Random Blogging – Page 170

Alice–Updated, Slipping Further Behind

Regular readers of this blog have met ALICE before. ALICE is an acronym standing for “Asset limited, income constrained, employed.” That last word–employed–is important; it puts the lie to the widespread fiction that struggling Americans just need to work, or work harder.

The Association of United Ways issued the original ALICE report in 2014, updated it in 2016, and have now produced data for 2018. It isn’t pretty.

For those who haven’t met ALICE, the report describes her:

ALICE is your child care worker, your parent on Social Security, the cashier at your supermarket, the gas attendant, the salesperson at your big box store, your waitress, a home health aide, an office clerk. ALICE cannot always pay the bills, has little or nothing in savings, and is forced to make tough choices such as deciding between quality child care or paying the rent. One unexpected car repair or medical bill can push these financially strapped families over the edge.

As the researchers point out, traditional measures of poverty don’t capture the real picture–the number of people who are struggling financially because the actual cost of life’s necessities where they live is more than they earn.

Indiana, for example, has 2,530,581 households. Thirteen and a half percent of those households fall below the official poverty line–but another 25.2% fall between the poverty line and the ALICE threshold. That’s 38.7% of Hoosiers who face a constant, debilitating struggle for economic survival.

The Indianapolis Business Journal (subscription required) recently began a series it is calling “One City, Worlds Apart” focusing on the dimensions of that struggle and the consequences for the city as a whole.

The number of Indianapolis residents living in poverty rose from 11.8 percent in 2000 to 21.3 percent in 2015 — an increase of more than 85,000 people. During that same period, the city’s population only grew 90,000.

About 30 percent of Indianapolis children lived in poverty in 2015, a particularly worrisome finding, because recent research has found that growing up in impoverished homes has a quantifiably negative effect on children’s cognitive ability.

The stress experienced by impoverished and ALICE families isn’t just financial: struggling people live in poorer neighborhoods that are less safe and less healthy. They lack the time and resources that permit other citizens to participate in civic and political life–and as a result, their voices aren’t heard–or their needs considered– in most public policy debates.

As the ALICE reports have emphasized, ALICE folks are in large part the workers that we more privileged folks rely upon for a multitude of essential services. Evidently, we aren’t willing to pay a living wage to the people who provide those services. (There’s a parallel here with our unwillingness to pay taxes adequate to support the public services we demand.)

The irony is, we pay in other ways. As the ALICE reports and the Business Journal series document, there are significant social costs to a system that leaves so many hard-working people behind.

Dismissing the struggle of ALICE families as a consequence of laziness or lack of ambition is a sign of moral obtuseness–when it isn’t intentionally self-serving. When you tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, you should probably check to see if they have any boots.

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Real-World Choices

I have never been a big fan of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. Sometimes I’ve agreed with him, sometimes not, but he generally comes across (to me, at least) as patronizing–someone who engages in the sort of “coastal elitist” hectoring that conservatives love to hate and the ideological “middle-of-the-roadism” that sets liberal teeth on edge.

In this column, however, he hits it out of the park.

Friedman makes an argument–vote straight Democratic in the upcoming midterm elections– that has often been made by Pete, one of the most thoughtful of this blog’s regular commenters. It is emphatically not an argument that Democrats are all “good guys” untainted by the moral and ethical deficiencies that permeate the GOP.

It is instead a (far more eloquent) restatement of what has become my own mantra, to wit: I don’t vote for the lesser of two evils. I vote for the person/party that is pandering to the people who are least dangerous.

To put that another way: I recognize that all politicians are beholden in some fashion to the interest groups that support them, so I’m going to evaluate the priorities of those interest groups and vote for the candidate who is beholden to the ones most closely aligned with what I believe to be the common good.

As Friedman puts it,

It is not a choice between the particular basket of policies offered by the candidates for House or Senate in your district or state — policies like gun control, right to choose, free trade or fiscal discipline. No, what this election is about is your first chance since 2016 to vote against Donald Trump.

As far as I am concerned, that’s the only choice on the ballot. It’s a choice between letting Trump retain control of all the key levers of political power for two more years, or not.

If I were writing the choice on a ballot, it would read: “Are you in favor of electing a majority of Democrats in the House and/or Senate to put a check on Trump’s power — when his own party demonstrably will not? Or are you in favor of shaking the dice for another two years of unfettered control of the House, the Senate and the White House by a man who wants to ignore Russia’s interference in our election; a man whose first thought every morning is, ‘What’s good for me, and can I get away with it?’; a man who shows no compunction about smearing any person or government institution that stands in his way; and a man who is backed by a party where the only members who’ll call him out are those retiring or dying?”

If your answer is the former, then it can only happen by voting for the Democrat in your local House or Senate race.

The same issue of the Times that carried Friedman’s column reported on a study of the issues being raised thus far in 2018 by Republican contenders for the House and Senate. The overwhelming majority are emphasizing their antagonism to immigration and immigrants–a (slightly) less obvious way to appeal to what the media likes to characterize as “racial anxieties.”

Are there racist Democrats? Sure. But they belong to a multi-racial, multi-ethnic party. To exhibit such attitudes is likely to be the kiss of political death. Are there Democrats who are “in the pocket” of corporate interests? Again, yes. But there are degrees of corruption, and right now, most Democratic officeholders obey ethical constraints that their Republican counterparts cheerfully ignore.

Friedman (and Pete) are correct:

What we’ve learned since 2016 is that the worst Democrat on the ballot for the House or Senate is preferable to the best Republican, because the best Republicans have consistently refused to take a moral stand against Trump’s undermining of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Civil Service, the basic norms of our public life and the integrity of our elections.

Here’s the bottom line. Refusing to vote for Democratic candidates who fall short of ideal–opting to make the perfect the enemy of the good– is a vote for Trump and Trumpism. Pretending otherwise is intellectually dishonest.

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Memorial Day Observations: Patriotism, Coercion and the NFL

The purpose of Memorial Day is to remember–memorialize– those who died in active military service to the country.

As we contemporary Americans enjoy our beers and barbecues, perhaps we should take a few minutes to consider what national characteristics and ideals have been considered important enough to merit that ultimate sacrifice. (It’s a holiday; we can postpone consideration of how frequently we’ve fallen short of those ideals to another time…)

Liberty and equality are often said to be the basic American values. The nation’s founders defined liberty as personal autonomy–your freedom as an individual to “do your own thing,” so long as your “thing” wasn’t harming the person or property of someone else, and so long as you were willing to accord an equal liberty to others.

In other words, live and let live–at least up to a point.

Americans have often disagreed about what constitutes harm and about the proper limits of government’s power, but generally within the confines of that libertarian definition. The nation’s courts have increasingly taken a dim view of government efforts to intrude into matters that are properly the purview of personal conscience and individual decision-making.

Since the Bill of Rights only limits what government can do, arguments against improper exercises of private power must rest on consistency with our national values unless they contravene some affirmative law.

Which brings me to the NFL, and its recent decision to require players to exhibit public behaviors that team owners and our ignoramus President deem “patriotic.” The NFL is not government; as private employers, owners cannot violate the First Amendment. They can, however, demean its principles and the very concept of patriotism. And by imposing a rule that government could not constitutionally impose, they have.

A few observations:

The “fans” who have declared themselves so offended–who claim that “taking a knee” is “disrespectful” to the flag and unpatriotic–haven’t complained about the longstanding forms of “disrespect” that routinely occur during the national anthem: food vendors hawking, large numbers of attendees ignoring the ceremony and talking, etc. Nor have they mounted an effort to ban flag bathing suits and bandanas, or protested when some civil war apologist displays the confederate flag. So you’ll excuse me if I conclude that their real objection is to black athletes having the temerity to (quietly and yes, respectfully) protest police brutality toward African-Americans.
Genuine patriotism expresses itself by fidelity to the principles upon which this country was founded. Among the most important of those principles are freedom of speech and conscience, and civic equality. The soldiers we memorialize today didn’t fight and die for a piece of cloth; they were defending the principles that the piece of cloth symbolizes. The player protests are consistent with those principles; the NFL rule is an expression of contempt for them.
The exercise of power doesn’t change hearts and/or minds. If human history teaches us anything, it is that coerced expressions of religious belief or patriotic allegiance are not only inauthentic but counterproductive. Forcing children to recite a prayer in school doesn’t make them religious; forcing grown men to forego public expression of their grievances doesn’t lessen the grievance.

The NFL has caved in to the bullying of a racist President and the noisy anger of his rightwing base. It will be interesting to see the reaction to this rule from people who understand genuine patriotism to require respect for the rights of players to express opinions with which they may or may not agree.

Noise, after all, doesn’t equate to numbers, and I’m willing to bet that the people disgusted by the NFL’s cowardly effort to placate phony “patriots”outnumber those noisemakers by a substantial margin.

If the NFL owners lose more business than they gain, it will serve them right. Their brand of “patriotism” dishonors the flag they purport to be respecting.

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Overthinking Mental Incapacity

Sometimes, a simple explanation is better.

A recent article in Alternet asked an important question: Why are some people so resistant to science and evidence?

Currently, there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among laypeople: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination. On all three issues, prominent members of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research.

This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.

Agreed. So far, so good.

The author of the piece, a psychologist, then notes that many people resist complexity and shades of gray; they live in an either-or, black or white universe, and are extremely uncomfortable with “non-dichotomas” thinking. He notes that this characteristic is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder.

In this type of cognition, a spectrum of possibilities is divided into two parts, with a blurring of distinctions within those categories. Shades of gray are missed; everything is considered either black or white. Dichotomous thinking is not always or inevitably wrong, but it is a poor tool for understanding complicated realities because these usually involve spectrums of possibilities, not binaries….

In my observations, I see science deniers engage in dichotomous thinking about truth claims. In evaluating the evidence for a hypothesis or theory, they divide the spectrum of possibilities into two unequal parts: perfect certainty and inconclusive controversy. Any bit of data that does not support a theory is misunderstood to mean that the formulation is fundamentally in doubt, regardless of the amount of supportive evidence.

Similarly, deniers perceive the spectrum of scientific agreement as divided into two unequal parts: perfect consensus and no consensus at all. Any departure from 100 percent agreement is categorized as a lack of agreement, which is misinterpreted as indicating fundamental controversy in the field.

The article goes on to explain that people whose minds work this way will latch onto any anomaly or disagreement, any “non-consistent” factoid, as confirmation that the entire theory–evolution, climate change, the efficacy and safety of vaccination–is bogus.

Where I part company with the author is his willingness to see this “conceptual approach” as a sign of a mental mal-adaptation, an indicator of other (generally mild, but troubling)mental illness. Although I’m certainly willing to concede that this may sometimes be the case, a couple of other explanations are more consistent with Occam’s razor– the principle that, when presented with competing hypothetical answers to a problem, one should select the answer that requires the fewest assumptions.

In other words, simpler is likelier.

Among the elected officials who dismiss climate science, for example, are a significant number whose campaign coffers are regularly replenished by fossil fuel companies. I suspect these lawmakers’ expressed opinions are more convenient than real.

And if I may be permitted a decidedly un-politically-correct observation, a genuine inability to understand the difference between the scientific method and religious dogma–the inability to recognize the difference between empirical evidence and a preferred and comforting world-view– may be a sign of limited intellectual capacity.

In other words, these people aren’t mentally ill. They’re just not very smart.

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Another Perspective On How We Got Here

Yesterday, I noted the ubiquity of efforts to understand what happened to the Republican Party. Equally predictable are the efforts to understand how America could have elected Donald Trump–how a man so manifestly unfit for the Presidency (or really, life in polite company) could have garnered millions of votes. True, he lost the popular vote, but that doesn’t negate the fact that millions of people actually cast ballots for him–and that even in the face of the damage being caused by his impetuousness and ignorance, many of them continue to support him.

Amanda Marcotte, who writes for Salon, is out with a book that attempts to answer that question. Her conclusions in Troll Nation won’t surprise anyone who reads this blog with any regularity, but her approach is worth considering, as Andrew O’Hehir’s review makes clear.

“Troll Nation” is not about the election of Donald Trump. Amanda and I have certain areas of cheerfully-expressed political disagreement, but I think we share the view that Trump was the culmination of a long process, or is the most visible symptom of a widespread infection. Amanda’s analysis is, as always, calm, sharp-witted and clearly focused on available evidence. American conservatives, she says, used to make rational arguments and used to present a positive social vision. Did those arguments make sense, in the end? Did that “Morning in America” vision of the Reagan years conceal a vibrant undercurrent of bigotry?

The answers to those questions — “no” and “yes,” respectively — led us to the current situation, when conservative politics has become almost entirely negative….Most Republicans gleefully embrace incoherent or self-destructive policies designed to punish or horrify people they dislike, whether that means feminists, immigrants, black people, campus “snowflakes,” members of the “liberal elite” or (above all) Hillary Clinton. I am not the world’s biggest fan of Hillary Clinton, as Amanda knows! But what the hell she ever did to all those people to make them despise her so much is entirely unclear..

As O’Hehir notes, the self-proclaimed conservatives of the GOP have morphed from the “supercilious, upper-crust conservatism “of William F. Buckley Jr., whom he accurately describes as the dictionary definition of an elitist, to the delusional ignorance of Alex Jones and the small-minded hatred of Charlottesville.

The basic premise of Marcotte’s book is that Trump is not an anomaly. Much as we might like to believe that we are living in a time that is a departure from the trajectory of American history, Marcotte sees Trump as the logical conclusion of an undercurrent in conservatism that’s been going on for decades — attitudes and resentments encouraged by talk radio, Fox News and their imitators that have “reconstructed” American conservatism. Today, rather than political opinions or policy positions, it’s all about hate and bigotry and who doesn’t belong–who isn’t a “real” American.

Plenty has been written about Fox News, talk radio and other media that ranges from spin to propaganda, and the extent to which those outlets are implicated in the twisted worldviews of their audience, but Marcotte shares an important insight that often gets overlooked:

I want to convey in this book, and I hope in this interview, that conservative audiences respond to this kind of media because they want to. I think we underestimate how much people are going to do what they want to do and believe what they want to believe.

Blaming the propagandists and conspiracy theorists lets their audiences off the hook–it assumes a lack of moral agency. The people who parrot “Fox and Friends” choose their news, and they choose not to balance it with other perspectives. For whatever reason–impelled by whatever inadequacies and resentments–they choose to indulge in confirmation bias rather than resisting it.

It’s co-dependency.

Without their willingness to suspend critical thinking–their desperate need to believe in their own racial and/or religious and/or gender superiority, the Rush Limbaughs and Fox News blonds and purveyors of Pizza conspiracies would be out of business.

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