I know, I know….this blog has become a venue for breast-beating and hand-wringing and other elements of my increasingly curmudgeonly analysis of our collective civic IQ. (Ironically, if the people who comment here are representative of those who read my rants, they don’t need the lectures. I guess it’s the ultimate “preaching to the choir.”)
Still.
A reader sent me a link to an NPR story that makes a really important point about the content of civic knowledge.
According to the National Council for Social Studies, the goal of social studies is to promote civic competence, or the knowledge and intellectual skills to be active participants in public life. Yet, engaging with the most complex public issues of our time—biodiversity, climate change, water scarcity, obesity, energy, and HIV/AIDS—also requires a deep understanding of the scientific process.
I’d settle for a cursory understanding of what science is. And isn’t.
Turn on your television, or even worse, read the letters to the editor in your local paper, and you will encounter–ad nauseum–mindless repetition of the “evolution is just a theory” meme, displaying total ignorance of how the use of the term by scientists differs from its use in everyday language. Ask students what falsification means, and you will get blank stares.
Ignorance of the most basic definition/methodology of science may not have been problematic back when most Americans were still on the farm, and the policy issues we faced did not require a working understanding of things like net neutrality, climate change, the human genome, etc. It is more than problematic now.
And scientifically illiterate voters have just empowered a bunch of aggressively scientific illiterate politicians to decide those policies and make those decisions.
Increasingly, the most trenchant commentary on what passes for a political landscape these days comes from avowed comedians–especially satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. (Satire is really hard these days, what with walking self-satirists like Sarah Palin, Louie Gohmert, et. al. I find myself looking at headlines and saying “Surely that’s from the Onion…)
When Bill Clinton ran for President, James Carville famously posted a large sign in the campaign’s “war room.” The sign read: “It’s the economy, stupid!” Carville wanted to remind his candidate and those working for him to keep their focus where he felt it belonged– on the economy.
Fast forward to the escalating debates over American inequality, the diminishing numbers of people who can be categorized as middle class, and the widening gap between wealthy Americans and everyone else. As Ryan Cooper noted in a recent article in The Week, progressives arguing for measures to reduce that gap have forgotten Carville’s lesson, and in the process have neglected the most potent argument for those measures.
That argument is the economy.
As Cooper notes,
“A growing body of evidence suggests that inequality isn’t just an issue of fairness, but is actually hampering general prosperity. And that, in turn, ought to have enormous knock-on political effects.
Modern economic systems depend upon consumption. Many of us are less than enthusiastic about that undeniable fact, and there is certainly much to criticize in consumer culture. But in the system we inhabit, consumer demand is a critical element of economic health. When millions of people are making poverty wages, demand suffers.
When the great majority of people have very little disposable income, there is no mass market. No matter how entrepreneurial a given individual may be, s/he is unlikely to start a business—or get financing to start a business—if the success of that business will be dependent upon mass sales.
It’s not just new business starts, either; when consumers aren’t spending, existing businesses aren’t likely to invest and grow, and they are equally unlikely to be “job creators” hiring more workers.
When debates about growing inequality are framed as issues of fairness (compelling as some of us may find such arguments), we fail to deploy the most effective weapon at our disposal—the fact that the current policies intended to privilege supposed “makers” aren’t just harming those who are scorned as “takers.” They are actually harming us all, “makers” included, by depressing demand and retarding economic growth.
When I was in law school, by far the most valuable lesson I learned was “he who frames the issue wins the debate.”
Take the current debate over raising the minimum wage.
When we argue for raising the minimum wage only on fairness grounds, the typical response is that higher wages will depress job creation. Even though available evidence convincingly rebuts this, it is a widely accepted meme because it seems so self-evident; indeed, it would be true if all else were equal. (In real economic life, it turns out that all else isn’t equal–who knew?) If, however, we frame the argument for a higher minimum wage as an argument for a more robust economy benefitting everyone—an argument that has the added merit of being demonstrably true—we win.
As James Carville reminded us: It’s the economy, stupid!
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.
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.
