Monthly Archives: February 2020

Labels For The Intellectually Lazy

In a class discussion the other day, a student noted that she had taken one of those “where do you stand?” tests on the Internet, and had emerged dead-center–neither Left nor Right. She wondered what was wrong with her; evidently, her fatal flaw is that she actually thinks for herself.

These Internet “tests,” of course, are bogus; the questions lack nuance, and tend to reflect the “either/or” bipolarism of contemporary American politics.

I’m old enough to remember when the most common complaint about the parties was that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference between them.” I also remember a popular libertarian illustration of the political spectrum as a circle, not a straight line–the accurate message being that, at the far left and far right, the extremes meet, with their only disagreement being whose agenda government should impose on the rest of us.

I’m also old enough to remember when issues we now consider “left” were held by many on the right: lots of limited-government Republicans used to be pro-choice and pro-gay-rights, for example, asserting that–as Barry Goldwater put it–government didn’t belong in your boardroom or your bedroom.

The tendency to apply labels that allow us to dismiss, rather than engage, positions with which we disagree is hardly new; in 2003, I wrote

This mania for labeling people so that we don’t have to engage with them on the validity of their ideas has accelerated during the past few years. Perhaps it is talk radio, with its tendency to reduce everything to name-calling sound-bites. Admittedly, it is much more efficient to call a woman a “feminazi” than to take the time and effort needed to discuss why her positions are untenable. And the tactic certainly isn’t limited to Republicans; Indiana’s very own Evan Bayh has solemnly warned the Democrats against the danger posed by “leftists” like Howard Dean. (I’m not quite sure when Dean’s support for gun rights, the death penalty and a balanced budget became “far left” positions. Perhaps when they were espoused by someone the Senator isn’t supporting.)

Intellectual honesty has not improved since 2003. Far from it.

Perhaps my memory is faulty, but when I became politically active, the major differences in political philosophy involved “how” rather than “what.” In other words, there was general recognition of the problems America faced, but different approaches to solving those problems. Today, the bulk of the Republican Party disagrees about the very existence of certain problems–think climate change.

Disputing evidence, however, is neither Left nor Right. It’s delusional.

For that matter, a number of America’s current challenges simply do not lend themselves to classic Left/Right classifications. Climate change is one. Globalization is another. The likelihood that automation will displace millions of workers, and the increasingly undemocratic structure of our electoral system are still others. Proposed solutions to these challenges may or may not fall on the familiar left/right spectrum, but any genuine debate about those solutions must be grounded in acknowledgment of their existence and complexity.

Admittedly, the resurgence of white nationalism on the one hand and calls for massive economic redistribution on the other fall on the familiar left/right spectrum–but even then, partisan labeling and name-calling are no substitute for considered analysis.

Yelling “snowflake” or “fascist” at those with whom you disagree may make you feel better, but it’s not only lazy–it’s no substitute for an evidence-based explanation of why you disagree.

Name calling is also unlikely to change anyone’s opinion  –although, given the rancor of today’s political tribalism, and the unwillingness of today’s zealots even to consider contrary positions, probably nothing is.

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Cities And Democracy

Jane Jacobs was one of the great urban theorists of the twentieth century, and an enormously provocative thinker. (Her Systems of Survival is one of my all-time favorite books–in my opinion, right up there with the Death and Life of Great American Cities.) 

A recent article about Jacobs focused on a less-well-known aspect of her work: her abiding concern about the fragility of democracy.

As the author noted,

Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.

The article began with a description of an Appalachian village–Higgins, North Carolina–where Jacobs’ aunt was a social worker. The town was a depressing example of decline, an example of civic failure that evidently deeply concerned Jacobs.

In a year when American democracy has courted despotism, Jacobs’s work offers a warning and a challenge. Her goal was never merely to enlighten urban planners. In her work she argued, with increasing urgency, that the distance between New York City and Higgins is not as great as it seems. It is not very great at all, and it is shrinking.

Jacobs’ first book, Constitutional Chaff was a compilation of failed proposals from the Constitutional Convention of 1787, such as a third house of Congress and direct election of a Senate that never went out of session. In the introduction to the book, Jacobs argued that this diversity of conflicting perspectives “reflected the soul of American democracy as vividly as the ratified document itself did.”

In her “magnum opus,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs argued that a city–or for that matter, a neighborhood– absolutely requires diversity: “diversity of residential and commercial use, racial and socioeconomic diversity, diversity of governing bodies (from local wards to state agencies), diverse modes of transportation, diversity of public and private institutional support, diversity of architectural style.”  She also insisted that concentrating numbers of people in relatively small areas, far from being problematic, is the foundation of healthy communities. Dense, varied populations are desirable, Jacobs wrote,

because they are the source of immense vitality, and because they do represent, in small geographic compass, a great and exuberant richness of differences and possibilities, many of these differences unique and unpredictable and all the more valuable because they are.

If vitality comes from diversity, decline comes from homogeneity. Early indicators of decline in places like Higgins–a decline we increasingly see in small towns across many states, including Indiana–are :

“cultural xenophobia,” “self-imposed isolation,” and “a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit … to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” She warns of the profligate use of plausible denial in American politics, the idea that “a presentable image makes substance immaterial,” allowing political campaigns “to construct new reality.” She finds further evidence of our hardening cultural sclerosis in the rise of the prison-industrial complex, the prioritization of credentials over critical thinking in the educational system, low voter turnout, and the reluctance to develop renewable forms of energy in the face of global ecological collapse.

The article’s conclusion brings the lesson home.

No reader of Jacobs’s work would be surprised by the somewhat recent finding by a Gallup researcher that Donald Trump’s supporters “are disproportionately living in racially and culturally isolated zip codes and commuting zones.” These zones are latter-day incarnations of Higgins: marooned, amnesiac, homogenous, gutted by the diminishment of skills and opportunities. One Higgins is dangerous enough, for both its residents and the republic to which it belongs. But the nation’s Higginses have proliferated to the point that their residents have assumed control of a major political party.

Assuming voters successfully “vote blue no matter who,” one of the multitude of daunting tasks a new administration must undertake is the rescue of small-town America.

I have no idea how.

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Conspiracy Theories In One..Two..Three…

I still remember a meeting I attended many years ago, when I was in City Hall. A number of neighborhood groups–aggrieved about something I no longer recall–met with Mayor Hudnut and a small group of city officials and accused us of engaging in a devious conspiracy to undermine whatever it was they were exercised about. Bob Cross, then Deputy Director of the Department of Metropolitan Development, responded that incompetence usually explains far more than conspiracy. (Actually, as he remarked after the meeting, we would have been incapable of pulling off a conspiracy.)

It was a bit of wisdom I’ve not forgotten.

There are all sorts of ongoing problems with the Iowa Caucuses–working folks often can’t participate, Iowa is over 95% white and unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, and the parties and media pay far too much attention to the results. Perhaps the monumental cluster-f**k this year will prompt a re-evaluation. (I personally favor a national primary…or at this point, even a retreat to those despised “smoke filled rooms.” Trump would never have emerged from a smoke-filled room.)

In the wake of Iowa’s inability to issue immediate results, Talking Points Memo blamed complexity and an app that was definitely “not ready for prime time.”

Experts in cybersecurity and election administration told TPM on Tuesday that the app chosen by the Iowa Democratic Party failed to handle the complexity, providing an example of what not to do in administering an election.

But incompetence isn’t an explanation that feeds the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders identified a donor who had given money to both Mayor Pete and to the company that developed the flawed app (as had four of the Democratic contenders) and concluded that Pete was part of a clandestine effort to rig the election. Anti-Bernie folks responded by identifying a guy with a “commie background” who has  donated to Bernie, so Bernie’s a commie.

For the record, Bernie’s campaign has said the caucuses were not rigged.

Business Insider reported that GOP operatives were gleefully piling on.

Amid the chaos surrounding the delayed results of the Iowa caucuses, multiple Republicans have pushed conspiracy theories that imply the process was rigged against Sen. Bernie Sanders.

With so much confusion in Iowa, some in the GOP saw an opportunity to be exploited.

There is no evidence whatsoever the caucuses were rigged, but some Republicans are pushing this conspiratorial narrative in what appears to be a fairly transparent effort to divide Democratic voters. The primary season is already heated, with supporters of the various Democratic candidates often duking it out online.

A column in the Washington Post summed up the various elements of this mess that should genuinely trouble Democrats, and the lessons this exercise in breathtaking incompetence should teach.

Transmitting results digitally opens up a whole cyber-world of hacking risk — yet Iowa insisted on doing it anyway. Organizers did try to guard against disaster by requiring precincts to include snapshots of an on-paper count. But there’s a lot more they didn’t do, such as test their system statewide or tell any security experts the name of the for-profit company that constructed the app in a hurried two months. (That name, by the way, is “Shadow, Inc.” Now don’t you feel better?)…

Iowa party officials started by crying “user error” to explain the struggles many precinct captains had downloading and uploading. Okay, if “user error” means very few people could use the app without encountering an error. Some encountered limited bandwidth because so many individuals were accessing the program at the same time, which the party might have anticipated considering they were running 1,681 caucuses simultaneously. Some in rural areas ran into poor wireless service, which the party also should have anticipated considering, well, it is Iowa. The next day, officials began to blame a “coding issue.”

The Iowa imbroglio, in other words, so far reveals lots of incompetence and little insidiousness. More tech isn’t always better, and, in this case, it was worse because a product wasn’t fully tested and didn’t function as it was supposed to.

The first two sentences of the column pointed to the real issue: Americans’ widespread distrust– distrust that encourages belief in conspiracy theories.

Want to cause countrywide confusion and sow doubt in the integrity of our democracy? Apparently there’s an app for that.

Indeed.

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Avoiding The Merits Of The Case

My years as Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU gave me the kind of education that schooling just can’t supply. It was during that time that I first recognized how few Americans knew even the most basic principles of the Constitution and Bill of Rights; for example, there was–and probably still is–a belief that the majority always rules.

I can’t count the number of Hoosiers I encountered who insisted that if a majority of citizens wanted a book banned or a public prayer said– why, that should be the law. The idea that the Bill of Rights enumerates things government cannot do –even if a majority wants government to do them–was both a foreign concept and an unpleasant surprise.

When the issue involved criminal procedure, people expressed widespread disgust at “stupid rules” (for example, the Fourth Amendment) that allowed an occasional defendant to “get off on a technicality.” (“Occasional” is the operative word; aside from television episodes of “Law and Order,” that’s a pretty rare occurrence.)

I thought about those negative attitudes toward “technicalities” a while back, while I was reading a New York Times column by Linda Greenhouse on the standing doctrine. Standing actually is a “technicality” in the sense that when the doctrine is too expansively applied, it allows a court to ignore the merits of a case–to sidestep the issue that is being litigated.

I’m copying a fair amount of the Greenhouse column, because the concept of standing is unfamiliar to most Americans, and its significantly expanded use by the Courts is far more dangerous than the likelihood that fidelity to the Fourth Amendment will free an accused felon.

Pop quiz No. 1: What do the following have in common: an abortion clinic in Louisiana; the county of El Paso, Tex.; and two individuals who don’t want to buy health insurance?

Answer: All are plaintiffs in federal court.

The Hope Medical Group for Women, in Shreveport, La., is the petitioner in the June Medical case now at the Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality of Louisiana’s latest effort to shut down the state’s few remaining abortion clinics.

El Paso County is suing the Trump administration to stop construction of a new section of border wall on its southern border with Mexico that will be paid for in part by siphoning off millions of dollars that Congress intended for a project at the Fort Bliss Army base, the county’s biggest employer and economic engine. This case is not yet at the Supreme Court, but is most likely headed there.

And Neill Hurley and John Nantz, the two men who object to being told to buy health insurance? They and a group of red states led by Texas are in the Supreme Court defending the lower courts’ conclusion that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, which no longer carries any penalty for noncompliance, is unconstitutional.

Pop quiz No. 2: Which of these are the only plaintiffs that the administration’s lawyers are not trying to throw out of court?

Answer: The ones who don’t like Obamacare.

And how are Trump’s lawyers trying to keep the other issues from being decided by the courts? By arguing that the plaintiffs lack standing —the right to bring the lawsuit in the first place.

Courts have developed a three-part inquiry for deciding whether a plaintiff has standing, designed to ensure that a lawsuit presents the “case or controversy” that Article III of the Constitution requires for the exercise of federal court jurisdiction. Did the plaintiff suffer a real injury? Was the injury caused by the defendant? And can a victory in court actually bring relief? These questions appear to invite simple yes-or-no answers. But a few minutes’ reflection shows that they are far from value-free, and finding the answers requires the exercise of judgment.

For example, El Paso County claims that even before a dime has been diverted from Fort Bliss and spent on the wall, it is already suffering damage to its reputation that will cost it business investment and tourist dollars.

The District Court Judge agreed with El Paso that “reputational and economic injuries”  were real, and sufficient to establish standing, and that the injuries were traceable to the government’s proposed action.The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, however, granted the administration’s request for a stay of the injunction, finding a “substantial likelihood that appellees lack Article III standing.”

Greenhouse goes through the arguments for and against standing in each of the other cases; the explanations demonstrate both the dishonesty of the administration’s positions and the pliability of the doctrine.

“Actual damage” is in the eye of the beholder, and when the beholder is an unqualified partisan put on the bench by Trump and McConnell, standing becomes a “technicality” that can be used to neuter constitutional guarantees.

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Will Bribery Work?

Apparently, today’s Republicans–who sure don’t look like the Republicans I grew up with–are no longer bothering to hide their corruption from public view. All of America has witnessed the travesty of the Senate’s impeachment “trial,” and reports of the party’s operation “Redmap” and other efforts at gerrymandering and voter suppression have become ubiquitous.

Now Politico reports that even garden-variety bribery is out in the open.  

Allies of Donald Trump have begun holding events in black communities where organizers lavish praise on the president as they hand out tens of thousands of dollars to lucky attendees.

The first giveaway took place last month in Cleveland, where recipients whose winning tickets were drawn from a bin landed cash gifts in increments of several hundred dollars, stuffed into envelopes. A second giveaway scheduled for this month in Virginia has been postponed, and more are said to be in the works.

The cash giveaways are supposedly under the auspices of an outside charity, the Urban Revitalization Coalition. That stratagem permits donors to remain anonymous and make tax-deductible contributions. (That adds insult to injury–taxpayers are subsidizing partisan bribery.)

One leading legal expert on nonprofit law said the arrangement raises questions about the group’s tax-exempt status, because it does not appear to be vetting the recipients of its money for legitimate charitable need.

“Charities are required to spend their money on charitable and educational activities,” said Marcus Owens, a former director of the Exempt Organizations Division at the Internal Revenue Service who is now in private practice at the law firm Loeb & Loeb. “It’s not immediately clear to me how simply giving money away to people at an event is a charitable act.”

The CEO of the organization is a longtime Trump ally, and the rest of the Politico report is enough to turn your stomach.

But this is hardly the only evidence that the GOP is trading money for votes. Salon has an article documenting contributions to Republican senators in advance of the sham impeachment trial.

President Trump’s legal team made numerous campaign contributions to Republican senators overseeing the impeachment trial.

Former independent counsels Ken Starr and Robert Ray, who both investigated former President Bill Clinton ahead of his impeachment, contributed thousands of dollars to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last year before they joined the president’s team, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics (CFPR)….

The contributions came months before McConnell bragged to Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would be in “total coordination with the White House counsel’s office and the people who are representing the president in the well of the Senate.”

It would also be enlightening to know how many projects were recently and generously funded by the federal government in states represented by Republican senators–especially purple states.

And I suppose promising that a senator’s head wouldn’t be “on a pike” might be considered a bribe as well..

Along with raising money for senators who will decide his fate, Trump has also been accused of threatening Republicans after a Trump confidant told CBS News that senators were warned: “vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike.”

In all fairness, Trump has never made a secret of his belief that bribery is just part of doing business. According to the Washington Post,

For years, President Trump has criticized a more than 40-year-old law banning companies from bribing foreign officials to win business.

In 2012, he told CNBC that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was a “horrible law.” In a 2017 Oval Office meeting, Trump ordered his then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to do away with it.

“It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump said, according to “A Very Stable Genius,” a book by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig that published in January.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said recently that the Trump administration is “looking at” making changes to the global anti-bribery law.

Because of course they are.

Honesty, morality and integrity are so last administration.

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