The Center Will Not Hold

I attended a conference on Media Reform last weekend, and came back pretty depressed. Although there were several thousand people in attendance who were determined to save journalism–not necessarily newspapers, or broadcast news, but the essential watchdog function that led our Founders to give Constitutional status to the press–it’s abundantly clear that right now, no one has a clue how to provide the public with the news democratic societies require.

In place of widely-read, credible news media serving the general public, we have “niche news” tailored to our personal prejudices and politics. Thanks to consolidation and corporate ownership focused on the bottom line to the exclusion of journalism’s social mission, we have more “human interest” and “self-help” stories and less real news; more “opinion” and less fact-checking. That we have ever-more dysfunctional government is not a coincidence.

In fact, America seems to be actively dismantling the institutions that create unum from our pluribus: those places in our society that knit individuals into a public.

I’ve written here often about our diminished constitutional literacy, and the likely consequences of that in a diverse country that depends for its very identity upon a common understanding of our form of government.

Add to that constitutional illiteracy the utterly ferocious attacks on public education we are experiencing. Whatever the defects in our public schools, they are and have been the institution that–as Benjamin Barber eloquently put it–is constitutive of a public. When we privatize education, we treat it as if it is a consumer good–skills we are “buying” so that our children can compete economically. But public education should be more than that; it should respect our diverse private identities while providing a common social umbrella.

When we no longer know our common history or political structure, when we no longer meet each other in public schools, when each of us gets our news from different sources operating out of different political and social realities, what will Americans have in common? What will make us a public?

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Political Fundamentalism

I had lunch today with a delightful young woman who, among other things, is active with the League of Women Voters. During our discussion, she remarked (rather plaintively) that she found it difficult to understand why the League was so often viewed as a “liberal” organization. “We don’t take positions until we have studied them carefully,” she said. “We gather evidence for two years, and assess it carefully, and base our position on that evidence.”

There you go! Basing positions on evidence is what is now considered liberal.

The conversation reminded me of an explanation from my book God and Country: America in Red and Blue. I was looking at the paradigm shift caused by the Enlightenment, and the profound effect that shift had on our Constitution.

When Francis Bacon insisted that laws governing the material world could be inferred through careful observation (a notion that, for contemporary Americans, is an unremarkable commonplace), it had enormous implications for the existing, traditional, deductive methods of understanding reality. The “old learning,” had begun with an a priori “given,” the bible, the absolute truth of which was unquestioned. The primary goal of Puritan education was thus directed at biblical understanding; one began with the text and learned—deduced—how to interpret it. Proper interpretation required the application of time-tested methods of exegesis and analysis, and instruction in historical context and meaning (mostly, what important theologians of the past had decreed to be correct understandings and approaches). One started with Truth, and education was the process of learning to apprehend and defend that Truth. Bacon changed the fundamental order of things by teaching that education must begin with observation of natural phenomena.

We are a country that was founded on a radical notion: evidence matters. Today, however, those of us for whom evidence still matters are dismissed as “liberals” by the political equivalents of the Puritans. Like those Puritans, our ideologues (of every stripe) begin with their “truth,” and look for evidence to support it and ways to impose it.

No wonder we find it so hard to communicate.

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Who Do They Work For?

Theoretically, members of Congress work for us–for “we the people.”

Whatever the theory, it’s clear that many of them think they work for those whose campaign contributions put them in office. To take just one recent example, ask yourself who would benefit from Paul Ryan’s much ballyhooed new budget proposal to replace Medicare with subsidies allowing the elderly to purchase insurance in the private marketplace? It doesn’t take a genius to answer that one: the beneficiaries of those subsidies would be the insurance industry.

I’m sure it is simply coincidental that insurers are among the most generous of campaign contributors.

As the Congressional Budget Office analysis pointed out,

A private health insurance plan covering the standardized benefit would be more expensive currently than traditional Medicare. Both administrative costs (including profits) and payment rates to providers are higher for private plans than for Medicare. Those higher costs would be offset partly but not fully by savings from lower utilization stemming from two sources. First, private health insurers would probably impose greater utilization management than occurs in Medicare. Second, private plans might restrict enrollees’ ability to purchase supplemental insurance plans; enrollees would thus face higher out-of-pocket costs than they do in Medicare, and that increased cost sharing would encourage lower utilization. On net, for a typical 65-year-old in 2011, CBO estimates that average spending in traditional Medicare will be 89 percent of (that is, 11 percent less than) the spending that would occur if that same package of benefits was purchased from a private insurer.

In other words, this plan would cost the government more money. To the extent there would be any “savings,” they would come from shifting costs to the individuals covered.  Protecting the disabled and elderly from those costs, of course, was the original purpose of Medicare. Essentially, this program would screw over the recipients and give a windfall to the insurance companies.

What is amazing to me is how utterly bald-faced this proposal is. Have we really convinced the American people that giving more and more to the “haves” at the expense of the most vulnerable is in the national interest? I was never a fan of the Robin Hood theory of government–robbing the rich to give to the poor–but I am appalled by the current “reverse Robin Hood” ideology, where we rob the poor to benefit the rich.

Well, we certainly know who Ryan works for. And it isn’t us.

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No Rites, No Rights

Those of us who argue for same-sex marriage typically refer to the 1008 or so rights that accompany state recognition of marriage. The rights most often discussed are concerned with hospital visitation, taxation and inheritance, and those inequities are particularly galling.

But there are lots of other rights that are denied to GLBT folks who cannot marry—and even to those who live in states that do allow same-sex marriage, thanks to the unwillingness of the federal government to recognize those marriages for purposes of federal law. Immigration law is an example.

Back in my days as Indiana’s ACLU director, I had a visit from a twenty-something young man (let’s call him Scott) and his lover, who was from El Salvador (let’s call him Juan). They had met on a student exchange program of some sort, and fallen in love. They wanted to make a life together, preferably in the United States. But the young man from El Salvador was ending the term of his most recent visa, and immigration lawyers had told him there was nothing they could do—that if he wanted to immigrate to the U.S., legally, he would have to go home, apply and wait. If memory serves, his likely wait was something like fourteen years.

Scott’s American parents were supportive. They offered to legally adopt Juan. That didn’t sit well with Juan’s parents, not to mention some pesky legal impediments to what was a pretty creative—or desperate—approach.  At that time—and probably still today—an equal protection lawsuit was untenable. The last I heard, the couple—consisting of two highly skilled workers who would have been valued members of the workforce had they been straight—was living in El Salvador.

Had Juan been “Janice,” the scenario would have been far different.

Thirty years ago, our daughter fell in love with a non-citizen. They married, and as the spouse of a U.S. citizen, he has lived in the U.S. legally ever since. No problem.

Unfortunately, Scott and Juan ran into two deeply-entrenched bigotries: one against same-sex couples, and one against Hispanics.

It is unnecessary to recount the current efforts in Arizona, Indiana and elsewhere to marginalize and harass Hispanics. The rhetoric is all about “illegals,” but the legislative measures are not so narrowly targeted. Meanwhile, my son-in-law has lived in this country for over 30 years without ever encountering anti-immigrant animus. Why? Here’s a clue: He is British, and very white. His accent is considering charming, even “classy.”

People are people. There are certainly undesirables who want to come to America (not to mention our homegrown crop), but they are undesirable for personal reasons: drug habits, criminal histories, contagious diseases, likely inability to find gainful employment. None of these reasons has anything to do with sexual orientation or country of origin.

In our interconnected world, where international travel is easily accessible and growing exponentially, people from different countries will fall in love. It makes no sense to treat those couples differently based upon their sexual identity or birthplace. These distinctions are not based on thoughtful policies, they are not enforced in order to make our country safer or to protect our economic well-being. They are based purely on prejudices that we would do well to discard.

Until we do, the Scotts and Juans of this world will continue to get the short end of the stick.

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Balancing the Books

When most of us talk about “balancing the books,” we have a mental image of a bookkeeping ledger (for those of you too young to recall keeping financial records on paper, those ledgers were books filled with graph-like paper, on which one recorded assets and liabilities). The point was to balance revenues with expenditures.

Somehow, our discussions of the federal budget has operated on a different premise. Even David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director, has noticed the change, and I think it is fair to say he isn’t especially impressed with the House Republican budget plan, which deals with only the “debit” side of the ledger.

“It doesn’t address in any serious or courageous way the issue of the near and medium-term deficit,” Stockman told Brian Beutler. “I think the biggest problem is revenues. It is simply unrealistic to say that raising revenue isn’t part of the solution. It’s a measure of how far off the deep end Republicans have gone with this religious catechism about taxes.”

I’m old enough to remember when David Stockman was considered impossibly conservative. But I am also old enough to remember that the real Ronald Reagan–whether you agreed with all his positions or not–looked very little like the icon that contemporary Republicans worship.