Category Archives: Random Blogging

A Worldwide Cold Civil War

Like many Americans, I tend to focus on domestic issues, both national and local. America produces more than enough fodder to keep bloggers like me busy. But the fear and hysteria propelling the ever-more-radical Right isn’t confined to our shores.

Trumpism was accompanied by Brexit in England, powered by the same mix of anti-immigrant bias, racism and misinformation (aka blatant lying) that (barely) put TFG in the White House.

The reporting in the run-up to recent elections in Spain was filled with warnings about the strength of that country’s emergent Rightwing–fortunately, as it turned out, not strong enough to win control outright, but the Right’s strongest showing since Franco.

In just the past few weeks, Putin’s Russia has continued emulating America’s far-Right states, passing laws that target LGBTQ people–especially but certainly not exclusively trans Russians.

I needn’t report what is going on in Afghanistan, or Iran, where women are special targets of their governments’ return to religious fundamentalism.

And then there’s Israel, where Netanyahu’s far-Right coalition has rammed through a frontal assault on that country’s Supreme Court, and plunged Israel into a crisis that has fractured civic society and threatened the country’s security.

As the Washington Post has editorialized: 

For months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned of the consequences. He was strongly urged to negotiate a deal over the proposal to emasculate the Israeli Supreme Court, a misguided power grab advanced by his far-right coalition. On Monday, the first part of the legislation was approved by the Knesset. It appears Mr. Netanyahu went over a cliff. What now?

 Mr. Netanyahu and his coalition have ignited a political crisis of immense proportions, perhaps the most consequential in Israel’s history. Massive protests against the judicial reform have filled Israel’s streets for months, and the vote brought open resistance from not only Israel’s progressive and secular Jews but also other bastions of the establishment.

Large businesses and unions are planning strikes and closures. A former head of Israel’s security service, the Shin Bet, was among those on the streets protesting after the vote. Nadav Argaman said he came to “mark the end” of Mr. Netanyahu’s rule. “Bibi has a coalition, but he doesn’t have the people. He’s lost the people,” he said. A letter signed by more than 1,100 air force reserve officers declared, “The legislation, which allows the government to act in an extremely unreasonable manner, will harm the security of the State of Israel, will break the trust and violate our consent to continue risking our lives — and will very sadly leave us with no choice but to refrain from volunteering for reserve duty.” Dozens of former top security officials — including former heads of the Israel Defense Forces, Mossad and Shin Bet — sent a letter declaring, “The legislation is shattering the common foundation of Israeli society, tearing the people apart, dismantling the IDF and causing grievous harm to Israel’s security.”

Messy–unlike in the US, where the Right has managed to take over state-level courts while staying under the radar…

Unless reversed, these moves by a government that is by far the most radical in Israel’s history will shatter what has always been a special bond between the US and Israel. That bond rests on what was seen as a common approach to democracy and the rule of law.  During Netanyahu’s “reign” (I use the word advisedly, as he has always been an autocrat), it has become more and more difficult for American Jews and pro-Israeli politicians to support Israeli tactics and ignore its mistreatment of the Palestinians.

As the Post–along with several Israeli newspapers–has warned, Netanyahu’s actions endanger Israel’s security, further splinter an already badly divided body politic and add to the strain on Israel’s  relationship with the United States.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the entire globe is enmeshed in a complicated cold civil war. This one lacks geographical boundaries; instead, it’s a war between the people in every country who welcome social change and understand–however dimly– that the tribalism of the past impoverishes everyone, and a frantic minority clinging to comforting verities and the privileges they fear losing.

Cunning power-seekers like Netanyahu and TFG manipulate the fears and feed the bigotries of that latter group.

Here in Indiana, we joke about our pathetic legislature. Facebook posts frequently show some version of “Entering Indiana and 1950” signs. But fear of modernity and civic equality isn’t limited to Indiana. In fact, if there is any lesson to be gleaned from these worldwide struggles, it is that every group–every tribe–has its fundamentalists and those George W. Bush dubbed “evil-doers,” as well as good people who just want to live in civic peace and obey the rule of law.

I sure hope the good guys win….

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A Changing Electorate

You can get whiplash from reading the political news.

One story making the media rounds suggests that–despite the non-emergence of a “Red wave” in the 2022 midterms, Republican turnout was better than Democratic turnout. Hard to read that without despairing of the prospects for 2024, despite the fact that midterm turnout by the party that doesn’t hold the White House is almost always reliably bigger.

But then, I came across this article in the Washington Post. Talk about an upper!

The essay was co-authored by Celinda Lake, a Democratic Party strategist and one of two lead pollsters for Biden’s 2020 campaign, and Mac Heller, a documentary filmmaker. Here’s the part that lifted my spirits:

Every year, about 4 million Americans turn 18 and gain the right to vote. In the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, that’s 32 million new eligible voters.

Also every year, 2½ million older Americans die. So in the same eight years, that’s as many as 20 million fewer older voters.

Which means that between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people. That’s about 20 percent of the total 2020 eligible electorate of 258 million Americans.

And unlike previous generations, Gen Z votes. Comparing the four federal elections since 2015 (when the first members of Gen Z turned 18) with the preceding nine (1998 to 2014), average turnout by young voters (defined here as voters under 30) in the Trump and post-Trump years has been 25 percent higher than that of older generations at the same age before Trump — 8 percent higher in presidential years and a whopping 46 percent higher in midterms.

Not as impressive–but not insignificant–has been the midterm increase of 7% in voter registration among under-30 voters since Gen Z joined the electorate. The authors report that, In midterm elections, “under-30s have seen a 20 percent increase in their share of the electorate, on average, since Trump and Gen Z entered the game.

Interestingly, reactions to Trump don’t turn out to be a major factor for these voters. Polls suggest that Gen Z voters are motivated by “strong passion” on one or more issues — “a much more policy-driven approach than the more partisan voting behavior of their elders.”

That policy-first approach, combined with the issues they care most about, have led young people in recent years to vote more frequently for Democrats and progressive policies than prior generations did when of similar age — as recent elections in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin have shown.

Researchers have already demonstrated the fallacy of the long-held belief among political observers that American voters become more conservative as they age. Recent studies show that once political identities are formed, they tend to remain constant. And as the authors of this essay note, “about 48 percent of Gen Z voters identify as a person of color, while the boomers they’re replacing in the electorate are 72 percent White.”

Gen Z voters are on track to be the most educated group in our history, and the majority of college graduates are now female. Because voting participation correlates positively with education, expect women to speak with a bigger voice in our coming elections. Gen Z voters are much more likely to cite gender fluidity as a value, and they list racism among their greatest concerns. Further, they are the least religious generation in our history. No wonder there’s discussion in some parts of the GOP about raising the voting age to 25, and among some Democrats about lowering it to 16!

The fact that younger voters are more likely to be driven by issues rather than partisanship should be very good news for Democrats, since polling demonstrates that Democratic positions align with the policy preferences of a substantial majority of Americans.

But the news isn’t all good. There’s a danger there, too.

The importance of issues, rather than party ID, holds a warning:Both parties should worry about young voters embracing third-party candidates. Past elections show that Gen Z voters shop for candidates longer and respond favorably to new faces and issue-oriented candidates. They like combining their activism with their voting and don’t feel bound by party loyalty. And they can’t remember Ross Perot, Ralph Nader — or even Jill Stein.

GOP support for “No Labels” and RNK, Jr. are evidence that Republicans understand that danger. They know they can’t win a head-to-head campaign between Donald Trump and Biden (or for that matter, between Trump and pretty much any sentient Democrat). Their best hopes for victory lie with the Electoral College and third-party candidates who can peel off votes in selected states that would otherwise go to the Democrats.

Like I said–whiplash.

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Good News For A Change

Over the past few years, I have become increasingly convinced that the death of traditional newspapers is at the root of much–if not most–of America’s polarization and anger. It isn’t just the dearth of local news, damaging as that is. The deeper problem is fragmentation.

As I used to tell students in my Media and Public Policy classes, “back in the day,” when large majorities of city residents got their news from the same newspapers (and from the local television newscasts that largely got theirs from local newspaper reporters), they occupied a similar civic reality.Even if they bought the paper for the grocery coupons or the sports scores, and merely glanced at the headlines, they shared a common information environment.

That shared environment is the loss that has most deeply cut into local civic cohesion and civic participation. So–although I have cheered the recent entry of new local media sources–I realize that those new resources don’t solve the fragmentation problem, even assuming that people who don’t currently get much local news learn about and access them. (I do worry that the availability of these resources won’t penetrate the consciousness of those who don’t share the nerdy preoccupations of people like me.)

All this is by way of explaining why I was thrilled to read the following:

A nonprofit group dedicated to rescuing local newspapers from either collapse or private equity pillaging is buying 22 local papers in Maine. The National Trust for Local News, founded just two years ago, will purchase five of the state’s six dailies and 17 weeklies from a private company called Masthead Maine owned by Reade Brower, who made his money in direct mail. (How one guy managed to get control of all the important newspapers in a state is a story for another day.)

As we all know, daily newspapers became less profitable with the rise of the Internet. That loss of profitability led private equity operators to swoop in and buy thousands of local newspapers. They saw a way to profit by “paring staff and news coverage to the bone.” Since then, the venerable (and rapacious) Gannett chain was bought by GateHouse, “one of the most predatory of the private equity outfits, which took over the Gannett name.”

The result has been the aptly-named “ghost” newspaper. (The Indianapolis Star is an excellent example.)

Local dailies and weeklies could actually turn a profit with well-staffed newsrooms if owners could be satisfied by returns in the 5 to 10 percent range rather than the 15 to 20 percent that was typical in the pre-internet era and that is demanded by private equity players. Despite the internet, local merchants still rely heavily on display ads, which are profit centers. And well-run local papers attract more display ads.

Since then, there has been a slowly growing movement to save the local press by returning it to community or nonprofit ownership. My friend and co-author Ed Miller has gone on to found an exemplary weekly, The Provincetown Independent, which has thrived at the expense of the GateHouse-owned Provincetown Banner, which has lost most of its staff and circulation. Between 2017 and July 2022, over 135 nonprofit newsrooms were launched, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Another hopeful sign is that even by laying off staff and reducing coverage, private equity companies are not making the money they hoped for, so some of these papers are on the auction block and can be saved. Maine is not a typical case, since Reade Brower is a relatively benign monopolist and was willing to work with the National Trust for Local News.

According to the linked report, the Trust–which does not have a lot of its own money– employs a variety of ownership models and draws funding from a number of sources:

Its first major deal was in Colorado, where it now owns 24 local newspapers in that state in collaboration with The Colorado Sun. It has funders that include the Gates Family Foundation, the Google News Initiative, and the Knight Foundation. The MacArthur Foundation also recently announced a major initiative to save local news.

This is the beginning of a very hopeful trend to save priceless civic assets from predatory capitalism at its worst.

I never understood why those “predatory capitalists” didn’t understand that their approach ensured a death spiral. Newspapers sell a product: content. Did the Gatehouses and Gannetts not understand that consumers would respond to cuts in staffing, reflected in dramatic reductions of useful content, by discontinuing their subscriptions?

We need local news. And we need a shared source of local news. The National Trust for Local News seems to understand that saving local newspapers is the most efficient way to rebuild shared information resources.

That is very good news.

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Why The Right Won’t Win The Culture War

The term “culture war” is shorthand for the increasingly frantic effort of America’s White Christian Nationalists to turn back the clock–to return “uppity” women and Blacks to their prior, subordinate positions, stuff LGBTQ citizens back in the closet, and make it clear that respect for “religion” extends only to Christians (and really just certain Protestants).

The ferocity with which they are waging that battle can make our lives chaotic and dangerous. Bizarre accusations leveled at school boards and teachers are accompanied by voucher programs intended to destroy the schools that create a democratic polity; rogue Courts ignore longstanding jurisdictional rules in order to accommodate anti-gay religious bigotry; a contingent of Congressional mental cases has now gone beyond their effort to defund the FBI by refusing to fund the military if the Pentagon doesn’t eliminate what they call its “woke” policies.

Rational people are understandably depressed and/or frightened.

I don’t know who first uttered the phrase “this too shalll pass,” but it definitely applies to the culture warriors’ current eruption of fear and hate. What we are seeing is a tantrum triggered by subconscious recognition that the America they are fighting so hard to prevent is inevitable.

Why do I say it’s inevitable? Because it is already here.

A few months ago, I was asked to speak to a local church’s Sunday school class about anti-Semitism. It was a good discussion (they were members of a denomination that I categorize as actually Christian), and as I was leaving, a lovely lady stopped me to say she’d appreciated the conversation, because her grandchildren are Jewish.

She has a lot of company. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 42% of all currently married Jewish respondents had a non-Jewish spouse. (I’m obviously one of them–in case you were confused, Kennedy is not a Jewish name.) For that matter, the high rate of Jewish intermarriage is of great concern to the Rabbinate and to Jewish organizations; to the extent intermarriage reduces the number of people identifying as Jewish, we may disappear entirely. After all, there weren’t that many of us to start with.

Of course, it isn’t just inter-religious marriage. It’s also interracial and same-sex unions.

America is experiencing the demographic “mixing”that so terrified Southern slaveholders (at least, when they weren’t engaging in some of that “mixing” themselves, with slaves who couldn’t refuse…) The most recent data I could find from the U.S. Census Bureau was from 2019; at that time, about 11% of all marriages in the United States were interracial. Even more significantly, in 2021, according to Axios, approval of interracial marriage in the U.S. hit a new high of 94%, according to Gallup polling.

The article noted that the prevalence of intermarriage continues to increase. In 1967, when Loving v. Virginia was decided, just 3% of married couples were interracial. In 2021, Pew estimated it at 20%.

Numbers and percentages can change, depending upon the definitions used, but whatever the “accurate” percentages, the rate of demographic inter-mingling continues to rise, and to affect the social context within which increasing numbers of Americans live.

It isn’t just increased acceptance of opposite-sex intermarriage. A poll conducted by the Trevor Project found that two-thirds of American adults report personally knowing someone who identifies as gay or lesbian, and nearly two-thirds of them (62%) said they would be comfortable if their child came out to them as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.(Only 13% would not be comfortable–a huge change from past attitudes.) Approval of same-sex marriage is now at 71%.

Dobbs was also too late to re-stigmatize abortion. Researchers tell us that one in four American women have terminated a pregnancy at some point in their lives. Gallup tells us that 85% of American women support reproductive choice–and that 45% would impose no restrictions on the procedure.

We now live in a society in which a not-insignificant number of older White Christians have Jewish, Black, Latino or gay grandchildren. Some number of those people react by rejecting those grandchildren, but a larger number will fight for a world that treats them fairly.

It isn’t just our friends and families. Increasing numbers of Americans go to jobs every day where their colleagues and co-workers are “diverse.” We have doctors and lawyers and CPAs who come from backgrounds different from our own.–and increasing numbers of those doctors, lawyers and CPAs are female.

In short, the world has moved on, and most of us prefer its current contours to the bigotries and caste-like social structures of the past. The exceptions are very angry and very loud, and they can do a lot of short-term harm. But their time has passed–and the tantrums they are throwing are evidence that–deep down–they know it.

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The Eternal Target

Robert Hubbell is the author of one of the newsletters that appear in my inbox each weekday; some months ago, my sister recommended that I add him to my daily read and I can echo her endorsement.

Hubbell recently considered the anti-Semitism displayed by one of RFK, Jr.’s many conspiracy theories–this one, that the Chinese had “bio-engineered”  COVID  to disproportionately target Caucasians and Black people., while immunizing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

As Hubbell wrote

Over the weekend, we learned that Kennedy’s conspiratorial thinking regarding the origins of Covid and the (alleged) evils of vaccines led him to the place where many conspiracy theories seem to inevitably land—blaming “the Jews” for the world’s problems. Most conspiracy theories begin by blaming the ubiquitous and anonymous “they”, which inexorably morphs over time to “liberal elites,” then “Bill Gates and George Soros,” and then “the Jews.”

 I sure wish we Jews were as powerful as these conspiracy-addled  lunatics clearly think we are. (Really, if I had a space laser, don’t you think I’d have used it against some of these nutcases by now??)

In Hubbell’s subsequent discussion of Junior’s “bioweapon” theories, he meticulously examined the ignorance it required.

He claims that the Chinese and American governments are developing “ethnic bioweapons.” The notion that governments are building bioweapons that will selectively attack people based on their “ethnicity” is a delusion based on monumental ignorance about DNA, biology, race, ethnicity, science, politics, and reality. It is the stuff of 1950s comic books, adolescent imagination, and Nazi eugenics—which is how sheer stupidity morphs into absolute evil in the reality free cauldron of conspiracy theories.

Hubbell examined RFK,Jr.’s “copious documentation” (so that we don’t have to), and found that–to the extent any legitimate documentation exists regarding “ethnic bioweapons”– “it relates to the fear that some government might exploit the gene editing technology CRSPR/Cas9 to develop ethnic bioweapons in the future.”

Rather obviously, a concern about what might occur  sometime in the future is not “evidence” that U.S. and China are developing bioweapons targeted at various genetic groups.

What struck me about this particular eruption of anti-Semitism–and Hubbell’s ability to demonstrate the ignorance that prompted it–was an insight it prompted about the nature of conspiracy theories in general: people who don’t understand the world they inhabit, and who are unable to tolerate the ambiguities resulting from that lack of understanding, are desperate for answers and explanations they can comprehend.

Conspiracy theories provide those answers. (So do some religions.)

Are LGBTQ people more visible than they used to be? There must be more of them, and that means that some groups–librarians and Drag Queens among them– are “grooming” children and turning them gay.

Are the FBI and Department of Justice closing in on Donald Trump’s myriad crimes? That’s convincing evidence that those federal agencies have been “weaponized” against Republicans.

Did your 87-year-old grandfather die a month after getting a COVID vaccine? Was your sister-in-law’s next-door neighbor’s brother’s child diagnosed as autistic after getting her measles vaccine? Aha! Evidence that vaccines are dangerous.

Are you a man who’s unable to get a date? (Okay, unable to get laid?) It isn’t because you’re unattractive or unpleasant (or nuts). As your fellow Incels will tell you, it’s evidence that “women’s lib” groups have poisoned relations between the sexes.

Is your life not unfolding in ways you had hoped? Are your children behaving in ways that you disapprove? It’s evidence that some shadowy group–probably the Jews–is running the world in ways that disadvantage good White Christians like you…

I’m sure readers of this blog can add to the list….

There is a reason for the growing political and social gap between educated and uneducated Americans. And by “educated” I don’t mean people with degrees; I mean people who read books and newspapers, open themselves to the lessons of history, and respect science and technical expertise. Educated people are humans who recognize–and have learned to live with– the inevitable ambiguities of modern life. They are people who understand that the world is a complicated place, that we humans are still learning about causes and effects, and there are many questions we can’t answer.

They are people who can tell the difference between evidence and fantasy, and are comfortable saying “I don’t know.”

Other people–those who are frantic for simple answers and desperate for someone or some group  to blame for their distress– cope by adopting fantasies that justify their fear and hatred of the “other.”

Today’s America evidently has a lot of them. Until their fevers subside, they can and do make life for the rest of us very uncomfortable–and for some of us “others,” very unsafe.

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