The Heckler’s Veto

Speaking of “framing,” as I did a few days back, Jamelle Bouie had a recent column in the New York Times that addressed Republican efforts to re-brand censorship as “parental rights.”

The official name of Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill, prohibiting “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity,” is the Parental Rights in Education Act. And the state’s Stop WOKE (short for Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, which outlaws any school instruction that classifies individuals as “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” was framed, similarly, as a victory for the rights of parents.

As Bouie points out, these bills certainly do empower certain parents–those who want to remove books, films, and even whole classes that they believe will expose their children to material with which they disagree, or to those parts of history about which they’d prefer their children remain unaware.

In Pinellas County, for example, a single complaint about the Disney film “Ruby Bridges” — about the 6-year-old girl who integrated an all-white New Orleans school in 1960 — led to its removal from an elementary school.

Lest we shake our heads and mentally write off Florida as an aberration, Bouie reminds readers that these efforts are not limited to Florida under the increasingly autocratic rule of the appalling Ron DeSantis.

In his 2021 campaign for the Virginia governor’s mansion, Glenn Youngkin made “parents matter” his slogan, and he has asserted “parents’ rights” in his effort to regulate the treatment of transgender children and end “divisive concepts” such as “critical race theory” in schools. His early moves included new history standards that removed discussions of racism and downplayed the role of slavery in causing the Civil War.

And at this moment, Texas Republicans are debating a bill — backed by Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — that, according to The Texas Tribune, “would severely restrict classroom lessons, school activities and teacher guidance about sexual orientation and gender identity in all public and charter schools up to 12th grade.” Texas parents, The Tribune notes, already have the right to “remove their child temporarily from a class or activity that conflicts with their beliefs or review all instructional materials.” This bill would further empower parents to object to books, lessons and entire curriculums.

These efforts certainly do “empower” a subset of racist and homophobic parents. They don’t empower the majority of parents who want their children to learn about–and learn from– accurate American history. And they run roughshod over the rights of parents who want schools to educate their children by offering them a wide library of thought-provoking, age-appropriate books and materials.

Bouie says these laws amount to the institutionalization of the “heckler’s veto,” an observation with which I fully agree.

What is the heckler’s veto?

The term originated as a judicial response to arguments often made when unpopular speakers came to town–think Martin Luther King in the South during the Civil Rights movement, or the KKK planning an “event” on Indiana’s Statehouse steps, or similarly contentious presentations that raise a non-trivial possibility of violence and protest. Those who wish to shut the speaker down use that threat of conflict to argue that allowing the speech to take place will be too dangerous.

If successful, that’s an argument that permits the “hecklers”–those who disagree with the message– to  mute the speaker, to “veto” his First Amendment Free Speech rights. The Courts have seen through that tactic, ordering localities to respond to the threat by deploying a police presence sufficient to ensure the public safety– not by disallowing the speech or rally.

“Parents’ rights,” is just another form of the heckler’s veto, giving some parents the right to deny a similar right to the parents who disagree with them. It is, as Bouie writes, a movement is that is meant “to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents” allowing them to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community.

It is part of a wider assault.

The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a cover for a more material and ideological agenda. The screaming over “wokeness” and “D.E.I.” is just another Trojan horse for a relentless effort to dismantle a pillar of American democracy that, for all of its flaws, is still one of the country’s most powerful engines for economic and social mobility.

The only parents these hecklers are “empowering” are the parents who are soldiers in the GOP’s war on intellectual honesty and public education.

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Mitch Daniels And Tea Leaves

We all view the news of the day through a personal lens. I know that I do. So it may be that my “reading” of a recent item in the Indianapolis Business Journal simply reflects my conviction that the Republican Party is far along in the process of disintegration.

The article reported on former Governor Mitch Daniels’ acceptance of a new position:

Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is set to join the Carmel-based Liberty Fund this week in the new position of distinguished scholar and senior adviser, the educational foundation announced Tuesday.

The position was created specifically for Daniels, who has spent the past decade as president of Purdue University. The Liberty Fund said Daniels’ work will focus on the creation of educational programming and partnerships that will strengthen the not-for-profit’s existing education programs.

The Liberty Fund is one of the richest foundations in the state, with about $341 million in assets as of April 2021. The pro-free-enterprise foundation, which has about 45 employees, was founded in 1960 by businessman and philanthropist Pierre Goodrich, the son of James Goodrich, Indiana’s 29th governor (1917-21).

The foundation raised its local profile by opening a $22 million headquarters at 111th Street and U.S. 31 in Carmel in 2016.

“I have watched for decades as the Liberty Fund, with impeccable scholarship and fidelity to principle, has labored to keep lit the lamp of freedom, and spread understanding of its historical and intellectual underpinnings,” Daniels, 73, said in written remarks. “Now, with individual liberty under relentless threats foreign and domestic, I’m grateful for the funds’ invitation that I try to assist it in its noble and essential mission.”

Wealthy Republicans and conservative institutions have a long history of providing comfortable “stopping points” for politicians who are between electoral gigs, and perhaps this is simply another illustration of the cozy relationship of political folks with their moneyed patrons.

But through my “lens” I see it differently.

I’m superficially familiar with the Liberty Fund. I even attended one of their conferences. And while I have substantial differences with the extreme libertarian political philosophy that led Pierre Goodrich to establish the organization, it is a philosophy that for many years formed a significant part of the GOP’s policy agenda.

The books published by the Fund are by thinkers like Adam Smith, Ludwig  Von Mises, and David Hume, along with reprints of the Federalist Papers and other documents explicating the Constitution. The conference I attended focused on a scholarly discussion of totalitarianism and the writings of Hannah Arendt.

I seriously doubt that Kevin McCarthy or the ragtag members of the House misnamed “Freedom Caucus” have ever read any of those books, or have ever heard of Hannah Arendt. The vast majority of today’s Republican officeholders are buffoons and/or racists, intent only upon appealing to their White Nationalist MAGA base and retaining power.

And that brings me to the few remaining Republicans like Mitch Daniels. When Mitch was Governor, I disagreed with several of his policy priorities, but I endorsed and admired his refusal to engage in culture war politics.

I have been predicting the implosion of the Republican Party for several years. That’s my “lens.” The conservative businesspeople we used to call “Country Club” Republicans, who tend to be educated, are increasingly fleeing the out-and-proud racism, misogyny and conspiracy theories embraced by the MAGA Republicans and Trumpers.

Before I read about Daniels new position at the Liberty Fund, I’d been planning to post about the GOP’s abandonment of anything resembling a principled, intellectually-defensible conservatism. (That today’s GOP has no agenda–conservative or otherwise– was made abundantly clear by the party’s failure to produce a platform during the last election cycle.)

What does that have to do with Daniels new “gig”?

When there were rumors that Daniels might run for Senate, and oppose MAGA world’s Jim Banks in the primary, the far right Club for Growth came out with guns blazing, accusing him of being an “old guard” Republican–i.e., too liberal. (Still sane?)

That  knee-jerk reaction was just more evidence–as if we needed it– that today’s GOP is a pathetic assemblage of reaction and racism, leaving the Democrats as the party-by-default of everyone else. That’s terrible for the country, because we lose the benefit of principled conservative analyses of proposed legislation, and because the Democratic Party has to cope with the internal disputes that are inevitable when a party becomes home to pretty much every voter–from center-right to “out there” left– who rejects the current GOP.

Bottom line: My “lens” tells me that Daniels and the Liberty Fund and conservatives like Paul Ryan who once had a home in the GOP are mounting a last-gasp effort to retake the party.

My lens also tells me it’s too late.

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Who’s Winning The War?

The title doesn’t refer to the Ukraine versus Russia war–instead, I want to talk about a far more protracted conflict: America’s culture war.

A few days ago, I shared my opinion that culture will ultimately overwhelm politics. A few days after that, a Washington Post column by Eugene Robinson highlighted a relevant University of Chicago survey of that culture. It appears–and the op-ed is titled–that “wokeness is winning.”

“Wokeness” is winning, according to an illuminating new poll that should — but probably won’t — make Republican politicians wary of hitching their wagon to the anger-fueled culture wars.

The survey — conducted this month by the nonpartisan research institute NORC at the University of Chicago, with funding from the Wall Street Journal — found that on several hot-button issues related to “wokeness”, substantial majorities of Americans believe our progress toward inclusion and diversity is on the right track.

Given the ferocity of current attacks on trans people, it was comforting to learn that 56% of respondents thought that social acceptance of people who are transgender, “has been about right” or “has not gone far enough.”  The opposing view– that we have “gone too far” in accepting transgender people–was held by 43 percent of those surveyed. 

And as Robinson noted, the results just got “more woke” from there.

On “promoting equality between men and women,” 86 percent took the woke “about right” or “not gone far enough” positions, as opposed to 12 percent who espoused the anti-woke “gone too far” view. On “accepting people who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual,” the poll found respondents to be 69 percent woke versus 29 percent anti-woke. On “businesses taking steps to promote racial and ethnic diversity,” woke beat anti-woke, 70 percent to 28 percent. And on “schools and universities taking steps to promote racial and ethnic diversity,” wokeness ruled once again, 67 percent to 30 percent.

Even on the subject of pronouns, which GOP demagogues have sought to shift from the grammatical realm to the political, 58 percent of respondents were neutral or favorable toward the practice of specifying “he/him, she/her or they/them” in emails, on social media or in conversations; 42 percent were unfavorable. And on the narrower question of “being asked” to address someone with gender-neutral pronouns such as “they/them,” those polled were evenly divided.

When the survey asked about the GOP’s current effort to ban “inappropriate” materials from the nation’s classrooms, the results were gratifying: 61 percent of respondents  were concerned that “some schools may ban books and censor topics that are educationally important.”  Only 36 percent worried that “some schools may teach books and topics that some students or their parents feel are inappropriate or offensive.”

Of course, 36% is still a troubling number, especially since these are the people most likely to be making noise and challenging educational choices. As Robinson notes, the poll results are unlikely to deter MAGA activists from “hectoring school boards to yank classics such as Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” from library shelves.”

And don’t get me started about the parents who got a Florida school principal fired because a teacher in the school showed students “pornography”–aka Michelangelo’s David.

The least surprising finding of the survey was its confirmation of the partisan divide– a  divide Robinson characterized as stark.

Seventy-five percent of respondents who identified as Republicans said we have “gone too far” in accepting transgender people, as opposed to just 15 percent of Democrats and 47 percent of independent voters. Majorities of Republicans also took the “gone too far” position on gay, lesbian and bisexual acceptance, and on promoting diversity in businesses, schools and universities — versus minorities of Democrats and independents who hold those views.

As other media have reported, the one area in which the survey showed less of a partisan divide was on the issue of gun control. It found 

“broad public support for a variety of gun restrictions, including many that are supported by majorities of Republicans and gun owners….71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats and a majority of those in gun-owning households.”

Overall, the survey confirmed what most Americans understand: American citizens’ partisan affiliations are no longer based primarily on economics or policy preferences. Instead, they reflect profoundly different values, and contending perspectives on Americanism and the common good.

The good news is that Americans who are “woke”–who value inclusion and respect for individual rights– are in the majority. The bad news is that–thanks to gerrymandering and outmoded electoral structures– MAGA Republicans and White Christian Nationalists retain far more positions of authority than they should be entitled to hold in a democratic system, given their minority status.  

The silent majority has evolved, and it’s woke. Now its members need to get out the vote. 

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That Pesky Thing Called Evidence

The World’s Worst Legislature is barreling toward the session’s finish line, and the Republican super-majority shows no sign of moderating its war on public education, despite recently emerging evidence that several of the most enthusiastic proponents of vouchers have disturbing conflicts of interest, not to mention overwhelming evidence that privatizing schools leads to poorer educational outcomes.

Of course, Indiana’s lawmakers are impervious to evidence of all kinds. (Look at Indiana’s gun laws, disregard of environmental impacts…the list goes on.)

I know my periodic posts on the subject are the equivalent of “whistling in the wind,” but as the research continues to pile up, I find it hard to restrain myself.

So…

In the Public Interest recently shared  “a clear and concise breakdown of the problems of vouchers,” written by a Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, and  titled “There is no Upside.”

Here’s the lede:

What if I told you there is a policy idea in education that, when implemented to its full extent, caused some of the largest academic drops ever measured in the research record?

What if I told you that 40 percent of schools funded under that policy closed their doors afterward, and that kids in those schools fled them at about a rate of 20 percent per year?

What if I told you that some the largest financial backers of that idea also put their money behind election denial and voter suppression—groups still claiming Donald Trump won the 2020 election? Would you believe what those groups told you about their ideas for improving schools?

What if I told you that idea exists, that it’s called school vouchers, and despite all of the evidence against it the idea persists and is even expanding?

The article followed up with a compilation of independent analyses drawn from both the research community and “on the ground” reporting by journalists. You need to click through for the details, but here are the “top level” findings:

  • First, vouchers mostly fund children already in private school. Seventy to -eighty percent of kids using vouchers were already in private school before taxpayers picked up the tab.
  •  Among the relatively few kids who did use vouchers to leave public schools, test scores dropped between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations.
  • The typical private school accepting vouchers “isn’t one of the elite, private schools in popular narrative.” The typical voucher school is “small, often run out of a church property like its basement, often popping up specifically to get the voucher.”
  • Understandably, many  kids leave those sub-prime schools. (In Wisconsin, about 20 percent of kids left their voucher school every year and most transferred to a public school.)

Then there is the issue of transparency and oversight.

All of the above evidence should already tell you why it’s critically important that states passing voucher laws also include strong academic and financial reporting requirements. If we’re going to use taxpayer funds on these private ventures, we need to know what the academic results are and what the return on government investment is.

And of course, we don’t.

Then, of course, there’s discrimination.

We know that in Indiana, where one of the largest and lowest-performing voucher programs exists, more than $16 million in taxpayer dollars went to schools discriminating against LGBTQ children. Similar story in Florida—and that includes kids whose parents are gay, regardless of how the children identify.

Given the fact that Indiana’s legislature is advancing other discriminatory measures aimed at the LGBTQ community–especially several ugly measures  targeting trans children–I’m sure our lawmakers consider that documented bigotry to be a feature, not a bug.

The article also traces connections I’d not previously been aware of between the most active voucher proponents and far-right organizations engaging in efforts to suppress votes and reject the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Interestingly, the article doesn’t highlight one of my main concerns: that vouchers are an end-run around the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State. Here in Indiana, over 90% of voucher students attend religious schools, a significant percentage of which are fundamentalist. The children who attend overwhelmingly come from the corresponding faith communities. Even the religious schools that don’t actively discriminate do not and cannot provide the diverse classroom environment that prepares children for  citizenship in increasingly diverse  America.(Most don’t teach civics, either.)

It also doesn’t address how vouchers disproportionately hurt rural communities.

The article concludes:

So there you have it: catastrophic academic harm. A revolving door of private school failures. High turnover rates among at-risk children. Avoiding oversight and transparency. Overt, systematic discrimination against vulnerable kids and families. Deep and sustained ties to anti-democratic forces working in the United States today.

That’s school vouchers in 2023.

That’s the “system” Hoosier lawmakers want to greatly expand–with funds stolen from the state’s already under-resourced public schools.

It’s indefensible.

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He Who Frames The Issue..

I keep thinking about a line from that old Burt Bacharach song–“What’s it all about, Alfie?” After all, figuring out what it’s all about–framing the correct issues– could be the most important task humans face.

We don’t do it well.

I used to tell students that what three years of law school teaches is: “He who frames the issue, wins the debate.” It’s a maxim that the GOP clearly understands.

  • Is the massive assault on trans children an effort to use a wedge issue to political advantage in our ongoing culture war? Or is it, as Republicans piously claim, an effort to “protect” children?
  • Are the various efforts to prevent schools from teaching accurate history and/or providing thought-provoking reading material mechanisms to control the educational narrative, or are they intended to “empower parents”?
  • Does “school choice” allow parents to select schools that are best for their children? Or are such programs a way to circumvent the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State, so that tax dollars can flow to religious institutions?
  • Are laws forbidding mask mandates efforts to protect our precious individual freedoms, or do they represent dangerous pandering  to the GOP’s anti-science base?
  • Are the gun nuts in the legislature really protecting Americans’ “2d Amendment” rights? (I can’t even come up with an alternate framing rooted in policy–in my view, lawmakers who want to protect kids from “inappropriate” books but not from being murdered by firearms are mentally disordered.)
  • And of course, there’s the mother of all dishonest framing–abortion bans that will inevitably cause the deaths of large numbers of women masquerading as “pro-life” measures, rather than the anti-women efforts grounded in religion and misogyny that they clearly are.

You can probably come up with a number of similar examples of laws defended on the basis of X that are really expressions of Y.

I thought about the multiple examples of GOP excellence in framing when I read that Michigan’s Governor had signed a bill overturning that state’s brilliantly misnamed “Right to Work” law. Right to Work laws are one of the most successful examples of dishonestly “framing the issue” in order to win the debate.

Talking Points Memo recently reported on the decades of successful marketing that gave so many states these laws.

On its face, who’d object to a “right-to-work” law?

By that token, and divorced from its substance, who wouldn’t be “pro-life”? Who quibbles with the assertion that “all lives matter,” or that markets should be “free”?

Right-wing activists have historically been good at branding, at characterizing even policy positions that restrict rights as postures of freedom and advancement.

“Right-to-work” laws are a seminal example of this marketing technique. They have nothing to do with guarantees of employment, but allow those in unionized jobs to opt out of paying union dues — while the unions are still required to provide services, like representation in disputes with management, even to those non-paying workers.

These laws have become the topic of national conversation, as Michigan is poised to repeal its version, the first state to do so in over 50 years.

The article noted the origins of the phrase and the trajectory of its subsequent marketing.

There is some dispute as to the phrase’s origins, but most point to anti-union Dallas Morning News editorial writer William Ruggles as coining the modern usage. In his 1941 Labor Day column, he called for a constitutional amendment to prohibit the “closed shop” or “union shop” — workplaces where unions can negotiate a contract that includes union membership as a condition of employment.

His column reportedly piqued the interest of Vance Muse, an avowed white supremacist who was working for various racist, anti-Semetic and anti-union campaigns — including a push for a “right-to-work” law in Arkansas (the name for the legislation courtesy of a Ruggles suggestion). That effort was successful: Arkansas became one of the first states to pass a right-to-work law, along with Florida.

“Opponents to unionism in the South discovered this brilliant rhetorical phraseology, and they began to propagandize on it,” Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor who directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told TPM.

 From the beginning, this marketing campaign had a distinctly libertarian bent. It was meant to evoke the idea of individual freedom, that workers should get to pocket their hard-earned cash that would otherwise go to union dues.

Interestingly,  states with right-to-work laws are almost all the same states that have outlawed abortion. As the article notes, advocates for both are extremely good at marketing themselves, and at getting their chosen rhetoric to be adopted by the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Democrats keep using slogans like “defund the police.” No wonder we have minority political control.

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