Category Archives: Random Blogging

Meanwhile…

Virtually everyone I know is obsessed with the dumpster fire that is our current federal government. It’s certainly understandable; we have a President whose manifest deficiencies become more bizarre by the day, and a Cabinet filled with ideologues who are  incompetent or racist or both. And if you want to know a lot about our “Christian” vice-President, this (very amusing but really totally accurate) site is worth visiting.

Watching what is happening in the nation’s capital is obviously important, but so is the ongoing, on-the-ground work of local governments and nonprofit organizations. In fact, those nonprofit organizations are more important than ever; in a country where the federal apparatus is stuck in neutral (if not reverse), and few of the elected officials in Washington seem to give a rat’s ass about the common good, the steady presence of these voluntary and charitable organizations is often a life preserver.

What made me think about all this was an email announcing an event to support Hope Academy, a “recovery high school” that is attached to and affiliated with Fairbanks Hospital.

I had visited Fairbanks Hospital and Hope Academy a few years ago, at the invitation of a good friend who was then the President/CEO of Fairbanks, and I was duly impressed. As local folks know, Fairbanks Hospital addresses substance abuse in adults, and it has been a compassionate and supportive lifeline for people hooked on alcohol or drugs. At the time of my first visit, my friend and her board had just established Hope Academy.

A couple of months ago, on a return visit, I talked at length with teachers and students, and was once again struck by the importance of what Hope Academy does.

The individual stories really got to me: “Jeremy” was using and selling hard drugs, blacking out and failing tests in his high school. He was in jail at 17. After he was released, he found Hope Academy and he now has a college degree, a good job, and a wife and child. “Ben,” another graduate, has turned his life around and is working on a dual master’s degree at Purdue. There were many other stories, equally inspiring.

Medical science confirms that addiction is a disease, not a failure of will power or evidence of moral failure. Like other diseases, it can be cured–or at least sent into remission–if pproached with appropriate understanding, support and treatment.

That costs money, of course, and it’s no surprise that Medicare and Medicaid together account for only 27% of Fairbanks’ operating budget. Given what’s going on in Washington, Fairbanks’ staff aren’t expecting that to improve any time soon. Like so many other nonprofits, they depend heavily on volunteers and donors–on “the kindness of strangers.”

I’ve dwelled a bit on this particular nonprofit, not just because I recently visited, but because Fairbanks and Hope Academy are examples of the thousands of voluntary organizations supported by people of good will–people who have seen gaping holes in America’s social safety net and moved to fill them. (It’s like the tag line in that old TV series, “The Naked City”–“There are a million stories in the Naked City; this has been one of them.”)

America has so many truly admirable people providing so many important services out of the goodness of their hearts–working in our communities to make life better for their neighbors, helping people who need that help, giving of their time and treasure to make  the worlds of those less fortunate just a little less desolate and forbidding.

Seeing compassion and generosity in action raises the question: why aren’t we sending those sorts of people to Washington?

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A Selective Kudos

I’m sure it didn’t have anything to do with gender bias (cough, cough), but during the fevered coverage of the GOP’s “repeal and replace” efforts, there was virtually no media coverage of a heroic Senator who–despite suffering from Stage Four cancer– came to Washington last week to cast a vote against repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

She got no standing ovation. She got no mainstream media lauds for her heroism. She got no kudos for leaving home, a much longer journey than that other senator, the one from Arizona, to get to DC, and there are no mainstream media stories on it that I can find… I only found out from a friend who spotted it on Twitter.

She didn’t do it for publicity.

Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii was just doing her job as a good politician, voting not to repeal the ACA so as to protect her constituents. She has Stage Four kidney cancer — that means scarce chances of survival — is recovering from a second surgery to remove part of a rib, and made sure she got to her seat in the Senate Chamber to vote “no” to whatever Republican wealth-care crap was thrown at her.

But you’ll only find out about it on social media. Because she’s not a pale male, maybe?

After this post ran on Daily Kos, a few media outlets did pick up the story (in an “oh by the way” fashion).

I’m as grateful as anyone for John McCain’s vote, but I’ll admit to being annoyed by the disparity between the overwhelming and laudatory coverage of his vote and the votes of Senator Hirono and especially the equally dispositive (and far more steadfast) positions of Senators Collins and Murkowsky.

I think I want a bumper sticker that says: If you still have healthcare, thank a woman! (Not a woman from Indiana, however….our female Representatives both voted for the obscenity that passed the House– they supported Paul Ryan’s efforts to destroy Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, eviscerate Medicaid and use the money saved to provide tax breaks for the rich. Jackie Walorski and Susan Brooks have both been reliable, enthusiastic Trumpsters. In a sane world, that would be enough to guarantee them ignominious defeat in 2018.)

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Revisiting the Big Sort

A recent article posted to the website of the Niskanen Center  corroborated a depressing theory that I have entertained over the past several years.

The United States is not very united.

Americans have been sorting themselves along ideological lines into like-minded regions of the country, increasing polarization in congressional voting patterns, and creating a striking division in political preference and party loyalty between city-dwellers and the denizens of low-density exurban and rural counties.

Population patterns matter; they also defeat truly representative government. The United States has considerably more Democratic than Republican voters, but the Democrats are  concentrated in a handful of Democrat-heavy cities and states; Republicans, on the other hand, are spread relatively thinly but evenly across the non-urban regions of the country.

Add gerrymandering, and the Republican electoral advantage becomes overwhelming.

What does the urban/rural divide look like?

Because America’s highly-schooled creative, political, academic, and business classes tend to cluster in liberal cities, the town-and-country split corresponds to a rough class distinction between so-called “elites” and non-urban non-elites. Underline “rough” here.

People of color number heavily among urban non-elites, and tend to vote with (mostly white) urban elites, so it’s wrong to conflate the town-and-country divide with the elite/ordinary folks divide. Many, many millions of ordinary Americans aren’t white and live in big cities. That said, the United States will remain a white-majority, white-dominated country for another few decades. Populist anti-elitism, as it has manifested itself behind Trump, seems to me largely a reaction of non-city-dwelling whites against urban whites and the cosmopolitan, multicultural conception of American identity they affirm.

But let me repeat that “white people who don’t live in cities” is not remotely the same thing as “the people,” most of whom do live in densely populated metropolitan areas, and many of whom are African-American, Asian, and Hispanic. And it’s important to clarify further that “white people who don’t live in cities” is also not remotely the same thing as “the white working class,” as there are many millions of non-urban, white people with college degrees and upper-class incomes. The ruling political, business, and cultural classes in Republican-dominated places like to pretend that they’re “just folks,” too, but they aren’t. They’re elites.

The point being made is important, because many pundits continue to focus on economic distress as the reason for the urban/rural divide. The theory is that poor rural residents resent the comparative affluence of their urban counterparts. A number of studies conducted after the election, however, have reached the same conclusion as the author of this article–Trump voters actually were economically better off on average than Clinton voters. (They were not, however, from regions that were as economically productive–and as the article explains in the conclusion, that matters.)

The author notes a variety of efforts to explain the personality differences between liberals and conservatives, before concluding that evidence confirms the “big sort” first identified by Bill Bishop.

The upshot is that liberals (low conscientiousness, high openness to experience) and conservatives (high conscientiousness, low openness) have distinctive personalities, and that there’s reason to believe we’ve been sorting ourselves into communities of psychologically/ideologically similar people.

To make matters worse, as Cass Sunstein’s work on group deliberation shows, we tend to radicalize in the direction of our predispositions when we’re surrounded by people who already agree with us. In short, we’re moving into bubbles of people who resemble us and an echo chamber effect pushes our opinions to extremes.

If this were the whole story, America’s future would be grim indeed, but as the author notes, entire cultures tend to become more liberal in their attitudes over time. The content of conservative ideology has changed–liberalized–over my own lifetime, and the article delves into the reasons for that phenomenon.

It also explains how and why improving economic productivity liberalizes social beliefs and values–and notes that, in the U.S. at this particular moment in time, “Clinton” counties are far more productive than “Trump” counties.

The United States may be dividing into two increasingly polarized cultures: an increasingly secular-rational and self-expression oriented “post-materialist” culture concentrated in big cities and the academic archipelago, and a largely rural and exurban culture that has been tilting in the opposite direction, toward zero-sum survival values, while trying to hold the line on traditional values…For a certain group of Americans, liberalizing post-materialist cultural change has been ongoing. For another, it has stalled or reversed.

To (partially) sum up:

A shrinking number of counties is accounting for a rising proportion of America’s wealth. Partisan affiliation is breaking along this population/productivity divide in a way that suggests that America’s moral and political culture has been polarizing along this divide, as well. Given the specific counter-majoritarian mechanisms in the U.S. constitution, this is a recipe for political dominance of the less economically productive conservative white minority, who control most of the country’s territory, over the liberal multicultural majority who live in increasingly concentrated urban centers of wealth. To the extent that increasing economic security is liberalizing and stagnation and decline tend toward an illiberal, zero-sum survival mindset, this amounts to a recipe for the political imposition of relatively illiberal policy on increasingly liberal and increasingly economically powerful cities. This is not a stable situation, and bodes ill for the future of American freedom.

The rest of the (very long) article considers why this is happening, and a subsequent article by the same author suggests policies that might ameliorate the divide. Both are well worth reading and considering–although I suggest accompanying that endeavor with a stiff drink.

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The Party As Cult

Evidently, McConnell and the Senate GOP are still intent upon taking healthcare away from millions of Americans–despite the overwhelming unpopularity and utter immorality of that effort. If this current vote fails, they’ll fall back on their determined sabotage of the ACA and continue their refusal to work with Democrats to tweak and fix that measure’s flaws.

All because their “base” can’t abide the fact that a black President passed it.

On several occasions, I’ve remarked that today’s GOP bears less and less resemblance to the party I once worked for, and more and more resemblance to a cult. I used the term in its broadest and least precise sense–to indicate a walled-off reality–but I recently came across the following description of cult behavior, and it made me think that, at least for the so-called “base,” the comparison may have been more apt than I realized.

There seems to be a typical mindset within most destructive cults. This is often characterized by black and white thinking, a low tolerance of ambiguity and a relentlessly judgementa1 attitude. Members of such a group often think in “we, they” opposing terms regarding those outside their group. This mindset frequently produces feelings of superiority and/or spiritual elitism, claims of supposed “persecution” and unreasonable fears.

The description sent me on a Google search for information about the characteristics of cults. The so-called “unsafe” groups evidently share certain behaviors: affinity for authoritarianism, a lack of tolerance for critical inquiry and analysis (any criticism is labeled “persecution”), isolation and fear of the outside world, and loss of a sense of humor.

To be fair, any group of zealots–left or right–exhibits these characteristics. But the degree to which the Republican base falls within this description is striking. The penchant for authoritarian leadership, wholesale rejection of science and scholarship, isolation within an information “bubble,” excessive fear of terrorism, and the utter lack of a sense of humor (which requires a sense of proportion), are hard to miss.

We live in a time when the increasing complexity of the world around us requires a tolerance for ambiguity, a willingness to consider contending and unfamiliar perspectives and an ability to recognize the common humanity of people who do not look like us. Those are responses that many people simply cannot manage.

Political scientists analyzing the motivations of Trump voters in the wake of the 2016 election have identified “resentment”–especially but not exclusively racial resentment– as a primary characteristic.

That finding brings us back to the description of cult behaviors: black and white thinking (no pun intended), rejection of ambiguity and uncertainty, tribalism and claims of persecution (War on Christmas, anyone?).

The 64 Thousand Dollar question is: will this pass? Are these fearful and self-defeating attitudes mostly confined to older Americans who will die out, leaving the social and political landscape to a less panicked, less tribal and more intellectually nimble younger generation?

We can only hope.

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Just The Facts, Ma’am…

Shades of Joe Friday!

There really are incredible resources on the Internet. Granted, it can be hard to locate them  in that ever-burgeoning sea of spin, propaganda and conspiracy theories, but they exist. Last week, I blogged about “ProCon,” a site that presents the arguments made by contending sides on so-called “hot button” issues.

Today, I want to highlight USA FACTS, a site devoted to presenting a data-driven portrait of the American population, our government’s finances, and government’s impact on society.

We are a non-partisan, not-for-profit civic initiative and have no political agenda or commercial motive. We provide this information as a free public service and are committed to maintaining and expanding it in the future.

We rely exclusively on publicly available government data sources. We don’t make judgments or prescribe specific policies. Whether government money is spent wisely or not, whether our quality of life is improving or getting worse – that’s for you to decide. We hope to spur serious, reasoned, and informed debate on the purpose and functions of government. Such debate is vital to our democracy. We hope that USAFacts will make a modest contribution toward building consensus and finding solutions.

The site offers a brief description of its genesis:

USAFacts was inspired by a conversation Steve Ballmer had with his wife, Connie. She wanted him to get more involved in philanthropic work. He thought it made sense to first find out what government does with the money it raises. Where does the money come from and where is it spent? Whom does it serve? And most importantly, what are the outcomes?

With his business background, Steve searched for solid, reliable, impartial numbers to tell the story… but eventually realized he wasn’t going to find them. He put together a small team of people – economists, writers, researchers – and got to work.

Ultimately, Ballmer partnered in this effort with Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), the Penn Wharton Budget Model, and Lynchburg College.

The site does something I have long advocated–it collects numerical data about America’s state and federal governments that has previously been available only through a patchwork of reports and agency sites, and assembles it in a usable, comprehensible (and comprehensive) format. Want to know how much government took in in taxes last year and the year before? Where those dollars came from? What was spent? What a “trust fund” is and what its assets are? How many people work for government? What governments owe?

It’s all there, along with population demographics.

The charts are simple, the text understandable.

The next time one of the talking heads on cable makes an assertion about job creation under President X, or deficits amassed under President Y, his numbers can be checked in real time. (Like the t-shirt says, “Trust Data, Not Lore.”) (Star Trek fans will get that…)

These days, it sometimes seems as if partisans are uninterested in those pesky things we call facts; indeed, they seem to resent those of us who prefer to deal with accurate data. This site isn’t for them–but it is definitely a great resource for the rest of us!

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