Not all in yet

The presidential campaign of 2020 keeps to its early timetable as of Monday morning, as Kamala Harris announced her candidacy for President.  I haven’t previously resonated with her major policy platforms — Medicare for All as a solution to American healthcare, and a large wealth transfer tax to increase working people’s incomes — but I’ll look more seriously at them now that she’s a candidate and I’m not associating Medicare for All strictly with Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists.  Her tax credit actually is very reminiscent of Sherrod Brown’s tax credit proposals, though it may differ in specifics.  And I admire her for taking the step to run explicitly for the office at this point, and to try her particular way of organizing the coalition she wants to elect her, which seems clearly not to be the same approach as that taken by the candidates appealing to Iowa or New Hampshire or people who voted for Obama but then Trump in the Midwest.  She’s starting her campaign on Sunday in Oakland, and I’ll be there to hear her, even if I don’t decide to support her to the exclusion of others.  

This “all in” terminology is not my generation, or at any rate it’s not me.  I’ll vote for anyone against Trump, and I want to see someone run who can defeat Trump, and beyond that I want to vote for someone I basically agree with — the combination of those three axioms leads to conclusions such as: 

(1) In California, I wouldn’t feel compelled to vote for someone I truly disagree with, like Bernie Sanders, even in the general election.  A three million or more vote cushion means I don’t ever have to take responsibility for a Democratic defeat based on how I vote in California. 

(2) Most other candidates I’ve heard about I’d give at least some money to during the general election campaign, to meet my responsibility of doing something positive to get a Democrat elected over Trump. 

(3) But in the next two years prior to the general election, I’m much more likely to give money to someone with an agenda I agree with, such as Warren or Brown or maybe Harris, than I am to somebody who just wants to be President.  I don’t know which of those categories Julian Castro or Kristin Gillibrand is in, yet, but I’ll try to find out.

The edge of chaos

A couple of walks on Sunday listening to “The Edge of Chaos,” by Dambisa Moyo — walking to Safeway to get cereal and milk earlier in the morning, and then around the lake in the afternoon.  I haven’t quite gotten to the gist of the book, the arguments for changes that go against the grain of the commonplace, yet, but Moyo summarizes the issues of the day in a way that at least requires me to think about them, and question their solubility within the limits of what’s currently available in the political process.  

That said, I do believe some candidates, especially Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown right now, are putting forward substantial proposals for change and redress that could appeal to more than just the liberal-progressive axis of the Democratic Party — earned income and child tax credits should be winners for anyone in the majority of relatively low wage people in the country, unless they’re being completely bamboozled by their preachers.  And Warren’s proposals to put restraints on corporate and financial behavior are consistent at once with Bernie Sanders’ and Trump’s rhetorics and the thinking of moderate Democratic groups like Third Way.  

I can only hope that these ideas, combined with genuine empathy and outrage at the state of unbalanced advantage to the extremely wealthy and to corporations run by hedge funds (and hence indifferent to any standard of value other than short-term stock price), might make them as candidates more formidable than the less experienced candidates running on diversity issues and tacking the larger problems on only after attaching to their demographics.  

Jay Inslee’s interesting too, but is running entirely on the issue of climate change, which taken by itself is more likely to be taken as one more progressive left coast boutique issue by the heartland, or worse, combined with Green New Deal proposals that throw cost-benefit analysis out along with free market economics as having any role in addressing climate change.

Old folks and youngsters

Walking along the Embarcadero to the ballpark at lunch last Friday, past Red’s Java House and the pier warehouses, was a palimpsest on all the walks I’ve done like that over the years, since I was introduced to Red’s by William Talcott.  The sweep of the promenade is the same, though it seemed wider today for some reason — it does that when there are high clouds covering the sky and the Bay Bridge is captured within that dome, but clearly.  At the ballpark rather than turning back I took Second Street, again the palimpsest but this time a palimpsest of modifications within the basic theme, the street a kind of fugue on commerce and where people go for lunch.  Nothing lasts but everything’s the same.  Everyone seemed to be “a kid,” meaning a post-millennial, kids in their twenties, which had me counting the years to figure out whether they could be my grandkids or great-grandkids.  Fixing on an age of parenting at 23, as was the case with Mom and Dad when I was born in 1957, had I followed their example I’d now have sixteen year old grandchildren, so no great-grandkids yet, and certainly none in their twenties, but the distance was great, not so much in terms of what they know or how they think, which is pretty uniform in San Francisco, I’m not much different from them in that way, but in the mere duration and enduring of events, whether measured by the narrative of mediated news or in the character of the city and the Bay Area itself, invisible changes that become visible, changes that aren’t changes, and changes that finally are changes.  How are they to trust that what I point to as experience is that and not a fabrication meant to divert from the main event or the thrust of what’s being done to them by forces beyond their control.  When I was in my twenties I certainly didn’t hold my world in common with people in their sixties: one the one hand their lives had a different weight, the result of great wars and technological change I suppose; and on the other hand I supposed their experience to be merely residual to my own.

"The Meaning of Belief," by Tim Crane

I found Tim Crane's approach to relations between atheists ("we atheists," I should state clearly) and the religious far more satisfactory than the New Atheism's dogmatics as I understand them.  On the other hand, I'm not sure that the New Atheism's dogmatics really exist except as essayists' proposals -- they don't represent anything that's been agreed on, a consensus that is to say, or anything that has been tested for effectiveness.  Crane's approach isn't really satisfactory either, but that's on the premise held by so many British philosophers that nothing is ever really satisfactory, and that such limitations should be accepted and even made the foundation of a way of moving forward.  I spent twenty plus years as a practicing Catholic who didn't really believe in any of the dogma of the faith, so I can testify to the accuracy of Crane's emphasis on identity and a sense of a need for greater meaning, as opposed to any pseudo-scientific mythology, as the base of religious practice for many.  The only area in which I think Crane really falls short is in his willingness to place very little blame for violence on religious affiliation; this doesn't invalidate his argument, but it causes me to wonder why he felt it so important to attribute similar levels of violence to non-religious groups throughout the twentieth century.  Christians were deeply complicit in the Holocaust, on the one hand; and the violence that led to mass deaths via imprisonment and famine in the Soviet Union and China were not the result of non-religious group practice equivalent to that of ISIS, say, but rather the practices of totalitarian governments.  Such distinctions are meaningful to me, but seemingly not to Crane.

Mo' more nukes

The main speakers at the Commonwealth Club’s “Climate One” last Thursday were advocating for either a little or a lot of nuclear to be built on an emergency basis to address climate change, depending on the stage of their argument.  Their foil was a California renewable energy consultant advocating for the standard “solar + storage” model of how we’ll get through the perils of a system mostly made up of intermittent resources.  The main speakers advocated for not closing Diablo as if this were a relatively costless decision, rather than a political process almost certainly doomed, which is I think how PG&E saw it when they announced the plant’s scheduled closing.  They conveniently disregarded the closure under duress of San Onofre a couple of years earlier due to manifest failures in maintenance and materials.  On the other hand, their argument that solar and wind, even augmented by a reasonable amount of battery resource, cannot possibly lead to a fossil-free power system is I think correct.  If the solution to baseload needs, dispatchability during prolonged periods of low intermittent resource generation, and seasonal fluctuations is not nuclear plants, what is it?  There are at least a couple of existing technologies that could meet the need: long=term gravity-based storage, and hydrogen production and later re-use for generation or transportation.  But neither of these technologies is in fact either economic or easily put in place at scale (even if not economic) at this juncture.  Still, building nuclear plants in large numbers is a plan that would take at least a decade to come to fruition even if the right people were somehow placed in power; and the storage and hydrogen technologies are equally likely to come to maturity in that time frame, if fully supported by some government somewhere.

Of bankruptcies and Brexits

It was odd that though I spent most of my time for days thinking through the implications of my employer’s failure (and by association my own), I felt more in command of my fate last Wednesday than I did earlier in the week, when I deliberately clouded my mind and determined to accept the comforting nostrums given to us in Monday’s series of town halls and meetings.  I may in fact be wrong in my assessments, but the sheer act of working through the appearance of a logical sequence of events provided me with more of a sense that I was an active participant in the process, rather than a passive spectator or victim being asked to keep to a holding pattern until further notice.  Overlaid on my “thinking through,” and the conversations I had in which I tried to do that thinking aloud and see if it still held together, was a half hour of listening to the British parliament debate and then vote on a vote of no confidence, which somehow reinforced my conviction that I was approaching events in the right way: the British debate, unlike a comparable American political debate, seemed forthright, clear, intelligible and yet more intelligent than I could possibly have managed to be in such a setting, one in which every statement was subject to uproarious contention but at the same time equally uproarious support, and in which the quality of speaking was itself a subject of debate and almost of critique in the course of coming to a very serious conclusion.