Years of obstructionism has destroyed the GOP in California

A common state politics nerd tattoo

There's been a lot of Republican soul-searching since the election, mostly focusing on how the party needs to rethink its xenophobic approach to Hispanics. No where is this more true than in California, where Hispanics comprise around 38% of the population, which is about parity with whites. Romney lost here in a landslide, and at the state level Republicans fared no better.

Columnist George Skelton in the LAT ticks off a list of Republican defeats:

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein drew only token Republican opposition and won by 23 points. 

Democrats, at last count, were gaining four congressional seats in California.

The stunner was the state Assembly, where Democrats apparently achieved a historic supermajority to match the party's similar feat in the Senate.

I think what you're seeing here--total Republican irrelevance in California--is the inevitable result of what has been poisoning California politics for decades, namely the conversion of the legislature to a supermajoritarian body on any law involving budgets and revenue. By requiring a 2/3 majority in the legislature in order to raise taxes, the state constitution has effectively granted the minority party the power to control the political agenda via obstruction. This has led to gridlock and insolvency over the years, and to what almost everyone agrees is a dysfunctional state government unable to make hard budgetary choices.

But it has also atrophied the Republican party, rewarding anti-tax extremists with real power and removing any incentive for striking deals and compromises. Ideologues thrive in this environment as they are able to portray themselves as heroic last lines of defense--and show results--but moderates are gradually purged from the party, their ability to make deals useless so long as the party is successful with obstructionism. Over the years the Calfornia GOP has evolved into an institution optimized for obstruction, very good at ideological purity and solidarity but completely clueless when it comes to bipartisan compromise and the art of cobbling together an ideological diverse constituency to support it.

Now--due to a combination of growing alarm at dysfunctional state government, rejiggering of district boundaries, and the continued demographic shift away from "establishment whites", Republicans find themselves completely ousted and on the wrong end of a Democractic supermajority that they can no longer obstruct, and that no longer needs to seek their bi-partisan acquiescence.

In a way this will be healthy for the Republicans, as now they will once again have the political incentive to make bargains and extract concessions from inevitable Democratic legislation. I predict a move towards more moderation and deal-making in the state legislature in the coming years--and far more functional government than we've seen over the last few decades.

I hope that in addition to solving California's eternal budget problems, both sides come to see the harm of supermajoritarian requirements in the legislature and return to the days where a budget--or a tax increase--can be passed with a simple majority, subject to the subsequent approval of the citizens come election time. That's how it's supposed to work.

Review: The Beach

A few months ago I decided to take a break by watching The Beach, which someone had put on in the common area of the hostel I was staying at in Thailand. The choice was apropos: the movie is all about a young traveler Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) who visits Thailand but spurns the commercialized experience and boorish, ugly-American behavior of the typical tourist.

Playing the familiar archetype of an idealistic young man discontented with the world and seeking the authentic, Richard rails against the "cancers" and "parasites" that spend their time in Thailand binge drinking out of large plastic cups and whooping and shouting obnoxiously. He does this in a self-important, monotone narrative that cinematic convention--from classic noir to Apocolypse Now to Terminator 2--has deemed the appropriate way of conveying a cynical protagonist's world-weary pronouncements about the human condition. Helpfully, in the world of The Beach, figurative ugliness and beauty are reinforced by the actual, physical kind: the good tourists, who are either basically decent or amiable eccentrics, are invariably good looking (Richard, his French friends, most of the inhabitants of the commune), whereas the bad tourists, who are seldom seen without a drink in hand, nonsensically shouting, are invariably plain or cartoonish (the surf dude interlopers, the various shots of revelers). At one point the beautiful DiCaprio looks with disgust at a fat, hairy tourist as a Thai masseuse forcefully massages his buttocks. An ugly American indeed! The audience is all but asked to shake its collective head at the shame of it.

Eventually Richard finds himself on a real adventure: mysterious map in hand he sets out to find a paradise, a rumored island with surpassingly beautiful beaches, ample supplies of marijuana, and--most important of all--no tourists. When he gets there he finds that in fact there is a community of like-minded travelers who have settled there and have, over the years, created a sort of hippy-commune for themselves, where they frolic and do hedonistic things during the day, along with a healthy dose of chores like hunting for fish, doing carpentry work around the commune, and light gardening. However, interestingly, Richard himself recognizes that this utopia, for all its alternative-lifestyle trappings, is in substance no different than the sort of mainstream tourism he despises. It was, in the end, "just a beach resort--for people who don't like beach resorts". And throughout his stay, he only refers to his life in the commune as one dedicated to "pleasure" and "fun"--there is no overriding pretense of anything more important going on, either religious/spiritual or ideologically (the place is not connected with environmentalism, for example). For Richard, we are led to believe that--while certainly an improvement over the obnoxious drunken hordes of Koh Phangan, and an interesting and unique enough experience in itself--it has not satisfied his search for the truly authentic and meaningful travel experience. Our protagonist, surprisingly shrewd, has retained his cynicism.

All of which makes what follows so baffling: for even though Richard has admitted the underlying frivolity of his supposed utopia, he goes ahead and jettisons all notions of morality and common decency in order to preserve it. It begins with his indifference to the painful cries of a member who is denied permission to leave the island to visit a dentist, and who has the tooth forcibly removed by the commune's carpenter; and accelerates quickly as he passively allows the murder of four innocent tourists, and soon after goes ahead and deliberately murders an injured man in cold blood by suffocating him. All of these actions, to one degree or another, are motivated by the desire to keep the secret of the commune from leaking--for the commune can only exist in isolation from the hideous tourist-industrial complex that has ravaged the rest of Thailand. His actions--cold blooded murder to preserve what he himself refers to as mere "fun"--render him a monstrous character who ought not to have a shred of the audience's sympathy; yet the movie continues to treat him as the same credible narrator who not long ago encouraged us to judgmentally leer at a tourist merely for receiving a massage in a tacky bathing suit.

This is where I have trouble with The Beach. At first it seems to treat the problem of tourism, of authenticity in travel, with a surprisingly subtle handling: we are hit over the head with the awfulness of the typical drunken partier only to have this complicated by the observation that even the antithesis of this--the alternative life-style hippy commune--is morally no better, both being exercises in vapid hedonism by Westerners who are incurious about and insulated from the authentic native culture they are purportedly there to explore. But Richard's reaction is not to reject the commune and continue his search for the authentic, perhaps by, I don't know, interacting with some locals--no, instead he abruptly leaves the commune and runs around like an idiot in the jungle for a while. What is he doing in there? It is difficult to say. Sometimes it feels like he has rejected all of society in a contented Robinson Crusoe sort of way; other times it feels as if he has reverted to some kind of Rambo-style Vietnam commando mode that the audience had not previously been informed about. Watch him slowly eat a bug! Watch him unblinkingly track his human prey! He even sets a rudimentary jungle booby-trap that seriously maims a druglord's henchman. It is, to me, a nonsensical mish-mash of various Vietnam/jungle tropes that don't connect with the first part of the story.

Eventually he wends his way back to the commune, where--after the aforementioned cold-blooded, first degree murder of a fellow member--he collects the original friends he arrived with and flees the imploding mini-world he had killed to defend, as the druglords run them out by force and their charismatic, murderous-psychopath leader is exposed as a murderous psychopath. Time passes, and we end on a winsome, sentimental note: back in civilization, presumably Bangkok, Richard is checking his email (with the improbable user name "Richard"--but we'll look past that), and has received a photo from his friend he had gone to the island with: it is a group photo of everyone in the commune, jumping and cheering in merriment. The movie insanely asks us to sigh along with Richard at those great times they once had, even though one of the pictured men was killed by a shark and another one was murdered by Richard himself. The movie shows no sign that it is aware of this startling juxtaposition; there is neither wink nor nod, at least that I can detect.

So for me The Beach begins promising but ends in frustration, seeming to fall into thematic incoherence just when it starts getting interesting. Interesting problems are posed, but not only is no remedy or resolution forthcoming, but the latter part of the movie doesn't even seem aware that the problems were posed in the first place. Lame.

Science, theism, and different types of belief

Thomas Nagel has a review in the New York Review of Books of Alvin Plantinga's latest, Where the Conflict Really Lies. Nagel says the book's overall claim is that, quoting Plantinga, "there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism."

As Nagel explains, Plantinga justifies apparent contradictions between empirical, scientific claims and theological ones by distinguishing between different "basic types" of warrented belief--perception, memory, rational intuition, induction, and some others--each of which is sufficient by itself to give us what can rightly be called knowledge, without any evidentiary support from the other basic types. So for example, if I remember that I took a shower this morning, then I can safely say that I know (in the epistemological sense of the word) I took a shower, without any further appeal to any other authority than memory, a basic type. With this in place, Plantinga goes on to argue that theistic claims--e.g. that there is a God--is another basic type of warrented belief alongside all the others, and as such does not require any further appeal to perception or rational intuition in order to be warrented.

Now, I'm not sure if I'm understanding or summarizing that correctly, and I haven't read Platinga's book, BUT I like the general approach of trying to distinguish between types of belief,  and the attempt to find compatability between scientific and theological beliefs by arguing that they are both primitive types, ultimately on equal epistemological footing.

However, to me it's interesting to note how very different the two types are in terms of the role they play for humans. The basic types of belief entailed by science and naturalism--perception, induction, maybe others--are in some sense a mere means to an end, for all we're really interested in when we perceive and make inductions and so forth is to get to a point where our actions make sense and have efficacy in the world around us. For example, if I'm in a room and I see a sofa against the west wall, what matters to me isn't whether the sofa is on the east or north wall or whatever--what matters is that the belief is true, whatever wall it might be, so that if I decide to go sit down I don't fall on the floor, and if I decide to move about the room I don't go stumbling over it. So these scientific beliefs are just messengers, and if we're uninterested in the message--for example, a precise description of the downtown area of Canton, OH--then the messenger, the set of beliefs about downtown Canton, are quickly dropped from our mind entirely, and we care little whether or not the beliefs were true or false. So our scope of interest in scientific beliefs is a function of what we're interested in, what our future plans and intentions are, what are goals are. Certainly, for example, the city developer in Canton will be very interested in the downtown schematics, because of his particular set of goals and interests.

Theological belief, however, is entirely different: we don't need them as a means to move around and enact our will on the world, but rather to fill some spritual void in ourselves that, for whatever reason, needs filling. Thus what matters for these beliefs isn't whether or not they are "true", but whether the subtance of the belief itself is spiritually fulfilling. Unlike the sofa, the actual physical position of which was arbitrary to us--and in which our only concern was simply that, whatever the coordinates of the sofa, they were the correct coordinates--in theological belief the substance of the belief itself is the crucial, important point--does God love me? Does he forgive me?--for simply the act of believing these beliefs is sufficient to get what we want from them, for the beliefs to serve their purpose as spiritual relief from existential dread. And similarly to scientific beliefs, the area of interest in theological questions is a function of our spiritual deficits, our dread, our need for meaningfulness in our lives. In the same way that we are uninterested in the description of downtown Canton because it has nothing to do with our future plans, intentions, and goals, we are also uninterested in, say, whether God prefers the Dodgers, because that question is of no spiritual significance to us. However we are very interested in things like being loved and being good and there being some significance to our lives, and those are at the very core of theistic belief systems.

Another way to put it is to ask: what makes this type of belief fail? For scientific beliefs, the point of failure occurs when our will gets frustrated when we've based our actions on those beliefs--for example, tripping over the couch. That's a result of a misperception of where the couch is, and what you need is a different perceptive belief, specifically, the one that is true and will therefore not lead you to trip on the couch.

For theistic beliefs, however, the point of failure is if you are in a state of misery, existential dread or boredom, or some other thing like that, having based your lifestyle and worldview on those beliefs. So for example if you are a Christian and find your life lacking meaningfulness, then that's like misfaith, or a bad theistic belief. Similarly if you are an atheist and are suffering from a profound sense of amorality in the world, then it seems that you would need to toss out those beliefs and find a different set that sets you to spritual rights.

I acknowledge that this sounds something like the argument you hear from atheists, which is that, "Look, if having religious beliefs makes you feel better, then by all means have those beliefs", reducing religious belief to something exactly like a placebo pill--something that essentially fools the person into feeling better but has no real efficacy in the world. However, I think this really misses the point, for it merely applies the standard of scientific beliefs to theistic beliefs and reasserts the central premise of materialistic naturalism, which is that the only things that exist are those that are described by science.

But I think that, really, the epistemological space opened up by scientific belief and the epistemological space opened up by theistic belief are separate spaces, and they hang together, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes with much dissonance, an organic part of our strange, fragmented animal selves--and it is unclear to me by what standard or criteria you can metaphysically rank one space above the other, and say the one is real and the other is not, as the materialistic naturalist argues. We're animals that need to eat and move around and plan ahead and sit on sofas, but we're also animals that need meaningfulness in our lives and sundry other spiritual salves, and to each of these needs there must be a way of deciding if the need is satisfied, and it is to this end that beliefs, at the most general level, are used. Maybe the best way to think about ourselves is as many different animals crammed into a single vessel, all existing in parallel, each one complete with its own metaphysics. We are large, we contain multitudes....