Category Archives: Random Blogging

A Tale of Two Countries

So….some reflections from this Tuesday’s elections.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Republicans took the Senate. Most seats up for election were in the reddest of red states, and the Democratic challengers didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory. (Mitch McConnell may be corrupt and despicable, but a candidate who refuses to admit she voted for her party’s nominee for President just turns everyone off. We have to remember that voters don’t get to choose between Candidate X and God. In races like this one, they have to pick between the devil they know and the one to whom they are just being introduced.)

In two years, the election landscape will be considerably different–and as one pundit sourly noted, there won’t be a black guy in the White House to motivate the racist voters.

Turnout was once again embarrassing. Preliminary reports suggested that nationally, approximately 24% of eligible voters went to the polls, giving the winners an average “mandate” from perhaps 13% of the electorate. Most of the low turnout was due to voter apathy, but a not-insignificant part was deliberate: between the millions of dollars spent on negative ads that can be relied upon to depress turnout, to “voter ID” laws intended to suppress the votes of the poor and minority Americans, the message was pretty clear: stay home.

Perhaps the biggest take-away, however, is the troubling picture of American “sorting” that continues to emerge. I’ve written before about Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort, and the academic research supporting his thesis that Americans are increasingly “voting with our feet”–moving to places we find philosophically and politically compatible. This has been going on for more than a few years, and the electoral result is what has been called an “Urban Archipelago”--bright blue dots in seas of red. We have gerrymandered ourselves into cities that are overwhelmingly Democratic  and rural areas that are reliably Republican. We really are “two Americas”–an urban America that is noisy and diverse and young, and a (rapidly dwindling) rural America that is much older, much whiter and frequently much angrier.

Are there exceptions to that picture? Of course. But the overall accuracy of those descriptions is  demonstrable.

There are real equal representation issues raised both by partisan gerrymandering and population sorting: in the last general election, for example, Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives received more than a million more votes than Republicans–but because of the way the districts were drawn and populated, the GOP kept control of the House. It’s hard to see how this changes under our current redistricting rules.

The larger issue, of course, is turnout.

When I was a young, active Republican preparing to run for Congress, I remember the County Chairman telling me how grateful he was that “Democrats don’t vote.” Even then, with the vaunted Republican machine firmly in control of Marion County, registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans three to two. But Republicans got out their vote; Democrats didn’t.

Now, no one really gets out their vote. And that is a real problem–not just for partisans, but for America–because only the most polarized and ideological “wing nuts” can be counted upon to vote in either party. The result is that both are in thrall to the party “base.” That’s not so bad for the Democrats, although it does hurt at the margins, because the progressive base is anything but monolithic. But it is killing any effort to bring the Republicans back to a sensible middle-right, because the GOP base/TeaParty activists have all the characteristics of a cult. (Joni Ernst? Mike Delph? Ted Cruz?? I rest my case.)

I doubt whether yesterday’s election results were a “last hurrah” for the reactionary right incarnation that is now the GOP, but that last hurrah is close. If demographics are destiny, the Grand Old Party (which is currently the Old Party of Grandparents) cannot survive much longer. Rural areas are hollowing out as younger people opt for city life; survey research shows younger people, Latinos and other minorities rejecting the party by large margins, and the degree of overt racism shown by Republican office-holders to our first African-American President pretty much undercuts any effort to make inroads in the black vote.

The tragedy here is that America desperately needs two responsible, adult political parties.  Without an intellectually respectable GOP, there is no pressure on Democrats to bring their A game. We lose all around.

As we did Tuesday.

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False Equivalence

Let’s postpone discussion of yesterday’s election for now. We’ll have two years to see just how bad things in Washington can get.

One of the regular readers of this blog has taken me to task more than once for “false equivalence”–for suggesting that the sins of the Left and the sins of the Right are somehow equally troubling.

I would respectfully respond that I’ve done no such thing. (Just ask my right-wing critics, who regularly complain that I’ve become a pinko-socialist-commie.)

Let’s leave aside the fact that the labels have become meaningless. The U.S. hasn’t ever had a significant Left, and the Right is no longer conservative. To the extent that the GOP/Tea Party folks can be said to have a philosophy these days, it is radically reactionary. As for me, I have pretty much the same political philosophy that got me labeled “too conservative” back in 1980.

But let’s address the complaint, which seems to be that pointing to stupidities emanating from liberals amounts to promoting “false equivalencies.” I would make the opposite argument:  criticizing people who are generally on one’s “side” of the political wars is one of the things that distinguishes progressives from their knee-jerk counterparts on the right. Reasonable people refuse to defend the indefensible, and most progressives are reasonable people.

I do agree with my commenter that efforts to actively seek out “equivalencies” are misguided. We see that sort of phony “balance” a lot in discussions of Fox and MSNBC, for example. MSNBC has a point of view, to be sure, but unlike Fox, its on-air personnel don’t manufacture “facts” out of whole cloth, or routinely indulge in the idiocies that make informed people cringe–not to mention giving Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert so much raw material.

Straining to be even-handed when the errors are anything but equivalent is not only unfair, it’s misleading. That said, refusing to acknowledge that someone on your own “team” got it wrong makes us no better than the closed-minded defenders of the Right.

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Good for Pope Francis

Sometimes, it’s not what you say, it’s the way you say it.

Recently, there was a small furor about Pope Francis’ restatement of the Catholic position on evolution:

The “Big Bang” and evolution are not only consistent with biblical teachings, Pope Francis told a Vatican gathering – they are essential to understanding God.

“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything — but that is not so,” the pope told a plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

The Pope’s pronouncement was not a departure; as I understand it, this has been Catholic doctrine for at least 50 years, but the Pope chose an arresting– and indeed, very significant– metaphor to make his point.

I’m not Catholic. For that matter, I’m not religious. But (unlike Catholic conservatives, who are evidently not happy campers) I really like this Pope. He seems to focus on what religion should be about: how people treat each other. His approach to doctrinal issues seems to be a process of engaging with ultimate meaning, and it’s far less rigid and legalistic than his predecessor’s. He’s been a breath of fresh air.

I have many friends who are deeply religious. Some are in the clergy. All of them respect science and accept evolution. All of them approach biblical passages and issues of ultimate concern alike with admirable modesty, looking for life lessons and trying to fathom the essence of moral behavior. None of them worship a cartoonish deity who issues unbending edicts, favors some nation-states (or sexual orientations, or football teams) over others, or otherwise behaves more like Superman (or a magician) than an all-knowing God.

Creating one’s God in one’s own image is really the ultimate blasphemy.

This Pope seems to get that.

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“Squirrel!!”

I think it was the animated movie “Up” that first introduced the “squirrel!” distraction. In the middle of conversations between the talking dog and the old man, someone says “squirrel!” and the dog’s head swivels and he loses his train of concentration.

The lesson, evidently, is that you can teach a dog to talk but his fascination with squirrels can always de-rail the conversation.

We Americans are a lot like that dog, which is to say, easily distracted.

Were we talking about health care policy? Ebola!! We’re all going to die!! (Okay, so Ebola isn’t easy to catch, and–as my favorite internet snark put it–more Americans have been married to Kim Kardasian that have contracted Ebola, but scaring the shit out of people is so much more fun than policy. Squirrel!!)

Were we talking about the role processed foods, sugar and factory farms play in America’s obesity epidemic? OMG, GMOs!! (Okay, so we’ve altered the genes of plants–created hybrids– for over a thousand years. But if we terrify people about Frankenfoods, maybe they won’t focus on truly dangerous practices like using hormones and antibiotics to bulk up the animals we eat, or overuse of pesticides and herbicides. Squirrel!!)

Were we talking about the environment, and policies to encourage clean energy production and reduce carbon emissions? Solyndra!! (Okay, so one green energy company got government subsidies and went bankrupt. But we don’t want to bore people by going on and on about the massive subsidies taxpayers provide to highly profitable fossil-fuel companies like Exxon and Koch Industries, or about what we need to do to shift the country to greener policies. Squirrel!!)

Were we talking about dysfunction in Congress? Obama’s a Muslim!

Were we talking about 30,000+ gun deaths in the U.S. each year? Ebola!!

Whoops–I guess that’s where I came in…

Squirrel!!

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Wisdom from FDR: The Sunday Sermon

The other day, I came across a quotation from a State of the Union given by FDR, expressing a basic truth that is too often obscured in today’s highly moralistic political discourse.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

A very similar thesis was at the heart of Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen’s important book, Development as Freedom. Development, for Sen,” is the process of expanding human freedom.”  Sen argued that true freedom — ”substantive freedom” is his term — requires ”economic facilities,” ”social opportunities” and ”protective security,” thus government should not only provide social security, but should be prepared to be the employer of last resort.

Roosevelt’s point was practical: desperate people are ripe pickings for demagogues; they are the raw material of revolutions and social unrest. Sen’s argument was more basic; it was a consideration of the nature of freedom. His conclusion: a person whose every waking moment is spent ensuring simple survival is not free in any human sense of that word. She is certainly not free to develop her talents or pursue her dreams.

For both reasons then, prudential and humanitarian, it behooves a good society to provide its citizens with at least a minimal level of sustenance.

Aristotle defined a good society as one that promotes human flourishing, and no one can flourish if every waking moment is devoted to subsistence. The trick is finding the sweet spot between empowering people and creating dependency. In the U.S., we have historically frowned on assisting the poor, concerned that a too-generous social safety net would create a dependent underclass. (Our disinclination to help impoverished folks also reflects the Calvinist assumption that poverty is evidence of divine disapproval–that being poor somehow reflects moral deficiency.)

Ironically, despite America’s public celebration of self-sufficiency, capitalism and markets, our government blithely subsidizes all manner of private-sector business enterprises, privileging the well-connected and tilting the playing field with abandon–and creating considerable dependency in the process.

I’ve never understood why welfare for the rich is less morally suspect than welfare for the poor.

In that same State of the Union message, FDR outlined what he called a second Bill of Rights, one that would include the right to “a useful and remunerative job;”  the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; and the right to a good education.

We’re no closer to realizing those goals than we were when FDR delivered his speech; if anything, we’re farther from them, thanks in no small measure to a small group of smug, self-righteous and highly subsidized “captains of industry” who have purchased our political system–and who can count on the millions of us who won’t vote on Tuesday.

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