Random Blogging – Page 14

Hoosiers For Democracy

I’ve been getting intellectual whiplash looking for political omens.

Polls aren’t cutting it: as I have previously noted, contemporary obstacles to accurate measures of candidate strength are immense, and the various efforts to compensate for low response rates and to develop meaningful “likely voter” screens have proved inadequate. When Trump routinely underperforms his poll results by some ten points, it seems safe to ignore click-bait headlines about this or that poll.

I have also shared my conviction that victory in the upcoming elections will depend almost entirely on turnout. I don’t understand what get out the vote campaigns do to generate turnout, but then I don’t understand people who think political participation is irrelevant to their lives, so my lack of comprehension is probably due to that mystification…

All that said, despite living in Indiana– often dismissed as an irremediably deep-Red state– I’ve recently stumbled across some interesting and very positive omens.

One of those is Hoosiers for Democracy, a newly-formed group that describes itself as “a growing movement of Indiana citizens who are concerned about the erosion of democratic norms, the continual drumbeat of extremism and the persistent undermining of our democratic institutions.” I know the founders of the group, and I consider them informed and politically savvy. They’ve done their homework, and are focused on demonstrating that Indiana–even rural Indiana– is considerably less Red than the state’s reputation suggests.

Hoosiers for Democracy publishes a thoughtful Substack newsletter, and is working with other grass-roots organizations–partisan and bipartisan– concerned about the GOP’s lurch into far-Right extremism.

Relatively few Hoosiers have heard of Hoosiers for Democracy so far–it’s new, and just building its network. (I encourage Indiana readers to sign up for its very thoughtful newsletter at the link.) But more recently, I was astonished to discover the existence of several statewide organizations with a longer timeline. The Nasty Woman Project began as an Instagram account; it was born out of Trump’s expressions of fury in November 2016 and began a series of self portraits by self-proclaimed Nasty Women. Since then, it has grown into a women’s collective that “throws events, raises money for charity, makes waves, and puts smiles on people’s faces.”

I was even more astonished to learn that the organization has more than seven thousand members across Indiana. (I was especially surprised because–according to my youngest son–I am a Nasty Woman. In the wake of the 2016 election, he even had a t-shirt that identified him as a “Bad Hombre raised by a Nasty Woman”…)

Indiana’s Nasty Women organization has a FaceBook page describing itself:

We are INDIANA NASTY WOMEN; because we believe in love, acceptance, equality, kindness, respect, and the POWER of our voices. Through this consortium of like-minded women, with an overall vision to do whatever we can to help transform Indiana into, at the very least, a purple state.

This will take different forms, including but not limited to: being dedicated to political activism… helping to create & support liberal and progressive political candidates into office at all levels (national, state, and local).

Educate fellow Hoosiers so they become more informed voters.

Increase the number of likeminded voters in Indiana.

I couldn’t help wondering how many other grass-roots political efforts might be underway and essentially underground, devoted to efforts to highlight the dangers of MAGA extremism and the capture of the Republican party apparatus by Christian Nationalists. I get a large number of political publications and thanks to being older than dirt and a lifetime Hoosier, I know a lot of people here in Indiana, yet I’d never heard of Indiana Nasty Women.

Nor, it turned out, had I heard of at least fifteen other Indiana organizations working to turn out the sanity vote.

In a recent meeting with progressive activists, I was astonished–and gratified–to learn of multiple Indiana organizations formed since 2016. They’re working to educate voters about issues like reproductive rights, voting rights and the threat MAGA poses to democracy.

Several were surprisingly large. Most are run entirely by volunteers, and they overwhelmingly focus on encouraging Hoosiers to vote for Democratic candidates– from Joe Biden and Jennifer McCormick on down the ballot.

I’d never heard of any of them.

Bottom line: I’ve seen data suggesting that MAGA’s strength in Indiana “tops out” at 37%. That’s a very worrisome percentage, but it isn’t a majority. Hoosiers for Democracy, Indiana Nasty Women and these numerous other voluntary, under-the-radar organizations are immensely hopeful omens, especially since several are mounting grass-roots campaigns to turn out Hoosier voters–especially Democratic-leaning voters with spotty voting records.

In November, Hoosiers might be able shed our reputation as a northern Mississippi– a state firmly in thrall to MAGA’s assorted bigotries.

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How Today’s Media Fails Us

As I have frequently noted, at the very root of America’s–and the world’s–current dysfunctions are the failures of today’s information environment.

How we behave–as friends, as parents, as voters, as humans–ultimately depends upon our understanding of the world we inhabit. And that understanding, that view of what constitutes reality, is a product of the information we access and trust. In the United States–the society with which I am most familiar–the human family confronts two massive informational challenges: bias (both intentional and not) and fragmentation.

Unfortunately, there is little we can do about the Internet’s fragmentation of media sources, which allows citizens to occupy distinctly different realities. When the voting public accesses “alternative facts,” the incoherence of public opinion is understandable.

The failures of traditional media sources are especially troubling, both because they add to the incoherence and because they are the result of mistaken notions of journalism’s most important function–which is to provide an accurate description of the subject matter, irrespective of who or what that accuracy benefits.

Jennifer Rubin is one of the pundits who has been clear-eyed about the persistence of a journalistic worldview that prevents otherwise reputable news sources from avoiding a distorted equivalency.

After missing the significance of the MAGA movement in 2016, innumerable mainstream outlets spent thousands of hours, gallons of ink and billions of pixels trying to understand “the Trump voter.” How had democracy failed them? What did the rest of us miss about these Americans? The journey to Rust Belt diners became a cliché amid the newfound fascination with aggrieved White working-class Americans. But the theory that such voters were economic casualties of globalization turned out to be false. Surveys and analyses generally found that racial resentment and cultural panic, not economic distress, fueled their affinity for a would-be strongman.

Unfortunately, patronizing excuses (e.g., “they feel disrespected”) for their cultlike attachment to a figure increasingly divorced from reality largely took the place of exacting reporting on the right-wing cult that swallowed a large part of the Republican Party. In an effort to maintain false equivalence and normalize Trump, many media outlets seemed to ignore that the much of the GOP left the universe of democratic (small-d) politics and was no longer a traditional democratic (again, small-d) party with an agenda, a governing philosophy, a set of beliefs. The result: Trump was normalized and a false equivalence between the parties was created.

There was a reason Fox News chose “fair and balanced” as its (highly misleading) slogan: most Americans–including too many students of journalism–have been acculturated to believe that “balance” is fairness, that exhibiting similar respect for all sides of an argument is an essential element of reporting. This has led–as one wag put it–to a reportorial stenography that faithfully reports person A’s assertion that it’s raining and person B’s that it isn’t, when what the reporter ought to be doing is looking out the window to see who’s right.

As Rubin noted,

Even as Trump shows his authoritarian colors and his rants become angrier, more unhinged and more incoherent, his followers still meekly accept inane assertions (e.g., convicted Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are “hostages,” magnets dissolve in water, wind turbines drive whales insane). More of the media should be covering this phenomenon as it would any right-wing authoritarian movement in a foreign country.

The proliferation of propaganda sites facilitating confirmation bias is troubling enough, but as Rubin writes, the problem with disinformation is compounded when mainstream outlets spend “far too little attention on why and how MAGA members cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and ignore Trump’s obvious and growing mental illness and decline.

Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening….

The race between an ordinary democratic candidate and an unhinged fascist is not a normal American election. At stake is whether a democracy can protect itself from a malicious candidate with narcissistic tendencies or a rational electorate can beat back a dangerous, lawless cult of personality. Unfortunately, too many media outlets have not caught on or, worse, simply feign ignorance to avoid coming down on the side of democracy, rationality and truth.

Humans can only form opinions and base behaviors on the information they rely upon. When that information is unreliable– or simply wrong– “do the right thing” becomes meaningless.

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Non-Profit Doesn’t Necessarily Mean “Do-Gooder”

I was intrigued to come across an essay by John Dilulio, Jr. in a publication I had previously not encountered: American Purpose.

I have been familiar with Dilulio–a political scientist currently at the University of Pennsylvania–since his work on George W. Bush’s “Faith-Based Initiative.” (Thanks to a generous Ford Foundation grant, I helmed a three-year, three state study of that initiative.) In the 1990’s, Dilulio was best known in criminal justice circles for his hostile analysis of young criminals and his condemnation of violent juveniles as ”superpredators,” a position from which he later–and properly–retreated.

The essay in American Purpose addressed a very different issue: the nonprofit status of American organizations, a status that entitles such organizations to various types of tax avoidance. The “nonprofit sector,” he tells us, consists of organizations

that enjoy one or more of four types of tax exemptions, subsidies, or supports: tax-free property owned by the organizations; tax-deductible donations to the organizations; taxpayer-funded grants, contracts, or fees to the organizations; and taxpayer-funded payments to individuals for purchasing goods or services from the organizations.

Intriguing indeed. But, you ask, why do we need any such “nonprofit sector?” What criteria should be used to determine which existing or new organizations receive some, all, or none of those four tax privileges? Who is supposed to benefit from their existence, and by what measures? And, last but not least, how might we mitigate the moral hazard when some of these organizations inevitably use their tax privileges for private gains or to evade public accountability, or behave in ways that are both deceptive and self-dealing?

The essay began with the good news: something like 92 percent of all nonprofits are small, community-based, and serve local needs. Fewer than 3 percent lobby for government grants or contracts.

At the top of the nonprofit pyramid, however, are less publicly beneficial organizations–and those are especially prevalent in health care.

At its very top, the tax-privileged sector is dominated by the ten nonprofit health systems that in 2021 each collected $14.5 billion or more in annual revenues, and by a dozen nonprofit universities that are among the most well-endowed universities in America. Is enough being done to ensure that these tax-privileged titans’ board members, CEOs, presidents, and other leaders are using their respective tax privileges in the public interest while refraining from individual or institutional self-dealing?

Dilulio cites a 2023 article in which Rice University economists Derek Jenkins and Vivian Ho wrote that, “Nonprofit hospitals, which currently comprise approximately 58 percent of U.S. hospitals, have been repeatedly criticized by scholars and policymakers for failing to live up to a poorly articulated standard of ‘charity care’ and benevolence,” and for failing to justify their tens of billions of dollars a year in federal, state, and local tax breaks. He also cited a 2022 report by the Economic Research Institute, which found that, while nonprofit hospital CEOs are paid, on average, $600,000 a year, the ten highest-paid nonprofit health systems executives made $7 million a year or more; the CEO of Kaiser Permanente was paid nearly $18 million in 2018.

Back when I was a practicing lawyer, I saw how this worked. If a corporation being formed could credibly point to some charitable purpose, and could successfully argue for nonprofit status, monetary gains that would otherwise constitute–and be taxed as– profit could be diverted/mischaracterized as “overhead costs.” These “nonprofits” could divert what would otherwise be profit into generous salaries and lots of perks for management. (Does a health organization executive really need a luxury car supplied by the nonprofit entity? What about that corporate jet?)

The essay has much more information, and offers suggestions for legislative interventions. If you are interested in the various ways in which nonprofit status can be–and has been– gamed, it’s well worth the time to click through and read in its entirety.

My own first reaction was that this situation–the culture of “game-playing” that has allowed greed to infect and distort significant elements of a system originally intended to serve the public good–has become widespread. It isn’t limited to health care and a handful of elite universities.

Assuming we emerge from the November election with American democracy still largely intact, we need to address a multitude of structural distortions, and not just those affecting the electoral system. The misuse of nonprofit status is one of them.

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OK–Let’s Talk About Those Polls

Survey research ain’t what it used to be.

Back in 2020, the Harvard Business Review summarized the changes that have diminished polling accuracy. The article described the industry as “living on borrowed time,” and predicted that its increasing errors would not be soon–or easily–corrected.

The basic problem is low response rates. Thanks to caller ID, fewer Americans pick up the phone when a pollster calls, so it takes more calls to reach enough respondents to make a valid sample. It also means that Americans are screening themselves before they pick up the phone.

So even as our ability to analyze data has gotten better and better, thanks to advanced computing and an increase in the amount of data available to analysts, our ability to collect data has gotten worse. And if the inputs are bad, the analysis won’t be any good either.

It now takes 40+ calls to reach just one respondent. And there really is no reliable way to assess how those who do respond differ from those who don’t. (I know my own children do not answer calls if they don’t recognize the phone number–are they representative of an age group? An educational or partisan cohort? I have no idea–and neither do the pollsters.) There are also concerns that those who do respond are disproportionately rural.

These things matter.

A sample is only valid to the extent that the individuals reached are a random sample of the overall population of interest. It’s not at all problematic for some people to refuse to pick up the phone, as long as their refusal is driven by a random process. If it’s random, the people who do pick up the phone will still be a representative sample of the overall population, and the pollster will just have to make more calls.

Similarly, it’s not a serious problem for pollsters if people refuse to answer the phone according to known characteristics. For instance, pollsters know that African-Americans are less likely to answer a survey than white Americans and that men are less likely to pick up the phone than women. Thanks to the U.S. Census, we know what proportion of these groups are supposed to be in our sample, so when the proportion of men, or African-Americans, falls short in the sample, pollsters can make use of weighting techniques to correct for the shortfall.

The real problem comes when potential respondents to a poll are systematically refusing to pick up the phone according to characteristics that pollsters aren’t measuring…. if a group like evangelicals or conservatives systematically exclude themselves from polls at higher rates than other groups, there’s no easy way to fix the problem.

As the article notes, with response rates to modern polls below 15%, it becomes extremely difficult to determine whether systematic nonresponse problems are even happening.

These problems go from nagging to consequential when the characteristics that are leading people to exclude themselves from polls are correlated with the major outcome that the poll is trying to measure. For instance, if Donald Trump voters were more likely to decide not to participate in polls because they’re rigged, and did so in a way that wasn’t correlated with known characteristics like race and gender, pollsters would have no way of knowing.

Then there’s the failure of likely voter models.

People tend to say they’re going to vote even when they won’t. Every major pollster has its own approach to a “likely voter” screen, but they all include a respondent’s previous voting behavior. As long as that behavior stays stable, these models work. But when something generates turnout among voters who have previously been absent, all bets are off. That happened when the Obama campaign energized previously apathetic voters, and since the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, we’ve seen evidence of significantly increased registration and turnout among women who hadn’t previously voted.

As the Harvard article noted,

It may be the case that standard sampling and weighting techniques are able to correct for sampling problems in a normal election — one in which voter turnout patterns remain predictable — but fail when the polls are missing portions of the electorate who are likely to turn out in one election but not in previous ones. Imagine that there’s a group of voters who don’t generally vote and are systematically less likely to respond to a survey. So long as they continue to not vote, there isn’t a problem. But if a candidate activates these voters, the polls will systematically underestimate support for the candidate.

Polling is broken, and we need to stop hyperventilating about their results. Remember, Trump has consistently underperformed his polling percentages in every primary thus far this year.

As the saying goes, the only poll that counts is the one on election day.

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The Attention Economy

There is a very common complaint–usually voiced by an older person with “know-it-all” pretensions–about “kids these days.” Although that complaint has echoed through history (ever since Socrates, actually), today it tends to focus on the ubiquity of screens…the inescapable elements of our digital world.

It is certainly true that we now occupy an unprecedented environment, and there’s really no telling how or whether it is warping the young of the species. (If I had to guess, young people were different post-Gutenberg than they’d been pre-Gutenberg–and I would wager that some folks weren’t all that happy with that change, either.) The way we socialize the young into constantly changing cultures is inevitably evolving, and determining whether the changes are healthy or damaging is pretty speculative.

We just don’t know.

That said, a recent essay in the most recent Hedgehog Review, addressing that issue, was alternately annoying and thought-provoking. It was titled “The Great Malformation: A personal skirmish in the battle for attention.” After reminding readers of the often-quoted African proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child,” the author indulged in the all-to-common verbal handwringing:

The villagers are too often found behind closed doors, watching television or surfing the Internet. When they do appear in public, they are increasingly prone to do so with portable electronic devices in hand, phoning or surfing or tweeting their way through virtual realms, leaving the village streets full of moving bodies but emptied of human presence. This same retreat from shared physical spaces is observable even—or, rather, especially—in the inner sanctum of the home, where brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, parents and children, are increasingly found alongside each other yet absent to each other, cocooned in mesmerizing solipsism, ghosting even themselves and their own lives. The human race is on its way to becoming seven or eight billion perfect societies of one, each bound in what Stephen Colbert once called “solitarity” with other human beings, somewhere or another—who knows where—who themselves are busy absenting themselves from their families and homes. Where are the children being raised in such a world heading? What are they being urged to care about, cultivated to do and to be? What conception of the human good, if any, is implicit in, supported by, or coincident with this sort of upbringing?

I nearly stopped reading. Agitation about something we all know, without reference to data that illuminates what’s occurring, is just another version of “get off my lawn.” But the essay then took a different direction, arguing that today’s screen fixations come from an intertwining of culture and economics. The article is lengthy, and much less superficial than the cited paragraph suggests.

A few observations that struck me:

The market economy torn free from the rest of cultural life some half-dozen generations ago has now turned upon its parent and consumed her. The work of the polity that Aristotle regarded as most crucial—the acculturation of successive generations—increasingly occurs as the unplanned aggregate effect of corporate profit-seeking, in a direction that few regard as genuinely good for the next generation. This novel experiment in socialization raises anew the concern that we might prove unable to keep our republic (as Benjamin Franklin put it), or even our humanity….

As industrial capitalism matures, it gradually colonizes large swaths of the culture, whose evolution is then subject to being steered by the same decentralized and unplanned processes that serve up the other benefits and burdens of capitalism…We are accustomed to this arrangement and not generally awake to its perversity. When we enter the sphere of getting and spending, our activity is shaped by the pursuit of profits, and unlikely to cleave to any compelling conception of the human good. Presumably we do this in order to gain the resources we need to pursue genuine goods in the remainder of our lives. When the market swallows this remainder and seeks to reshape it to maximize profits, it becomes an impediment, not a contribution, to human flourishing.

This cultural revolution could not have come so far so fast without tapping into a very personal resource, located in the inner realm of conscious experience: human attention. There is growing recognition that attention has become an exceedingly valuable and hotly contested commodity.

From radio and television, to advertising, to video games…it’s hard to argue that today’s culture hasn’t devolved into a competition for eyeballs and clicks. And it is worth asking ourselves what the long-term consequences of that devolution portend.

A brief blog post cannot do justice to the essay’s lengthy analysis. It’s well worth reading the entire article.

I don’t agree with everything in it, but it’s a provocative read.

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