Monthly Archives: October 2016

A Plausible Explanation for the Otherwise Inexplicable

One of the disquieting realizations I’ve come to during this interminable campaign is just how many things I don’t understand.

Hard as it has been for me to “get” why any sentient being would support Donald Trump, I’ve been particularly confused about why Evangelical Christians would support a thrice-married admitted adulterer who boasts about his greed, talks about the size of his penis and has a long history of distinctly unChristian behaviors.

It certainly isn’t because they agree with his policy proposals. He doesn’t have any. (Martin Longman recently explained why policy has played such a minor role in this campaign: Despite the fact that Clinton has advanced multiple proposals,  you can’t have a policy debate with rageoholic voters, or with a candidate more focused on beauty queens and his penis than with what is ailing America.)

Not all Evangelicals support Trump, of course, but a significant number do, and I’ve been at a loss to account for that support. I recently came across an interview with Robert P. Jones, the author of “The End of White Christian America” that offers a plausible explanation.

I went back and looked at remarks Trump made at that evangelical college in Iowa in January. There it became really clear to me that he really wasn’t making the case that he was an evangelical. Instead he was making the case that he saw their power slipping from the scene and that he was going to be the guy who would do something about it. He very explicitly said in that message in January in Iowa, “When I’m president, I’m going to restore power to the Christian churches. We’re not going to be saying ‘Happy Holidays,’ we’re going to be saying ‘Merry Christmas.’”

In the book, Jones talks about the politics of nostalgia and grievance–important clues to Trump’s appeal.

When I think and write about white Christian America in the book, I use the term to refer to this big cultural and political edifice that white Protestants built in this country. This world allowed white Protestants to operate with a whole set of unquestioned assumptions. It really is the era of June Cleaver and Leave It to Beaver and Andy Griffith. This sense of nostalgia is very powerful for white Christians, particularly conservative white Christians, who could see themselves in that mythical depiction of 1950s America, but who are having a more difficult time seeing their place in a rapidly changing country….

 What has become most important to the eight in ten white evangelical voters who are now saying they’re voting for Trump over Clinton is that in Trump they see someone who is going to restore their vision of America. It is a vision which really does look like 1950s America. It’s pre-civil rights, it’s pre-women’s rights, and it’s before immigration policy was opened up in the mid-1960s. And most of all, it’s a time when white Protestants were demographically in the majority. But just over the last two election cycles, we’ve gone from a majority white Christian country to a minority white Christian country, from 54 percent white Christian in 2008 to 45 percent white Christian today. So this nostalgic vision of the country harkens back to a mythical golden age when white Protestants really did hold sway in the country, both in terms of numbers and in terms of cultural power.

As Jones sees it, Trump’s real appeal to white evangelicals—how they hear “Make American Great Again”—is his promise to turn back the clock and restore their power, a promise Jones puts in the same category as “I’m going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.”

Obviously, neither is going to happen. But then, reality isn’t Trump’s–or his supporters’–natural habitat. Grievance is.

There simply may not be “a bridge too far” for these voters, but I can’t help wondering how they  will rationalize away yesterday’s disclosure of a tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women by the p—y” ….

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Voter Frauds

One of the most pernicious tactics employed by Republican political operatives is voter suppression masquerading as protection against “voter fraud.” As proponents of Voter ID are well aware, such fraud as exists almost never happens during the in-person vote process that Voter ID laws target.

Virtually all of the “Voter ID” measures being pushed by Republicans are thinly-veiled efforts to intimidate poor and minority voters, who are more likely to vote Democratic. This year, the suspicions fostered by these ungrounded accusations of voter fraud have been further inflamed by Donald Trump’s insistence that, if he doesn’t win, it will be proof that the election is “rigged.”

Here in central Indiana, the media has been reporting on an investigation that newspaper and broadcast outlets have labeled “voter fraud”–but that should be called “registration fraud.”

Interestingly–at least from the somewhat garbled news reports–they are investigating what appears to be an effort to disenfranchise legitimate voters, rather than provide phony credentials to illegitimate ones. Easily detectable inaccurate information is apparently being coupled with the names of actual voters, who may not check to be sure they are properly registered, and won’t realize  they aren’t until they appear at their precinct voting place and are rejected.

Until more details are released, it’s hard to tell precisely what scheme is being alleged. Whatever the actual scam turns out to be, the labeling of any dishonesty focused on the franchise as “vote fraud” simply confirms the public’s belief that there’s justification for Voter ID laws–even though people getting hit by lightning occurs more frequently  than in-person vote fraud.

Illegal voting behaviors include such things as double voting (ballot stuffing), where one individual casts more than one ballot in the same election; dead voting, where the name of a deceased person remains on a state’s official list of registered voters and a living person casts a ballot using that name; felon voter fraud, where a convicted felon who is for that reason not eligible to vote does so; vote-buying,  where someone pays voters to vote a certain way; and fraud by election officials: where dishonest officials toss out ballots or cast ballots using the names of registered voters who didn’t show up at the polls.

As anyone who has worked at the polls can tell you, the best guarantee against these efforts to “rig” the system is competent management of the state’s voter rolls–purging dead and otherwise ineligible voters, ensuring that poll watchers from both major parties are present and similar safeguards. Vote buying is by far the most difficult to detect, and Voter ID would do nothing to prevent it.

The election fraud we see most frequently, ironically, is voter suppression, defined by Ballotpedia as  “A variety of tactics aimed at lowering or suppressing the number of voters who might otherwise vote in a particular election.”

During this election cycle, a new concern has arisen: the possibility that an election dependent upon electronic voting machines might be hacked. As the Brennan Center has noted, however,

There are over 10,000 election jurisdictions in the United States. This means in a federal election, there are essentially more than 10,000 separate elections being run, with different voting machines, ballots, rules, and security measures. One clear benefit of this system is that it is not possible to attack the nation’s voting machines in one location, as might be possible with a statewide voter registration database or campaign email server.

Bottom line: no one is going to “steal” or “rig” this election. If the results are–to coin a word–“deplorable,” American voters will have only ourselves to blame.

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And for the Department of Head in the Sand….

Another day, another reason to view Donald Trump as a threat not just to the United States  and the rule of law, but to the entire globe.

As has been widely reported, Trump has called global warming “bullshit” and he has said that, if elected, he would “cancel” the Paris climate accord and reverse President Obama’s executive actions on climate change. Now, he has announced that Myron Ebell will head up his climate transition team, should he be elected President.

And who is Myron Ebell?

Ebell certainly is not a climate scientist. He is instead a disinformation specialist on global warming, working out of the D.C. offices of the right-wing, Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute as chief of the Center for Energy and Environment. He is also chairman of Cooler Heads Coalition, a collection of propagandists that “question[s] global warming alarmism and oppose energy-rationing policies.” And now he’s been picked to head Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team.

The rest of this “environmental team” are equally frightening.

Also appointed by Trump: Mike McKenna to guide the Department of Energy transition team. He’s worked in the energy field for former Virginia Republican Gov. George Allen and in the George H.W. Bush administration. He’s currently a lobbyist for Koch Companies Public Sector LLC, Southern Company Services, Dow Chemical Co. and Competitive Power Ventures Inc. David Bernhardt, formerly with the U.S. Department of Interior, will be heading the DOI transition team. Bernhardt works the Natural Resources Department of the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Faber Shreck. Among other things, he has represented clients involved in energy development on American Indian lands and businesses accused of violating the Department of the Interior’s regulations.

There are two main categories of science deniers: those who place their immediate financial interests above the common good and their children and grandchildren’s futures; and people like Donald Trump, who live in a reality of their own construction.

As with other aspects of the real world, Trump and his ilk apparently believe that it is possible to ignore facts, science and empirical evidence if you simply put your fingers in your ears and go “la la la, I can’t hear you.”

The problem with childish responses to complex, adult problems isn’t simply that they don’t solve those problems. It’s that they make them much worse.

Whether the Donalds of the world want to believe it or not, climate change is not only occurring, it’s accelerating. The consequences–even if we begin to act responsibly–will be enormously costly, and will reshape global population patterns and politics.

If we don’t act responsibly, they will be catastrophic.

Another reason–as if we needed one– to reject the Orange Buffoon.

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Connecting the Dots–Inequality Edition

I am one of those tiresome academics who has repeatedly criticized the so-called privatization of government functions.

I say “so-called” because what Americans call privatization is no such thing. Actual privatization would require government to sell off or otherwise abandon a particular activity, and let the private sector handle it. (Much like Margaret Thatcher selling England’s steel mills to private-sector interests.)

What Americans call privatization is more accurately described as contracting out; government retains responsibility for a service and the obligation to fund it, but delivers the service through a third-party surrogate, either for-profit or not-for-profit.

There are certainly instances where choosing such a surrogate makes sense; unfortunately, we Americans tend to embrace fads in government as elsewhere. So rather than engaging in analyses of risk and reward for each proposal to contract, too many public entities have accepted the argument that nongovernmental actors will do a better job, or be less expensive, no matter what is to be outsourced.

Research results strongly suggest otherwise. Sometimes, contracting is appropriate; often it is not.

With the publication of a new in-depth report, In the Public Interest has illustrated the often pernicious effects contracting can have on equality. The report centers on five ways in which contracting out exacerbates inequality:

User-funded contracting. Public budgets have tightened all across the country, largely due to the American public’s unwillingness to pay taxes to support services we continue to demand. As a result, some jurisdictions are allowing contractors to charge fees to end-users to subsidize or completely fund an outsourced service.

This is increasingly happening in areas where citizens have little to no political voice. In private probation, for example, offenders are expected to pay for everything from their own drug testing to the costs of ankle-bracelets, despite the fact that as a group they lack the resources to do so.

Rising rates. Residents of places that have privatized critical public services such as water or transit have experienced steep increases in their rates. Some of these increases can be attributed to the profit motive, but in other jurisdictions—like my own—the increases mask desperate, clandestine efforts to shift the costs of public infrastructure from taxpayers to ratepayers. (In Indianapolis, the city sold the water company, which—thanks to deferred maintenance needs—had a negative value of several billion dollars. As part of the deal, the purchasing entity, a nonprofit, “adjusted” its payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) obligation, upward. That allowed the city to float bonds, repayable from the artificially increased PILOT, and use the proceeds to pave deteriorated streets. The result was to shift the costs of infrastructure repair from general tax revenues to utility ratepayers. It would be hard to think of a more regressive strategy.)

Cutting the social safety net. Programs like Medicaid and food assistance are often subjects to privatization experiments, and the report notes that the impact can be
tragic. Contractors have increasingly taken over critical social services like child foster care services, welfare, the distribution of food assistance, Medicaid, and child support services. But as the report details, the complex social problems faced by families and children who utilize these services are difficult to address using a privatization model, and many social services contracts have financial incentives that inadvertently perpetuate cycles of poverty and divert money from critical programs to corporate profits.

Indiana, again, provides an example. Then-Governor Mitch Daniels attempted to outsource welfare intake; as a result, many recipients were denied benefits to which they were clearly entitled, and others endured long waits and confusing, burdensome processes. The results were so negative that the effort was discontinued, but the ensuing lawsuits cost the state millions of dollars that might otherwise have provided needed services.

A race to the bottom for workers. One of the recurring criticisms of privatization has been that, when private companies take control of a public service, they often slash wages and benefits to cut costs, replacing stable, middle class jobs with poverty-level jobs. The report confirms the criticism.

Similarly, the report underlines increasing recognition that privatizing schools, especially, increases socioeconomic and racial segregation. As the text notes, introducing private interests into things like schools and public parks can—and often does–radically impact access for certain groups.

The report is a sobering reminder that there is a critical difference between procurement—government purchases of such things as street paving or computers—and contracting out delivery of core governmental responsibilities. It turns out that “Weakening democratic control over public goods and services increases economic, political, and racial inequality.”

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Media and Women

I was recently asked by the local chapter of the American Association of University Women to participate in a panel discussion on women’s role in journalism and the 2016 election. Preparing for that panel led me to some gloomy conclusions. (Yes, I know this blog has been getting more and more gloomy as the election season drags on..Sorry about that.)

Obviously, women’s roles and participation in media have both improved over the past decades; today, women anchor television news programs, pen op-eds, have bylines and author blogs. That increased media visibility accompanies other notable improvements in our various roles across the economic terrain.

That said, in my view, any discernible “differential” impact on the media landscape has been swallowed up by the far more consequential changes to that landscape generally. Any effect of an increase in female journalists has been more than countered by the massive losses–the hemorrhaging– in what has been called “the journalism of verification.”

In today’s surfeit of fluff and “click-bait,” celebrity has more influence and range than credibility or gravitas. So we have a buffoon (to put it as kindly as possible) running for President and a media environment in which lunatics like Ann Coulter and Shawn Hannity have as much or more influence as respectable reporters and editorial writers, male or female.

My conclusion to the earnest all-female audience at the panel discussion: I don’t think we can examine the role of women in journalism when we have lost journalism to “infotainment.”

And that reality doesn’t even address the unbelievable misogyny that has made Hillary Clinton virtually unrecognizable–a misogyny that has gone largely unchallenged by reporters of both genders who are worried more about generating twitter followers and “clicks” than about accuracy and context.

If Obama’s Presidency and the Clinton campaign have taught us anything (and that is a real question), it is that the emergence of leaders from previously marginalized groups (blacks, women) generates increased hostility from those who were previously privileged. Much of the opposition to President Obama has been shameful and nakedly racist; Hillary Clinton has been vilified ever since emerging on the political scene for failing to be “properly” feminine and deferential. Most of the vitriol lobbed at both of them has had little or no relationship to their actual flaws and/or missteps.

Although I applaud the notion of more women journalists–not to mention more female lawmakers, CEOs, and law firm partners– I doubt that such an increase will immediately or in the mid-term usher in a dramatic change from that still-sexist reality. Progress will continue to be incremental and–for some of us–agonizingly slow.

Actually, at this point, I’d happily settle for more real journalists–of any gender.

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