Protagoras by Plato

Socrates' friend Hippocrates asks Socrates to accompany him to visit Protagoras, the great sophist who has arrived in town, so that he can pay him to learn how to be a doctor. Sophists today would be like teachers of rhetoric which instead of teaching knowledge teach the appearance of knowledge, for a fee. The argument of the dialogue is whether knowledge can be taught which Protagoras defends, but by the end of the dialogue he and Socrates see, to switch positions.

Protagoras begins his argument with what I think is the most interesting part of the dialogue which is an account of the state of nature. All animals are equal to each other because they are made by the gods to be suited to their own environment. The weak have swiftness and cunning to balance their lack of physical strength. Birds have wings and beaks to provide for themselves, while camels have large humps for carrying water in the desert. Every animal has what they need to survive, nature exists in a kind of harmony. That is until man comes on the scene. Men do not have much of what they need to survive, needing clothing and fire to keep warm and weapons to ward off predators. So Prometheus stole knowledge from the Gods and gave it to man, for which he was punished. Humans have enough knowledge to provide for themselves, but this partial knowledge makes them unable to live with one other and so exist in a state of near perpetual conflict. So Zeus sent Hermes to give men a sense of shame and justice so that people could live in cities. I get the feeling that Hobbes got his state of nature directly from this passage, though without the gods.

It's from this jumping off point that Protagoras' argument that knowledge is learned comes from. Each of us is good at what we know, but since we all have enough restraint to live together, it is not by virtue of reason but feeling. To be a good citizen is to exercise that feeling wisely. Socrates argues against this by saying that nobody intentionally does wrong and that everybody acts according to what they think good. So the good is synonymous with knowledge. It is not learned it is already there and needs to be cultivated. The same argument is made in The Republic, that a doctor must know how the body works to perform his task. Likewise there must be knowledge which allows the soul which directs all tasks, knowledge which cannot be learned but honed and refined. Oddly at the end the arguments get switched around and Socrates defends the opinion that the good requires knowledge, Socratic irony. The whole story can be seen in the larger context of Platonic thought, which is the idea that knowledge is the source of the good and that knowledge is not really learned but is an act of recollection, recalling what is already known.

Why Should People Vote?

Ancient Athenian leader Pericles gave in what was a speech for honoring the dead from war a defense of democracy which has surpassed the time for which he spoke in. Pericles defended democracy from the common criticism that the liberality of democracy leads to a decline in moral virtue among the citizenry, namely towards selfishness. "The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty". We trust everyone else to make decisions over us because in some sense we see each other as equals, so we trust individuals to rule their own affairs we trust them to rule over each other. However, despite Pericles' rhetoric, ancient Athens did not grant the kind of equality we understand today. Females and non-citizens did not have any rights, as equality was seen as only between equals, meaning those who already had power in society. Today while one person one vote has been established, the increased partisanship of the system has many voters questioning the sensibility of the other half of the country. If we do not agree with the ideology of the other, how can we extend this to their wisdom in the ballot box? This is I believe a misunderstanding of what democracy is good for. The good of having elections isn't to impart wisdom to rulers but to establish legitimacy, by going through the motions of competitive fair elections. Given data from the social sciences, the outcome of an election and individual voter opinions are largely decided beforehand. We should trust the opinions of voters not as being wise enough to decide the common good but wise enough to express their approval or disapproval of government from their own point of view.

Kenneth Arrow in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values demonstrated in that individual voters can choose an outcome which is not for the public good as defined by their own choices. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem states that a clear order of voter preferences cannot be determined if voters have three or more choices. Formally put an election with fair rules without a dictator will not reflect the preferences of a social group. These fair rules are that every vote is equal to the other one, what a majority prefers is the winner, and no single voter can determine the group's preferences (their choices are independent). From these rules, this situation can happen:
5 votes A > B > C
4 votes B > C > A
3 votes C > A > B
Candidate A is the winner by getting the most votes, yet candidate C is preferred by more voters than A for all voters and would win 7:5 if candidate B did not run. The majority preference did not win because of democratic rules. Even in America's two party system this has happened several times at the Presidential level. In 1912 two Republicans were on the ballot, William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt running on a third party ticket, splitting the vote and giving Democrat Woodrow Wilson the presidency with less than a majority of voters, 42%. This happened again in 1992 where independent Ross Perot ran against incumbent George Bush and Bill Clinton. Perot's 19% of the vote, hurting Bush more than Clinton, allowed Clinton to become President with 43% of the popular vote. In Florida, George Bush Jr. won by only 500 votes against Al Gore. Third party candidate Ralph Nader took 97,488 votes, far more than enough to guarantee Gore victory. There is no doubt most of these voters would rather choose Gore than Bush in a three way race, yet they helped elect the candidate the least wanted winning. The point of Arrow's theorem is to demonstrate how easy it is for the system itself to decide an election and not the will of voters. Even if voters did make the right decision, it may not matter anyway.

Political socialization theory demonstrates that by the time we make it to voting age, our minds have been shaped in important ways by our social environment. There is a strong correlation between the party identification of parents and that of the child when they hit adulthood. Given that party identification is thought to be the greatest predictor of voter behavior, much of our political orientation is decided before we are able to cast a ballot. One can predict an individual's vote just by knowing their demographic profile. Black Americans vote for the Democratic Party nearly 90% of the time, Latinos 60-70% Democrat, and Whites close to 60% Republican. Males lean more Republican and women Democratic. By the time anyone heads to a poll their vote can be predicted. Political psychology has cast doubt on whether political opinions can even conform with reality. When misinformed voters are presented with facts, they don’t change their opinions (Keohane 2010). They actually dig deeper into their beliefs.

Given that voters decide their vote from factors not relating to individual campaigns and may not be able to get an outcome in accordance with their preferences, why should we give the public the power to decide who gets into office and influence policy? Its because voters are wise enough to know how their own life is going. The electorate is wiser than politicians and pundits about what they want. Economist Jude Wanniski made this point in his The Way the World Works. He subscribed to the wisdom of crowds in politics. “The electorate as a whole is wiser than any individual member in understanding its interests, it is wiser than any economist or group of economists.” Wanniski’s model described voters as wanting a balance of economic growth and redistribution which only the electorate as a whole could know. Their vote is an approval or disapproval of a state of affairs, not made in hindsight using abstract knowledge. The job of the politician is to listen and sell their ability to listen, not to direct public opinion. A candidate is successful if they can clinch enough voters to win. This a narrow view of what voters are capable of, so voters should be restricted to expressing a preference and not be expected to make particular decisions. This is the essence of a representative democracy.

(For a political behavior and elections class)

Decline of Voter Turnout

The greatest challenge for the oldest representative democracy in the world, the United States, is that of decreasing levels of voter turnout. The modus operandi of democracy is that in some fashion the citizenry are sovereign, and the political system gets its legitimacy from their opinions alone. Yet over the last four decades the percentage of voters turning out for elections has been on a long term decline, beginning albeit more slowly during the early twentieth century and accelerating after the 1960s. The reasons given for this phenomenon are numerous, everything from expansions to voter franchise to the decline in community participation. A larger theory for such a major and continuous trend is what is needed to make sense of these explanations, to discern a general reason for the decline in voter turnout. An examination of these explanations jointly demonstrates that the rise of non-voting in the United States is due to rational decision making by a significant part of the population to changes in the political system and American society itself. These decisions have major consequences for the future of American democracy, the greatest being a distortion of which policy preferences the political system pays attention to and by exacerbating political polarization despite a lack of matched polarization of the public.

Since the 1960s the United States has undergone dramatic social change. De jure segregation has been abolished, we are more tolerant of different lifestyle choices, and community participation has declined. Some of these changes matter more than others for explaining the decline in voter participation. The twenty sixth amendment lowered the voting age to 18 from 21 in time for the 1972 Presidential election. More people are in prison or have been incarcerated than in the 1960s following a rise in crime levels and the expansion of the War on Drugs among other things. This has increased the population of those who are not eligible to vote. The increase in immigration particularly the illegal variety since the 1980s has also increased the population of those living in America who cannot vote, even though they are counted by the census. These demographic factors aren't enough to explain the decline however. The estimated ineligible population is only 3-5% of the population, if they were included the turnout rate for the 2012 election would rise from 53.6% to 58.2% (Flanigan 2015). Even with the rise in the ineligible population, turnout is still lower even if at a lower percentage.

The social changes which have influenced turnout are the decline of political machines, the dwindling of competitive races, and declining union membership. These changes affect the benefits of voting for the eligible population by making political participation not in the voter’s interest or convincing them it isn’t. The decline in voter participation began in the early twentieth century, partly due to Southern states disenfranchising black voters, but mostly due to anti-corruption reforms. The introduction of the secret ballot, replacing party-line ballots, and voter registration laws reduced the incentive to vote as a public display of loyalty to a political machine and made it harder for immigrants and the poor to vote. Also during this time elections became less competitive. Republicans held the Presidency for 28 years from 1896 to 1932 and held Congress for all but 10 years in the House, and the Senate for all but 8 of those 36 years. In recent years Presidential elections by state and most Congressional races are not competitive. In 1992 the number of swing districts, those within five percentage points of the Presidential vote, was 103. By 2012 the number is 35 (Silver 2012). In Presidential races the number of swing states is now eight or ten out of fifty. Turnout was 9% lower in 2012 than in 2008 in the forty non-competitive states, while turnout stayed the same or increased in the swing states (Silver 2012). Also reducing the incentive to vote is the decline in union membership. Labor union membership peaked at 28% in the late 1960s and today is at less than 12% (Madland and Bunker 2012). There is a positive correlation with union membership and voting, other nations with a higher percentage of the workforce unionized have higher turnout levels as do states with higher levels of unionization. This is because unions decrease the cost of voting and increase the benefits by providing organization and money. Unions educate and organize workers much like political machines used to do.

These changes have reduced voter turnout because they reduce the incentives to vote. The barriers to voting have been reduced over the last several decades without increasing turnout. The Motor Voter Act of 1993 made it easier to register to vote by providing registration forms at government offices, several states adopted voting by mail in the 1990s, and after the 2000 election Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act which allowed provisional ballots and gave states money to move to electronic voting. Still turnout has not increased significantly. The result has been that the political system reflects the preferences of the wealthy and business, who vote and spend more on politics. Studies on government policy outcomes for the last 20 years show that the preferences of average and low income citizens have little to no influence. The preferences of economic elites were 15 times as important (Bartels 2014). This also reflects the growing amount of money in politics, but is partly attributed to the drop off in voting among ordinary Americans. Polarization is also affected by non-voting. While Washington has become more polarized, the majority of Americans remain in the center. Only 21% of Americans are consistently liberal or conservative, while 39% are mixed in their opinions (Steenkiste 2014). Ideological voters are much more likely to vote, creating a feedback loop where political parties and candidates spend and campaign to reach these voters. Those with mixed opinions regularly vote less than 40% of the time, while conservatives and liberals regularly vote more than 60% of the time. Both these trends bode poorly for the world’s oldest democratic republic and are exacerbated by the decline in voter turnout.

(For a political behavior and elections class)

Money as Freedom

During the oral arguments prior to the Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC, Solicitor General Elena Kagan's deputy Malcolm Stewart was asked by Chief Justice John Roberts if under current election law the federal government could ban a book funded by a corporation engaged in political advocacy. Stewart said this wouldn't happen if the corporation paid for the book through a political action committee. “And if they didn’t, you could ban it?” asked Roberts. Stewart replied "If they didn’t, we could prohibit publication of the book". The resulting 5-4 decision in 2010 became one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions of the 21st century, not because the court upheld censorship but because it didn't. Public opinion does not think of spending to influence politics as free speech, and would be surprised to think of banning books as falling under campaign finance regulation. Barack Obama in his 2010 State of the Union address declared that the Supreme Court “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests...to spend without limit in our elections".  It is from this angle, of money as an illegitimate means of expressing political opinions, that prevents most of the public from seeing campaign spending as a form of free speech falling under the purview of civil liberties. This essay will argue that spending money to influence politics is a form of free speech protected by the first amendment.

                 Spending on campaigns to elect candidates or influence the results has been around as long as there have been elections. However federal laws regulating spending in politics did not come about until the twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt as a leader of the progressive movement of the early twentieth century in his 1905 State of the Union asked congress for legislation to forbid corporate contributions directly to candidates. This became the Tillman of 1908, the first campaign finance limitation on organizations outside of the government. Now corporations and nationally chartered banks were prohibited from making direct contributions to federal candidates. Congress extended these provisions to labor unions in the 1940s with the Smith-Connally Act and the Taft-Hartley Act.

              The doctrine that money should be seen as free speech didn't emerge until the 1970's. In 1971 a Democratic Congress under Richard Nixon passed the Federal Electoral Campaign Act. Over President Gerald Ford’s veto in the wake of the Watergate scandal Congress passed several amendments in 1974. The 1974 FECA amendments included a limitation on candidate expenditures from their own money. This was challenged before the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, brought by New York Senator James Buckley against Francis Valeo representing the FEC. By a 7-1 vote, the Court invalidated the restrictions on expenditures under the First Amendment. The majority opinion declared that "a restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.  This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money". Contribution limits for donors were upheld as“only a marginal restriction upon the contributor's ability to engage in free communication." Buckley altered the purpose of regulation of money in politics to be "the prevention of corruption and the appearance of corruption spawned by the real or imagined coercive influence of large financial contributions on candidates' positions and on their actions if elected to office." Corruption only occurred due to "large contributions ... given to secure a political quid pro quo from current and potential office holders”, which justifies contribution limits for donors. Most recently in 2014, the Supreme Court struck down total contribution limits, not for individual candidates but in aggregate spending, in McCutcheon v. FEC. Before, individuals could give up to$48,600 to 18 candidates per election cycle (Sullivan 2014). The limitations upheld in Buckley would themselves be challenged using the language of Buckley.

               After Buckley, federal election laws changed drastically. Congress made further amendments to the FECA in 1976 and 1979 in response to First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti to create the division between hard money that is given directly to a candidate which is highly regulated and soft money not given directly to support a candidate which have few restrictions. In 1978 First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti applied first amendment rights to corporations investing in state-level ballot initiatives. The Massachusetts statute prohibiting the expenditure of corporate funds for influencing voters’ opinions infringed on the corporations’ “protected speech in a manner unjustified by a compelling state interest.” Bellotti said that such laws restrict the information a voter has access to and limits free speech. The next series of seminal cases come in the wake of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002, also called McCain-Feingold. The law restricted the ability of political parties to raise and spend soft money on elections, and restricted issue advocacy advertisements paid for by corporations and unions 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election. In 2003 the Supreme Court heard objections in McConnell v. FEC by plaintiff Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Whip for the Republican Party. The court upheld most of the legislation as preventing "both the actual corruption threatened by large financial contributions and... the appearance of corruption.” The majority opinion was that not all political speech is protected from government regulation. The majority however was 5-4 and composed of a diverse set of views from more liberal justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, and swing vote Sandra Day O’Connor. Seven years later a majority would overturn parts of this decision.

               Citizens United v. FEC is important not for originating the concept of money as speech but applying the concept to donors. At issue was the provision from McCain-Feingold which limited the time when campaign ads could play before an election. Citizens United is a non-profit, tax exempt, 501(c)(3) organization made to promote Conservative principles. They promote their agenda primarily by making documentaries. In early 2008 before the Democratic Party primary elections, it sought to run television commercials promoting its latest documentary Hillary: The Movie airing on DirecTV. The movie was highly critical of candidate Hillary Clinton, and could be described as an elongated version of a negative 30-second television spot. In January 2008, the United States District Court for D.C. ruled that the television advertisements for Hillary: The Movie violated the McCain-Feingold restrictions of campaign advertisements within 30 days of a primary. Dissatisfied with the ruling, Citizens United took it up with the Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision, the majority ruled that Hillary the Movie could be shown, and that the McCain-Feingold provision was a limit on freedom of speech. The Court argued that because previous decisions had established that a right to free speech entailed spending money, limitations on independent spending by corporations and unions was unconstitutional. The restrictions did not survive strict scrutiny serving the previously established definitions of corruption, the legitimate state interest. Citizens United did not break new ground, the principles were established largely in the 1970s. Citizens United applied first amendment protections to independent expenditures, keeping in place the ban on direct corporate contributions established by the Tillman Act as well disclosure requirements.

               Several arguments have been made against spending to influence a campaign qualifying as free speech. The most popular is that corporations are not people, that is having the same rights as individuals since they are legal entities created by governments and given privileges. Corporate personhood precedes Buckley v. Valeo, corporations were given some legal rights in 1819 in Dartmouth College v. Woodward and fourteenth amendment protections in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1896. Further, the right to spend money on elections applies to non corporate entities like labor unions and political parties, as have restrictions. President Harry Truman’s veto message of the Taft-Hartley Act criticized the restrictions on union political contributions and expenditures as going to “prevent the ordinary union newspaper from commenting favorably or unfavorably upon candidates or issues in national elections. I regard this as a dangerous intrusion on free speech, unwarranted by any demonstration of need, and quite foreign to the stated purposes of this bill”.  

             The totality of arguments in favor of money as speech in politics is that the regulation of such activity engages in prior restraint of speech, viewpoint discrimination, does not induce corruption or the appearance of corruption, and does not serve a compelling government interest. Near v. Minnesota in 1931 established prior restraint as an unconstitutional limitation of speech. Prior restraint is when government approval is required for speech activity, which is what laws limiting campaign spending do as the funds are meant to be spent on information and advertising. Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce in 1990 gave the argument that spending by corporations with more money than the average voter distorts the political system and prevents others from being heard, both corrupting the democratic nature of the system and making the public believe the system is in favor of big money, the appearance of corruption. Buckley and Citizens United argued against this on the basis that restricting speech removes other points of view that citizens can consider when making their opinions. Restrictions do not equalize speech, it prevents speech and so engages in viewpoint discrimination against the amount of money or nature of personhood of the speaker. First amendment cases, especially relating to political speech, require strict scrutiny which is met by three requirements; a compelling government interest, narrowly tailored, by the least restrictive means as established in United States v. Carolene Products 1938. Corruption by simply giving money to a candidate is not what is at issue with restrictions on donations and expenditures, but influence which in some way is what democratic government is about. We are supposed to be able to influence the government. Banning direct contributions from corporations and unions serves a legitimate government purpose, but spending on elections where voters ultimately decide is influence which is not decisive for who gets into office. Alternatives like matching funds or publicly funded elections have been upheld since Buckley as have disclosure requirements. These laws are tailored to prevent quid pro quo corruption and maintain public trust.

            Money should be seen as relevant to the question of the first amendment’s protection of freedom of speech and its exercise by individuals and associations of individuals. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” That the Supreme Court has in recent decades been more skeptical of limitations on activity related political speech follows the trajectory of a Court more involved in controversial issues, for better or worse. A kind of Pandora’s Box has been opened for both sides of the political debate about what constitutes civil rights and liberties, which in turn decides whether the judiciary becomes involved with what previously belonged to legislators. In light of these developments, one should be able to understand the argument on behalf of spending to influence politics as relevant to freedom of speech.

(Essay for my Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Class PLSI 315)

Language, Truth, and Logic by AJ Ayer

Mental ejaculations. That's what most of philosophy is if you follow Ayer. Metaphysics, theology, aesthetics, and much of ethics is cognitively meaningless. The whole book is pretty simple, it is a phenomenalist account of empiricism in which sense data is all that exists, but adds to traditional empiricist accounts the idea that a priori truths are not subject to empirical verification not because empiricism is limited, but that a-priori truths tell us nothing new. This is the crucial innovation of the logical positivists, that a statement like 2+2=4 doesn't need to be continually proved by experience or shows that there is non-empirical knowledge. Our logical constructions are just that, constructions of language related to the phenomenal world. 7+5=12 is true because 12 is defined as containing those numbers. This is course inspired by Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

All meaningful statements, from the radical empiricist view, are either analytic or synthetic. Analytic statements are tautologies, definitions of particular experiences which are either true or false by non-contradiction based on how they are defined. Synthetic truths are empirical statements about differently defined observations which aren't absolutely true or false but only probabilistically. When we say a causes b, we are really saying A and B occur close together enough that we assume the appearance of A brings to mind the appearance of B. All this an updated version of David Hume's distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact.

Ayer invokes the old Epicurean argument against those who say that the senses are flawed, limited, or only give us a picture of reality. The senses don't lie, they are passive. It is our expectations based on past experience about what will occur in the future that deceives us. And epistemologically, from what standard do we criticize our senses? How do we know there is a real world beyond our senses if we cannot trust the senses? In reality what we view as reality is a selective construction of certain experiences. The "underlying world" is just experience itself as it enters our perception before we consciously categorize it.

Of all the traditional philosophy Ayer describes as meaningless, only ethics survives in a very limited way. He gives an emotive account of ethics, which does not add truth or falsity to a statement but expresses either our approval or disapproval or a command for someone to do something. All else in ethical discussion is either a clarification of language or metaphysical and therefore meaningless.

The conventional wisdom if there is such a thing among philosophers is that logical positivism especially as presented by Ayer has been refuted. It is said that the verification principle, which gives meaning only to what can be based on sense experience, cannot itself be verified. Or that there isn't really a distinction between analytic and synthetic. Just reading it for myself, it sounds plausible. It is just so satisfying to believe all truths are either definitions or observations. So simple, maybe that's the problem.

For philosophy students, I think that the arguments presented here could be a way to get into analytic philosophy, or at least generate some interest. That's what it did for me, in a very accessible way.

The Environmental Philosophy

The environmental philosophy
9/28/14

There can be only one source to our thoughts, that which is sensation and that which derives from experience. The mind is born with no knowledge other than what has been impressed upon it. These impressions become experience as they remain impressed into our mind after the source is no longer apparent. This decaying sense is experience, which forms memory. Experiences and memories form ideas, which link experiences together according to the principle of expediency.

All the thoughts which are expedient are those which increase action in response to a sensation or decrease action away from a sensation.

There are two sources of knowledge, that of deduction and induction. Something is deductively true by definition, a given phenomena has characteristic assigned to itself and not to others. Something is inductively true by observation, a given phenomenon is observed with another phenomenon and we infer a connexion.

True knowledge involves these two principles. Our knowledge begins with experience but ends with verified knowledge.

Utopia by Thomas More

A classic of political philosophy and the book that launched the genres of utopian and dystopian fiction. It is the story of the traveller Raphael Hylothloday (however that's spelled) who tells of an island in South America which has abolished poverty by adopting communism. There is no money as all receive what they need from the government and contribute as much as they are able. From each according to their ability to each according to their need.

The most difficult thing to learn from this book is whether More actually supported communism, it is a guide for the church, or a social satire. The title represents this conundrum, utopia is Greek for both nowhere and a good place. More is actually a character in the story who meets Raphael, and at the conclusion notes how strange utopia is, but how some of its measures should be replicated.

John Locke

Tabula rasa? I never said that!

What Locke actually said: ¨All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished?...To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.¨

Propaganda & Democratic Elitism

The concept of propaganda as distinct from persuasion is a semantic game. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, ¨I know it when I see it¨. Propaganda usually amounts to persuasion someone doesn’t like. It is hazily defined as something on its own, and has been used in ways most reasonable people would agree are acceptable. The proper use and misuse of propaganda is how propaganda is used, not in whether to use it. Propaganda becomes more important in modern mass society to coordinate behavior for collective efforts like war and serves to instill certain values in the population. The objectors to propaganda speak of its ill effects on public discourse, therefore it is their responsibility to demonstrate exactly what abuses of propaganda are doing, and who they are harming.

The most common objection to propaganda is that it is dishonest. Propaganda distorts the truth at best and downright lies at worst. Propaganda is seen as a deliberate form of deception, made only for the goals of whoever is behind the propaganda. Scholars identify two basic types of propaganda, white and black propaganda. White propaganda does not hide its source, while black propaganda conceals it. White propaganda then cannot be criticized as inherently deceptive. The source and thereby its intention are clear. Obviously obscuring the source is not the only means to distort the truth. Even with the source revealed, the portrayal of information can be misleading, as in the tactic known as card stacking where certain facts which are contradictory to the message are withheld. The fact of life is that even the honest use certain facts and not others. Not all facts are relevant to a certain case, just because two things happen does not mean there is a connection. The misleading use of certain facts has to be proved since the act of persuasion is one of exclusion.

Critiques over the use of propaganda are mostly concerned about its effects on democratic participation. If the people’s will is the source of government’s legitimacy, propaganda manipulates what the many want for the benefit of the few. On the contrary, the people do not speak with one voice and agree what their interest is. Some level of propaganda is necessary for a free society to function. The greatest problem with public opinion in a democracy is reaching consensus, as public opinion is a cacophony of competing interests. James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper #10 that division is ¨sown into the nature of man... zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points¨. Madison’s remedy is to have a democracy of groups which can reach a consensus on behalf of their members. This makes the dilemma of consensus easier by reducing the amount of voting parties, but retains the antagonism of interests by inducing competition into decision making to ensure representation of different groups, like the states through the Senate (originally) and the popular vote through the House. The problem is that groups do not act, their leaders do. Democracy works in the real world paradoxically through elites. It is from this reality that propaganda can be justified as facilitating the public’s choice of democratic elites.

The theory of democratic elitism recognizes that the state is a separate institution from elites in a democratic society. Joseph Schumpeter elaborated democratic elitism in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy as ¨that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote¨. Having an electoral system of wide franchise in some fashion divides political power from economic power, when each citizen’s vote is equal. Even a democratic socialist state without external economic elites will have elites because it remains a state. If voters opt for socialist policies, they do not enforce them. If the people enforced every law themselves, it would be a voluntary organization and not a coercive state. To give government the autonomy to work, a socialist state would result in an ever increasing unelected bureaucracy having control over voters lives. Even in socialist states like the USSR the people remained separate from the party apparatus who claimed to be the vanguard of the people. Increasing power to the state and allowing it to act as a state does takes power away from voters, an argument made by Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom and put pithily by Winston Churchill as a socialist state “would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo”. The existence of the state presupposes the existence of an elite as groups act in politics by accepting leadership.

Given that democracy is a competition over which elite will rule over citizens, it is the members of the elite who run for office who must use propaganda to present the clearest alternatives to voters. The separation of political power into the hands of voting individuals means that a political leader’s job is not to create opinions, but to sell them. Public opinion is a blessing for the various opinions emerging from public discourse, with the leader as the midwife. This conundrum was realized by Woodrow Wilson as a young scholar in his writings on the American system of separation of powers. To bring cohesiveness to American democracy while accepting the reality of its constitutional structure, he proposed the idea of rhetorical leadership. The square of public debate is outside the realm of politics, politics is about action. The politician’s job is to make these inchoate ideas comprehensible to voters. In Leaders of Men Wilson described this ideal of leadership as ¨The men who act stand nearer to the mass of men than do the men who write; and it is at their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds¨. The role of a politician is to mold public opinion, to persuade them that their program is in their best interest. It is not manipulation of public opinion because without leadership there is no public opinion. It is a convoluted mess of competing interests. Propaganda can only sell what others are willing to buy, in the absence of their desire or ability to run for office. ¨The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much-everything for the external uses to which they may be put...men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader¨.

Propaganda is not good or bad in itself, it is really just persuasion writ large. It is called into use in the era of mass communication and the leveling of political legitimacy. The fundamental reality of power remains intact underneath. Propaganda in democracy is persuasion of how power will be used.

(From a paper I wrote for a media & propaganda class)

Political Socialization: How Malleable Are Our Opinions?

Thomas Paine embodied the purpose of the American war of independence when he wrote in Common Sense that ¨we have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.¨ This enlightenment era faith in reason ironically could be seen as propaganda for the American cause. Paradoxically the success of a free society relies on instilling certain values in the population, the opportunities and encouragement provided by men like Paine. He knew that lasting success would require the political ideals of representative democracy to be embedded into the culture. Political socialization is the manner in which individuals gain such political attitudes, and is done through social institutions. Of increasing importance in the era of mass communication is the mass media who have a responsibility for engaging citizens in the political system. The question is what role the media actually has in producing political attitudes, a question with major consequences for American democracy. Although the extent that media effects public opinion is limited by cognitive biases, the media does influence our perception of political issues. By controlling what issues to focus on and the context we consume information, the media gives us the symbols to express our political behavior.

             Political socialization is a lifelong process of transmission and reinforcement. The process can be understood as a succession of stages corresponding to age. Each stage is important because age decides which agents of socialization are the most influential. The primary influence are parents. At an early age a child's parents are the first authority figures. From parents children learn the value of obeying authority, and the parent in turn cares for the child. This results in benevolent leader imagery, when children trust whoever is in charge to do what is right most or all of the time (Clawson 46). At this time opinion of political leaders is a projection of their parents. Children’s opinion of political leaders like the president are generally more positive. School is another important agent of socialization, which like the parent instills trust in authority rather than particular political views. Those particular values begin to form during adolescence. A 1965 study by Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi asked both parents and children their partisan identification and opinion on a number of issues. What they found was party identification correlated higher, at .47, than agreement on other issues (Clawson 52). Jennings and Niemi interviewed the same children again in 1997. The strength of the partisan relationship remained higher than for party identification than on individual issues. This strength however relies on the stability of the parent’s political views over time and the degree of political involvement the parent takes with the child, as basic as conversation. The individual voter’s own preferences are set in early adulthood, roughly from age 18 to 26. Jennings and Niemi’s subject’s views shifted somewhat during this period then remained stable into adulthood (Clawson 54). Early adulthood is a time of great personal change, political development being a part of that. Also of great impact is collective memory. There are events which are so

wide ranging in their effect that the help form the political consciousness of a generation. The Civil Rights Era changed the Democratic Party loyalty of young white southerners who associated Democrats with an activist federal government and racial equality. My 99-year-old Great-grandfather is an example of a pre 1960’s southern Democrat, from Arkansas, who associates the party with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War 2. He sees the Democratic Party as having the interests of poor southern farmers, having lived through the Great Depression. Today’s adult southerners associate the Republican Party with southern identity. The federal government wishes to socially engineer southern life out of existence. The greatest opportunity to shape voters minds is during early adulthood after a major social event.

There is however considerable evidence that political socialization is more complicated than a host of environmental factors. There might be biases inherent in our individual thinking that limit the effect of political socialization. This consideration lies at the intersection of politics and psychology. Psychologists have developed many personality tests to gauge disposition like introversion vs extroversion, but the most important for politics is the ¨Big Five¨ test. Abbreviated as OCEAN or CANOE, the test measure five personality traits; openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The hypothesis would be that liberals should be higher in openness and conservatives lower. In 2003 John Jost and Arie Kruglanski reviewed 88 studies for Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association and found that there are personality differences between liberals and conservatives (Mooney 60). Political conservatism was linked to less openness to new experiences . Openness entails risk taking behavior, which an ideology of order and stability would shun. A yale study by Alan Gerber found that the effect of openness on political preferences is higher than educational attainment or income level, predicting a 71% correlation with liberalism compared to 59% and 56% for education and income respectively (Mooney 66). Perhaps more challenging to political socialization is the possible effect of genetics. The study of genetic influences on behavior was pioneered from twin studies which take two individuals with identical DNA, monozygotic twins, raised in the same environment and record their political preferences. From these monozygotic twin studies, around 40% of our political preferences are linked to our genes (Mooney 118). Our political beliefs are formed in the mind and brain before they find ways to express themselves.

Even with the assumption of cognitive biases in information processing, there is still room for agents of political socialization to act. Even if the mind is not a total blank slate, what allegiances we form from our personalities and the symbols we express them are created through language. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls this context setting framing. ¨Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary-and the language provokes those ideas, especially those ideas¨ (Lakoff 4). Lakoff argues that conservative success since the 1980s has been the result of conservative media manipulating a set of moral values rooted in how we see the world, a “strict father morality” and a ¨nurturing parent morality.¨ These values are like those expected from political socialization, derived from metaphors gained from childhood experience reinforced by one’s culture. “Conservatives, through their think tanks, figured out the importance of framing, and they figured out how to frame every issue. They figured out how to get those frames out there, how to get their people in the media all the time. They figured out how to bring their people together” (Lakoff 16). Even if our political views are rooted in our personality, the media can sell us politicians and policies by presenting them in a way that concords with that personality. President George W. Bush wanted to win over voters who had a “nurturing parent” personality, so he pitched himself as a “compassionate conservative” arguing against those who say we are “slouching towards Gomorrah”, a loaded term for those who favor a strict conservative view of morality. Bush wished to present his conservative values as tough love, not punishing sin. A disposition does not in a practical way dictate loyalty.

Nowhere is this context framing power of the media more prevalent than in today’s media. The proliferation of ideological media, starting with conservatives but with liberals having caught on, has given us evidence of how this power manifests itself. Partisan media’s power is in taking those who are already inclined to agree and giving their thinking direction. Talk radio and cable news have become regular sources of information, despite being opinion and not news. The number one cable channel is Fox News, whose top programs are political opinion shows. MSNBC followed suit by hiring Keith Olbermann and his protege Rachel Maddow, becoming a liberal alternative to Fox. Liberals also forayed into talk radio with the now defunct Air America. The goal of these programs is not to change people’s minds but to reinforce those who are inclined towards their position, as the format of Cable allows for comparatively smaller audiences who pay subscriptions to remain profitable. It has come to a point where a controversial news story has two guests, one from each side, to debate the issue. The show Crossfire on CNN makes an entire show of presenting an issue not from a factual point of view but from the common frames of left and right. This seems like a way to ensure objectivity, but it suggests that there are only two ways to look at an issue. The media adopting this format socializes viewers into partisan political positions on particular views. Whether they know it or not, the media is playing a role in our political loyalties.

That political socialization is limited to the association of sentiment with symbolism makes the power of the media less powerful, but also paradoxically more dangerous. Media can reinforce already held views by adding strong imagery or manipulate our perception of political issues with stereotypes. The mass media doesn't create opinions for us, but it has the ability to direct our loyalties. We can become socialized to positions which do not serve our interests. But there is the potential to bridge our personal differences and socialize those who might be set one way or another regardless of facts not by persuasion but coming to their worldviews. Positive reinforcement can instill democratic values in those who might not be inclined naturally, by transference. Political socialization then is not a value free tool, the way in which we gain attitudes affects how we interpret political reality. The media with its powerful imagery can be the most important agent of political socialization. There is a power to make the world over again, for better or for worse.

Notes on Political Realism

Realism: individual and collective self-interest in the basis of social organizations. In the political sphere self-interest means power. The basic unit of international politics is the nation state, which is the ultimate sovereign authority over a territory and its people. Anarchy is the permanent international condition. There is a constant struggle for power between states which result in balances of power based in unequal distribution of military/economic power. There are superpowers who lead balances of power and regional hegemonic powers who are able to maintain geographical spheres of influence.

Classical Realism: Written for personal purposes, not originally academic. States behave like individuals. Considers the state only.

Hans Morgenthau Politics Among Nations

6 premises
1. States are governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. Allows for a rational theory.
2. Interest for states is power. Politics has a sphere separate from economic interest.
3. Power is universal as a concept, but its meaning depends on specific political and cultural context.
4. Inherent tension between morality and success of a state.
5. Moral aspirations of particular states not the same as universal laws of morality. States couch their goals in moralistic language, but it never works out that way.
6. Profound difference between power interest of politics and other approaches.

¨to search for the clue to foreign policy in the motives of statesmen is both futile and deceptive. It is futile because motives are the most illusive of psychological data, distorted as they are...by the interests and emotions of actor and observer alike.

Yet even if we had access to the real motives of statesmen, that knowledge would help us little in understanding foreign policies, and might well lead us astray judging his motives ...we can say nothing of the probability of their success” Hans Morgenthau

The Melian Dialogue by Thucydides: The Athenians during the Peloponnesian War send envoys to discuss the surrender of the Melians, who wish to remain neutral. Athenians argue that there is no justice between unequals, and the weak suffer what they must. It is necessary for a hegemon to display or exert power, even without a threat. Melians argue that overextension of power can invite retribution from Lacedaemonian league. Athens did lose the Peloponnesian War.

Machiavelli Doing Evil in Order to do Good: Prudence is the value of a politician. Hate and fear are not the same. Love must be balanced, don't become a pushover. Hate invites resistance.

¨a prince, so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal, ought not to mind the reproach of cruelty; because with a few examples he will be more merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies; for these are wont to injure the whole people, whilst those executions which originate with a prince offend the individual only.

¨it is impossible for the new prince to avoid the imputation of cruelty, owing to new states being full of dangers... proceed in a temperate manner with prudence and humanity, so that too much confidence may not make him incautious and too much distrust render him intolerable

¨It is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you...Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women. But when it is necessary for him to proceed against the life of someone, he must do it on proper justification and for manifest cause, but above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony.¨

Hobbes The State of Nature and the State of War: Anarchy is the permanent political condition internationally, is suspended between individuals by the development of states in which a single ruler(s) is given monopoly on the use of force, and whose subjects agree to be bound by its laws surrendering their rights from the state of anarchy. All are equal in the state of nature because of the ability to form alliances and use strategy. The lack of order prevents progress because there is a constant fear of attack, far worse than the attack itself. This diffidence prevents development which takes time and involves trust.

Individuals are psychologically egoistic. Man is matter in motion, a physical entity which seeks to perpetuate motion, otherwise it would cease to exist. The natural law which allows only objects which can perpetuate motion to continue develops organisms which are complex enough to have interior motions, which become voluntary motions. The senses develop from experience with other motions which leave impressions. The voluntary motions from the interior develop memory of previous impressions which guide it in future sensations. Organisms' minds are developed individually. The capacity to reason in man creates a disconnect from immediate environment as we develop ideas, which form our preferences.

Structural Realism: begins with verifiable assumption of international anarchy, no world government capable of controlling all state activities. The state of anarchy is not due to selfish or flawed human nature but to structural imbalances of power among states with different capabilities. World politics revolves around hegemons, regional and polar powers. Polar powers, superpowers, create different world orders based on balance of power among states. There are unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar world orders. A bipolar order is usually considered by realists to be the most stable, as it is clear what sides there are for states to align with against. A unipolar order can lead to overextension of the world hegemon. The threat to a world order are rising powers which engage in territorial revision.

Kenny Waltz

The world, however, has not been transformed; the structure of international

politics has simply been remade by the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and
for a time we will live with unipolarity. Moreover, international politics was
not remade by the forces and factors that some believe are creating a new
world order. Those who set the Soviet Union on the path of reform were old
Soviet apparatchiks trying to right the Soviet economy in order to preserve its
position in the world. The revolution in Soviet affairs and the end of the Cold
War were not brought by democracy, interdependence or international institutions.
Instead the Cold War ended exactly as structural realism led one to
expect. As I wrote some years ago, the Cold War “is firmly rooted in the
structure of postwar international politics and will last as long as that structure
endures. So it did, and the Cold War ended only when the bipolar structure
of the world disappeared.

Structural change affects the behavior of states and the outcomes their
interactions produce. It does not break the essential continuity of international
politics. The transformation of international politics alone could do that. Transformation
however, awaits the day when the international system is no longer
populated by states that have to help themselves...States’ perennial uncertainty about their fates
presses governments to prefer relative over absolute gains...Liberal institutionalists were right to start their investigations with structural realism. Until and unless a transformation occurs, it remains
the basic theory of international politics

Stephen Walt's Alliances In a Unipolar World

An alliance (or alignment) is a formal (or informal) commitment
for security cooperation between two or more states, intended to
augment each member’s power, security, and/or influence
The essential element in a meaningful alliance is a commitment
for mutual support against some external actor(s)
The advent of unipolarity has had profound effects on the nature
of contemporary alliances
Yet there is no consensus on the overall impact that unipolarity will
have on contemporary international alliances
Some writers believe

1. unipolarity heralds the dissolution
of nato and other cold war–era alliances, whereas others predict that

2. the other major powers are likely to draw closer together in an effort to
contain the overwhelming power of the United States and

3. Medium and lesser powers will align with the United States not because
they fear U.S. power but because they are primarily concerned with
regional threats and want to use U.S. power to deal with them

Bandwagoning: Under certain circumstances, states may
choose to bandwagon with an existing threat, especially if they believe
that resistance is impossible or if they are convinced a threat can be
deflected or appeased by accommodating it

Friedberg The Future of U.S.-China Relations

For realist pessimists, the single most important feature of the PRC today is its
rising power...since the start of economic reforms in 1978, the
PRC’s gross national product (GNP) is thought to have increased by a factor of
four and, according to some estimates, it could double again by the middle of
the second decade of the twenty-first century...Given the sheer size
of its population and the rising productivity of its workers, China may one day
regain its historic position as the world’s largest economy...The combination of the speed and the magnitude of China’s growth in recent decades appears to be unprecedented.

As was true of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, so too is China’s rapidly growing economy bringing expanding military capabilities in its train.

...throughout history, rising powers have tended to
be troublemakers, at least insofar as their more established counterparts in the
international system are concerned. This is the case, in the realists’ view, regardless of regime type

As a state’s capabilities grow, its leaders tend to define their interests more expansively and to
seek a greater degree of influence over what is going on around them. Rising
powers seek not only to secure their frontiers but to reach out beyond them

As they seek to assert themselves, rising powers are often drawn to challenge territorial boundaries, international institutional arrangements, and hierarchies of prestige that were put in place when they were relatively weak

the United States is vastly more powerful than China
there is a significant probability that China’s power will not continue to grow at anything resembling the pace of the past two decades. The process of economic expansion, in particular, may well be disrupted by domestic social and political turbulence

realist optimists argue that the United States is now so overwhelmingly powerful that its position is essentially unassailable
Instead of balancing against American power, most other states will seek to jump on the U.S.
bandwagon, or at least to stay well out of its way. Moreover, the very size of
the power gap separating the United States from the rest of the world is so
large as to diminish the prospects for misperception or miscalculation.

The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson

Kafkaesque to say the least, Matheson explores several fears all at once that I and many others have had and connects them to the loss of status among our fellow humans. The fear of death is prevalent in Scott's, the shrinking man, preoccupation with what will happen when he shrinks from 1/7 of an inch to 0 inches. It is the most terrifying thought since like death there is no knowledge of what happens afterward because, like in case of shrinking men, nobody has come back to tell the tale.

Also the loss of physical vigor is a constant reminder of our impending end. Shrinking becomes aging but so much more obvious. He loses everything that he has accomplished in life, his job wife and child, due to something he cannot control. There is no rationalization, no magical thinking that can save Scott. The oh so apparent handicap forces him to constantly adapt just to survive.

But from all this there is a positive ending, contrary to Matheson's I am Legend. Even though he has no hope to escape his plight, the mystery of what will happen at the end keeps him going. That is the message of this story. We keep living through life's hurdles because we don't know what is coming next. The uncertainty of the future and its inevitability ushers us forward.

Windsor's Wave: The Zeitgeist of Gay Marriage

Despite most likely being overshadowed by the outcome of the all important 2014 midterms, 2013 will be looked back upon as the year when support for gay marriage hit the tipping point. As recently as 2012 North Carolina voters passed an amendment to their state constitution banning same sex marriage. In Iowa three state judge who approved gay marriage in 2009 was facing possible defeat, possibly tipping the state's supreme court towards anti-gay conservatives. A Gallup poll measured stronger support for "traditional values" among younger voters. Until November 2012, no state which had legalized gay marriage had done it through popular referendum. Even the Democratic president of the United States had until that point opposed gay marriage. California voters, perhaps the bluests of states, passed on leading the issue by voting for prop. 8. Then in an interview, vice president Joe Biden came out in favor of gay marriage, forcing Obama to claify his position. He choose not to contradict Biden and came out in full support of gay marriage, but only at a state level. His reelection solidified the viability of a pro gay marriage candidate. That November, Maine, Washington and Minnesotta became the first states to legalize gay marriage by popular vote. Minnesotta voters voted down an anti gay marriage amendment. The final talking point that every time gay marriage was put to a popular vote it would lose was moot.

2012 saw the national mood shift, but 2013 is when that turned into real world action. 2013 is pivotal because of the nature of our constitutional system. The constitution's supremacy clause states that the federal constitution is the highest and final law of the land. Since the Supreme Court is the interpreter of the constitution's meaning, their word is what gives ultimate sanction. So when the court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act provision in 2013 which forbade federal benefits to spouses of the same sex, gay marriage gained constitutional muster. It was no longer the product of renegage judges, it could be seen as part of the larger constitutional rights gained for groups who deserved them.

Antonin Scalia of all people realized the legitimacy given to the issue by the majority in United States v. Windsor. His dissent predicted an end to the issue without much struggle over the next few years.

"As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe.
By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition"

The language used in the majority opinion declared the discrimination against same sex partners to have no rational basis, so therefore the purpose of such laws is only to demean a group of people. The laws have no legitimacy, and will fall like dominoes.

And in 2013 within months this happened. The New Jersey Supreme Court struck down that state's ban on same sex marriage, which the Republican governor Chris Christie chose not to appeal. But New Jersey is a reliably Democratic state, so it wasn't going against the grain. But very late in 2013, the 10th federal district court knocked down Utah's state ban. Utah is one of the most conservative states in the union, so this was a big deal. Instantaneously marriage licenses were being granted. This could be the tipping point where gay rights become national and not just restricted to the more liberal parts of the country. There are now 18 states where gay marriage is legal, up from only one in Massachusetts in 2003 a decade before Utah. And now a majority of those states have done it either through the legislature or by referendum, marking the stage of popular viability and not only court action.7 out of the so far 18 are by court decision, 8 by legislatures, and 3 by ballot initiative. Windsor came right when support for same sex marriage has tipped past 50% in national polls, and for the future it seems a dual route will be taken. Democratically in blue states and by courts, following the Supreme Court, in the red states.