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GELFAND’S WORLD - It was a year of fear and worse fear, of consumer rebound and of war, a year of freedom and fascism. The forces of right wing authoritarianism continued to build both here and abroad, even as a 2022 anti-abortion victory by the misogynistic conservative party may put the liberals back in power come 2024.
The big story continues to be global warming. It's the big story because the effects are so widespread and potentially catastrophic, ranging from killer storms to mass extinction.
The year 2023 is the warmest on record, but that factoid tells only a small part of the reality. The real issue is that the few degrees of rise in the temperature index represent a lot of increased heat energy that has been going into the global system for the past half century. This increased energy results in summer storms being more destructive, the melting of once-stable ice shelves in both the far north and south, sea level rise, and lots of incidentals such parasites and diseases moving outward from the tropics.
You can't talk about global warming without talking about global warming denial, and that leads us to the other big story -- politics -- for the year 2023. Back in 2020 we had a presidential election and, as in previous elections, there was a winner and a loser. The results were reported as usual, the winner -- Joe Biden -- was announced after nearly a week of vote counting, and we should have gone on with our lives as we have done in previous decades. But Donald Trump didn't like being defeated, so he invented the Big Lie, and we have been dealing with it ever since.
The effects of the Big Lie have expanded as the followers -- roughly speaking one-third of the electorate -- are forced by their illogic to adopt all the corollaries and conclusions. These include a massive conspiracy aimed at defeating Donald Trump -- a conspiracy which goes deep into local, state, and federal governments. Of course every time a court looks at such accusations, it finds nothing. Every time an honest news organization takes a look, it finds the accusations to be spurious. But to the true believer, there is nothing that can dissuade. The year 2023 is, among other things, the year of the Big Cult.
An aside: Even if Trump supporters believe that there are lots of other Trump supporters (and there are), how could you not also know that there are millions more of us who truly despise Trump as the lying bully that he is, and that we voted against in 2020.
So we are heading towards a 2024 rerun of Trump v Biden. That also seems to be a big story, at least if you are a journalist/pundit looking to write something on a slow news day, and all you have is the claim that Americans are not happy with octogenarian rerun elections.
And this observation leads inexorably to the critical observation of our political present: Fox News has been incredibly effective in poisoning its viewers against Democrats and the Democratic Party. It has presided over the development of the Trump Cult. And this has put congressional Republicans in their own bind. The year 2023 was the culmination, what with the Clown Car Congress™ and its myriad Speaker fights. The Republican House of Representatives became The Group that Can't Govern™ or perhaps just The Group that Won't Govern.
There is a tragic side to this circus. Ukraine military aid is running out, and the congress is on vacation. Even after new Speaker Johnson's pledge to pass aid to Israel, the only thing that got passed was a poison pill bill (now there's a phrase that deserves a trademark) that would have undermined the IRS in its ability to audit the very wealthy: DOI in the Senate. So Republican Party chest pounding has left Israel and Ukraine without needed Americn aid. In this way, the Republicans have inadvertently joined with the American far left in trying to starve the Israelis.
It was the second year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What was supposed to be a three day coup, with the Ukraine government fleeing and the Russian tanks being welcomed with flowers and kisses, has turned out to be anything but. It is becoming clear that NATO could end the whole conflict in a week by asserting air superiority. As it is, Ukraine has the ability to stop Russian advances, just as long as it has the equipment and the ammunition, and as long as the Russians cannot themselves develop air superiority.
But Donald Trump and the congressional Republicans are stabbing Ukraine in the back, to borrow a phrase from Trump's favorite author. (Oh yeah, Trump now claims he never read Mein Kampf, even though he borrows some of the fuhrer's favorite words and phrases.) Suddenly, in 2023, we have had "vermin" and "poisoning the blood" added to American political rhetoric. That's got to be a first, not because we haven't had our own home-grown Nazis, but because the leading candidate in one of the main political parties is getting away with using those words.
Science continues
In what has become a yearly note, I will point out that science continues to advance. We can think of 2023 as the year that we officially put many of the Covid restrictions to bed. We can go to the mall and to concerts without masking, and the death rate has fallen enormously. The virus didn't go away, but most of us have had some exposure and most of us got through the worst part of the epidemic due to the timely appearance of the vaccine. It now appears that the vaccine allowed us to catch a moderate case of the Covid without ending up with viral pneumonia and death. Let's hope that this will continue.
But we cannot mention science and its beneficial effects without making mention of the continuing Republican war against science. (It's not a new idea. Chris Mooney published The Republican War on Science back in 2005.) It seems like a strange idea, but it appears that any logical conclusion drawn by science that is also a danger to corporate profits becomes a target. The fact of global warming is a threat to oil companies, so global warming is put in question.
Local politics and culture
The big story, studiously covered in these pages by Jack Humphreville, is the newly created Los Angeles City structural deficit, which results from the large wage increases for police and city employees. Since the neighborhood councils have been covering this issue (about 20 years now), the City Council has never failed to roll over and pass a large increase. We can remember arguing with our City Council representative shortly after 2002, and we can remember watching the process play out in ensuing years.
The results are predictable. There will be cuts in anything that is other than a critical essential, there will be cuts in things like street repairs, but low level employees in the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment will be making what doctors and lawyers couldn't hope to make in earlier years. (OK, those were way-earlier years, and inflation has to be taken into account, but still --- .)
This is what I have been calling the parody of liberalism. It isn't really liberalism, because funding public unions in exchange for electoral help is not the same as supporting non-public unions. It's just a political payoff.
There is another parody of liberalism that has been going on, and which I have been covering here in CW. That is the increasing desire on the part of the City Council, the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE), and the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners to saddle neighborhood council participants with increasing levels of unpaid training. The training is itself classifiable as being part of the Parody of Liberalism, because it is an attempt to force indoctrination in a particular ideology. In at least one instance, training about the so-called implicit bias, the scientific justification is incredibly dubious.
At the immediate neighborhood council level, we will be watching the process by which the mayor chooses a new General Manager for DONE. The real question ought to be what DONE is for -- what is its proper mission -- rather than nitpicking about who would best be suited to run the Department as it now functions. The Department has become authoritarian, even as it continues to be ineffective and inefficient, so why should we want an increasingly efficient authoritarianism?
The next year will be the presidential election year, so this, along with the Ukraine War, the continuing bloodshed in Israel and Gaza, and the continuing decline of the former Soviet Union ought to be among the top stories to come. Still, things happen that we don't expect. Who would have predicted the Hamas attack? Will we see the end of Putin rule? Will the U.S. develop better relations with Iran? Will there be some breakthrough in non-fossil energy sources? Will the U.S. get its act together and work seriously on cheaper nuclear energy? Will the whiz kids at MIT (or other places) work out an effective method of storing citywide levels of electric power and thereby make solar energy the reality for our immediate future? Is there some way to reform the Metro transportation organization here in L.A. County? Will Virtual Reality become the new standard in teaching and entertainment?
Lots of questions. From a public policy standpoint, is there any likelihood that lying will be less acceptable in American politics in 2024?
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
