Public Policy and Governance – Page 89

That Ambitious ‘Hillbilly’

When Hillbilly Elegy was first published, critics were generally positive. I wasn’t.

Granted, I read only excerpts, which probably made my negative reaction unfair, but the impression I got was of a self-congratulatory “escapee” who’d decided that he’d “made it” largely by reason of his personal virtues, albeit with the help of some immediate family members.

As a few negative reviewers at the time noted, Vance gave no credit to any of the government programs and/or services– public schools, the GI bill, the public university where he earned his B.A – that facilitated his move out of poverty and into the upper class, and he expressly blamed laziness for the failures of those left behind.

It was clear that–in his mind– working-class folks were to blame for their own struggles.

Vance’s focus on personal responsibility was just what opponents of a strong social safety net were looking for, and they hyped the book (and later, the movie.) See–you too can overcome adversity and whatever barriers you face if you just get off your rear end and work hard…

Now, Vance is running for the Senate as a Republican from Ohio. He has already modified his earlier criticism of the former guy, and scrubbed evidence of that criticism from social media, and he has doubled down on his support of what he calls “family values.” Most recently, he criticized prominent Democratic politicians–including Kamala Harris, Corey Booker and Pete Buttigieg– for their childlessness, calling them the “childless left.”

He also praised the policies of Viktor Orban, the leader of Hungary, whose government is subsidizing couples who have children, and asked, “Why can’t we do that here?”

The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, who was there, pointed out it was odd that Vance didn’t mention Joe Biden’s newly instituted child tax credit, which will make an enormous difference to many poorer families with children.

It was also interesting that he praised Hungary rather than other European nations with strong pronatalist policies. France, in particular, offers large financial incentives to families with children and has one of the highest fertility rates in the advanced world. So why did Vance single out for praise a repressive, autocratic government with a strong white nationalist bent?

It gets worse. As reported by CityBeat, Vance proposes giving parents additional votes on behalf of their children. He also claims that people without children shouldn’t serve in legislative positions, since–in his weird worldview–they won’t be good at legislating. Especially if they’re Democrats.

“The ‘childless left have no physical commitment to the future of this country,” The Guardian reports Vance as saying during his July 23 address. “Why is this just a normal fact of … life for the leaders of our country to be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring?”

It’s hard to assess how much of this is just pandering to the increasingly insane GOP base and how much is authentic Vance, who has clearly imbibed both rightwing beliefs about what Paul Krugman has dubbed “Zombie Family Values” and embraced the GOP’s willingness to substitute child-friendly rhetoric for even minimal support of policies that would actually help families with children.

Vance reminds me of an extremely libertarian acquaintance of mine who attributes his own success entirely to his own ambition and hard work. He’s a 6’3″ healthy, athletic, straight White male whose parents both graduated from prestigious universities and were able to provide him with a similar, debt-free education. He’s convinced that anyone in America can prosper as he has, without “sucking at the public tit.” He finds the notion that some folks face barriers that weren’t there for him–and that government might have a role to play in removing those barriers and leveling the playing field a bit– simply incomprehensible.

“Look at me–I did it all by myself…” was understandable when my three-year-old managed to use a spoon without spilling his soup.

It’s not an attractive– nor intellectually defensible– attitude in an adult.

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Car Culture

I need to vent.

Today’s post isn’t about politics, or a particular public policy, or (except tangentially) my worries about the environment. It’s about the insanity of what–for lack of a better descriptor–I’ll call America’s “car culture,” and it was triggered by my recent drive from Indianapolis to a beach in South Carolina.

It isn’t as though I haven’t been concerned with driving behaviors I’ve seen locally. We have lived in downtown Indianapolis ever since 1980, and watched as more and more cars have evidently confused residential city streets with racetracks. I’ve lost track of the number of times a car has sped around me, only to come to a stop beside me at the same traffic light. (Do these speed demons think they’re saving time? They aren’t.)

But it was on our recent trip South that I witnessed a seemingly unending parade of drivers engaging in unimaginably reckless behaviors.

Now, honesty compels me to begin this rant with an admission: I have a heavy foot, and when I’m on an Interstate–especially during a very long drive–I can hit speeds of 79 or 80. But during this drive, even when I was going that fast, cars passed me as if I was standing still. Not only that–a number of them were weaving through three lanes of traffic, presumably unable to bear the thought of following some other vehicle. In at least one instance, we were slowed by a major wreck and a number of emergency vehicles involved in removing the injured and clearing the Interstate–I was actually surprised there weren’t more.

Every so often, we passed an electronic sign warning that additional efforts to catch speeders were being deployed, but I saw no evidence of those efforts.

It’s bad enough that America’s car culture contributes so heavily to the pollution driving climate change. It’s bad enough that the constant need to add lanes and reconstruct interchanges consumes untold amounts of our tax dollars, snarls traffic and triggers road rage. It’s close to unforgivable that we allocate far more resources to streets and roads than to mass transit and rail. But those are issues for a different rant.

What I don’t understand is why we don’t deploy available technologies to address an obvious and growing problem.

When we leave Indiana for the beach by car these days, we take a new toll bridge into Kentucky. We no longer have to stop to throw quarters into little buckets—the time-honored method of paying a toll. These days, we don’t have to slow down or stop–a camera takes a picture of our license plate, and we get a bill in the mail. Camera technologies have come a long way, and the upfront costs of installing them would easily be repaid by the ticketing they would facilitate. For that matter, if the driving I saw during this recent trip is any indication, we could repave America with the proceeds of ticketing.

I can hear the protests: cameras would invade my privacy! In my view, this is akin to the equally tone-deaf and selfish refusals to be vaccinated. In both cases, refusal clearly endangers others.

A speeding automobile is potentially a deadly weapon–a reality the law recognizes. We allow sobriety checkpoints in order to control impaired driving (an acknowledged deviation from the 4th Amendment); we require drivers’ tests as a condition to allowing people to operate a motor vehicle.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at this reluctance to address the danger of speeding automobiles. This is, after all, a country that refuses to impose even the most reasonable controls on lethal weapons. But I do wonder: Where are all those “pro life” people when they might actually do some good?

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Laws Are For The ‘Little People’

I don’t know about all of you, but I’m getting tired of daily news items that leave me both mystified and angry. One of the most recent causes of that combination was news that, during the Republicans’ “negotiation” (note quotes) on the infrastructure bill, they insisted on removing the measure’s additional funding for the IRS.

Please note, this wasn’t a provision allowing the government to raise taxes. This money would have provided the agency with more resources to go after tax evasion. In a sane world (which we clearly don’t inhabit), the party of “law and order” might be expected to support the notion that government should crack down on the crime of tax evasion.

Plus, we are talking about a lot of money. The Treasury Department has estimated that what they call the “tax gap,”–that is, taxes owed under current rates but not paid– amounts to more than $500 billion every year. According to Paul Krugman, some estimates put the number much higher. The Biden administration has simply proposed additional resources that the I.R.S. needs to reduce that gap.

I also want to emphasize that we aren’t talking about the obscene amounts of money sheltered by obscenely rich people in various tax havens, or monies not payable thanks to the operation of various tax loopholes. We are talking about money people owe after their tax advisors have helped them take advantage of these handy little mechanisms.

When people who owe taxes don’t pay them, the rest of us have to make up the difference. Given the economics of what constitutes today’s GOP base, why wouldn’t Republican officeholders want to spread the burden–in this case, the costs of repairing America’s crumbling infrastructure–to the citizenry as a whole?

In his column, Krugman shares my mystification–although he’s a bit more cynical.

Just to be clear, I’m not surprised to learn that a significant number of senators are sympathetic to the interests of wealthy tax cheats, that they are objectively pro-tax evasion. I am, however, surprised that they are willing to be so open about their sympathies.

There is, after all, a big difference between arguing for low taxes on the rich and arguing, in effect, that rich people who don’t pay what they legally owe should be allowed to get away with it.

Just to be equally clear, I was surprised that even these Senators would be “objectively pro-tax evasion.”

For one thing, I don’t think even right-wingers would dare make the usual arguments for low tax rates, dubious as those arguments are, on behalf of tax evasion. Who would seriously claim that the only thing keeping “job creators” going is their belief that they can dodge the taxes the law says they should pay?

Krugman asks the question that I also ponder: who are the constituents for this startling position? Granted, a bigger budget deficit might cut into the social spending Republicans detest, but–as he points out– it also leaves less room for legal tax cuts.

Tax evasion certainly isn’t limited to the rich–Krugman reminds us that when plumbers or handymen ask for payment in cash, we can pretty much figure out why–but it is definitely concentrated among the well-do-do.

Opportunities to hide income are concentrated at the top; one recent estimate is that more than 20 percent of the income of the top 1 percent goes unreported.

It’s certainly possible that big political donors are among the biggest tax cheats. Krugman thinks that their clout within the G.O.P. “has actually increased as the party has gotten crazier.”

There have always been wealthy Americans who dislike the right’s embrace of racial hostility and culture wars but have been willing to swallow their distaste as long as Republicans keep their taxes low. But as the G.O.P. has become more extreme — as it has become the party of election lies and violent insurrection — who among the wealthy is still willing to make that trade-off?

Some rich Americans have always been right-wing radicals. But as for the rest, the party’s base within the donor class presumably consists increasingly of those among the wealthy with the fewest scruples and the least concern for their reputations — who are precisely the kind of people most likely to engage in blatant tax evasion.

This seems like a stretch. On the other hand, I have no better explanation.

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Loyalty Signaling

I’ve posted before about “virtue signaling”-a way of publicly expressing a moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating one’s connection to people of similar, virtuous sentiments. (When I first purchased a Prius, a colleague asked if the purchase was prompted by a desire to “signal” my concerns for the environment to those who would be sympathetic. I guiltily wondered if he was on to something..)

However, I had never heard of “loyalty signaling” until I read a recent column by Paul Krugman.Krugman was referencing scholarship on the development of cults, and he was particularly impressed by a paper by a New Zealand-based researcher, Xavier Márquez.

“The Mechanisms of Cult Production” compares the behavior of political elites across a wide range of dictatorial regimes, from Caligula’s Rome to the Kim family’s North Korea, and finds striking similarities. Despite vast differences in culture and material circumstances, elites in all such regimes engage in pretty much the same behavior, especially what the paper dubs “loyalty signaling” and “flattery inflation.”

Krugman defines signaling as a concept originally drawn from economics; it describes costly, often pointless behaviors engaged in by people trying to demonstrate that they have attributes that others value.

In the context of dictatorial regimes, signaling typically involves making absurd claims on behalf of the Leader and his agenda, often including “nauseating displays of loyalty.” If the claims are obvious nonsense and destructive in their effects, if making those claims humiliates the person who makes them, these are features, not bugs. I mean, how does the Leader know if you’re truly loyal unless you’re willing to demonstrate your loyalty by inflicting harm both on others and on your own reputation?

And once this kind of signaling becomes the norm, those trying to prove their loyalty have to go to ever greater extremes to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hence “flattery inflation”: The Leader isn’t just brave and wise, he’s a perfect physical specimen, a brilliant health expert, a Nobel-level economic analyst, and more. The fact that he’s obviously none of these things only enhances the effectiveness of the flattery as a demonstration of loyalty.

Does all of this sound familiar? Of course it does, at least to anyone who has been tracking Fox News or the utterances of political figures like Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy.

Krugman repeats his often-communicated belief that the G.O.P. is no longer a normal political party. (As he says, it sure doesn’t look anything like the party of Dwight Eisenhower). But as he and a number of other observers have pointed out, it does bear a distinct and growing resemblance to the ruling parties of autocratic regimes.

In the U.S., of course, the Trump Party doesn’t (yet) exercise complete control– so Republican politicians suspected of insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump aren’t sent to the gulag. “At most, they stand to lose intraparty offices and, possibly, future primaries.” Yet–as Krugman says, these threats are seemingly sufficient to turn them into modern-day versions of Caligula’s courtiers.

Unfortunately, all this loyalty signaling is putting the whole nation at risk. In fact, it will almost surely kill large numbers of Americans in the next few months….

Republican politicians and Republican-oriented influencers have driven much of the opposition to Covid-19 vaccines, in some cases engaging in what amounts to outright sabotage. And there is a stunning negative correlation between Trump’s share of a county’s vote in 2020 and its current vaccination rate.

Krugman says that hostility to vaccines has become a form of loyalty signaling–which, if accurate, answers a question about vaccine refusal that has confounded most sane Americans. As he says, the G.O.P. has become something having no precedent in American history (although there have been many precedents abroad.)

Republicans have created for themselves a political realm in which costly demonstrations of loyalty transcend considerations of good policy or even basic logic. And all of us may pay the price.

When cult members “drink the Kool Aid,” they typically only kill themselves. Unfortunately, the cult that has replaced the once-Grand-Old-Party threatens to kill us all.

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The Data Keeps Coming…

Emerging data goes a long way toward explaining the increasing visibility–and acting out–of America’s White Christian Nationalists.

As commenters to this blog frequently point out, the racial animosity so vividly on display these days is itself not a new phenomenon–far from it. But the visibility–the shamelessness– is new. The willingness to “come out”–to publicly flaunt beliefs and attitudes that had previously been soft-pedaled or hidden–and the virtually complete capture of a major American political party by people who believe that they are the only “real” Americans is a recent (and unwelcome) phenomenon.

Fear often makes people discard the veneer of civility, of course, and these folks are currently terrified.

It’s bad enough when fear is “ginned up” by propagandists warning of immigrant caravans or computer chips hidden in vaccines, but it turns out that the White Christian Evangelical fear of being “replaced”–of becoming just another thread in a colorful American tapestry–is actually well-founded.

I’ve recently read several media reports about a study conducted by PRRI , the Public Religion Research Institute. One, by Michelle Goldberg for the New York Times, characterizes PRRI’s findings as “startling.” Goldberg began her column by noting the major role played by the Christian Right in the election and administration of George W. Bush, and she notes that many of the leaders of that movement assumed they were on the cusp of even greater control.

The PRRI results–and others–suggest otherwise.

The evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.

It isn’t just the shrinking numbers. White evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the country, with a median age of 56.

“It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.

White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.

In the Washington Post, Aaron Blake also reported on the “striking” PRRI findings.

The Public Religion Research Institute released a detailed study Thursday on Americans’ religious affiliations. Perhaps the most striking finding is on White evangelical Christians.

While this group made up 23 percent of the population in 2006 — shortly after “values voters” were analyzed to have delivered George W. Bush his reelection — that number is now down to 14.5 percent, according to the data.

Blake also notes the age disparity and the lack of youth replentishment. While 22 percent of Americans 65 and over are White evangelicals, the number is just 7 percent for those between 18 and 29 years of age.

Goldberg quotes Robert Jones, the Director of PRRI, who connects some bizarre dots.

From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.

QAnon is essentially a millenarian movement, with Trump taking the place of Jesus. Adherents dream of the coming of what they call the storm, when the enemies of the MAGA movement will be rounded up and executed, and Trump restored to his rightful place of leadership.

These QAnon people are unwell. If I were Christian, I’d consider Trump taking the place of Jesus an unbelievable blasphemy…

Bottom line: the PRRI study, and several others with similar findings, is both good news and bad. The diminished power of a religious sect that has been dubbed (with some accuracy) the American Taliban is clearly very good news. The accompanying rage, resentment and paranoia–and the unrest those passions encourage– is not.

But as I indicated earlier, it explains a lot.

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