-- Philip K. Dick.
Y'all know I love science fiction. I bloody well named this blog after an obscure sci-fi reference! Sometimes, though, science fiction writers really are the best at capturing that which needs to be said. So it was with Philip K. Dick, who wasn't even really trying to be that insightful. It was a momentary thought for him. Nothing more.
New age mystics and other hucksters have attempted to impute the power of belief to quantum mechanics by misinterpreting the nature of "observation," but... no. Dick. The universe and reality are all about... Dick.
Look, there are going to be Dick jokes in this post. Sometimes I make Shakespeare references. Sometimes Faulkner. I just referenced quantum mechanics, which in not unusual for this blog. I have elaborated on the dramatic theories of Aristotle and Gustav Freytag. I present you with music from jazz giants, and other cultures from around the world. This blog is often a place for intellectual growth and discussion. Today, this blog is all about Dick.
Philip! Get your mind out of the gutter! I have standards to maintain around here! If you want that kind of juvenile humor, go watch the new season of Veronica Mars. I won't spoil the ending.
Anyway, Dick's point was that what you believe to be true is irrelevant. There is objective reality, indifferent to your beliefs.
Politically, recognizing that matters.
Or, I suppose that's the question before the Democratic Party.
Ironically, that was something relevant to Dick himself. He was known as an author of short stories. He was the idea guy. He wrote the novella which was the basis for Blade Runner, and plenty of other short stories. Good ones. He didn't write novels. Why not? He wasn't good at plotting, character development, or anything like that. Just simple ideas, of the kind that were best conveyed in short stories. So, that was what he wrote. Had he ignored that and tried to write novels because that's what real writers do, he wouldn't be as famous as he is because his work would have sucked. Other authors are better at novels. I keep telling you to read NK Jemisin, but she put out a collection of short stories recently (How Long 'Til Black Future Month?), and it kind of showed why she is a novelist. I read it because... I'm a fanboy, and the prologue explained that she was writing the stories primarily as exercises, so it was kind of like listening to demos. There was skill, but Jemisin is a novelist. Work in your medium. Recognize what you do. Dick understood that writing... small... was OK! If that was what worked for him-- and it did!-- then that's what he should do. Reality will not conform to your wishes if you choose to pretend that it is otherwise.
Yes, it was cool when Adam Savage said, "I reject your reality and substitute my own," but remember the show's tagline: Do not try this at home.
The Democratic Party right now is trying to decide for itself whether or not there is such a thing as "reality," as defined by Philip K. Dick, or whether they can pull an Adam Savage.
The prohibition of private health insurance, "reparations," constitutional amendments on campaign finance... take your pick. These things are not going to happen. Whatever you think of their merits or lack thereof, they won't happen.
The fundamental question underlying much of the Democratic presidential contest right now is whether or not the party should acknowledge and respond accordingly to that reality. If they cease to believe in that reality, after all, could they tell themselves that it might go away? A... Dick-less world?
There are several lines of thinking within the Adam Savage faction of the party.
1) The GOP will call the Democrats bad names and lie about their platform anyway, so electorally, it should be a wash.
2) There is a magical action called "fighting" that turns fantasy into reality, thereby nullifying any attempt to apply Dick's dictum to politics.
3) Anything other than all-or-nothing extremism is pointless, and you might as well not run for office, and just hand all power over to Donald Trump, because, wah! wah! wah!
4) Public opinion follows from the top, so when the politicians take positions, that moves the public, creating the possibility of policy shifts.
Let's go through these, starting with 1. You heard this. It's kind of bullshit. More than kind-of. In terms of the events of a campaign, yes, Donald Trump will lie no matter what. Fox News will lie, no matter what. However, we have extensive empirical evidence that policy extremism actually does diminish vote shares in elections. By a lot? No, but in a close election, a little is enough. With GDP growth sitting at a bit over 2%, which is likely, and an unpopular president, there is a Republican advantage in 2020, but not a big one. Policy extremism does reduce vote shares, by a little, but it is measurable. Not determinative, but giving that up when the policies have zero chance of passage, regardless of whatever you think of their merits... is objectively stupid.
Next. "Fighting." You know who this is, and the general attitude suffused the debates. If you "fight," then stuff happens. That's... not how math works. You see, there is this institution called "Congress." So... "fighting." I suppose, in principle, a Democratic president could just declare a sequence of bullshit "emergencies" and allocate funding on a temporary basis for certain programs, but that won't get you things like the prohibition of private insurance. There's no way to do that without Congress, and there is zero chance of getting that through Congress. What these people don't understand is that is was damn-near impossible to get even Obamacare through Congress, and even the public option had to be jettisoned immediately. What has happened to the Democratic caucus is that the left-wing caucus has moved way left, but even if the Democrats got a majority in both chambers and nuked the filibuster, there's no way that even Pelosi could get the remaining moderates on board with that. Pelosi got Obamacare by understanding what could and couldn't pass, and that meant jettisoning the public option, which pissed off a lot of the liberals to no end, so she had to work them pretty hard to keep them in line. She also lost power this year to the moderates to keep the gavel. This magic word called "fighting..." No. Idiocy on a Trumpian scale.
But hasn't the GOP been deferential to Trump because he "fights?" Deferential in a few senses. They have stonewalled investigations, so I suppose if Warren's idiocy were associated with similar corruption, she might be able to "fight" for a similar level of protection. They have also deferred on executive power. But, the programs that the lefties are proposing during the debates can't just be done even with Trumpian ideas of executive power. A ban on private insurance? Congress. And frankly, Trump has been an abysmal failure getting want he wants from Congress through the legislative process by "fighting."
So, no. There is no magic technique called "fighting" that severs Dick. Talk to Joni Ernst if you want help with that.
Third. I... just don't even know where to start with this kind of thing. If you aren't going to get everything the most extreme wing of your party wants, then don't bother?! Seriously?
Does anybody remember Jim DeMint? Former Senator from South Carolina. He left the Senate to head the Heritage Foundation as part of its transition from kinda-think tank to "think" tank. Back in 2010, one of the Tea Party darlings was Marco Rubio. This was before his immigration apostasy, which turned him into an establishment candidate by 2016, but in 2010, he was Mr. T...ea Party. Now you can pity him. In contrast, the Pennsylvania incumbent was Arlen Specter, deciding whether or not to make the transition to the Democratic Party because as a moderate, he wasn't really up for a primary challenge in the Tea Party era. DeMint said "I'd rather have 30 Marco Rubios than 60 Arlen Specters."
Sound familiar? When I talk about the Democratic Party's left sounding like the Tea Party... this is kind of what I mean. Would you really rather hand the presidency to Trump for four more years than to someone who recognizes that your pie-in-the-sky dreams can't pass Congress?
This is what turned the GOP into what it is.
OK, now for 4. This is a bit of a trick because it isn't so much what you hear directly from the candidates, but it is an argument that you can hear. This is sort of an argument that went around in the GOP. There is something to this. People can be influenced by opinion leaders, particularly within their own party. We have models on this, from Philip Converse to John Zaller. The complication is that it gets more difficult when the new message is too far from existing beliefs.
Within the GOP, voters can go from hating Russia to loving Russia when Trump tells them to because they never really cared at all, below a certain age. Sure. That'll happen. However, telling people that you're going to take away their health insurance? Haven't we seen how that plays out? Obama lied his ass off when pitching Obamacare because he knew how toxic that position was, and every isolated case of someone getting booted from their insurance became a Republican campaign weapon after the ACA passed.
Once you move from an abstract thing, disconnected from peoples' lives, to taking away something with which people are OK and replacing it with an uncertainty-- it changes. That's why this is such a toxic position for the general election.
Analogies can be tricky in politics, but think of it this way. Take a bar and apply pressure slowly, and you can bend it. Try to apply a lot of force quickly, and it'll snap.
Reality is a thing. And here's a test of how nerdy you are (heavily conditional on age and gender). Is this a meaningful phrase to you? "I disbelieve!"
If you spent/d too much time playing Dungeons & Dragons, then you get it. If the "Dungeon Master" describes a thing that may or may not be an illusionist's spell, the premise is that you can counteract it by telling yourself that it isn't real. Once this happens enough, it becomes a running joke, and you just start saying, "I disbelieve!" at annoying times.
This is not Dungeons & Dragons, an illusionist has not cast a spell-- difficult as reality may be to believe these days-- and you cannot counteract reality by saying, "I disbelieve!" There is no Adam Savage solution to the political dilemma of the Democratic Party, and Philip K. Dick is still right. The grand ambitions of the far left cannot pass, even if a Democratic nominee defeats Trump, and the Democrats eke out a majority in both chambers of Congress.
Right now, recognition of these facts seems to be a point of contention within the Democratic Party, and those who do recognize these facts are under attack for it.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. This is how the GOP went wrong.
Bonus music for Saturday: Fishbone's classic album, The Reality of My Surroundings.