Uncategorized – Page 3 – Sheila Kennedy

Let’s Talk Specifics

One thing most Americans can agree upon is that this year’s election is abnormal.

We have a presidential contest featuring a convicted felon– supported by a fact-averse cult–who routinely lies, threatens violence, and violates long-established political norms. (I would add that–although we’ve had some unfortunate political actors in our history–we’ve never previously faced a presidential campaign by someone so obviously, seriously mentally ill.)

Perhaps as a result of that novelty, the traditional press consistently fails to convey the actual stakes of the upcoming election–and those stakes are monumental. Handwringing pundits have complained about that failure, but very few have made specific recommendations for change. For that matter, grousing without suggesting what actions might be helpful characterizes most conversations about the upcoming election.

What should the media do? What should each concerned citizen do?

Jennifer Rubin recently answered that question for the media. She began with a statement of the obvious:

The United States has never had an election in which: a felon runs for president on a major party ticket; a presidential candidate lays out a detailed plan for authoritarian rule; an entire party gaslights the public (e.g., claiming the president was behind their candidate’s state prosecution; pretending they won the last election); and, prominent leaders of one party signal they will not accept an adverse outcome in the next election. Yet, the coverage of the 2024 campaign is remarkably anodyne, if not oblivious, to the unprecedented nature of this election and its implications.

Rather than indulging an obsession with meaningless early polling, Rubin says, show a minute or two of unedited video of Trump’s rambling, incoherent and deranged rants. Rather than “fact checking” the nonsense blizzard, focus on the unprecedented nature of his rhetoric. Illustrate the deterioration in his thinking and speech. Quote experts discussing “how an obviously irrational and unhinged leader casts a spell over his devoted following.”

Rubin says the media should refuse to entertain “laughable MAGA spin,” such as claims that Trump’s conviction will help him win the election. (Those polls they love to cite rebut that premise.) Real journalists would debunk other MAGA lies, including the frequent ones about crowd size.

Reporters should stop giving spineless Republican officials a free pass when they parrot Trump’s obvious falsehoods. Interviewers should be prepared to challenge and debunk them.

You can read the rest of her litany at the link, but the call for specificity also applies to each of us. After all, fulminations on this blog–including mine– are not actions. Sharing memes and “liking” posts on social media aren’t actions.

Other than the obvious–casting our votes and donating to underfunded candidates–what specific activities are available to those of us who understand the gravity of the threat posed by MAGA?

Let me suggest three:

If everyone who recognizes that threat, everyone who agrees that voting Blue up and down the ballot is essential, would find just one rational person who has not previously voted– or who has not voted regularly–and would take it upon herself to ensure that person is registered and casts a ballot, we would assure a Blue tsunami. (Women who have previously skipped elections ought to be prime candidates this year, given the GOP’s unremitting attacks on abortion and birth control.)
When you come across examples of news media engaging in the behaviors Rubin has described, write and complain. If the offending outlet gets enough complaints, especially if those complaints come from subscribers, they’ll notice. They may defend their coverage, but they’re likely to be more careful.
If you are on social media, post accurate, credible information about the actual state of the economy, real numbers about criminal activity, and other facts that rebut widespread misinformation–with links to official sources, if possible. You needn’t get into online arguments (if someone has posted that the stock market is down, or unemployment is up, all you need to do is post an article from, say, the Wall Street Journal or other business publication reporting the fact that the market has hit an all-time high and employment is the highest in fifty years.) The people posting misinformation on Facebook or Tiktok or wherever aren’t people who read the New York Times or Washington Post–or, here in Indiana, the Indianapolis Business Journal. At the very least, you’ll be ensuring that they see something other than Rightwing media misinformation.

If you have the time and can join an activist organization, that would be great, but if large numbers of people just did these three things, it would change the dynamic of America’s upcoming election.

This is our (much safer) beach at Normandy. Storm it.

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Okay, Let’s Talk About Crime

I’ve forgotten the name of the old-time pundit who first summed up the biggest problem we humans face, but Mark Twain is often credited with a variation of it. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

That observation has never been more apt. In this, our age of the Internet, it’s the things Americans “know” that just aren’t so that have given us our polarized, fraught politics. Think of the things so many Americans wrongly think they know: the 2020 election was stolen, climate change is a hoax, vaccines cause autism and don’t ward off disease, President Biden can control the prosecutor and jury in a state-level trial, the economy is in recession …the list goes on.

Here in Indiana, anyone unfortunate enough to have weathered the vicious and fact-free food fight that was the Republican primary contest for Governor heard increasingly ridiculous claims about crime in the United States. (I’m surprised that anyone listening to–and actually believing–those claims had the courage to leave their homes.)

It really isn’t easy to be and remain this uninformed, but quite obviously, lots of folks manage to believe what they want to believe, easily ascertainable facts be damned.

I recently came across some data on crime, and those facts tell a rather different story than the one being peddled by the GOP.

Despite false claims by Donald Trump that crime has increased under President Joe Biden, PolitiFact confirms that in 2022, the violent crime rate neared a 50-year low.

That’s not all. Preliminary statistics for 2023 indicate the lowest levels of violent crime ever recorded, dropping below previous records in 2014 and 2019. And that’s still not all, because right now it appears that 2024 is still trending down…

There are fewer violent crimes now than there were in 1971 under Richard Nixon, despite a population that has increased by over 100 million people. Today we are experiencing not simply fewer crimes per person, but fewer crimes overall. According to FBI statistics, there were over 5 million fewer violent crimes in the United States last year than in the final full year of Ronald Reagan’s “tough on crime” administration.

After peaking in 1991 under George H. W. Bush, violent crime has been slowly declining year over year. There have been a few exceptions: Some categories of violent crime, including murder, were up in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic. Even then, those numbers didn’t come close to the levels seen in the 1980s or 1990s.

The numbers in the quoted article–together with their links to official sources of the data– directly contradict one of the GOP’s major talking points. That was the barely veiled racist claim made in virtually all of those nasty commercials, the claim that it is immigrants who are generating this invented “crime wave.” (“Be very afraid of those Brown people”…)

Since the statistics show that crime is actually going down, Trump has also jumped in with a false attack on FBI crime statistics, adding “fake numbers” to the list of things he can dismiss when they don’t fit his narrative. Fox News has also been leading the charge to undercut the truth by pushing an evidence-free claim from a recently formed right-wing group insisting that America has suddenly developed an issue with counting crimes.

Well, when the evidence fails to support one’s preferred world-view, I guess the only thing you can do is attack the veracity of the evidence. Or–as the linked article suggests–revise your definition of what constitutes a crime.

Only 18% of Republicans admit that Jan. 6 insurrectionists were violent and 45% believe punishment of those who fought with police, smashed their way into the Capitol, and tried to capture members of Congress has been too harsh. An eyebrow-raising 86% of Republicans don’t hold Trump to blame for any of it. But then 85% of Republicans don’t believe Trump should be prosecuted for any of the crimes he’s been charged with so far. It turns out Republicans are soft on crime—so long as it’s Republican crime.

I guess if a Republican does it, it isn’t a crime.

Also, the increasing incidents of violent weather aren’t evidence of climate change, the stock market hasn’t recently reached unprecedented highs, unemployment isn’t at a 50-year low…

As that old saying goes, it isn’t not knowing (and knowing that we don’t know) that gets us into trouble–it’s knowing things that “just ain’t so.”

Give these partisan ideologues credit. It isn’t easy avoiding fact-based reporting in order to double down on those preferred “alternative facts.” Of course, listening only to Faux News helps….

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The Protests, The War

This will be a somewhat longer post than usual, and it has been an extraordinarily difficult one to write.

As a retired faculty member of Indiana University, and a former Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, I have been appalled by IU’s over-the-top response to the student protests on the Bloomington campus. The late-night change of a 55-year-old policy, the decision to invite a police presence, the horrifying confirmation that a sniper was positioned on a nearby roof–all of this in response to what observers described as a peaceful protest–is incomprehensible.

Other institutions of higher education have similarly over-reacted–but still others have not. At Dartmouth, Jewish and Middle-Eastern professors have co-taught a class exploring the conflict and its history; at the University of Chicago, where my granddaughter is a sophomore, the University has issued a statement reaffirming students’ right to protest while making it clear that demonstrations “cannot jeopardize safety or disrupt the University’s operations and the ability of people in the University to carry out their work.”

You don’t have to agree with the message being conveyed in order to support the right to protest. In the immortal words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, freedom of speech is meaningless unless it is also “freedom for the idea we hate.”

I have refrained from posting my own concerns about the conduct of a war that has divided America’s Jewish community as much as it has the broader polity. But Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo recently shared his reactions, and I share them. (Marshall is Jewish). He begins his essay by noting that much of the anti-Semitism being voiced has come–at least at Columbia–from non-students on the periphery of the protests. He also points to the naiveté of students calling for the elimination of the State of Israel, attributing the slogans to “the kind of revolutionary cosplay that is often part and parcel of college activism.”

Is this anti-Semitic? Not as such. It’s a political view that the Israeli state never should have come into existence in the first place and that the events of 1948 should simply be reversed by force, if a solution can’t be voluntarily agreed to. But since a bit over half of Jews in the world live in Israel, that is a demand or an aim that can’t help but seem wildly threatening to the vast majority of Jews in the world, certainly the ones in Israel but by no means only them.

Marshall discusses the decades-long administrative changes in institutions of higher education that have made so many universities ill-equipped to deal properly with this particular moment, and then he turns to the war itself.

If it is true that the groups spearheading the protest expressly hold eliminationist goals and beliefs about Israel, it is just as clearly true that the real energy of these protests isn’t about 1948 or even 1967 — they are about what people have been seeing on their TVs for the last six months. And that is a vast military onslaught that has leveled numerous neighborhoods throughout Gaza, led to the substantial physical destruction of much whole strip and lead to the deaths of more than 30,000 people. That’s horrifying. And people know that the U.S. has played a role in it. It’s not at all surprising that lots and lots of students are wildly up in arms about that and want to protest to make it stop.

To me, you can’t really understand the situation without recognizing that Hamas started this engagement by launching a massacre of almost unimaginable scale and brutality and then retreated to what has always been its key strategic defense in Gaza, which is intentionally placing their military infrastructure in and under civilian areas so that the price of attacking them militarily is mass civilian casualties that are then mobilized internationally to curtail Israeli military attacks on Hamas.

This is unquestionably true and no one can honestly deny that this is Hamas’s central strategic concept: employing civilian shields to limit Israel’s ability to engage Hamas in military terms.

But that being true doesn’t make tens of thousands of people less dead. And most of the dead aren’t Hamas. So if you’re a student you say — along with quite a few non-students in the U.S. — all that stuff may be true, but what I’m seeing is the ongoing slaughter of thousands of innocents and I absolutely need that to stop, especially if it is being carried out directly or indirectly with arms my tax dollars bought….

The last six months has thrown me very hard back on to defending the existence of Israel, its historical connections to Jews in Europe and the Middle East before the 20th century, its origins as the political expression of a people who are in fact indigenous to Israel-Palestine. And that’s because all of these things are now questioned and attacked as core questions.

But the reality is that these conversations, often harrowing and angry, are simply diversions from anything that creates a path forward from the terrible present. There are two national communities deeply embedded in the land. Neither is going anywhere even though there are substantial proportions of both communities who want that to happen to the other one. There’s no way to build something sustainable and dignified without both peoples having a state in which they have self-determination and citizenship. That’s the only plausible endpoint where violence doesn’t remain an ever-present reality. How you get there is another story. And yes, if you think one unified state makes sense, God bless you. If you can get majorities of both groups to agree to that, fine. I don’t live there. If that’s what they want, great. That’s almost certainly never going to be the case. And it’s a failed state in the making.

But none of these arguments about 1948 or 1967 or indigeneity or “settler colonialism” really impact or have anything to do with getting to some two state/partition end point. And no I’m not saying for a moment that that will be easy to get to. It seems terribly far off. But fantasies and alternative histories won’t get us there.

I am older than Marshall–old enough to remember my mother sobbing while reading “The Black Book” after the end of WWII–a compendium of reporting on Nazi atrocities. I remember the little blue box she kept, in which she collected dimes and quarters to plant trees in Israel, and I remember the fervent hopes of family members for the establishment of a place where Jews would be safe. Back then, none of us could have conceived of an Israeli government dominated by a Bibi Netanyahu, whose twenty years of shameful policies toward Palestinians have actually strengthened the Hamas terrorists, not to mention being utterly inconsistent with Jewish law, culture and tradition.

On this blog, I often repeat the mantra “it’s complicated.” And the situation in the Middle East is nothing if not complicated. Nothing–not history, not Netanyahu’s behavior before or since–justifies the barbarity of October 7th. That said, neither does that barbarity justify the horrors that have been unleashed on the Palestinian civilians in Gaza–just as shameful incidents of anti-Semitism on the nation’s campuses do not justify wholesale assaults on peaceful protesters.

A final reminder: the Christian Zionists in and out of Congress who support anything and everything that Israel does are motivated by their belief in the prophecy that all Jews must be “returned” to Israel in order to usher in the Rapture. Jews who accept Jesus will be “Raptured up,” while the rest of us will burn in hell. Unconditional support for Israel is necessary to bring that about–such support is most definitely not evidence of loving-kindness for the Jewish people.

At the end of the day, I keep thinking about that plaintive question from Rodney King, after he’d been beaten by officers of the LAPD: “Why can’t we all just get along?”

If only I had an answer to that…..

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P.S.

After I wrote yesterday’s post about White Rural Rage, I re-read my description of the Niskanen Center’s far more careful 2019 analysis, and decided that it bears re-posting. So here it is:

The Density Divide is the title of a very important paper issued in June by Will Wilkinson, Vice President for Research of the Niskanen Center. It looks in depth at the phenomenon that I usually refer to as the “urban/rural divide”–delving into the attributes that make individuals more or less likely to move into cities, and examining the consequences of those differences and the steady urbanization of the American polity.

The paper is lengthy–some 70 pages–but well worth the time to read in its entirety. It is meticulously sourced, and replete with graphs and other supporting data.

Wilkinson confirms what others have reported: a substantial majority of Americans now dwell in the nation’s cities and generate the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth. But he goes beneath those numbers, referencing a body of research demonstrating that people who are drawn to urban environments differ in significant ways from those who prefer to remain in rural precincts. He focuses especially on ethnicity, personality and education as attributes that make individuals more or less responsive to the lure of city life.

He goes on to describe how this “self-selected” migration has segregated Americans. It has not only concentrated economic production in a handful of “megacities”–it has driven a “polarizing wedge” between America’s dense and diverse urban populations and the sparse White populations remaining in rural areas. That “wedge” is what he dubs the “Density Divide.” (Wilkinson is careful to define “urban” to include dense areas of small towns–the divisions he traces aren’t a function of jurisdictional city limits. They are a function of residential density.)

Wilkinson finds that the “sorting mechanism of urbanization” has produced a rural America that is lower-density, predominantly White, and “increasingly uniform in socially conservative personality, aversion to diversity, relative disinclination to migrate and seek higher education, and Republican Party loyalty.”

That sorting has also left much of rural America in economic distress, which has activated a “zero-sum, ethnocentric mindset.” (That mindset is reflected in the angry rhetoric spouted by rural MAGA hat wearers about “un-American” immigrants and minorities, and disdain for “liberal elites”–all groups that are thought to reside in those multi-cultural cities.)

The density divide–together with America’s outdated electoral structures– explains the 2016 election. The “low-density bias” of our electoral system allowed Trump to win the Presidency by prevailing in areas that produce 1/3 of GDP and contain fewer than half of the population. That low-density bias continues to empower Republicans far out of proportion to their numbers.

Wilkinson reminds us that there are currently no Republican cities. None.

As he points out, the increase in return to human capital and density has acted to amplify the polarizing nature of selective urbanization. Temperamentally liberal people self-select into higher education and big cities, where the people they encounter exert a further influence on their political attitudes. They leave behind a lower-density population that is “relatively uniform in white ethnicity, conservative disposition and lower economic productivity.” Economic growth has been shown to liberalize culture; stagnant or declining economic prospects generate a sense of anxiety and threat. (In that sense, the political scientists who attributed Trump votes to economic distress were correct, but the distress wasn’t a function of individual financial straits–it was a reaction to the steadily declining prospects of rural environments.)

Wilkinson argues that there are no red states or blue states–not even red or blue counties. Rather, there is compact blue urban density (even in small cities in rural states) and sprawling red sparseness.

This spatial segregation of people with very different values and world-views is radicalizing; Wilkinson reminds us that a lack of exposure to intellectual diversity and broadly different points of view breeds extremism. Because urban populations are far more intellectually diverse, more homogeneous rural populations have shifted much farther to the right than urban Americans have shifted left.

The United States population is projected to be 90% urbanized by 2050–not too many years after we are projected to become “majority-minority.” Those projections suggest we will see increasing radicalization of already-resentful rural inhabitants.

The prospects for returning to rational politics and a truly representative governance will depend entirely upon reforming an outdated and pernicious electoral framework that dramatically favors rural Americans. Whether those reforms can pass our very unrepresentative Senate is an open question.

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About That Plan…

An increasing number of media outlets are reporting on Project 2025–a plan by the Heritage Foundation together with other right-wing organizations intended to be a road map for a second Trump presidency.

Pundits have noted Project 2025’s similarity to Victor Orbán’s “illiberal” democracy in Hungary, where Orban has gutted the civil service and filled government positions with loyalists who support his attacks on immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ+ community, and his efforts to distance Hungary from other NATO nations. Orban’s recent trip to Mar-A-Lago was followed by a less-publicized meeting at Heritage.

So–what is in the Project 2025 plan for a second Trump Administration? Heather Cox Richardson recently spelled it out:

Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace. In their vision, the U.S. must “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “[d]efend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and “[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”

In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means making “family authority, formation, and cohesion” a top priority and using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is “pornography” and must be banned.

The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end “is just the beginning.”

Dismantling the administrative state in this document starts from the premise that “people are policy.” Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce—about 2 million people work for the U.S. government—and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism describes Project 2025 as a significant threat to democracy. Spearheaded by Heritage and supported by more than 80 extremist organizations, the plan aims to “rescue the country from elite rule and woke cultural warriors.” The Global Project notes reports of internal discussions centered around a proposal that the next “conservative” President invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, in order to allow use of the military to quell civil unrest.

Project 2025 plans what it calls a “robust governing agenda,” with all of the hallmarks of authoritarianism.

It threatens Americans’ civil and human rights and our very democracy. The America that Project 2025 wants to create would involve a fundamental reordering of our society. It would greatly enhance the executive branch’s powers and impose on all Americans policies favored by Christian nationalists regarding issues such as sexual health and reproductive rights, education, the family, and the role of religion in our society and government. It would strip rights protections from LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, women, and people of color. It would dismantle much of the federal government and replace our apolitical civil service with far-right partisans it is already training in anticipation of a power shift. It would end attempts to enhance equity and racial justice throughout the government and shut down agencies that track progress on this front. Efforts to tackle issues such as climate change would be ended, and politicized research produced to back the project’s views on environmental policy, the evils of “transgenderism,” and women’s health would take priority.

There is more, obviously, in a thousand-page document, and it’s all very chilling, but what strikes me is how explicit and professional it is.

Project 2025 represents a very troubling step up from the tracts and manifestos produced by the disaffected and generally disturbed members of militias and groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. This is a professional document, produced and endorsed by people and organizations that already wield considerable power and influence–extremists who have already massively infiltrated the courts, completely taken over of one of America’s major political parties, and who “own” numerous lawmakers in Congress and in a number of states. Those “fellow travelers” are easily identifiable: we need only look at the GOP Representatives who oppose aid to Ukraine, attack trans children, and advocate for a national abortion ban. (Here in Indiana, that includes far-Right Congressman Jim Banks, currently running for the Senate, among others.)

The fact that Heritage felt free to put it in writing tells us the takeover is well underway. That should terrify us all…..

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