Category Archives: Random Blogging

How Gerrymandering Gave us Donald Trump (And Bernie, too)

Last night was another Republican debate, this time minus “The Donald.” It’s difficult to believe that this assortment of wannabes is the best a once-serious political party can muster.

How have we come to this?

David Brooks, the conservative columnist for the New York Times, is a thoughtful observer of the American scene, and while (in my opinion) he often misses with his analysis, he also often contributes to our understanding of the America we inhabit.

In a recent column, Brooks honed in on the public’s pervasive feelings of powerlessness:

The Republican establishment thinks the grass roots have the power but the grass roots think the reverse. The unions think the corporations have the power but the corporations think the start-ups do. Regulators think Wall Street has the power but Wall Street thinks the regulators do. The Pew Research Center asked Americans, “Would you say your side has been winning or losing more?” Sixty-four percent of Americans, with majorities of both parties, believe their side has been losing more.

These days people seem to underestimate their own power or suffer from what Giridharadas calls the “anxiety of impotence.”…

There are, as Brooks points out, many reasons for these perceptions of powerlessness, and certainly not all of them are political. That said, however, a case can be made that one of the great frustrations fueling the palpable anger in today’s electorate is the realization by so many citizens that their votes don’t count.

The American message has always been that we have political choice. If we don’t approve of the behavior of our political representatives, we can vote them out. Increasingly, that’s not true; gerrymandering has produced Congressional districts that would re-elect dead people if they ran with the correct political label.

At the federal level, the House of Representatives is unrepresentative of the American public, and likely to remain that way. In the last Congressional cycle, Democrats garnered a million more votes than the Republicans who nevertheless remain firmly in control—and, thanks to checks and balances—able to obstruct and defeat policies favored by a popularly-elected President.

I’ve written previously about the lack of competitiveness that gerrymandering produces, and about other deleterious consequences of the practice. Brooks points to one I omitted: the frustration experienced by citizens who feel—with considerable justification—that they have no voice.

Plagued by the anxiety of impotence many voters are drawn to leaders who pretend that our problems could be solved by defeating some villain. Donald Trump says stupid elites are the problem. Ted Cruz says it’s the Washington cartel. Bernie Sanders says it’s Wall Street.

When voters feel powerless, they are vulnerable to simple messages, identifiable villains, and candidates who channel their anger.

If history is any guide, that has never turned out well.

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A Useful Metaphor

You’d have to be living in a cave to escape all the hype about the new Star Wars movie. I rarely go to movies, but even I felt the need to see this one—if only to hold my own with my grandchildren.

For the record, I thought it was a pretty mediocre movie. I have always thought that Star Wars was space opera with great special effects, rather than inventive science fiction, but I think I understand the appeal of the franchise.

It’s the good guys against The Dark Side.

In real life, the lines are not so simple. Most people are neither saintly or unremittingly evil. (As a friend of mine likes to say, incompetence explains so much more than conspiracy.) In  many situations, determining right and wrong can be complicated. But—probably for that very reason— we humans tend to pine for bright lines, for simple demarcations between “us” and “them”—with “us” being the good guys and “them” the bad guys.

Of course, there really are “bad guys.” Sometimes, those we label “bad” are simply misguided, or mentally incapacitated  (or really, really stupid), but there is no denying that there really are a lot of malevolent people in the world—not to mention the assholes, the self-aggrandizing, self-centered power-seekers who aren’t affirmatively evil, but who don’t care about the harmful consequences of their actions.

These days, in various arenas and more often than we like to admit, the “bad guys” seem to be winning, and winners are attractive. Political psychologists tell us that people like to identify with winners, to climb onto the bandwagon of popular opinion.

In real life, we are challenged to reject the affirming mindlessness of the mob— to refuse to go over to The Dark Side, no matter what the temptations or inducements—and to do so without becoming “bad guys” ourselves.

Draw your own political analogies….

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Yet Another Reproach to Our Governor and His Ilk

As Indiana citizens have discovered, our Governor’s mean-spirited decisions aren’t limited to issues affecting LGBT Hoosiers. His efforts to reject even a handful of desperate Syrian refugees (mostly women and children and men over 60) is a case in point.

Fortunately, Pence doesn’t speak for all Hoosiers—or even for most of us.

I recently was contacted by Sam Harnish, a Hoosier from Northern Indiana who is part of a newly-formed group in Michigan City, “Citizens Concerned for Syrian Refugees.” He described it as an effort to provide some portion of needed help for 10 million refugees.

As he put it, 10 million of anything is impossible to comprehend.

Is there any way to visualize 10 million people? Perhaps it helps to say that that 10 million people are the combined populations of Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, Washington D.C., and Wyoming. There are 10 million refugees or internally displaced persons in Syria.

I cannot grasp the reality of life for those 10 million people. I watch the news. I see the pictures of the camps. I try to imagine being driven out of my home by war. There they are: men, women, children, and babies. All trying to survive, all seeking safety, all looking for a safe place to live – and winter is upon them.

Most, but not all, of these 10 million people are Muslim. Civil war and ISIS, ISIL, IS, Daesh (choose your favorite acronym) force families to flee regardless of religion. These 10 million people are human beings – human beings in need – and fellow human beings must respond to others in need when we have the ability.

Harnish draws a parallel to the classic “Grapes of Wrath.”

When the book “The Grapes of Wrath” was published, a newspaperman in California (Frank Taylor) tried to prove that the conditions described in the book didn’t exist. Many people today insist that there isn’t a real problem in Syria, or that America didn’t have anything to do with it. That is made easier because we don’t see what’s happening until a three-year-old child’s body washes up on a beach in Greece, or Hungary builds a fence to keep refugees out…  in Syria today, as in America in the 1930’s, there are millions of innocent human beings who need help. As human beings with the ability to help, we must.

Harnish’s organization has compiled a list of charitable organizations working to ameliorate the plight of Syrian refugees, and has investigated to determine which ones are the most cost-effective stewards of donations.

If you are interested in helping, you can contact Harnish at [email protected], or call him at (219) 879-3265.

There’s a yiddish word that describes people like Harnish: mensch. It means “a real human being.” Too bad one of those doesn’t occupy the Governor’s office.

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Canaries in the Coal Mine

Historically—or so we are told—miners tested the breathability of the air in mines by releasing a canary into the space. If the canary continued to fly and look healthy, the air was safe; if the bird died, it wasn’t.

Recently, Pew Research published findings about the millennials who are, for all intents and purposes, our American canaries. As we older citizens die out, the values, fears and ambitions of the millennial generation will determine the direction of the country.

Pew announced six “key takeaways” about this generation. Some were unsurprising: this is a financially burdened generation, largely as a result of student loan debt; as a result, fewer millennials are married than previous cohorts at the same age. They are also the most racially diverse generation thus far.

Two of the characteristics found by Pew deserve special “canary” status.

First,

Millennials have fewer attachments to traditional political and religious institutions, but they connect to personalized networks of friends, colleagues and affinity groups through social and digital media. Half of Millennials now describe themselves as political independents and 29% are not affiliated with any religion—numbers that are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the last quarter-century.

My discussions with students in this age cohort anecdotally support this conclusion—and suggest that the public behaviors and pronouncements of political and religious figures is one significant reason they reject those institutions. My students are repulsed by the use of religious or patriotic language in service of discrimination and generally hateful behaviors; rather than rejecting the specific individuals or organizations guilty of such behaviors, they tend to develop a “pox on all of you” attitude.

But a less obvious finding also casts considerable light on the institutionally detached status of this generation:

Millennials are less trusting of others than older Americans are. Asked a long-standing social science survey question, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people,” just 19% of Millennials say most people can be trusted, compared with 31% of Gen Xers, 37% of Silents and 40% of Boomers.

This really troubling absence of trust manifests itself in a number of ways: millennials don’t expect Social Security to be there for them, for example (although, interestingly, they oppose proposals to cut benefits for current recipients). Their lack of trust in a wide variety of social institutions helps explain their rejection of political and religious identification, their pervasive skepticism about media information sources, and their increased reliance on friends and colleagues.

Assuming these findings continue to hold, what does this “canary” generation tell us about America’s future?

One the one hand, greater diversity and tolerance—together with rejection of dogma and partisanship—bodes well. This generation is likely to reject racism and address the glaring flaws in the criminal justice system, likely to welcome immigrants, likely to scorn anti-LGBT bias.

On the other hand, participation in a democratic polity requires at least a minimal level of trust—trust that the information one receives is credible, trust that the operations of government are mostly fair and ethical, trust that one’s fellow citizens are basically well-intentioned. Without that trust, without social capital, societies cannot function.

The canary isn’t dead. But it’s coughing a lot.

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Yeats Was So Right….

One of my favorite quotes is from a poem by William Butler Yeats, who wrote that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Science has confirmed the observation, at least with respect to the “worst,” and to the extent that “best” and “worst” refer to intellectual acuity.

In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the department of psychology at Cornell University conducted a fascinating study after reading about a man named McArthur Wheeler. Wheeler  robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, because lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras.

Earlier studies had suggested that what might delicately be termed “ignorance of performance standards” accounts for a substantial amount of incorrect self-assessment of competence. In other words–as the Facebook meme has it–stupid people are too stupid to recognize their stupidity.

Dunning and Kruger found that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

  • fail to recognize their own lack of skill
  • fail to recognize the extent of their inadequacy
  • fail to recognize genuine skill in others
  • will only recognize and acknowledge their own lack of skill after they are exposed to training for that skill

According to Dunning, “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.… [T]he skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”

According to Wikipedia (yes, I know–I don’t let my students cite to Wikipedia, but it’s convenient and generally, albeit not always, accurate):

Dunning and Kruger set out to test these hypotheses on Cornell undergraduates in psychology courses. In a series of studies, they examined subject self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. After being shown their test scores, the subjects were asked to estimate their own rank. The competent group estimated their rank accurately, while the incompetent group overestimated theirs.

Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.

(This definitely explains most of  the students who come in to complain about their grades….but I digress.)

How did Yeats put it? Those who know the least are those with the most “passionate intensity.”

The evidence is everywhere. Just look at Congress, or the Indiana General Assembly.

Or the “Y’all Qaeda” standoff in Oregon…

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