Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

There’s A Monster Under The Bed!

I’ve given up trying to understand the anti-vaccine crazies. The arguments they pose are nonsensical: “I don’t know what’s in them!” (They don’t know what’s in the hot dogs they eat, among a million other things.) “There’s a chip inserted by Bill Gates!” (Yes, it’s in the cell phone you cheerfully carry!) “My friend’s brother got diabetes after getting his shot!” (“After this, therefore because of this” is one of the oldest logical fallacies…). And don’t even get me started on the claims that requiring sensible public health measures violates the Constitution– people who insist government can require a woman to carry a pregnancy to term while arguing that government lacks authority to require people to get vaccinated, are beyond the reach of reason.)

Logic and reason, clearly, have nothing to do with it. 

I was recently sharing my frustration with the young woman who cuts my hair, who told me that her sister– a nurse in a local hospital –is equally frustrated. And angry. According to her sister, the hospital is coping with overflow conditions caused almost entirely by unvaccinated people, and they are not just sick, but unpleasant and irrational. A large number of them refuse to believe they have Covid, insisting that it must be something else, because Covid is a hoax. 

In fact, she said, her sister has characterized these patients as “big babies,” who are making the job of tending to them considerably more difficult than it needs to be.

Evidently, those “big babies” are convinced that vaccines are the monsters hiding under their beds…

What is interesting–if maddening–is that this irrational behavior is largely occurring on the political right (although left-wingers who see conspiracies where the rest of us see human complexity also subscribe.)  A recent article from The Week suggests a reason for those statistics showing that Republicans are dying at far greater rates than Democrats.

The article recounted several recent speeches by rightwing ideologues, and summarized the worldview common to them:

The right believes that the progressive left hates America; that it is an evil totalitarian cult which has infiltrated every institution; and that it is using a mix of business, bullying, and technological surveillance to deconstruct both masculinity and the United States as a whole in order to create a world without belonging.

In other words, the cult that has replaced the once-respectable GOP believes that “the progressive left” (i.e., everyone to the left of lunacy) is the monster under the bed. They actually believe that Democrats and moderate (i.e. sane) Republicans are capable of constructing and executing a co-ordinated, well-planned and utterly nefarious effort to destroy the America that exists in their fevered imaginations. 

Because???

The sheer number of people who have imbibed this Kool-Aid is scary enough, but the threat they pose to the rest of us is monstrous. As RFK Jr’s family has written, “his and others’ work against vaccines is having heartbreaking consequences.” We probably wouldn’t be facing the Omicron upsurge in Covid if vaccination rates had been higher, but the dangers posed by widespread acceptance of these conspiracy theories goes well beyond a deadly pandemic. We wouldn’t be teetering on the brink of something like Civil War if more people were intellectually or emotionally able to resist the lure of simple answers (It’s the bad guys! They’re the monster under the bed!) to complicated realities.

What was that famous quote by H.L. Mencken? “For every complex problem, there’s a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” 

Evidently, America is home to a depressingly large number of people willing to believe that all their problems can be solved just by destroying the imaginary monster under the bed…and if destroying the monster means eliminating democracy, well…so be it.

Comments

Could This Work?

A couple of weeks ago, a commenter posted a YouTube video from February of 2019, in which actress Jennifer Lawrence introduced viewers to a nonprofit organization called Represent Us.

You really need to click through and watch it, because the summary I’m about to provide is incomplete, and doesn’t do it justice.

The basic premise upon which the organization proposes to function is that mending American democracy must come at the state level–that only when we end corruption in a sufficient number of states will we be able to move the federal government and federal courts in a positive direction.

The video was made in 2019, and I haven’t heard anything about this effort in the intervening years, but according to its website, the organization remains active. It’s harder to tell whether–like so many other efforts to salvage the American Idea–it has failed to energize enough people to get the job done.

I had two competing reactions to that video.

The first was triggered by the imminent victory of the pro-fetal-life movement, which will overturn (explicitly or by eviscerating) Roe v. Wade. That will return the issue to the states, and in a “best-case” scenario, will activate a significant percentage of the 60% of Americans who want Roe retained and send an impressive number of them to their respective statehouses. If that happens–if voters in large-enough numbers are sufficiently enraged and motivated–the state-level reforms identified in the video are much more likely to occur.

That scenario is the optimistic one. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that my optimism is at death’s door.

Over the last few months, I’ve had multiple discussions–with my children, with friends, with former colleagues–about the state of American and global governance. Attitudes ranged from deep depression to resigned acceptance, but virtually everyone I’ve talked to believes that–as one person put it– America is over. Democracy has had its day.  Autocrats  and their fearful and tribal supporters are on the ascent worldwide.

Of course, none of this may matter in the end, thanks to our unwillingness to confront climate change when we could have moderated its effects.

It’s hard to argue with this gloomy analysis.

When I look at the collection of deranged and incompetent people serving in Congress, when I think of the millions of people who cast their 2020 vote for a man whose terrifying inadequacies and mental illness were impossible to miss, and the large numbers who still believe in the Big Lie and QAnon…when I think of the state-level lawmakers focused on protecting the “rights” of nutcases with guns but who are unwilling to protect citizens from a pandemic (not to mention the culture warriors willing to die to “own the libs”) …It’s really hard to envision a happy ending.

If any of you can talk me off the edge, I’m listening…..

Comments

Trust And Governance

When I was doing research for my 2009 book Distrust, American Style: Diversity and the Crisis of Public Confidence, I became aware of the considerable amount of data that tied social trust to the functioning of institutions–especially government.

What prompted that research, and the book that emerged, was my considerable skepticism of a widely-read study by Robert Putnam (author of the even-more-widely read Bowling Alone), in which he attributed America’s diminished levels of social trust to our growing diversity. I agreed that the erosion of interpersonal social trust had occurred, but I strongly disagreed about the cause, which I attributed to burgeoning evidence that much of government was untrustworthy.

I also saw the data as manifestation of a “chicken-and-egg” problem: were low levels of trust a cause or consequence of diminished trust in our government?

My research led me to argue that–partly because of the complexities of modern society and partly due to specific attributes of America’s political culture–generalized social trust depends on our ability to trust our social and governing institutions.

Fish rot from the head.

The issues are complicated, and I don’t intend to re-litigate the arguments I made in the book, but one clear lesson I took from my research was that social trust is incredibly important. (One of the reasons the collapse of a truly mass media is so consequential is that the rise of outright propaganda has contributed mightily to the erosion of that trust.)

We see the consequences of low levels of trust–in government, in medical science– in the refusal of too many Americans to get vaccinated, prolonging the COVID pandemic. We see it in the astonishing numbers who believe the “Big Lie” about rigged elections.

What prompted me to think about my former research was an article in the Atlantic, titled “A Trust Recession is Looming Over the American Economy.”

Manufacturer inventories. Durable-goods orders. Nonfarm payrolls. Inflation-adjusted GDP. These are the dreary reportables that tell us how our economy is doing. And many of them look a whole lot better now than they did at their early-pandemic depths. But what if there’s another factor we’re missing? What if the data points are obscuring a deepening recession in a commodity that underpins them all?

Trust. Without it, Adam Smith’s invisible hand stays in its pocket; Keynes’s “animal spirits” are muted. “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust,” the Nobel Prize–winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote in 1972.

The article focused on the importance of trust to economic performance, and noted a little-remarked element of the remote work necessitated by the pandemic: one study  found that the longer employees were apart from one another during the pandemic, the more their faith in their colleagues fell. The article reported on a number of other studies that found similar “trust erosions” in the workplace.

As companies have gone virtual during the coronavirus pandemic, supervisors wonder whether their remote workers are in fact working. New colleagues arrive and leave without ever having met. Direct reports ask if they could have that casual understanding put down in writing. No one knows whether the boss’s cryptic closing remark was ironic or hostile.

The article reminds us that “Trust is to capitalism what alcohol is to wedding receptions: a social lubricant.”

The economists Paul Zak and Stephen Knack found, in a study published in 1998, that a 15 percent bump in a nation’s belief that “most people can be trusted” adds a full percentage point to economic growth each year. That means that if, for the past 20 years, Americans had trusted one another like Ukrainians did, our annual GDP per capita would be $11,000 lower; if we had trusted like New Zealanders did, it’d be $16,000 higher. “If trust is sufficiently low,” they wrote, “economic growth is unachievable.”

My own research noted the effects of diminished trust on business and the economy, but focused more on the widespread, negative consequences for governance and social amity.

In a complex society, we can no longer rely on gossip and informal interpersonal networks to tell us who is trustworthy and who is not. We rely on our social institutions, especially (albeit not exclusively) government. As I wrote in the book, when government does not function properly–when it intrudes into areas that are inappropriate for government intervention, when it violates the terms of our original social contract, or when it performs its necessary and proper functions in an incompetent or corrupt manner–it undermines social trust and cohesion.

The corruption of the Mitch McConnells and the corruption and incompetence of the Trump administration–aided and abetted by propaganda outlets pretending to be “news” organizations–have decimated the already badly eroded social trust required for democratic governance.

I for one don’t have a clue how to grow it back.

Comments

The GOP (Non) Platform

Speaking of “what’s next”…..(yesterday’s subject)…

What happens when a crazed minority controls important parts of a nation’s government? I worry that we are about to find out just how much worse it can get.

A few days ago, I woke up to news that the GOP is once again competing for office solely on the basis of its ongoing culture war–that the party will not produce a platform in advance of the 2022 midterm elections. According to Heather Cox Richardson,

Senate Republicans will not issue any sort of a platform before next year’s midterm elections. At a meeting of donors and lawmakers in mid-November, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that the Republican Party’s 2024 nominee would be responsible for deciding on an agenda. The Republican senators in 2022 will simply attack the Democrats.

That should have been stunning, front-page news–one of America’s two major political parties is asking for our votes based only on what it is against. 

To be fair, it isn’t that Republicans aren’t for anything; they are simply unwilling to be explicit about their obvious, albeit policy-free goal, which is to return the U.S. to the social structures of the 1950s, when women, LGBTQ individuals and people of color were second-or-third class citizens, and White, purportedly Christian males dominated.

Granted, it would be awkward for the party to articulate its actual goal, but there’s another barrier to producing a document that sets forth what today’s GOP stands for–the inability of the crazies who are now at the center of the Republican cult to form any coherent narrative, let alone agree on any specific policy agenda.

True, some of the more obvious, albeit unwritten “planks” in that abandoned platform have been part of GOP dogma for quite some time: repealing women’s reproductive rights, ensuring that every nutcase who wants a weapon can access one, ensuring that industries can misbehave–collude, pollute, spy– without the interference of that pesky government…but others are relatively new, and difficult to explicitly defend.

For example, how do you frame an argument against government’s role in protecting public health? I continue to be gobsmacked by the “freedom warriors” who are literally laying down their lives for the right to refuse a lifesaving vaccine. (Let me be clear: if they weren’t also endangering rational folks, I’d be more than happy to see them thin the ranks of the terminally stupid.)

How do you justify attacks on accurate education without admitting that your motivation is protection of White Supremacy?

Thanks are due to the Williamson County, Tennessee, chapter of Moms for Liberty for once again clarifying what the “critical race theory” (CRT) uproar is really about. We can say until we’re blue in the face that critical race theory is a graduate-level school of thought not taught in K-12 schools, and along comes an anti-CRT group to show that what they really object to is any teaching that shows that racism is or has ever been a real thing.

The group, run by a woman whose children do not attend public school, filed a complaint with the Tennessee Department of Education claiming that some texts being taught to grade-school students violate the state’s new law against teaching about “privilege” or “guilt” or “discomfort” based on race or sex. The texts? Books for second-graders including Martin Luther King, Jr. and the March on Washington and Ruby Bridges Goes to School, along with Separate is Never Equal and The Story of Ruby Bridges.

Lest you think “Moms for Liberty” isn’t racist to the core, the book they recommend to replace “Ruby Bridges” was written by one W. Cleon Skousen, a conspiracy theorist and John Birch Society supporter. It characterizes ‘black children as ‘pickaninnies’ and American slave owners as the ‘worst victims’ of slavery, and claims the Founders wanted to free the slaves but that “[m]ost of [the slaves] were woefully unprepared for a life of competitive independence.”

I could go on, but I’ll spare you.

The good news should be the fact that  GOP craziness and conspiracy-mongering are most definitely a minority phenomenon. Survey research confirms that its delusions and positions are held by a distinct minority– a lot more people than we’d like to believe, but certainly not a majority of Americans.

The bad news is that, thanks to gerrymandering and the filibuster, a wacko minority has seized far more power than a properly operating democratic system would let them wield.

In fact, if Congress cannot pass voting rights legislation, and soon, the crazies and bigots will win.

Comments

If We Can’t Get Rid Of It, Reform It

One of the very few things in today’s political environment that is abundantly clear is the critical need to pass election reform. We need federal legislation to outlaw gerrymandering and a variety of vote suppression tactics, to make it easier rather than more difficult to vote, and to restore trust in the maxim “one person, one vote.”

The only impediment to that critical necessity is the continued existence of the current form of the filibuster, which has made a mockery of majority rule. As everyone reading this blog knows, the way in which the filibuster now works requires any measure to be passed by super-majority.  Wedded to Republican nihilism, It has brought the business of government to a standstill.

As a recent article from The Brookings Institute noted, the Senate’s ability to pass pending voting rights legislation–which is favored by large majorities of Americans and even by majorities in both houses of Congress–is the filibuster.

I have previously shared the filibuster’s relevant history, but let me repeat it.

Originally, the use of the filibuster was based on a recognition that so long as a senator kept talking, the bill in question couldn’t move forward. Once those opposed to the measure felt they had made their case (or at least exhausted their argument,) they would leave the Senate floor and allow a vote. The first change came In 1917, when filibustering Senators threatened President Wilson’s ability to respond to a perceived military threat.  The Senate responded by adopting a mechanism called cloture, allowing a super-majority vote to end a filibuster.

In 1975, the Senate again changed the rules; this time, the change made it much, much easier to filibuster.

The new rules allowed other business to be conducted during the time a filibuster is (theoretically) taking place. Senators no longer are required to take to the Senate floor and publicly argue their case. This “virtual” use has increased dramatically as partisan polarization has worsened, and it has effectively abolished the principle of majority rule. It now takes the sixty votes needed for cloture to pass any legislation. This anti-democratic result isn’t just in direct conflict with the intent of the Founders, it has brought normal government operation to a standstill.

Meanwhile, the lack of any requirement to publicly debate the matter keeps Americans  from hearing and evaluating the rationale for opposition to a measure–or even understanding why nothing is getting done.

With Senators like Manchin  (aka McConnell’s favorite Democrat) defending the filibuster, eliminating it is probably not an option. But even Manchin has displayed an openness to revising it. In the Brookings  article linked above, the authors share a number of proposals for amending the process, and consider the pros and cons of each. They look at a variety of ideas: reducing the number of senators needed to open debate in the face of a filibuster; requiring the objectors to be present with one of their number speaking at all times during a filibuster; and shifting the burden to those mounting the filibuster–making them muster the votes required to maintain the filibuster whenever it’s challenged, instead of enlisting the 60 who wish to proceed to so vote.

Whatever the merits of these proposals–and I definitely like the one requiring these obstructionists to stay on the Senate floor and bluster throughout–I especially like the paper’s final suggestion–to carve out an exception for voting rights, modeled on the exception that already exists for fiscal measures:

In Part III, we advocate for one additional option that the authors have previously written about, and that has been getting some significant proponents of late. We term that approach “democracy reconciliation.” It is based upon the existing practice of budget reconciliation, which allows certain fiscal measures to have an up-or-down simple majority vote. As we explain, we would craft a similar exception for voting measures, allowing them a similar opportunity to be voted upon by a majority. Reconciliation operates on a key principle known as the Byrd Rule, named after the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd. Because the current fate of the filibuster swirls around his successor, Senator Manchin, one may refer to this hoped-for new compromise of democracy reconciliation as “the Byrd-Manchin” Rule.

Name it anything–just get it done. Quickly.

Comments