Category Archives: Random Blogging

An Attack on Cities

It is not news that demographic data poses long-term problems for the GOP–at least unless the party returns to its more responsible roots. For a decade or more, pundits have pointed to the disaffection of Latinos and other immigrant populations, the continuing Democratic self-identification of African-Americans, and the reduced religiosity and increasing social liberalism of younger Americans–characteristics that correlate with voting Democratic.

What has been less remarked-upon is the widening urban/rural political divide. In our familiar red/blue political map, cities are dots of blue in even the reddest states. And in America, as elsewhere, people are increasingly moving to the cities.

The political dilemma this poses for Republicans is obvious. Thus far, the party has responded with efforts to make it more difficult for poor people and minorities to cast their ballots, and (in states they control) with aggressive gerrymandering  aimed at diluting urban political power. (And yes, Democrats, in states they control, gerrymander too.)

Now, Ed Blum–who brought Shelby County v. Holder, the case that resulted in the gutting of the Voting Rights Act– is asking the Court to redefine “one person, one vote.”

Is Congress’s job to represent people, or just voters? Currently, all states are required to redraw their political boundaries based on the Census’s official count of total population every 10 years, which includes minors and noncitizen immigrants. But the Texas plaintiffs argue that states should be allowed to apportion seats based on where only U.S. citizens over 18 years of age live…..

A move toward counting only eligible voters, as logistically difficult as it may be, would drastically shift political power away from the urban environs with minorities and noncitizens, and toward whiter areas with larger native-born populations. That’s bad news for Democrats: Of the 50 congressional districts with the lowest shares of eligible voters, 41 are occupied by Democrats (nearly all are Latino-majority seats). Meanwhile, of the 50 districts with the highest shares of eligible voters, 38 are represented by the GOP.

Those “logistic difficulties” would be substantial, with opportunities for all sorts of mischief; the blog FiveThirtyEight notes that calculating the number of eligible voters would “require statistics that no one has.” (In a rational world,  Evenwel v. Abbott would never have made it to the Supreme Court for that reason alone.)

What this lawsuit really  highlights is that the partisan division between today’s Republicans and Democrats is also geographic, with Republicans primarily rural and Democrats, urban. (Of course there are Republicans in cities and Democrats on farms, but they are the outliers.) The problem for the GOP is that the U.S. population is increasingly urban–city dwellers vastly outnumber rural folks, and movement into metropolitan areas continues to accelerate. The problem for Democrats (and city dwellers) is that state governments are still largely controlled by rural interests, thanks to legal structures originally created for an agrarian nation.

There are plenty of flaws in the arguments advanced in Evenwel–practical, democratic and legal–and election law experts are quite properly focusing on those flaws. But at its root–and at the root of the increasingly hysterical attacks on “elitists” and “intellectuals” and “progressives”–is rejection of the values and diversity and complexity that characterize modern urban life.

That hysteria may attract insecure folks for a while, but over the long haul, resentment isn’t a viable political strategy.

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The Retreat of the Puritans

Last week, Irish voters overwhelmingly voted to recognize same-sex marriage. Leave aside, for now, the question whether fundamental rights should ever be subject to popular vote, and consider that Ireland has long been considered a very religious country.

Whatever it may mean to be “very religious” today, for growing numbers of people, it’s clear it doesn’t mean obediently following the doctrinal pronouncements of the relevant clerics. Increasingly, the ways in which people connect with their religious traditions have changed.

Earlier this week, my friend Art Farnsley had an excellent op-ed in the Washington Post, addressing this decline of religious authority. It is well worth reading in its entirety. Art notes the recent, widely-discussed Pew poll showing a decline in the number of Americans identifying as Christian, and suggests that numbers don’t adequately tell the story:

.. behind the story of Christian decline and the rise of “nones” is a long-standing debate about what religion theorists call “secularization,” the broad process by which religion gradually loses its social influence….

By the last two decades of the 20th century, secularization theories were in retreat for a number of good reasons. Most people did not stop being religious in the sense that they still had beliefs, intuitions, feelings and practices they defined as sacred. Modernity had not pushed spirituality out of their lives in America, and maybe not even in Britain or the Netherlands.

As Art notes, whether secularization has grown depends upon how you define the term.

Sociologist Mark Chaves redefined secularization as declining religious authority back in 1994. He suggested we stop worrying about whether individuals thought of themselves as religious and focus instead on religion’s social influence.

The evidence for this kind of secularization, the decline of religious authority, is everywhere. It is quaint to think of a time stores did not open and liquor was not sold on the Sabbath. But that is a small, symbolic change compared with the massive growth in individual choice at the expense of tradition, especially religious tradition.

Understood in this way, secularization is an inevitable consequence of modernity. We no longer see diseases like smallpox as indicators of God’s judgment; we call a doctor. We no longer ask the minister or rabbi to mediate our disputes; we call a lawyer.  For most inhabitants of modern, Western countries, religion is an incubator of values, not the source of binding law. So we have cultural Catholics, social Protestants, ethnic Jews…individuals still attached to their respective traditions who nevertheless feel free to pick and choose aspects of the relevant doctrines.

Change in the role of any social institution is never linear, of course, so we still have a number of the folks I called Puritans in God and Country-– the “old time religion” fundamentalists who continue to wage war against religious diversity, women’s rights, same-sex marriage and any effort to grant LGBT citizens equal civil rights.

As Art concluded, they aren’t likely to win that war.

“In the struggle for authority with modern individualism, American religion is slowly losing.” That would be my headline for the recent Pew report. “Christians are declining in America” is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Saving Remnant? Or Leading Edge?

I was recently in a meeting where courteous, educated and concerned citizens shared different perspectives on promoting the common good. I couldn’t help wondering whether  gatherings of this sort might be evidence of incremental positive change, or whether, instead, part of what biblical folks might call “the saving remnant”–the relatively small segment of society that keeps the lamp of reason burning through dark ages.

One of my sons recently characterized my reactions to contemporary politics as “bipolar” noting that I alternate between despair over destructive stupidity to hopefulness sparked by emerging signs of rebellion against our “Gilded Age” status quo.

I’ve shared a good deal of the despair on this blog: the evidence of persistent, widespread racism; the efforts to roll back women’s rights; the descent of a once-responsible political party into fantasy, bigotry and anti-intellectualism; the systemic, legal and structural barriers to change; the growing gap between the rich and everyone else; the outsized influence of money in politics….and the list goes on.

When I focus on these aspects of our poltical/social landscape, it’s hard to be cheery and upbeat about the future.

But there are also emerging signs of change–signs that a challenge to the status quo may be in the offing. And there’s the fact that American history is filled with examples of such change.

Survey research provides evidence that younger Americans are less bigoted, more inclusive and far less in thrall to religious fundamentalism than their elders. The  movement to raise the minimum wage is gaining traction. The dramatic change in public opinion on same-sex marriage should be a wake-up call to the proponents of all sorts of “traditional” stereotypes, not just of LGBT folks, but of women and African-Americans.

Rush Limbaugh continues to lose market share. Despite the anti-science posture of so many lawmakers, recent surveys show that 80% of Americans accept the reality of climate change and want government to do something about it.

And all around the country, people are taking to the streets to demand change. It isn’t just Ferguson and Baltimore protesting police excesses; it’s fast-food and hotel workers and Walmart employees demanding fair treatment and pay, and Moral Monday activists reproaching state-level lawmakers’ disregard for the common good (shades of the Social Gospel!). In Washington, it’s bipartisan recognition of the need to reform America’s criminal justice system. Here in Indiana, it was the overwhelming pushback to passage of RFRA (followed by the “Pence Must Go” signs still popping up all over the state).

While social media and the Internet can be used to create a bubble that reinforces our pre-existing world-views, they can also inform us of injustices we wouldn’t otherwise  know about. They can connect us with others committed to change. The ubiquity of cellphone cameras allows documentation of events that were previously “he said/she said.” The same technologies that disorient and threaten my generation are allowing those who’ve grown up with them to create new kinds of communities.

The structural barriers to change are formidable, but entrenched privilege has been toppled before. I’d say it’s 50/50….and my mood at any given time depends upon which 50% I’m looking at.

Saving remnant? or Signs of emerging social change?

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Propaganda’s Willing Audience

Talking Points Memo recently shared the findings of a paper by Bruce Bartlett, former economic advisor to Ronald Reagan, documenting the so-called “Fox Effect.” Bartlett’s conclusions are similar to those of others who’ve studied the political impact of what is widely recognized as the propaganda arm of the GOP.

A 2007 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that the arrival of Fox had a “significant effect” on the presidential elections from 1996 to 2000: Republican candidates gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in towns that broadcast the channel. (The research also credited Fox with GOP gains in the Senate.)

Meanwhile, a 2014 study by The National Bureau of Economic Research found that the likelihood of voting Republican increased by 0.9 points among viewers who watched “four additional minutes per week.”

Bartlett also found research that shows the Fox Effect caused congressmen in both parties to “increase their support for Republican policies.”

Last year, researchers out of Princeton and Vanderbilt found that during the Clinton years, members of Congress became “less supportive of President Clinton in districts where Fox News begins broadcasting than similar representatives in similar districts where Fox News was not broadcast.”

No serious observer doubts that Fox is a wildly inaccurate propaganda mill. (Several studies have found that people who watch Fox regularly know less than those who don’t watch any news at all.) The more important question, of course, concerns what researchers call “self-selection,” and what more down-to-earth folks call the “chicken and egg” conundrum. Why do certain people choose to watch Fox? Why does its propaganda work? More to the point, upon whom does any particular propaganda work? What makes person A receptive to misinformation that is crude and obvious to person B? 

At least one writer suggests that “white fragility” is the fertile ground being tilled by Fox and conservative talk radio.

White fragility is a termed coined by Robin DiAngelo, an associate professor of education at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. In her 2011 academic pedagogical analysis titled “White Fragility,” DiAngelo goes into a detailed explanation of how white people in North America live in insulated social and media spaces that protect them from any race-based stress. This privileged fragility leaves them unable to tolerate any schism or challenge to a universally accepted belief system. Any shift away from that (like a biracial African-American president) triggers a deep and sustaining panic. Racial segregation, disproportionate representation in the media, and many other factors serve as the columns that support white fragility.

At the end of the day, there are two very different reasons people follow the news: to understand what is happening in the world (even if those events or outcomes aren’t consistent with their worldviews, and may require adjusting those worldviews), or to confirm pre-existing fears and beliefs.

Propaganda outlets let partisans select reinforcement over reality.

As Bartlett points out, however, when reality bites and self-delusion is no longer possible (when, for example, the polls predicting Mitt Romney’s defeat turned out not to be “skewed”), the shock and disbelief can be overwhelming.

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The Death of Satire?

A regular reader of this blog made an astute observation a few months ago; in response to a discussion of seemingly ridiculous behavior by some political figure or other, he noted that “Their reality has lapped our satire.”

No kidding.

I was scrolling through my Facebook page, and came across a quote attributed to Congressman Trent Franks, questioning the Pope’s grasp of the bible, and insisting that a proper reading of that text did not require helping the poor. In a sane age, I would have immediately concluded that the quote was fake, but then I remembered an incident I personally witnessed a few years ago, at a debate about same-sex marriage sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council.

Two of us on the panel spoke in opposition to the (then pending) constitutional ban. Curt Smith from the Indiana Family Institute and someone whose name I don’t recall spoke in support. During the question and answer period, Rabbi Dennis Sasso quoted a passage from the bible as a reason to oppose the ban; Smith responded by telling the Rabbi that he’d misinterpreted the bible, and offering to send him some materials that “explain that passage properly.”

In my ethnic group, that’s called “chutzpah.” I’ve never forgotten it. So I suspended disbelief and googled the Trent Franks quote, which did turn out to be inaccurate. (Franks had suggested that the Pope should stay out of “politics.”)

The moral of this story is that it is getting increasingly difficult to tell whether a story is satirical or true. When state legislatures pass laws “protecting” pastors from performing same-sex marriages, or laws forbidding food stamp recipients from buying seafood; when Sarah Palin says things like “Paul Revere warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our guns,” when pretty much everything that comes out of the mouths of people like Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Louis Gohmert, Ben Carson and so many others sounds like a headline from the Onion, is it any wonder that we approach reports about even the most outrageous statements with a suspension of disbelief?

Actually, disbelief over accurate quotations threatens to become my permanent attitude….

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