Category Archives: Random Blogging

JK Rowling is AWESOME

In the wake of the horrific events in Paris, Rupert Murdock tweeted that all Muslims should be held responsible. JK Rowling’s response was wonderful:

“I was born Christian. If that makes Rupert Murdoch my responsibility, I’ll auto-excommunicate.”

If 10 Americans traveled abroad to commit mayhem and murder, would Murdock and his ilk blame all Americans? Should we blame all White Christians for the KKK?

Raw Story has an interesting article listing the worst terrorist attacks in the U.S.–virtually all of which were perpetrated by home-grown, Christian Americans. Think Timothy McVeigh, the murder of Dr. George Tiller,  the bombing of a Colorado NAACP office just this month, and the three militia members from Georgia arrested last February for planning attacks on government agencies and the metro Atlanta police, and many more.

When white males of the far right carry out violent attacks, neocons and Republicans typically describe them as lone-wolf extremists rather than people who are part of terrorist networks or well-organized terrorist movements. Yet many of the terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who had long histories of networking with other terrorists. In fact, most of the terrorist activity occurring in the United States in recent years has not come from Muslims, but from a combination of radical Christianists, white supremacists and far-right militia groups.

Evidently, when members of “our” tribe misbehave, it doesn’t reflect on “us.”

But those Muslims….

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Maybe an Invasion from Outer Space?

The Washington Post recently ran a column listing the top ten reasons American politics are so broken. None of the listed reasons will surprise anyone who’s been following our increasingly uncivil, toxic political environment, and the whole column is worth a read.

That said, this struck me.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States lost a common enemy that had once unified the country.

There’s a Bedouin proverb: Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the stranger. From 1939 through 1989, the United States had a rogue’s gallery of heavily armed strangers to unite with in defense of democracy and the homeland. The Cold War began as a bipartisan affair with strong support from both parties. By the 1980s, the parties had clearly split into the hawk party and the dove party, and that split has only deepened. As the parties have purified and moved apart, foreign policy and the proper response to foreign threats has become more divisive.

I’ve often wondered whether the human animal is hard-wired to need an enemy– whether we evolved to inhabit an “us versus them” universe. It seems increasingly likely.

Sociologists argue that “membership” is a meaningless term unless there are also non-members–people we can point to who don’t belong. Many years ago, in a book focused upon the growing assimilation of Jews in the United States, the author–who was very concerned that Jews might die out altogether–posited that anti-Semitism might be necessary to Jewish identity. In other words, without an enemy, there was really no reason to remain in the “tribe.”

That appeal to tribal loyalties, that lack of a more capacious and inclusive definition of “we,” that view of a world divided into “teams” that allows us to experience the world as “us versus them” is what drives everything from religious extremism to Fox News.

All of which does raise an uncomfortable question:  Do Americans–or earthlings–require an existential threat to our existence in order to see each other as fellow Americans, or fellow humans?

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The Important “How” Question

When the shoe fits….

A recent post to Washington Monthly took Democrats and liberals to task:

For the most part, today’s left-leaning progressives are almost entirely focused on politics, economic justice, social issues, and the influence of money in politics. These are important subjects. But the vast complex of government is largely a black box to these folks. Other than defending the idea of government against anti-government conservatives, getting rid of the filibuster, reforming the primary system, and occasionally calling for more “accountability” and “transparency,” they would be hard pressed to articulate any coherent vision of how to reform the government we have, or any real understanding of how the damn thing works.

In all fairness, this is a thoroughly bipartisan flaw.

Whenever I hear people complaining that the President–any President–promised to do such-and-such and hasn’t done it, I want to ask the complainer if s/he has ever heard about those pesky three branches of government…

It also underscores a lesson I am constantly trying to hammer home in my policy classes: although the “what” is clearly important, the “how” is equally so. In fact, it is often only when we try to figure out how to do something–how to craft a system or device that will get us from here to there–that we have to confront the very real possibility that the “what” we so ardently desire isn’t achievable.

Our ubiquitous smart phones didn’t come about because someone said, gee, wouldn’t it be great if we could access the internet from our phones? Achieving the goal required understanding how to make the damn thing work.

Genuine political reform requires intimate knowledge of those boring nuts and bolts, an understanding of how government works (and–increasingly–why it doesn’t).

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This Isn’t Democracy…

Vox and several other sources recently reported on the composition of the incoming Congress, noting that “winning” can no longer be defined as “getting the most votes.”

On Tuesday, 33 US senators elected in November will be sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden — including 12 who are new to the chamber. The class includes 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, a big reason why the GOP has a 54-46 majority in the Senate overall.

But here’s a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, “the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes.”

The writer used these numbers to make the point that the Senate–a body to which all states, large or small, send two senators–is undemocratic.

I want to make a different point, and one that I find much more troubling. The Senate, after all, was intended to be less representative than the House. We may disagree with those initial choices, but in the case of the Senate, the system is working as designed.

When it comes to Congress and the nation’s statehouses, however, “one person, one vote” is no longer an accurate description of American elections. We have disenfranchised urban voters, and given control of the country’s policymaking to rural America.

In the 2012 Congressional elections, Democratic candidates for the House received over a million more votes than Republicans, yet the GOP easily retained control. In state after state, rural voters have a disproportionate voice–drowning out the political preferences of  urban inhabitants–partially as a result of gerrymandering and partially as a result of residential “sorting.”

The first Constitution counted African-Americans as 2/3 of a citizen [update: my bad. Slaves were 3/5ths, not 2/3ds]. Today, we count people in cities (where, I’m sure coincidentally, most minorities still live) as 2/3ds of a voter.

I don’t know what you call that, but it isn’t democracy.

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Two Paths Diverged in a Wood….

When news outlets reported that former New York Governor Mario Cuomo had died, I couldn’t help thinking of Robert Frost’s famous poem, the one that ends:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

It isn’t entirely apt, because Mario Cuomo actually represented the path “less traveled,” but the enduring message of Frost’s poem–at least to me–is that we choose the paths we will travel, and those choices do, indeed, “make all the difference.”

Mario Cuomo is probably best remembered for his speech to the 1984 Democratic convention, in which he criticized Ronald Reagan’s sunny description of America as “a shining city on a hill”–describing it as the worldview of a man unaware of poverty and unconcerned about impoverished Americans. “Mr. President,” he said, “you ought to know that this nation is more a ‘tale of two cities’ than it is just a ‘shining city on a hill.’ ”

Cuomo himself came from a poor, immigrant family, and he never forgot the struggles of his family and the families in the neighborhoods he grew up in.

Cuomo’s antipathy to the death penalty was undoubtedly rooted in his Catholic faith, but it was a position that he defended with secular logic. He was deeply religious, but (unlike so many of today’s ostentatiously pious politicians) he understood the difference between religion and government, and why keeping that bright line between them was necessary both to authentic faith and effective governance. His principled belief in church-state separation led him to defy the Catholic hierarchy and publicly defend elected Catholic officials who opposed both abortion and use of the power of the state to impose that opposition on others.

Brilliant and uncommonly thoughtful, Cuomo was an articulate voice for the “little guy” and a powerful advocate for the importance of government.

In his first inaugural address as governor he called on state government to “be a positive source for good.” But–as the New York Times noted in a column after his death– the speech “also offered a critique of Reagan policies and a liberal vision for the country. Fiscal prudence, Mr. Cuomo asserted, did not prevent government from providing “shelter for the homeless, work for the idle, care for the elderly and infirm, and hope for the destitute.”

At the time, Americans (including yours truly) rejected both Cuomo’s view of the civic landscape, and his belief in the possibilities of government.

In the 1980s, two political paths diverged in America. We chose the one that was easier, the one that asked less of us–the path that allowed us to believe in our own superiority, blame poor folks for their poverty, and pursue policies that benefited the already comfortable.

And that has made all the difference.

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