Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Two Different Worlds?

It has become commonplace to complain that Americans are living in different realities–to respond to statements or opinions that seem particularly bizarre with some version of Barney Frank’s famous line, “on what planet do you spend most of your time?” But what if that isn’t hyperbole? What if Red and Blue Americans really are occupying different worlds?

What if America is actually going through some sort of “virtual” replay of the civil war?

My husband and I eat breakfast at a local coffee shop most mornings with a friend who shares our political obsessions.  Yesterday, during a breakfast discussion about the embarrassing series of congressional fiascos that finally led to last minute legislation avoiding–or at least postponing–the fiscal cliff, my husband shook his head in wonder: as he noted, Congress had set this scenario up and thus seen it coming for at least 18 months during which it had done absolutely nothing. Why? It seemed incomprehensible.

Our friend offered his theory: The Republicans swept into office in 2010, convinced they would retake both the Senate and the White House in 2012. During the campaign, they continued to believe that Romney would win the election, and that they would then have the opportunity and power to fashion their own “fix” of the impending sequester, probably along the lines of the Ryan budget. When Romney lost, and the Senate became even more firmly Democratic, they were stunned. They hadn’t prepared for that eventuality, and they’re still trying to find their bearings.

In the aftermath, the party’s internal fissures have also become more pronounced. At this point, the GOP is like a fish out of water, flopping frantically this way and that on the floor.

I would dismiss my friend’s explanation as utterly fanciful if there were not so many emerging reports that support it. Somehow, despite all of the data and polling and anecdotal evidence to the contrary, despite Nate Silver, a significant number of Republican political figures managed to convince themselves that up was down, blue was red, and America would never re-elect that black guy, especially in a sour economy. When Obama won, they were genuinely shocked–and unprepared to participate in divided government.

I was still mulling over this increasingly plausible explanation when I got to the gym, climbed on the treadmill, and turned on the television. There was Chuck Todd in front of a chart showing the massive increase in the number of single-party states–states where one party or the other controls both houses of the legislature and the Governor’s mansion. (Indiana, as we know, is one of those states.) There are exceptions, but most of the Republican-dominated states are in the old South (i.e., the Confederacy); most of the Democratic-dominated states are in the Northeast and on the west coast.

Representatives elected from lopsidedly one-party states don’t worry about challenges from the opposing party; they worry about primaries. So the Republicans pander to the rabid rightwing base of their party, and the Democrats play to the intransigent left of theirs. As the number of “safe states” multiplies, so does the number of unyielding, uncompromising ideologues.

Even in the absence of that political calculus, however, when people come from an environment that is dominated by a particular political philosophy, it takes effort to seek out and understand competing points of view. Such environments reinforce those “bubbles” we create by our media habits and friendship choices. Pretty soon, other perspectives seem fanciful and/or deluded, and we lose our ability to function within them.

The question is, how do we engage in anything remotely like self-government under these circumstances?

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A Little-Noted Lesson from the Fiscal Cliff

Apparently, the country will be taking a leap off the so-called fiscal cliff, since–despite a flurry of last-minute activity and a vote by the Senate–midnight came and went without passing anything. (And even the Senate’s measure didn’t remotely resemble a “grand bargain.”)

For most of us, the tax consequences are likely to be short-term. Incredibly, a significant number of Representatives refused to vote in 2012 to terminate the Bush tax cuts for rich folks, but are perfectly willing to come back early in 2013 after the cuts have expired and vote to reinstate them just for the non-rich. Why is that, you might reasonably ask, when the result will be exactly the same? Because they can then tell their constituents they never voted for a tax increase. They evidently think the American public is really, really stupid–and we elected them, so maybe they’re right.

Then there’s the issue of spending cuts. If a larger deal cannot be negotiated, and the dreaded “sequester” goes into effect, we’re told that government spending will be sharply reduced. And that’s true–as far as it goes. But the nasty little secret is that government is no longer a word that describes…government. As in public sector employees and elected and appointed officials. After decades of privatization and contracting out, government is all of us and everywhere–defense contractors, civil engineers, social service agencies and other for-profits and nonprofits that depend upon government contracts to survive. The last analysis I saw–and it is now several years old–counted some eighteen million people working full-time at ostensibly private and nonprofit sector jobs that were wholly supported by our tax dollars.

Retrenchment in those government contracts–required by the sequester–will affect more than just those 18+ million people who are employed in what we might call the “quasi-government” sector. When the defense contractor loses his biggest customer, his suppliers lose theirs, and so on down the line. The economic contraction would be rapid and severe.

I say it “would be” because I believe that the reality of that outcome will quickly become apparent even to the less-than-brilliant policymakers in Congress. (Their constituents can be counted on to point it out, if they somehow don’t get it.) Call me Pollyanna, but I think we’ll see some sort of acceptable-but-not-ideal agreement early in January.

Even if we evade economic disaster via fiscal cliff-diving, however, it may be worth pondering the largely unrecognized extent to which the private and nonprofit sectors are now part and parcel of that “bloated and wasteful” government we routinely excoriate, and the extent to which demands for cuts in “government spending” threaten to reduce our own incomes. That’s certainly not an argument for unrestrained spending; it is, however, an argument for recognizing economic reality and the extent to which “privatization”–which has increased, rather than reduced, the size of government–has made necessary spending cuts infinitely more difficult.

Happy New Year.

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It’s Us

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves…

Shakespeare penned those words; Nate Silver demonstrates their accuracy.

The increasing partisanship and polarization in Washington is making it more and more difficult to get anything meaningful done. The paralysis of government is real, and it is making all of us vulnerable–to economic recession, to climate change, to gun violence and all of the myriad challenges of contemporary social systems. Those in what Molly Ivins called the  “chattering classes,” the punditocracy, bewail this state of affairs, and insist that the American public not only deserves better but deeply disapproves of this ideological rigidity.

Nate Silver begs to differ.

in a recent post for the New York Times, Silver demonstrates that the gridlock in Washington mirrors our own polarization. As recently as 1992, there were 103 swing Congressional districts; this year, there were 35. At the same time, the number of “landslide” districts doubled, from 123 to 242. As a result, most members of Congress now come from “hyperpartisan” districts where they face no general election threat. Any re-election challenge will come in a primary; in other words, Democrats must protect their left flanks, Republicans their right. As Silver notes, House members have little incentive to move toward the middle. Compromise with the other party simply makes them vulnerable to a primary challenge.

I have written about the pernicious effect of “safe” districts before, but I have generally assumed them to be the product of redistricting–gerrymandering. But Silver says the effect persists even if we ignore redistricting. He underscores what Bill Bishop reported in The Big Sort: people are voting with their feet, moving to areas they find congenial. The result is that Democrats are crammed into urban areas, and Republicans populate more rural districts. The result of that is the dilution of Democratic votes: in this year’s election, Democrats won the national popular vote by one point–an 8 point shift in their favor from 2010. But they gained only 8 House seats out of 435.

The results of these population patterns disadvantages Democrats by making continued control of the House by Republicans likely (absent a “wave” election), but it holds an even more serious threat to Republicans. As Silver points out, although individual Republican House members have little incentive to compromise, there are risks to the party if they fail to do so. Individual House members come from districts that reward them for being intractable, but that intransigence and hyper-partisanship make it increasingly difficult for the GOP to win either the Senate or the White House.

It seems appropriate, given how dysfunctional our government has become, to devolve from Shakespeare to Laurel and Hardy:  this is certainly a fine kettle of fish we’ve gotten ourselves into!

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What We Don’t Know and How It Hurts Us

Remember the old saying, “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”? Unlike a lot of folk adages, it’s wrong. Very wrong.

A lot of folks–especially younger people–shrug off the suggestion that they need to follow what our political class is doing. They have lives to live, livings to earn, children to raise, parties to attend. Let the politicians tend to governing.

This morning’s New York Times–buttressed by an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association–offers a prime example of why it’s important to keep tabs on Congressional shenanigans.

In the wake of the most recent horrendous shootings, of children in Connecticut and firefighters in New York, fingers have been pointed at the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives. ATF is theoretically an agency with the authority to thwart gun violence. But it has been without a permanent director for six years, thanks to the persistent efforts of Republicans in Congress to block any and all Obama appointments. Furthermore, it is hampered by laws lobbied for by the NRA and dutifully passed by Congress. As the Times notes,

Under current laws the bureau is prohibited from creating a federal registry of gun transactions. So while detectives on television tap a serial number into a computer and instantly identify the buyer of a firearm, the reality could not be more different.

So–unlike many countries–the U.S. doesn’t have a gun registry database. The NRA thinks such information would “pose a threat to the Second Amendment.”

In fact, the NRA evidently thinks that information would pose a threat to their version of the Second Amendment.

A former student who went on to get his doctorate in medical informatics sent me a recent Viewpoint from JAMA, the Journal of the AMA. After detailing several of the most recent mass shootings, and noting that in the U.S. more than 31,000 citizens die annually from firearms, the authors note research findings that ready access to guns in the home “increases, rather than reduces” a family’s risk of homicide in the home.  Then they make their main point:

The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the CDC. Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget–precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year.

The funding was restored in joint conference committee, but only on condition that it be earmarked for traumatic brain injury. And the following language was added to the final appropriation: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

Similar language has been added to funding for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, after a research study was funded by that agency to determine whether carrying a gun increased or decreased the risk of firearm assault. The article went on to detail similar restrictions on other agencies.

A couple of rhetorical question: why doesn’t the NRA want the American public to have good information about gun violence? and why does a majority of Congress do its bidding?

A not-so-rhetorical question: when will citizens of this country say “enough!”

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The Art of Governing

Yesterday, I went to see the movie Les Miserables.  (The theater was full–evidently, going to the movies on Christmas isn’t just a Jewish tradition.)

Les Miz is one of our favorites, and my husband and I were prepared to be critical of the movie version. While we had some quibbles, it was very good; the production made use of the medium to do things that can’t be done on a live stage. As we compared the constraints of the two art forms, stage and film, it was hard not to compare the state of the arts with the state of the state, the state of government–especially since the storyline focused on the French revolution and its aftermath. (Talk about your 99%…..)

There’s certainly a lot of trash being peddled as art these days, but it would be hard to argue that the arts are not vibrant, or that the arts community is not robust. Even here in Indianapolis, hardly a mecca for high art, we have a robust and growing arts culture. Theater, visual arts, dance, literature….the explosion of galleries, theaters and other arts venues over the past 25 years or so has been dramatic. And Indy’s experience has been mirrored in cities around the country. Indeed, the arts are no longer simply a human pleasure; they have become an important economic driver (more important economically, I’m told, than sports).

Both the production and the enjoyment of the arts requires imagination and an appreciation of the complexity of human nature and experience. And audiences for the arts have grown exponentially. Which leads me to a question: why have we not seen a similar growth in the maturity and depth of those practicing that ancient art we call statecraft? We see those folks in business and in our burgeoning nonprofit sector–why are there so few in the public sector?

Why do we continue to elect cardboard cutouts who seem able only to approach the art of governing with trite, one-dimensional slogans rather than thoughtful analyses and innovative proposals?

What have we done to turn talented people away from politics and civic engagement? And what can we do to lure them back to the practice of the ancient and important art of government?

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