Changing The World–For Better Or Worse

Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with that famous quote from Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” If you are inclined to doubt that observation–inclined to dismiss as ineffective the efforts of small numbers of activists–I’ve got news for you. 

Very small groups of people can have a very large impact, for good or not-so-good. Case in point: those proliferating book bans.

The Washington Post recently did a “deep dive” into the growing number of parental challenges to books in the nation’s classrooms and school libraries, and they found something counter-intuitive and very interesting. It turns out that a large percentage of the complaints come from “a minuscule number of hyperactive adults.”

And when the Post says “small,” it means small.The majority of the 1,000-plus book challenges analyzed by The Post were filed by just 11 people.

The Post requested copies of all book challenges filed in the 2021-2022 school year with the 153 school districts that Tasslyn Magnusson, a researcher employed by free expression advocacy group PEN America, tracked as receiving formal requests to remove books last school year. In total, officials in more than 100 of those school systems, which are spread across 37 states, provided 1,065 complaints totaling 2,506 pages.

Other findings from the Post’s investigation are unsurprising–the great majority of challenges focused on books with LGBTQ content, followed by those dealing with race.

The Post analyzed the complaints to determine who was challenging the books, what kinds of books drew objections and why. Nearly half of filings — 43 percent — targeted titles with LGBTQ characters or themes, while 36 percent targeted titles featuring characters of color or dealing with issues of race and racism. The top reason people challenged books was “sexual” content; 61 percent of challenges referenced this concern.

The people filing these objections evidently consider the identification of gender to be “sexual.” And I suppose any mention of race is “woke” and evidence of the incursion of that dreaded Critical Race Theory (which none of its critics can define).

In nearly 20 percent of the challenges, petitioners wrote that they wanted texts pulled from shelves because the titles depict lesbian, gay, queer, bisexual, homosexual, transgender or nonbinary lives. Many challengers wrote that reading books about LGBTQ people could cause children to alter their sexuality or gender.
“The theme or purpose of this book is to confuse our children and get them to question whether they are a boy or a girl,” a North Carolina challenger wrote of “Call Me Max,” which centers on a transgender boy.

The objections are to “sexual” content, but the Post reports that in “37 percent of objections against LGBTQ titles, challengers wrote they believed the books should not remain in libraries specifically because they feature LGBTQ lives or stories.”

The article is lengthy and very informative, but I continue to be fixated on that finding that, essentially, eleven people have managed to terrify teachers and librarians, exclude books (many of which have been read by students for decades without appreciably increasing the population of gays and lesbians or triggering psychotic episodes of racial regret…), and producing an enormous national culture war debate centering on censorship.

This is our political problem in a nutshell. The MAGA Republicans who are making government difficult or impossible represent distinct minorities of Americans. A significant number of the gerrymandered Congressional districts that send whack-a-doodles to Washington wouldn’t be safe for the GOP if most of the Democrats in that district came out to vote. 

We bemoan the disproportionate influence of Fox “News” and its clones, but the  audience for Rightwing media is a small proportion of the overall number of American viewers. 

I keep insisting that if enough Democrats and sane Independents get sufficiently active, we can lance the MAGA boil–and I am increasingly convinced that “enough” just requires a relatively small activist base that focuses on a much bigger number: voter turnout.

Or look at it from another angle: If every Democrat and disaffected Republican could identify and register just one previously apathetic non-voter, and could get that non-voter to the polls, reasonable people could retake America, and we could return to the days of (relatively) boring arguments about policy.

Margaret Mead was right: the actions of small groups of thoughtful, committed Americans can send the MAGA warriors to wherever it was that former Americans sent the Whigs.

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Revisiting Adam Smith

From time to time, a number of my friends have remarked on the GOP’s emphasis on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and  its corresponding neglect of his Theory of Moral Sentiments–a work that casts considerable doubt over the simplified message for which people cite Wealth of Nations .

Like most Americans, I was familiar with the citation and Smith’s celebration of “the hidden hand,” and unfamiliar with the work itself, so it was interesting and enlightening to read an essay/book review in the New Republic titled “The Betrayal of Adam Smith.”

I had always thought that Wealth was a single volume making a coherent argument about economics; apparently, I was very wrong.

To call it wide-ranging is an understatement; the opposite of a tightly focused, logical argument, its five volumes and 1,000-plus pages range over everything from the problems with apprenticeship to the origins of money to the “discouragement of agriculture in the ancient state of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.”

According to the author of the essay, the massive work was “replete with contradictory ideas.”

and The full complexity of his thinking was reduced to the catchphrase “the invisible hand,” even though (as intellectual historian Emma Rothschild has noted) the words appeared just a few times in his entire corpus of work, and only once in The Wealth of Nations.

The book that prompted this essay was “Adam Smith’s America,” by Glory M. Liu, what the reviewer calls an “intriguing account of Smith’s reception in the United States.”

The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, the same year the Colonies declared their independence, and many of those who sought to break from Britain were familiar with Smith’s work—both Wealth and his earlier writing. As Liu shows, the first thinkers to make use of Smith in America were more inclined toward his musings about politics and psychology than any of his economic prescriptions. Nor did they interpret Smith in a way that narrowly aligned him with a particular political perspective

John Adams, most notably, drew on Smith to meditate on the political power of the rich. In an argument that echoes Smith’s in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (his first major book), Adams suggested that there was a deep tendency in human psychology to defer to the wealthy and powerful and to treat them with an esteem that was unseemly for democratic citizens. Smith had warned that the poor man was “ashamed of his poverty,” while the rich man gloried in the “attention of the world” that his wealth conferred. This genuflection, Adams insisted, was still present in the new republic. Wealth had a way (as Liu puts it) of transmuting itself into power even in a constitutional order that lacked an aristocracy.

One of the lessons Americans took from Smith was that countries don’t become rich or poor due to geographic luck, climate and resources (or God smiling on the inhabitants), but rather on how it organized labor—on human will, ingenuity, and effort.

In earlier works, Smith wrote that “sympathy”—or the ability to identify with the pain and joy of others—was among the “original passions of human nature,” and that “the greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.”

How could this be congruent with his argument in Wealth that “self-love”—the “propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another”—was what set humanity apart from other animals? …Self-interest was the defining principle of human nature, and the source for the immense division of labor that produced “general opulence” without anyone quite planning that it would do so. But how to reconcile self-interest with sympathy?

An early Chicago School economist wrote that Smith saw a “wide and elastic range of activity for government,” believing that “self-interest and competition were sometimes treacherous to the public interest they were supposed to serve”—and that collective action is sometimes necessary.

It was later economists–especially Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and George Stigler– who are responsible for our current understanding of Smith.

They were drawn to Smith for his commitment to the idea of individual self-interest as the principle that underwrote the entire theory of the price mechanism. For them, as Stigler wrote, The Wealth of Nations was “a stupendous palace erected upon the granite of self-interest.”

That current, truncated understanding of Smith is the “betrayal” of the title.

The essay/review is lengthy, but it’s well worth reading in its entirety. Today’s misunderstanding of Smith is an example of what happens when readers approach a work through an ideological lens. “Captains of industry” emphasize the “hidden hand” in much the same way contemporary theocrats cherry-pick passages from the Bible.

Both  are betrayals.

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Democracy And Dirty Tricks

When Democrats gripe that American government is no longer small-d democratic, they have a point. Not only has extreme gerrymandering given more power to rural voters than to those who reside in cities, but the allocation of two Senate seats to each state, regardless of population, has grossly distorted the ideal of “one person, one vote.” The last time the GOP won the Senate, it was with twenty million fewer votes than had been cast for the Democratic “minority.”

Democratic Senators currently represent some forty million more voters than Republican Senators, despite an almost-even split in the upper house. Thanks to predicted demographic shifts, it’s poised to get even worse: one scholar estimates that by 2040, 70% of Americans will live in the fifteen largest states, and will be represented by thirty Senators, while the remaining 30% will have 70 Senators voting on their behalf.

If these structural advantages weren’t enough, the deep pocket donors who support the GOP continue to fund political dirty tricks. I’ve been reading a number of reports about the latest effort to re-elect Donald Trump: a phony “third party” called No Labels.

As Robert Hubbell recently wrote,

The “No Labels” organization is a GOP dark-money PAC designed to elect Donald Trump by running a doomed third-party candidate to draw votes away from Joe Biden in 2024.

Hubbell quotes the Intercept for a story suggesting that No Labels intends to run Manchin; whether that is accurate or not, what we do know is that No Labels is not a real political party. It is funded by the Koch brothers, Harlan Crow, and Peter Theil (among others).

Worse, “No Labels” is operating as a 501(c)(4) charitable organization so that it does not have to disclose its donors like every other political party—even though No Labels is registering as a political party across the nation for the 2024 election.

Arizona Democrats, among others, are challenging the organization’s misrepresentation of itself as a third party, alleging that, as a 501(c)(4) organization — which legally cannot primarily be engaged in political activity —  it cannot comply with federal election regulations governing political parties, including disclosure of contributors.

“No Labels is not following the rules for political party recognition, while attempting to be placed on the ballot alongside actual, functioning political parties who do,” a spokesperson for the Arizona Democratic Party said in March.

Hubbell quite properly characterizes articles suggesting that No Labels is a new, “centrist” political party as “journalistic malpractice.”

As anyone who has followed election politics even casually knows, thanks to America’s political structures, third party candidates are always spoilers. That’s true even when the third party is a legitimate party and the candidate honorable and sincere. The presence of such ballot options simply takes votes from one of the major party candidates. (Most consequential example: No Ralph Nader on the ticket, no George W. Bush in the White House.)

In this case, there is ample evidence that the effort to mount a bogus “third-party” option is anything but honest and sincere. There is also absolutely no doubt who they hope that bogus entrant will benefit–any doubt about the motives should be dispelled by the identity of the funders.

Harlan Crow already owns a Supreme Court Justice; now he and the surviving Koch brother and Peter Theil and their ilk want to ensure the election of Trump, an intellectually vacuous and mentally-ill narcissist they can easily manipulate.

I worry that this particular “dirty trick” may not receive the publicity it deserves–the media and the voters who pay attention are constantly distracted by the equally dangerous antics of the MAGA nutcases and Neo-Nazis currently impeding rational governance  and fiscal meltdown in Congress–and relatively few voters pay attention.

It is absolutely true that both parties have engaged in political trickery–mostly at the local level–just as both parties have gerrymandered when in a position to do so. In the last couple of decades, however, it is the GOP that has benefitted–thanks in large part to the huge amounts of money these millionaires and billionaires have been willing to spend in order to foreclose the twin threats of increased regulation and increased taxation.

If the Democrats ever secure a real, working majority in Congress, they need to address the structures that are most anti-democratic–at least, the ones that are amenable to changes in rules (the filibuster) and statutory repair (gerrymandering, vote suppression). They can also address the corruption at the Supreme Court. There is nothing lawmakers can realistically do about distorted Senate representation, and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would have to be passed by several Red States, which makes that effort to neuter the Electoral College unlikely.

But nothing good will happen without massive turnout that ignores third party candidates–real or fictitious.

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The Conundrum

In a discussion the other day with a friend and former legal colleague, we recalled the mantra of the law firm with which we’d once practiced: there is only one legal question, and it’s “what do we do?” What course of action do we advise the client to pursue?

I think about that mantra a lot these days, and most frequently in connection with the media.

I’m convinced that so many of the problems that bedevil American society today are exacerbated by a media landscape that is wildly fragmented. Not only are numerous media outlets–credible and not-so-credible– nakedly partisan, but thanks to the internet, they are all immediately accessible to citizens looking for “news” that confirms their world-views.

Partisan news organizations are nothing new–if you don’t believe me, read up on the vicious contemporaneous attacks on “ungodly” Thomas Jefferson. What is new is the sheer number of media outlets and the ease of accessing them.

The problem isn’t confined to out-and-out propaganda mills. Dubious stories from slanted outlets can and do get picked up by credible news organizations, and its a truism that later “corrections” are seldom as widely read as the initial misinformation.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo recently reported on an example: the New York Post had run a “made-for-Fox News story” about veterans who, it reported, had been “booted out of hotels about an hour north of New York City to make way for migrants”.

As I said, it was a made-for-Fox News: Here are these disabled or impoverished American veterans getting kicked to the curb to make way for migrants with no permission to be in the country in the first place. Politicians jumped on the story. The Post ran it. It made the rounds of the wingnutosphere. Fox of course got on board.

But none of it was true. And I don’t just mean not true in the sense of being misleading or incomplete or embellished or sensationalized. It was a hoax. Sharon Toney-Finch, the founder and head of a small local nonprofit, the YIT Foundation, which focuses on veterans issue and premature births (?) was the source of the original story. But it turns out the she recruited a group of 15 homeless men from a local shelter to impersonate veterans and talk to the press about their tale of woe.

After a few of the homeless men admitted the truth to reporters, Toney-Finch confessed she’d made the whole thing up.

The hoax was apparently perpetrated with the aim of creating a media spectacle for  the right-wing press–to focus on the Biden administration’s terrible, awful, no-good  approach to immigration, and  the purported national immigration crisis. Even the Post has now been forced to recant and report on Toney-Finch’s hoax.

A local paper, The Mid-Hudson News, uncovered the truth with what Marshall notes was “a lot of shoe-leather reporting.”

This relatively minor story is a microcosm of our current dilemma. Today’s media environment is a Wild West of propaganda, spin, misinformation and outright lies. Along with the partisans peddling that propaganda and those lies are genuine reporters working for outlets that practice old-fashioned “shoe leather” journalism. And protecting them all are the Free Speech provisions of the First Amendment.

So–what do we do?

What we clearly cannot and should not do is eliminate or constrict those First Amendment protections. The result of that would be to hand over to government the power to censor communications.

In some cases, like the recent Dominion lawsuit against Fox, libel law can be employed to punish the most egregious behaviors, but this is a very slim reed: few of those who’ve been libeled have the means to bring such suits, and they are–quite properly–very difficult to win.

Unfortunately, new rules that would make it easier to sue over misinformation would end up constraining real journalists as well as the sloppy or dishonest ones–when you are creating the “first draft of history,” it can be easy for even good reporters to make mistakes, not to mention that in the multiple gray areas of modern life, one person’s truth is another person’s lie.

The only answer I can come up with is better education and a change in the information culture–both long-term projects. Teaching critical thinking and media literacy in the schools–although highly unlikely in those fundamentalist religious schools to which our legislature sends our tax dollars–would help. Organizations like the Society of Professional Journalists that issue codes of ethics might consider “rating” outlets based upon their observance of those ethical standards.

But as long as individuals can search for and locate “facts” they find congenial, Americans will continue to inhabit alternate realities. I just don’t have an answer to “what do we do?”

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Rights And Obligations

 A few months ago,  Bret Stephens wrote an essay in New York Times that included the following paragraph about what he–accurately– called the  “classically liberal core of intelligent conservatism,” defined as:

 The idea that immigrants are an asset, not a liability; that the freedoms of speech and conscience must extend to those whose ideas we loathe; that American power ought to be harnessed to protect the world’s democracies from aggressive dictators; that we are richer at home by freely trading goods abroad; that nothing is more sacred than democracy and the rule of law; that patriotism is about preserving the capacity to criticize a country we love while loving the country we criticize.

Well, how extremely “woke” of the Times’ conservative columnist…

I continue to be amazed–gobsmacked, really–by the complete 180-degree turn of a Republican Party that used to be serious about such old-fashioned ideas, along with “duty” and “responsibility.” 

In January, Richard Haass published The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. While it once might have been seen as an exercise in “preaching to the choir,” these days, a depressing number of Americans are no longer members of that choir.

As the linked review begins,

It’s an idea as old as Rousseau: With rights come responsibilities toward the social contract. To this, Haass adds the admonition that “American democracy will work and reform will prove possible only if obligations join rights at center stage.” Those rights are constitutionally enumerated even if “the struggle over rights…continues to this day.” The obligations are less well enshrined, though the 10 Haass offers are unobjectionable. The first, echoing the right of freedom of speech and thought, asks that citizens be informed about how the government works and be prepared to participate in civic duties. On that second point, the fundamental obligation is to vote (and to insist on it when that right is impeded). “Voting is the most basic act of citizenship,” writes the author. “It creates a bond between the individual and government and between the individual and country.” Given a largely uninformed citizenry, that bond would seem tenuous, and it’s also conditioned by a lack of civility, which asks of each citizen a reasoned willingness to set aside ideology in order to deal with matters of shared concern or interest “on their merits, not on motives you may ascribe to those making the arguments.” Civility bespeaks a willingness to accept another obligation, which is to reject and repudiate violence of the kind we saw on Jan. 6, 2021. Civility also feeds into the obligation to respect norms and the lessons of civics, such as the idea that the common good often overrules one’s selfish demands—e.g., being allowed to smoke in a crowded restaurant or walk around unvaccinated and unmasked in a pandemic. Sadly, of course, those who most need to read this agreeably thoughtful book likely won’t, but that’s the way of the world.

I am hardly the only observer of today’s rancid and decidedly uncivil politics to endorse the importance of re-emphasizing these obligations. 

Rights–as Haass points out–imply duties. Your right to exercise freedom of speech, for example, imposes a duty on me (and especially on government) not to engage in behavior making that speech impossible. I don’t have to listen or agree; I am free to respond critically–but neither individual citizens nor government is free to censor you. (A/K/A “pulling a DeSantis.” ) When an individual citizen does so, it is unbecoming and, I’d argue, unAmerican; when government does so, it’s unconstitutional.

Haass does not limit the obligations of citizenship to the duties implied by our constitutional rights. He quite properly includes duties/obligations of  democratic participation–especially informed voting. 

The approaching national elections are very likely to be a turning point for this country. What is at stake is nothing less than our national commitment to America’s longtime–albeit still unrealized– aspirations to democratic self-rule, liberty and equality.

In 2024, the electorate will be faced with a deceptively simple question: will we continue to work toward realizing those aspirations? Or will we make a philosophical U-turn into White Christian Nationalism? 

It really is as simple–and profound–as that.

I have absolute faith in the good will of most Americans. I remain convinced that–no matter how loud they are– the racists, anti-Semites and misogynists are a minority. What I worry about is the willingness of the majority of Americans to take their civic obligations seriously–to inform themselves, to ignore the incessant messaging that tells them their votes won’t count, and to turn out at the polls.

Good people need to vote like America depends on their ballots, because the version we and they want to inhabit really, truly does.

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