Random Blogging – Page 207

R.I.P.

If there was any doubt that 2016 was a miserable year, word that Bill Hudnut has died confirmed it.

Bill Hudnut, for those of you who are too young to remember, or who live elsewhere, was the Republican Mayor of Indianapolis for four terms–sixteen years–from 1976 to 1992. His fingerprints are on this city in more places and ways than most current residents appreciate.

I served as Corporation Counsel–the city’s chief lawyer– in the Hudnut Administration from 1977-1980. (My appointment raised eyebrows; at that time, no woman had previously held the position. Bill valued diversity.) That was also where I met my husband–then the City’s Director of Metropolitan Development. With Bill’s death, the two of us have lost a good friend with whom we shared a vision of what urban life should and could be.

The loss is more difficult because his death reminds us that we’ve lost more than Bill Hudnut. We’ve lost both the Republican party he represented and the approach to religion and politics he exemplified.

Before he entered politics, Hudnut had been a Presbyterian minister. The lessons he drew from his faith focused on service and compassion; he expressed that faith in ways dramatically different from the fundamentalist arrogance of the present-day culture warriors who are constantly trying to impose their beliefs on everyone else.

A story: Shortly after I joined the Administration, the ACLU and the Jewish Community Relations Council sent a letter to the City, objecting to the seasonal placement of a nativity scene on the publicly owned Monument at the center of Monument Circle. No other symbols of seasonal or religious celebration accompanied it, so it was a pretty clear endorsement of Christianity.

The Mayor asked me for my legal opinion, and I explained that religious endorsements by government violate the Establishment Clause. He ordered the Nativity moved. (Its new “home” was–and still is– across the street from the Monument, on the entirely appropriate lawn of Christ Church Cathedral.) Hudnut could have scored lots of political points by resisting– “protecting Christianity”– and he took considerable heat, especially because he was a member of the clergy, for doing the right thing.

Hudnut’s religious beliefs motivated him to work for the well-being of his fellow-citizens and to respect political and religious differences. His was a Christianity of inclusion, not demonization.

During my time in City Hall, I watched the Mayor work closely with both Republicans and Democrats who represented Indianapolis in the General Assembly. I saw him communicate regularly with Concerned Clergy and other groups representing the African-American community, with neighborhood organizations and with organized labor. He appointed a police liaison to the LGBTQ community at a time when that community was subject to considerable marginalization. Relations with these and other constituencies wasn’t all sweetness and light by any means, but the outreach was genuine and the inevitable disagreements usually civil.

It was exciting working in City Hall in those days, because we were participants in a great adventure. We were working with Mayor Bill to build a world-class city, and his enthusiasm for that venture was contagious.

We don’t see much evidence of that sort of excitement today, largely because we have lost faith in the ability of government to improve citizens’ lives. For the past forty years, we’ve been told that government is always the problem, never the solution, that taxes are theft rather than the dues we owe if we want a functioning society, and that public service is an oxymoron.

Hudnut—and Dick Lugar, who preceded him as Mayor—represented a Republican Party that no longer exists. I miss that party, and I miss the optimism, integrity and humanity of people like Lugar and Hudnut and many others—men and women who saw public service as a calling and an opportunity to serve the public interest rather than as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement.

Bill Hudnut’s death reminds me that the loss of those people and that party has impoverished our civic landscape.

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States’ (And Cities’) Rights

I’ve never been a big fan of federalism–I’ve seen too much in the way of retrograde parochialism defended in the name of “states’ rights”–but as the song goes, I’m beginning to see the light. As Heather Gerken writes,

These days it’s an extraordinarily powerful weapon in politics for the left and the right, and it doesn’t have to be your father’s (or grandfather’s) federalism. It can be a source of progressive resistance and, far more importantly, a source for compromise and change between the left and the right.

As Gerken points out, the federal government is heavily dependent upon state and local officials to implement its policies. Immigration is a good example; even though immigration law comes unambiguously under federal jurisdiction, the federal government relies to a significant extent upon the co-operation of local police officers. Recently, LA Police Chief Charlie Beck announced that his force will not help the Trump administration deport undocumented immigrants. Several cities have reaffirmed an intent to be “sanctuary cities,” protecting undocumented people.

Lack of co-operation can be passive or active.

Sometimes states engaged in uncooperative federalism simply refuse to participate in federal programs, or they do so begrudgingly. Some states have refused to carry out the Patriot Act and federal immigration law. States didn’t just denounce the Patriot Act’s broad surveillance and detention rules as an attack on civil liberties. Blue and red states instructed their own officials not to collect or share information with the federal government unless there was a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, or they forbade state officials to engage in activities inconsistent with the states’ constitutions.

Politico reports that at least 37 cities are resolute in their commitments to undocumented immigrants, even in the face of Trump’s threat to “cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities.” None have moderated their resistance to cooperation with federal immigration officials.

States resisted the No Child Left Behind Act by manipulating testing standards and by slow-walking reforms. State recalcitrance was so great that eventually the Bush Administration threw in the towel and granted states so many waivers that the federal program was basically gutted.

Of course, that strategy won’t work when the federal action is “deregulatory;” uncooperative federalism is irrelevant when there isn’t a program to resist, and Trump’s choice of cabinet nominees signals his intent to gut much of the federal regulatory structure.

But that’s where spillovers come in. When one state regulates, it often affects its neighbors. When Texas insisted that its textbooks question evolution, its market power ensured that textbooks used in blue states did the same. When Virginia made it easy to buy a gun, guns flooded into New York City despite its rigorous firearms prohibitions. When West Virginia failed to regulate pollution, toxic clouds floated over Ohio.

But spillovers, like federalism, don’t have a particular political valence. Just as there are spillovers conservatives cheer, there are spillovers progressives celebrate. Want to know who really sets emissions standards in this country? It’s not the EPA. It’s California, which sets higher emissions standards than the federal government. Because no company can afford to give up on the California market, our cars all meet the state’s high standards.

Gerken reminds us that “states’ rights” can be deployed for progressive ends, despite regressive deployment of the tactic in the past. (According to Vox, Colorado, for example, is investigating the possibility of keeping its Obamacare marketplace even if the ACA is repealed.)

Progressives have long thought of federalism as a tool for entrenching the worst in our politics. But it’s also a tool for changing our politics. Social movements have long used state and local policymaking as an organizing tool, a rallying cry, a testing ground for their ideas.

The most remarkable example in recent years has been the same-sex marriage movement, which depended heavily on state and local sites as staging grounds for organizing and debate. That process may explain why those equality norms now run deep enough that the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage in Obergefell — a decision that would surely have caused intense controversy not so long ago — was greeted with enormous enthusiasm in many quarters and opposed in precious few.

All of these strategies require a change in focus from progressives’ reflexive preference for top-down, uniform national policies to bottom-up activism. Those of us in (mostly blue) cities are in the best position to generate opposition to Trump’s edicts, to throw sand in the gears of his federal apparatus. In red states like Indiana, non-cooperation will require us to identify those aspects of Trump’s agenda that are most at odds with the interests of the state, and to focus our disruptive forces there.

There’s a satisfying irony to using a states’ rights mantra to protect human rights, rather than deny them. Call it karma.

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About Those Democratic Norms…

This morning’s New York Times contains a disquieting submission from two Harvard government professors. They began

Donald J. Trump’s election has raised a question that few Americans ever imagined asking: Is our democracy in danger? With the possible exception of the Civil War, American democracy has never collapsed; indeed, no democracy as rich or as established as America’s ever has. Yet past stability is no guarantee of democracy’s future survival.

We have spent two decades studying the emergence and breakdown of democracy in Europe and Latin America. Our research points to several warning signs.

Pre-eminent among those warning signs is the emergence and electoral success of what the authors call “anti-democratic” politicians, who can be recognized by their failure–or refusal– to reject violence, willingness to curtail civil liberties, and their attacks on the legitimacy of elected governments. As they illustrate, Trump fits the bill.

Another warning sign is the weakening of democratic institutions and norms.

Among the unwritten rules that have sustained American democracy are partisan self-restraint and fair play. For much of our history, leaders of both parties resisted the temptation to use their temporary control of institutions to maximum partisan advantage, effectively underutilizing the power conferred by those institutions. There existed a shared understanding, for example, that anti-majoritarian practices like the Senate filibuster would be used sparingly, that the Senate would defer (within reason) to the president in nominating Supreme Court justices, and that votes of extraordinary importance — like impeachment — required a bipartisan consensus. Such practices helped to avoid a descent into the kind of partisan fight to the death that destroyed many European democracies in the 1930s.

As the authors note, “partisan restraint” and other norms of democratic behavior have significantly eroded, replaced by naked power struggles.

The filibuster, once a rarity, has become a routine tool of legislative obstruction. As the political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have shown, the decline of partisan restraint has rendered our democratic institutions increasingly dysfunctional. Republicans’ 2011 refusal to raise the debt ceiling, which put America’s credit rating at risk for partisan gain, and the Senate’s refusal this year to consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee — in essence, allowing the Republicans to steal a Supreme Court seat — offer an alarming glimpse at political life in the absence of partisan restraint.

The erosion of these governing norms did not happen all at once; the signs of growing dysfunction have been visible–especially at the federal level–for decades. Although Trump did not cause the weakening of these safeguards, he was a clear beneficiary.

In the wake of November 8, pundits have scrambled to “explain” the election results. As James Fallows writes in “Despair and Hope in the Age of Trump,” most of those explanations are wrongheaded.

Fallows, too, underscores the importance of democratic norms, and the implications of Trump’s contempt for rules of any kind.

The American republic is based on rules but has always depended for its survival on norms—standards of behavior, conduct toward fellow citizens and especially critics and opponents that is decent beyond what the letter of the law dictates. Trump disdains them all. The American leaders I revere are sure enough of themselves to be modest, strong enough to entertain self-doubt. When I think of Republican Party civic virtues, I think of Eisenhower. But voters, or enough of them, have chosen Trump.

Fallows dismisses two popular explanations of that choice: the belief that this was a sweeping “change” election, and the theory that the vote reflected the “desperation and fury” of citizens living away from the liberal coasts. Change elections drive waves of incumbents out of office; as he notes, that didn’t happen. The “rage” theory is similarly wanting. As Fallows says, that theory misses

the optimism and determination that are intertwined with desolation and decay in the real “out there.” I can say that because I have been out there, reporting with my wife, Deb, in smaller-town America for much of the past four years….

A Pew study in 2014 found that only 25 percent of respondents were satisfied with the direction of national policy, but 60 percent were satisfied with events in their own communities. According to a Heartland Monitor report in 2016, two in three Americans said that good ideas for dealing with national social and economic challenges were coming from their towns. Fewer than one in three felt that good ideas were coming from national institutions. These results also underscore the sense my wife and I took unmistakably from our visits: that city by city, and at the level of politics where people’s judgments are based on direct observation rather than media-fueled fear, Americans still trust democratic processes and observe long-respected norms.

It really is the media.

Count me among those who have become convinced that the decline of responsible journalism, the proliferation of “fake news” sites and the increasing sophistication of propaganda (Russian or homegrown)–abetted by a dangerous lack of civic literacy– are largely to blame for the disconnect between citizens and their national government, and for the erosion of those all-important democratic norms.

Fallows’ concluding paragraph is profound.

Nearly a century ago, Walter Lippmann wrote that the challenge for democracies is that citizens necessarily base decisions on the “pictures in our heads,” the images of reality we construct for ourselves. The American public has just made a decision of the gravest consequence, largely based on distorted, frightening, and bigoted caricatures of reality that we all would recognize as caricature if applied to our own communities. Given the atrophy of old-line media with their quaint regard for truth, the addictive strength of social media and their unprecedented capacity to spread lies, and the cynicism of modern politics, will we ever be able to accurately match image with reality? The answer to that question will determine the answer to another: whether this election will be a dire but survivable challenge to American institutions or an irreversible step toward something else.

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To Russia, With (Trump’s) Love

MarketWatch is a subsidiary of Dow Jones, and a property of News Corp. It operates a financial information website that provides business news, analysis, and stock market data. It is neither a fake news site nor a particularly ideological one (certainly not left-wing–News Corp also owns Fox News), so I was surprised to read a column headlined “Top 10 Signs that American President is a Russian Agent.”

The “signs” the column identified were: (1) U.S. Intelligence has concluded that the Kremlin helped put him in power; (2) the new President sides with the Kremlin against the CIA; (3) He receives vast sums of money from mysterious Russians (Including an astonishing $95 million that Trump personally received from a Russian billionaire during the 2008 collapse); (4) His election made a lot of people in Moscow rich–their stock market is up 20% since the U.S. election; (5) He wants to end Russia’s global isolation and terminate U.S. and international sanctions against Russia; (6) He has surrounded himself with known Russian allies and sympathizers; (7) He repeatedly refuses to criticize the Kremlin; (8) One of his first steps as President-elect was to drive a wedge between the U.S. and China, Russia’s chief Asian rival; (9) He has announced policies that would undermine NATO; and (10) He once had his own brand of vodka.

Okay, that last one is a stretch.

The column gives “chapter and verse” for each of these signs, so those interested in more detail can click through.

My reaction to this seemingly outlandish theory is not altogether dismissive. Two points are worth consideration: first, whether Trump is simply being his clueless self or knowingly acting on behalf of the Kremlin–being blackmailed by the Russian oligarchs who financed several of his projects after American banks stopped doing business with him, perhaps, or otherwise being bribed to do so–is irrelevant. If he were a knowing Russian agent, how would his behavior differ?

Second, MarketWatch’s list of ten signs is missing a huge one. Russia’s economy is heavily dependent upon oil, and Putin’s stranglehold on the Russian people is heavily dependent upon the economy. The Kremlin is thus threatened by U.S. efforts to address climate change–efforts that diminish reliance upon and use of fossil fuels. Trump’s cabinet nominees are virtually all anti-science climate change denialists. His energy transition team has already signaled a witch hunt against government scientists working to protect the environment.

A military friend recently told me that Russia’s conventional armed forces are substandard. Evidently, according to the CIA and the New York Times, they are much better at cyberwarfare. (Slate also has a good overview of the history and tactics of the Russian hackers.)

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Russia subdued us without having to deploy a soldier or fire a shot?

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When What We Know Just Ain’t So

A recent research report from Journalists’ Resources examined whether regulations intended to protect the environment cost jobs. The belief that such regulatory activity has a negative effect on employment has been an article of faith among conservative Republicans, yet research on the issue fails to confirm that faith– there is little evidence that environmental regulations substantially impact overall employment figures.

I thought of that report, and a number of other areas where reality fails to confirm our firm expectations, when I read a post to an academic listserv in which I participate. The article of faith that Kim Lane Scheppele–an eminent comparative constitutionalist– called into question in that post is a critically important one: the belief that American democracy cannot be subverted.

Scheppele cited the work of a Columbia professor who had watched Turkey fall under the control of a populist autocrat who won democratic elections–and who sees dangerous parallels to Trump and the U.S.

Confidence in the exceptional resilience of American democracy is particularly misplaced in the face of today’s illiberal populist movements, whose leaders are constantly learning from each other. Trump has a wide variety of tried and tested techniques on which to draw; already, he has vowed to take pages out of Putin’s playbook.

Scheppele had just come back from Chile, where she had lectured on the advance of illiberal constitutionalism around the world.

People there asked me how Trump could have been elected in the US, and I showed them this data: Nearly one quarter of young Americans no longer believe in democracy and since 9/11, faith in the way America is governed has plunged to all-time lows (raised slightly in election years when Obama was elected, but then plunging back again).

These are danger signals that should have alerted us earlier to the possibilities of Trump. I might add that very similar danger signals appeared before the election of other populist autocrats of both left and right: Putin, Erdogan, Orbán, Kaczynski, Correa, Chavez.

There’s a clear pattern here. First people lose faith in the system. Then they vote to break it. And when the new leader decides to trash constitutional institutions, he is cheered on by those who want change at any price. When people wake up to the damage done, it is too late because their constitutional system has been captured.

Scheppele is particularly concerned because in our interconnected world, these autocrats learn from each other.

I am admittedly among the number of Americans who have always had a false sense of security: it can’t happen here. But as we have seen, that article of faith–that particular element of our belief in American exceptionalism– has proved to be fragile in other countries that had seemingly stable democratic institutions.

Just last weekend, the New York Times ran an article about the “alt-right” (our homegrown Nazis) and its ideal of leadership.

As the founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, an American group that aims to preserve the privileged place of whiteness in Western civilization and fight “anti-Christian degeneracy,” Matthew Heimbach knows whom he envisions as the ideal ruler: the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“Russia is our biggest inspiration,” Mr. Heimbach said. “I see President Putin as the leader of the free world.”

Despite our belief that America is somehow different, we are not exempt from the white nationalist fervor that is sweeping large sections of the globe. If we want to emerge from this very dangerous period of time with something resembling an actual constitutional democracy and the rule of law, we will need a determined and informed resistance.

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