thing Trump did, also to his surprise: not everyone in the military or in intelligence services is a white, Christian crypto-fascist. Most have been educated to cherish the Western tradition as much as anyone else has. It might be a version of the Western tradition that values Beowulf more than Foucault, but it’s a vision that still values freedom of thought and expression.. In fact, many aren't especially conservative at all. As Michael Wolff put it in Fire and Fury: 

"Trump's criticism seemed to align him with the left in its half century of making a bogeyman of American intelligence agencies. But, in quite some reversal, the liberals and the intelligence community were now aligned in their horror of Donald Trump. Much of the left--which had resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community's unambiguous assessment of Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower--now suddenly embraced the intelligence community's authority in its suggestion of Trump's nefarious relationships with the Russians."

It often seems that the stands political sides take have as much to do with opposition to the other side as they do with their own ideologies. As they circle one another and take jabs, they sometimes end up reversing roles. That's how conservatives ended up being the ones clamoring to end a proxy war with Russia or how liberals are now the champions of free trade and the need for a strong and militarily engaged America on the world stage. That’s what’s happening when the NYT is fretting about Trump dismantling intelligence services. 

I can't stand Trump. I hope that's apparent. I can't stand him because I don't think he knows where Laos is on a map, because he thinks his hazy sixth-grade understanding of American history is enough to base decisions off of, because he is boorish and crass and lacking in the most basic understanding of how to treat people. However, occasionally, I understand his skepticism about the country that was handed to him, about the world order everyone said was unassailable. I hate that he lacks the logical and verbal skills to better express his skepticism with that world, but I understand why he feels that way. Before Trump, I was also skeptical of some of the same things. If I support them now, it's only because the last person I want to upend what has been there is him, and I think with all the problems the old order had, it's better than what he will put in its place. 

Still, the desire to change some officials might not be fascist. It depends. Your typical civil servant is supposed to swear an oath to the Constitution. They're allowed to have political feelings, they just can't share them qua civil servant. That is, you can say "I like Kamala Harris," but you can't say, "I work for the FBI and I like Kamala Harris." But high-level officials who run executive branch agencies are often political appointees, and Trump could well demand they be loyal. If he starts requiring loyalty oaths to him rather than the Constitution, or if he changes hiring programs for regular civil servant jobs to favor those who supported him, then we have a problem. 

Maybe I'm splitting hairs unnecessarily, but it does feel important to me that the left not excessively resort to charges like saying Trump is racist or fascist. He's got enough wrong with him that needs patient attention and analysis that getting off track is a distraction and wasting energy. I also think the left has done itself harm by crying wolf every time Trump says something stupid, which has made others suspect that Trump's criticism of the media has merit. I understand the desire to fight Trump for every inch of terrain, but that's not a good strategy. There is such a thing as strategically allowing an opponent to move forward such that he overextends himself. 

I say all this because unfortunately, I think it's going to matter after tomorrow night. I'd love to be wrong. I'll be the happiest person to be wrong if I am, but I have little doubt left that we're about to face another Trump presidency. When that happens, I'll get my chance to see if he really was more fascist than clown. Unfortunately, if I'm wrong, I guess nobody will get the chance to gloat about it. Maybe I'll get the chance to give George Saunders some cigarettes in prison. 

All the dumb clichés that are maybe true this time

Best American Short Stories drops at midnight. I'll be back to analyzing it this year, as it's pretty much the highlight of whatever it is I do on this blog. Each BASS comes with a foreword by the editor and guest editor, which I usually ignore. It's always about how things are dire in the world and how it's a miracle that art like BASS continues to survive and how critical art is in these dark times. 

Since the first election of Trump in 2016, I've not been a fan of two trends among liberals. One is the tendency to over-catastrophize. The election of such a mercurial and at times vengeful person to the highest office is calamity enough without looking for extra reasons to find it terrifying. The second is the refusal of liberals to acknowledge their own part in creating the monster of Trump. The result is that I've spent the last 8 years loathing the fact that Trump ever got past eleventh place in the primaries on one hand, and chiding fellow liberals on the other for finding a Trump conspiracy under every bottle of ketchup on the other. Those BASS forewords sometimes trip both of those triggers of mine.

Nonetheless, it does look like somehow, my fellow countrymates are going to elect him again in two weeks, and this time, not feeling any need to surround himself with grownups in order to make himself look like a real politician, Trump is going to feel free to do whatever dumb thing pops into his head. Meanwhile, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are all feeling bolder to do whatever they want to do, because they doubt the strength, resolve, and ability of what has been the world order to do anything about it. It really feels like Trump will be elected, he will force Ukraine to take a terrible deal or be conquered outright, and what has been called the liberal world order will officially come to an end. In its place will be a much more frightening world. 

In the 90s, it seemed to me at one point like in a mere twenty years or so, the world would have all its major problems solved. It now feels the opposite of that, like some kind of definitive doom is imminent, and only unlikely chance can prevent it. 

That's the environment in which I approach an attempt to seriously read twenty short stories that represent the best of what American letters produced in 2023. In the middle of the greatest angst I've felt since I was a kid thinking about nuclear fallout, I'm going to put all of my effort into reading, thinking about, and communicating my thoughts about twenty short made-up stories. It's a hugely frivolous thing to do, and it's also the only thing I can think of to do. 

There's never a time when there aren't more useful things to do than write or read or think about literature. We could always be feeding the poor or righting a wrong or curing a disease, but we read anyway. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing in the human race, but I know it's in our nature. So if we're going to do it anyway, we may as well try to do it well. So for the next several weeks, I'll be neck-deep in trying to do the least fuzzy-headed readings I can do, readings that are hopefully what the authors who wrote these stories deserved. 

I used to think a watchful uncertainty was the sign of someone paying attention. Boy, I miss those days.

I've been effectively off social media for about a year, I think. I left for two reasons. One was my sanity, the other was because I got tired of everyone complaining about how much they thought Elon Musk was the devil but then stayed on Twitter/X, because they didn't hate the devil as much as they wanted to keep the platform the devil provided. But my sanity was the bigger of the two. It was partly that I already feel like a huge underachiever in life, and seeing all the perfect lives others project--even when I know they're probably fake--made me feel even worse about myself. But it also had to do with how so many of the people I followed seemed so certain about so many things in the world, when I myself am seldom certain about much of anything. 

My lack of certainty in the face of so much sincere confidence about the right answers made me feel somehow deficient. It didn't used to be that way. When I got out of the Marine Corps and started college, the world that belonged to intellectuals seemed like a haven far away from the Marine Corps precisely because smart people were permitted to be uncertain. Ambivalent, even. Look at almost any intellectual subject that has been discussed since the beginning of written history, they'd say. You'll find highly learned scholars at this school who feel one way about it, and equally learned scholars who feel a different way. That doesn't mean that you can't have an opinion yourself, but it does mean that you should approach your opinion with a certain amount of circumspection.

Last week, I started parallel blogging on Substack. Substack is sort of a blend of social media and a blog site; there's a feed where you can see the people you follow post things, and their post can be short, like Twitter, but it can also be a direct link to their Substack blog. I've ended up in the stream of comments a few times this past week almost by mistake as I've been trying to figure out how Substack works. 

What I've seen is a deluge of posts from people I either know and chose to follow or who Substack thinks I ought to want to follow concerning the situation in Palestine. And man, are they sure they've got the answer. They sure they've got the answer, and they're so mad that anyone wouldn't accept their answer, they're willing to let someone with a clearly worse answer win an election in order to increase their relative bargaining power. 

Bojack basically gave this answer to say, "I'm trying hard not to make anyone angry here," but this answer is as likely as any to make people angry now. 

I might have once believed I had the right answers for most of the major geopolitical hotspots in the world, but I am cured of that belief now. What cured me was going deep on just one of those areas. I may not be the most knowledgeable person in the world on the Korean Peninsula, but I do know a hell of a lot about it. With the exception of one reader of this blog, I know a lot more than you do. Going deep on just this one area of the world has made me see how incredibly complicated it is, and I'd assume most other areas in the world are at least that complicated as well. Complicated enough that while I probably have a responsibility to at least understand the broad outlines of what the issues are, I should also keep my face shut about what the right answers are to fix the problem. 

I've spent so much of my life trying to understand just one problem in depth, I probably have neglected my duty to understand as many broad outlines elsewhere as I should have. When the latest flare-up in Palestine started last year, I tried to amend that shortcoming at least a little bit. I read The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. I know some people will think I'm a rube and that I only read the Palestinian side of the story, but that was kind of the point. I'd heard the mainstream version before. I wanted to get the Palestinian version, knowing that it might not be the truth, but it would be a side of the story I hadn't subjected myself to before.

I thought the book was reasonably convincing. Rashid was mostly objective, although there were times I thought he was downplaying atrocities from the Palestinian side. My general takeaway was that yes, the Palestinians have a legitimate gripe with both Israel and the West, especially the U.S., and they deserve a state of their own. 

That doesn't mean I know what the situation on the ground is, what steps it would take to create such a state, or how seriously to take Israeli insistences that they remain under serious threat. Moreover, I don't know how close we are to this blowing over into a regional war. Most of all, I don't know what steps a president can take--or a presidential candidate can promise to take--and still get elected. 

The world being complicated isn't a reason to do nothing, ever, of course, but I do think it means the general attitude of thoughtful people on most issues should be watchful uncertainty. We should be alert for evidence that a particular course is warranted, but always ready to change course if more evidence comes in to change that belief. This...does not seem to be the attitude most people in my orbit adopt.

I'm particularly surprised that people in the writing world, who I'd think would be the most likely to be willing to believe issues are complicated and have many sides to listen to, are often the quickest to call for uncompromising action. This has put me back in the same malaise I was in a year ago before I finally got off social media. Either I am wrong about the importance of watchful uncertainty, or I'm completely off my rocker about specific situations in the world. Either way, I seem to be in a minority, and I'm not nearly certain of myself enough that I'm comfortable believing I'm right where so many others are wrong. 

Goldtooth

I was born in 1972 to parents who had both been at Kent State University during the 1970 shooting. At the time of the massacre, they were living in married student housing while Dad was finishing his degree. Mom had graduated a year earlier and was working as a teacher. She was pregnant with my older brother on the day of the shooting, and soon she’d take the next ten years off of teaching to raise kids. A few weeks before the shooting, she participated in the first Earth Day, where she was scolded for being pregnant and contributing to Earth’s overpopulation.

            Their mixed experience with progressive movements at the time probably explains why their parenting philosophy was a blend of hippie idealism grafted uncomfortably onto the depression-era conservativism they were both raised with. My siblings and I were raised on books like TA for Tots, which our family read and discussed together like we were all in a book club. My parents let me play records at night to help me sleep. One was called Free To Be You and Me, and it consisted of a number of then-noteworthy celebrities singing or acting out short dramas encouraging gender neutrality and being comfortable with your own identity. Although it wasn’t my favorite part of the album, I will never forget the chorus to the record’s eponymous opening anthem. It promised that if you took the singer’s hand, you would soon find yourself:

In a land where the river runs free

In a land through the green country

In a land to a shining sea

And you and me are free to be you and me

 

            My parents believed in the ideals of the sixties, but they also believed in the bootstraps, no-excuses achievementism passed on to them by their steel factory fathers. I played piano for three years, although I don’t remember ever asking for lessons. Was this because they were nurturing, new-age parents who wanted to encourage me to have confidence in myself, or was it an old-school belief that children needed culture, discipline, and productive tasks? Yes to both, I think.

            We were a similar mix of future and past when it came to racial ideology. My biological brothers (my only siblings until I was eleven) and I knew and understood that prejudice was wrong, and cruelty to anyone based on any kind of difference they couldn’t control would result in swift retribution. We knew that we should not treat the racial or cultural “other” badly, but that didn’t mean we put much effort into seeing the world from their point of view. A lot of our ideology could be summed up by the show M*A*S*H, which we watched endlessly after taping all the episodes. Hawkeye would fiercely defend Korean farmers or Chinese enemy combatants or Black American soldiers from bigots, but there were hardly ever any moments in the show when Korean farmers or Chinese soldiers had agency. Most of the “Koreans” who appeared on the show were whatever generically Asian actors the producers could scrounge up. Rewatching the show now that I speak Korean, I can tell most had only learned to say a few lines and didn’t actually know the language.

 Like most well-intentioned white Americans who might have voted for either party until the culture wars of the 90s took off and made us solid Democrats for life, our racial ideology was probably centered around two concepts: the notion of color blindness and the belief in the white savior.

            Color blindness is universally rejected by liberals as a racial ideology now, but back then, it seemed like the cutting edge of hip progressivism. People who practiced color blindness, as I saw it, were what we would now call woke. They were aware in a way others were not, like Neo in the Matrix. This was confirmed for me by En Vouge’s 1992 hit “Free Your Mind,” which regarded color blindness as achievable only by those who had emerged from something like Plato’s cave:

Free your mind

And the rest will follow

Be color-blind

Don't be so shallow

           

Color blindness wasn’t regressive; it was something only those woke enough to free their minds could accomplish. It didn’t even feel like something I could achieve, because I didn’t feel cool enough. It was like being a saint: ordinary people could only hope to imitate the truly holy.

One of the reasons color-blindness as a model is discouraged nowadays is because it denies identity and agency to people of color. If I can’t see color, I can’t appreciate the differences of others and learn from them and adapt to them. I don’t think, though, that most people ever conceived of color blindness in a literal way. En Vogue wasn’t telling us we should convince the rods and cones of our eyes that they were lying to us so we literally couldn’t tell others were different. It was more limited than that. The idea was simply that you were to treat everyone the same, in spite of the fact that you could see they looked different. It wasn’t far off from the adage that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. En Vogue linked it to this adage in their song, because the verses are mostly about not judging the narrator by the clothes she wears or the fact that she dates white guys or that she likes to shop. Color blindness as an ideology might have been restated like this: Once you have seen that someone looks different—which you of course cannot help but do—try to act as impartially with the “other” as with those within your group.

Blindness as a metaphor invoked the image of the woman holding the scales of justice with a blindfold over her eyes. One reason for its appeal was that it didn’t require anybody to actually change how they felt about others. You could maintain your ancient prejudices as long as you could set those prejudices aside when taking part in social, business, and legal interactions. It was, perhaps, a not totally useless stepping stone for the first generation of American society raised after the Civil Rights Movement, when younger people would be learning a new way of interacting with otherness while the foundations of the old way were still visible. Its simplicity and rough-and-ready pragmatism were at least comprehensible to the masses and provided some guidance about how to act.

The notion of the white savior was less clear, because unlike color blindness, it wasn’t something we talked about directly. It was an idea we absorbed indirectly from the way in which every narrative we knew that involved an interaction between whites and non-whites ended up with the whites benefiting the non-whites more than the other way around. This was certainly true in M*A*S*H, with Father Mulcahy running his orphanage for local children who lost parents in the war. Do I even need to dissect the message behind Different Strokes? White saviorism was something a well-meaning white person would imbibe from an avalanche of narratives in which the praiseworthy, proto-woke white person showed their modern and progressive attitude toward people of color by helping them to adapt to and succeed in a world ruled by white people. Neo-liberal progressivism owes much of its roots to mid-to-late 19th century social progressives largely coming from a Protestant background, and the missionary impulse was still there in the late 20th century, even if the movement had largely secularized.

 The upshot of the prevailing progressive ethos in the 1980s concerning race was that our family adopted two children from Hong Kong. Nowadays, there is a long-overdue movement advocating the rights of adopted children, and one of the points it stresses is the need to undo the narrative that adopted children of color were saved by heroic white parents. I don’t believe that my parents adopted children to be admired. There is a fine line between doing a deed because you believe it is admirable and doing a deed to be admired, and we all likely struggle at times to have pure motives. I’m sure my parents struggled, too, but I believe they were at least aware of the struggle and tried, as much as they were able, to do it out of love rather than the desire to be admired.

Their motives might have been blameless, but looking back on it now, I can see that our family was in no position to support the emotional needs of our new siblings. My parents did what they could. They found someone in Ohio who spoke Cantonese to help interpret when we couldn’t communicate with them. We made an attempt to preserve some notion of Chinese culture for them by celebrating Chinese New Year and occasionally going to eat at a Chinese restaurant. We did this on special days, like the day they became naturalized U.S. citizens. For my own part, I know that I must confess to mostly viewing them as strange-speaking, lovable but funny oddities, and only in my best moments did I manage the empathy to try to imagine what the experience must have been like for them.

The weakness of the dual color blind/white savior framework showed itself. This framework gave me enough of a foundation to defend my siblings against the—depressingly substantial—number of people in North Canton, Ohio who still used terms like “gook” and “chink.” It meant I recognized that these were my siblings as much as my biological brothers. It even meant that I recognized I had some responsibility to help them, but that responsibility mostly consisted of treating them with “color blindness,” i.e. treating them like everyone else, partly in order to help them to adapt to being American. Color blindness taught us to treat others how we’d want to be treated, but it didn’t give us the imagination to realize others might want treated differently from us.

Families in northeast Ohio who adopted Chinese kids in the 1980s tended to know everyone else in the area who had done the same. We got together for potlucks and camping trips. Some families had far more children than we did, and many were very religious, so the missionary impulse in their decision to adopt was much more evident than it was in my quasi-agnostic, quasi-nominally-Catholic family. I wonder what kinds of conversations my parents had with the other grown-ups while the kids were off playing together.

Maybe because of my 80s-version-of-woke upbringing, my best friend for years, until he moved away, was one of the few black kids in North Canton. He was one of three adopted black kids in his family, the children of a Methodist minister. When my family got together with them, I think it’s quite possible we had a sizable percentage of all the people of color in North Canton under one roof. Once, during an intramural sporting event, some of the older kids in our middle school yelled at him that he should “go back to the plantation.” He laughed at it. What else could he do? I certainly didn’t leap to his defense. Those kids would have pummeled me. I didn’t think being a white savior meant I should actually sacrifice myself. White saviors lectured stupid people, they didn’t get their asses kicked.

Color blindness and white savior thinking made sense to me in an environment where people of color were extreme minorities. Why would they ever want anything but to adapt and fit in? And someone had to be there to stand up (not always very successfully or bravely) to the casual and not-so-casual racism they faced. This was the entirety of the responsibility of a conscientious white person toward people of color as I understood it.

I had occasional glimpses into worlds where people of color were not minorities. We’d play basketball against all-black or nearly all-black schools from Canton or Akron (and lose, badly). Although it was obvious that with these kids, they weren’t looking to fit into my world or act like white kids, that they in fact had their own, autonomous ways of acting and speaking and living in the world, I somehow always wrote that off as an exception. America was mostly a monocultural white society, I thought, with occasional pockets of idiosyncratic non-conformity. But these pockets were in “the inner city,” a place that seemed as exotic and unreal to me as Korea in M*A*S*H.

And then, I joined the fucking Marine Corps

 After high school, I entered the Marine Corps. It was the first time I’d lived in an environment in which whites weren’t a clear majority. When my platoon in boot camp lined up at night in the squad bay wearing only towels, half along a yellow line on the port side and half along a similar line on the starboard side, it was the most black skin I’d seen in my life. It wasn’t majority black, perhaps, but it wasn’t majority white, either. The recruits to my left and right as I stood on the line were black. Three of my four drill instructors were black, including the senior.

The Marine Corps encouraged its own form of color blindness, one it believed made the Corps a unique haven of racial utopia among the mess of society we all came from, a society for which it could not possibly express its contempt strongly enough. The Marine Corps didn’t see black and white, they said. There was only light green and dark green. That was the actual vocabulary used. If you needed to describe a person to someone who didn’t know them, you said they were light green or dark green. If it was a very dark-skinned person, you’d say dark-dark green. (I don’t know why they picked green, the color of our camouflage utility uniforms, when the Marine Corps colors, as they never grew tired of telling us, were scarlet and gold.)  

Although the Marine Corps claimed to be color blind, it could also be cruelly observant about the physical features of recruits. It is, I have since learned, not unlike China or Korea, where someone a little bit overweight is likely to be called “fatty” by his friends. Our black senior DI called a very “dark green” recruit “Daffy Duck.” The black recruit I was probably closest with in boot camp was Wilkens. I don’t know his first name. We didn’t use first names then, and nobody called him Wilkens, either. He had a prominent gold cap on his front tooth, and the drill instructors, with all their imagination, dubbed him “Goldtooth.”

Because Wilkens’ surname was the closest one in the alphabet to mine, he stood to my left and slept in the bunk next to mine. He was a big guy, and this presented problems for us every night when we had to perform a sweeping ritual. We were supposed to grab our “scuzz brushes”--little hard-bristled brushes--run to the bulkheads (walls) behind our bunks, then duckwalk between our bunks, sweeping up the squad bay as we went. When the two sides of the squad bay met in the middle, we’d clank our scuzz brushes on the deck (floor) in unison to get the last of the dirt out, and then the two recruits who had the first shift of fire watch that night would sweep them up. The rest of us would run back to our bunks, tuck the brushes into our boots under the bunks, and return to stand on line. Woe to the recruit who straggled getting back.

Yet straggle I often did, because Goldtooth and I couldn’t both fit into the space between our bunks. One night, out of desperation, as Goldtooth and I turned from the middle of the squad bay to run to return our brushes, I reached out and took his from him. It surprised him, but thankfully, he got the point in time for me to run back and drop both our brushes off and return to the line much faster than I usually did. This went on for a few nights until he surprised me by reaching out to take mine. For the rest of boot camp, we took turns like that, and we were faster than anyone else at getting back to the line before lights out.

After we’d been doing this a few weeks, one night a drill instructor noticed what we were doing. It was a night when it was my turn to carry the brushes for both of us, so all Goldtooth had to do was go straight to the line. Realizing I was carrying his brush for him, the drill instructor asked, in the impossibly sardonic voice only a D.I. can accomplish, “Does he always carry that for you? Is he your little errand boy?”

“We take turns,” Goldtooth answered. He had a high and soft voice that you wouldn’t expect to look at him.

“Welllllll, isn’t that sweet,” the D.I. retorted. “Ebony and Ivory.” He didn't even notice that Goldtooth had used the pronoun "we" instead of the proper "these recruits." 

I think Ebony and Ivory would have become our new nicknames, except that D.I. was suddenly replaced in the middle of boot camp.

When I went to Defense Language Institute to learn Korean, all I knew about Korea was what I’d learned in M*A*S*H, which wasn’t much. As class went on, I realized something about the racial attitudes of fellow classmates. Some who started out training not openly racist at all would become so during training. They were frustrated, I think, with so much immersion into total otherness all at once. I’d been raised to think that racism was always the result of not knowing people of color, and that if we just got to know each other, the world’s problems would be solved. That might be true, but there’s a curve to it. Before things get better, they sometimes get worse as people get their first dose of realizing otherness can be so, well, other.  You have to keep going deeper in to get past the disorienting feeling of it all before you can get to an acceptance based on knowledge rather than a general principle. This takes time and work. Some students got stuck in the early phase.

I am told by a much younger, currently active Marine that “dark green” and “light green” have all but disappeared, and that only very old Marines will still say it. “Most Marines now acknowledge color,” he told me when I asked him. That seems to be the way society has moved, also. The song “Ebony and Ivory” that my drill instructor referred to claimed that, “We all know that people are the same wherever you go,” another attempt from that generation to achieve color blindness by insisting the differences between us didn’t matter. Nowadays, we are just as insistent that people are not the same, and that we need to understand, appreciate, accommodate, and account for our differences.

 Where we go from here

The rise of Trump has led to increased visibility for openly racist groups, the kind that the 70s and 80s were trying to get rid of, the kind I thought were all but gone by the turn of the century. Many people read this as proof that old-school racism never really went away and was just lying low, awaiting its moment. That’s certainly one way of reading it, but I think that among white swing voters in places like Ohio who turned the state from Obama twice to Trump twice, the number of whites who wouldn’t dream of carrying a tiki torch but who are nonetheless unhappy with the change from color blind ideology to the anti-racism they see in their social media outnumber the carriers of torches by at least ten to one. Every person I grew up with in Ohio who voted for Trump fits into this category. They all accepted the notion of color blindness in the 80s, so they have a hard time accepting the label of racist today. To them, racism still means what it did in the 80s: a person who said things like “gook” and “chink.” Changing it to a subtler meaning of supporting systemic inequity and then lobbing the term at political opponents feels unfair. As one friend I know said in 2016 when explaining his vote for Trump, “I got tired of being called a racist.” It was a vote of defiance. If you’re going to call me a racist anyway, I might as well go all-in.

I was born at the beginning of what has been called “third-wave anti-racism.” The first wave was the end of slavery, the second the Civil Rights movement, and the third a post-Civil Rights movement to counter, as John McWhorter put it, “a different form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional.” Judging from the practical outcomes, the third wave has used one effective strategy and one ineffective one.

The effective strategy has been the explosion of narratives from people of color. One of the weaknesses of 70s and 80s color-blind ideology was that the default “neutral” position was white and male. Hawkeye spoke for the person of color, rather than letting the person of color speak for herself, denying her agency. Nowadays, the available novels, memoirs, network dramas, Netflix standup comedy specials, and blockbuster movies written by and starring people of color absolutely dwarfs that which was available forty years ago. I tend to think that if only this change had been made, many of the other changes third-wave anti-racism wanted to achieve would have happened on their own. The default neutral position of color blindness would have changed for enough people that the “psychological abuses” would have changed, too. Even Trump voters from Ohio watch these narratives enthusiastically. If our culture had been able to pass a generation with new voices speaking, the political goals might have followed the culture far more easily.

The less effective strategy has been to call people who still cling to some form of the racial ideology of the early post-Civil Rights years racist.

 

My wife Amy grew up in the same part of Ohio, with as little racial diversity as I did. We went to graduate school in Chicago, moved to Maryland in 2004, and she began working as a teacher in an all-black middle school in Baltimore in 2006. Her only real preparation for her job was that she’d focused in undergraduate and graduate school on black writers. She was a middle class, white woman from rural white Ohio, now teaching poorer, black kids. On her first day of class, she had students fill out index cards with their information. One line asked them to write “something you think I should know about you.” One student wrote, “I hate white people.”

I wouldn’t have believed it, but the two dozen or so black writers Amy had read during college actually was a halfway decent preparation for her job. As a lit major myself, I always harbored the fear that literature was probably kind of useless in the real world, but her experience suggested that isn’t so. She knew the worst verbal mistakes to avoid, and she was able to interpret remarks from the perspective of her students with reasonable accuracy. She has always been one of her students’ favorite teachers. Her social media today is made up of hundreds of former students who love her. One of those former students is now our daughter, and when I deal with the issues involved in trying to meet her needs even with all the resources available today, I can only marvel at the sheer moxie my parents had, flying nearly blind in the 80s.

No DEIA curriculum prepared her for her job. She had no anti-racism set of principles laid out. She was an empathetic person with passion who had read stories from people similar to her students. That was enough to get started with.

The limitations of the color-blind ideology we grew up with meant that only going in with a determination not to judge her students by appearance would not have been enough for her to succeed. In fact, even during the heyday of color blindness as an accepted idea, the cracks in it were apparent. They were apparent in that same En Vogue song, as a matter of fact, because at the same time as the narrator is asking for color-blindness, she also tells those judging her that, “Before you can read me/You got to learn how to see me.” The song realized that blindness has its limitations. Nonetheless, Amy, who like everyone from our time started with color blindness as an ideology, was able to adapt from there. Color blindness, with all its faults, had been a somewhat effective bridge.

For me, thrown into a situation I was also not prepared for, if I had ever been to DEIA training, I don’t know if I’d have ever reached out and taken Goldtooth’s brush. Was that being insensitive? Was I assuming too much? What unconscious biases might be leading me to take the lead? Should I wait for him to tell me what he thought we should do? Instead, I made the assumption that “people are the same wherever you go,” and that he would quickly see the advantages to the arrangement. He did.

This is the strength of the simplistic racial ideology we were brought up on. It allows for action. An imperfect but committed action is sometimes better than well-informed inaction. The 80s gave me ideas that allowed me to do something. My workplace DEIA courses, and the discourse on anti-racism, for all their claims to be about action, leave me wondering sometimes what the hell I’m actually supposed to do.

Rather than blowing color blindness out of the water, I think it would have been more effective to simply refine it. It could have been updated to: If dealing with someone whose background might mean they view the world differently from you, start with the assumption that what you like, they will also like, and then refine from there. Our culture now gives us tools to refine. Color blindness is like the advice given to beginning chess players, such as to avoid placing your knight on the edges of the board. There are situations where you will want to put your knight on the edge, but that comes with playing and learning. A simple heuristic, though, will at least get you playing. The relative complexity of third-wave anti-racism’s message, though, has encouraged many people from my generation who used to think they were progressive to drop out of engagement with racial discourse. Social media’s tendency to flood their timelines with the most extreme forms of anti-racist messages, because those are what provoke rage-based engagement, tend to make it all much worse.

 

One thing both the old generation and the new have in common is a wistful, hands-thrown-in-the-air questioning of why we can’t do better. This was voiced many ways pre-2000, from Rodney King’s “Can’t we all just get along?” to “Ebony and Ivory’s” “Oh Lord, why can’t we?” to “Free Your Mind’s” “Why, oh why, must it be this way?” However, I think the exasperation of the older generation was different from today. Today, the frustration is that the problem seems too complicated to solve. A generation ago, the disgust was that the problem seemed so simple to fix, if only people would do what they obviously should.

There is always a relationship between culture and politics. What has changed since 2016 is there has been a much more intentional attempt to use politics to change culture, rather than the other way around. This was occasioned by one group believing that the culture influencing politics had become too “woke,” which was another way of saying one group did not understand how the goals and aims of anti-racism were an improvement on the color blindness preached a generation earlier. Calls for “equity” seemed to them like the antithesis of color blindness, and the attack on color blindness itself seemed like an attack on something that had done some good compared to the 50s and 60s.

There is always a balance between idealism and pragmatism. If the goal is the elimination of what may be termed “sneaky” racism, there will need to be a mix of unbending calls for absolute justice and also political deals struck to achieve less than the full goal. It seems to me, though, that time is on the progressive’s side, and there was never any need to rush. Rather than blowing color blindness out of the water, a better strategy for the present might have been to refine color blindness by saying it’s a good place to start, but that afterwards, listening and reflection might refine your thinking. Culture is doing a good job now of providing grist for that reflection by producing so many great stories by new voices. If pushing too hard for change all at once is causing a reaction, it might be okay to practice a little Taoist wuwei and back off for the moment, letting the inertia culture is creating do its work. This isn’t about coddling sensitive white people who see their privilege threatened. It’s about a change in rhetoric to avoid losing an election that might mean the end of the world.  

The Alex Perez interview at Hobart was many things, but it was not boring

I was recently in a conference with about a hundred participants. The event organizers decided, for some reason I'll never understand, to start the conference with all hundred or so of us giving self-introductions. Part of the self-introduction was to include the answer to the ice-breaker question, "What's the best job you ever had?" With so many of us, it ended up taking a very long time. Attentions waned early. I stopped paying attention about 1/3 of the way through. I don't think I even listened when it was my turn to go. When we had finally gotten near the end, a guy near the back named Eddie got up. Eddie was not content to stick to the formula, and Eddie did not know how to read the room, which clearly just wanted the introductions to be over. Eddie proceeded to not just tell us his favorite job (he'd been a cop in Philadelphia), but his favorite story about being a cop. It involved a man he'd pulled over on the street who ended up having a sock full of chicken wings in his pants. As he went through his animated telling of the story, which he'd obviously told many times and enjoyed telling, he used a voice that might have been a semi-racist caricature of the person he'd pulled over. At the end, we all kind of laughed nervously, and the event leader, who obviously was familiar with him, said, "And that is everyone's introduction to Eddie." 

What this has to do with the latest literary brouhaha on Twitter 

The latest Twitter culture-war-inspired literary spat (meaning all of like .002% of the US population noticed it) has to do with an interview Hobart editor Elizabeth Ellen did with Cuban-American writer Alex Perez. In his interview, Alex kind of reminds me of Eddie. He makes me uncomfortable at times, and he obviously has his take he wants to get through, and there's really nothing to do but get out of the way until he's finished. But at the end of it all, I honestly did have a few laughs, was challenged a few times, and found it hard to not like the guy. At the conference, Eddie was never alone during breaks, and he was at the center of a few groups during drinks in the evening. I'm sure most everyone needed to walk away now and then to get a break from Eddie, but you also didn't want to miss out on a few minutes with him completely. 

That's not the way most people apparently feel. Many of the editors at Hobart quit over the interview, leaving a statement on their way out the door. They called the interview misogynist and white supremacist, but they also called it "boring." A LitHub article on the subject called it "tedious." It was many things, but I don't think "boring" or "tedious" were it. 

In short, Perez, who went to the very exclusive Iowa Writer's program, feels that the high-brow world of literature to be taken seriously (as opposed to literature for the masses) has been infected by "wokeism." It's run by a cabal of rich white women in Brooklyn who push an agenda of diversity, but whose real interest is to stay in power. They mouth conformity to certain woke principles and demand the writers they grace with publication to do the same. So does the majority of the literary community. 

Yes, that sounds boring when I summarize. I'm tired of articles ranting about wokeism, too. But Perez somehow isn't boring. He has a unique background as the child of Cuban immigrants who were disappointed their son chose writing over baseball. This isn't your typical Praeger University claptrap. There's a sense that Perez has earned at least some of his gripes. I don't think his critique of rich whites and his perception of how the baseline political take of a rich white has changed in the past ten years can be completely dismissed. From his perspective, I can see how he'd think that.

There are reasons to think that the current ideological majority surrounding writing--the kind of  ideology you'd see assumed at places like the AWP conference--isn't entirely sound. Surely, no ideological consensus is ever fully correct. Surely, any political consensus always needs critiqued. 

Some of the same white writers I see on Twitter lambasting Perez I've also heard in private expressing their own doubts. They've sent in stories using fake, person-of-color-sounding names. They've complained that they didn't fit the right demographic to get into a collection. I'm sure a lot of that is white fragility and sour grapes, but I don't think it all is. We all sense something isn't quite right, but it's hard to say exactly what, and it probably isn't altogether safe to ask the question.

I've tried from time to time on this blog to question what it is I find troubling about the assumed ideology I find around literary journals and publishers. I don't know that I've ever succeeded.  The closest I've seen anyone get was this love letter to the profession of literature by Mark Edmundson from a few years back. I was hoping Perez would knock it out of the park a little more, and I was disappointed that at times, he used the lazy shorthand "wokeism" to describe that difficult-to-pin-down something that makes so many people feel uneasy. The closest he got was this: 

What connects people isn’t color or creed or gender or stupid political taxonomies, but the existential despair that comes for us all. How do you respond to that despair once it comes for you? I never feel closer to a person than when they share a piece of their despair with me, and rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with politics or ideology. It’s always about loneliness or heartbreak or loss, etc. It’s about life. The best art reflects that despair we all face back at us; it doesn’t separate us from other people.

I tried to write something similar when I summarized the most recent Best American Short Stories a few months ago. I also did it four years earlier, again summarizing BASS. One Asian Tweeter responded to that part of the interview by saying, "cool unfortunately my existential despair comes from the fear of being stabbed in the street as an asian woman." I totally understand that, and I don't want to put my existential despair that I'm privileged enough to feel in front of real existential (as in, will I live or die) fear. I just know that the writing I remember and that provides solace to me in my life usually is responding to that. 

Even Jonny Diamond, writing his piece for LitHub, acknowledged that "like all clichés, there is some truth to it." That's sort of what The Economist said about Trump's critique of the world order. My problem with Trump wasn't that he was assailing ideas I found too sacrosanct to assail, it's that he did such a shitty, illiterate, incoherent critique of it. Perez wasn't Trump-level incoherent. He seemed kind of like one of the Eddies of the world. I'm sure I'd find having a few beers with him to be more enjoyable than dull, even if I might find some of his ideas confounding.  

Perez and others who are trying to critique what they're calling "wokeism" because they can't find a better word yet are trying to do something very difficult. I'd like it if, when they did an imperfect job of it, the conversation focused more on that "truth behind the cliche" that they are trying to get at than it did on rage about one's beliefs being questioned. Auto-naming things "misogyny" and "white supremacy" is just about as lazy as calling something "wokeism." 

Hardly anyone reads serious fiction now. Novelists have very little voice in public discourse, or at least discourse that affects anything. To tell the truth, I'd never paid any attention to Hobart before yesterday. (I don't write fiction under 2,000 words, normally.) Clearly, something is off the rails. It's off the rails enough that we ought to be willing to hear just about any spaghetti-at-the-wall idea out there for what's wrong. Perez's ideas were off in a lot of places, but I'd rather see subsequent analysis of where the wheat beneath the chaff might be than burning the field to the ground. 

Literary reading and originalist readings of the Constitution

In any Lit 101 class in America, you're pretty much guaranteed to get the following scenario. A professor explains how a text is saying things beyond what is literally written on the page, either through implication or symbolism or juxtaposition of images or metaphor or other indirect methods. One student or many, annoyed by what seems a kind of legerdemain or sophistry, will object. "How do you know that's what Hawthorne meant by that?" Or, "What if Melville was just telling a good story and the whale isn't a symbol of God or the universe or anything? Where does it say that it's a symbol of those things?" And so on.

On the one hand, I admire the spirit of these classroom heretics. It represents a deep-seated American skepticism toward authority, be it political authority or intellectual. You can see this skepticism in some of our earliest literature, like "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In that story, the learned school teacher is held up as an object of scorn and derision by the strong and practical Bram Bones. It's kind of like Disney's Beauty and the Beast, only in this version, Gaston is the hero and the professor really is just crazy. I remember my advisor as an undergrad at Walsh University commenting on "Sleepy Hollow" being an example of how once an idea gets into a culture, it never quite goes away. We still have a strain in America of preferring the rough and manly man to the nerd, a strain that can be seen in any number of Adam Sandler movies or Animal House. The classroom skeptic objecting that the professor's fancy readings of stories flies in the face of good 'ole common sense and is just meant to give the professor an excuse to show off and lord his learning over other people is part of this tradition.

NERRRRRRRRRRRRD!

 

I've dealt with this strain of thinking before as a commenter on literature. For example, when I wrote about various readings of homoeroticism in Lord of the Rings, I got a couple of people insisting that because Tolkien was a devout Catholic, he didn't intend for anyone to read the relationship between Frodo and Sam in a romantic way, and therefore any reading of Sam and Frodo's relationship that left room for romantic feelings was unequivocally wrong.  

The argument against "common sense" readings

It's usually at this point that annoying literary experts like to invoke something called the intentional fallacy. Introduced by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardley, the intentional fallacy sought to tear down what had long been considered to be (and still is considered to be by most ordinary people) the "common sense" approach to literature, which is that "in order to judge the poet's performance, we must know what he intended." (Wimsatt and Beardley use "poet" throughout their essay, as that is the art they are considering, but their argument works nearly the same for other works of art.) 

Wimsatt and Beardley argue that although a work of art obviously originates in the mind of the poet, "yet to insist on the designing intellect as the cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard." The gold standard is not to arrive at what the poet meant, but what the poem itself says. There are several reasons Wimsatt and Beardley see for this: 

1) The design or intention is not available to us, except in what is in the poem itself. "How is (the critic) to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do."  

2) Just like you judge a car by how it works or a cake by how it tastes, so with a work of art. Poetry doesn't mean; it is. Critically, Wimsatt and Beardley point out, this makes poetry different from "practical messages," which "succeed if and only if we correctly infer the intention." Whether this matters when looking at non-fiction like, say, a constitution, we shall consider later. 

3)  When we read a poem, we should read the words as the words of the speaker of the poem, not the author. The author might have views at odds with the speaker in the poem she created.

4) Authors revise works. Does that mean the intent changes? Which intent in the creative process is the one we should take as the "real" intent? 

As a society that believes strongly in intellectual property, we have come to accept that the author maintains not only commercial interests in her work, but controlling interest in how those works are interpreted. New Criticism, though, which adopted the intentional fallacy as a principle, does not accept "the authority of the poet outside the poem." Instead, "the poem belongs to the public," because "it is embedded in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge." 

This might sound like sophistry, but I think even with what Wimsatt and Beardley called "practical messages," we occasionally see an application of the principle. The other day at work, a person above my immediate boss sent me a calendar invitation for a one-on-one meeting. I don't normally have one-on-one meetings with this person. The request came a day after we announced a rather significant reorganization within my office. I wondered: was I about to find I'd been made redundant by the reshuffle? The next day, however, I talked to my teammates and found we'd all gotten the same meeting request. We then deduced--correctly--that this was more of a "let's talk about your feelings after the announced reorg" meeting. 

When I talked to this person, I told her how all of us had been scared when we got the meeting invitation, because we didn't know when we got them that we weren't the only ones getting them and there was no explanation of what the subject of the meeting would be. She acknowledged that she should have been more careful sending the invitations out, although it was, of course, not her intent to frighten us. 

Judging the author's intent in this case is important to how I feel about the author with whom I work, but it isn't important to judging the message itself. The message did something the author did not intend. If a meeting invitation can do this, how much more a work of art. 

So how do you read a text, then?

Instead of trying to deduce what an author wanted to say in a text, the correct subject of literary studies is to look at the intent of the text. If we judge an engineer's intent by how the car works, then for an author, all we have to go on is the text they left. We can still use biographical and historical information in our study of the work, but it now plays a different role. Rather than using it to find the author cluing us into hidden interpretations not found in the work itself, we use it to establish ground rules for "the public" to use. 

For example, if a word meant something when the author wrote it that it doesn't mean now, we should use the meaning that was in circulation when the author wrote it. If a text from 1803 says someone was "gay," that means they were happy. If a text refers to something that happened in the real world, we can research to find out what the author knew or thought he knew about that real event. 

What we can't do is look at events in the life of the author or extratextual statements the author made about the work and use those to try to intuit what he really meant in a work of art. The work of art may say things we think the author clearly did not mean to say, but if they are in the text, then the text matters more than our psychoanalysis of the author. If Tolkien disapproved of homosexuality but his text contains images and interactions between characters that readers often see as involving varying degrees of same-sex romantic feelings, then it's in the text whether Tolkien wanted it there or not. 

This does not mean we go to the extreme of favoring the "intent of the reader" over the intent of the text. We don't read more homoeroticism into the story because we happen to enjoy that which is homoerotic. We don't ignore attitudes present in a text because we dislike them. We are disciplined and keep within the words and spirit of the text. However, "intent of the text" standards do tend to lead to more freedom of interpretation than "intent of the author"-based ones, because rather than assume a unitary mind of genius and a single, coherent purpose, we are permitted to view the text as being at times in tension with itself. 

What's this got to do with reading legal texts?

You might say that it's well and good to read a novel or sonnet like this, but with the law, shouldn't we try to understand the original meaning of the authors? Isn't a law more akin to what Wimsatt and Beardley called a "practical message" than a poem? Wouldn't an "intent of the text" standard lead to too much freedom of the reader, leading to an inability to ever know what any law meant and, eventually, to anarchy?

It's simple. We just get 1,000 psycho-analysts together to read all the surviving correspondence of all the people in this painting, and....

In the case of the U.S. Constitution, of course, determining the intent of the author is an incredibly complicated task. It had many authors, some of whom were at loggerheads with each other throughout the writing. It is a compromise document that went through multiple rounds of edits. Whose authorial intent do we give precedence to? We have, in The Federalist Papers, an extra-Constitutional record some of the key writers left explaining their thinking behind the writing. To what extent is that extra-Constitutional record authoritative in determining authorial intent? And what to make of the fact that the Constitution didn't end in 1789, but has been added to over time, with some additions and changes explicitly overwriting other parts? 

Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization and Alito's attempt to recreate the intent of the authors

Justice Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade as a precedent, seemed to lean, whether he was aware of it or not, toward an "intent of the author" reading. On the first page of the opinion, he lays out the question before the court as whether "the Constitution, properly understood, confers the right to an abortion." This "properly understood" suggests that there is a single, correct reading of the text. It's an assumption in reading heavily influenced by Biblical hermeneutics, which itself is a large part of the reason why the West assumes "intent of the author" to be the common-sense approach to reading. The opinion assumes there was genius behind the writing of such authority that there is only one way to read the product of such genius. 

The crux of the issue for the six justices who went along with the decision was whether the right to an abortion was meant by the term "liberty" in the 14th Amendment. Roe v. Wade rested heavily on the argument that a right to abortion was implied by the term "liberty" in the amendment, the first article of which reads: 

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Roe made the argument that abortion was guaranteed by implication in other amendments, but because Casey, the 1992 case that partly upheld Roe, mostly focused on the 14th Amendment, so did the court in Dobbs. Alito proceeded to undermine the argument that "liberty" implies the right to an abortion through a three-step process:

First, he insists there should be a high standard for applying implied, rather than explicit, rights. To claim a right was understood as implied when written, there is a burden of proof to prove that implied right is "deeply rooted in our history and tradition." He indicates that the court was "guided by the history and traditions that map(ped) the essential components of the Nation's concept of ordered liberty." This is an extremely non-textual source of interpretation, and many have contested the court's prowess in historical analysis, but the court felt highly confident both that it was an appropriate source to use in determining the meaning of "liberty" and that they had analyzed it correctly. 

Having established the added burden of proof for implied rights, he states that "liberty" isn't a very useful term. He doesn't say why, but one can suppose he means that liberty is vague and means something different to everyone. He doesn't consider that this is exactly why the term is there. If we think of a Constitution as a car and judge it by how it works, then one thing we can say about this particular constitution is that it seems to become increasingly difficult to change the further from its original writing we get in time. Perhaps the vagueness of terms like "liberty" is there to compensate for this feature. Future generations may not be able to keep making amendments, but in order to help offset this flaw in the design, there are words in it that have had protean meanings in every generation. They were vague when written, they're vague now, and the vagueness is a feature, not a bug. Rather than consider this (because it isn't explicitly stated in the Constitution that we should do so), the court instead tried to establish what kinds of liberty people had in 1868 and suggest that the Constitution only guarantees those liberties and no more (although this standard also isn't explicit in the text itself).  

For the majority justices, because "liberty" is vague and doesn't explain what sorts of rights "liberty" should apply to, that means abortion isn't explicitly covered as a right by the term. That being the case, the heightened "deeply rooted in our history and tradition" standard applies.

Having first stated that implicit rights have a higher standard of proof than explicit ones and then arguing that the right to an abortion as a subset of "liberty" is an implied right, one that should be established only if we can see that this right has been accepted broadly throughout the nation's history, Alito moves to his third and final step. The court plays historian to determine what "liberty" might have meant--or more precisely what it did NOT mean--in 1868 when the amendment was ratified. The court found that:

Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise. Indeed, abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy. This consensus endured until the day Roe was decided. Roe either ignored or misstated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis.

Since the world didn't think of abortion as a right one's liberty entitled them to in 1868 anymore than they thought murder was a right protected by "liberty," it is not protected in the Constitution. If the nation means to enshrine abortion as a right, it must do so explicitly in a law. It cannot expect the court to keep applying its understanding of modern opinion on abortion in order to change the meaning of a text from what its authors meant by it. 

The unspoken context of the broken balance of power 

It might be small comfort to those who find the decision deeply upsetting, but the opinion does, I think, leave open a possibility for making abortion legal by an easier road than might have once been thought. Because Alito claims the Constitution doesn't say anything about abortion, that means that if Congress could pass a law protecting the right (haahahahhahahhaha...Congress pass a law...but I digress), that law would be constitutional. Unlike the court's decision when it struck down a New York gun law, abortion doesn't have a Second Amendment to overcome. It wouldn't take an amendment to protect abortion, just a law. 

Of course, nobody expects both houses to pass such a law, even though about sixty percent of Americans think it should be legal more or less on the terms Roe set forth. The reason we look to nine godlike wise people in robes to rescue us with their sanity when the law fails us is because the law seems to always fail us. The Federalist Papers explained how the Constitution was meant to protect both from the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority, but the line between protecting the minority and tyranny of the minority can be pretty thin. That 39% of America that wants abortion to be illegal happens to be a majority in a large number of states, and those states each get two senators. Ergo, the outsized political influence in one house of Congress from a minority group.  

It's the same reason we can't get legal weed, in spite of polls suggesting nearly everyone wants it. It's the same reason we've twice in recent memory ended up with a president for whom a majority of people did not vote. We have a system that is showing its age. If we were to set it up now from scratch, it would never look like this, but because our system is so intractable, we're likely stuck with it forever. We're the beta version of democracy, and we have a lot of bugs. 

There's a small part of me that almost welcomes this decision, because maybe it will force Congress to do its job. Maybe it will fix the system, even if it does so by breaking it for a while. But I think most of us doubt that's a likely outcome. When the court recently made it harder for the EPA to enforce emissions laws, one environmentalist criticized the decision by saying the court "was insisting on a clear statement from what it knows is an effectively dysfunctional body." In other words, what was really devastating was that the court was saying if Congress wanted to give the EPA a certain authority, they should say so in clear words, but they know damn well Congress isn't capable of that, because Congress doesn't work. 

Nearly all of us probably agree with this assessment. On some issues, there is a minority who perhaps welcomes the dysfunction. Coal companies probably aren't that unhappy that Congress doesn't work well for the interests of the majority. Right now, neither are anti-abortion activists. But it's not good for any of us in the long run. We know that. That's why the decision is upsetting. Yes, we ought to have an explicit law saying abortion is a protected liberty, but we don't, and we're not likely to get one, even though most people want one. That's why we look to justices to be wise and benevolent gods who intervene to fix the other branches when they don't work. 

Intent of the text and flexibility in a failing Republic

Am I cheating by wanting the court to read the term "liberty" the way 61% of people today read it, instead of the way people in 1868 read it? I said that when the meaning of words shifts over time, we should prefer the original meaning. But that's truer for denotative meanings than connotative ones. To use a somewhat facetious example, if the Declaration of Independence had stated that one of our endowed rights was "the pursuit of gayness" instead of "happiness," that wouldn't be an argument for gay rights. Gay has a different denotative meaning now than it did then. 

But words like "liberty" are nearly all connotation and little denotation. When those words appear in a document, they invite a sort of freedom in the reader. Spousal abuse was accepted and expected in the first century, but few Christians today think that spousal abuse is one of the things Paul's explanation of love in 1 Corinthians allows. Hardly any pastor would say that because Paul wouldn't have objected to it in a husband, it must be part of what 1 Corinthians means. Paul wrote words that were greater than him, which means they mean things he himself might have objected to. He was brilliant, but also limited by his time, which means the fullness of what he wrote wasn't even apparent to him. He certainly didn't have full control over it. 

That's why it's better to read from what the text says than what we imagine authors would have agreed or disagreed with about what the text says. In 1868, assumptions about women did not permit them to have abortions in many cases. Assumptions about women also meant they couldn't vote or own property or have sex with men they weren't married to or work in the profession of their choice. Would the court apply these standards to EEO laws prohibiting sexism? Say it's not in the Constitution? 

Some are worried it might, but I doubt even this court has the guts to go that far. That's because whatever the court might say about the importance of explicit intent of the authors of the Constitution, it also knows there is a limit to this kind of reading. As others have pointed out, even when Clarence Thomas suggested following up this decision with a number of other reconsiderations of implied liberties, he did not mention Loving v. Virginia, the case that overruled miscegenation laws. The Constitution has changed its explicit views of race since 1789, but there is no Constitutional amendment mentioning marriage between races. Still, I doubt this court would go back and use historical analysis to relook at miscegenation laws and argue the Constitution doesn't outright ban them. That's because whatever the court might say in its high-minded and humble "we are but poor stewards of the words given to us" approach to this case, it very clearly is happy to decide for itself what "liberty" means by its own standards, but only when it agrees with those standards. Not when 61% of the people agree with those standards. 

The Constitution is full of contradictions and tensions that threaten to tear any reading of it apart.  Nearly any text about anything that matters is. Authorial intent readings seem humble, because they place the reader at the feet of the master who wrote the words, but in fact, this approach to reading is often a ruse to force a reading the reader prefers and use an argument from authority to defend it. These kinds of readings sometimes force us to seek for a unity that doesn't exist within the riven and difficult text. 

The founding parents knew they were taking on a hard job. They did the best they could. That the result wasn't a perfect success doesn't detract from their accomplishment. By focusing on the accomplishment itself in the form of the text, we have the freedom to in turn do our best to deal with the problem we face in running a democracy. Within this freedom is the only space to fill in the inevitable imperfections. Americans at their best are nothing if not pragmatic. If the rules don't work, we fudge the rules. As the 1935 case Home Building and Loan v Blaisdell found, we should not always read the Constitution with "literal exactness like a mathematical formula," especially when the exigencies of the day obviously demand something else. That same opinion argued that even though the Constitution clearly dictates that no state shall pass any law "impairing the obligation of contracts," still states should be able to alter contracts to help the indebted in times of crisis because 

"into all contracts, whether made between states and individuals or between individuals only, there enter conditions which arise, not out of the literal terms of the contract itself. They are superinduced by the pre-existing and higher authority of the laws of nature, of nations, or of the community to which the parties belong. They are always presumed, and must be presumed, to be known and recognized by all, are binding upon all, and need never, therefore, be carried into express stipulation, for this could add nothing to their force. Every contract is made in subordination to them, and must yield to their control, as conditions inherent and paramount, wherever a necessity for their execution shall occur."

That's American pragmatism. We have a very good Constitution, and the balance of powers works most of the time, but when it isn't working, we don't wring our hands about how it doesn't work. We stick a penny in the fuse box and make it work.  Believing that when the Constitution was written, they slew a ram and thus began the third covenant doesn't give us the freedom and flexibility to deal with our problems. That's always and only going to serve the interests of people who want to turn back the clock. Sticking to the text, especially a text like the Constitution that seems to invite open readings, is a better option. 

It's a dangerous option, of course. It can lead to anarchy if taken too far. The way to avoid going too far is to take the text seriously without taking it as holy writ.