Random Blogging – Page 89

Hopeful Signs

During some twenty years on a university faculty, I learned to appreciate the vast differences in the reliability of research, especially survey research. It isn’t simply the “garbage” studies that are promoted by partisans of one sort or another–even serious efforts at determining attitudes and beliefs of particular populations run into problems with the way in which questions are posed and the selection of representative respondents, among other minefields.

Carefully crafted, reliable surveys require skilled researchers (they’re also very expensive), so we need to look carefully at the source of data coming from survey researchers. One of the most skilled, reliable and reputable of such sources is Pew Research–which is why I was so heartened by a recent study Pew published, showing that the electorate is shifting — and not in the Republican Party’s favor.

As The Week reported:

A new deep dive into the 2020 electorate by Pew Research contains mostly bad news for Republicans, whose approaching demographic doom is less racial than it is generational. While it shouldn’t be news to anyone at this point that young voters are a solidly blue voting bloc, the more worrisome developments for the GOP are the unexpectedly elderly nature of the party’s coalition and the unyielding Democratic lean of younger voters as they age. If Pew’s numbers are to be believed, the only solidly Republican age demographic last year was 75 and over, meaning that every time the sun comes up, the GOP’s struggle to win a majority of American voters gets harder.

Pew’s in-depth study uses validated voter files – matching panelists to a registration database confirming whether or not they turned out – to offer a different, and possibly more accurate, view of the electorate than the exit polls taken on Election Day. Often this new data can challenge narratives that set in stubbornly and immediately after the votes are counted – in 2016, for example, Pew’s research found that Donald Trump won white women by a considerably smaller margin than Election Day surveys indicated, upending one prevailing story about who was most responsible for Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss.

Some of the ways in which Pew’s findings differed from the arguably less-precise findings of exit polls included the extent of Trump’s inroads with Latino and Black voters (he did somewhat better with Latinos and worse with Blacks than previously reported) and the fact that he did not win married men by 11 points–in fact, Pew found that married men went for Biden by 5.

But it was the age numbers that I found most hopeful. Exit polls had shown Biden winning 18- to 29-year-olds by 24 points, 60-36; Pew found it at a similar, albeit slightly smaller 58-38. Exit polls also showed Trump with just a 52-47 edge among voters over 65, and Pew’s numbers were almost identical – 52-48 for Trump over Biden.

Pew also broke the survey down into not just age groups but generational cohorts. And it’s here where you’ll find the most terrifying information for the GOP. According to Pew, Trump won a decisive majority only with members of the “Silent Generation,” those born between 1928 and 1945 (and the extremely tiny number of living people older than that). Trump dominated that cohort by 16 points, 58-42. That means that the only reliably Republican voter bloc will shrink considerably between now and 2024, and that 65- to 74-year-olds must have been a much more blue-leaning group in 2020 to produce Trump’s comparatively narrow 4-point margin with all over-65s.

As the article notes, you don’t need a degree in actuarial science to know that 65- to 74-year-olds will be around considerably longer than 75- to 102-year-olds.

Perhaps even worse for former President Trump and his acolytes, the Pew data showed little erosion in the millennial preference for Democrats over Republicans. Fifty-six percent of millennials voted for Clinton in 2016, and 58 percent voted for Biden in 2020. Remember, the first millennials voted in 2002, and as a group they simply have not budged. “Elder millennials” are turning 40 this year and they don’t love the Republican Party any more than they did when George W. Bush was lighting several trillion dollars on fire prosecuting a pointless war in Iraq. And that’s terrible news for the GOP’s hopes of ever becoming a majority party again, because if they keep losing the youngest voters by double digits election after election, they need a significant number of them to get more conservative as they age just to hold current margins in place.

This is all good news–in the long run. Even in the medium run.

The task for those of us who are terrified by the GOP’s current efforts to win elections by cheating–gerrymandering, vote suppression, placing unethical partisans in positions to oversee elections, etc.–is to work our fannies off to keep them from destroying democracy in the short run.

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Common Ground? With Whom?

Periodically, I get messages from readers of this blog, or encounter essays and columns in mainstream publications with the same, urgent theme: Americans need to work on understanding each other. Those of us to the left of the reactionary right need to be more generous in our appraisals of those with whom we disagree. We need to find a common ground from which we can build productive dialogue.

For the greater part of my professional life, that message strongly resonated with me. During the thirty-plus years I was an active Republican, most of my friends and family were Democrats, and I was keenly aware of the unfairness of dismissing all Republicans as rightwing racists and anti-Semites. (Yes, the roots of Trumpism have always been visible in the GOP, but those attitudes were once relegated to the fringes, just as “fellow-travelers” were sidelined by the Democrats.)

When I became the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, I launched a publication called Common Ground, dedicated to the proposition that good people could have different, principled approaches to public policy, and that organizations dedicated to support of the Constitution and Bill of Rights needed to demonstrate that America’s legal framework respects those differences.

More generally, both as a woman and a Jew, I have seen firsthand how damaging and unfair it can be to “other” those who are different, to judge and dismiss people based on their identities.

All of which brings me to my unprecedented discomfort with the contemporary, well-intentioned pleas to “understand” the people on the “other side” of the political divide.

At risk of running afoul of Godwin’s Law, I want to pose a question: How do we now evaluate the behavior of the “good Germans” who failed to condemn the behavior of the Nazis?

An old book review from Forbes —by none other than “conservative” Steve Forbes–detailed the various reasons why Germans who weren’t Nazis nevertheless “went along” with Hitler. Forbes found the book, The German War, to be “an extremely interesting yet disheartening tale of a civilized people’s descent into barbarism.”

Much of the collaboration was “patriotic.”

A number of German soldiers and officials were uneasy or outright horrified by what was happening, but most did nothing about it. All but a handful of non-Nazis supported the war to the end because they believed defeat would lead to Germany’s annihilation..Most Germans convinced themselves that the war was one of self-defense, a fight for survival, because the evil French, Russians, British and Americans and their “Jewish masters” all wanted to destroy Germany…

Germans also engaged in moral equivalence: The bombing of German cities by the U.S. and Britain was in retaliation for the Reich’s treatment of Jews, but what was happening in the death camps and shooting pits was really no different from the Allies’ “terror” bombings.

Survival of the “real” (Ayran) Germany. False equivalencies. Unsettlingly familiar…

Obviously, not all of the people who continue to call themselves Republicans are racists prepared to acquiesce to barbarism. The GOP continues to contain plenty of good, moral people–and I agree that we should continue to look for them, and when we encounter them, “reach out” and engage and make good-faith efforts to understand where they are and why they remain.

But the majority of today’s GOP is another matter entirely. We have steadily mounting evidence of its march toward reaction, racism and yes, barbarism. Former high-level Republicans who have left the party warn that elected officials like Paul Gosar , Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and a significant number of other “deplorables” (sorry!) are now the mainstream of the GOP. They really do reflect and represent the people who voted them into office.

I submit that seeking “common ground” with such people is suicidal–that there is a monumental and morally-significant difference between debates over such things as the efficacy of tariffs or the contours of the social safety net and arguments over the human rights of people who don’t look like us.

Yes, it is important to understand why people react to cultural change or economic disadvantage in such irrational and destructive ways. Such understanding is necessary in order to fashion policies to minimize the dangers such reactions pose.

But that’s a long-term goal.

In the shorter term, it is critically important that we highlight the immorality and profoundly anti-American nature of what political observers are witnessing–not because doing so will change those who are lost to logic and human connection, but because failure to do so will lull the many “good Americans” who haven’t been paying attention into quiescence.

Ultimately, it isn’t the “bad guys” who threaten American values. It’s the “good guys” who remain unaware and/or disengaged. “All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing…..”

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The “Good Republican” Dilemma

Michael Gerson is one of the many prominent former Republicans who are horrified by what the Grand Old Party has become. In a column earlier this year for the Washington Post he wrote that

A political movement will either police its extremes or be defined by them.

Disapproval from opponents is easy to dismiss as mere partisanship. It is through self-criticism that a political party defines and patrols the boundaries of its ideological sanity.

The column was triggered by the overt racism of Senator Ron Johnson and the reaction–really, the lack of a reaction–by Johnson’s Republican colleagues, who (once again) proved unwilling to “patrol the boundaries of ideological sanity.”

There have always been bigots with access to a microphone. But in this case, Johnson did not face the hygienic repudiation of his party. Republican leaders preferred a different strategy: putting their fingers in their ears and humming loudly. Republicans have abolished their ideological police.

The reason is simple. After four years of Donald Trump, Johnson’s sentiments are not out of the Republican mainstream. They are an application of the prevailing Republican ideology — that the “real” America is under assault by the dangerous other: Violent immigrants. Angry Blacks. Antifa terrorists. Suspicious Muslims. And don’t forget “the China virus.”

Gerson concedes that Trump didn’t somehow create those views out of whole cloth. But he points out–as many others have–the fact that Trump normalized these sentiments to an unprecedented degree.

Under Trump’s cover, this has been revealed as the majority position of Republicans, or at least engaged, activist Republicans…

Our country faces many crises. But our nation’s politics has a single, overriding challenge: One of the United States’ venerable, powerful political parties has been overtaken by people who make resentment against outsiders the central element of their appeal. Inciting fear is not an excess of their zeal; it is the substance of their cause.

In the column, Gerson describes the effect this has had on him, personally; he now considers himself politically homeless. As he says, as an Evangelical Christian, he has difficulty with several aspects of Democratic policy goals. Despite his own discomfort, however,

I could not advise an idealistic and ambitious young person to join today’s GOP because her ambition would be likely to destroy her idealism. Most Republican leaders can no longer be trusted with the moral education of the young on the central moral challenge of our history. Elected Republicans who are not bigots are generally cowards in the face of bigotry. And that is a shocking, horrible thing.

Gerson is far from the only former Republican adrift in a political no-man’s-land, confronting a once-typical political party that has embraced anti-intellectualism and abandoned policy prescriptions in favor of waging culture war.

I have many friends with whom I served in a very different GOP, and most of them are struggling with a similar personal dilemma. These aren’t simply people who once voted Republican and have decided to no longer do so–they were what you might call “professional Republicans,” people who spent the greater part of their careers in political activity and public service. They include former office-holders, several of whom were quite prominent, a collection of state and county elected officials, a few former city-county counselors, and a number of high-level Republican lobbyists.

Most no longer consider themselves Republican, and several have publicly announced that fact. Others are convinced that necessary change will only come from within–and although I disagree (I think it’s too late, that the party is too far in the thrall of the know-nothings and bigots) I understand their reluctance to “pull the plug” and pronounce the patient dead.

There are many kinds of homelessness. For good people who are intellectually honest, political homelessness is–at best– purgatory.

What’s worse, however, is that the American political system is deprived of the benefit of principled, reality-based debates over the way forward–debates that require honorable and thoughtful political debaters. The ultimate decisions made by politically homeless former Republicans–create a new party? fight to regain control of the GOP?– will determine whether those discussions can ever resume.

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Words, Words, Words…..

One of the barriers to productive political debate is language–its use and misuse.

Genuine communication–in general, not just in politics– is anything but simple. Back in “the day,” when I was a high school English teacher, discussions of grammar included a lesson on the difference between “definition” and “connotation”–between the dictionary meaning of a word, and the social or emotional “freight” it had picked up through use. (Further complicating matters, that “freight”–the negative or positive spin on a word or phrase–often varies depending upon the constituency hearing it. Think of how different ears hear “woke.”)

We all bring our individual world-views to our discussions, and those views and personal experiences become the lens through which we interpret what others are saying. Often, those interpretations are wildly different from the intended meaning–think “Defund the Police”–which is why political strategists and PR folks are so concerned with the language employed by candidates and/or commercial interests. Insisting “that isn’t what I meant” is almost always ineffective; it’s far preferable to initially frame an argument or proposition using language that is as accurate about meaning as possible, and that will be most resistant to misinterpretation, whether intentional or unintentional.

Sometimes, partisans forget that the object should be to communicate, not simply to engage in virtue signaling.

Back in April, Governing Magazine ran an article titled ” ‘No Accountability, No Peace’: Sloganeering and the Language of the Left,” focusing on the differences in language employed by contemporary Republicans and Democrats. The author noted the “constant demand on the left” to be sensitive, to use words that are received as less hurtful. Sometimes, he wrote, this makes perfect sense. “Other times it feels like they want to fight on the wrong battlefield.”

This is not an isolated linguistic debate. It comes just after the recent overbaked argument about whether President Biden’s infrastructure plan, or parts of it, qualify as infrastructure, namely caregiving for children, the elderly and those with disabilities. Mother Jones was not alone in decrying this as a “semantic argument,” stressing the importance of Biden wanting to support women workers as part of the recovery.

But semantics do matter in politics. For years, the right has found success by putting potent, clever labels on things that help make their arguments for them: Recasting estate taxes as the “death tax,” for example, or succeeding in switching usage from the clinical description of intact dilation and evacuation to the soberingly graphic “partial-birth abortion.”

On the left, the impulse is more aspirational. You increase the power of your vocabulary by borrowing meanings, asserting that some things actually mean other, good things — that child care is infrastructure, or that housing is a human right or health care is a human right.

Give credit where it’s due: the GOP has been far more successful than Democrats in using language–words–to drive public opinion. That success has been partly due to good PR advice, but it also owes a debt to the fact that today, Republicans are far more monolithic than Democrats, and their major goals are simpler to convey: keep my taxes low lends itself to far clearer messaging than, say, immigration reform, or even “Black Lives Matter.”

I actually think a large-scale public debate over the meaning of “infrastructure” would be very useful. I have often distinguished between physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, the electrical grid, etc.) and what I think is accurately described as social infrastructure–the governmentally-provided social supports and services that are arguably necessary to social functioning and national cohesion.

America is rather clearly not ready for that discussion–not ready to use language for its intended purpose, which–I will reiterate– is to communicate. Far too many of us evidently subscribe to Tallyrand’s theory that “speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts.”

“Make America Great Again” comes to mind….

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Grief

Gerald Stinson recently shared a research article with me that gave rise to a small epiphany.

The article was titled “Political Grief” and it had been prompted by reactions to the 2016 election of Donald Trump–a reaction that the author accurately noted went well beyond the usual types of depression partisans suffer in the wake of electoral loss, and in fact, was a manifestation of what the author dubbed “political grief.”

I think this is exactly right.

All of us who are of “a certain age” have experienced personal losses and the grief that accompanies those losses. Friends and family members disappoint or die, businesses and/or projects near and dear to us fail, and we respond to those events with grief and despair. As the article notes, however, similar responses occur when our expectations about how the world works prove unfounded. We humans are “attached” to such deeply-rooted assumptions; they are deeply woven into the way we live our lives, interpret our life events, and anticipate outcomes. When we “experience a significant life event that cannot be readily incorporated into these assumptions” we experience “a state of disequilibrium.”

Grief, in response to loss.

The author reviews research into the nature of grief, noting that the loss of our assumptions about the way the world works translates into a loss of safety, logic, clarity, power and control. Grief becomes the process by which we reconcile (or don’t!) the world we now know exists with the world as we once believed it to be.

The entire article is worth reading and considering. Those of us who reacted viscerally to the results of the 2016 Presidential election will recognize ourselves in the author’s description of the “feelings of sadness, disbelief and grief over the death of values, ideals, hopes and dreams” experienced by her colleagues at a conference they were attending at the time of the election. But what we may fail to appreciate is the corresponding reaction to cultural change that has been experienced by those who ended up voting for Donald Trump.

The author of the article traces the evolution of our current, toxic political climate, and considers the various academic theories about the motivations of Trump voters, especially the economic inequality perspective and the cultural backlash thesis, both of which have contributed to the deep resentment of those who feel disrespected and left behind. (The Left Behind is a book I referenced in a previous post; I’m reading it now, and Wuthnow’s description of the rural folks he interviewed is consistent with the article’s thesis.)

People who embrace so-called “traditional values” feel increasingly out of step with the changing culture of contemporary American (and European) society–and they are grieving the loss of their worldview and their place in American society. The accompanying resentment and anger makes them susceptible to nativism and xenophobia–a susceptibility that is particularly (but certainly not exclusively) found among older, less-educated White men.

Terror Management Theory also has application: people who feel threatened tend to find refuge in their cultural world-views, religious symbols and beliefs.

“When we perceive a threat, we retreat to what we know best and to those who are most like us, and who make us feel safe and protected….Identifying with others who share similar values, culture, religion (including outward appearance and skin color) is seen as safe; blame and fear are placed on those who are not us.”

In our current political environment, political affiliation is no longer based upon support for particular policies or parties, it has become an integral part of one’s personal identity. Partisans aren’t just working for specific policies–they are defending deeply-held values and world-views. Both sides of the divide express “moral outrage” over the views of the “others.” As the author notes, the only common ground to be found is in “the shared sense of outrage over the deplorable values and platform of the other side.”

If this analysis is accurate–and I think it is–we’re in for a world of hurt.

The grief felt by both sides in what seems an insurmountable divide is all too real. Those clinging to “traditional values” (and traditional social castes) are grieving the increasing abandonment of those beliefs and the once-familiar lines of social and racial demarcation; those embracing that social evolution are grieving, overwhelmed and discouraged by evidence that so many Americans are ready to fight to keep change and inclusion at bay.

Grief seems appropriate.

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