Author Archives: Sheila

The Southern Strategy

Speaker of the House Michael Johnson is the latest product of Richard Nixon, Kevin Phillips and what we now refer to as “the Southern Strategy.”

Speaker Johnson is an avowed Christian Nationalist, an Evangelical who attributes his election as Speaker to God.

Johnson was formerly counsel to the Alliance Defense Fund–a far-right, Christianist organization deeply committed to the culture wars. (He authored the ADF’s brief in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, representing the baker who argued that baking a cake for a gay couple’s wedding would violate his religious freedom.)

As many media outlets have reported, Johnson was counsel to Louisiana Right to Life before starting his own legal firm, Freedom Guard, to “defend religious liberty, the sanctity of human life, marriage and the family.”

After the Supreme Court decided Obergefell, Johnson wrote for the magazine of the creationist organization Answers in Genesis that Christians would be increasingly “pressured to choose between their conscience and conformity.” He urged readers to read the Bible to discover “how God intends for us to live out our faith in a hostile world.” And “despite the radical secularists’ efforts to convince the public otherwise,” he argued, “it is not ‘bigotry’ to remind people of God’s claims on our lives and biological reality.” He also offered free legal services, through Freedom Guard, to any government officials, like justices of the peace, who feared they would “compromise their faith by issuing marriage licenses or solemnizing marriages under circumstances that conflict with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

There’s much more (he’s also a Young Earth climate denialist), but why do I connect his  theocracy to the Southern Strategy? Answer: because it is all cut from the same cloth–the conviction that God intended America to be dominated/ruled by White (“European”) Christians.

Jamille Bouie outlined the Southern Strategy in an essay for the New York Times.

Phillips had worked as a strategist on Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, the experience of which supplied much of the material for his book. His argument was straightforward: Nixon’s victory wasn’t just a momentary triumph but the beginning of an epochal shift in American politics, fueled by a latent conservatism among many members of the white middle class. These voters were repulsed, Phillips wrote, by the Democratic Party’s “ambitious social programming and inability to handle the urban and Negro revolutions.”

The latter point was key. “The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it,” Phillips declared. “The Democratic Party fell victim to the ideological impetus of a liberalism which had carried it beyond programs taxing the few for the benefit of the many (the New Deal) to programs taxing the many on behalf of the few (the Great Society).”

If one tallied Nixon’s share of the national popular vote, at 43.5 percent, and added it to the share won by the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, at 13.5 percent, then you had, in Phillips’s view, the makings of a conservative majority.

The Republican Party was revamped to wage culture war, to appeal to voters who see the world as an existential struggle between “us” and “them.”  The Southern Strategy defined “us” as White and “them” as people of color, and that racist element remains central, but it has been joined by bigotries against a wide variety of other “thems.” Jews, of course (history’s most durable villains); Muslims, LGBTQ people…Anyone who isn’t a White Christian Nationalist.

Every credible academic study done after the 2016 election confirmed the importance of racism to Trump’s (Electoral College) victory. Every subsequent poll and/or study has corroborated the deep divisions between values held by ordinary Americans and those held by respondents who self-describe as White Evangelical Christians.

During the 1968 Presidential campaign, Kevin Phillips reportedly told the journalist Garry Wills,“The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.”

Before he died, Phillips became a fierce critic of the Republican Party he’d done so much to create, but by then, hate had become part of the party’s DNA. As Bouie concluded his essay,

The Republican Party did not just win the white South in the years and decades after Phillips wrote “The Emerging Republican Majority.” Nor did it just become the party of the white South — or at least its most conservative elements. No, what happened is that the Republican Party Southernized, with a politics and an ideology rooted in some of the most reactionary — and ultimately destructive — tendencies of that political tradition.

So here we are– with a Speaker of the House who fully embraces those destructive, reactionary beliefs–a Speaker intent upon substituting White Christian Nationalism for a Constitution profoundly influenced by the Enlightenment.

It’s not a good omen….

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Remember The City Committee?

Back when I was a member of Indianapolis’ city administration, local government was supplemented and assisted by a couple of semi-official organizations composed of local power brokers.

The Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee (GIPC), formed by Mayor John Barton in 1964, was billed as an advisory group of leaders from the public and private sectors . It was charged with formulating a “program of progress that makes use of the city’s full potential.” Frank McKinney, a local bank president, was its first chairman. GIPC still exists, but wouldn’t be recognizable to its founders–its membership today is far broader and more representative (and arguably much less influential).

Another group, dubbed the City Committee, was formed–if my aging memory serves–under the aegis of the Lilly Endowment. The City Committee was a relatively informal collection of government “movers and shakers.” It was bipartisan and (unusual for that time) racially integrated, and included Indianapolis members of the state legislature and city government officials. It served as an important–albeit unofficial– venue for decisions involving the city.

The City Committee included Black men, but excluded women. I still recall the dismissive remark by the Lilly executive who served as the Committee’s convener (conveyed to me by my husband, who–as the then-Director of Metropolitan Development– was a member); when someone suggested including me–the city’s first female Corporation Counsel– and another female lawyer, he vetoed it, saying “Admitting women would destroy collegiality.”

Whatever its faults and drawbacks, the City Committee played an important role in the growth and governance of Indianapolis–vastly improving the administration’s ability to get things done– and I have often thought that the current absence of anything remotely resembling it has made progress more difficult.

A recent column by Thomas Edsall in the New York Times cited research supporting that concern. When we look at trends that are hurting cities, Edsall says we don’t talk enough about the “erosion of the local establishment and the loss of civic and corporate elites.”

Until the late 1970s, virtually every city in the United States had its own network of bankers, corporate executives, developers and political kingmakers who dominated their private associations, golf courses and exclusive downtown clubs.

The members were affluent white men who wielded power behind closed doors, without accountability to the citizenry. For all their multiple faults — and there were many — they had one thing in common: a shared economic interest in the health of their communities.

As cities like Indianapolis have lost corporate and banking headquarters to a handful of “star” cities, we’ve also lost leadership and sources of the “wherewithal, capital, know-how and prestige” needed to advance municipal and regional priorities.

Robert D. Atkinson, the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, described the long-term secular trends in an email to me: Big ‘anchor’ corporations played a key role in civic life in metro areas, not just in terms of corporate donations to nonprofits but also in bringing to bear leadership to revitalize cities. This used to happen all the time in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, the Twin Cities, etc.”

These locally based companies, Atkinson continued, “played an important role of helping the various municipalities in a region work more closely together. Banks and utilities were especially critical to this, in large part because their sales base depended on a healthy regional economy.”

Edsall quotes Aaron Renn for the observation that “changes in cities over the course of the last 30 to 40 years have greatly undermined local leadership cultures.”

The banks in most cities were locally owned and were limited by law to their home markets. Their C.E.O.s were extremely powerful both in their companies and communities. And their personal professional incentives were aligned with those of their locality. The only way to grow their banks or electric utilities was to grow the community where they were based. Today, many C.E.O.s of once-local companies are branch managers of global firms. Their job is to sit on local boards and dabble in community relations, but they don’t really call the shots anymore.

Edsall’s column focused on what happened in Baltimore as that city’s “elite” dissipated;  many other cities had similar experiences.

Edsall doesn’t gloss over the considerable negatives that accompanied the “mover and shaker” model, but his analysis also recognizes that when cities lack substitute civic mechanisms, the consequences are also negative.

The question for cities that have lost headquarters and other corporate assets is: what will replace mechanisms like the City Committee? Can we form “committees” capable of replicating the good they did and the role they played without also replicating their lack of democratic accountability and other exclusionary characteristics?

What should a 21st-Century “City Committee” look like?

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I’d Have Sworn This Was Satire

This isn’t satire. I kid you not.

The DeSantis administration has proposed a rule for Florida’s public campuses that would prevent the teaching of issues “that polarize or divide society among political, ideological, moral, or religious beliefs.”

Back in May, DeSantis signed into law Senate Bill 266, banning the state’s public colleges and universities from using public funds to “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism.” But the law, which took effect in July, never defined those terms, instead leaving that up to the Board of Governors that oversees those state schools. Now the board has done just that. In draft regulation obtained by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the board proposes that the ban apply to all campus programs and activities in which the college or university “endorses or promotes a position” on “topics that polarize or divide society among political, ideological, moral, or religious beliefs, positions, or norms.”

This idiocy is the logical outcome of redefining education as job training–a belief near and dear to contemporary Republican hearts. Just crank out worker bees–and for heaven sakes, don’t let them learn anything from our human history of deeply-contested political, ideological, moral or religious theories and beliefs!

UnderS.B. 266, Florida’s public colleges and universities are prohibited from offering general education classes that “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” or that include “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” The law also bars public higher education institutions from using state or federal funds for activities or programs that “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion”—making Florida’s anti-DEI law one of the most restrictive of the dozens of such laws introduced across the United States. A DeSantis press release announcing the bill’s signing declared it is meant to “prevent woke ideologies from continuing to coopt our state universities and state colleges.”

I have a proposal: rather than this tortured effort to describe matters that will now be forbidden on campus, just reduce the bill to its essence: “Education will not be allowed.”

Think my snark is an over-reaction? Just look at the draft resolution:

In addition to defining “social issues” as “topics that polarize or divide society among political, ideological, moral, or religious beliefs, positions, or norms,” it defines “political or social activism” as “any activity organized with a purpose of effecting or preventing change to a government policy, action, or function, or any activity intended to achieve a desired result related to social issues, where the university endorses or promotes a position in communications, advertisements, programs.” “Diversity, equity, or inclusion,” meanwhile, “is any program, activity, or policy that promotes differential or preferential treatment of individuals, or classifies such individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation.”

As several pundits have observed, today’s GOP is the party of projection: the Florida effort to control what is discussed in the state’s classrooms is precisely the “indoctrination” that they pretend is occurring under “woke” auspices.

How does one teach the Crusades or the Reformation or the colonizing of America without noting the religious beliefs that polarized people living at those times? How do you teach philosophy without examining the contending perspectives of the philosophers, or discuss the role of women in politics without reference to the social “norms” that originally denied women the franchise? 

Are efforts to prevent rape on campus evidence of “differential treatment” of women? Speaking of “evidence,” what does evidence that a university is “promoting equity” look like? (I always thought “equity” meant fundamental fairness–I guess we don’t want that on campus….)

Education is typically defined as the process of acquiring knowledge and developing the powers of reasoning and judgment. Education may also extend to the acquisition of specialized skills needed for a career or profession, but it is usually understood to require the development of critical thinking, differentiating it from mere job training and from indoctrination.

DeSantis is well on his way to destroying higher education in Florida.

He began with attacks on New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college that was forced to alter its curriculum and programs. DeSantis installed conservative ideologue and education foe Christopher Rufo as a member of the college’s board of trustees, and together they worked to “remake” New College, which immediately lost more than a third of its faculty–a fact DeSantis hailed as permitting the “replacement of far-left faculty with new professors aligned with the university’s mission.”

I don’t know what that mission is, but it sure isn’t education.

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Waging War On Poor People

I came across a recent Facebook post that has really stuck with me. It shows the face of a young girl. She’s being asked “are you Jewish? Muslim? Christian?” and she responds “I’m hungry.”

It made me wonder when, if ever, the culture warriors of every tribe will learn to look at other humans as humans–beings with needs and talents common to our shared humanity. It’s a question that becomes especially pertinent in times of war, but people’s penchant for inhumanity–for labeling strangers as “other”– isn’t limited to such times.

It also isn’t limited to our ethnic or religious differences. Far too many Americans also think of themselves as distinct from poor people–a different form of tribalism, and one that is particularly cruel, because it encourages comfortable folks to dismiss the needs of the impoverished–or worse, to blame them for their neediness.

We see it in our politics. Republican politicians recently went on record dismissing evidence that  government shutdowns disproportionately hurt poor women and children. In September of this year, when it last looked as if the GOP would engineer such a shutdown, the administration warned that millions of the country’s most vulnerable women and children would lose their nutrition benefits. The Women, Infants and Children nutrition program—which serves pregnant, postpartum, and breastfeeding mothers and their children under the age of 6—would run out of federal funding if the government shut down.

Those pious “pro life” Republicans dismissed the warning and instead used low-income mothers and their children as pawns in a  game of shutdown chicken.

Speaking of “piety”–The New Republic recently reported that a “new, antisocial strain of the prosperity gospel is making its way into pulpits and breeding new hostility toward the least fortunate Americans.”

Chief among the new doctrines is the idea that God rewards “seeding”—that is, the “sowing” of financial donations to churches, or favored online preachers—with a material harvest in return. The prosperity gospel might sound as old-fashioned—and feel as familiar—as a preacher in a three-piece suit, but a new and cynical version is making a comeback across ministries both old and new; among people who go to church and those who get their faith online.

A recent survey by Lifeway Research found that 52 percent of American churchgoing Protestants say their church teaches God will bless them if they give more money to their church and charities. That figure is up from 38 percent of churchgoers in 2017. 

We’ve seen some of this before, of course, but apparently, the prosperity gospel is also being “weaponized by some of the most right-wing elements in conservative religious circles as a form of retribution.”

In May, Jason Mattera, son of Joseph Mattera, one of the most influential modern prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation—which emerged from the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition that is sweeping all of evangelical Christianity before it—wrote a piece outlining a new direction for prosperity theology. In the article, titled “A Biblical View of Work and Welfare,” Mattera junior opined that, while Christians should help to alleviate poverty, they are not “under any obligation to help indolent bums.” Such people, he added “are not entitled to our generosity.”

While the concept of prosperity gospel has always held some latent hostility to the poor—that your circumstances belie a lack of faith or at least that you’re not doing it right—Mattera’s view highlights an escalation of prosperity-gospel thinking that says the quiet part out loud.

In Mattera’s vision, which appears rooted as much in right-wing talking points as in theological ideas, “​​there are clear worldview implications for Christians to consider on the topic of work and welfare.” A hereditary influencer who made his name creating a “whites-only scholarship” while at college, he concedes that Christians should be at “the tip of the spear” when it comes to looking after the poor but largely for other Christians. The unfortunate, he writes, “have chosen the path of poverty.” 

This is no war on poverty–it’s a war on poor people.  

The belief that people are poor because they are morally defective isn’t new–it is integral to the bastardized Calvinism that permeated early America, and it was barely veiled in George W. Bush’s approach to welfare reform. Its appeal is obvious: if your hunger is due to your own inadequacy, you have no moral claim on those of us whose comfortable situations are evidence of our moral superiority.

And if that hungry young girl isn’t even a Christian…she certainly doesn’t deserve to be fed…

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Common Sense Democracy

One of the most frustrating aspects of America’s current political dialogue (if our screaming fits can even be dignified by the term “dialogue”) is the importance attributed to  various individuals–looney-tunes and statesmanlike figures alike. It makes me want to amend that famous James Carville adage–“It’s the Economy, Stupid”–with a more accurate one: it’s the system, stupid.

Call. it the “but for” problem.

But for systemic flaws like gerrymandering, Americans would be highly unlikely to elect posturing fools like Jim Jordans and Margery Taylor Green. But for the Electoral College, Donald Trump would never have occupied the Oval Office. But for our current “winner take all” system, we could send many more sane, competent people to Congress.

In a recent article for Time Magazine, two prominent political scientists pointed out that these systemic flaws are fixable.

America’s sharp division isn’t just about policy disagreements or ideology. Much of it comes down to the science of how Congress is elected. Winner-take-all elections have produced a fully-sorted two-party system in America that pits two sides against each other, incentivizes performative conflict, and punishes compromise. With the existing electoral and party system, we may as well invest all our money into a colony on Mars as hope for a bipartisan coalition leading Congress right now.

The silver lining is that America is not stuck with this broken system. Preserving the failing status quo is a choice. Winner-take-all elections are nowhere in the Constitution, and Congress has the power to change them. Multi-party coalitions work well in many other countries, and they can work in America, too, if we are willing to confront the root causes of Congress’s brokenness.

One of those root causes is America’s system of winner-take-all elections.

Winner take all elections do not result in anything remotely like accurate representation. As the authors point out,  all five of Oklahoma’s representatives are Republicans, even though about a third of Oklahoma voters consistently vote for Democrats, and all nine of Massachusetts’ representatives are Democrats, even though about a third of Massachusetts voters are consistent Republicans. But because the minority party doesn’t make up a majority of any one district, they are deprived of any voice in Congress.

That means that primary elections in these states effectively determine the general election outcome, making it easy to win for extreme candidates, harder for moderates, and impossible for anyone in the minority party.

This is one reason why the overwhelming majority of the world’s democratic countries use proportional representation for their elections, where districts elect multiple representatives to Congress in proportion to their party’s share of the vote. In America, it would allow more voters to have a say in who represents them; if a party wins 40% of the vote, it would get about 40% of the seats. Oklahoma liberals and Massachusetts conservatives would have a voice. That would mean more moderates in Congress. Members of the far right and far left would be elected, too – but in accurate proportion to their amount of support.

Proportional representation would also alter the incentive structure for representatives. Reflexive opposition to the “enemy” would no longer be the way to win elections, because voters would have more than a choice between the lesser of two evils. This would allow more ways to form a coalition in Congress capable of compromising and governing with a lot less infighting and chaos. This is one reason why last year, more than 200 political scientists, historians, and legal experts signed an open letter to Congress calling for the adoption of proportional representation.

There is much to love about Americans’ fixation on individualism and personal responsibility, but it is an emphasis that far too often masks important realities. For example, people are rarely poor because they are lazy and unwilling to work–far more often, they can’t work because they are disabled, or because the factory closed, or because the economy tanked. Congress isn’t dysfunctional just because the GOP base prefers angry buffoons –it’s our unrepresentative and obsolete electoral systems that give legislative terrorists the ability to bring the operation of government to a screeching halt.

In our winner take all system, a candidate who wins 49.9% of the vote loses to the one who garners 50.1%–and the people who voted for that losing candidate are 100% unrepresented. Then we wonder why the people who won election feel free to ignore the needs and desires of that 49.9%. After a few election cycles, we wonder why so many voters who find themselves consistently in that losing 49.9% stop voting and participating.

It’s the system, stupid. We need to fix it.

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