In 2011, 30 percent of white evangelicals said that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Now, 72 percent say so
Kind of a necessity for them. If they still held to expecting morality of elected officials, there's no way they could vote for Trump.
There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable.
it's 9 years old now, but it's still remarkable:
In 2011, 30 percent of white evangelicals said that "an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life." Now, 72 percent say so — a far bigger swing than other religious groups the poll studied.
It's just one poll, but it does suggest a sizable shift in how Americans of several religious stripes think about the connection between morality and politics. White evangelicals also are less likely than they used to be to say that "strong religious beliefs" are "very important" in a presidential candidate. That share fell from 64 percent in 2011 to 49 percent this year.
White mainline Protestants and Catholics also grew more accepting of a candidate who has committed "immoral acts," while religiously unaffiliated people barely changed. Those "unaffiliated" people in 2011 had been much more willing than the broader population to believe candidates who had committed "immoral acts" could do their jobs. Now, they are in line with Americans as a whole.
in the archive.org copy of this article (linked), there's a nice graph that illustrates what happened more clearly than text can (NPR's current version has lost the graph image).
sometime between Obama and Trump, huge numbers of people in the religious groups surveyed changed their minds about how much personal morality mattered for Presidents.
which, IMO, is all you need to know about how highly those religious groups people actually valued that particular morality.
if one can abandon a principle that quickly, there's a good chance that principle was never very strongly-held.
The people who advocate private charity replacing government payments usually have no real idea of the relative scales of what the government does, and what private charity could do. Ignore Social Security on the (incorrect) theory that it's a mandated savings program. Medicare and Medicaid combined are more than four times the size of all charitable giving each year. Private charity could cover income support spending in normal years, but would be bankrupted trying to cover the surge that happens during a recession.
I think Wonkie is correct about religion as the locus for right wing charity. I remember seeing claims a decade or so ago that conservatives gave more to charity than did liberals, but the details of that showed that part of what counted as conservative charity was church offerings and tithing, which may be charity or it may be paying the pastor/priest/rabbi/imam and covering the overhead/improvement of the communal place of worship. And unlike Charity Navigator, there really isn't any way to track the efficiency with which those religious donations are turned into support for charitable causes.
My conservative family members and friends can be quite generous. I do think, however, that liberal charitable giving tends to go to causes a bit farther from home and immediate community, where conservative giving tends to have fewer degrees of separation from the giver.
I've been seeing a lot of this "Government shouldn't do charity because charity should be voluntary through churches." Back in the days of Dickens, that is how charity was done. The 1800's were a transition period in Europe and the US when the medieval attitude that the poor deserved to be poor was gradually replaced by the common good and the social contract (and I'd say, basic human decency.). Quite often the people who make the argument that the government shouldn't do charity are themselves living off taxpayers and feel entitled to what they get. It isn't an argument that has any validity, in my view.
My observation is that charitable giving and good works are at least as common on the right as on the left. The R's are predominantly in favour of helping the unfortunate, so long as the get to do it of their own free will.
Their perspective is it's wrong for the government to take their money to give it to possibly undeserving poor people they've never met.
It's a different thing to support unpleasant politicians who share, or pretend to share, parts of one's world view. I thought it couldn't possible extend to someone as unremittingly vile as Trump: I was wrong.
I don't want to be the old geezer who blames everything on the internet, but it seems to me that all the touted ability to hook people up with like minded individuals has a lot of people missing the diversity in their own backyard. That diversity used to keep these sorts of opinions in check, even though they were held by people, by isolating people, it allows them to flower. Not a new idea, but one I think holds.
I've been reading Jeffrey Hall's Japan's nationalist right in the internet age: Online media and grassroots conservative activism, and he has this
In his book, Yasuda portrays Zaitokukai [an ultra-nationalist and far-right extremist political organization] as a product of feelings of economic uncertainty among the working classes of Japanese society. In other words, they feel socially and economically isolated, and can experience positive emotions by channeling their ill feelings into hatred of Koreans.
Sociologist Higuchi Naoto conducted interviews with Zaitokukai participants and came to very different conclusions. Instead of finding social or economic anxiety as infuences on joining the movement, Higuchi found that many of his interviewees had been raised in politically conservative households or had been involved in conservative political activities for the year.90 The idea that they are just “ordinary” people who, due to anxiety, join nativist groups was misleading. Most of Higuchi’s interviewees were already ideologically on the right:
"There are, in this sense, specific problems with Yasuda’s opinion that Zaitokukai is made up of “your neighbors.” There are certainly many activists in the nativist movement who are “ordinary people” with jobs, but ideologically they are not “neutral or apolitical”; they are conservative."
People who are already subscribed to a conservative worldview are more receptive to how nativist groups frame and introduce information. Higuchi sees these nativists as an outgrowth of the existing nationalist and revisionist movement of the 1990s and a conservative establishment that already encouraged hostility toward Korea and China. He also argued that the geopolitical situation in Asia has aided in their rise. Issues such as war responsibility, the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea, and ongoing territorial disputes fueled hatred toward people from Korea and China. Higuchi found that the attitudes of Zaitokukai members toward immigrants from countries such as the Philippines and Brazil, who tend to have a lower socioeconomic status than Korean and Chinese immigrants, were not particularly negative. This is very different from the observations of scholars of the far-right in Europe and the United States, for whom the perceived economic or cultural threats from immigrant laborers, or demographic replacement, are central ideas.
That last point is interesting, as it suggests that there is a stronger class element involved in this for the West than it is for Japan.
Are you in contact with your Apache and Hopi cousins?
I'm in touch with my cousing Peter - the Apache - on Facebook. After Charlie retired from FDNY he painted houses, and Peter basically apprenticed with him and continues to work as a house painter and general handyman. He had some bumpy times, but is all good now. Peter has the best family pictures and has become kind of the family archivist.
My cousin Tara - the Hopi - grew away from the family a bit at some point, although she and her daughter Kateri are still in touch with Charlie's kids.
Charlie and his wife (and the rest of them) sound like wonderful people.
They were a pretty remarkable crew.
FWIW, the younger guy on the left, sitting in front of my grandfather (older Archie Bunker looking guy in the white shirt) was Eddie Gonzales. Not a brother by birth, but basically unofficially adopted into the family.
Eddie's father abandoned him, and his mother was an alcoholic. Eddie himself was gay, which nobody ever talked about but everyone knew, and nobody really cared about one way or the other. He was good friends with the brothers, so he came and lived with them and my grandfolks raised him along with the rest of the gang.
Eddie was at every family gathering and was just part of the family, full stop. Just a part of the larger Richmond Hill crew.
So yes, this weird dilemma of people who are personally beautiful - kind and outgoing and generous - but aligned with social and political movements that are... not.
I think a part of all of this for my mom's folks was coming up through the Depression, and then WWII. The brothers were too young to serve in the war, but my father (guy in front of the Christmas tree holding the baby - you can only see the top of his head) did, and they all dealt with rationing etc.
They were basically poor - not desperately, but poor enough to have to watch every nickel and do without a lot of things. Like everyone around them was. Tucky - the brother in the middle with the big smile - was offered a full basketball scholarship to Columbia, and wasn't able to go, because the family needed him to work and bring money into the house.
My sense is that all of those experiences - the anxiety of having just barely enough, the sacrifices around wartime - gave them an ethic that you pull together and help out whoever needs help.
But lots of folks came through all of that and were not quite as open-hearted.
This crew and their kids were my people, really - my father's family were all in Georgia, and I did not see them as often, many of them I never even met. They were a joy to know, and I miss them.
Vance strikes me as a person who has no values beyond self-promotion and no sincerity. He'll say or do what is convenient at the time. He might decide to dump the Hindo wife to marry the wife of the martyred Saint Charlie of Free Speech for Conservatives Only. It wouldn't surprise me at all.
Are you in contact with your Apache and Hopi cousins? I'm curious about how their lives turned out. My shirt tail relatives of that generation had a native adopted daughter, but their attitude was condescending and eventually she cut off all connection.
As for how good people do bad things. I think partly it's because they are good people that they can do bad things. They know their own lives, their values, their actions and think that people like them aren't doing anything bad. That plus the harm they do is an abstraction to them.
Charlie and his wife (and the rest of them) sound like wonderful people. It's so valuable to hear the specifics, and to be reminded (and one needs to be reminded) that people are complicated, and that they contain multitudes. Sometimes, like in that old Dirk Bogarde movie, you have to focus on the singer not the song.
I'm resigned to the impossibility of figuring out how otherwise good and smart people have horrible politics. I can only observe, without having a worthwhile explanation, that they sometimes do.
It's much easier if the person in question is plainly an a**hole.
I think you make a good point about people being complex. So the first question that's worth asking about someone whose politics you question is Why are you supporting this horrible person for office. The answer can be surprising.
Take one obvious example that most of us are old enough to remember. There are people who supported Clinton both times that he won, simply because they liked the platform he ran on and despite his character flaws. There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable. (Personally, I think him a pretty appalling excuse for a human being, even if I like many of the things he tried to do while in office.)
Things get more complex when you find people that have essentially identical views on the issues. Faced by a candidate whom they agree with on some issues and disagree with on others, they may vote differently based on how they prioritize the various issues.
Certainly there are extreme cases -- Trump, for example, has absolutely nothing that I can see to recommend him. Unless you somehow manage to see politics are merely a show, with zero real world consequences. But in general people, and circumstances, are rarely binary good/bad.
Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?
In pretty much any country, no group has a stronger work ethic than immigrants. About the only exceptions are places where most of the immigrants are retirees or the idle rich.
The US is unusual only in the numbers of immigrants that we have been blessed (and we have been blessed) with. Not unique, certainly, but unusual.
I have a long time friend, Kile Smith, who is actually a living breathing composer. He heard a recording of the Brahms Requiem when he was a teenager and decided, without much other background or context other than playing some bass and singing in his high school chorus, that that was what he wanted to do.
I met Kile when we both attended Bible College in the mid 70's. Long story for another time. Suffice it to say we became good friends, went our separate ways for a while, and then reconnected a few years ago courtesy of Facebook. For which I'm grateful, Kile is a good person to know.
Most serious arts have a sort of "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" aspect to them. They require a lot of time - hours and hours and hours - of hard work, often time spent alone, with no particular guarantee that you are going to get anywhere. Composing has the additional complication that, to actually realize your work, you have to get someone to perform it. Which introduces a kind of chicken-and-egg thing - if you don't really have a reputation yet, how do you persuade someone to invest in performing your stuff? But if nobody ever performs your stuff, how do you build a reputation?
It's a challenge.
Kile is my age - 69 and counting - and his work is now performed and recorded a lot, by ensembles with real national and international reputations. But it took decades of hard lonely work to make that happen. If you ask him, he will tell you that his secret is having an "iron butt" - he made himself sit in a chair for hours, day after day, to do the work. He's an extremely humble guy, makes no great claims about his talents, but he also knows his work is good.
And it is good.
Most of his work is sacred choral stuff. He's also done some orchestral work, and has set texts by folks as various as Seneca, Robert Lax, Tagore, and Stephen Foster.
Here is Kile talking about his process in composing an Agnus Del.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMoL-y_vjIY
One of the movements from his setting of texts by Seneca, "The Waking Sun".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0J1pgCAx3g
"The stars shine", from his "Consolation of Apollo", a setting of a text from Boethius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZIe8d5StCw
"Three Spirituals for Piano Trio", an instrumental piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq6cjnOxW00
Kile almost died this year. He had been feeling ill for a while, with weird and non-specific symptoms. Doctors gave him a bewildering variety of diagnoses, none of which led to a useful treatment plan. He finally got an accurate diagnosis of multiple myolema and has spent the last couple of months in the oncology ward at University of Pennsylvania Hospital. He's doing better - still a long road ahead, but improving, with good prospects for managing things and having lots of years to go.
While in isolation, he finished a piece that had been commissioned. I suggested to him (via Facebook IM, it was a no-visitors situation and talking on the phone was too tiring) that he might want to take his condition as an opportunity to rest for a bit, but apparently he wasn't having it.
Let us work while we have the light.
Thank you for this opportunity to share my good friend with you all.
Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?
Maybe it's just me, but every time I see someone who looks "immigrant-ish" - which usually means cafe au lait skin tone and an accent - they are working their asses off.
You know those "how many X does it take to do Y" jokes? Here is mine.
How many immigrants does it take to... oh wait, never mind, they're done.
russell - Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.
I'm sure that Grok has been fed those things, but what it "thinks" about those things is just a matter of remixing what others have said about those texts.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
Russell: Loved this. And so fun "meeting" you in your element. Music really is the universal language.
But now I'm seeing your hands every time I read one of your comments, lol.
On “People and poliltics”
In 2011, 30 percent of white evangelicals said that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Now, 72 percent say so
Kind of a necessity for them. If they still held to expecting morality of elected officials, there's no way they could vote for Trump.
Does clarify what their priorities are.
"
There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable.
it's 9 years old now, but it's still remarkable:
in the archive.org copy of this article (linked), there's a nice graph that illustrates what happened more clearly than text can (NPR's current version has lost the graph image).
sometime between Obama and Trump, huge numbers of people in the religious groups surveyed changed their minds about how much personal morality mattered for Presidents.
which, IMO, is all you need to know about how highly those religious groups people actually valued that particular morality.
if one can abandon a principle that quickly, there's a good chance that principle was never very strongly-held.
"
The people who advocate private charity replacing government payments usually have no real idea of the relative scales of what the government does, and what private charity could do. Ignore Social Security on the (incorrect) theory that it's a mandated savings program. Medicare and Medicaid combined are more than four times the size of all charitable giving each year. Private charity could cover income support spending in normal years, but would be bankrupted trying to cover the surge that happens during a recession.
"
I think Wonkie is correct about religion as the locus for right wing charity. I remember seeing claims a decade or so ago that conservatives gave more to charity than did liberals, but the details of that showed that part of what counted as conservative charity was church offerings and tithing, which may be charity or it may be paying the pastor/priest/rabbi/imam and covering the overhead/improvement of the communal place of worship. And unlike Charity Navigator, there really isn't any way to track the efficiency with which those religious donations are turned into support for charitable causes.
My conservative family members and friends can be quite generous. I do think, however, that liberal charitable giving tends to go to causes a bit farther from home and immediate community, where conservative giving tends to have fewer degrees of separation from the giver.
I think that is a fair assessment.
"
I've been seeing a lot of this "Government shouldn't do charity because charity should be voluntary through churches." Back in the days of Dickens, that is how charity was done. The 1800's were a transition period in Europe and the US when the medieval attitude that the poor deserved to be poor was gradually replaced by the common good and the social contract (and I'd say, basic human decency.). Quite often the people who make the argument that the government shouldn't do charity are themselves living off taxpayers and feel entitled to what they get. It isn't an argument that has any validity, in my view.
"
My observation is that charitable giving and good works are at least as common on the right as on the left. The R's are predominantly in favour of helping the unfortunate, so long as the get to do it of their own free will.
Their perspective is it's wrong for the government to take their money to give it to possibly undeserving poor people they've never met.
It's a different thing to support unpleasant politicians who share, or pretend to share, parts of one's world view. I thought it couldn't possible extend to someone as unremittingly vile as Trump: I was wrong.
"
I don't want to be the old geezer who blames everything on the internet, but it seems to me that all the touted ability to hook people up with like minded individuals has a lot of people missing the diversity in their own backyard. That diversity used to keep these sorts of opinions in check, even though they were held by people, by isolating people, it allows them to flower. Not a new idea, but one I think holds.
I've been reading Jeffrey Hall's Japan's nationalist right in the internet age: Online media and grassroots conservative activism, and he has this
That last point is interesting, as it suggests that there is a stronger class element involved in this for the West than it is for Japan.
"
Are you in contact with your Apache and Hopi cousins?
I'm in touch with my cousing Peter - the Apache - on Facebook. After Charlie retired from FDNY he painted houses, and Peter basically apprenticed with him and continues to work as a house painter and general handyman. He had some bumpy times, but is all good now. Peter has the best family pictures and has become kind of the family archivist.
My cousin Tara - the Hopi - grew away from the family a bit at some point, although she and her daughter Kateri are still in touch with Charlie's kids.
"
The Eddie aspect is even more moving, if that's even the right word. No wonder you miss them.
"
Charlie and his wife (and the rest of them) sound like wonderful people.
They were a pretty remarkable crew.
FWIW, the younger guy on the left, sitting in front of my grandfather (older Archie Bunker looking guy in the white shirt) was Eddie Gonzales. Not a brother by birth, but basically unofficially adopted into the family.
Eddie's father abandoned him, and his mother was an alcoholic. Eddie himself was gay, which nobody ever talked about but everyone knew, and nobody really cared about one way or the other. He was good friends with the brothers, so he came and lived with them and my grandfolks raised him along with the rest of the gang.
Eddie was at every family gathering and was just part of the family, full stop. Just a part of the larger Richmond Hill crew.
So yes, this weird dilemma of people who are personally beautiful - kind and outgoing and generous - but aligned with social and political movements that are... not.
I think a part of all of this for my mom's folks was coming up through the Depression, and then WWII. The brothers were too young to serve in the war, but my father (guy in front of the Christmas tree holding the baby - you can only see the top of his head) did, and they all dealt with rationing etc.
They were basically poor - not desperately, but poor enough to have to watch every nickel and do without a lot of things. Like everyone around them was. Tucky - the brother in the middle with the big smile - was offered a full basketball scholarship to Columbia, and wasn't able to go, because the family needed him to work and bring money into the house.
My sense is that all of those experiences - the anxiety of having just barely enough, the sacrifices around wartime - gave them an ethic that you pull together and help out whoever needs help.
But lots of folks came through all of that and were not quite as open-hearted.
This crew and their kids were my people, really - my father's family were all in Georgia, and I did not see them as often, many of them I never even met. They were a joy to know, and I miss them.
On “Another variety in the diversity of greasy”
Vance strikes me as a person who has no values beyond self-promotion and no sincerity. He'll say or do what is convenient at the time. He might decide to dump the Hindo wife to marry the wife of the martyred Saint Charlie of Free Speech for Conservatives Only. It wouldn't surprise me at all.
On “People and poliltics”
Are you in contact with your Apache and Hopi cousins? I'm curious about how their lives turned out. My shirt tail relatives of that generation had a native adopted daughter, but their attitude was condescending and eventually she cut off all connection.
As for how good people do bad things. I think partly it's because they are good people that they can do bad things. They know their own lives, their values, their actions and think that people like them aren't doing anything bad. That plus the harm they do is an abstraction to them.
"
Charlie and his wife (and the rest of them) sound like wonderful people. It's so valuable to hear the specifics, and to be reminded (and one needs to be reminded) that people are complicated, and that they contain multitudes. Sometimes, like in that old Dirk Bogarde movie, you have to focus on the singer not the song.
"
In color.
"
I'm resigned to the impossibility of figuring out how otherwise good and smart people have horrible politics. I can only observe, without having a worthwhile explanation, that they sometimes do.
It's much easier if the person in question is plainly an a**hole.
"
I think you make a good point about people being complex. So the first question that's worth asking about someone whose politics you question is Why are you supporting this horrible person for office. The answer can be surprising.
Take one obvious example that most of us are old enough to remember. There are people who supported Clinton both times that he won, simply because they liked the platform he ran on and despite his character flaws. There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable. (Personally, I think him a pretty appalling excuse for a human being, even if I like many of the things he tried to do while in office.)
Things get more complex when you find people that have essentially identical views on the issues. Faced by a candidate whom they agree with on some issues and disagree with on others, they may vote differently based on how they prioritize the various issues.
Certainly there are extreme cases -- Trump, for example, has absolutely nothing that I can see to recommend him. Unless you somehow manage to see politics are merely a show, with zero real world consequences. But in general people, and circumstances, are rarely binary good/bad.
On “Another variety in the diversity of greasy”
But cleaned up kinda misses the point, doesn't it?
"
All cleaned up...
On “Horrifying stuff”
Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?
In pretty much any country, no group has a stronger work ethic than immigrants. About the only exceptions are places where most of the immigrants are retirees or the idle rich.
The US is unusual only in the numbers of immigrants that we have been blessed (and we have been blessed) with. Not unique, certainly, but unusual.
On “Weekend Music Thread #04 John Mackey”
I have a long time friend, Kile Smith, who is actually a living breathing composer. He heard a recording of the Brahms Requiem when he was a teenager and decided, without much other background or context other than playing some bass and singing in his high school chorus, that that was what he wanted to do.
I met Kile when we both attended Bible College in the mid 70's. Long story for another time. Suffice it to say we became good friends, went our separate ways for a while, and then reconnected a few years ago courtesy of Facebook. For which I'm grateful, Kile is a good person to know.
Most serious arts have a sort of "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" aspect to them. They require a lot of time - hours and hours and hours - of hard work, often time spent alone, with no particular guarantee that you are going to get anywhere. Composing has the additional complication that, to actually realize your work, you have to get someone to perform it. Which introduces a kind of chicken-and-egg thing - if you don't really have a reputation yet, how do you persuade someone to invest in performing your stuff? But if nobody ever performs your stuff, how do you build a reputation?
It's a challenge.
Kile is my age - 69 and counting - and his work is now performed and recorded a lot, by ensembles with real national and international reputations. But it took decades of hard lonely work to make that happen. If you ask him, he will tell you that his secret is having an "iron butt" - he made himself sit in a chair for hours, day after day, to do the work. He's an extremely humble guy, makes no great claims about his talents, but he also knows his work is good.
And it is good.
Most of his work is sacred choral stuff. He's also done some orchestral work, and has set texts by folks as various as Seneca, Robert Lax, Tagore, and Stephen Foster.
Here is Kile talking about his process in composing an Agnus Del.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMoL-y_vjIY
One of the movements from his setting of texts by Seneca, "The Waking Sun".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0J1pgCAx3g
"The stars shine", from his "Consolation of Apollo", a setting of a text from Boethius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZIe8d5StCw
"Three Spirituals for Piano Trio", an instrumental piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq6cjnOxW00
Kile almost died this year. He had been feeling ill for a while, with weird and non-specific symptoms. Doctors gave him a bewildering variety of diagnoses, none of which led to a useful treatment plan. He finally got an accurate diagnosis of multiple myolema and has spent the last couple of months in the oncology ward at University of Pennsylvania Hospital. He's doing better - still a long road ahead, but improving, with good prospects for managing things and having lots of years to go.
While in isolation, he finished a piece that had been commissioned. I suggested to him (via Facebook IM, it was a no-visitors situation and talking on the phone was too tiring) that he might want to take his condition as an opportunity to rest for a bit, but apparently he wasn't having it.
Let us work while we have the light.
Thank you for this opportunity to share my good friend with you all.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
Thank you, nous, lj and pb.
On “Horrifying stuff”
Also, as a comment on the "work ethic" thing:
Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?
Maybe it's just me, but every time I see someone who looks "immigrant-ish" - which usually means cafe au lait skin tone and an accent - they are working their asses off.
You know those "how many X does it take to do Y" jokes? Here is mine.
How many immigrants does it take to... oh wait, never mind, they're done.
Just saying.
"
Now, some of us have more Neanderthal DNA than others, but that miscegenation is long, long in the past.
There are far fewer men who self-identify as Neanderthal than there are women who claim that they're married to one.
"
russell - Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.
I'm sure that Grok has been fed those things, but what it "thinks" about those things is just a matter of remixing what others have said about those texts.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.