Author Archives: Sheila

Speaking Of Symbolism…

Most sane observers understand that Trump’s wall is entirely symbolic. If built, it clearly wouldn’t prevent the entry of undocumented folks (the majority of whom fly in and overstay their visas) or the successful smuggling of drugs (which tend to come by ship or air).

Even Fox News rebutted the Administration’s claim that 4,000 terrorists had been stopped at the Southern border (the actual number appears to be 6 people on the watch list). I’m told that most of the Saudis responsible for 9/11 entered through Canada.

The obscenely expensive wall Trump wants to build between the U.S. and Mexico is solely intended to send a message: ignore the poem on Lady Liberty. If you are brown, you aren’t welcome.

The government shutdown triggered by his tantrum over the wall provided Trump watchers with another symbol–one more example of how truly corrupt our know-nothing President can be. Not that most of us needed the reminder.

As federal employees tried to figure out how they would pay their mortgages and put food on the table during the shutdown, as landlords threatened to evict tenants dependent upon Section 8 vouchers that stopped coming, as millions of Americans who rely on SNAP (food stamps) faced the likelihood that those benefits wouldn’t be forthcoming…Talking Points Memo reported that the President managed to keep a historic site incorporated in his hotel fully staffed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Smithsonian museums are closed. There are no federal staffers to answer tourists’ questions at the Lincoln Memorial. And across the United States, national parks are cluttered with trash. Yet despite the federal government shutdown, a historic clock tower at the Trump International Hotel remained open Friday for its handful of visitors, staffed by green-clad National Park Service rangers.

“We’re open!” one National Park Service ranger declared around lunchtime, pushing an elevator button for a lone visitor entering the site through a side entrance to ride to the top of the 315-foot-high, nearly 120-year-old clock tower.

The Trump administration appears to have gone out of its way to keep the attraction in the federally owned building that houses the Trump hotel open and staffed with National Park Service rangers, even as other federal agencies shut all but the most essential services.

A watchdog group has filed a Freedom of Information request over the Trump Hotel’s exemption from a shutdown that furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers and crippled many agencies.

Completed in 1899, the Romanesque-style former post office is on the National Register of Historic Places. The GSA pays for the National Park Service to run the building’s clock tower for visits by the general public. The tower initially closed to the public after the shutdown started. The GSA noticed then that the deal under which the park service staffs the site had expired, and renewed it, and the park service reopened the tower this week, the agency said.

There could hardly be a clearer symbol of Trump’s priorities.

Are more than 800,000 hard-working federal workers desperately trying to make ends meet? Is air travel becoming dangerous as TSA personnel call in sick rather than continue working without pay? Are the national parks overflowing with trash? Well, first things first–we certainly don’t want to inconvenience Trump’s business.

The wall is a symbol of his bigotry; the park rangers tending to the clock tower are a symbol of his self-engrossed avarice.

His presidency is a shameful symbol of national decline.

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“Those People”

A recent, fascinating article in the New York Times focused on the growing divisions between Israeli and American Jews. The differences between them are real, and the implications of those differences for American foreign policy and Middle East peace deserve examination–but I took a somewhat different lesson from the “schism” being scrutinized.

That lesson has two parts: national cultures matter, and stereotypes rest on a profound misunderstanding of the relative influences of biology and culture.

It isn’t only bigots who ascribe certain behaviors to discrete groups of people; even folks who would never impose a quota or paint a swastika on a synagogue wall often stereotype marginalized groups, believing that all Jews–or gays, or blacks, or “Polacks” or other identifiable populations– have particular, inborn characteristics. How many times have you heard someone refer to a minority group as “those people”?

To the extent that minority groups do have observable “markers” of attitude or behavior, those characteristics are almost always the result of history and culture rather than genetic traits. (In an echo of the old nature/nurture debate, it’s hard to disentangle, for example, the emphasis Jews have placed on education from a history that highlighted the value of an asset you could take with you when the powers-that-be confiscated your property and ran you out of the country.)

Marginalized groups develop coping mechanisms that observers often assume are inborn characteristics of “those people.”

Jews who live in Israel, where they are the majority, occupy a very different culture than we American Jews. The threats they face from hostile countries on their borders, the requirement that almost everyone serve in the military, and the theocratic elements of Israel’s governance combine to provide an environment that is dramatically different from the environment experienced by American Jews.

It shouldn’t surprise us that different national cultures shape different perspectives and behaviors, even among people who share a long history. Scholars tell us that the worldviews of the cultures into which we are socialized are enormously consequential.

The truth of the matter is that all groups composed of “those people” are the products of a specific history, time and place. Any group of people who shared that particular history, time and place would be likely to exhibit similar behaviors and attitudes.

Stereotypes are based upon the assumption that certain identifiable groups are monolithic, that all of its members have recognizable, inherited similarities.

The differences that have emerged between Israeli and American Jews should remind us that humans are a mixture of genetics and culture–of nature and nurture–and efforts to cram our differences into silos marked “those people”–or simply “us” and “them”–aren’t simply pernicious.

They’re wildly inaccurate.

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Revising History? Or Ignorance Of It?

A recent article in the Charleston Post and Courier reported on the results of a poll conducted by Winthrop University. It was pretty disheartening.

The Winthrop University Poll randomly dialed and questioned 969 residents in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia between Nov. 10-20 and Nov. 26-Dec. 2. Results have an error margin of plus or minus 3.15 percent.

The poll found that half of residents either agree or strongly agree that America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation.

Among white evangelicals, three-fourths agreed or strongly agreed with this belief about how the nation was founded.

The immediate question raised by such results is whether these respondents have chosen to ignore what they (presumably) learned in history class  or whether they are simply uninformed. Whatever the answer, the poll results explain a number of things about Southern political culture.

The poll’s director noted that the belief in a Christian founding is central to Christian Nationalism.

“Research has shown that increases in Christian Nationalist beliefs lead to more exclusionary views on immigration and more negative views of multi-culturalism in America,” Huffmon said. “Those who hold these views care more about whether they have a strong leader who will protect their religious and cultural values than whether a leader is individually pious.”

Forgive me if I suggest that the “cultural value” they want to protect is Christian social dominance.

It is virtually impossible to reconcile this belief in a Christian Nation with American history, or with what we know about the origins of America’s constitution–or for that matter, with the plain language of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It is one thing for Christian fundamentalists to prefer that the country affirm the superiority of their particular creed; it is another thing entirely to falsify history in order to convince themselves and others that the Founders agreed with them.

If these folks have made a conscious decision to falsify history, that’s reprehensible. But it is far more likely that they are ignorant of history, that they’ve never heard of the Enlightenment, or encountered the (then radical) political philosophy that privileged personal autonomy over religious and political beliefs endorsed and imposed by the state.  The widespread belief in Christian nationhood reflected in the poll results is a stark reminder of Americans’ deficit of civic literacy, and the failure of our schools to teach history and government accurately and adequately.

It’s interesting–and telling– that this particular fantasy about America’s founding is almost exclusively a phenomenon of White Christians who consider themselves the only true Americans.

The Rev. Joseph Darby, first vice president for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Charleston, disagreed with claims that the country was intended to be explicitly Christian.

Darby, who also pastors Nichols Chapel AME in Charleston, didn’t mince words in describing Christian nationalists and white evangelical denominations with exclusionary views on immigration and multiculturalism.

“It’s called Christian hypocrisy,” Darby said.

Darby added that the country should not be in favor of one particular religion. Rather, he said politicians and voters should “love God and love others as we would be loved.”

“If the laws reflect that, we’d be one nation under all,” he said. “If you have something that’s exclusively Christian, you’re walking a very slippery, nationalist slope. Everyone in America is not Christian.”

I suspect that White Christian Nationalists are more worried about the threat civic equality poses to their cultural hegemony than they are about America’s spiritual prospects.

Policymakers can’t do much about chosen ignorance, but polls like this should be seen as yet another reason to make civic education a national priority.

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Progress Report From Juanita Jean

So much winning…

A few days ago, my favorite Texas blogger summed it all up:

As of this moment, we have no Attorney General, no White House Chief of Staff, no Interior Secretary, no Director of the EPA, the Secretary of Education is a religious nut trying to destroy education, the VP is a religious nut who believes women should be subjugated, the Secretary of State is a political hack helping cover up the murder of a Saudi journalist, the Director of National Security wants to bomb Iran, 18 countries have no US ambassador (including Australia), half of the positions in the State Department remain unfilled, the stock market is down almost 3,000 points, China now owns Pacific rim trade, the US is the only major power to NOT be in the Paris accords, the entire world is either terrified or laughing at us, and the president has shut down the government for the last 10 days over his 5th century solution to a 21st century problem. Notice I didn’t mention anything about everyone convicted, in jail, or on the way to jail, or Trump’s current average of telling over 500 lies per month.

This is great? Are we tired of winning yet?

The answer to her (entirely rhetorical) question is: yes, some 60% of us are very tired of Trump and his version of “winning.

The question that is harder to answer is, what the f**k is wrong with that other 40%?”

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Misogyny Over Racism?

In the January/February issue of the Atlantic, Peter Beinart attributes the global move to authoritarianism to misogyny.

After noting the current roster of bullies in power in various countries–he calls them ‘Trumpists’– and noting the very different political and economic environments of those countries, he points to the one threat they all share: women.

But the more you examine global Trumpism, the more it challenges the story lines that dominate conversation in the United States. Ask commentators to explain the earthquake that has hit American politics since 2016, and they’ll likely say one of two things. First, that it’s a scream of rage from a working class made downwardly mobile by globalization. Second, that it’s a backlash by white Christians who fear losing power to immigrants and racial and religious minorities.

Yet these theories don’t travel well. Downward mobility? As Anne Applebaum pointed out in this magazinejust a few months ago, “Poland’s economy has been the most consistently successful in Europe over the past quarter century. Even after the global financial collapse in 2008, the country saw no recession.” In the years leading up to Duterte’s surprise 2016 victory, the Philippines experienced what the scholar Nicole Curato has called “phenomenal economic growth.” The racial-and-religious-backlash theory leaves a lot unexplained, too. Immigration played little role in Duterte’s ascent, or in Bolsonaro’s. Despite his history of anti-black comments, preelection polls showed Bolsonaro winning among black and mixed-race Brazilians. Racism has been even less central to Duterte’s appeal.

The problem with both American-born story lines is that authoritarian nationalism is rising in a diverse set of countries. Some are mired in recession; others are booming. Some are consumed by fears of immigration; others are not. But besides their hostility to liberal democracy, the right-wing autocrats taking power across the world share one big thing, which often goes unrecognized in the U.S.: They all want to subordinate women.

Beinart quotes Valerie M. Hudson, a political scientist at Texas A&M, who reminds us that  for most of human history, leaders and their male subjects agreed that men would be ruled by other men in return for all men ruling over women. Since this hierarchy mirrored that of the home, it seemed natural. As a result, Hudson says, men, and many women, have associated male dominance with political legitimacy. Women’s empowerment disrupts this order.

The article mines history to illustrate the ways revolutionaries have used “the specter of women’s power” to discredit the regime they sought to overthrow.

French revolutionaries made Marie Antoinette a symbol of the immorality of the ancien régime and that Iranian revolutionaries did the same to Princess Ashraf, the “unveiled and powerful” sister of the shah. After toppling the monarchy, the French revolutionaries banned women from holding senior teaching positions and inheriting property. Ayatollah Khamenei made it a crime for women to speak on the radio or appear unveiled in public….

When the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi replaced the longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Morsi quickly announced that he would abolish the quota guaranteeing women’s seats in parliament, overturn a ban on female circumcision, and make it harder for women to divorce an abusive husband. After Muammar Qaddafi’s ouster, the first law that Libya’s new government repealed was the one banning polygamy.

Beinart draws a comparison to Trump, whose attitudes toward women were shared by supporters whose hatred of Hillary was blatantly–even exuberantly– sexist. The misogyny theory even explains Trump’s improbable support among Evangelicals.

Commentators sometimes describe Trump’s alliance with the Christian rightas incongruous given his libertine history. But whatever their differences when it comes to the proper behavior of men, Trump and his evangelical backers are united by a common desire to constrain the behavior of women.

The article is lengthy, and filled with concrete examples. It’s persuasive, and well worth reading in its entirety. Assuming the accuracy of the analysis, it’s hard to disagree with this observation near the end of the essay:

Over the long term, defeating the new authoritarians requires more than empowering women politically. It requires normalizing their empowerment so autocrats can’t turn women leaders and protesters into symbols of political perversity. And that requires confronting the underlying reason many men—and some women—view women’s political power as unnatural: because it subverts the hierarchy they see in the home.

It would seem that the personal really is the political; misogyny evidently begins at home.

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