Women And Politics

“Housekeeping” note: My husband and I are departing today for a two-month cruise to Australia and New Zealand. I will have internet and plan to continue blogging, but I’m not sure when items will post, as time zones will change and we’ll cross the international date line a couple of times, so please bear with me!

Last week, a chapter of the Indianapolis Kiwanis invited me to discuss the book that Morton Marcus and I recently published. This is what I told them (sorry for the length…)

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As I know you are all aware, Morton Marcus and I recently co-authored “From Property to Partner: Women’s Progress and Political Resistance.” When we began working on it, neither of us expected the political tsunami that would be ushered in by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson.

Morton and I have been friends for some 30+ years, and he initially approached me about collaborating on a book that would identify and document the scientific and technological changes that had facilitated women’s progress. Morton absolutely bathes in data, and he was determined to share reams of evidence about the effect of things like railroads, bikes, and household appliances on women’s emancipation.

We both understood that genuine biological differences between men and women had shaped human cultures for thousands of years; and we both wanted to track how science and technology had minimized the social impact of those differences—how changes in the job market made physical strength less important and how various inventions reduced the time needed for housework, which is still considered “women’s work.” That sort of thing.

Morton did agree with me that the most important advances, by far, were the ones that allowed women—for the first time in history– to plan, defer or abstain from procreation without the necessity of remaining celibate. Birth control—especially the pill– allowed women to pursue educational and career choices that had formerly been available only to males.

Control of reproduction allowed women to participate fully in economic, civic and political life.  No other advance has been nearly that consequential.

But control of reproduction ran headlong into fundamentalist and paternalistic religious beliefs that continue to influence America’s politics and culture. Although religions and denominations within them vary considerably with respect to birth control, abortion and the role of women, fundamentalist theologies support a patriarchy that is deeply rooted in history, politics and privilege. In the book, we explored the teachings of different religious traditions about women—the very different beliefs held by different religions about women’s roles in general, and the very dramatic differences about decisions to terminate a pregnancy.

As some of us are old enough to remember, before the advent of reliable birth control, every sexual encounter carried the risk of pregnancy, and pregnancy generally meant the end of a woman’s economic independence. A pregnant woman was almost always unemployable; for that matter, a married woman in her childbearing years was similarly unemployable, since there was always the possibility of pregnancy and the resulting need to care for offspring, seen as a uniquely female responsibility.

Most women were therefore economically dependent upon the men to whom they were married. (Refusing to marry was no panacea: unmarried women were routinely labeled “old maids,” and were objects of pity.) If her marriage was unhappy, or worse, violent, a woman with children was literally enslaved; given the barriers she faced to participation in the workforce and her resulting inability to support herself and her offspring, she usually couldn’t leave. Absent charitable intervention or inherited wealth—or friends or relatives willing to house and feed her and her children—she was totally dependent on her husband’s earnings.

That reality is why access to reliable contraception –and in situations where that contraception failed, abortion—was thus absolutely essential to women’s independence. If women could plan when to procreate, they could also plan when not to procreate. They could choose to schedule or defer motherhood in order to pursue education and career opportunities. The availability of the birth control pill didn’t just liberate millions of women,  its availability and widespread use triggered enormous changes in social attitudes—some of which opened the door to legislation that advanced both females’ economic independence and their ability to more fully participate in the civic life of the nation.

The Dobbs decision, over-ruling Roe v Wade, came down when we had just begun our research for the book; it changed our focus and presented us with an obvious question: how would American women respond? What political consequences would we see to a decision that allowed states to deny women access to adequate healthcare during pregnancy– and also threatened to return them to second-class citizenship?

We knew we were about to see what happens when the dog finally catches the car…and you can probably guess our conclusion from the title of our final chapter: “When Mama Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy.”

So much for our book. I want to conclude with a point that is not widely understood. As politically consequential as the Dobbs decision has turned out to be, most non-lawyers really don’t understand how fundamentally it undermined constitutional rights that have absolutely nothing to do with abortion or the status of women.

For the past fifty years, Americans have relied upon a constitutional doctrine known as substantive due process, often called the “right to privacy.” That doctrine confirmed the American principle that certain “intimate” individual decisions—including one’s choice of sexual partners or the decision to use contraception– are none of government’s business.

Most constitutional scholars would argue that the right to personal autonomy has always been inherent in the Bill of Rights, but it was explicitly recognized in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut. The Connecticut legislature had passed a law prohibiting the use of birth control by married couples. The law prohibited doctors from prescribing contraceptives and prohibiting pharmacists from filling those prescriptions.

The Supreme Court struck down the law, holding that whether a couple used contraceptives was not a decision government is entitled to make. The majority recognized that a right to personal autonomy—the right to self-government—was necessary to the enforcement of other provisions of the Bill of Rights, which would be difficult or impossible to respect without the recognition of such an underlying right.  Justices White and Harlan found explicit confirmation of it in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—which is where the title “substantive due process” comes from. Wherever it resided–in a “penumbra” or the 14th Amendment—the Justices agreed on both its presence and importance.

As I’m sure you all know, procedural due process protects Americans’ right to a fair process—a fair trial or other government proceeding. Substantive due process distinguishes between decisions that government has the legitimate authority to make, and decisions which, in our system, must be left up to the individual. I used to tell my students that the Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things that government is forbidden to decide: what books you read, what opinions you form, what prayers you say (or don’t)—such matters are outside the legitimate role of government. The issue isn’t whether that book is dangerous or inappropriate, or that religion is false, or whether you should marry someone of the same sex, or whether you should procreate: the issue is who should get to make that decision.

Substantive due process draws a line between decisions government should make and those that must be made by the individual involved. Aside from its other logical and historical defects, the Dobbs decision ignored 50 years of precedents confirming that principle.

Dobbs also changed the focus of our little book, which became much more political than we had originally intended. That said, we had fun collaborating on it—and if you haven’t already bought it, I hope you will!!

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The More We Learn…

It’s a conundrum.

Any civilized society operates by creating and enforcing rules. Social tranquility depends upon choosing wise people to make the rules and fair-minded people to enforce them.Right now, America isn’t doing too well with either of those populations.

This blog spends an inordinate amount of time on the clown show that is the U.S. House of Representatives, but problems with enforcement–with policing–are equally thorny.

From the beating of Rodney King to the murder of George Floyd and the multitude of other unwarranted violent episodes, Americans have been inundated with video evidence of questionable police behavior.

And “questionable” is frequently the correct word. As public safety professionals will tell us, protecting the public often requires split-second decision-making in situations that are a lot more ambiguous than they appear after the fact. Given the difficulties they face, giving police the benefit of reasonable doubt is only fair.

But all doubt isn’t reasonable.

Reporters keep uncovering deeply disturbing evidence of a racist, anti-Semitic and thuggish culture that persists in a troubling number of police departments. A year or so ago, one such culture was exposed in Torrance ,California . Text messages that had circulated among current and former officers of the city’s Police Department “reveal a culture rife with racism, antisemitism, and homophobia going back at least a decade.”

The texts are extremely violent in nature and grotesquely racist, homophobic, and antisemitic.

According to reporting from the LA Times, one text shows a picture of a candy cane, a Christmas tree ornament, a star for the top of the tree, and an “enslaved person.”

“Which one doesn’t belong?” the caption asks.

“You don’t hang the star,” someone replies.

Another message reads “hanging with the homies,” attached was a photo of several Black men who had been lynched.

Another photo asks what someone would do if their girlfriend was having an affair with a Black man. The captioned response was to break “a tail light on his car so the police will stop him and shoot him.”

Prosecutors say the messages go back years and could jeopardize hundreds of criminal cases in which the officers either testified or made arrests.

The LA Times identified 13 current and former police officers and one Long Beach cop who are now under investigation. At least nine of the officers texted images or commentary advocating violence against Black people and LGBTQ community members and ridiculing racial profiling.

There was much more, and all horrific. Discovery of the texts was triggered by an investigation of two former Torrance police officers who had spray-painted a swastika inside a resident’s car.

If Torrance was an isolated instance, it would be troubling enough, but in the last few years, we’ve seen repeated evidence that these White Supremacy attitudes are widespread among both the police and the military.

As the linked article by an FBI agent now with the Brennan Center warns:

For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has routinely warned its agents that the white supremacist and far-right militant groups it investigates often have links to law enforcement. Yet the justice department has no national strategy designed to protect the communities policed by these dangerously compromised law enforcers. As our nation grapples with how to reimagine public safety in the wake of the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, it is time to confront and resolve the persistent problem of explicit racism in law enforcement.

I know about these routine warnings because I received them as a young FBI agent preparing to accept an undercover assignment against neo-Nazi groups in Los Angeles, California, in 1992. But you don’t have to take my word for it. A redacted version of a 2006 FBI intelligence assessment, White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, alerted agents to “both strategic infiltration by organized groups and self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes.”

As the officer who wrote the above article pointed out, If the U.S. government found out that al-Qaida or a similar foreign terrorist organization had infiltrated American law enforcement, it would immediately launch a nationwide effort to identify those individuals and neutralize the threat.

Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the U.S. over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.

We the People need the police. But we need the right kind of police. That requires hiring practices capable of weeding out thuggish, bigoted applicants, and training that emphasizes service to all parts of the communities they will be hired to protect.

We have a problem, and public safety requires that we fix it.

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The Wages Of Cowardice

What explains the chaos/civil war in the GOP?

I’ll admit that I haven’t always been a Mit Romney fan–I really didn’t pay much attention to him until his infamous “47% “takers” remark, and that gave me a very negative opinion of him. (I’m also not a fan of the “makers versus takers” view of the world.)

That said, he has steadily risen in my opinion, thanks to his vote to impeach Trump, and–along with his announcement that he will not run for a second Senate term– his willingness to be honest about the current GOP.

Romney has said publicly what most observers have long surmised–that the more rational members of the Senate’s Republican caucus share his disdain for Trump. They recognize Trump’s profound ignorance. They laugh at his ungrammatical pronouncements. They shake their heads over his “policy” choices.

But not in public.

Rarely have We the People been treated to a display of utter cowardice equal to that we are currently experiencing. As David French has written in the New York Times, the Republican Senators who refused to do their constitutional duty and vote to impeach

punted their responsibilities to the American legal system. As Mitch McConnell said when he voted to acquit Trump, “We have a criminal justice system in this country.” Yet not even a successful prosecution and felony conviction — on any of the charges against him, in any of the multiple venues — can disqualify Trump from serving as president. Because of G.O.P. cowardice, our nation is genuinely facing the possibility of a president’s taking the oath of office while also appealing one or more substantial prison sentences.

The GOP appears to be stuck with Trump, a candidate recently–and accurately– described by Jennifer Rubin as “unhinged, vengeful, incoherent, dangerous and neo-fascist.”)

French began his column by agreeing with a recent, densely-argued law review article concluding that the clear language of the 14th Amendment–if applied–disqualifies Trump (or any other traitor) from holding further public office. He then acknowledged the realities of trying to enforce that disqualification–and the likelihood that the current Supreme Court would refuse to intervene if the attempt were to be made.

While I believe the court should intervene even if the hour is late, it’s worth remembering that it would face this decision only because of the comprehensive failure of congressional Republicans. Let me be specific. There was never any way to remove Trump from American politics through the Democratic Party alone. Ending Trump’s political career required Republican cooperation, and Republicans have shirked their constitutional duties, sometimes through sheer cowardice. They have punted their responsibilities to other branches of government or simply shrunk back in fear of the consequences…

And then, of course, there’s Congress, where GOP members are in thrall to their crazy caucus.

For many of them, the answer lies in raw fear. First, there is the simple political fear of losing a House or Senate seat. In polarized, gerrymandered America, all too many Republican politicians face political risk only from their right…

Mitt Romney has pointed to a different fear: physical harm to a lawmaker’s person or family. The Trumpist cult that now controls what was once a political party is capable of real violence, and several elected officials are reacting to explicit threats from members of that cult.

The problem is, appeasement never works, as Kevin McCarthy now understands. Cowardice simply encourages the mob mentality that animates today’s GOP. As French reminds readers,

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable. But we can and should learn lessons from history. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, two of our greatest presidents, both faced insurrectionary movements, and their example should teach us today.

As French says, people of character and conviction once inhabited the American political class, and those people gave us the tools to defend the American experiment. He says that “All we need is the will.”

We won’t have “the will,” however, until and unless we elevate better people to office. In Indiana, we have empowered a number of people whose intellectual and moral deficits and lack of concern for the Constitution and the public good make them utterly unfit for any public office.

We have our smarmy, “me myself and I” actors (Rokita, Braun), our looney-tunes, bigoted far-Right culture warriors (Banks) and the cowards who appear to know better but have thus far been unwilling to act on what they know (Young). There are many others. None of them will step up to the plate and impose accountability.

Bottom line: we have to replace them.

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John Kelly: Late, But Better Than Never

At lunch a few days ago, a friend and I shared our distress over the current chaos of America’s political landscape. Both of us are women of “a certain age,” and both of us have difficulty wrapping our heads around the loyalty of MAGA Republicans to a man who is quite clearly–and dangerously–mentally ill.

My friend has always been a Democrat, but I spent 35 years as a Republican, which adds to my bewilderment. The Republican Party I worked for had its problems (there was always a racist, anti-Semitic fringe), but it also had a set of principles that have now been totally abandoned. Today’s GOP –now controlled by what was once its fringe–is in thrall to a man who repudiates virtually everything the party once stood for.

That includes respect for the men and women who serve in the U.S. Military.

In an interview that has been labeled “better late than never,”John Kelly, Trump’s former Chief of Staff, confirmed what most observers have surmised–that Trump’s “it’s all about me” worldview made it impossible for him to understand why people might sacrifice themselves for their country.

Kelly set the record straight with on-the-record confirmation of a number of damning stories about statements Trump made behind closed doors attacking US service members and veterans, listing a number of objectionable comments Kelly witnessed Trump make firsthand.

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”

Kelly confirmed the accuracy of earlier reports that Trump had refused to visit the graves of American soldiers buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, saying “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Trump said the 1,800 US Marines killed in the Belleau Wood were “suckers” for getting killed.

Perhaps the most eloquent rejoinder to that despicable attitude was in the widely-quoted retirement speech delivered by General Mark Milley. Without mentioning Trump, Milley explained America’s military patriotism.

“We are unique among the world’s militaries. We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen or a tyrant or a dictator. We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual.”

“We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it,” Milley continued. “Every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, Guardian and Coast Guardsmen each of us commits our very life to protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price, and we are not easily intimidated.”

You don’t have to be a fan of America’s bloated defense budget or unfortunate history of international meddling to respect the men and women who put themselves in harm’s way to serve the American idea. To view these people as “suckers” and “losers”–to call General Milley a “traitor”– can only be understood as the ravings of a mentally-ill man who has become increasingly unstable as he faces accountability for his own past criminality.

I wonder–if John Kelly had “come clean” at the time about the ravings of the ignorant narcissist he served, would it have made any difference to the MAGA cult?

Probably not.

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Countervailing Power

When I was growing up in Anderson, Indiana, both my parents were passionately anti-union. There was a reason: my father had a small auto-parts business, and frequent strikes in Anderson’s then-dominant automotive plants meant fewer customers. Furthermore, there was a considerable amount of what can only be described as union “thuggery” that occasionally erupted. So I grew up with a very dim view of unionization.

Let’s just say I’ve developed a more nuanced perspective.

What my parents and I failed to recognize “back in the day” was that it’s not good when either unions or management holds vastly superior power. The ideal is balance, or what has been described by scholars as “countervailing power.”

The phrase “countervailing power” was coined in the 1952 book American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power by the economist and social thinker John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith argued that, in a modern technological society, most important markets would be dominated by a few large firms. Their market power and political influence could be checked, however, by countervailing power—both public, in the form of a strong regulatory state, and private, in the form of labor unions and consumer cooperatives. Arguing that measures to strengthen the bargaining power of unions and farmer groups were “among the most important legislative acts of the New Deal, all designed to give a group a marketing power it did not have before,” Galbraith asserted that “the support of countervailing power has become…perhaps the major peacetime function of the Federal Government.”

The equation of the New Deal with government-supported checks and balances in the market may seem surprising today, when many associate the New Deal with social insurance programs like Social Security or Keynesian deficit spending in downturns. But this view was the conventional wisdom (another phrase coined by Galbraith) of many New Dealers. For example, in 1940, the journalist John Chamberlain wrote: “The labor union, the consumers’ or producers’ cooperative, the ‘institute,’ the syndicate—these are the important things in a democracy. If their power is evenly spread, if there are economic checks and balances to parallel the political checks and balances, then society will be democratic.”

When there is no countervailing power–when those sitting on one side of the bargaining table are easily able to dominate or intimidate those on the other side– the result is inevitably negative. The longtime imbalance between management and workers in the auto industry has enriched  managers–obscenely– at the expense of those who make their companies profitable: CEO compensation for 2022 is reportedly  $29 million for GM’s Mary Barra, $21 million for Ford’s Jim Farley and $24.8 million for the CEO of Stellantis (and as the Free Press recently noted,  those weren’t even the highest payouts to an individual last year at the companies).

It’s not difficult to understand why union members– who had agreed to reduced wages and benefits in 2009 when the economy tanked and who still haven’t caught up– would be resentful.

In the more than half century since I left Anderson, the precipitous decline in the power and influence of organized labor has led to a number of unfortunate consequences. As the linked essay notes, one of those consequences has been an “upward shift of political power on the center-left to college-educated progressives,” and a politics that is more   technocratic and top-down. Another has been the captivity of the GOP  to the anti-labor agenda of the party’s libertarian donors.

Technocratic neoliberalism ignores the values and interests of the two core constituencies of the New Deal—the working class and rural Americans. Unrepresented in either party, these groups are drawn to outsider populists, including maverick old-school New Dealers like Sanders and right-wing demagogues like Trump.

I think the above paragraph oversimplifies the reason working and rural folks have flocked to Trump –it overlooks the extent to which his appeal is to a still-potent, still widespread racism. The racist element of his appeal been repeatedly documented.

But it’s also true that when people feel powerless or abandoned, racism that might otherwise be latent rises to the surface, so the observation isn’t entirely wrong.

The bottom line is that bargains made by unions composed of the laborers whose prospects are on the line–the people with “skin in the game”– are infinitely preferable to laws passed by well-meaning elected officials. The parties to any negotiation are privy to the issues particular to that workplace, and an agreement hammered out between employers and workers is unlikely to stoke the same level of resentment as a measure imposed by lawmakers.

The recent rise in union activity may be disruptive, but it’s long overdue.

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