Insights And Prescriptions

Evidently, I’m not the only person who writes more about problems than solutions–and gets criticized for it. I recently came across a column by someone named Scott Galloway that began with a similar concession.

Galloway began by acknowledging criticizism for focusing on tech, business or social problems, and not proposing solutions. “Well, guilty as charged, I suppose. But let me say two things.

First, these problems flow in part from failures of perception and awareness. My cohort of economically successful people vastly overestimates our own contribution to our success. Society has been telling us that our nice homes and fancy cars must mean we’re hard-working geniuses, and why should we argue the point? The flip side is also true. Society tells those who’ve been dealt a bad hand, who’ve never caught a break, that their failure must come from a lack of grit, an incapacity to dream big. I believe that just pulling the veil of hype that’s been laid across our unequal society is part of the solution to that inequality….

Second, to be blunt, things are really fucking bad. The dashboard of threats, from inflated asset values to irreversible climate change to armed assaults on government proceedings, is flashing red and getting worse. If I spent my entire public life pointing out the risks we face, I would never run out of material.

Those points made, Galloway also points to the ways in which America is, truly, “exceptional.” Certainly not perfect, but he acknowledges a point I have frequently made: what sets us apart is that this nation wasn’t born out of ethnicity or dynastic conquest, but  on the foundation of an ideal, what I’ve referred to in my own books as “The American Idea.”  Galloway says that fact does set us apart; “it holds a special promise. It remains a promise unfulfilled, but one I believe is within our grasp.”

He says that “we’ve gotten closest to realizing our ideals when we’ve balanced ruthless capitalism with the ballast of a strong middle class. We’ve drifted off that course” and he follows that observation with five recommendations to help us find it again. Those recommendations are: simplification of the tax code; reform of Section 230 and incarceration policy; imposition of a one-time wealth tax; and a rebranding of nuclear power.

You can read his reasoning for each of these prescriptions at the link. I have no particular dispute with any of them, although I would add–and prioritize– more civic education and support for the nation’s public schools, and a concerted effort to counter the “veil of hype” he refers to in his opening paragraphs.

So long as well-to-do and financially comfortable Americans can reassure themselves that their economic good fortune is a reflection of superior merit–that poor folks are disadvantaged because they are lazy or lack “middle-class values” and not because of structural and/or systemic social barriers they’ve encountered–we will fail to achieve the very real promise of a country that–despite all its imperfections–has aspired to an ideal of equality of opportunity.

A friend of mine used to remind me that curing disease requires both an accurate diagnosis and an appropriate prescription. An accurate diagnosis of our social ills has to go beyond the obvious manifestations–observations along the lines of “oh look, there are homeless people sleeping under that bridge.” It requires us to figure out just why those people are homeless, and why our society has failed to provide appropriate interventions.

As Galloway notes, social media currently feeds some of our more dysfunctional and harmful impulses. What is it about our legal framework that allows or incentivizes its use to convey misinformation and disinformation, and what changes to that framework are most likely to ameliorate the situation?

In other words–and in defense of those of us constantly pointing to problems that need fixing–we need to accurately diagnose the roots of our problems, and then consider what prescriptions might cure them.

But in order to come up with an accurate diagnosis, we do need civic literacy–an accurate understanding of our history and the institutions that shaped–or failed to shape–that history.

Comments

And I Had High Hopes….

When Barack Obama raised zillions of dollars from millions of small-dollar donors, I was ecstatic. It seemed to me that his success in online fundraising–fulfilling the promise of earlier efforts by Howard Dean and John McCain–would counter the outsized influence of big money donors.

After all, no public official was going to feel indebted to someone who’d sent in $20 dollars-or even $200. Campaigns would be funded by small-dollar gifts sent by regular, mostly non-ideological voters who’d decided they liked Candidate A.

How naive I was….

A guest essay in the New York Times took a look at the current, ugly status of online fundraising. Not that it will come as a shock to anyone who sent $3 or $5 dollars to a candidate only to have their inbox subsequently buried in hysterical, overwrought and frequently inaccurate appeals for money–contributions that would be matched or doubled and would allow Candidate Y to meet the onslaught of scurrilous attacks from Opponent Z.

The overwhelmingly positive narrative about the power of small-dollar online fund-raising began to congeal: Grass-roots fund-raising is pure and good. Big-dollar donations from corporate cronies are suspect. This is what democracy looks like!!!

It hasn’t exactly worked out that way. It turns out that Americans don’t just vote for certifiable nutcases and nice but clearly unelectable candidates–they also send them money.

As it turned out, grass-roots fund-raising is also what ending democracy looks like. As with any other mass movement, people-powered campaigns followed the standard Hofferian trajectory: beginning as a cause, turning into a business and becoming a racket. Our online fund-raising system is not only enriching scam artists, clogging our inboxes and inflaming the electorate; it is also empowering our politics’ most nefarious actors.

It is how Donald Trump and his cast of clueless coupsters raised nine figures to “stop the steal” that they had fabricated to try to stay in power. It is one way our most extreme candidates dominate the conversation and gain power in our political system. It has redirected money from politicians who work to find compromises that might just help people, diverting it instead to those who either have no chance to win or, worse yet, can win and want to undermine that work for their own ends. And it’s hard to imagine how we can stop it.

The author pointed to an example “of the hellscape to come.”  Remember when South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during an  address to a joint session of Congress?  After the Democratic-controlled Congress censured him, Mr. Wilson’s campaign team used that incivility to fundraise. The campaign “uploaded fund-raising pleas to YouTube” and bought ad space on The Drudge Report.

In just 12 days he collected more money than he’d spent during his entire previous campaign.

The lesson wasn’t lost on those who raise money for campaigns.They could raise money and gain influence without bothering to build relationships and coalitions in Washington and back home. They could bypass all that by “being jerks on the internet and calling out their voters’ enemy du jour in the most ostentatious manner they could summon.” (Josh Hawley raised $3 million after he was pictured giving a salute to the rioters about to storm the Capitol.)

It’s created a perverse incentive structure, empowering the congressional shock jocks at the expense of actual legislators. Meanwhile, a series of court decisions supercharged political fund-raising generally. The new no-limits era allowed big donors to maximize huge contributions to political committees and blasted billions in dark money through the system, continually raising the stakes of each fund-raising deadline.

The elevation of the small-dollar donor has created other nightmarish unintended consequences, however. Democratic candidates with no hope of winning are raising ungodly sums from online liberals drawn to their flashy videos and clever slams. This is particularly the case when said candidates are running against notably loathed Republicans. In 2020, this meant Jaime Harrison, the current Democratic National Committee chairman, raised a record-breaking $131 million in his campaign against Senator Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that Mr. Harrison lost by double digits and never really had a prayer….hundreds of millions of dollars are being pumped into hopeless hype candidates.

As the essay notes, it has become a race to the bottom, inflaming a party’s base voters.

Can we ever know the full effect that years of emails, texts, Facebook ads and viral Twitter ads with doom-driven fund-raising appeals have had on the average voter’s conception of the country and politics? How those stimuli may have contributed to the radicalization of their recipients, especially those who aren’t in on the joke (a nihilistic campaign politics trope in which the strategists make arguments they know are phony)?

So much for my early optimism….

Comments

Originalism And The Second Founding

It’s interesting (okay, infuriating) to note the highly selective “originalism” practiced by  retrograde justices on the Supreme Court. In their professed zeal to mind-meld with the nation’s earliest Founders, they entirely ignore what scholars have called “the Second Founding”–the post-Civil War passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

Ratified in the years immediately following the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution—together known as the Reconstruction Amendments—abolished slavery, safeguarded a set of basic national liberties, and expanded the right to vote.

Both Justice Ketanji Jackson and Heather Cox Richardson have recently reminded us of that “original” history.

President Andrew Johnson, an unrepentant racist, vetoed the 1866 civil rights bill, claiming–among other things– that it wasn’t race neutral.  It wasn’t–and it wasn’t intended to be. Congress passed it over his veto– and based the Fourteenth Amendment on it.

 The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments explicitly give the federal government power to protect individual rights in the states. Scholars like Akhil Reed Amar, who teaches Constitutional Law at Yale, call their passage the “second founding.”

Amar explains that the Reconstruction Amendments shift emphasis somewhat from Madison’s first concern– protecting people from unrepresentative government (see Federalist 51)–to his second: protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority. The 14th prioritizes “ideals of liberty and equality.” 

Amar and Richardson are two of the many historians and constitutional scholars who define the period following the Civil War as a “reconstruction” or “second founding.” (Amar’s magisterial book The Bill of Rights is subtitled Creation and Reconstruction.) So it is very interesting that today’s self-described “originalists” ignore that reconstruction.

I can see two reasons for that studied avoidance: first, the clear legal meaning of those Amendments, especially the 14th, is inconsistent with their theocratic revisionism; and second, they provide clear historical evidence that Constitutional principles have evolved to meet changing times.

A 2019 article in the New Yorker focused on the work of constitutional historian Eric Foner, who has written extensively on the Reconstruction Amendments. As Foner explains, the issues central to those Amendments remain central to our politics today.

Who should vote? Who should be a citizen? What does equality before the law really mean? But, most important, and without trying to denigrate any other scholar, I lecture a lot about Reconstruction—I lecture in law schools, I lecture in history departments, I lecture to public audiences outside the academy—and I have found that there’s very little knowledge of why the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments are important, or what they were trying to accomplish, even in law schools.

Foner points out that, even in the immediate wake of their passage, the Court narrowed  application of the Amendments, arguing–against the evidence–that they hadn’t really effected much change. Foner and other historians disagree.

Many years ago, when I was doing research for a book I was writing, I unearthed  contemporaneous newspaper coverage of the arguments for and against ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Those debates confirm Foner’s reading: the Americans who were preparing to vote on their state’s ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment believed it made very substantive expansions to the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship. It was with that understanding that they voted for (or against) ratification.

As one pundit noted during Amy Comes Barrett’s (excessively brief) confirmation hearing: “given that the Constitution was effectively rewritten by the Reconstruction Amendments, it would be great to see a Supreme Court nominee say something like “I will interpret the Constitution as it was understood in 1870.”

In 2004, the Brennan Center issued a paper explaining the real history of the Reconstruction Amendments, and the persistent failure of the Supreme Court to properly respect and interpret them.(The current court is simply a more egregious example of a longtime failure of jurisprudence.)

From the introduction to that paper

The Supreme Court’s recent turn away from civil rights and toward states rights claims legitimacy from a familiar but false history: the Constitution of 1787 carefully preserved the states sovereignty; Congress operated for 150 years within narrow constraints on its enumerated powers; the courts zealously policed the boundaries of proper federal action; and the half-century starting with the New Deal, when the Supreme Court allowed the federal government to do more or less what it wanted, was an anomaly.

None of this is true. If there is an anomalous period in the relationship between the Court and Congress, it began shortly after the Civil War … These decisions betrayed Lincoln, who had promised a new birth of freedom at Gettysburg, and the people who enacted the constitutional amendments and legislation to make that promise a reality… 

Basically, the Court continues to ignore “the widely understood meaning and purpose of those amendments at the time they were ratified.”

We have very selective “originalists”!

Comments

Accounting For MAGA

In a recent newsletter from The Atlantic, Tom Nichols echoed a frustration of my own. He wrote that, in his lifetime, he’d seen” polio defeated and smallpox eradicated. Now hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead—and still dying—because they refused a lifesaving vaccine as a test of their political loyalty to an ignoramus.”

Ever since 2016, a significant percentage of my posts have revolved around the reality (or actually, the unreality) of that political loyalty, and my inability to understand what–other than racial grievance–might account for it.  Study after study, however, has confirmed that it is, indeed, racism that explains support for Trump and the MAGA movement.

The Guardian recently published an article building on that research. The author began by commenting on President Biden’s forceful condemnation of Trump and MAGA, and as he noted, that attribution was correct —so far as it went.

The deeper, more longstanding threat, however, was articulated by historian Taylor Branch in a 2018 conversation with author Isabel Wilkerson recounted in Wilkerson’s book Caste. As they discussed how the rise of white domestic terrorism under Trump was part of the backlash to the country’s growing racial diversity, Branch noted that, “people said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country”. He went on to add, “the real question would be if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

 Whiteness is the deeper threat because championing whiteness is what makes Trump powerful. People forget that Trump was not particularly well-regarded before he started attacking Mexican immigrants and signaling to white people that he would be the defender of their way of life. In the months before he launched his campaign, he was polling at just 4% in the May 2015 ABC/Washington Post poll. After stirring the racial resentment pot, his popularity took off, growing exponentially in a matter of weeks and propelling him to the front of the pack by mid-July 2015 when he commanded support of 24% of voters, far ahead of all the other Republican candidates.

Of course, Trump’s discovery of the power of racism is nothing new. (That’s why the Right doesn’t want accurate history taught in our schools.) The author quoted George Wallace’s epiphany:  “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes – and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about n—–s – and they stomped the floor.”

People who’d dismissed Trump as a loudmouth buffoon “stomped the floor” when he began talking about (brown) Mexicans and Muslims.

The article reminded readers of Wallace, Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and the fact that David Duke–an “out and proud” Klansman–had attracted the support of 44% of Louisiana’s voters when he ran for the U.S. Senate.

The good news is that the proponents of whiteness do not command majority support. The original Confederates themselves were in the minority and represented just 11% of the country’s white population. People who enjoy majority support have no need to unleash fusillades of voter suppression legislation in the states with the largest numbers of people of color. Yet, from the grandfather clauses of the 1800s to the restrictive voting laws passed last year in the south and south-west, we are seeing an unrelenting practice of trying to depress and destroy democracy by engaging in what the writer Ron Brownstein has described as, “stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change”.

It’s one thing to confirm that a majority of Americans aren’t racist. It’s another thing to ensure that the people in that majority turn out to vote. As the author says,

In order to defend democracy and win the fight for the soul of the nation, two things must happen. One is to make massive investments in the people and organizations working to expand voting and civic participation. Coalitions like America Votes Georgia and Arizona Wins played critical roles in bringing hundreds of thousands of people of color into the electorate, helping to transform those former Confederate bastions.

We also need to “name and shame” the numerous political figures who are appealing to racist sentiments in order to turn out their supporters. Too many liberals shrink from calling out those who are trafficking in racism–it seems so uncivil. But racism is also uncivil–and far more dangerous.

To ultimately prevail in this defense of our democracy, we must clearly understand the underlying forces imperiling the nation, name the nature of the opposition, and summon the majority of Americans to unapologetically affirm that this is a multi-racial country.

This is a test, and we cannot afford to fail.

Comments

Well, At Least I’m Consistent….

Back in 2012, when I was still teaching, I published an essay in an academic journal. I recently came across it, and realized that–as the midterms approach and the GOP departs further from reality–it’s more applicable than ever, so I’m sharing it.

I titled it The Great Disconnect.

As another election season comes to a close, one lesson is abundantly clear: there is a huge disconnect between the skill sets public offices require and the sales pitches candidates are making.

Campaigns are job applications and the candidates are applicants. We voters are the folks doing the hiring. In order to make informed “hires,” we need to know two things: what competencies the job requires, and which of the “applicants” come equipped with the requisite skills as well as our preferred policy positions.

Is this election for mayor, governor or president? We need someone who understands the relevant administrative structure, who is able to assess and recruit knowledgeable technocrats and aides, who has a good grasp of economic and budgetary issues, tax policies, intergovernmental relations and the mechanics of service delivery. It is highly desirable that the applicant be aware of the competing needs and desires of the diverse constituencies to be served and have an ability to communicate with representatives of those constituencies.

Is this an election to fill a legislative seat? In addition to the skills listed above, a policy background is highly desirable—as is a demonstrated ability to work in a bipartisan way with other legislators and members of the executive branch.

If democratic processes are going to produce satisfactory results, voters need information that allows them to match the qualifications of the candidates to the requirements of the position. Unfortunately, it is impossible to sit through the avalanche of misleading 30-second spots, scurrilous Internet postings or negative direct-mail pieces that flood our in-boxes and snail-mail boxes and not conclude that the task is impossible, and that the American electoral process is badly broken.

There is no dearth of theories about what ails us: too much money, too much rigid ideology, too much partisanship, too many lobbyists, too many pundits and too few real reporters….the list is extensive, and all of the items on that list undoubtedly contribute to the sorry state of today’s politics. But these things would matter less if the electorate were better informed.

Let me just offer a couple of all-too-typical examples. In my state, a Senate candidate is currently airing a spot blasting his opponent—a sitting Congressman—for voting to raise the debt ceiling. This political attack depends for its effectiveness on public ignorance of the difference between a vote to raise the debt ceiling and a vote to add to the national debt. Large bipartisan majorities have raised the ceiling without controversy for many years, because members of both parties have understood that difference.

The national debt is a real problem. Reasonable people can disagree about the mix of “revenue enhancements” (aka taxes) and spending cuts needed to address that problem, how much stimulus is needed to get the economy moving again, and what programs might be cut without harming our still-tenuous recovery from the Great Recession. But only someone with absolutely no understanding of the economic system advocates a reckless act that would make it impossible for the U.S. Government to pay its bills—and only an uninformed voter would respond positively to such advocacy.

A more typical political attack is some variation on the theme that “Congressman X has been in Washington for Y years, but we still have problem Z.” No one who understands checks and balances and the limits on what any individual member of Congress can accomplish is going to take such a charge seriously. The fact that a political candidate believes this to be an effective argument tells us a lot about that candidate’s respect for the intelligence of the average voter.

There is another possibility, of course. It may be that these appeals are not simply cynical ploys based upon perceived public ignorance. It may be that the people who are running for office actually believe their own arguments. In several races around the country, candidates are promising to enact policies that are clearly unconstitutional. Others are promising to achieve economic results that are mathematically impossible. Knowledgeable folks tend to discount these statements as political games candidates play, but in at least some cases, it’s clear the candidates really don’t know any better.

It would be nice if we could simply shrug off the more embarrassing examples of electoral dysfunction, but the quality of our political candidates ultimately affects both the voting public and the public administrators trying to serve that public.

Just as having a crazy boss makes a private-sector worker’s job more difficult, electing people to set policy in areas they don’t understand is a major barrier to public problem solving. If members of the House Science and Technology Committee reject evidence of global climate change (last year, one member reassured a panel of climate scientists that we don’t need to worry because after the flood, “God promised in Genesis that He would not destroy Earth again, and I believe God”), where will we find the human and fiscal resources necessary to combat global warming and reduce carbon emissions? If members of the Texas Board of Education reject evolution and choose creationist textbooks that are then adopted for use throughout the country, how do conscientious science teachers do their jobs? For that matter, where will we find the next generation of competent biologists and doctors?

There are a number of things individuals might do to help clean up the current mess that is our election system. We can visit fact-checking sites to vet campaign pronouncements. We can work to reform the redistricting process. We can sign on to one of the various efforts to reverse Citizens United – the case that opened the money spigot that became the gusher of SuperPac spending. Those of us who are educators must work to raise the levels of civic literacy in this country.

And we all need to withhold our votes from those who run campaigns geared to public passions and popular ignorance.

We need to close the great disconnect.

Comments