The curious use of the label ‘un-American’

One of the features of being an immigrant (like me) is that one has a natural frame of comparison when observing certain patters of behaviors and language. One that strikes me in the US is how frequently one hears politicians use the term ‘un-American’ when describing a practice or person that they deplore. Take for example this speech recently by Joe Biden castigating the efforts by Republicans around the country to make voting harder, especially for poorer communities and communities of color, under the belief that those people are more likely to vote for Democrats.

Speaking at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Biden called state efforts to curtail voting accessibility “un-American” and “un-democratic” and launched a broadside against his predecessor, Donald Trump, who baselessly alleged misconduct in the 2020 election after his defeat. Biden called passage of congressional proposals to override new state voting restrictions and to restore parts of the Voting Rights Act that were curbed in recent years by the Supreme Court “a national imperative.”

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What happened to the British queue?

Growing up in Sri Lanka, a former British colony, while we deplored the imperial exploitation, there was also admiration for many qualities that the British displayed, in particular the orderliness of the British general public. Specifically we marveled at the fact that the British people would spontaneously form a line whenever there was a need to get in somewhere or get something, even in the absence of railings or someone to enforce the line. One example is at the bus stop. In Sri Lanka, as the bus arrived, there would be a free-for-all as people tried to get in ahead of the others irrespective of the order in which they arrived at the bus stop. I used to wish that we would emulate the British in this regard.
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The forces driving ‘white fright’

The blame for the seeming rise of racist words and actions targeting people of color and immigrants has sometimes been placed on what might be called ‘white fright’, the fear of the white majority that changing demographics might undermine their position of power and put them in the second class category of citizenship that they had been able to impose on others up until now. Mark R. Reiff argues that that view is too simplistic and that we need to look deeper into the dynamics at play.

Why are so many white people throughout the liberal democratic world moving to the illiberal Right? The conventional explanation is that they are being driven by fear of the ‘demographic shift’. That is, because of immigration, both legal and illegal, and differing fertility rates among the relevant groups, white people of specific ethnic and religious backgrounds will soon no longer make up the electoral majority in the regions they currently dominate. Losing their majority status, in turn, is understood as meaning that the days of white privilege and political dominance in liberal democratic societies are now numbered
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But the demographic shift explanation is in fact both unconvincing and dangerous. It is unconvincing because it is built on a series of what are in fact highly implausible presumptions. It is dangerous because it disguises the fact that what is really going on is not a battle with what philosophers call akrasia, or weakness of the moral will – the struggle to live up to our moral ideals when doing so seems contrary to our self-interest. Rather, the battle is over what moral values society should embrace. It is a battle over whether society should remain committed to liberalism, even if imperfectly so, or whether it should reject the aspirations of liberalism entirely and embrace illiberalism and all the consequences that flow from this.

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The anti-vax lunacy continues

After declining for some. time, there has been an ominous uptick in the number of new Covid-19 cases in the US. It appears that 99.7% of all the new Covid case involve unvaccinated people.

In Mississippi, a state with a low-vaccination rate, health officials urged people to avoid crowds. And in other vaccine-hesitant communities, there are new efforts to push back the Delta variant by encouraging more people to get the shot, Michael George reports for “CBS This Morning: Saturday.”

The NAACP put boots on the ground in Louisville neighborhoods where only 30% of residents have been vaccinated, hoping flyers and conversations get more people to get shots.

The effort comes as cases are rising in 26 states. Hospitalization rates are up in 17 states — 27% in Florida, almost exclusively among the unvaccinated.

The far corners of Utah are hit hard, too.

“We’re seeing people that are extremely sick with it,” said Dr. Greg Gardner, chief of emergency medicine at Mountain West Hospital in Tooele, Utah. “A lot sicker than what they were the majority of the time in the winter time.”

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Background to the racist reactions to England’s loss

In a post yesterday, I expressed my disgust at the online racist abuse that was dished out to the three English players Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka, and Jadon Sancho who could not score on their penalty attempts and that resulted in Italy’s victory. I had not followed the tournament and so had not known about what happened earlier. Apparently the English team had earlier in the tournament, like Colin Kapernick in the US, taken a knee to protest racism and injustice and, again like with Kapernick, had been booed by some fans. Both UK prime minister Boris Johnson and home secretary Priti Patel, racism enablers like their hero Donald Trump, took the opportunity to pander to racists and had not unequivocally condemned that earlier display and had even seemed to excuse it.

[B]oth Patel and Johnson have repeatedly stopped short of criticising fans who booed England players for taking the knee in a stand against racism. Patel has said taking the knee represents “gesture politics” and whether to boo the England players was a “choice” for fans to make.

As the players were subjected to a barrage of online abuse, one Tory MP had to apologise for suggesting Rashford should have concentrated on football rather than “playing politics” in an apparent reference to his campaign for free school meals.

Natalie Elphicke, the Tory MP for Dover and Deal, made the comment in a WhatsApp message to fellow MPs, suggesting Rashford should not have spent time on his successful campaign for free school meals for low-income pupils in the school holidays.

In comments first reported by GB News, Elphicke said: “They lost – would it be ungenerous to suggest Rashford should have spent more time perfecting his game and less time playing politics?”

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Racist sports ‘fans’

There have been ugly racist sentiments expressed on social media after England’s loss to Italy in the European Cup Final. Racist abuse by sports fans is sadly not uncommon but usually it is aimed at players on the opposing team. This abuse allegedly by English fans was aimed at their own team’s players. This was because in the penalty shootout that decided the game, the three England players who did not score goals were all players of color and now they are being blamed for the loss.
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The proxy Civil War goes on, now over statues

Charlottesville, Virginia was the scene of the infamous rally in August 2017 in which white supremacists marched in the night bearing tiki torches and chanting that white dominance must be defended and yelling things like “Jews will not replace us”. The next day there were clashes between them and anti-racist protestors that resulted in a young woman Heather Heyer being killed when a car ran over her. It was driven by a white supremacist who was later convicted of murder.

That rally sparked movements to remove monuments honoring the Confederacy and yesterday two massive statues in the city of the leaders of the rebellion Robert E Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, which the white supremacists had used as their rallying cry, were removed and put into storage. There was a small crowd present to cheer the removal.


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Ranked choice voting and approval voting

There are many problems with the most common voting system in the US which is the plurality system where each voters picks just one candidate and the person who gets the most votes wins, even if they do not reach a 50%+1 majority. The problem with this method is obvious, that if there are three or more candidates, it forces a voter to sometimes have to choose between voting for the person they really like or voting for someone they like less because that person has a better chance of beating the third person whom they really dislike. This voting for the ‘lesser of two evils’ means that an ‘evil’ person or party will always win.
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What the Nina Turner candidacy reveals about the Democratic party establishment

In the US, the two major political parties of Democrats and Republicans are not really distinguished by their class structure. Both parties contain the full spectrum of classes from the very wealthy to the working class, the urban and the rural. The main difference is the relative weight that is given to the various constituencies that make up the parties. The primary races, where each party selects its candidates for general elections, reveal the strength of the various factions. Because of gerrymandering, demographics, and geography, most elected offices are safely Republican or Democratic so the primary elections are where the action is and where the fissures are most clearly revealed, because the need to defeat the Republican opponent is not a major factor in the calculus.
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