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Posts published in July 2020

Denial

johnson

In 2017, Tom Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, published a book that anticipated our current state of affairs. Nichols’s book, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, made an overarching point: with so much information literally at our fingertips everyone can be an expert on everything. Or at least play at being an expert on Facebook.

One example Nichols cited was a Washington Post poll that found after the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine “only one in six Americans could identify Ukraine on a map; the median response was off by about 1,800 miles.” Yet, this lack of basic knowledge hardly kept Americans from their sure-fire opinions about what action the country should take.

“In fact,” Nichols wrote, “the respondents favored intervention in direct proportion to their ignorance. Put another way, the people who thought Ukraine was located in Latin America or Australia were the most enthusiastic about using military force there.”

Turns out our certainty frequently has an inverse relation to our intelligence. Why? Why do so many Americans disdain expertise?

“Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,” Nichols wrote. “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”

The country’s disastrous, fragmented and deadly response to the global coronavirus pandemic is deeply rooted in the America aversion to expertise. Unfortunately for the first time in modern history we have a “fragile ego” in the White House who has made being ignorant about virtually everything a governing principle.

“Across the rest of the developed world, COVID-19 has been ebbing,” David Frum wrote this week in The Atlantic. “As a result, borders are reopening and economies are reviving. Here in the U.S., however, Americans are suffering a new disease peak worse than the worst of April.” As a result, the European Union this week barred almost all travelers from the United States because we have failed to control the virus, and we have failed because millions of us have rejected fundamental common sense.

Back in February the president and his Fox News echo chamber were calling the virus “a hoax” that was completely under control. It wasn’t and people who have spent a lifetime studying such things knew it wasn’t. Yet, governors in Arizona, Florida and twenty other places embraced Trumpian logic about the virus, waited too long and then acted inadequately.

From June 15 to the end of the month Arizona’s totals went from about 1,000 cases per day to nearly 5,000 per day. Idaho’s cases seem on a similar trajectory. Little wonder Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, worried this week that the country could soon be headed for 100,000 new cases per day. “I am very concerned,” he said. And for good reason. Death numbers, a lagging indicator compared to cases, will almost certainly begin rising in coming days.

Meanwhile, every disease expert in the world is recommending the wearing of face masks as a fundamental necessity in slowing the spread. Yet, Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul – hard to believe he is actually a doctor – mused out loud at a hearing where Fauci testified, “We shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best for everyone.”

Delegates to the Idaho Republican convention fumed last week about Governor Brad Little’s contact tracing efforts, an effective and proven method of isolating the virus and containing its spread that has been widely implemented in countries that have brought the pandemic under control.

One “expert,” Heather Rogers, a convention delegate from Lewiston, was quoted by reporter Nathan Brown as saying, “What Governor Little did was frankly, in my opinion, completely unconstitutional.” The key words here are “in my opinion.”

Donald Trump is scheduled to be at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota’s Black Hills Friday for a big fireworks display that defies common sense on at least two fronts. Fireworks displays at the national monument were long ago suspended due to concerns about forest fires and a big crowd of people will create a mountain sized petri dish of virus spread.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem welcomes the chaos. “We told those folks that have concerns that they can stay home,” she told NBC, “but those who want to come and join us, we’ll be giving out free face masks, if they choose to wear one. But we will not be social distancing.”

One of the toughest tasks in politics is to muster the courage to tell your followers that they are wrong. But so many Republicans have lived for so long in the land of science denial, in the universe of expertise bashing, that when confronted with a genuine crisis that can’t be flim flamed away they’re left with little but their own nonsense.

But at this moment, as David Frum writes, “reality will not be blustered away. Tens of thousands are dead, and millions are out of work, all because Trump could not and would not do the job of disease control” – a task that requires deferring to science, accepting facts and behaving responsibly about things like wearing a mask. The task also involves leading the skeptical.

From denying climate change and abandoning the international effort to rescue an imperiled planet to embracing the claim that the virus would somehow magically “go away,” the president and a sizeable percentage of the American population have, as Tom Nichols says, chosen to be ill-informed.

They are left with only their anger and their demands because they have abdicated “their own important role in the process: namely, to stay informed and politically literate enough to choose representatives who can act on their behalf.”

Meanwhile, the cases continue to grow.

Initiative squeeze redux

stapiluslogo1

The specifics are as new and current as Covid-19 but, really, we’ve been here before.

The news is about the school funding and tax initiative being proposed by the group Reclaim Idaho, which launched its effort to gather petition signatures - which are needed to obtain a line on the ballot - last October. Signature-gathering was rolling along, and might or might not have succeeded under the usual rules, when the pandemic intervened, and shut down a lot of person-to-person communications around the state.

In some ways, the impact of shutdown orders on petition signatures for an initiative proposal may be among the smaller effects of the new way or where we are. But it’s significant nonetheless, and a way forward actually is suggested in the recent rulings of federal Judge B. Lynn Winmill.

Back up for a moment to the whole matter of initiatives in Idaho. The Idaho State Constitution was amended in 1912 to allow for voter-driven initiatives as a method of bypassing the legislature if it proved unwilling to act as the voters want. The provision specifically said voters “reserve to themselves the power to propose laws … independent of the legislature.” So the ability of citizens to do this is explicitly part of the state governing policy in Idaho.

The legislature, and a number of other state officials, haven’t always liked that. Starting from a base of setting reasonable requirements for petition signatures within a scheduled period of time - to ensure substantial voter support for the proposal actually does exist, and to keep the ballot from being flooded with initiatives - legislators periodically have tried to make the rules for ballot qualification so difficult that the right reserved to the people in the state constitution would become meaningless. For the last decade the requirements have been so strict that only an extremely well-organized and well-supported effort could manage the task (which the recent Medicaid expansion effort did). Another legislative effort to tighten the requirements still further - to all but eliminate the initiative in Idaho - only narrowly failed last year.

That’s the context for the conflict this year, in which state governance may in another way effectively block the right of the people to make their own laws.

The difference in this case is that the state action wasn’t undertaken with the intent of doing that. The pandemic shutdown orders by Governor Brad Little were issued for health reasons. But the petition circulators, who under state law had to obtain a certain number of signatures during a period when in-person contact was sharply limited by state order, were caught up in it.

What to do?

Since the state’s official (and constitutional) policy is to allow people to pursue initiative efforts, the answer logically seems to involve some flexibility in the specifics of the rules, maintaining them enough to continue to ensure some support for the proposal, but easing them enough to give backers a reasonable shot at ballot status.

When state officials declined to accommodate that, Reclaim Idaho sued in federal court. Winmill proposed one of two options: the state could simply put the initiatives on the ballot, or allow the signature gathering to be done online, over a period of 48 days.

That second option, because it seems so similar to how a whole lot of governmental and even commercial activity is being handled during the pandemic, feels like a no-brainer. We’re being encouraged to conduct all sorts of activity, wherever realistic, online; why not petition signatures, at least during the pandemic period? Where’s the great harm in allowing that?

The state, of course, said it plans to appeal. Reclaim Idaho is, in the meantime, pursuing its online signature-gathering effort. We’ll see what happens when the case hits the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

But the core of this debate is the same as the core of the legislative debate on the structure of initiatives last year:

Is the state government of Idaho going to uphold the rights of the voters as enumerated in the state constitution, or not?

Don’t think like a virus

schmidt

As the numbers climb in some states and bump up a bit in ours, I thought we should take some time to consider the lowly viral point of view. I’m not here to sell you on “viral rights” or equal opportunity for viruses, none of that usual liberal stuff. But if you put your mind into the viral point of view for a minute, this pandemic might make sense. Or maybe not, since after all viruses don’t think. And that might be our problem.

We think too much. Viruses just want to procreate.

That’s all, their focus is simple: make more of me. Spread my RNA across this planet. But they can’t even think of a planet.

Whatever host that serves will do. It just so happens this virus spent some time in some bats and it made a change that allowed it to find a host that happens to be the most prevalent, wide spread large mammal on our planet. Except maybe rats.

Don’t think we humans are too special. The virus really doesn’t care. Honestly, rats would do just fine too. But this Covid 19 virus got stuck with us humans.

One of the limits to spreading its RNA are its ability to transmit itself from one host to the next. And we sure are a social animal, as much as rats. So, this virus has found a welcome host.
The efforts that have been successful in limiting the spread have been what makes us so frustrated; they are antisocial.

Masks are antisocial.

Staying at home, limiting contact with others has worked. But boy, that ain’t fun, and it sure kills the economy. We don’t think like a virus.

The communities that have had full hospitals and known folks who have died sense the reality of this infection. The less affected communities wonder, “Why all the fuss?”. That’s not viral thinking.

Viruses would find these thoughts a waste of time, since all they want is more of themselves spread all over. Thinking doesn’t help a virus, so they don’t. I’m not sure it’s helping us right now. But we can’t stop ourselves, can we? We are thinking, social animals.

The virus doesn’t really want to kill us. A dead host can’t cough and spread the RNA as effectively. So, all those folks infected but not really too sick, who may not even know they have it are doing the virus a favor. They spread the infection much more effectively. The unlucky ones who have to be hospitalized, isolated, ventilator, aren’t nearly as valuable a viral vector as those out walking around without masks.

We sure have our thoughts about masks, don’t we? Viruses don’t think about masks, just as they don’t think about killing us. But if they could, I’ll bet they’d vote against the masks. They just want to spread. They probably like big gatherings too, if they could like something. They are lucky they adapted to infect a social animal.

One of the gifts this pandemic has given us is a bit of insight into how our neighbors think. We sure don’t think like viruses, and we probably can’t, thought we have grown our species on this planet virally. There must be a part of us that has that viral, procreate focus.

It may turn out that how our bodies, how our immune systems react to this virus determines who lives and who dies. The strong, well balanced, healthy immune systems get to work and deal with it like a bad cold. The older, weak ones can’t manage. The over reactive ones suffer too.

This pandemic is an opportunity. It has made me think about the place we humans have on this planet. It has shown me how some of my neighbors think. But a virus wouldn’t care. We should. We shouldn’t think like a virus.

All about the base

malloy

Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin is a heartbeat from being governor, and doesn’t mind mentioning that fact to anyone who will listen.

If some folks had their way – specifically the 15 legislators who gathered on the House floor last week (June 23) and the throng of supporters in the House gallery – McGeachin would be the governor today. What this means is that the effort to recall the governor has traction.

Last week’s meeting on the House floor, amounted to little more than a gripe session, but with plenty of fanfare. Rep. Judy Boyle of Midvale wheeled out a lengthy proclamation, calling for a special session of the entire Legislature and accusing the governor of violating the Constitution. She says the Legislature, as a separate but equal branch of government, should have been a working partner in the handling of the COVID-19 health crisis, the changing of election laws and the appropriation of a $1.25 billion grant from the federal government for the purpose of giving people a bonus for returning to work. For sure, dissatisfaction among legislators goes well beyond the 15 Republicans who showed up last week.

As Little has pointed out, the governor can call a special session for a single purpose. Given the Legislature’s typically snail’s pace, it could take months to resolve the issues identified in Boyle’s proclamation – with no guarantee of timely action.

Nevertheless, Boyle says, the governor shouldn’t be the only one making decisions. “He’s usurped our power as an equal branch of this government.”

Rep. Heather Scott of Blanchard, in her usual form of diplomacy, referred to Little as a “self-appointed tyrant.”

Which leads us back to McGeachin, who has hammered Little about his handling of the coronavirus crisis – and especially his identifying of businesses that are “essential.”

There’s wide speculation that McGeachin is preparing a primary run against Little in two years. If there is a vote on a recall, Idahoans won’t have to wait two years for a Little/McGeachin matchup.

Little and McGeachin are on speaking terms, after weeks of silence, but they hardly are working partners. Since taking office in 2017, McGeachin mostly has been shoved in a corner, aside from performing her constitutional duties (presiding over the Senate and serving as acting governor when Little is out of state). Her communication with the governor during the early part of the pandemic crisis has been through letters, made public through her newsletters.

Little, in his handling of the COVID-19 issue, has followed almost to the letter the guidelines outlined by President Trump and health experts. Strangely, McGeachin – a strong Trump supporter – offered glowing praise to the president for his measured approach for re-opening the economy, while criticizing the governor for not moving fast enough. Still, Little may have spared himself some anguish by talking with McGeachin before issuing stay-at-home orders and attempting to have the lieutenant governor on his side.

It’s a mistake to underestimate McGeachin, but an easy thing to do. She’s the first woman to serve in that high office and has a pleasant appearance – unlike some of the old codgers there. She has gotten plenty of advice from senior members on everything from running the Senate’s business to pounding the gavel. But McGeachin, who served for a decade in the Idaho House, has seemed out of place in the Senate chamber.

She reminds me of someone else who didn’t fit in with the established politicians – the late Helen Chenoweth, who served three terms in Congress and was often ridiculed for her outspoken views and occasionally strange votes. But McGeachin – as with Chenoweth – is a hit with her right-wing base. She interviews well (especially on conservative talk shows) and has a following with her newsletters.

Her political path does not need to include being part of Little’s inner circle, or running against the governor in two years. Her best route would be running for re-election and continuing to play to her conservative base. She could well expand that base by using the kind of personal touches that made Chenoweth so popular with her constituents in the First District. Helen couldn’t care less about what anyone else thought about her.

With aging politicians holding a tight grip on the higher offices, and no apparent up-and-comers waiting in line, the governorship could be McGeachin’s for the taking in 2026.

Chuck Malloy is a long-time Idaho journalist and columnist. He may be reached at ctmalloy@outlook.com

Editor’s note: In last week’s column, the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s position on an issue was misrepresented. The IFF opposed a bill that would prohibit businesses from asking job applicants about their criminal records.