When You Can’t Trust Your Law Enforcers

Eyal Press produced a nice little study of human behavior in his book Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times.  The people he studies are ones you almost certainly never heard of, and they are in most ways not extraordinary, but chose, at great personal risk, to do “the right thing” when the opportunity presented itself.  Of interest here is one of his subjects, Avner Wishnitzer, an Israeli veteran of the Sayeret Matkal the most elite unit of the Israeli army, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).  In telling his story, Press pointed out a rather unique feature of IDF service that was derived from Jewish experience under the Nazis.  He provides this perspective. 

“’If members of the armed forces commit violations by order of their Government, they are not war criminals and may not be punished by the enemy.’  So wrote the German jurist Lassa Openheim in one of the most influential treatises on international law published in the first half of the twentieth century…Lawful or unlawful, justified or not, combatants were expected to follow the orders they received.  There was no duty to refuse.”

“This was the prevailing view among Western legal experts—until World War II, until the prospect of Nazis invoking the Superior Orders defense at the Nuremberg Trials prompted reconsideration.  The mass murder of Jews, Communists, and intellectuals carried out by the Einsatzgruppen, the industrial-style slaughter in the camps: by the standard laid out in the British and American military codes, judges would have had little choice but to exonerate all but the highest ranking perpetrators of these crimes, perhaps everyone save Hitler himself.”

Both the British and American military codes had to be rewritten before Nuremberg to allow punishment for those who “violate the accepted laws and customs of war.”  This change of view would be of great importance to Jews as they created their state of Israel.  It would not take long, given the violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians, before an atrocity occurred which would provide the legal precedent requiring that members of the IDF must refuse to carry out an order they believe to be illegal.  In the case involved, an order was issued to impose a curfew on Palestinians at a certain time of the day.  But the order was distributed only an hour before the curfew was to go into effect.  The command stated that any Palestinian who violated the curfew should be shot.  There were several IDF commands within the region affected.  Only one commander chose to follow the letter of the order that day and executed a number of Palestinians who were unaware of what was going on.  He and his soldiers were tried and convicted.  The judge in the case issued a firm ruling.

“Orders that are ‘manifestly illegal’ not only can be disobeyed, Judge Binyamin Halevy held in his ruling; they must be disobeyed.”

This ruling established the legal precedent giving a soldier the right to decide for himself whether or not a given military activity was or was not “manifestly illegal.”  Avner Wishnitzer was one of a number of experienced soldiers who concluded that the activities of the government, as executed in the occupied territories, were illegal and they would refuse to participate in them.  In his view the occupation was clearly illegal under international law and IDF members were complicit in allowing Israeli settlers in the West Bank to stage brutal attacks, pogroms if you wish, against Palestinians who legally lived there.  This was not a very popular decision to make.  In fact, it was directly countered by a much larger group concerned that the IDF might one day be asked to force the settlers to withdraw from their illegal occupation.  The religious far-right in Israel views the West Bank as a part of Israel given to them by God and any move to remove settlers is forbidden by their beliefs.  What devout Jew would go against the will of God?

The legal underpinning of conscience-driven disobeying of orders allows the Israeli army to decide what it will or will not do.  Right now, the general belief is that if a government attempted to negotiate a peace treaty that involved clearing settlers out of the occupied territories, the settlers would refuse to leave and the IDF would refuse to force them to leave.  The IDF, by recognizing this legal hoop they can jump through, is then in a position to determine governmental policy by refusing to support activities with which the majority of the IDF disagrees.  Supporters of a particular position can merely flood the ranks of the IDF to gain political leverage.  This is probably something the legal system never intended.

Why is this of interest to us in the United States?  Should we be concerned that our policing agencies might one day refuse to follow political leadership and chart an independent path?  It is becoming clear that our own law enforcers, our police departments, often have sufficient influence that they can control policy decisions.  The actions by police forces here indicate that some police organizations believe they are more powerful than the politicians who nominally control them and dare government leaders to cross them.  The sources of their power are the police unions and the rights they have attained to essentially be the judge of their own members’ actions.  William Finnegan provides some perspective in an article for The New Yorker titled How Police Unions Fight Reform. 

“In May, just days after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, Lieutenant Bob Kroll, the bellicose leader of the city’s police union, described Floyd as a violent criminal, said that the protesters who had gathered to lament his death were terrorists, and complained that they weren’t being treated more roughly by police. Kroll, who has spoken unsentimentally about being involved in three shootings himself, said that he was fighting to get the accused officers reinstated. In the following days, the Kentucky police union rallied around officers who had fatally shot an E.M.T. worker named Breonna Taylor in her home. Atlanta police staged an organized sick-out after the officers who killed Rayshard Brooks were charged. Philadelphia police sold T-shirts celebrating a fellow-cop who was caught on video clubbing a student protester with a steel baton. The list goes on.”

“In many cities, including New York, the unions are a political force, their endorsements and campaign donations coveted by both Republicans and Democrats. The legislation they support tends to get passed, their candidates elected. They insist on public displays of respect and may humiliate mayors who displease them. They defy reformers, including police chiefs, who struggle to fire even the worst-performing officers. In an era when other labor unions are steadily declining in membership and influence, police unions have kept their numbers up, their coffers full.” 

“In their interstitial safe zone, police unions can offer their members extraordinary protections. Officers accused of misconduct may be given legal representation paid for by the city, and ample time to review evidence before speaking to investigators. In many cases, suspended officers have their pay guaranteed, and disciplinary recommendations of oversight boards are ignored. Complaints submitted too late are disqualified. Records of misconduct may be kept secret, and permanently destroyed after as little as sixty days.”

Waves of migrants passed through our big cities over the years.  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these newcomers initially brought increased crime, but they also brought valuable voters for the politicians of the time.  These migrants could convert their votes into political influence and often used the politically controlled police forces as a steppingstone to economic and social acceptance.  When the waves of black immigrants came fleeing the South in the early twentieth century, the politics and opportunities had changed.  Their votes were not viewed as valuable, and their skin targeted them as undesirables who must be kept in their place, both geographically and economically.  The police forces were no longer a path to a better future, but rather an enemy designed to keep them under control.

“By the end of the sixties, a racialized law-and-order ideology had emerged as a sort of unexamined American consensus, and it has basically prevailed since then, providing the political context in which police unions thrive. In the N.Y.P.D. today, with the arc having bent toward inclusion, people of color constitute slightly more than half the uniformed force. And yet the unions—there are five, for various ranks, with the P.B.A. the largest by far—give a different impression. Their leadership, their politics, and their occasional mass protests, not to mention the N.Y.P.D.’s riot squads, still read as overwhelmingly white. White cops, Black and brown suspects: that remains the dominant paradigm.”

Police brutality has always been an issue for black citizens.  Consider the history of New York City.

“In the city’s large, and largely segregated, Black community, police brutality had been a first-order issue for decades. The 1964 riots had been sparked when an off-duty policeman killed a fifteen-year-old Black student, James Powell. Activists, led by the N.A.A.C.P. and by Black newspapers such as the Amsterdam News, had been calling for more police accountability since at least the twenties, and for civilian oversight since the forties. Another frequent demand was for the hiring of more Black officers. One of the less-remembered lines in Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s soaring speech at the March on Washington, in 1963: ‘We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality’.”

David Dinkins became the first, and only, black mayor of New York City.  He had the temerity to attempt to install a civilian review board to cover police activities.  The largest police union, the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), expressed its displeasure by rioting in the streets.

“When Mayor David Dinkins sought to install a civilian review board, in 1992, the P.B.A. staged a ferocious protest at City Hall, with ten thousand off-duty officers, virtually all white and many carrying guns and drinking alcohol. Demonstrators waved racist placards—'Dump the Washroom Attendant’—attacked reporters and bystanders, vandalized City Council members’ cars, stormed City Hall, and overflowed onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where they stopped traffic and jumped on occupied cars. It was a wild performance of police impunity, and the on-duty officers did nothing to stop the mayhem.”

“Jimmy Breslin was there, reporting for Newsday, and he described a scene of toxic racism. ‘The cops held up several of the most crude drawings of Dinkins, black, performing perverted sex acts,’ he wrote. Newsday had more. A city councilwoman, Una Clarke, who is Black, was prevented from crossing Broadway ‘by a beer-drinking, off-duty police officer who said to his sidekick, ‘This nigger says she’s a member of the City Council.’  As the rally surged, Rudolph Giuliani, a former prosecutor, stood on a car, leading obscene chants through a bullhorn. He defeated Dinkins the next year and went on to two terms as mayor.”

“Dinkins ultimately succeeded in installing a civilian complaint-review board, but its disciplinary recommendations to the department are rarely followed. In public, the union trashes its every step.” 

The NYPD is the oldest and largest police force in the United States.  With 36,000 well-armed uniformed officers it is an army; one that has demonstrated that it can be mobilized as a single unit to counter any move to which it objects.  Its tools are political leverage and the constant threat of massive civil disobedience if provoked. 

The picture of policing in New York City is certainly troubling, but its example is far from the worst in the nation. 

“The N.Y.P.D. is not the most insular, lawless police department around. It is, in fact, one of the least violent police agencies in the country’s hundred largest cities. During the past seven years, according to a database built by a group called Mapping Police Violence, the police in St. Louis have killed fourteen times more civilians, per capita, than New York police have. In New York, police kill Black civilians at 7.8 times the rate of white civilians. In Chicago, the factor is 27.4.” 

Police departments find it easy to maintain their influence because there seems to always be political prostitutes like Giuliani lusting after their support.  Consider the situation in Chicago, long assumed to have the most brutal of all the police forces.  Civil suites against the city’s police cost it over half a billion dollars over a ten-year period.  Charges include the long-time tolerance of a “torture squad” within its ranks.  Observe the behavior of Rahm Emanuel, far from a right-wing crank like Giuliani, as the recent mayor of Chicago in dealing with a blatant execution by a police officer.

“In Chicago, in 2014, an officer named Jason Van Dyke shot a teen-age boy named Laquan McDonald sixteen times. The police report said that McDonald had advanced on officers with a raised knife. More than a year later, after an activist and a freelance journalist sued under the Freedom of Information Act, the city released a dash-cam video, which showed McDonald not advancing with a knife but walking away. This coverup wasn’t perpetrated by the police alone. City leaders knew what was on that video. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, though he denied having watched it, fought for thirteen months to prevent its release. 

What can explain this behavior other than fear of retaliation by the well-provisioned police army in Chicago whose first duty seems to protect its members against all threats.

Something has gone terribly wrong in our cities.  Tweaking things around the edges of our policing will not get the job done.  A massive restructuring and reimagination of what policing entails will be required.  Calls to defund or eliminate police departments are driven by passions of the day, but that passion is not misdirected.  We need to take time and carefully produce a path forward.  Real progress will probably require national rules for use in recruiting and training a new generation of police officers.

 

Religion Is Declining in the United States and Worldwide

Ronald F. Inglehart produced an interesting article on trends related to religion for Foreign Affairs for which he provided the eye-catching title Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion.  He used international surveys that were performed across many countries to draw his conclusion that a worldwide decline in religiosity became apparent in recent data over the period 2007-2019.  And that decline was most precipitous in the United States.

“A dozen years ago, my colleague Pippa Norris and I analyzed data on religious trends in 49 countries, including a few subnational territories such as Northern Ireland, from which survey evidence was available from 1981 to 2007 (these countries contained 60 percent of the world’s population). We did not find a universal resurgence of religion, despite claims to that effect—most high-income countries became less religious—but we did find that in 33 of the 49 countries we studied, people became more religious during those years. This was true in most former communist countries, in most developing countries, and even in a number of high-income countries. Our findings made it clear that industrialization and the spread of scientific knowledge were not causing religion to disappear, as some scholars had once assumed.”

The way these surveys worked was to ask people how important God was in their lives, and request they assign a numerical value to their response based on zero meaning no importance and ten indicating great importance. 

“For example, from 1981 to 2007, the mean score of the Bulgarian public rose from 3.6 to 5.7. In Russia, it rose from 4.0 to 6.0. In part, this growth in religiosity was a response to the severe decline of economic, physical, and psychological security experienced after the Soviet Union disintegrated; religion was filling the ideological vacuum left by the collapse of communism. Religious beliefs also increased in many developing countries outside the former Soviet Union, including Brazil, China, Mexico, and South Africa. On the other hand, religion declined in most high-income countries.”

Something would change around the interval between 2007 and 2019, and that change would become most apparent in the United States.

“But since 2007, things have changed with surprising speed. From about 2007 to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied—43 out of 49—became less religious. The decline in belief was not confined to high-income countries and appeared across most of the world.”

“The most dramatic shift away from religion has taken place among the American public. From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the world’s more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little. Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data. Near the end of the initial period studied, Americans’ mean rating of the importance of God in their lives was 8.2 on a ten-point scale. In the most recent U.S. survey, from 2017, the figure had dropped to 4.6, an astonishingly sharp decline. For years, the United States had been the key case demonstrating that economic modernization need not produce secularization. By this measure, the United States now ranks as the 11th least religious country for which we have data.”

Most religions derive from eras in which patriarchy was predominant and childhood survival was low.  It made sense to create a religion in which women were subjugated and concentrated their efforts on producing offspring.  Things that interfered with this plan such as contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and women’s rights were either discouraged or forbidden.  This approach seems hopelessly outmoded in a modern society and has been fading gradually over recent decades in wealthier nations.  If one believes that religions were created to meet the needs of humans, then it should not be too surprising that when humans no longer feel a need for what religions provide then participation in them will decline.  Inglehart identifies this drift away from traditional, religion-sponsored rolls in gender and sexuality as a partial explanation for what has been observed. 

The fact that around the year 2007 an inflection point occurred is curious, and the magnitude of the inflection also cries out for an explanation.  Inglehart provides this hypothesis. 

“Although secularization normally occurs at the pace of intergenerational population replacement, it can reach a tipping point when the dominant opinion shifts and, swayed by the forces of conformism and social desirability, people start to favor the outlook they once opposed—producing exceptionally rapid cultural change. Younger and better-educated groups in high-income countries have recently reached this threshold.”

A “tipping point” seems an all too convenient mechanism.  He uses the sorry state of politics in the United States to try to justify this supposition. 

“Several other factors beyond rising levels of economic and technological development help explain the waning of religion. In the United States, politics accounts for some of the decline. Since the 1990s, the Republican Party has sought to win support by adopting conservative Christian positions on same-sex marriage, abortion, and other cultural issues. But this political appeal to religious voters has had the corollary effect of pushing other voters, especially those who are young and culturally liberal, away from religion.”

And finally, he makes the most critical observation. 

“It once was generally assumed that religious beliefs shaped political views, not the other way around. But recent evidence indicates that the causality can run the other way: panel studies have found that many people change their political views first and then become less religious.”

What could possibly have occurred that would explain such a dramatic change in attitudes in such a short period of time?  Well, consider the insane Iraq War in which old people committed young people to go and die in a worthless cause.  It was at that point that young people began to establish a different voting pattern from their parents and became more liberal in their political views.  Younger people would receive another shock just a few years later when the Great Recession hit.  Many were left in debt with little prospect for beginning the long march of a career.  Yet another blow has been delivered to them as they struggle through the current coronavirus pandemic.  And if they survive that they can begin to face the inevitable upheavals of global warming.  Another recent development of note is the ascendance of social media.  People are still trying to understand the role those platforms play in establishing political views, but most assume they are significant.

In Young Voters: Generation Divide or Class Divide? We discussed the notion that young people have begun to see themselves as members of an economic lower class merely by the happenstance of their age.  They are highly unlikely to ever lead the economic lives that the previous generations enjoyed.  Milestones like attaining home ownership seem unattainable as they observe an older generation enjoying the benefits of decades of asset value increases.  Evidence suggests that the younger cohorts have grown impatient with the status quo and are demanding political solutions that once were considered radical.  More power to them.

For whatever reason, political views have begun to change rapidly.  Gay marriage became generally acceptable in an incredibly short time.  Could racial injustice become the next great political revolution?  Let us hope so.

The conclusion to draw from Inglehart’s discussion is that humanity was never intended to be molded by the dictates of religion; rather, the dictates of religion were defined in such a way as to serve the needs of humanity.  Religions that forget their own history and refuse to adapt will become irrelevant.

  

The Republican Party’s Disdain for Its Voters

We are in the midst of the battle with Covid-19.  The number of unemployed is enormous.  The first response by Congress was to spend several trillions to protect individuals from economic calamity and provide necessary spending to keep the economy afloat.  One of the measures was to tack on an extra $600 benefit each week to unemployment benefits.  By providing this increase, the individuals would benefit, and the economy would also benefit because the recipients were sure to spend that money.  But then Republicans became aware that this extended unemployment resource meant that some people would end up with more disposable income while unemployed than they had earned when working at their last job.  This generated moral outrage because Republican politicians assumed that the unfortunates who so benefited would obviously prefer to remain on the dole rather than accept reemployment at a diminished income.  This notion was used to argue that an extension of this benefit should not be made unless it could be limited so that no one could receive more than 70% of their former income.  Even breaking even financially was too dangerous a move for the population of beneficiaries in the view of the Republicans.  At present, the extra benefit has expired, and no new benefit bill has been passed, nor is one likely in the near future.

The Republican Party seems to have a rather dim view of the people who are currently in financial need.  The data indicates it is those at the lower end of the wage spectrum who are most likely to lose their jobs in a crisis.  This means minorities are hard hit in this situation, along with whites having a high school or less education.  The Republicans clearly have disdain for black and brown people, but it seems rather reckless to extend that characterization to the whites whose votes they desperately need.

The Republican response seems reminiscent of early nineteenth century attitudes of the wealthy towards the poor.  In Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, and the Poor People of Yesterday and Today we discussed the description by David Bellos of Victor Hugo’s time and the impact of his classic novel on peoples’ attitudes toward those living in poverty.  He introduced us to the classic representation of prevalent attitudes provided by the dismal scientist Robert Malthus.

“Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798 but read for many decades after that, claims that, absent the benefits of education and refinement, human beings are naturally idle and can be roused to productive labour only by a pressing need.  Its second premise is that the uneducated and unrefined always take the easiest path.  Given the opportunity, poor people steal what they need instead of working to acquire it.  In Malthus’s dim view of human nature, the poor constitute a different species.”

Although the Republicans do sound a bit like Malthus in evaluating their citizens who have fallen on hard times, let us give them credit for advancing their knowledge a bit beyond that of the early 1800s.  Unfortunately, the advance was not great, and those who would control the destiny of the party fell under the spell of another dismal philosophy that rejected all we know about human evolution, human history, and the social sciences.  The source of their inspiration would be Ayn Rand.  Rand would have been a little-known crank if she had limited herself to promoting her ideas through essays and philosophical tracts.  Having spent time in Hollywood screenwriting, she knew the power of a good story and presented her ideas in two best-selling novels: The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957).  Corey Robin provides some perspective on Rand’s influence in his book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.

“In 1998, readers responding to a Modern Library poll identified Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead as the two greatest novels in English of the Twentieth century…In 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club found that with the exception of the Bible, no book has influenced more American readers than Atlas Shrugged.”

Her stories would detail the struggles of heroes to overcome the obstacles society and lesser people put in their paths before they eventually see their greatness recognized.     Bigger-than-life heroes have always found an audience in our society—and in our politics.  In Rand’s world the battlefield is unfettered capitalism and the enemy is society with its rules, regulations, and taxes.  The masses of common folk are there to eventually recognize the greatness of the hero, but otherwise contribute nothing.

“The chief conflict in Rand’s novels then is not between the individual and the masses.  It is between the demigod creator and all those unproductive elements of society—the intellectuals, bureaucrats, and middlemen—that stand between him and the masses.  Aesthetically, this makes for kitsch; politically, it bends toward fascism.”

Rand once claimed to be “the most creative thinker alive” and stated that Aristotle was the only philosopher who influenced her.  As Robin explains, she seemed to know little about Aristotle’s writings, but developed a philosophy that seemed to be most closely aligned with those of Friedrich Nietzsche and Adolph Hitler.  Life is a continuing struggle and the strongest deserve to win—and the weak must lose.  A hero has no time for weaknesses such as altruism or religion.  It will be these heroic individuals (always men) who will drag society forward.  Inequality is a fundamental characteristic of this worldview.  All good comes from the heroic elite while the lower classes contribute nothing.  This view is summarized nicely by one of Rand’s characters. 

“The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all of those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time.  The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.  Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of intellect.  Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.”

The political posturing of the current crop of Republican leaders, all of whom consider themselves “heroes,” is consistent with sending the message to each unemployment compensation recipient that he/she “left to himself would starve in his hopeless ineptitude.” 

Barack Obama has suggested that a Randian outlook is something that troubled adolescent boys might find attractive.  Obama, perhaps not intending it, has come up with a descriptor that quite accurately captures the Republican leadership, including Donald Trump: men frozen in a troubled adolescence.