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The Older I Get, the Less I Understand….

Final week is over, grades are in, and I’ve had more time to read the news. That’s obviously a mixed blessing.

There are so many things I just don’t understand.

There’s a toaster that embosses the face of Jesus on each piece of bread as it toasts. It is evidently selling briskly.

There’s Newt Gingrich.

And then there’s the House GOP. Even the Senate GOP is scratching its collective head over them. After the Senate passed one of the few genuinely bipartisan measures that has emerged this year, extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax reduction for two more months, the House Republicans are refusing to go along. No coherent reason why has yet emerged, although John Boehner has seemed particularly teary.

Think about this: Christmas is coming. So the House GOP wants to raise taxes on America’s dwindling middle class and its working poor, while continuing to insist that the historically low taxes on the rich cannot move up an inch. Ignore, for the moment, the moral poverty and economic danger of that position. Think about the political obtuseness of the message they’re sending.

Even they must recognize that this is not the way to popular acclaim. The New York Times reported this morning that “rather than have a straight up-or-down vote, the House will implement a procedural maneuver in which they will “reject” the Senate bill while requesting to go to conference with members of that chamber in a single measure, protecting House members from having to actually vote against extending a payroll tax cut. During the conference meeting among Republican members, some members expressed concern about effectively voting for a tax increase on the eve of an election year, said some who attended.”

Ya think?

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Luck of the Draw

A friend of mine used to have a saying to the effect that he’d rather be lucky than smart. While I think President Obama is pretty darn smart, if current trends continue, he may also prove to be very, very lucky.

Conventional wisdom–which is conventional because it tends to be right fairly often–is that Presidents presiding over poor economies have a hard time getting re-elected. Ordinarily, then, even a President who didn’t have a lot of people who already hated him for the color of his skin would be in trouble in 2012. But the Republicans, bless them, are helping him out.

The GOP field–filled with embarrassingly retrograde candidates–is one thing. These are mostly people who would have trouble running for City Council in normal times, and they have even some reliable Republican voters wincing. Those voters may not switch in November–but they also may not vote.

But if Obama is REALLY lucky, here’s the scenario: Gingrich wins the nomination, and Ron Paul runs as an independent. As conservative columnist Kathleen Parker has pointed out, no one thinks Gingrich can win the general election. He’s an unstable megalomaniac, without the discipline to run a sustained campaign. And Ron Paul–who will not run again for his House seat–has sent signals that suggest he’s contemplating a third-party run. He’s done it before, and he has the donors and volunteers to sustain such a candidacy. None other but George Will speculated that Paul would pull 80% of his votes from the eventual GOP candidate.

Paul could be a spoiler if the candidate is Mitt. If the candidate is Gingrich, Obama will have quite a mandate.

Hard to believe that anyone could be THAT lucky, but you never know.

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Reich Hits the Nail on the Head

I don’t always agree with Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, but in this post, he hits the proverbial nail squarely on the head.

What contemporary Republicans are selling is reheated and reconstituted Social Darwinism. (And just for the record, Darwin never used the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Herbert Spencer coined it; Sumner used it.) Social Darwinists twisted Darwin’s theory of evolution to justify wide disparities of wealth and well-being, melding it with a superficial Calvinism to conclude that those who prospered did so because they were a talented and hardworking elect, and those who were poor suffered because they were morally defective.

Not that they put it that way. Instead, the rich were lauded as creative entrepreneurs, while the poor were scorned for lack of diligence and work ethic. In effect, they were told to “take a bath and get a job.”

Sound familiar?

Read Reich’s post. 

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It’s All About the Framing

A recent report in Salon quotes Frank Luntz as being “very scared” of Occupy Wall Street. Luntz, for those who don’t know, is the GOP “messaging” genius who came up with terms like “death tax” to rebrand the estate tax, and who urges Republicans to abandon use of the word capitalism in favor of terms like “economic freedom.” His concern about OWS is obvious: the movement threatens to re-frame the debate–to shift the focus to the undeniable hardships created by lax regulation coupled with unbridled greed.

As George Lakoff demonstrated in “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” framing is a powerful tool. We all have mental “frames,” culturally transmitted worldviews that act as lenses through which we view reality. Those of us who teach try to expand those mental paradigms, enlarge the lens, so that students can see and consider facts they might not otherwise encounter. Understood as an inevitable consequence of human socialization, the act of framing is descriptive of our mental processes–and morally neutral.

What isn’t morally neutral is the use of framing to distort reality, to push people’s “buttons,” to obscure relevant information and harden, rather than relax, our worldviews. The hired guns who do this for the political parties are not concerned with reality–they are concerned with winning. So social programs become “giveaways,” feminists are always “strident,” and concerns about social justice are “socialism.”

I think it was Tallyrand who said that “words are given to man to conceal his thoughts.”  The ability to name things is an essential tool of communication. The ability to mis-name things is a weapon employed by the amoral.

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Polite Company

Remember the old saying to the effect that one shouldn’t discuss religion or politics in polite company? Last night, I think I observed a slightly different version, to wit: people with wildly different political orientations can be perfectly pleasant to each other if they avoid discussing specific policies.

I realize this isn’t exactly practical as a prescription for civic argumentation, but hey–it’s a start.

Last night, an undergraduate class at SPEA–under the direction of Professor John Clark–presented a community discussion on the topic “Distrust in Government.” The students did all the work–conceived the program, invited the participants, found the venue and promoted the event. They did a great job, and despite the really awful weather, the Lilly Auditorium at IUPUI’s library was approximately two-thirds full.

The first panel was particularly interesting: it included a representative of the local Tea Party, a long-time chair of the Indiana Libertarian party, and a member (she declined to be identified as a “representative”) of the Indiana Occupy Wall Street movement. All three were pleasant, civil to the others, and in agreement that government is broken. The Tea Party representative began by assuring the audience that “we’re nicer than people think.” He quoted the Founding Fathers and portions of the Constitution (much as Biblical literalists quote the Bible, without dwelling on questions about how those texts should apply in a complex contemporary society), and urged the students to become involved. Hard to argue with that.

The Libertarian was easily the best speaker and clearly the most nuanced thinker of the three. He was funny and he was also realistic about the prospects that face third parties.

The woman from OWS seemed bright, but exhibited what has widely been seen as a central weakness of the movement–when an audience member asked her what it is that the OWS movement is trying to achieve, she responded that different members want different things, and she explicitly rejected the idea of what she termed “hierarchy” and what some of us might call organization.

What all of the panelists expressed, in one way or another, was frustration–with politics, with the role of money in politics, with the fecklessness or overreaching of government, or both.

It was an entirely civil discussion, because it focused upon a theme all three could endorse–we need to fix our government so that we can trust it again. Had the question been “how should we fix it?” my guess is that the civility would have been harder to sustain. But it was a start.

Kudos to Dr. Clark and his students. We need more venues for such discussions–even for more heated ones.

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