[FRIAM] What is the response when bad faith is pervasive and coordinated?

[Prof David West]

I have been thinking a lot about the *"public movement to disintegrate society."* It feels like we are in the throes of a country-wide schismogenesis - the process of defining ourselves as what our neighbors are not. We expect differences in culture in different environments/contexts, but dramatic differences within the same environment surprise us. An example would be pacific coast native american groups, neighbors, where one culture has autocratic kings and slavery while the neighbors abhor and 'outlaw' both. 

Schismogenesis is the concept used by anthropologists (probably no the only users) to explain how adjacent cultures, or similarly characterized (e.g. nomadic herders, hunter gatherers, urban agriculturalists) can exhibit such diversity of political and social organization.

>From this perspective, it is not "society" that is being dis-integrated, it is a particular form of hierarchical Federalist society. The roots of this dis-integration are deep and mythical.

davew


On Wed, Sep 28, 2022, at 6:43 AM, glen wrote:
> There's an ambiguity in "institutional". Our elections (and suits and 
> rulings) are handled like a tree of locales, allowing both challenges 
> and rulings many articulation points up and down the heterarchy at 
> which to act. Immigration is more unified, more homogenous. As I 
> understand it, federal law preempts state law in all but employment 
> licensing. So "institutional" for elections is distributed and 
> heterogeneous, whereas it's more centralized and homogenous for 
> immigration.
>
> One institutional change would be to distribute it. But we'd risk human 
> rights abuses in the same way we currently risk things like states 
> banning abortions or a frivolous election challenging blitzkrieg like 
> we saw in 2020. Another institutional change would be to retool federal 
> immigration law, which probably won't happen with first past the post 
> elections that guarantee 50/50 legislators. I suppose if we could 
> appoint a good faith Machiavellian secretary of homeland security, we 
> could retool the execution in such a way as to obviate many of the 
> judicial challenges. But I have no idea how that might happen.
>
> On 9/28/22 06:08, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/politics/election-activists-voter-challenges.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/politics/election-activists-voter-challenges.html>
>> 
>> To moan about this may have some small role early, to try to raise awareness (to compensate for the absence of a News industry that functions as such).  But after that, it ceases to be a response, and decays into an abnegation and a waste of time.
>> 
>> Responses are institutional.  What is the institutional response to what, by now, sort of qualifies as a public movement to disintegrate the society?  “When in the Course of human events [a certain group of people decide] to dissolve the political bands which have connected them [with others]….”   For things that have been around for a long time, like frivolous use of lawsuits, we have arrived at some norms for throwing out mistakes and actively penalizing abuses, a kind of detente within which we can function at some level from day to day.  For more acute recent changes, like handling immigration claims, we are not doing so, and we approach jamming transitions.  For this electoral contesting, I don’t know if there even is an institutional plan.
>> 
>> I would like to have something in my head about this that qualifies as a thought or an idea.
>> 
>> Eric
>
>
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