The Kids Are All Right!

I have several friends who have stopped watching/reading the news. They find the daily assault just too depressing.

But along with the deluge of dispiriting news they’re avoiding are some very encouraging stories. I recently came across one.

THE NATIONWIDE CAMPAIGN to stifle discussions of race and gender in public schools through misinformation and bullying suffered a reversal in Idaho on Monday, when a high school senior vocally opposed to book bans and smears against LGBTQ+ youth took a seat on the Boise school board.

The student, Shiva Rajbhandari, was elected to the position by voters in Idaho’s capital last week, defeating an incumbent board member who had refused to reject an endorsement from a local extremist group that has harassed students and pushed to censor local libraries.

Rajbhandari turned 18 only a few days before the election, but evidently he was already well-known in the school district as a student organizer on climate, environmental, voting rights, and gun control issues.

Pretty impressive for a 17-year-old.

If your reaction to a high school senior on a school board is less than enthusiastic, that’s  understandable. But the difference between Rajbhandari and his opponent was stark.

In the closing days of the campaign, his opponent, Steve Schmidt, was endorsed by the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs, which in response helped Rajbhandari win the endorsement of Boise’s leading newspaper, the Idaho Statesman.

Rajbhandari, a third-generation Idahoan whose father is from Nepal, was elected to a two-year term with 56 percent of the vote.

Rajbhandari insisted that he’d wanted people to vote for him rather than against his opponent, but acknowledged that he had been shocked that Schmidt wouldn’t reject the far-right group’s endorsement.

The Idaho Liberty Dogs, which attacked Rajbhandari on Facebook for being “Pro Masks/Vaccines” and leading protests “which created traffic jams and costed [sic] tax payers money,” spent the summer agitating to have books removed from public libraries in Nampa and Meridian, two cities in the Boise metro area

Rajbhandari had started leading Extinction Rebellion climate protests in Boise when he was only 15 years old, and it was through that activism that he became familiar with Liberty Dogs and its tactics.

“We used to have climate strikes, like back in ninth grade, and they would come with AR-15s,” he said, bringing rifles to intimidate “a bunch of kids protesting for a livable future.”

When he was 16, Rajbhandari had publicly confronted Idaho’s then- far-right lieutenant governor, who had set up a task force to “Examine Indoctrination in Idaho Education.” He accused her of investigating an entirely imaginary threat and endorsing baseless conspiracy theories to generate support for her candidacy.

When Idaho’s Liberty Dogs endorsed Schmidt along with a slate of other candidates for the school board (all of whom, fortunately, ended up losing), Rajbhandari texted his rival to say, “You need to immediately disavow this.”

“This is a hate group,” Rajbhandari says he told Schmidt. “They intimidate teachers, they are a stain on our schools, and their involvement in this election is a stain on your candidacy.” Schmidt, however, refused to clearly reject the group, even after the Idaho Liberty Dogs lashed out at a local rabbi who criticized the endorsement by comparing the rabbi to Hitler and claiming that he harbored “an unrelenting hatred for white Christians.”

We old folks repeatedly hear –and repeatedly repeat!–accusations about the apathy of the younger generation. The following paragraphs of the linked article give the lie to that lazy characterization.

The initial impetus for Rajbhandari’s run for office was a feeling of frustration that the Boise school board was simply ignoring pleas from student climate activists to make a clean energy commitment. Two years ago, he said, a group of high school and junior high students tried everything they could think of to urge the board to make a commitment to renewable energy. “We sent emails; we did a postcard drive and wrote like 300 postcards; we met with our local power company; we had a petition, we delivered the largest petition ever to our school district,” Rajbhandari said, but the board never responded. “Last year, I wrote a letter to our school board president, just asking for a meeting … and I never got anything back. But I know that he read my letter because about a week later, I was called to the principal’s office.”

“That’s when I knew I was going to run” for a seat on the board, Rajbhandari recalled. “Because that is indicative of a problem. Students are the primary stakeholders in our education, right? And yet our board wasn’t seeing us as constituents, and they weren’t willing to meet with us, and they weren’t taking our ideas seriously,” he said.

The kids are okay. We “elders” just need to get out of their way…

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That John Wayne Worldview…

Paul Krugman recently commented on Tucker Carlson’s residence in a tough White male alternate  reality.

On Aug. 29 Tucker Carlson of Fox News attacked President Biden’s policy on Ukraine, asserting among other things: “By any actual reality-based measure, Vladimir Putin is not losing the war in Ukraine. He is winning the war in Ukraine.” Carlson went on, by the way, to assert that Biden is supporting Ukraine only because he wants to destroy the West.

Carlson’s timing was impeccable. Just a few days later, a large section of the Russian front near Kharkiv was overrun by a Ukrainian attack. It’s important to note that Putin’s forces weren’t just pushed back; they appear to have been routed. As the independent Institute for the Study of War reported, the Russians were driven into a “panicked and disorderly retreat,” leaving behind “large amounts of equipment and supplies that Ukrainian forces can use.”

Krugman’s column went on to analyze/deconstruct the worldview of those who–like Carlson–clearly prefer Putin’s Russia to Zelensky’s Ukraine.

He noted that there’s “a whole school of self-styled ‘realists'” who keep insisting that Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion is futile, and who continue to call on Ukraine to make big concessions in order to end the war.  He then proceeds to investigate the worldview that leads so many on the political Right to laud Putin’s brand of leadership–a worldview that, as he writes, mistakes tough-guy swagger for effectiveness.

This worldview has warped the right’s perception not just of the Russian Army but also of how to deal with many other issues. And it’s worth asking where it comes from…

After providing some relevant quotes from Rudy Giuliani and Trump, he says

it’s not hard to see where the MAGA right’s admiration for Putinism comes from. After all, Putin’s Russia is autocratic, brutal and homophobic, with a personality cult built around its ruler. What’s not to like?

Yet admiring a regime’s values needn’t mean having faith in its military prowess. As a center-left advocate of a strong social safety net — or, as Republicans would say, a Marxist (which, of course, I’m not) — I think highly of Nordic welfare states like Denmark. But I have no opinion whatsoever about the effectiveness of Denmark’s army (yes, it has one).

The conflation of Right-wing values with strength can be seen in the Right’s transformation of Jesus into a MAGA Republican–a change so dramatic it now prompts satirical “GOP ads,” like this one.

Back in March, I wrote about a book I’d just finished–Jesus and John Wayne, written by a religion scholar at Calvin College who traced how the Jesus of Evangelical imagination had morphed from the “wimpy, feminine” prophet my  Christian friends continue to worship into a “manly, dominant” John-Wayne-like warrior. The book documented the degree to which misogyny and male dominance have become central to the Christian Nationalism that is today’s Evangelical belief system.

For a stunning number of conservative White Evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian Nationalism, all anchored in white racial grievance.

The background provided by that book helps to explain the disdain of  MAGA Republicans like Ted Cruz (who has criticized  America’s armed forces for being feminized and “woke”) for Ukraine. That criticism, of course, is quite unlike their admiration for the Russian army which–as Krugman points out– is nothing if not brutal.

It is notable that –among its other “woke” features–women make up more than a fifth of Ukraine’s military.

Krugman points to what should be obvious: despite the Right’s celebration of brute strength, modern wars aren’t won by looking tough.

Courage — which the Ukrainians have shown in almost inconceivable abundance — is essential, but it doesn’t have much to do with bulging biceps. And bravery must go hand in hand with being smart and flexible, qualities the Russian Army evidently lacks.

Jesus and John Wayne added evidence to the arguments in Robert P. Jones’ book The End of White Christian America. Read together, the two books explain the transformation of Evangelical Christianity into the distinctly un-Christian worldview advanced by Tucker Carlson and other MAGA Republicans. Both books–together with a veritable mountain of social science research–document the morphing of a significant number of White Christian Americans into a very un-Christian cult.

The members of that cult frantically resist the inexorable progress of cultural and demographic change; they continue to reside mentally and emotionally in eras long past–in times when brute strength (epitomized by John Wayne) was more important than skill and smarts.

The obsolescence of that worldview is just one of the lessons we’re learning from Russia’s tragic and brutal war on Ukraine.

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It Isn’t Just Space Lasers

I’ve made a lot of fun of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s accusation that California’s fires aren’t the result of climate change, but instead were started by Jewish Space Lasers financed by George Soros. Greene and her loony-tunes ilk are perfect representations of an anti-Semitism that continues to attribute super-powers to an invented Jewish “cabal.” (Elders of Zion, anyone?)

If only we Jews were really that powerful…

There’s a robust academic literature attempting to explain some people’s need to pin the world’s woes on an identifiable, deliberate and malevolent group–and as Hitler figured out, it helps if the group chosen to be the bad guys is numerically small and unable to effectively protect itself.

Whatever has made Jews the “chosen” people to blame, it seems the contemporary GOP has become the preferred home for today’s anti-Semites, whose versions are marginally less whack-a-doodle than Greene’s, and for that reason, pose more of a threat.

A recent article in the Intercept recounted the then-Republican rejection of Pat Buchanan’s version of anti-Semitism, then contrasted it with what is occurring today.

Trump resurrected Buchanan’s strain of populist nationalism. He’s always nurtured business relations and personal ties with Jewish people, but his revival of “America First” — both the slogan and the ideas surrounding it — inevitably excited antisemites. In 2016, he tweeted out an image using a Star of David to symbolize Hillary Clinton’s “corruption.” The Trump campaign tweeted an altered version after an outcry but then ran an ad in the campaign’s closing days decrying “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities” coupled with images of Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein — all of whom are financial figures who happen to be Jewish.

Trump attacked his critics as a cabal of “globalists” and fixated on the secret powers exerted by Soros, who has displaced (or in some cases joined) the Rothschilds in the imagined role of secret Jewish financier orchestrating a series of catastrophes for profit. The explosion of militant paranoia that followed Trump’s rise — from the Oath Keepers to QAnon — has appeared both online and in the real world with occasionally deadly consequences in places like Charlottesville and Pittsburgh. Although much of this activity has taken place outside the party system, the energies on the right have crept into the Republican Party.

The article went on to report anti-Semitic statements by high-level Republicans (including a spokesperson for Ron DeSantis) and the close relationship of Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s GOP nominee for governor, with the ultra-right-wing social-media site Gab. (The site promotes Christian Nationalist themes, and its chief executive is an “out and proud” antisemite “who has promoted Mastriano as a fellow enemy of the Jews.”)

Is it fair to criticize the Republican Party for the views of its most distasteful members? The Intercept article is lengthy, with a number of other examples, but I found the closing paragraphs pretty persuasive.

There is a simple test to measure their influence. If antisemites were too marginal to pose any danger, it would be easy enough for the party to cut them off. (If you want to know what it looks like when Republicans decide to really throw somebody out of their party, look at their treatment of Liz Cheney.) Instead, they vacillate. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declined to comment on Gosar’s attendance at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s conference. McCarthy has likewise promised to restore Greene’s committee privileges if Republicans regain the majority.

Prosecutors have found that Trump’s January 6 rally attracted a significant number of people who share Hitler quotes, hold membership in neo-Nazi organizations, have a fixation with “white genocide,” and the like, making the party leadership’s desire to sweep the whole thing under the rug all the more dangerous. Whatever misgivings the remaining old-line Republicans may have toward the militant cadres Trump inspired, Republicans fear their political and even terroristic power. They no longer imagine they have the gatekeeping force to exclude the antisemites, less still to steer the party away from the kind of paranoid rhetoric that invites their participation.

The GOP’s overriding goal is to win, and it has decided this means accepting the support of anybody who will provide it. For three-quarters of a century, antisemites were locked out of major American politics or at least had to keep their bigotry quiet. Now the door is open.

I guess a Republican Party that has been deserted by  people who are pro-choice, pro- LGBTQ, pro-public school, pro-gun safety regulation and pro-environment needs to replace those groups with whoever is handy…

However, watching them scrape the bottom of the barrel is making me feel distinctly unsafe.

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This Is Encouraging

Regular readers of this blog are aware that I favor a UBI–a universal basic income. I’m certainly familiar with the arguments against it, and even more aware of the “devil in the details” that can make or break most policies. What I find encouraging is the slow but steady spread of pilot programs testing the concept.

The New York Times article at the link reports that at least twenty U.S. cities are currently conducting pilot programs meant to test the idea.

More than 48 guaranteed income programs have been started in cities nationwide since 2020, according to Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a network of leaders supporting such efforts at the local, state and federal levels. Some efforts are publicly funded, and others have nongovernmental support. Jack Dorsey, the former chief executive of Twitter, donated $18 million to help the initiative.

At its essence, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a stipend  that would be sent to every U.S. adult citizen, with no strings attached– no requirement to work, or to spend the money on certain items and not others. It’s a cash grant sufficient to insure basic sustenance. (A number of proponents advocate $1000 per month).

Andy Stern, former President of the Service Employee’s International Union, points out that a UBI is simple to administer, treats all people equally, rewards hard work and entrepreneurship, and trusts the poor to make their own decisions about what to do with their money. “Because it only offers a floor, people are encouraged to make additional income through their own efforts… Welfare, on the other hand, discourages people from working because, if your income increases, you lose benefits.”

With a UBI, in contrast to welfare, there’s no phase-out, no marriage penalties, no people falsifying information–and no costly bureaucracy. My more extended arguments for a UBI can be accessed here and here.

For obvious reasons, the programs described in the Times article focus on impoverished Americans, rather than testing universal payments.

Damon Jones, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, who has studied such programs, noted that unrestricted cash — including stimulus payments — was used broadly by the federal government to stem the economic devastation of Covid-19.

“Policymakers were surprisingly open to this idea following the onset of the pandemic,” Mr. Jones said. Now the emergency aid programs have largely lapsed, ending what for some was a lifeline.

A number of conservatives argue against a UBI, asserting that it would dis-incentivize work and/or that it would make more sense to reform programs already in place–something easier said than done. But support for a universal income has not been limited to progressives. Milton Friedman famously proposed a “negative income tax,” and F.A. Hayek, the libertarian economist, wrote “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all, protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income, or a floor below which nobody need descend.”

More recently, In 2016, Samuel Hammond of the libertarian Niskanen Center wrote about the “ideal” features of a UBI: its unconditional structure avoids creating poverty traps; it sets a minimum income floor, which raises worker bargaining power without wage or price controls; it decouples benefits from a particular workplace or jurisdiction; since it’s cash, it respects a diversity of needs and values; and it simplifies and streamlines bureaucracy, eliminating rent seeking and other sources of inefficiency.

One of the earliest of the pilot programs was in Stockton, California, and analysis of its results confirmed several of Hammond’s points.

Preliminary research from a pair of college professors, based on the first year of Stockton’s two-year program, found that giving families $500 each month reduced those households’ income fluctuations, enabling recipients to find full-time employment.

Researchers, for example, found that 28 percent of recipients had full-time employment when the program started in February 2019; a year later, the figure was 40 percent.

In one case, a participant had been studying to get his real estate license for more than a year — a pathway to more consistent, higher-paying work — but could not find time to study while piecing together an income doing gig jobs. The money from the pilot program, researchers found, gave him the time to study and get his license.

California–unsurprisingly–has most of the pilot programs currently underway, and the Times reports that Governor Newsom is an advocate of the UBI.

As I’ve previously noted, pilot projects to date have debunked predictions that poor folks would spend the money on drugs and liquor. Instead, most has gone for items like food, medicine, diapers and education.

It will be interesting to see the results of these current pilot programs–and assuming they continue to be positive, even more interesting to see how the nay-sayers respond.

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Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

A casual conversation following a recent meeting triggered my most recent epiphany. (I think it was an epiphany, although it may have been heartburn…)

We were discussing the comparatively swift change of American popular opinion on the rights of  LGBTQ citizens, and the extent to which “coming out” had accelerated that change. Political scientists have attributed much of the success of the gay rights movement to the profoundly political act of emerging from the closet. As the friend with whom I was talking put it, “Most people knew gay people–they just didn’t know that they knew gay people.”

So true.

When your family realized that Shirley wasn’t just elderly Aunt Gladys’ longtime roommate, but something more–when your doctor introduced you to his significant other–when cousin Johnny explained his lack of interest in finding a girlfriend…attitudes changed. Granted, a lot of people who exited the closet suffered rejection and worse, but their exit changed society dramatically and for the better.

As I was driving home from that meeting. I reflected on something that Joey Mayer told me about her experience going door-to-door in Indiana House District 24. She shared her surprise at the number of people she’d talked to who said something along the lines of  “I thought I was one of the few Democrats in the county.” In a comment to that post, Paul Ogden wrote that he was baffled as to why people would say that.

The Democratic candidate in 2020 got nearly 41.9% of the vote in HD #24, which followed 41.6% in 2018. In 2014 and 2016, the Democrats did not even bother to field a candidate . You’ve seen a dramatic shift to Democratic Party in that district (and Hamilton County as a whole), which trend was accelerated by one Donald J. Trump.

Bottom line: in both cases, there are more of “us” (however defined) than we realize when people stay closeted.

When the first few people muster the courage to “come out,” it gives permission to their more timid compatriots to do the same. And that changes perceptions.

I’ve had emails from people in deep-Red rural areas of Indiana who share their discomfort with what they perceive to be their lonely political affiliation. Unlike residents of America’s obviously changing suburbia, I’m willing to concede that they live in areas where Democrats and pro-choice Republicans are relatively rare–but there’s really no way to tell, because many of the people who actually agree with those correspondents don’t vote. They don’t display yard signs. They don’t speak up. They stay in the closet, because the closet protects them from being criticized, attacked or cold-shouldered.

I can’t believe that “coming out” as a Democrat, or as a disaffected Republican, requires anything like the courage that coming out as gay required 25 years ago. I do believe that–if enough residents of Red areas came out against  MAGA Republicans –it would change the political calculus and generate votes from people who have previously been too dispirited to cast ballots.

I am convinced that there are more people than we realize looking at the GOP’s assaults on democracy and fundamental rights while wringing their hands and asking “what can I do about it?” The usual answer (it has certainly been mine) is: vote. But after the epiphany triggered by my recent conversation, I’ll add: “you can come out.”

Here’s my advice to all of you who–despite tending to agree with the opinions expressed on this blog–have kept quiet out of fear of evoking hostile reactions: Put out an unexpected yard sign. Post support for a Democrat or two on Facebook. Disagree (politely, of course) when your neighbor makes a nasty crack about the “libtards.”

Be authentically who you are. Leave the closet. You won’t just be liberating yourself; you’ll be sending a very important message to more people than you think.

The following paragraph was originally written for LGBTQ folks, but I’ve changed the language so that it applies to political rather than sexual orientation:

Coming out is often an important psychological step for liberal and moderate people. Research has shown that feeling positively about one’s political orientation and integrating it into one’s life fosters greater well-being and mental health. This integration often involves disclosing one’s identity to others; it may also entail participating in Democratic politics.  Being able to discuss one’s politics with others also increases the availability of social support, which is crucial to mental health and psychological well-being.

Come on, you timid Democrats and pro-choice, still-sane Republicans. You can do this! You’ll feel better and–even more significantly– you’ll be offering important encouragement to others!

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