Quality Of Life

In a post a few days ago, I considered the GOP’s current definition of “crime”–noting that, to Republicans,  breaking federal rules is no longer criminal, and locally, “crime” only happens in Blue cities and states.

It’s another example of the widening perceptual gap between urban and rural Americans. City folks are increasingly Democratic; rural inhabitants increasingly Republican/MAGA.

Ideally, the decision where to live wouldn’t be viewed as political. Some people like owning tracts of land and being close to nature; others (like your truly) appreciate the energy generated by density and diversity. It is–or should be– simply a matter of individual preference.

Of course, it’s never that simple. Public policies matter.

There are measurable reasons that some places in America attract people, while others are emptying out. (Ironically, Red state culture war policies inflict the most damage on rural areas where residents are most supportive of those policies– anti-abortion laws have accelerated the departure of all doctors, not just ob-gyn practitioners, and educational vouchers hurt public schools in rural areas where thin population cannot support private alternatives).

For those who have a choice, the decision where to live often depends upon the perceived “quality of life,” an assessment of the amenities that make a city or state attractive to a majority of potential businesses and individuals.

Michael Hicks recently shared what the data tells us about that question.

Hicks began by noting that most of Indiana (and the Midwest generally)  is in economic decline. Projections are that more than 50 Hoosier counties will experience a declining population through 2060.

A dozen counties will be projected to grow faster than the nation through 2060. The remaining 30 or so will be projected to grow more slowly than the national rate—a pattern known as relative decline. Indiana and the Midwest will still be prosperous, in a global sense. But, relative to most of the nation, the coming decades will see us slipping farther away from the nation.

Research has identified the characteristics of places that do continue to attract residents.

Growing places almost always have most of the same positive attributes. Their schools are good and attractive to families, they are safe, their residents are better educated than average, and they have growing housing stock with good public infrastructure. Growing places enjoy recreational options, both private and public. And, there are few barriers to employment or starting a business, such as restrictive occupational licensing or heavy regulatory burdens

Research tells us that–duh!– when people aren’t moving to an area, it’s because they don’t wish to live there.

The primary reason people don’t wish to live in a place is that it doesn’t have the neighborhoods they want. The reasons for not moving to a place are as varied as human interests. But, for the median family, the common factors are that schools aren’t sufficiently good, crime is too high or infrastructure is too decayed.

That research also tells us that policymankers’ preferred emphasis on “economic development”–luring businesses–is misplaced. As Hicks notes,

No matter how successful a community is at luring new factories and warehouses, unless you can attract their highly paid workers to your town, it will have no lasting effect. If your business attraction efforts make your community less desirable for people, it will actually weaken your local economy. It is a costly business with inherent risks.

In the post-COVID world, people are increasingly mobile, making business attraction less important. Here there is some new policies. Some places are trying to attract remote workers through financial incentives. It is possible someone will figure out a magic incentive. However, the evidence I’ve seen suggests that fundamental conditions such as good schools, safe neighborhoods and recreational opportunities trump financial incentives every time.

Hicks stresses the importance of local government. I absolutely agree–in theory. Unfortunately, in Indiana, municipal governments are severely constrained by our retrograde state legislature.

In Indiana, cities and towns don’t have anything remotely like home rule: It took three legislative sessions to get permission to vote on a local tax to fund adequate transit. When Bloomington tried to ban plastic grocery bags, the legislature passed a bill divesting local governments of authority to do so. Education policies are dictated by a General Assembly determined to privatize public education. For years, dollars for street repair have been doled out based on “lane miles,” irrespective of the difference in traffic counts/wear and tear–a lane on a little-used county road gets funded the same as a lane on a traffic-choked Indianapolis thoroughfare. And efforts to address the number of guns on city streets run headlong into the resistance of “Second Amendment” fanatics in the Statehouse.

Those few among our legislative overlords who understand what Hicks is saying don’t care.

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Crime And Policing

I keep harping on the difference between “what” and “how”–and the too-often-unrecognized importance of “how.” I’ve been frustrated, for example, by public reactions to recent Supreme Court decisions that have largely focused upon agreement or disagreement with the holdings– ignoring the Court’s far more concerning willingness to break Constitutional rules about standing and jurisdiction.

That tendency to focus on the “what”rather than the “how” also characterizes most public debates about crime. Most pundits begin with the assumption that public safety requires more policing, and even critics of police misbehavior rarely dispute that assumption. They just want better hiring and training practices.

So I was fascinated by a New York Times essay by noted legal scholar Radley Balko titled “Half the Police Force Quit; Crime Dropped.”

Balko began with what we all know–the horrific incidents that have become common are not the result of “rogue” officers–they reflect institutional cultures.

In a staggering report last month, the Department of Justice documented pervasive abuse, illegal use of force, racial bias and systemic dysfunction in the Minneapolis Police Department. City police officers engaged in brutality or made racist comments, even as a department investigator rode along in a patrol car. Complaints about police abuse were often slow-walked or dismissed without investigation. And after George Floyd’s death, instead of ending the policy of racial profiling, the police just buried the evidence.

The Minneapolis report was shocking, but it wasn’t surprising. It doesn’t read much differently from recent Justice Department reports about the police departments in Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Ferguson, Mo., or any of three recent reports from various sources about Minneapolis, from 2003, 2015 and 2016.

Balko points to a common response by many in law enforcement: all this criticism is preventing police from doing their jobs “right.” Many officers- defeated and demoralized–quit. Fewer police, more crime.

Lying just below the surface of that characterization is a starkly cynical message to marginalized communities: You can have accountable and constitutional policing, or you can have safety. But you can’t have both.

As Balko notes, calls for more police fail to take into account the ways in which police brutality and misconduct erode public trust, and how that erosion of trust affects public safety. He then points to the experience of a prosperous Minneapolis suburb.

Golden Valley is 85 percent white and 5 percent Black — the result of pervasive racial covenants.

“We enjoy prosperity and security in this community,” said Shep Harris, the mayor since 2012. “But that has come at a cost. I think it took incidents like the murder of George Floyd to help us see that more clearly.” The residents of the strongly left-leaning town decided change was necessary. One step was eliminating those racial covenants. Another was changing the Police Department, which had a reputation for mistreating people of color.

Golden Valley hired a high-ranking Black policewoman and a Black Chief of Police, prompting members of the overwhelmingly white police force to quit — in droves. And police unions continue to warn officers against joining the Golden Valley force, despite excellent pay and a relatively low crime rate.

What happened after the police force lost some half of its officers?

Crime declined.

Balko concedes that Golden Valley is far from a perfect model; it’s a wealthy community with very little crime. But he also notes that its experience isn’t unique, either.

When New York’s officers engaged in an announced slowdown in policing in late 2014 and early 2015, civilian complaints of major crime in the city dropped. And despite significant staffing shortages at law enforcement agencies around the country, if trends continue, 2023 will have the largest percentage drop in homicides in U.S. history. It’s true that such a drop would come after a two-year surge, but the fact that it would also occur after a significant reduction in law enforcement personnel suggests the surge may have been due more to the pandemic and its effects than depolicing…

At the very least, the steady stream of Justice Department reports depicting rampant police abuse ought to temper the claim that policing shortages are fueling crime. It’s no coincidence that the cities we most associate with violence also have long and documented histories of police abuse. When people don’t trust law enforcement, they stop cooperating and resolve disputes in other ways. Instead of fighting to retain police officers who feel threatened by accountability and perpetuate that distrust, cities might consider just letting them leave.

In Indianapolis, the Republican candidate for mayor is basing his campaign largely on his “plan” to improve public safety–a plan to hire more police officers and to “let them do their jobs.”

He clearly doesn’t understand that we won’t get to “what”–less crime–unless we address the importance of “how.”

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Who Should Vote?

I have an old, ratty t-shirt that says “Corporations are not people.” It dates back to the (in)famous exchange between a heckler and Mitt Romney, in which Romney–then the Republican candidate for President–proclaimed that “Corporations are people, my friend.” Needless to say, that declaration didn’t win him many votes. After all, corporations don’t vote.

At least, not in most places. Yet.

A reader of this blog recently sent me a CBS News article about a Delaware town planning to extend the franchise to “corporate citizens.”

Seaford, a town of about 8,000 on the Nanticoke River, amended its charter in April to allow businesses — including LLCs, corporations, trusts or partnerships — the right to vote in local elections. The law would go into effect once both houses of Delaware’s state legislature approve it.

The proposal has rekindled a debate over how much power corporations should have in local government, with fierce opposition from civic interest groups who say businesses already wield too much influence over politics.

“It was very shocking to see this attempt to have artificial entities have voting rights,” said Claire Snyder-Hall, executive director of Common Cause Delaware, a watchdog group.

Delaware is probably the most “corporate-friendly” state in the U.S., with business laws so favorable to the corporate form that the state boasts more than 1.8 million entities registered there. According to the linked article, companies outnumber human residents by nearly two-to-one.

This effort would seem to be the flip side of the widespread efforts to suppress the votes of human citizens. Whatever the merits  of the proposal (admittedly, I’m at a loss to identify those), allowing artificial persons to cast ballots would dilute the votes of actual people. I assume that’s the goal–giving the ballot to corporations would certainly tilt the playing field further in the direction of the communities’ business interests.

In all fairness, when human voters fail to show up at the polls, they bear considerable responsibility for their subsequent loss of voice. What’s that phrase? Use it or lose it…

Legislators have cast the change as a fix for low turnout in municipal elections and a way to attract business owners to the community.

“These are folks that have fully invested in their community with their money, with their time, with their sweat. We want them to have a voice if they choose to take it,” Seaford mayor David Genshaw told local station WRDE. Genshaw cast the deciding vote in a split City Council decision on the charter amendment in April, according to The Lever.

According to Delaware Online, there are 234 entities, including LLCs, trusts and corporations, headquartered in Seaford — a significant number for a town where an April election only garnered 340 votes.

It appears that other Delaware towns already allow corporations to vote, with results that might have been predicted:

In 2019, it was revealed that a single property manager who controlled multiple LLCs voted 31 times in a Newark, Delaware, town referendum, an incident that led Newark to amend its rules. And residents in Rehoboth Beach in 2017 beat back a proposal to allow LLCs to vote.

Delaware has long been noted for being “corporation friendly,” but until I read this particular news item, I didn’t realize just how friendly. The state allows owners of LLCs to stay anonymous. It relieves businesses of the “burden” of paying corporate income taxes. And as every business lawyer knows, the vast majority of corporations headquartered in Delaware– including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies– don’t have a physical presence there.

American laws do consider corporations “people” for certain very specific purposes–doing business in the corporate form encourages economic activity that benefits us all. If you start a business and it goes broke, your personal assets can be protected from the business’ creditors. Without that protection, many fewer businesses would be formed. And–giving Romney credit for what he evidently meant in that infamous exchange–corporations are indeed formed, managed and owned by real people.

But in a society where the economic gap between the haves and the have-nots is uncomfortably large and continuing to grow–a country where legal structures already favor those with money and status– giving the already-privileged an extra tool to cement and augment their already significant advantages doesn’t seem like a particularly good idea.

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States begins with “We the People.” I’m pretty sure the Founders didn’t intend that “people” reference to include corporations.

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It’s All About Race

I have previously shared my youngest son’s analysis of the 2016 presidential election–an analysis with which I have come to agree, and which subsequent academic research has confirmed. As he put it, “there were two–and only two–kinds of people who voted for Trump: those for whom his racism resonated, and those for whom it wasn’t disqualifying.” 

I was initially reluctant to accept so oversimplified an analysis, but in the years since, study after study has confirmed its essential accuracy, and research clearly connects the importance of racism to the continued allegiance of Evangelical voters to Trump.

An article from the Brookings Institution is instructive. The linked article begins by looking at the characteristics of  White Evangelical voters, and finds that, overall, they are older and predominantly Southern. The aging of the cohort is due to America’s declining religiosity, and the departure of younger Americans from a Christianity seen as intolerant of racial diversity and the LGBTQ community. As the authors delicately put it, younger Americans are more “progressive”(i.e., less threatened) when it comes to “diversity.”

Evangelicals are 30% of self-identified Republicans–and they vote. Fifty-nine percent of them are older than 50; 52% hail from the South; 42% have a high school diploma or less; 69% identify as conservative. They have been shrinking as a percentage of the population–White Evangelicals are currently 14% of all Americans.

Interestingly, the current political divide between Evangelicals and others  on the issue of abortion is actually rooted in racism,  as FiveThirtyEight.com has documented:

The movement to end legal abortion has a long, racist history, and like the great replacement theory, it has roots in a similar fear that white people are going to be outnumbered by people believed to hold a lower standing in society. Those anxieties used to be centered primarily around various groups of European immigrants and newly emancipated slaves, but now they’re focused on non-white Americans who, as a group, are on track to numerically outpace non-Hispanic white Americans by 2045, according to U.S. Census projections.

It’s been decades since the anti-abortion movement first gained traction — and the movement has changed in certain ways — but this fundamental fear has never left, as demonstrated by attacks on people of color, such as the shooter in Buffalo, New York, who expressed concern about the declining birth rates of white people. That’s because the anti-abortion movement, at its core, has always been about upholding white supremacy.

The Brookings  report focuses on Evangelicals’ continued devotion to Trump, which it attributes to “shared anger and resentments rather than a shared faith.” As the authors write,

White Evangelical politics is now predominantly the politics of older, conservative voters for whom ‘owning the libs’ and pushing back against cultural and demographic change has become a sacred obligation.

The movement of White Evangelicals to the GOP began long before Roe v. Wade–it was prompted by backlash against civil rights and voting rights. The continued role of racial reaction, which also prompts opposition to immigration, has been well documented.

In a 2018 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center,  38 percent of Americans said that the U.S. becoming more diverse would “weaken American customs and values.” This opinion was most prevalent among Republicans, who by a margin of 59 to 13 percent said that having a majority nonwhite population would weaken rather than strengthen the U.S. (Twenty-seven percent said it wouldn’t have much impact either way.) Another poll, conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found 47 percent of Republicans (compared with 22 percent of Democrats and 22 percent of independents) agreeing with the statement that “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.”

It has to be emphasized that the allegiance of White Evangelicals to the GOP under Trump isn’t new–they have voted overwhelmingly Republican for a long time. What I’ve found hard to wrap my head around was the fact that more White Evangelicals “converted to Trump’s cause” during his presidency than defected from it. How rational people could view Trump’s bizarre behaviors in office and increase their support simply astonished me–and is inexplicable without reference to the increasingly blatant racism displayed by Trump and the contemporary GOP.

So what does all of this mean for the 2024 election?

The historical affiliation of White Evangelicals and other “racial grievance” voters with the GOP means they are probably unmovable. They can be counted on to vote–and to vote for any candidate with an R next to the name. They are not a majority even in very Red states–but absent effective GOTV efforts, their anger and cohesion can elect truly despicable people.

Massive turnout has never been more important.

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When Words Lose Their Meaning….

Before I was a lawyer, I was a high school English teacher, a position that required me to  explain how language communicates meaning–the roles played by denotation and connotation, and the often-unrecognized difficulty of getting one’s point across.

Recognizing that you may hear my use of term A to explain X  as an admission of Y is one  of the most frustrating aspects of political communication. it’s a problem that goes well beyond the obvious fatuity of slogans like “Defund the Police,” and it makes messaging particularly difficult for Democrats; the GOP base shares focused grievances that allow party strategists to communicate to a cohesive and receptive cult. Democrats who wring their hands over the party’s inept “messaging” aren’t wrong, exactly, but they fail to recognize both the inherent difficulties of language, and the Democrats’ need to reach people who occupy a broad spectrum of opinion.

A recent essay in the New York Times provides an example rooted in “dog whistle” days. It’s titled: “A Handy Guide to the Republican Definition of a Crime,” and it harkens back to that tried and true Republican demand for “law and order”–the meaning of which has changed rather dramatically.

If you think Republicans are still members of the law-and-order party, you haven’t been paying close attention lately. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican definition of a crime has veered sharply from the law books and become extremely selective. For readers confused about the party’s new positions on law and order, here’s a guide to what today’s Republicans consider a crime, and what they do not.

Not a crime: Federal crimes. All federal crimes are charged and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now that Republicans believe the department has been weaponized into a Democratic Party strike force, particularly against Mr. Trump, its prosecutions can no longer be trusted. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently tweeted.

The F.B.I., which investigates many federal crimes, has also become corrupted by the same political forces. “The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

And because tax crimes are not real crimes, Republicans have fought for years to slash the number of I.R.S. investigators who fight against cheating.

Having clarified why federal misbehaviors no longer qualify as criminal, the essay explains the current GOP approach to the labeling of state and local crime: if it happens in an urban area or in states run by Democrats, it’s a crime.

On the other hand,

Not a crime: Any crime that happens in rural areas or in states run by Republicans.
Between 2000 and 2021, the per capita murder rate in states that voted for Donald Trump was 23 percent higher than in states that voted for Joe Biden, according to one major study. The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.

But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.

Republicans now include under their motto of “law and order” the “crimes” of abortion and transgender care, prohibition of which they piously frame as protection of children. (As the essay notes, GOP solicitude for the young doesn’t extend to regulating the guns that are the leading cause of American children’s deaths.)

There are other  GOP “definitions.” If Hunter Biden did it, it’s a crime. Trump and his offspring? Didn’t notice any wrongdoing–despite vast evidence of influence-peddling and self-dealing that would seem to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and any number of federal ethics guidelines.

And of course, there was Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, leading to the GOP’s righteous demands to “lock her up.” That was criminal behavior, unlike Trump’s obviously innocent efforts to overturn an election and his theft of classified materials.

Effective messaging and communication require clarity and simplicity. The GOP has mastered it. “Law and order” still means “arrest Black people,” but now it also means “if Republicans did it, it was lawful; if Democrats did it, it was criminal.”

Unfortunately, that simple message cannot be countered with an equally simple response; explaining why it is dishonest requires facts and logic–and listeners.

Communication is hard.

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