Random Blogging – Page 32

The Idiocy Of The Isms…

Okay–I guess the time for mulling over relatively abstract issues of political philosophy has passed.

I really haven’t wanted to comment on the eruptions of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, or the wars currently raging in Ukraine or Gaza, because, after all, what can I add? That Russia’s incursion is inconsistent with global order and international law? That failure to help Ukraine would undermine democracy and stability around the world? That there are no unblemished “good guys” in the history of the Middle East? That there are deep divisions of opinion and politics within both the Israeli and Palestinian populations? That none of that is an excuse for the slaughter of innocent people attending a music festival?

That rain is wet…?

What I suppose I will never understand is the widespread tendency to believe that people who share a race or religion or ethnicity are all alike. (I think that’s the definition of bigotry.)

Like most members of the Indianapolis Jewish community, I get emails from our local Jewish organizations. I recently received one that began as follows:

Ruba Awni Almaghtheh drove her vehicle into a building in a residential neighborhood at 3500 N Keystone Av, Indianapolis. This building is identified as belonging to and representing a sect of the Black Hebrew Israelites (designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center), with a semblance of a star of David on the front door. Based on this signage and “Hebrew Israelite” wording, it is believed Almaghtheh thought the building to represent Israel in some way, specifically citing the Hebrew Israelite symbol on the door. The woman was immediately taken into custody. Coordination with local and federal law enforcement continues.

I can’t help thinking that this incident displays –indeed, highlights–everything that’s wrong with bigots. Stupidity, of course, (in this case amplified by the perpetrator’s evident inability to accurately identify her target) but especially the stupidity of blaming an entire group of people for actions of some of them with which you disagree.

The incident just underlines the idiocy of racism and bigotry.

If an Arab kid stole your bike when you were young, would you grow up assuming that all Arabs are thieves? If you saw one woman faint at the sight of blood, would you conclude that no women could be surgeons?

Questions like these ought to answer themselves.

What intellectual deficit or personality flaw causes someone to conclude that all members of a defined group are alike, that any misbehavior by any one of them reflects characteristics and behaviors common to all of them–and that animus toward the entire group is thus justifiable?

(That lack of uniformity works both ways: Jews have received a wildly disproportionate number of Nobel prizes, but believe me, that doesn’t mean all Jews are smart…)

My mother used to say that the only thing two Jews could agree on was what a third should be donating to charity. She wasn’t far wrong–we’re a disputatious lot. So are Black people. So are Muslims, women, LGBTQ folks…

Humans are individuals.

Anyone who has been following the political turmoil in Israel knows that Israelis are deeply divided over the policies of the Netanyahu government, and deeply conflicted over the proper approach to Gaza and to the Palestinians. Anyone who has been following the internal politics of the American Jewish community knows that those divisions are equally sharp here. (As recently as July, for example, the Guardian reported on Jewish groups demonstrating against the Israeli settlements policy.)

The current increases in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents, along with the stubborn persistence of American racism, act as uncomfortable reminders that we humans are deeply and inappropriately tribal–that we apparently have a very dangerous need to see the world in shades of “us” and “them,” and to see “them” as a monolithic, undifferentiated whole.

I don’t know what deep-seated tribal hatred convinced Ruba Awni Almaghtheh that she should ram her car into a building she presumed was occupied by “them,” or what she thought such vandalism would accomplish (other than wrecking her car). I do know that expressions of anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia and the like are the antithesis of civilized behavior, and that our current global unrest is largely due to politicians like Trump and Putin who encourage and legitimate the latent and not-so-latent bigotries of not-very-bright people.

One of the most laudable aspects of the American legal system is that it is a system that is intended to ignore the question of identity. In America, who you are isn’t supposed to matter–what does matter is how you behave. Not how your clan or tribe behaves, but how you, individually, behave.

Bigotry isn’t just stupid. It’s anti-American.

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Those Alternate Realities

Paul Krugman had a recent column in the New York Times headlined “Why Does the Right Hate America?”

Although the headline was clearly meant as snark, it wasn’t wrong: at its base, the division between MAGA voters and the rest of us rests upon MAGA’s clear distaste–even hatred–for the reality of today’s diverse America. That’s really what those anti-“woke” battles are all about; a not insignificant number of American citizens desperately want to “return” to an America that they mis-remember, an America that only existed in a Rightwing fever dream– a manufactured, inaccurate nostalgia for a world that privileged White Christian males.

Krugman began by referencing an essay by Damon Linker that profiled conservative intellectuals. Those writers, he argued, helped to explain where the MAGA right is coming from, and they paint a dire portrait of contemporary America.

For example, Patrick Deneen’s “Regime Change” describes America thus: “Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight. Cratering rates of childbirth, rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair,’ widespread addictions to pharmaceuticals and electronic distractions testify to the prevalence of a dull ennui and psychic despair.” And he attributes all of this to the malign effects of liberalism.

When I read such things, I always wonder, do these people ever go outside and look around? Do they have any sense, from personal memory or reading, of what America was like 30 or 50 years ago?

I am old enough to remember the America of the 1950s and 60s, and like Krugman, my reaction to the quoted paragraph is incredulous.

I clearly recall separate drinking fountains for Whites and Blacks, the “Restricted” billboards on housing developments (warning that Jews and Blacks would be excluded), the rules prohibiting women from opening charge accounts or obtaining mortgages without a male co-signer…

Krugman is a bit younger; he references the Seventies, noting that these right-wing critiques of modern America seem “rooted not just in dystopian fantasies but in dystopian fantasies that are generations out of date. There seems to be a part of the conservative mind for which it’s always 1975.”

Start with those blighted cities. I’m old enough to remember the 1970s and 1980s, when Times Square was a cesspool of drugs, prostitution and crime. These days it’s a bit too Disneyland for my tastes, but the transformation has been incredible.

OK, that’s something of a Big Apple-centric view, and not every U.S. city has done as well as New York (although it’s remarkable how many on the right insist on believing that one of America’s safest places is an urban hellscape). Chicago, for example, has done a lot worse. But between 1990 and the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic there was a broad-based U.S. urban resurgence, largely driven by the return to city life of a significant number of affluent Americans, who increasingly valued the amenities cities can offer and were less worried by violent crime, which plunged after 1990.

True, some of the fall in crime was reversed during the pandemic, but it seems to be receding again. And Americans are coming back to urban centers: Working from home has reduced downtown foot traffic during the week, but weekend visitors are more or less back to pre-pandemic levels.

This doesn’t look like blight to me.

What about family life? Indeed, fewer Americans are getting married than in the past. What you may not know is that since around 1980 there has been a huge decline in divorce rates. The most likely explanation, according to the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, is that expanded job opportunities for women led to a temporary surge in divorces as women left unhappy marriages, which receded as marriages adjusted to the new social realities. I take this to mean that during the “good old days” there was a lot of quiet marital misery, some of which is now behind us.

Oh, and when we talk about declining birthrates, we should note that a significant factor has been a huge decline in teenage pregnancies, especially among women 15 to 17. Is this an indicator of moral decay?

There’s more, and I agree with all of it.

As Krugman concedes, we Americans do still have big problems. (As he also points out, those “deaths of despair” and similar symptoms of dysfunction are mostly artifacts of rural areas of the country, not the urban “hellholes” that MAGA folks love to hate–those “cesspools” where uppity women and Black people and other minorities have the nerve to flourish…)

I couldn’t agree more with Krugman’s conclusion:

Indeed, some people on the right clearly hate the America we actually live in, a complex, diverse nation, as opposed to the simpler, purer nation of their imaginations.

Says it all….

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Well, What Do You Know? It DIDN’T Get Worse

Yesterday’s post ended with a gloomy “I don’t know how it can get worse.” Today, the news is considerably brighter.

I have no idea what day it is in the U.S. (Here on board the cruise ship, where we keep crossing the international dateline, the elevators helpfully have carpets that tell us the day of the week–they’re changed daily. Unfortunately, so are the clocks…). Whatever. The day before yesterday (I think), I accessed the results of the 2023 election, and boy do I feel better!

I’m sure everyone who follows this blog already knows what a very good day Tuesday was for Democrats, and for reproductive autonomy.

Ohio voters incorporated abortion rights in that state’s constitution. (They also gave a green light to weed…). In Virginia, where the Republican governor had promised to pass a “moderate” ban on abortion if voters gave him control of the state’s legislature, the Democrats hung on to their majority in the state Senate and took control of the House.

In Red Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshear defeated a “pro life” Republican to retain the Governor’s office. Less surprising–but still satisfying–Democrats won big in New Jersey.

The news was even good in depressingly Red Indiana.

In Indianapolis, in what has been billed the most expensive Mayoral race ever, Democrat Joe Hogsett won handily over Jefferson Shreve, who put more than thirteen million dollars of his own money into one of the worst and most annoying campaigns I’ve seen–he came across as a creepy guy willing to say pretty much anything to get elected (Issue consistency wasn’t his strong suit.) Given that this will be Hogsett’s third term–and given that he is not all that popular even among Democrats–it should have been closer; as it was, it was just a monumental waste of Shreve’s money.

With the exception of a disappointing loss in Carmel, indiana, where the Republican candidate repeatedly refused to criticize the local Mom’s for Liberty theocrats who’d “accidentally” quoted Hitler, Democrats did surprisingly well around the state: they flipped several mayoral offices from Republican to Democratic, including Evansville, Terre Haute, Lawrence, Michigan City, West Lafayette and Hobart.

Every local election is ultimately about the candidates in that race, but I remain absolutely convinced that Democrats owe a big thank-you to Justice Alito and his profoundly stupid, dishonest and unAmerican decision in Dobbs.

What a significant majority of Americans understand–at least at a visceral level–is that Dobbs isn’t simply about a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy–important as that right is. It is about the power of the state to dictate our most personal decisions.

Back when I was a Republican, the GOP stood for limiting government interventions to those areas of our common lives that clearly require government action. That is a position that is entirely consistent with the libertarian premise underlying America’s Bill of Rights: the principle that individuals should be free to make their own life choices, unless and until those choices harm others, and so long as they are willing to accord an equal right to others.

Today’s authoritarian, theocratic GOP has utterly abandoned that commitment to individual liberty–it has morphed into a party intent upon using the power of government to impose its Christian Nationalist views on everyone else.

As Morton and I wrote in our recent book, the assault on reproductive choice–the belief that government has the right to force women to give birth–is only one element of an overall illiberal, statist and very dangerous philosophy. The fundamental right of persons to determine for themselves the course of their own lives and the well-being of their families has become the central political issue of our time–and it isn’t an issue that affects only women.

For the last fifty years, the nation’s courts explicitly recognized the importance of drawing a line between decisions government can properly make and decision that–in our Constitutional system–must be left up to the individual. The decision in Dobbs very clearly threatens that fundamental understanding, and at some level, America’s voters recognize that threat and its very dire implications.

For much of the last fifty years, Republican electoral success relied upon turning out single-issue “pro life” voters. So long as Roe v. Wade remained in force, Democratic voters continued to base their votes on a range of issues, confident that the right to choose remained in place.

Then the dog caught the car.

Tuesday’s results bode well for 2024 and a return to American principles.

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Parting With Pence

I first met Mike Pence when we were both Republican candidates for Congress. We both lost, and he transitioned to hosting a televised talk show on which his “good friend” (!) Sheila periodically appeared– I was then director of Indiana’s ACLU. (Our discussions usually made me question the “attended law school” entry on his biography…)

Later, when Pence was Governor, former students of mine who were working for state government shared stories of prayer meetings in the Governor’s office–along with their impression that the Governor was basically uninterested in–and incompetent at–governing.

In 2016, as Pence began running for re-election, I had one of those ubiquitous “Pence Must Go” yard signs; I still believe that–had Trump not tapped him to appeal to Evangelical voters, “Pious Pence” would have gone down in well-deserved flames.

Credit where credit is due: his 2020 decision to uphold the Constitution (despite his very tenuous grasp of its provisions) was laudable and courageous. To the extent Pence has a place in history, that one virtuous decision secured it.

But let’s get real: Mike Pence was never going to be President.

The best reaction I have read to his withdrawal from the race was written by Mike Leppert.

It was a long shot bid from the start, so, its early end was no surprise. “It’s become clear to me: This is not my time,” was the apt comment he delivered at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual conference. I cannot recall agreeing with him more strenuously, but for more reasons than I expect he intended.

Pence’s time ended shortly after the 2016 election, as did the era of his entire brand of conservativism. The GOP shift toward the populist, inarticulate, grievance-based platform of today cannot credibly tout the Holy Bible as its guide. It never really could, but the party’s hate-based rhetoric of today has made the hard-to-take-seriously piousness of the party’s past an unfunny joke. Pence never wavered from his version of Christianity, though.

Message discipline could be his greatest asset. No matter how bad the message might have been, he was always entirely committed to it. So much so, the repetitiveness of it eventually would damage his authenticity on the stump. However, this skill was a difference maker for the ticket in 2016. He was the only guy who could stick to the script in that chaotic campaign, and I firmly believe that without this contribution, Hillary Clinton wins.

As Leppert points out, other than an ability to repeat talking points, Pence’s speechifying leaves much to be desired.

Admittedly, I already know that I am about to disagree with him before he makes a sound. But that’s part of the task at hand in political speech: to move people.

Try to recall a time he did that. Ever. There’s not a moment when he moved a crowd from hostile to simply opposed; from opposed to interested in listening more; or, from neutral to agreeable. On his own side of the aisle, he only succeeded at choosing a narrative he already knew his audience would applaud. As a political writer and communication consultant present in Indiana for almost his entire career, I can attest that I’ve never heard anyone say, “You really should have heard that Pence speech last night!”

It wasn’t only delivery–his policy positions set him far apart from the general public.

I’ve written about it before, but governmental control of anyone’s body is not conservatism. It’s pushing totalitarianism. Conservatives adopted the pro-life mantra without reconciling its fundamental contradictions with their platform. And Pence was one of that duality’s leaders. Again, a knock on his authenticity that his supporters are unable to see.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act and his monumental mishandling of it, is the event that defines him for many Hoosiers. It was a law that discriminated, by design, against the LGBTQ community. Pence knew that as well as anyone, but he knew he couldn’t get away with just saying that. So, he didn’t. And it cost him twenty points in his approval rating at the time, points he never got back.

Leppert reminds us that during his congressional career, Pence failed to pass a single bill–that he has no policy victories to tout. For that matter, Leppert says Pence has a tendency to cause more problems than he solves.

His political brand is highlighted by a career’s worth of troubles, some of his own making, others through his willful acquiescence. His sins are now ironically unforgivable, by a crowd that has never been more in need of forgiveness.

As Leppert says, pretensions aside, today’s GOP is no longer remotely conservative.

Ironically, the party’s base hates Pence for the single act of his career that actually was conservative.

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Inter-Generational?

Whoever said that change is the only constant was on to something. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen enormous changes in everything from social mores, to communication, to travel…and I’m pretty sure that most of the people who regularly read this blog can offer lots of other examples.

Apparently, even the widespread belief in generational differences–the life changes that have formed the basis of innumerable poems and novels, that have spawned repeated admonitions of how “someone your age” should behave–is undergoing a change.

According to a report in Fast Company, BMW in Germany is pioneering a multi-generational workplace.

The growing potential of the multigenerational workplace challenges the traditional way in which we think about people of different ages and what we can do and accomplish at various points in life. We frequently hear people say, “I’m too young for that job,” or “I’m too old to learn a new gig.” When universal schooling and “old-age” pensions were first introduced in the 1880s, life became organized into a simple sequence of stages. Infanthood was all about growing and playing. School, and perhaps college, would follow, and then work. Before we knew it, we would be in retirement, looking back at the linear pattern that a full and orderly life was supposed to be, hoping that our children and grandchildren would successfully replicate the very same trajectory in their own life spans. Our time in this world became compartmentalized into a rigid series of distinct stages ever since.

I call this way of organizing our lives the sequential model of life. Over the past 150 years or so, every generation has been told to follow the exact same rules all over the world, from Japan to the United States, and from Scandinavia to the southern tip of Africa. Meanwhile, wars were fought, empires came and went, women gained the right to vote, and we set foot on the moon and dispatched robotic rovers to Mars. But we continued to live our lives in the same old way, one generation after another, in endless reprise.

This state of affairs is becoming obsolete due to long-standing demographic transformations.

People now live longer, for one thing. In 1900, average life expectancy at birth in the United States was 46 years; as of 2022, it’s 78. Americans who have made it to age 60 can expect to live an average of another 23 years, dramatically up from just 10 years in 1900. As the article points out, that’s “another lifetime within a lifetime.” (Western Europeans are even better off, with a life expectancy at age 60 of 25 years.)

As anyone with eyes can see, not everything about our increasing longevity is positive–there are frictions between younger, taxpaying generations and those in retirement enjoying healthcare and pension benefits. Many people struggle with transitioning from one stage to another. We’re all subject to the destabilizing effects of technological change.

The article suggests that we think about life differently–that we rethink the ways in which “rising life expectancy, enhanced physical and mental fitness, and technology-driven knowledge obsolescence” are working to fundamentally alter the dynamics of the human life course, “redefining both what we can do at different ages and how generations live, learn, work, and consume together.”

The multi-generational workforce at BMW includes older workers–dubbed “perennials”–and the experiment has increased productivity.

The author predicts a massive transformation, a “postgenerational revolution” that will “fundamentally reshape individual lives, companies, economies, and the entire global society.”

As a result, we will witness the proliferation of perennials, “an ever-blooming group of people of all ages, stripes, and types who transcend stereotypes and make connections with each other and the world around them . . . they are not defined by their generation,” in the words of Gina Pell, a serial entrepreneur….

If people could liberate themselves from the tyranny of “age-appropriate” activities, if they could become perennials, they might be able to pursue not just one career, occupation, or profession but several, finding different kinds of personal fulfillment in each. Most importantly, people in their teens and twenties will be able to plan and make decisions for multiple transitions in life, not just one from study to work, and another from work to retirement.

Sounds great to these old ears…..

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