For the Birds

It’s Sunday morning and the birds are at the feeder. We get mourning doves, cardinals, sparrows, and chickadees. I like to sit in the kitchen and watch them squabble and gossip. Sometimes the cat scatters them, but he’s old and the danger he presents fairly low. The birds are at the feeder every day that we have food for them, which is nearly every day.

The impulse to do something for others without reward isn’t uniquely human, but we are the species that has the greatest capacity to do the most good for the largest number. Of course, the opposite is also true. Also, it’s rarely possible to know what the “most good for the largest number” means, since we can’t always foresee the consequences of our actions. Feeding the birds, for example, might promote the spread of bird flu.

(Probably a bad example since I don’t really know how bird flu spreads, but what am I, an ornithologist? ((I think an ornithologist is a bird expert, but rather than check to see if I am correct, I decided to just add a double parenthetical to explain my potentially incorrect usage of the word, which is a waste of your time and, therefore, not doing the most good for the largest number.))

One of the few useful consequences of the current regime’s assault on American representative democracy is that it forces us (well, it’s forcing me) to re-examine foundational beliefs. This is a natural result of opposing actions that strike me as repugnant.

Look at this stupid idiot. Photo by Bob Vuxinic

Why do I find them repugnant? Why do I support the Constitution in general even if I advocate for changes within it? Why do I support democracy at all? These are questions which previous administrations – including the previous Trump administration – didn’t provoke in me.

For example, nobody objects to the idea of cutting governmental “waste, fraud, and abuse” because we understand that such actions are intrinsically detrimental to the great majority of American people. We understand that we’d rather put a little more money in the pockets of the majority of Americans than a lot of money in the pockets of a few who game the system.

But is the gutting of our federal workforce promoting some greater good? If we believe recent reporting on the Right’s new muse, Curtis Yauvin, then the answer is yes. Yauvin and his ilk of neo-reactionaries believe that dismantling American democracy is the only way to “save” America.

By shrinking the federal workforce and/or replacing the current bureaucrats with political loyalists, they believe they’re paving the way for a new American – as lizard person Stephen Miller puts it – “golden age,” one in which an expansionist America headed by something like a king solidifies its place as the world’s mightiest power. If arriving at that berth requires throwing a few people overboard isn’t that worthwhile?

Everything in me says no, even though I just argued for the human capacity to do the most good for the largest number.

So, what’s the problem? I think it has to do with the difference between operating with a moral code or without. Those who would seek the greatest good for the largest number could, theoretically, operate without any sort of moral code because they could simply determine, for themselves, what they believe to be the greater good and act accordingly.

Isn’t that exactly what Trump is advocating when he writes, as he did yesterday, “He who saves the Country does not violate any Law”?

Note that “any” law would include moral law.

It seems to me that this logic dictates that the only actions by which any person should be judged are whether or not such actions are “good” for the nation. But who makes that determination? In a system such as this, wouldn’t the leader of the nation be in the best position to determine what is “good” for that nation? In a system such as this, wouldn’t it make sense that the leader is the only person in a position to make such a determination?

If so, then laws are not for such a person because, by definition, any decision that leader makes will be for the good of the nation. That is the logic of the current regime.

It’s also fascism.

I know, I know. I overuse that word but only because it’s the most apt. If you prefer “dictatorship” or the latest gobbledygook turn-of-phrase, “competitive authoritarianism,” have at it. As I’ve written before, the term is less important to me than the policies such terms portend.

When a leader is above the law, a view Trump is now claiming, and which the Supreme Court has, partially, endorsed, then we’ve destroyed our constitutional republic, which rests on the idea that every citizen is entitled to equal protection. When one is above -or below- the law (a framework we are also seeing being erected for certain undesirables), we are no longer operating within our constitutional system. We are no longer operating within any moral code, except that which is determined by the leader. It is he, and he alone, who determines what constitutes the greater good.

I would also note that John Wilkes Booth almost certainly applied the same logic when determining the course of his own actions.

If Martha doesn’t feed the birds, the birds don’t eat. Or maybe she could release 100 cats into the backyard. Or she could purchase a slingshot and take potshots while they fed. She’s free to operate within whatever moral code she determines is in the best interests of our backyard nation. Fortunately for them, birds have wings. People aren’t so lucky.