Random Blogging – Page 215

Media Matters

If there is one observation about American politics that everyone agrees on–whether they are left, right or center– it’s that the electorate is deeply polarized.

There are a number of theories about why political actors are unable to agree on even the most pedestrian and formerly uncontroversial issues. A recent study suggests that our fragmented media environment has a lot to do with it.

In “Income Inequality, Media Fragmentation, and Increased Political Polarization,” published in Contemporary Economic Policy, August 2016, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas looked for evidence that media fragmentation plays a bigger role in polarization than income inequality. They looked at variables across six decades: indexes of polarization in the U.S. House and in the Senate, family income data from the Census Bureau and the percentage of Americans with cable or satellite television. The data confirmed that polarization has increased rapidly since the 1980s, but did not point to a cause.

Two of their findings:

The growing plurality of news sources as well as the increasing access to cable television made the greatest contribution to political polarization. Two phenomena, or a combination of the two, are responsible: Individuals seek out “self-reinforcing viewpoints rather than be exposed to a common ‘nightly news’ broadcast” — this is sometimes called siloing. Also, individuals are jettisoning news programming for entertainment, “thereby reducing incidental or by-product learning about politics.”
The decreasing exposure to alternative views and the increasing buttressing of one’s own views has combined to create less sympathy for others’ views and less of an ability to understand others’ views. “This may be reinforced by a tendency for political differences to be decreasingly addressed through genuine debate and increasingly replaced with media coverage of political vilification or grandstanding.”

Other research has reached similar conclusions.The Pew Research Center published an extensive investigation into political polarization and media habits in 2014, including five key takeaways. In 2016, Pew also looked at ideological gaps between people with different education backgrounds.

As the Journalists’ Resource notes,

Harvard University Professor Thomas Patterson’s book, Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism (Vintage 2013), describes, among other things, how in 1987 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rescinded the Fairness Doctrine, giving rise to extremely slanted radio and then cable news talk shows. The Fairness Doctrine, Patterson writes, “had discouraged the airing of partisan talk shows by requiring stations that did so to offer a balanced lineup of liberal and conservative programs. Once the requirement was eliminated, hundreds of stations launched talk shows of their choosing, the most successful of which had a conservative slant.”

People who consume sharply partisan news coverage are less likely to believe the truth even when they are presented with clear evidence they are wrong, according to research published in 2016 in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and flagged by the Poynter Institute.

When America is going through a particularly nasty period, it’s often comforting to remind ourselves that “we’ve been here before.” (Think civil war, the 60s, etc.) But we haven’t had social media and the internet during previous rough patches. We haven’t been able to choose our realities, insulate ourselves in our preferred “bubbles” and shut out inconvenient facts.

I hope I’m wrong, but I think that makes a big difference….

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One Mystery (Possibly) Solved…

None of the theories to date about the reason for Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns have seemed very persuasive, but when I read this reporting by the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold, I had an “ah ha” moment.

Apparently, “deadbeat Don” has reported–and presumably deducted– charitable gifts that he didn’t actually make. Multiple charities are telling Fahrenthold that they never received donations that the Trump Foundation listed and claimed on IRS submissions.

One can see how the disclosure of tax returns reporting non-existent donations might be…embarrassing.

Of course, even if the existence of improper deductions does solve one mystery– the reason for Trump’s refusal to share his tax returns–it leaves us with a number of others. Why, for instance, would a man who clearly has no interest in public policy or administration run for public office? Why would a candidate who is totally ignorant of the basics of constitutional government refuse to inform himself about those basics? Why would someone who has never run in a political campaign ignore all advice from people who understand what such campaigns require?

The answers to those and similar questions are probably only obtainable on a psychiatrist’s couch. And ultimately, unless he wins (which, thankfully, is unlikely) the idiosycrasies of a self-obsessed megalomaniac will ultimately be matters of only passing interest.

The more pressing question–the question that keeps me up nights and consumes reasonable Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike–is why would anyone vote for this man?

In any sane universe, Donald Trump is a joke: a tacky, ignorant narcissist who communicates at a third-grade level, lies compulsively (and not very convincingly) and thinks childish insults and ad hominem attacks are debate points.

The reason for some portion of his support is abundantly clear. (Despite walking her comments back, Clinton quite accurately described these voters as belonging in a “basket of deplorables.”) White supremacists, anti-Semites, racists, sexists and xenophobes see him–probably accurately– as one of them. But other people, who don’t appear to fall into those categories and who don’t appear to belong in the basket, also tell pollsters they support him.

I assume some number of die-hard Republicans will vote for the party’s candidate no matter what–although Trump has made it clear that he has no respect for longstanding Republican positions (assuming he even knows what those are). And I suppose there must be some people who are so horrified at the prospect of a woman in the Oval Office that they will opt for any male, no matter how unfit and/or dangerous. But beyond those (hopefully small) categories, I am hard-pressed to understand why any voter would see this repulsive ignoramus as remotely Presidential.

I know I’ll hear from readers who hate Hillary and who will claim that Trump is no worse; however, even they know that is manifest nonsense. Even if you believed every accusation that has been thrown at her (despite the innumerable investigations that have come up empty), there is still no equivalence. Besides, large numbers of critics who detest her have publicly confirmed that they won’t vote for Trump. They’ll vote for third-party candidates or leave the Presidential line blank. Depending on the state the voter lives in, those actions do help Trump, but they aren’t the same as affirmatively supporting him.

I want to know about the people who actually plan to cast a vote for him. Who are they? What am I missing?

Why would anyone who isn’t a White Nationalist vote for an unstable, demonstrably unfit blowhard whose election would quite obviously pose a clear and present danger to the nation and the planet?

Inquiring minds really want to know.

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A Really Important History Lesson

At Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton highlighted a truly important segment from Rachel Maddow’s show, in which she traces America’s history of xenophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria.

Many readers of this blog are familiar with the broad outlines of America’s nativist history–the periodic eruptions of movements like the Know-Nothings and later, the Klan. But in this explanatory segment, Maddow ties these episodes to the nation’s political history in a way that I, certainly, had never considered, and shows how Donald Trump’s increasingly explicit and ugly fact-free rhetoric fits into that history–and what it means for the Republican party and the American two-party system.

No summary of this extraordinary history lesson could do it justice.

Watch it.

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Voting My Conscience

Okay–I have to get this off my chest.

Dana Milbank said it best, in a recent column in the Washington Post:

Moderates and reasonable Republicans who are considering voting for Trump portray it as a choice between two unpalatable options. But it isn’t. It’s a choice between one unpalatable option and one demagogue who operates outside of our democratic traditions, promoting racism, condoning violence and moving paranoia into the mainstream. This presidential election, unlike the six others I have covered, is not about party or ideology. It’s about Trump’s threat to our tradition of self-government.

More recently, Thomas Friedman made a similar point in a column for the New York Times.

Anyone who says it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton wins this election needs their head examined. The damage that Trump could do to our nation with his blend of intellectual laziness, towering policy ignorance and reckless impulsiveness is in a league of its own. Hillary has some real personal ethics issues she needs to confront, but she’s got the chops to be president.

These and a number of similar opinion pieces are efforts to get through to people who dislike both major-party candidates and insist that they intend to “vote their consciences” and avoid “dirtying” themselves, by opting for a third-party candidate.

Let’s “get real,” as the kids might say. No third-party candidate has even the remotest chance of winning. (And if, by some unimaginable chance, one did, they couldn’t govern from outside America’s a two-party system; like it or not, that’s the reality within which we operate.) Either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States.

Here’s my message to those who are planning to “vote their consciences.”

You may think that casting a “wasted” vote makes you virtuous, but the reality is that every non-Clinton vote cast in November helps Donald Trump.

I realize that many people detest Hillary Clinton. I am not one of the Clinton haters, and I have my own opinions about the source of the intense animus people feel for her, but I am not going to waste blog space arguing about “Hillary hate.” I am going to argue that those who hate her should hold their noses and vote for her anyway.

Even if most of the accusations thrown at Hillary Clinton were true, that would mean she’s not much different from other, similarly flawed politicians–several of whom have occupied the Oval Office. As libertarian P.J. O’Rourke put it when he declared he’d be voting for Clinton, “she’s wrong, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, really does represent an existential threat, not just to American values, the Constitution and the rule of law, but to the world. The thought of someone as ignorant, venal, thin-skinned and volatile having his finger on the nuclear button should be enough to make sane people shudder. (It has certainly had that effect on virtually every living high-ranking member of the defense community, both Republican and Democratic.)

The identity of Trump’s core supporters–the racists, misogynysts, anti-Semites and xenophobes who have crawled out from under their rocks to cheer him on–should give pause to anyone willing to narrow the margin by which America rejects him.

In 1991, Trump supporter and Klansman David Duke ran for Governor of Louisiana against Edwin Edwards, who had faced two racketeering trials before being acquitted in 1986. Edwards won, after a campaign featuring a popular and memorable bumper sticker reading “Vote for the Crook. It’s important.”

I don’t believe that Hillary Clinton is a crook, or anything close to it. But even if you do believe that, you should vote for her.

It’s important.

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The Anti-Science Ticket

There are so many reasons to vote against the Trump-Pence ticket, it almost seems like piling on to point out that a vote for Trump-Pence is a vote against science and empirical evidence. As a recent article in the New Yorker pointed out:

In May, for instance, while speaking to an audience of West Virginia coal miners, Trump complained that regulations designed to protect the ozone layer had compromised the quality of his hair spray. Those regulations, he continued, were misguided, because hair spray is used mainly indoors, and so can have no effect on the atmosphere outside. No wonder Hillary Clinton felt the need to include, in her nomination speech, the phrase “I believe in science.”

Often, Trump is simply wrong about science, even though he should know better. Just as he was a persistent “birther” even after the evidence convincingly showed that President Obama was born in the United States, Trump now continues to propagate the notion that vaccines cause autism in spite of convincing and widely cited evidence to the contrary. (As he put it during a Republican debate, last September, “We’ve had so many instances. . . . A child went to have the vaccine, got very, very sick, and now is autistic.”) In other cases, Trump treats scientific facts the way he treats other facts—he ignores or distorts them whenever it’s convenient. He has denied that climate change is real, calling it pseudoscience and advancing a conspiracy theory that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.”

Scientific American calls Trump’s lack of respect for science “alarming,” and worries that the U.S. presidential election “shows how far the political conversation has degenerated from the nation’s founding principles of truth and evidence.”

A respect for evidence is not just a part of the national character. It goes to the heart of the country’s particular brand of democratic government. When the founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, scientist and inventor, wrote arguably the most important line in the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident”—they were asserting the fledgling nation’s grounding in the primacy of reason based on evidence.

Lest Trump’s bizarre approach to what constitutes “fact” and “evidence” crowd out recognition of his running-mate’s preference for biblical, rather than scientific, explanations of the world, Slate has an article reminding us of Pence’s dismissal of “theories” like evolution and climate change.

You know anyone picked by Trump to be his running mate almost certainly will have a problem with established science, of course, but it turns out Pence is also a young Earth creationist. And one with a lot of conviction about it, too. In 2002, while a congressman from Indiana, he gave a short speech on the floor of Congress denying evolution, and used quite a few misleading, if not outright false, claims.

The Slate article has a video of Pence’s speech, and (assuming you can stomach it) it highlights–among other things– his misunderstanding of what constitutes a scientific theory.

Nonscientists use the word theory to mean speculation, or guess—“I have a theory about that.” Scientific illiterates like Pence fail to distinguish between that casual use of the term and its very different scientific meaning.

Development of a scientific theory is a part of the scientific method. It involves summarizing a group of hypotheses that have been successfully and repeatedly tested. Once enough evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, a theory is developed, and that theory becomes accepted as a valid explanation of a particular phenomenon. Scientific theories are based on careful examination of facts.

Pence’s preference for biblical explanations of the world comes as no surprise to Hoosiers, who have watched him fund parochial schools with public dollars, shift funding from science-based medical services like Planned Parenthood to religiously-based anti-abortion organizations, and enact measures like RFRA to protect those engaging in religiously-based discrimination.

Media outlets tend to portray Pence as less deranged than Trump. It’s a low bar.

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