Jim Banks–Hoosier Embarrassment

In November of 2024, Hoosiers will elect a U.S. Senator to fill a seat left open by the current occupant, who is running for Governor. The almost-certain GOP candidate will be current Congressperson and noted crackpot Jim Banks.

Lest you quibble with my “crackpot” designation, allow me to share a recent example, reported by Howey Political Report (paywall).

Indiana U.S. Reps. Jim Banks and Erin Houchin joined 68 fellow Republicans in voting to end U.S. military aid to Ukraine during debate on the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act.  They offered the following amendment (one of dozens offered by hard-Right Republicans): “Notwithstanding any provision of this or any other Act, no federal funds may be made available to provide security assistance to Ukraine.”

 It was defeated by a 358-70 margin, with all Democrats and a majority of Republicans (including U.S.Reps. Jim Baird, Larry Bucshon, Greg Pence, Victoria Spartz and Rudy Yakym) opposing the measure.

The misnamed Freedom Caucus believes that the United States should ignore Russia’s unprovoked invasion of another country and its subsequent commission of multiple war crimes. Why?

Well, according to Banks, we can’t afford it.

 “I don’t believe there was ever a parallel in American history where we’ve seen America decline as much as it has in two years with Joe Biden in the White House. So we’ve got to push the Biden administration to focus on our domestic weaknesses and the crisis in our own country before we grant billions and billions, $40 billion in this case to send to Ukraine. I looked through this bill and it was easy for me to vote against it. This bill gives every single person in Ukraine a ticket to come to the United States of America. That would be OK if we could afford it. To invite 44 million people to come here with no limits, we can’t afford it. Unlike Afghanistan, Ukraine is a wealthier country. We have to take that into account.”

Banks is one of the reliably hateful fringe that now controls  the grievance cult that used to be a political party. The fact that so demonstrably delusional a character represents an Indiana Congressional district is bad enough–allowing him to become a Senator would be immeasurably worse.

And as political strategists will affirm, if he becomes the incumbent –especially with an R next to his name in Red Indiana–he’ll be incredibly difficult to dislodge. 

One reason Republicans do well in Indiana is because Democrats have essentially thrown in the towel. They approach each race with the attitude: “what can we do? Indiana’s a lost cause.” But even in the most rural precincts of Indiana, I find it hard to believe that majorities of Hoosiers find Banks–a certified wing-nut and Trump lover who is pro-gun, anti-woman, and anti-LGBTQ–appealing.

A friend and I recently had lunch with Marc Carmichael, the former state legislator who  very recently decided to run for the Democratic nomination, after evaluating the political landscape. As he said, it’s rare in Indiana that Democrats face so promising a set of circumstances.

  • This is an open seat. Banks won’t have the advantages of incumbency.
  • It’s JimBanks–who is far, far to the Right of even very conservative Hoosiers.
  • Democrats are on the side of the majority of Hoosiers on the issues, especially  women’s rights and assault weapons.

Democrats have a candidate with political and legislative experience and the ability to run full-time. Carmichael has hit the ground running, and is in the process of putting together his website, social media strategy and fundraising plan.

What will defeat him–or another first-rate candidate, Jennifer McCormick, who is running for Governor– is the defeatist attitude of far too many progressive Hoosiers–an attitude that depresses both fundraising and turnout. 

If Carmichael raises enough money to get his message out, he can win.

 According to a Pew survey, 42% of Hoosiers are or lean Republican, 37% are or lean Democrat, and 20% report no lean. A poll (commissioned by Indiana Republicans!) found  63-percent of Hoosier voters are pro-choice. Another poll, this one from EveryTown for Gun Safety, found the overwhelming majority of Hoosiers support stronger gun laws: 56 percent of Hoosiers think gun laws should be made stronger, compared to just 8 percent who want weaker gun laws. (Support for individual gun safety laws was even higher.)

I wasn’t able to find polling on Hoosiers’ support for Ukraine, but I can’t imagine that many Indiana citizens think it’s “too expensive” to support a democratic ally–or who agree with TFG (and evidently Banks) that Vladimir Putin–currently trying to starve the world-– is a good guy.

Jim Banks is Indiana’s version of Margery Taylor Green. It’s bad enough that he continually embarrasses us in the House. We sure don’t need him in the Senate.

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A Changing Electorate

You can get whiplash from reading the political news.

One story making the media rounds suggests that–despite the non-emergence of a “Red wave” in the 2022 midterms, Republican turnout was better than Democratic turnout. Hard to read that without despairing of the prospects for 2024, despite the fact that midterm turnout by the party that doesn’t hold the White House is almost always reliably bigger.

But then, I came across this article in the Washington Post. Talk about an upper!

The essay was co-authored by Celinda Lake, a Democratic Party strategist and one of two lead pollsters for Biden’s 2020 campaign, and Mac Heller, a documentary filmmaker. Here’s the part that lifted my spirits:

Every year, about 4 million Americans turn 18 and gain the right to vote. In the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, that’s 32 million new eligible voters.

Also every year, 2½ million older Americans die. So in the same eight years, that’s as many as 20 million fewer older voters.

Which means that between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people. That’s about 20 percent of the total 2020 eligible electorate of 258 million Americans.

And unlike previous generations, Gen Z votes. Comparing the four federal elections since 2015 (when the first members of Gen Z turned 18) with the preceding nine (1998 to 2014), average turnout by young voters (defined here as voters under 30) in the Trump and post-Trump years has been 25 percent higher than that of older generations at the same age before Trump — 8 percent higher in presidential years and a whopping 46 percent higher in midterms.

Not as impressive–but not insignificant–has been the midterm increase of 7% in voter registration among under-30 voters since Gen Z joined the electorate. The authors report that, In midterm elections, “under-30s have seen a 20 percent increase in their share of the electorate, on average, since Trump and Gen Z entered the game.

Interestingly, reactions to Trump don’t turn out to be a major factor for these voters. Polls suggest that Gen Z voters are motivated by “strong passion” on one or more issues — “a much more policy-driven approach than the more partisan voting behavior of their elders.”

That policy-first approach, combined with the issues they care most about, have led young people in recent years to vote more frequently for Democrats and progressive policies than prior generations did when of similar age — as recent elections in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin have shown.

Researchers have already demonstrated the fallacy of the long-held belief among political observers that American voters become more conservative as they age. Recent studies show that once political identities are formed, they tend to remain constant. And as the authors of this essay note, “about 48 percent of Gen Z voters identify as a person of color, while the boomers they’re replacing in the electorate are 72 percent White.”

Gen Z voters are on track to be the most educated group in our history, and the majority of college graduates are now female. Because voting participation correlates positively with education, expect women to speak with a bigger voice in our coming elections. Gen Z voters are much more likely to cite gender fluidity as a value, and they list racism among their greatest concerns. Further, they are the least religious generation in our history. No wonder there’s discussion in some parts of the GOP about raising the voting age to 25, and among some Democrats about lowering it to 16!

The fact that younger voters are more likely to be driven by issues rather than partisanship should be very good news for Democrats, since polling demonstrates that Democratic positions align with the policy preferences of a substantial majority of Americans.

But the news isn’t all good. There’s a danger there, too.

The importance of issues, rather than party ID, holds a warning:Both parties should worry about young voters embracing third-party candidates. Past elections show that Gen Z voters shop for candidates longer and respond favorably to new faces and issue-oriented candidates. They like combining their activism with their voting and don’t feel bound by party loyalty. And they can’t remember Ross Perot, Ralph Nader — or even Jill Stein.

GOP support for “No Labels” and RNK, Jr. are evidence that Republicans understand that danger. They know they can’t win a head-to-head campaign between Donald Trump and Biden (or for that matter, between Trump and pretty much any sentient Democrat). Their best hopes for victory lie with the Electoral College and third-party candidates who can peel off votes in selected states that would otherwise go to the Democrats.

Like I said–whiplash.

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Florida Proves My Point

I have repeatedly communicated my conviction that racism is the root cause of America’s polarization. That root cause may be exacerbated by the other issues we address, but eventually, the racist roots become too obvious to ignore.

That the Republican war on “woke” is a barely-veiled attack on racial and gender equity has been fairly obvious for some time. In Ron DeSantis’ Florida, the determination to rewrite history and privilege White Supremacy has become impossible to ignore.

As the irreplaceable Heather Cox Richardson has explained,

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project. 

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines emphasize that slavery was common around the globe. Worse, “they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout).” They teach that slavery in the U.S. was really an outgrowth of  “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and that the practice “was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” –with emphasis on  “systematic slave trading in Africa.”

Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

Richardson notes that Florida’s Rightwing curriculum presents human enslavement as just one type of labor system, “a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.”

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

Those who constructed this curriculum evidently had a problem fitting the violence of Reconstruction into their whitewashed version of U.S. history so, according to Richardson, they didn’t bother. They simply included a single entry in which an instructor is told to “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104). 

There’s more, and you really need to click through and read the post in its entirety, but Richardson sums up this educational travesty with a powerful indictment:

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.” 

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage. 

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves. 

That is the “fundamental story” that MAGA folks want American children to believe. Anything else is “CRT.”

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The Right’s Educational Agenda

As regular readers of this blog know, Morton Marcus and I recently co-authored and published a small book on the women’s movement. (If you haven’t purchased it, I really wish you would…) We discovered that–despite our very different preoccupations–we work together well, and we’ve been considering another project, this time, an examination of educational privatization–aka the voucher movement.

But researching the consequences that most concern us ranges from tricky to impossible. There’s plenty of research demonstrating that privatization has failed to deliver what proponents promised: better test scores. Researchers can access that sort of data; many have, and the results are pretty straightforward–which is why voucher cheerleaders now talk about parental choice rather than improved educational outcomes.

We have another concern: that vouchers facilitate and encourage the polarization of the polity, undermining civic cohesion at a time when increasing population diversity makes civic unity both more difficult and more important.

The research problem is what academics call “self-selection.” Even if we were able to test the thesis that graduates of private, mostly religious voucher schools emerge less civically knowledgable or more religiously biased or more prone to misogyny, etc., there would be no way to attribute those outcomes to the schools; the likelihood is that parents choosing such schools considered those outcomes to be a feature, not a bug.

I ran into a similar roadblock several years ago; I’d hoped to research the effects of the built environment on social capital. Did people living in gated communities have measurably different connections to, or interactions with, other people? Again, the “chicken and egg” issue confounded me: it was likely that most people who chose to live in those gated communities already had similar levels of social capital.

We may or may not develop a data-driven analysis of the anti-democratic results of school privatization. We both recognize that our public schools are far from perfect–years of neighborhood segregation, among other things, created huge differences between schools. Some of the charter schools that were initially intended to be more innovative public schools have become indistinguishable from private academies. And not all parents who place children in a private or charter school are doing so in order to indoctrinate their offspring (or protect them from Black or Brown classmates).

That said, many of these schools are teaching a very Whitewashed American history.

One recent report traces the sharp, Rightward turn of a new breed of Charter schools.

NPE identified hundreds of charter schools, predominantly in red states, that use the classical brand or other conservative dog whistles to attract white Christian families to enroll in the school. From featured religious music videos to statements that claim they offer a faith-friendly environment, these charter schools are opening at an accelerated rate, with at least 66 additional schools in the pipeline to open by 2024. While some of these schools, such as the Roger Bacon Academies, are long-standing, nearly half of the schools we identified opened after the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Hillsdale College is a small, conservative Christian college that has long been noted for far-Right indoctrination, and it is one of the most influential organizations pushing these charters.

The small conservative Christian college in Michigan has become a major player in Ron DeSantis’s Florida; as the report says, “Tug any thread of Florida’s present education policy, and you will find this small Michigan college at the other end.”

Hillsdale’s president Larry Arnn was tagged by Donald Trump to head his short-lived 1776 Commission, charged with creating nationalistic history curriculum (a version of which is now offered by Hillsdale). He has made the occasional misstep, as when Hillsdale’s charter move into Tennessee was stalled after Arnn was caught saying that “teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

Hillsdale works through its Barney Charter School initiative as well as providing its classical curriculum to member charters at no cost. In some cases, as with the Optima chain in Florida, the charter may be operated by a for-profit charter management firm (in the case of Optima, both the charter chains and the charter management organization are owned by the same person). The report found that among this new wave of conservative charter schools, the percentage of those operated by for-profit charter management companies is twice that in the charter sector as a whole.

Not every charter that advertises a classical curriculum is Rightwing; here in Indianapolis, Herron High School is an admirable example–and proudly public. But the morphing of charters into Rightwing indoctrination academies continues to gather steam.

I’m convinced that this movement endangers American democracy–but convincing data proving my hypothesis isn’t likely to emerge until Americans are living with the very undemocratic results.

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Good News For A Change

Over the past few years, I have become increasingly convinced that the death of traditional newspapers is at the root of much–if not most–of America’s polarization and anger. It isn’t just the dearth of local news, damaging as that is. The deeper problem is fragmentation.

As I used to tell students in my Media and Public Policy classes, “back in the day,” when large majorities of city residents got their news from the same newspapers (and from the local television newscasts that largely got theirs from local newspaper reporters), they occupied a similar civic reality.Even if they bought the paper for the grocery coupons or the sports scores, and merely glanced at the headlines, they shared a common information environment.

That shared environment is the loss that has most deeply cut into local civic cohesion and civic participation. So–although I have cheered the recent entry of new local media sources–I realize that those new resources don’t solve the fragmentation problem, even assuming that people who don’t currently get much local news learn about and access them. (I do worry that the availability of these resources won’t penetrate the consciousness of those who don’t share the nerdy preoccupations of people like me.)

All this is by way of explaining why I was thrilled to read the following:

A nonprofit group dedicated to rescuing local newspapers from either collapse or private equity pillaging is buying 22 local papers in Maine. The National Trust for Local News, founded just two years ago, will purchase five of the state’s six dailies and 17 weeklies from a private company called Masthead Maine owned by Reade Brower, who made his money in direct mail. (How one guy managed to get control of all the important newspapers in a state is a story for another day.)

As we all know, daily newspapers became less profitable with the rise of the Internet. That loss of profitability led private equity operators to swoop in and buy thousands of local newspapers. They saw a way to profit by “paring staff and news coverage to the bone.” Since then, the venerable (and rapacious) Gannett chain was bought by GateHouse, “one of the most predatory of the private equity outfits, which took over the Gannett name.”

The result has been the aptly-named “ghost” newspaper. (The Indianapolis Star is an excellent example.)

Local dailies and weeklies could actually turn a profit with well-staffed newsrooms if owners could be satisfied by returns in the 5 to 10 percent range rather than the 15 to 20 percent that was typical in the pre-internet era and that is demanded by private equity players. Despite the internet, local merchants still rely heavily on display ads, which are profit centers. And well-run local papers attract more display ads.

Since then, there has been a slowly growing movement to save the local press by returning it to community or nonprofit ownership. My friend and co-author Ed Miller has gone on to found an exemplary weekly, The Provincetown Independent, which has thrived at the expense of the GateHouse-owned Provincetown Banner, which has lost most of its staff and circulation. Between 2017 and July 2022, over 135 nonprofit newsrooms were launched, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Another hopeful sign is that even by laying off staff and reducing coverage, private equity companies are not making the money they hoped for, so some of these papers are on the auction block and can be saved. Maine is not a typical case, since Reade Brower is a relatively benign monopolist and was willing to work with the National Trust for Local News.

According to the linked report, the Trust–which does not have a lot of its own money– employs a variety of ownership models and draws funding from a number of sources:

Its first major deal was in Colorado, where it now owns 24 local newspapers in that state in collaboration with The Colorado Sun. It has funders that include the Gates Family Foundation, the Google News Initiative, and the Knight Foundation. The MacArthur Foundation also recently announced a major initiative to save local news.

This is the beginning of a very hopeful trend to save priceless civic assets from predatory capitalism at its worst.

I never understood why those “predatory capitalists” didn’t understand that their approach ensured a death spiral. Newspapers sell a product: content. Did the Gatehouses and Gannetts not understand that consumers would respond to cuts in staffing, reflected in dramatic reductions of useful content, by discontinuing their subscriptions?

We need local news. And we need a shared source of local news. The National Trust for Local News seems to understand that saving local newspapers is the most efficient way to rebuild shared information resources.

That is very good news.

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