January 2012 – Page 2 – Sheila Kennedy

I Couldn’t Have Said It Better

Every so often, someone will come across my first book–“What’s a Nice Republican Girl Like Me Doing at the ACLU?”–and will express surprise that I was once a Republican. That happened the other day, and I tried to explain how different the party I belonged to for so long–35 years!–was from the party they see today.

Strange as it may seem today, I was considered “too conservative” for a significant number of Republicans in 1980, when I was their local candidate for Congress; many of them actually defected and voted for my more “mainstream” opponent, Andy Jacobs, Jr. My political philosophy hasn’t changed, but the GOP certainly has; the result is that the positions I held–and hold–that were once labeled conservative now are considered left-wing. I stood still; the party careened “right” past me.

I don’t think people with whom I have that conversation really believe me when I explain how dramatic the shift has been over the last 30 years. But a forthcoming book makes the case more eloquently than I have been able to do.

The book is “It’s Even Worse than it Looks,” and it was written by Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute. Back when I was a Republican, Ornstein was an important intellectual force in the party, and was considered a member of the GOP’s right wing. In the book, Mann and Ornstein write

“One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier–ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

A number of my friends have marveled at how weak the field of GOP Presidential contenders is, but when a political party has become an angry, unthinking mob, when the base that candidates must satisfy prefers red meat to reason, potential candidates have a distasteful choice. They can wait for a less fevered, less rabid environment, or they can do what Romney, Gingrich, et al have chosen to do: reject evolution and science, extol fundamentalist religion and “family values,” attack gays and immigrants, and use barely coded “dog whistles” to play the race card. (One of the most dispiriting elements of this campaign season has been watching Dick Lugar–once a reasonable, dignified elder-statesman–grovel for the votes of these rabid know-nothings by trying to become someone other than the Dick Lugar who once commanded bipartisan respect.)

The real tragedy in the transformation of what used to be the Grand Old Party is that America desperately needs two competitive parties controlled by rational political actors. We voters need to hear different perspectives on policy issues, thoughtfully argued–not name-calling and demonization. Worse still, the absence of a worthy adversary encourages similarly juvenile antics by the Democrats. It makes a circus of the whole political process.

I miss my old party–and America is poorer for its absence.

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What He Said

A relatively simple statement from the President’s State of the Union speech last night deserves emphasis. After reminding Americans of the economic situation when he assumed office, when the country was bleeding jobs and reeling from the collapse of the housing bubble, Obama reported

“In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s. Together, we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion. And we’ve put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like that never happens again.

The state of our Union is getting stronger. And we’ve come too far to turn back now. As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”

Americans have a notoriously short attention span, and a wildly inflated conception of Presidential power. Republican prospects depend upon those characteristics. If the GOP is to recapture the Presidency, Americans must forget how we got into this mess, and how long it took for George W. Bush to dig the hole we find ourselves in. We also have to forget how he did it–what those “policies that brought on the economic crisis” were.

There may have been some unrecognized underlying weaknesses, but economists of all political persuasions agree that Bush inherited a healthy economy, and a shrinking national debt. It took him eight years, but Bush destabilized and weakened that economy, and dramatically increased the debt.

Let’s just look at the three most damaging policies Bush pursued. First, he refused to pay for the wars he so recklessly waged (wars that cost several times the estimates given by then-budget director Mitch Daniels). Second, he actually reduced taxes on the wealthy–thus exacerbating the widest income gap between rich and poor since the gilded age. (Those tax breaks were justified as “job creation” measures, despite the fact that such cuts have historically failed to create jobs.) And third, he eviscerated government regulation, allowing banks and other big businesses to operate with lawless impunity in the serene belief that the market would provide all necessary discipline.

There were plenty of other policies the Bush Administration pursued that were wrong-headed and harmful– failure to address environmental issues, cowboy unilateralism in foreign policy, an assault on civil liberties–but the “big three” did the most widespread damage and make it more difficult to address the others.

A lot of Americans who acknowledge all of this nevertheless believe that it should all be turned around by now. Why, Obama has had three years! These are the folks who must think we elect a king, rather than a President. In the real world, however, Presidential power is more constrained. The President can only do so much–and when those who control Congress refuse to cooperate, refuse even to negotiate, refuse to put the interests of the nation above the interests of their contributors, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that improvement has come slowly.

What’s surprising is that we’ve had improvement at all.

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Shortchanging Students

Okay, okay … I may be beating the proverbial dead horse here, but yesterday, a colleague shared an article written by the the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, bemoaning the continuing elevation of what I’ve called “credentialing” over the sort of broad, liberal education that Americans used to recognize as an ideal. The author criticised the the “current policy rush to move students swiftly and efficiently through their educational paces,” a goal that is too often reached by simply dispensing with such “non-essentials” as history, philosophy, science and the arts in favor of providing “marketable skills.”

I couldn’t agree more. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten that job training is not education.

We lie to our students if we pretend that a quickie program of “how to” courses will prepare them to cope with our increasingly complex, interconnected, globalized world. Learning how to communicate, learning how to learn, learning how to think critically and analytically, and learning how to understand the world in which they live--are the essential survival skills, and inculcating them requires exposure to a broad array of subjects.

Today’s college freshmen can expect to have at least five different careers–careers, not jobs–over their lifetimes. At the same time, they will have to cope with dizzying social changes and increasingly complex political, economic and interpersonal environments. They will need tools not just to earn a living despite changes in the economy, important as that is, but tools that help them live authentic, meaningful lives, and be contributing members of American society.

As the author of the article put it, “The United States is in danger of squandering the opportunity to develop the liberally educated citizenry that both our economy and our democracy so urgently need, a citizenry possessed of that fuller understanding of the world and of the global challenges we face.”

Knowing how to program a computer or run a lab test for e coli or engineer a highway is important and useful, but it is insufficient preparation to be fully human. To the extent we conflate education with job training, to the extent we forgo genuine education–the sort of education that prepares young people for engaged citizenship and richly realized personal lives- we are cheating our students and impoverishing our civic and communal life.

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. We owe our students the tools with which to examine–and fully live–their lives.

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Another Kind of Polarization?

In a column justt before the South Carolina primary, David Brooks relayed a number of conversations with Republican primary voters. His treatment of them was what one might expect of the always civil Brooks–sympathetic and respectful.

But one line in particular struck me. After commenting on the nostalgia expressed by several voters, Brooks noted that such sentiments–however understandable–make for “an incredibly backward-looking campaign. I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return.”

As if to underline that observation, yesterday a number of people posted to Facebook an exit poll that broke down the composition of the GOP primary electorate–how many males, how many females, how many who self-identified as Evangelical, etc.

South Carolina is 26% black. The racial composition of South Carolina’s GOP primary voters was 99% white.

Whatever conclusions one might draw from those numbers, one seems pretty safe. In a country that continues to diversify, a political party that cannot appeal to Americans of all races and ethnicities has no future. If and when the demographics of South Carolina’s GOP reflect the demographics of the national Republican party, the party’s over.

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You’ll Never Get Your Hair Cut in this Town Again

Recently, a colleague of mine was asked to research the impact of professional licensing laws and to report her findings to a legislative study committee. Licensing laws have steadily proliferated—in1970, about 10% of the American workforce required a license of some sort in order to earn a living; by 2000, that percentage had doubled to 20%. It is now estimated to be around 29%.

Lest we think of these requirements as evidence of “big brother” or the much-deplored (and largely fanciful) triumph of an insatiable governmental regulatory fervor, most of these rules are the result of lobbying efforts by the occupational groups being regulated. The result is that Indiana—like many states—requires that workers be licensed before they can shampoo or braid your hair, hypnotize you, or decorate your family room.

Licensing laws are justified by concerns for public safety. We license doctors because most patients lack the knowledge to spot charlatans, and the consequences of what academics call “information asymmetry” can be fatal. We license architects and engineers because building collapses are similarly consequential. This justification seems weaker when we get to shampoo girls and interior decorators.

There is statistical evidence that licensing acts as a barrier to entry into a profession, and also as a barrier to labor mobility (since states have different requirements, licenses are considerably less portable than one might imagine). There is also clear evidence that licensing raises consumer prices—depending upon the profession, those increases range from 4-35%.

The study committee was weighing these benefits and burdens, and considering whether other means of protecting consumers in lower-risk situations might be more cost-effective. Certification, for example, might offer a middle ground. Physicians with specialties use this approach—they have numerous board certifications that are administered by professional organizations. Government isn’t involved, and taxpayers don’t pay the administrative costs, but consumers have the benefit of information about that particular doctor’s training and expertise.

Enter political reality.

Facebook postings warned of disease spread by unclean cosmetic instruments. Tweets went out to rally those in the affected occupations. On the day of the hearing, swarms of scissors-wielding hairdressers (and for all I know, livid interior designers and angry hypnotists) descended on the Indiana Statehouse. My colleague, somewhat shell-shocked, reported that those whose scissors were confiscated by security were furious—evidently it hadn’t occurred to them that weapons couldn’t be taken into the Statehouse. She may have to leave town to get her hair cut after this, and she wasn’t even there to advocate de-regulation; she was just reporting what the relevant research showed.

I am not a betting woman, but I’d give odds against any change in the status quo. As any political scientist can confirm, it is easier to stop change than to effect it.

There are a couple of lessons here, for those interested in reality, rather than the ideologies of Right or Left.

The Right needs to admit that government regulations are just as likely to be a product of the economic self-interest of the regulated industry as the expression of authoritarian impulses. At the state level, much of the drumbeat for licensure reflects the (understandable) belief that one’s occupation should be elevated to the status of a profession; much more comes from a less noble desire to restrict entry and increase profits.

The lesson for the Left is that regulations do, in fact, increase costs, and that they are not always the best way to achieve public goods. The perceived benefits in public safety must be weighed against those costs.

The lesson for my colleague is to avoid angry hairdressers brandishing scissors.

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