DEAL OR OBSTRUCT?

There is a big question among Democrats these days.  Should they in Congress cooperate with the new president if he, in turn, is championing something they want –  federal spending on a large infrastructure program – or should they mimic the Republicans and oppose anything the president attempts to initiate as they did with President Obama?  Deal or obstruct?

          Of course, even if they choose to cooperate, the details of any negotiations are very important.  But before such a strategy would be put in place, more generic questions need to be asked.  With whom should one seek a deal?  What assets would one be willing to give up?  What is a sought-after gain worth to him, her, or them?  What are the time elements of any negotiations and their subsequent consequences?  What third parties are involved and what are their claims, liabilities, assets, and other pertinent interests in any pending deal?

          Most of these questions – and those who deal in this sort of thing could probably think of other queries – while being generic, are concerned with situation specific conditions, but the first one is not.  Negotiations call on participants having trust among them – at least to some level. 

One remembers President Reagan’s famous quip:  “trust, but verify.”  But in most of these cases, verifying happens only after the fact, once the agreement is struck.  For example, the negotiations in North Carolina the other day are a case in point.

          In a one-day special session of the North Carolina Legislature, the Democrats of the state offered to have Charlotte, the state’s biggest city, overturn a city ordinance allowing everyone to use bathrooms in accordance to their gender – how an individual defines him/herself sexually – in return for the Republicans to drop House Bill 2.

House Bill 2 mandates everyone to use the bathroom that anyone’s birth certificate states the person’s sex designation is – a person’s biological designation.  Charlotte dropped its ordinance, but the Republicans, who control both houses of the legislature, did not meet their end of the deal.

So, one can question those lawmakers’ trustworthiness.  Of course, Charlotte can reestablish its ordinance, but one can imagine how the episode damaged the levels of trust among the different political actors in the political arena of North Carolina.  Having to take the time and expense to meet for the one day session will not be soon forgotten.

          Is there a lesson in the North Carolina case?  One can see that it is not only important to know what the other party holds important, but also to know the source of that concern and how, in the priority of concerns, those particular ones are held.  Often, and usually due to representative language that is used to initiate negotiations – made by representatives of one side or the other – the importance of a concern is downplayed.

One needs to be sensitive to this possibility.  It seems to be the case that in North Carolina there is a general sense of betrayal.  In addition to this backtracking on the deal, the legislature just stripped the new incoming, Democratic governor of important appointment decision powers.  The deal breaking is just more salt on the wound.

          Of course, the consequences of this failed deal are that North Carolina is apt to be further punished by national organizations that have been boycotting the state for different functions such as sporting events, business considerations, and entertainment concerts due to its “bathroom” policy.

The fallout from the law, which the General Assembly passed in March, has been impossible to miss. The National Collegiate Athletic Association stripped North Carolina of its right to host seven championship events this academic year. The Atlantic Coast Conference pulled its football championship from Charlotte, and major companies, including PayPal, abandoned or paused plans to expand in the state. Cultural figures like Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr canceled concerts, and the United States Department of Justice brought a civil rights lawsuit, which is still pending.[1]

This account indicates why Republicans were motivated to deal; the existing law was costing businesses significant revenues and promises to keep doing so.

          But back to the national scene and the pending question Democrats are asking – should they deal or obstruct? – it is easy to judge that “dealing” is the more patriotic thing to do.  To obstruct is merely a partisan move; it caters to the party’s base and energizes it to support and, when the time arrives, vote.  Given the last voter turnout numbers, this would be a good thing for Democrats. 

          On the other hand, dealing and finding common ground would more likely further the national interest.  But in judging whether the strategy followed is one or the other – deal or obstruct – a person is well-served to remember all that goes into such decisions.

These politicians, the ones who will decide the strategy – are pros at the political game.  They are the ones whom the president-elect promised are fools.  He has stocked his team with pros from the business world, so one will see what will happen.  A prudent sentiment by which to leave this topic would be to point out that trust should be earned, not foolishly bestowed.  This is true even among federated citizens.  

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[1] Richard Fausset and Alan Blinder, “North Carolina Fails to Repeal Bathroom Law That Prompted Boycotts” The New York Times (December 21, 2016).  Accessed December 23, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/us/north-carolina-fails-to-repeal-bathroom-law-that-prompted-boycotts.html?_r=0 .

FAKE NEWS

One of the problems this writer identified early in this blog is the lack of political knowledge among the citizenry.  At the time, he offered some studies that supported this general observation.  This most recent election cycle provides further evidence; no, not by who won, but by the role fake news played in the results.

          As the legitimate news services have pointed out, on-line “news” stories started out giving false information about outlandish events that never took place.  Apparently, there is an art involved.  The stories, to be effective, must pick up on certain commonly held beliefs and then be written in a certain style.  In short, they should mimic legitimate news offerings such as in Time or Newsweek magazines.  But their similarity is limited to style, not content.

          This whole business was being given secondary attention among the legitimate press, but this all changed recently.  When a man showed up at a Washington eatery and fired an assault weapon (not hurting anyone) because he wanted to find evidence of a child abduction ring that Hilary Clinton and John Podesta were operating out of the establishment, the existence of fake news took a serious turn.  Of course, no such evidence of abducted children was to be found since the entire story was false.

          The question of why such misinformation spreads – especially when such information leads to such incidents as this shooting or adds to the factors that determine elections – becomes important.  The most obvious reason is that social media provides the technological capacity to spread the misinformation, but why do people believe it, particularly in the case of more outlandish stories?

          This writer wants to suggest a factor, and this factor falls in line with one of this blog’s central claims.  When a nation, as this one has done, adopts a natural rights view of governance and politics, when it sees a citizen as autonomous to define its basic political and other values with little sense of what is legitimate or not, then one can expect a certain segment of the population to drift toward the bizarre and extreme.  This works on more than one front.

          A belief in one’s own autonomy does not necessarily equate such liberty to others.  Part of the credo of natural rights is to extend such rights to others, but this can be lost as it becomes a way of thinking among a general population in which varying levels of sophistication exist.  It is a short jump from “me” having a right to believe what I want to believe, to I want everyone believing the same thing.  And once this jump occurs, then it can manifest itself in many ways.

          For example, such a person is apt to believe conspiracies when he or she confronts a person who disagrees with his/her beliefs.  This, in turn, makes such a person predisposed to believe the most outrageous of stories as the abduction story described above.  There is a lack of fundamental beliefs in such a society – beliefs that place parameters on what one accepts as true or desirable in public policy.  Everyone is left to his/her own devices when formulating political beliefs.

          Not only is the problem that people believe such outlandish stories, but that they, in turn, have chosen to disbelieve legitimate sources of news, since such outlets provide a steady stream of information that counters their beliefs.  Now, one should not accept what one hears via legitimate sources without question; every source of information can get things wrong to varying degrees.  But there is, of course, a big difference between a source that honestly gets something wrong and one that is aiming to disseminate outrageous information.

It is also information that is bolstering a political position.  What has not been clear in the reporting of such fake news is how much of it bolsters conservative positions as opposed to liberal positions.  Is one side of our political spectrum more susceptible to fake news?  Also, to what degree did fake news affect how people voted? 

One can be sure that political scientists will consider these and other questions.  Whatever they find, one can see that what is taught in our civics classrooms and how successful such teaching is are important elements of maintaining our democracy.  Such concerns deserve our attention even when it comes to what is taught in the nation’s schools, for it is civics classes that are primarily charged with preparing students to meet the challenges of their political world.