A problem with populism

 My interest in Mexican newspapers led me to the work of a California scholar: Professor Kathleen Bruhn, an expert on democratization. She has written about how democracies in Latin America have been strengthened and undermined.

I got interested in her work because I love Mexico, a wonderful place with a problem with populism. Populism divides a society into two groups: the pure people v. the corrupt elite.

Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, was the kind of guy who would ignore court orders on the grounds that they violated the will of the people.

He was also an election denier — but only when he lost. He lost four times.

You are perhaps beginning to see parallels with the alleged leadership in the United States, which claims to be exceptional and disparages the kinds of things that go on in “banana republics.”

Professor Bruhn’s study of Mexico and other Latin American countries shows a pattern: Populist autocrats erode democracies. In her account, the movement from democracy to autocracy follows a formula.

• Once in power, the autocrat seeks to capture the state by controlling its institutions. He attacks the courts, law enforcement agencies, the military, oversight agencies (especially those that oversee elections) and public media.

• The autocrat attacks all opponents, driving them from power. He then seeks to gain more control of the state, gaining control over courts that hadn’t previously caved in.

• The autocrat seeks to polarize the divide between the true believers and opponents. By keeping up the constant theme that opponents — meaning people who disagree — are enemies of the state, the autocrat can justify infringing on their civil rights. He uses state institutions to persecute them. He eventually stops counting their votes.

I discovered the work of Professor Bruhn by reading the obituaries of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who showed that this process works both ways. Democracies can be strengthened as well as weakened. Cárdenas was known for undermining the idea of one-party rule in Mexico.

When the way is not clear

 Ludwig Wittgenstein, who watched Europe descend into insanity before World War II, wrote this: 

When you can’t unravel a tangle, the most sensible thing is for you to recognize this; and the most honorable thing, to admit it. …

What you ought to do to remedy the evil is not clear. What you must not do is clear in particular cases.

 

My ellipsis marks the spot of a note in parentheses that makes it clear he was talking about antisemitism. But I think his observation is generally true of all tangles in the social fabric, including antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and the kind of greed that allows us to exploit neighbors and destroy the natural world while pretending our enterprise is a virtue.

The remedy for all these tangles is not clear, at least not to me. But I think Wittgenstein was right: On a case-by-case basis in our dealings with people, it’s usually clear what not to do.

When doctors are trained, they learn the first rule is to do no harm.

It’s not a bad rule for citizens.

• Source: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value; The University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 74.

A prophet is not without honor ...

 Since I live in Georgia, people ask about U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff and whether he’ll run for president in 2028.

Since I’m a newspaper reader, I can tell you that half the voters in Georgia oppose the idea. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked likely voters which politicians they would like to see run for president and which are opposed to the idea. Here are the percentages, with support given first:

Ossoff: 44-50.

U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock: 36-54.

Gov. Brian Kemp: 47-47.

Former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: 11-77.

Kemp, a Republican, is widely viewed as a popular governor. I think that’s accurate. A lot of Democrats have supported his brand of conservativism, which has been criticized by the current occupant of the White House. Ossoff has some of that crossover appeal. Polls suggest 13 percent of people who say they are conservative support him.

But we’re getting into the fine print. What strikes me about the numbers: Georgians don’t see any of their elected leaders going on to allegedly greater things.

• Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has some interesting newsletters, including Politically Georgia. If I were a newspaper editor, I’d subscribe for a month or two just to study the newsletters. Details are at ajc.com.

Campaigning in Georgia

 The political stars have been coming to Georgia. I’m less interested in the speeches, the rallies and the star power than I should be.

In my working days, I liked stories that were grounded in factual details. I think the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has done some interesting work comparing early voting this year with early voting in the last midterms. The newspaper reported these numbers:

• Percent increase in Black voters: 33.

• Percent increase in voters under 30: 54.

• Percent increase in Black voters under 30: 80.

Voter turnout in the South is so dismal it’s fair to say that elections depend on who shows up.

The current occupant of the White House is unpopular in Georgia. He is especially unpopular with Black voters and young voters.

It’s probably me, but I think those numbers are more interesting than the coverage of the speeches and rallies.

Cheating in Texas

 The New York Times published a story saying that Texas is the most gerrymandered state.

Sadly, that’s old news to me.

I was working for one of the smallest daily newspapers in Texas when the Legislature redrew the electoral maps after the 1980 elections. The process, called “redistricting,” was a dirty game.

Back then, the idea was not to cheat the opposing party. The Democrats were in charge, and there were so few Republicans nobody thought it was worth the trouble to cheat them.

Instead, the goal was to dilute the voting strength of minorities.

Suppose you lived in a county in which 50 percent of the residents were minorities. In our imaginary county, 25 percent of the voters were Black, 25 percent were Hispanic and 50 percent were Anglo, as they said back in the day.

Each county in Texas typically has four county commissioners, each representing a district. Texas was segregated, meaning that you don’t need demographics experts to find the “communities of interest.” If you followed the law and kept communities of interest intact, you’d expect to draw four districts: one representing the Black community, one representing the Hispanic community, and two representing the majority group.

That was what the law required. In fact, it was remarkable how few minorities held office.

How was it possible to have so many minorities in East Texas and so few commissioners?

The secret was that the boundaries were drawn so that Blacks and Hispanics never made up a majority in any single district. By fiddling the lines, it was possible to create districts that “diluted the minority vote.” The term was a euphemism. I’d call it cheating.

Of course, it was more complicated than that. Books have been written about the art of dirty dealing.

But the basic idea was simple, and so I wrote about the process often, hoping that an informed public would insist on basic fairness.

When I began to write about gerrymandered districts, a chorus of county officials sang about fake news.

When I interviewed civil rights organizations that were interested in challenging the gerrymandered districts in court, the chorus of county officials sang louder. Fake news!

When I interviewed legal experts who predicted that the county would spend a fortune on lawyers and still lose, the chorus of county officials screamed. Fake news!

Governments in my county — the county, cities and school districts — lost in court. Taxpayers spent a lot of money that could have been better used on roads and schools.

Of course, the world has changed since then. We’ve elected a president who appoints judges who look for ways to skirt, rather than uphold, laws designed to ensure fairness. We’ve elected state judges who dilute the rights of those the majority doesn’t like. In short, we have done many things that undermine the basic ideas of fairness, the vital ingredient in any concept of justice.

All that is bound to erode the foundations of any democratic society.

We need to stop.

• Source: Eve Washington, Nate Cohn and Rumsey Taylor, “An Extremely Detailed Ranking of the Most Gerrymandered States in America”; The New York Times, Oct. 26, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/10/26/upshot/gerrymandering-ranking.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Alders

 We were on a new trail. I was looking at the plants covering the forest floor and was surprised to see thickets of alders, Alnus serrulate.

I was expecting to see muscadine vines, Vitus rotundifolia. Muscadines cover much of the forest floor in the Georgia Piedmont. Alders can grow to 15 feet, but the ones we saw were knee-high shrubs.

The canopy was the usual mix of pine and hardwood. I wondered why there were so many alders and so few muscadines.

The textbook says alder is a marker for wetlands. The trail we were on ran near a lake but followed a hill above the water table. It never got boggy.

I’m still wondering, and it occurred to me that’s the usual disposition of a person who’s interested in natural history. You always seem to have something in mind that’s provisional — something in mind where the explanations kind of fits, but not really.

Emotional granularity and conceptual confusion

 A footnote or two on Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, and I’ll move on.

Professor Barrett explains “emotional granularity,” a term used by psychologists, with an analogy. An artist or designer, looking at something blue, might speak of azure, cobalt and ultramarine. She says her husband would call all those colors “blue.” (I’m further down on the spectrum. I’m the husband who, instructed to put on a blue tie, has to ask whether the tie he has in hand is the blue or the gray one.)

The ability to handle concepts of emotion — such as “anger” and “fear” — varies.

Psychologists speak of a science of alexithymia. The Greek roots suggest a lack of words for emotion. It’s considered a “subclinical construct,” a trait that is measurable but not in itself a disorder. Ten percent of the population might have this trait.

Some people, including me, have problems distinguishing colors. I’ve no doubt that some people have problems distinguishing emotions.

But it seems to me that countless people, including experts, also have problems with the concepts.

Through most of the history of Western thought, we’ve largely followed Plato in thinking that there must be some essential, definitive quality for any concept. When Wittgenstein examined the notion, he found no essences. He found family resemblances among members of a category, rather than a single essence. (If you are skeptical, try to find the essential feature in the concept of “game.” Does it account for football, polo, poker, solitaire, chess, Monopoly?)

I’d say that the concept of “emotion” is at least as slippery. I think the variation in experiences we lump together under “anger” is enough to confuse anyone. Don’t get me started on “grief.”

• Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.