Some Arguments Just Go On And On…

Back in the day, when I served in the Hudnut Administration, I marvelled at the persistence of some issues. The city battled over drainage, for example, year in and year out. And while the particulars have changed, Hoosiers–and all Americans–have engaged in pitched battles over education policies as long as I can remember. Can children be required to pray in the classroom? Is racial segregation constitutional? Can universities engage in affirmative efforts to diversify their student bodies?

What about privatization–aka “school choice”?

Many of these issues have more in common than appears at first glance. “School choice” programs, for example, especially appeal to parents who want their children ensconced in classrooms occupied primarily by others who look and pray like them.

I have frequently posted about the importance of public schools and the damage done to those schools and to civic cohesion by Indiana’s costly voucher program. That damage is one reason among many to vote for gubernatorial candidate Jennifer McCormick, our former Superintendent of Public Instruction, and not Mike Braun, who wants to make Indiana’s vouchers universal. 

We now have enough experience with vouchers to assess the original claims made for privatizing our schools.

We know, for example, that vouchers don’t improve educational outcomes, that they are used primarily by wealthier families, that they increase racial segregation, and that they are particularly harmful to public schools in rural areas that lack sufficient population to support private competitors. There has been less attention focused on the educational deficits of a large number of participating private schools, although we do know that many religious academies substitute creationism for science and deliberately whitewash American history.

A few years ago, a colleague and I wondered how many of Indiana’s voucher schools taught civics. Did they teach about America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights? About democracy? The structure of government? Was civics instruction a condition of their receipt of public money? After all, the civic mission of public schools is central to their importance.

The (depressing) academic article reporting our research is here. Here’s the abstract:

America’s public schools have not been exempt from the enthusiasm for “privatization” and contracting-out that has characterized government innovations over at least the past quarter century. A number of the issues raised by school voucher programs and to a lesser extent charter schools mirror the management and efficacy questions raised by privatization generally; however, because public education is often said to be “constitutive of the public,” using tax dollars to send the nation’s children to private schools implicates the distinctive role of public education in a democratic society in ways that more traditional contracting arrangements do not. We explore the unique role of primary and secondary public schools in forging a broad consensus about the nature and importance of America’s constitutional ethic, and growing concerns that vouchers, in particular, are failing to address, let alone facilitate, an ethic of citizenship.

As we noted, arguments about providing educational competition ignore both the civic mission of education and the multiple ways in which education differs from ordinary consumer goods.

The civic mission of public schools includes the teaching of America’s history and the transmittal of the country’s core constitutional values, what I call the “Constitutional ethic.” A sound and accurate civics education provides students with an understanding of the genesis and evolution of the rules that shape and constrain public service in the United States.  The public mission of the schools requires teaching students about this country’s approach to and experience with the principles of democratic self-governance. As we wrote,

When citizens lack a common understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of America’s approach to governance and fail to form an ethical commitment to those common undertakings, a diverse polity inevitably fragments into tribal components contending for power and influence.

Indiana has very good standards specifying what our public schools must teach. As we discovered, however, oversight of the private–overwhelmingly religious–schools receiving vouchers runs from minimal to non-existent. As a result, the past few years have seen several scandals, including “virtual” schools that falsified enrollments, defrauding the state of millions of dollars.

There has been little to no research investigating the impact of voucher programs on civic knowledge and cohesion. There are no standards or procedures for assessing whether individual schools are even trying to create knowledgable, responsible American citizens.

It’s telling that Mike Braun’s pitch for a universal voucher program is “parental choice”–not educational outcomes and certainly not fiscal prudence. 

Early voting in Indiana starts today. I will cast my early vote for Jennifer McCormick, who understands that reproductive choice is good, and educational “choice”–aka vouchers–isn’t.

Join me.

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Do Republicans Hate Cities, Or Just Those Who Inhabit Them?

My husband and I live in the downtown core of Indianapolis, having downsized from a previous home in a nearby historic district. We are urban folks who love being able to walk to the grocery, the dentist, the bank and multiple restaurants and bars.

A recent report from Indianapolis Downtown suggests we’re not alone–our downtown’s residential population has grown nearly 50% since 2010, to almost 30,000, more than 50 new businesses have opened since last year, and $9.5 billion in development is in the works. Despite the fears and misconceptions of suburban and rural folks, crime downtown decreased 34% in the past year, and downtown is the safest district in Marion County. We were only 5% of all crime in the county.

Obviously, not everyone shares our love for urban living, and that’s fine–to each his own. What isn’t fine is the current Republican war on cities and those of us who choose to live in them.

Donald Trump portrays city neighborhoods as feral places, deranged by Democrats. “The crime is so out of control in our country,” Trump charged at a Michigan campaign stop during the recent Democratic National Convention. “The top 25 [cities] almost all are run by Democrats and they have very similar policies. It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped. … We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in America.”

This is, of course, a ludicrous caricature, as numerous bread-fetching city dwellers could attest. Yet to understand the significance of this seething anti-cities rhetoric — both its political potency and the unique opportunity it presents for Democrats — requires a brief look at a deep-seated tension in how conservatives have talked about urban areas across recent decades.

The article noted that the GOP conservative wing has run against cities for years, with an animus rooted in nativism and religion. Initially, they appealed to Protestant voters by attacking heavily Catholic cities as sites of “popery, demon rum, and corrupt Irish politicians.” Later, Nixon appealed to white voters by focusing on urban crime and civil uprisings.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, leading conservative politicians and intellectuals modified Nixon’s rhetoric, adding elements aimed at corralling new urban and urban-adjacent Republican voters. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan explicitly placed the social functions played by local neighborhoods at the heart of his urban commentary. Tender odes to the beauties of the human-scale city neighborhood — paired with condemnation of government programs for undermining community self-help capacities — infused national GOP communications output. Crucially, this often lent the party’s outreach efforts a pro-urban veneer. Propelled partly by this neighborhoods appeal, Reagan attracted key support from traditionally Democratic “white-ethnic” inhabitants of older city and suburban areas.

Donald Trump and MAGA have returned to the earlier portrayal of urban areas as dangerous hellholes that endanger an  “American Dream” anchored in (White) suburban and rural America.

The central metaphor Trump uses when talking about cities is “war.” Normally, war occurs between sovereign nations. For Trump, however, the war is within our nation. War requires two sides that are clearly differentiated and physically distinct. For Trump, the two sides are cities and suburbs. In the cities, as Trump tells it, you will find one of America’s enemies: foreigners who presumably look different from native-born Americans. They have infiltrated urban neighborhoods, in his telling, fueling a conflict between alien cities and native suburbs.

This rhetoric depends on racism and xenophobia for its effectiveness. For that matter, Trump’s entire appeal–and MAGA’s philosophy (if one can call fear and hatred a philosophy)– is firmly rooted in racism.

Trump uses terms such as “living hell,” “total decay,” “violent mayhem,” and “a disaster” to describe cities. Cities are foreign outposts within American society. In this view, the hordes of “illegal aliens” invading the southern border have taken over city neighborhoods.

These attacks aren’t simply wildly inaccurate and hateful, they are evidence of MAGA’s pathological racism.

A few days ago, I suggested that Americans are engaged in a “cold” Civil War, and that it is being fought over essentially the same issue as the last one–whether people who aren’t White Christian males are entitled to be seen as human beings who deserve equal civic status with the White guys. The rhetoric employed by Trump–and increasingly by other Republicans–underscores that observation. 

A vote for Trump and those who support him is a vote to return to the Confederacy. I hope Harris is right when she says “we’re not going back”

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We Need More Of This

Anyone remember Howard Dean and his fifty-state plan? Dean was a 2004 presidential candidate, and is remembered primarily for his insistence that Democrats should run candidates everywhere–that failing to mount campaigns even in heavily gerrymandered districts that were sure losers was a strategic error.

I agreed with Dean then, and I’m even more convinced of the wisdom of his advice now. As I’ve repeatedly noted, gerrymandering is a vote suppression tactic. Failure to even offer an alternative candidate is participation in that suppression.

For a long time, most voters remained unaware of the effects of gerrymandering (for that matter, most voters remain unaware of the extent to which America’s obsolete electoral systems subvert democracy). Raising that awareness is the first step toward countering and correcting those systems, so I was encouraged to read about a campaign in North Carolina recently profiled in the Washington Post.

The article was titled “She’s running with all she’s got for a seat she can’t win. That’s the point.”

Kate Barr is a blur of activity on the campaign trail this fall. She’s a fixture at local Democratic events, delivering fiery stump speeches. In her neighborhood here in the North Carolina Piedmont, many lawns display her Barbie-pink yard signs. She has branded T-shirts and sweatshirts and glittery stickers.

Wherever she appears, her opening salvo is always the same: “Hi. I’m Kate Barr. And I’m your losing candidate for state Senate District 37.”

Barr’s campaign is making a serious point: aggressive gerrymandering erases competitive elections and leaves voters without a real choice. North Carolina is a competitive state. It has a Democratic governor. But thanks to gerrymandering, it has a Republican super-majority in its legislature. (This will sound familiar to Indiana voters…) During the last round of redistricting, the legislature redrew Barr’s previous district, marrying the suburban area she lived in with a reliably rural, Red district. (Again, Indiana residents can relate…)

Davidson went from being part of a district centered in Mecklenburg County — where Donald Trump lost by 35 percentage points in 2020 — to being part of Iredell, which he won by about the same amount.

“Why am I losing?” Barr asked, warming up the crowd at a community center in her district ahead of a campaign appearance by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein one recent day. “In a gerrymandered state like North Carolina, it means representatives are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives.”

The article concedes that Barr’s decision to build her entire campaign around certain defeat is “unconventional,” noting that–among other things–she sells a “LOSER” T-shirt on her campaign website. But it also notes that–shades of Howard Dean!– “the strategy of running Democrats in districts in which they are sure to be beaten has spread across the country after decades of ceding state legislative races to Republicans.”

Both parties draw district lines to their partisan advantage — a tactic known as gerrymandering. But about twice as many state legislatures overly favor Republicans compared with Democrats, according to a 2023 study by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Running “sure loser” candidates and giving the “sure loser” voters a reason to come to the polls has been shown to improve the performance of the top of the ticket. It makes the majority party spend time and money they wouldn’t otherwise have to spend. And if focuses on a result of gerrymandering that has been aptly called “a highway to extremism.” That’s because gerrymandering acts to magnify a state’s partisan advantage.

The effect has been on particularly vivid display in some red states in recent years as legislators who have little to fear from a general election pass laws that are to the right of what their voters might support, experts say. Reproductive rights restrictions, school book bans and voting limitations have gone largely unchecked at the ballot box. Meanwhile, policies with wide support, like certain anti-gun violence laws, have gone nowhere.

You can see that extremism in Barr’s sure-to-win opponent.

Barr’s opponent, incumbent state senator Vickie Sawyer, who ran unopposed in 2022, has supported policies such as North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban — which was enacted after the legislature overrode the governor’s veto — and constraints on discussing sexual orientation in elementary schools. At a recent forum on aging, Sawyer brought up unprompted her support for a bill that would require sheriffs to detain undocumented immigrants who have been charged with a crime, even if they have made bail — “so they can’t kill our children,” she said.

Sawyer sounds a lot like the culture warriors in Indiana’s legislature.

The good news for Hoosiers is that statewide candidates can’t be gerrymandered. The current GOP statewide candidates are  worse than Sawyer, but they can–and must– be defeated.

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Question And Answer

In a recent column for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson asks THE question: how on earth is this election close?

The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.

Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.

This is the conundrum that drives most rational people crazy. Even without January 6th, 32 felonies, multiple sexual assaults and the horrified testimonies of people who worked in Trump’s administration, who listens to the childish rants of a mentally-disturbed man with a third-grade vocabulary and thinks, “Yep, that’s the guy who should have charge of the nuclear codes.”? Who wants this ignorant name-calling bully to be a role model for America’s children?

How can this election possibly be close?

Robinson suggests some possibilities. First, Kamala Harris is a woman, and many Americans harbor a deep-seated misogyny. He notes that Trump desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race–and that Trump and Vance  “are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.”

Another reason might be that the 71 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 are loathe to admit that they backed a loser, let alone an embarrassing buffoon utterly unfit for office. (Large numbers of these voters, after all, still believe the “Big Lie.”)

And Robinson notes that Trump does best among uneducated Whites–the demographic most responsive to his vicious demagoguery on immigration — “the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example.” He constantly tells working-class Whites that immigration is a threat to their jobs and communities. As Robinson says, those tribal appeals aren’t likely to win over many new voters, but will likely motivate turnout of his base.

Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.

I have wrestled with the question Robinson poses, and I consistently return to one answer: the “through” line in Robinson’s analysis is bigotry. Racism. A yearning for patriarchy. A simmering hatred of the Other.

Robinson identifies anti-woman, anti-immigrant strands of what we have come to identify as White Supremacy or White Christian Nationalism, but–at least in this essay– he fails to connect the dots, fails to call out the intense White grievance that lies at the heart of the MAGA movement.

When Trump won (barely–and only in the antiquated Electoral College), a number of pundits attributed economic motives to his voters. Research has soundly debunked that assumption; numerous studies confirm the association of “racial resentment” with support for Trump and MAGA. I have previously quoted my youngest son’s observation that there are two kinds of people who vote for Trump–and only two kinds–those who share his racism, and those for whom his racism isn’t disqualifying.

Beginning with that first campaign, Trump jettisoned “dog whistles” in favor of explicitly hateful, racist rhetoric. He asserted that there are “very fine people” who chant “Jews shall not replace us.” He tried to keep Muslims from coming into the country. He said Black immigrants came from “shithole” countries (unlike those nice White folks from Norway…) His supporters want to roll back gay rights, and they persistently wage war on trans children.

This election isn’t about the economy, or national security, or other policies. It’s about culture war.

His MAGA supporters agree with the only clear message Trump has delivered: making America great again requires taking America back to a time when White Christian heterosexual males were in charge, and the rest of us were second class citizens.

This election is close because too many voters share that worldview. The rest of us had better turn out.

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The Indiana Retention Vote

The other day, a reader asked me what I thought of a current effort to deny retention to three members of Indiana’s Supreme Court– judges who had voted to uphold Indiana’s abortion ban. As I told that reader, voting no on a retention vote because of disagreement with one ruling would set a very dangerous precedent.

I subsequently spoke with several practicing lawyers, including a good friend who is a highly respected trial lawyer, an active member of the local bar, and personally pro-choice. He suggested that I share the following information with my readers.

First of all, the process. For fifty years, Indiana has had a merit selection process to identify and appoint members of Indiana’s Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. Once candidates who have been found to be highly qualified are appointed, they submit to a statewide retention vote within two years. Thereafter, they are submitted for a retention vote every 10 years.

This year, Chief Justice Loretta Rush, Justice Mark Massa, and Justice Derek Molter are up for retention to the Supreme Court. None of them is known as “liberal” or “conservative” or partisan. The organized opposition to their retention is based upon their ruling on a challenge to Senate Bill 1, the abortion ban passed by Indiana’s regressive legislature in the wake of the Dobbs decision. Indiana’s ban broadly prohibited abortion but made exceptions for 1) when an abortion is necessary either to save a woman’s life or to prevent a serious health risk; 2) when there is a lethal fetal anomaly; and 3) when pregnancy results from rape or incest.

We can argue about how those exceptions work–or don’t–in the real world, but they are written into the law.

Abortion providers sued to invalidate the law and to enjoin its enforcement. The lawsuit was what lawyers call a “facial challenge”–meaning that the providers had to prove that they had standing and that there were no circumstances under which the law could be upheld. The court found that the plaintiffs had standing to bring the case and that Article 1, Section 1 of the Indiana Constitution protects a woman’s right to an abortion that is necessary to protect her life or to protect her from a serious health risk.

At the same time, the majority found that the Indiana Legislature had the authority to prohibit abortions that didn’t fall within one of those three categories. It also recognized that, prior to Roe v. Wade, Indiana and forty other states had upheld legislative limitations on abortion.

Lawyers can agree or disagree with the majority’s interpretation. I do disagree– but it was a reasoned decision, far from the   historical dishonesty and religious ideology that permeated Dobbs.

As readers of this blog know, I strongly support abortion rights, and I disagree profoundly with the Dobbs decision. But the postcards that are being disseminated to the public accusing these three justices of voting to ‘strip away’ Hoosier women’s rights to abortion are misleading and unfair. The Justices are bound by precedent–and, unlike the U.S. Supreme Court– they followed their honest reading of that precedent.

As my lawyer friend reminded me, Indiana has one of the most respected supreme courts in America. Our justices serve in many capacities in national judicial organizations, and Chief Justice Rush has been president of the Conference of Chief Justices and Chair of the National Center for State Courts. Opinions of our supreme court are frequently cited in other state judicial opinions and scholarly articles and relied on by state and federal courts nationwide.

Typically, only 75-80% of those who go to the polls will bother to vote on judicial retention. Of that group, there’s a “hard core” of approximately 30% who always vote no. That means that an organized group opposing a judge or justice need only muster another 21% or so–and that’s why this effort is so dangerous. The retention of judges should be based upon their entire body of work and not upon a single opinion, even a questionable one.

I share the anger of people who oppose Indiana’s ban, but our animus should be directed at the legislature–not at a court that, rightly or wrongly, held that the legislature had authority to act.

If the effort to unseat these jurists succeeds, it will close the Indiana Supreme Court for several months, pending the selection of new justices. Worse still, if the Braun/Beckwith ticket wins (and this is deep-Red Indiana), Christian Nationalists will select the new Judges. I’m sure that Braun would be more than willing to subvert the merit process in order to elevate clones of Alito, et al. to Indiana’s top court.

Be careful what you wish for.

 

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