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The Cognitive Dissident

A blog by Ronald P. Thompson, Ph.D.

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Election 2016

How the Rise of Donald Trump will Benefit the American Christianity

So large parts of the leaders of the evangelical community has embraced Donald Trump whose entire life epitomizes the pursuit of wealth and personal vainglory at the expense of anyone who gets in his way. Even without any discussion of how he treats women or specific minority groups, it is fair to say his value system stands diametrically opposed to that of Jesus. However, at the debate this week he endeared himself to the political Christian right by promising to overturn Roe v. Wade and thus pave the way for the banning of all abortion in at least some states.  No matter that the opposition to abortion was conceived in the Vatican and has only the most tenuous relation to any Christian scripture and none at all to the teachings of Jesus. I see this is an outright surrender by the evangelical right of any real connection to the religion they claim to follow. They are now simply fighting a rearguard action to preserve any political clout when the very nomination of Trump indicates their influence is on the wane.

As presented by Jesus and as practiced by the early church, the Christian religion was focused on helping the oppressed find meaning in their lives despite living under a political system that did not care one wit for their well-being.    Neither Jesus nor the writers of the New Testament ever once suggested or even hinted at the idea that Christians should expect the government or the society at large to live by the morality that they espoused for themselves.   Quite the contrary was true. The early church assumed they would always be the small minority subject to the whims of the larger world and their way of living was what set them apart from the general society in which they lived. Continue reading “How the Rise of Donald Trump will Benefit the American Christianity” →

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Of all Lies and Hype of the Gun Control Debate

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(note this is a repost of an essay I wrote after Sandy Hook.  I still think this is what we need to do, but no one is even proposing it.)

The vitriol has now reached a pitch so high as to likely preclude any sort of reasonable discussion and both sides are 100% at fault.

We have long known that counter to  what seems reasonable, that the more people are forced to defend their own position on an issue the more (rather than less) they become committed to their position.

So every time a story headline on CNN reads “NRA’s paranoid fantasy flouts democracy” everyone who is at all in sympathy with the NRA and even many “neutral” gun owners feel attacked and will resist any sort of dialogue.

Continue reading “Of all Lies and Hype of the Gun Control Debate” →

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The Choice in November

So it is down to a choice between The Donald and Hillary.

As I wrote back in the fall, Trump is not fit to be a small town mayor, let alone president of the United States. His actions since then have only reinforced the fact that he is driven by vindictive, narcissistic, capriciousness; but he seems to have not the slightest regard for the damage his words have.  Just as bad, he doesn’t seem to have a clue about the complexities of the issues.  He has taken the Obama template of “Hope and Change” from eight years ago and simply changed the words to “Make America Great Again.”   Neither campaign actually said anything about real policy. Sadly Americans seem to like vague catch phrases over real plans.  Time and time again I’ve listened to him speak at length only to ask myself “Do any of his supporters actually listen to what he is saying?”  I recall his daughter in an interview point out that her father says what he thinks his audience wants to hear. This is what a good salesman does, and Donald Trump is simply a big dollar salesman.  With this in mind, no one should be surprised that he never seems to feel bound by what he says.  Be sure those Republicans who are now supporting their party’s candidate have no idea what Trump will actually do if he is elected.

Now the line I’m hearing from die hard Republicans is that he is better than Hillary.  I ask if you took away your tribal loyalty would you come to that conclusion.   Yes, Hillary is corrupt in the classical sense. Yes she gave favors to people who gave her foundation money.  Yes, even before she took the Secretary of State’s office she began the process of creating a private network to evade the Freedom of Information laws. In her approach and personality she seems to be Richard Nixon come back to life.  Significantly the laws she worked to evade were mostly created by Democrats in response to Nixon.  She is very far from the kind of person I think should be president. I still think John Kasich was the best candidate, in either party, in the race.

To me the choice is clear: the center-left Hillary Clinton would be far less likely to do the country catastrophic damage than Donald Trump who doesn’t seem to have any guiding principles. Yes, she will have ethics problems. Perhaps she will, like Nixon, self-destruct. Yet, compared with Donald Trump’s utter lack of suitability to be Commander-In-Chief or the spokesman for the nation, I can do nothing else.

If we look at the history of our country morality is not necessarily the hallmark of an effective president.  Both Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush are good moral people, but neither was a particularly effective president.   Certainly this year we no longer have a choice of voting for a good moral person in the fall.  What we have to choose between are two different brands of self-serving amoral people.  And choose we (as a nation) must.  Wishing for the perfect candidate and not voting at all is the cowards way out. Following tribal party loyalty is the sheep’s path.  I for one will not be a coward or a sheep.  Though I have never voted for a Democrat in a presidential election before, with eyes wide open to her faults and failings, I will vote for Hillary in the fall.

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Of Human Migration

In both Europe and the United States, issues of human migration are front and center.

My ancestors left the region that is now Denmark around two thousand years ago in search of a better life in a less harsh climate.  They headed south.  However, there was already an established culture in north-western Europe.  The Celtic peoples populated most of the heart of Western Europe.

My ancestors were not there to assimilate or to work their way up in the established social system. They did not come prepared to pick crops and wash dishes. They came with ax and spear and shield to displace (kill) the locals. And they did. By the time the Romans arrived, the Celts were gone from northern Europe, they had been annihilated by my migrating ancestors.

The Romans held them up for several hundred years, but the southern march continued and did not stop till they had conquered nearly all of Western Europe from the Alps to Brittan to Rome and even parts of North Africa. Though they were not able to keep control of all that land and they grew into a number of distinct language and cultural groups, they never went “home”.  Some of their descendants, the Angles and Saxons became the English and ruled the oceans for 200 years. Today, the richest country in Europe is named after one branch of these migrants (Germany); and, in the United States, the world’s super-power, the largest racial group is the descendants of those Nordic peoples. Whether they are called English, German, Dutch, Norwegian or Swedes, they are all children of those same migrants. Continue reading “Of Human Migration” →

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Just a bit of reality check

I’ve been hearing lots of complaining about “Obamacare causing the cost of health care to rise.”   How sort are people’s memory?  The cost of health care  have been rising constantly for decades.  Heath care costs have risen slower in the past few years. The problem is that relative to income growth it has gotten worse. But to suggest the ACA caused the slowing of income has no foundation.  The truth to get the ACA passed, nearly all cost cutting measures were left out. Bernie Sanders is right, only by a single payer system can costs be cut. To cut costs, someone has to make less money. Now someone, but lots of someones, including doctors, lawyers, drug companies, insurance companies and a whole host of allied businesses. All have a huge financial stake in  keeping the gravy train flowing. That is why Bernie speaking of Never Never Land, not the USA.

For now, we aren’t going to do better than make tweaks to the ACA.  Which by the way is what Hillary is saying.

CPI-Health-Care-Inflation-2005-2015

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Mocked and forgotten: who will speak for the American white working class?

This is a terrific article. Here are two excerpts.

“The National Review, a conservative magazine for the Republican elite, recently unleashed an attack on the “white working class”, who they see as the core of Trump’s support.

The first essay, Father Führer, was written by the National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who used his past reporting from places such as Appalachia and the Rust Belt to dissect what he calls “downscale communities”.

He describes them as filled with welfare dependency, drug and alcohol addiction, and family anarchy – and then proclaims:

“Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster, There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. … The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”

“The differences are manifest in education. The pathway offered out of the working class is to get a college education. Yet at the best colleges there are veryfew low-income students, except for a few lucky enough to grow up in New York City, Los Angeles or Boston.

Differences are also stark around health issues, as well as social issues such asmarriage, family and where people live. The growing differences have made it easier and seemingly acceptable to ridicule the white working class, further marginalizing and isolating them. Go into an office in New York City (I worked in them for 20 years) and you will hear people joke about “white trash”, “trailer trash”, “rednecks”, “round people from square states”. Turn on the TV and you hear more cheap jokes about how they dress, talk and behave.”

My thoughts:

The author is quite right in how the Republican elites attack working class whites, but he is remiss in not pointing out that the Democrat elites do the same.

I spent over a decade as a social worker in Appalachia.  I know full well how these people feel utterly abandoned and powerless.  As a social worker I found that all of the activist and advocacy groups were based on race not income. The Urban League, NAACP and La Rasa are all good groups that do a lot of great work. However, there is no comparable group advocating for the working poor whites, especially rural and suburban whites.  It is hardly any wonder why they feel marginalized and are easy prey for those advocating white supremacy.

These are the Donald Trump voters. I am seeing and hearing increasingly virulent attacks on these low income white supporters calling them neo-NAZI’s and such, but in fact they are not; however, it is easy for them to be convinced the problem is caused by foreigners when no other easy answer is given.  You will notice that working class whites are also flocking to Bernie Sanders. He also gives the working poor whites a simplistic scapegoat (Wall Street bankers); but in reality he, just like Trump, sidesteps the larger problems facing the working poor.

To make matter worse, the working poor whites are increasingly hearing attacks on them because they are white. Poor blacks and Hispanics are being taught to scapegoat whites in general, not just rich whites, but all whites.   Talk of “White Privilege” coming from rich kids at elite universities does great harm to impoverished whites who would love to trade places with their accusers. The effect of this is to divide the working poor and further dis-empower all of them.

It seems the white working poor no longer have any political friends and are consequently easy targets for the elites of both parties. Not only is this immoral, it is a ticking time bomb in the US.

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