What If…

What if the rational majority of Americans decided to reject the nation’s culture warriors and their grievances? What if they went to the polls and rejected the candidates who were appealing to their fears and biases?

What if the gratifying results of the country’s school board races that took place earlier this month in several states were “leading indicators” of that rejection?

The above link will take you to a Politico article headlined, “Why GOP Culture Warriors Lost Big in School Board Races this Month,” and it began with the following paragraphs:

Amid all the attention on this month’s elections in Wisconsin and Illinois, one outcome with major implications for 2024 flew under the national radar: School board candidates who ran culture-war campaigns flamed out.

Democrats and teachers’ unions boasted candidates they backed in Midwestern suburbs trounced their opponents in the once-sleepy races. The winning record, they said, was particularly noticeable in elections where conservative candidates emphasized agendas packed with race, gender identity and parental involvement in classrooms.

The article went on to suggest that the results ought to serve as a warning to the Republican presidential hopefuls who are emphasizing those culture-war themes.(Trump, DeSantis et al are unlikely to heed that warning. Culture war is all they have.)

Appeals to racial and religious grievance might play well in Republican primary elections, but a variety of indicators–including this one–raise the likelihood that General election voters will be less interested in crusades against critical race theory, transgender students and Black Lives Matter activists than they are in a working government, just as the recent school board elections brought out voters more interested in funding schools and ensuring that students are safe than empowering aggrieved parents to censor what goes on in the classroom.

“Where culture war issues were being waged by some school board candidates, those issues fell flat with voters,” said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association labor union. “The takeaway for us is that parents and community members and voters want candidates who are focused on strengthening our public schools, not abandoning them.”

A recent column by Harold Meyerson in the American Prospect considered a radical idea: What If we fixed the public schools rather than destroying them?

Watching the news, you might think that teachers are the most disrespected workers in America. Reading state budgets, you might think they’re the most underpaid.

That first assertion is true only if you limit your intake to the anti-teacher jihads that the right is currently waging. As poll after poll makes clear, however, the great majority of Americans actually think well of their teachers—and perhaps even more important, support their freedom to teach. If anything, the polling here is even more lopsided. As one recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed, when asked if books used in public schools should “ever be banned for criticizing U.S. history,” fully 83 percent of the public answered “no.”

Meyerson’s column began by listing numerous, thorny problems currently confronting American public education, and noted that those challenges had been addressed in a recent, major address by Randi Weingarten, the current President of the American Federation of Teachers.

The right’s current attacks on public education, she began, have to be viewed as an effort to destroy it. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s universal voucher program, which he signed into law on Monday, will reduce support for his state’s public schools by $4 billion—this in a state, she noted, that already ranks 44th in per-pupil spending and 48th in average teacher pay.

After listing a number of the AFT’s current programmatic efforts, Weingarten concluded her speech by saying that “Teachers should have the freedom to teach, and students should have the freedom to learn. A great nation does not fear people being educated.”

To which I would add: a great nation doesn’t fear an electoral system that facilitates, rather than impedes, citizens’ efforts to vote. A great nation accedes to the will of its electorate, and declares the winner of each election to be the candidate who garners the most votes. A great nation doesn’t fail to act decisively when faced with evidence of judicial corruption.

What if, in addition to fixing our public schools, America’s rational majority voted to fix the nation’s democratic institutions?

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It’s Not Just Tennessee

In the wake of heightened attention to Tennessee, triggered by that state legislature’s expulsion of two young Black Democratic members, Politico ran an article examining the increasingly wide rural/urban divide in that state.

Nashville, Tennessee has been booming. It surpassed Austin, Texas, to take the top spot as the Wall Street Journal’s “hottest job market” of 2022. According to research from the Greater Nashville Technology Council, Middle Tennessee’s tech job growth grew by over 50 percent between 2015 and 2020. The “Silicon Valley of the South,” as Nashville has been called, accounts for some 40 percent of the GDP of the entire state. It’s a draw for talent and industry, a boon to the state’s coffers and a cultural gem of the American South.

So why does Tennessee seem so hostile to its own capital city — and greatest economic engine?

That same question could be asked about Indiana’s legislature, which has long been hostile to Indianapolis, despite the fact that the Circle City is very clearly the economic engine of the Hoosier state. For that matter, as the Politico article pointed out, this urban/rural divide is happening all over the country, at every level of government, “in which the preferences of voters often filter through representative bodies whose lopsided majorities don’t really represent the electorate of the state around them.”

Time for yours truly, the broken record: The legislative dominance of rural priorities is due to gerrymandering.

I have written before about the cultural differences that have exacerbated hostilities between rural and urban areas. Rural residents tend to hold more traditional values, to be more conservative and much more Republican, while in today’s America, every urban area over 500,000 is Blue on those ubiquitous political maps. The political divide  exacerbates the cultural divide, and both lead to an increase in hostility between rural and urban residents.

Economic factors also play a role. A large number of rural areas have experienced economic decline in recent years, with fewer job opportunities and shrinking populations.

The differing interests of rural and urban areas ought to lead to legislative compromises. That doesn’t happen, because– thanks to gerrymandering–rural voters exercise disproportionate electoral power. The result is a legislative super-majority that skews even further Right than its rural constituency–and disdains democratic norms and federalist divisions of authority.

As a CNN article reports,

From Florida and Mississippi to Georgia, Texas and Missouri, an array of red states are taking aggressive new steps to seize authority over local prosecutors, city policing policies, or both. These range from Georgia legislation that would establish a new statewide commission to discipline or remove local prosecutors, to a Texas bill allowing the state to take control of prosecuting election fraud cases, to moves by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey to dismiss from office elected county prosecutors who are Democrats, and a Mississippi bill that would allow a state takeover of policing in the capital city of Jackson.

These efforts by Red states to seize authority over law enforcement in their Blue cities is being fed by two recent, powerful trends.

One is the increased tendency of red states to override the decisions of those blue metros on a wide array of issues – on everything from minimum wage and family leave laws to environmental regulations, mask requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, and even recycling policies for plastic bags. The other is the intensifying political struggle over crime that has produced an intense pushback against the demands for criminal justice reform that emerged in the nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

That pushback against crime has a prominent racial component. Overwhelmingly White rural areas–and the Republicans they elect–want to empower police and reduce oversight that they believe impedes effective policing; prosecutors and other politicians in urban areas want to address racial bias in their criminal justice systems, and ensure that their systems are operating on a level playing field.

That particular divide motivated Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s announcement immediately after the jury verdict that he intended to pardon Daniel Perry, who was convicted of intentionally murdering a Black Lives Matter protester. (The jury that convicted Perry hadn’t seen a document that the judge subsequently unsealed, sharing Perry’s references to Black protesters as “monkeys,” and musing about “hunting Muslims in Europe.”)

None of this intended to suggest that rural Americans are all racists, or that all urban dwellers are racially progressive. In fact, the Politico article points out that Republicans representing rural areas tend to be well to the right of their rural constituents on many issues, including guns.

The problem is the systemic distortion that operates to empower the most resentful cohorts of rural voters, who then elect extremists willing to kill their state’s urban “golden goose.”

Resentment isn’t logical.

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A Not-So-Subtle Candidate

It’s primary election season, and in Indianapolis, the parties are wrapping up their races for the Mayoral nominations.

Indianapolis–like every urban area over 500,000–is a majority-Democratic city. When I first became politically active, it was a reliably Republican stronghold; I served as Corporation Counsel in a Republican administration headed by four-term Mayor William Hudnut. That GOP dominance lasted for thirty years.

Times–and Republicans–have changed.

Our current Mayor, Joe Hogsett, will be running for a third term. He’s a Democrat, he has lots of campaign money and he has the advantages that come with incumbency. (Of course, he also has the disadvantages that come with incumbency; in his case, a widely-criticized faintheartedness that his opponents are honing in on.) He’s widely favored to win the Democratic primary–and, given the significant Democratic tilt of the electorate, the general election.

The Republican primary is dominated by two candidates–Abdul Shabazz, a lawyer, media figure and longtime political pundit, and Jefferson Shreve, who is using a significant portion of the millions he made when he sold his business to blanket the airwaves. And when I say, blanket, I mean blanket–his ads are unavoidable. (I watch very little television, but I’ve seen what seems like thousands of them.) The ads ignore his primary opponent and focus on the Mayor, who–in Shreve’s telling–has presided over the “crumbling” of the city.

Shreve talks a lot about “leadership” (which he doesn’t define).  When I saw his spots the first few hundred times, I found them basically content-free, with the single exception of wildly exaggerated claims about crime–a problem that he proposes to solve with “leadership.”

Crime is the only actual issue raised by Shreve’s ads. Fair enough–it’s a real problem here as well as across the country, although we are hardly the hell-hole his ads describe. Shreve’s approach to the issue, however, is troubling. He will “let the police do their jobs.”

In an interview with Axios Indianapolis, Shreve was asked whether police reform has gone too far or not far enough. His response was instructive.

We don’t need police reform to make Indianapolis safer, we need more, better-paid police officers.

What that means comes through loud and clear.

Indianapolis, like all major cities, needs to police its police. There are many admirable officers in IMPD, and the force has made consistent good-faith efforts to educate its members about cultural differences and language barriers. But–again, like most cities–we’ve had episodes where officers have engaged in aggressive and/or inappropriate behaviors–times when they have acted in ways inconsistent with their training.

When I listen to the Shreve commercials, what I hear is “when I’m Mayor, I’m taking the restraints off. In my administration, the police will always be right. I’ll have their backs no matter what.”

Perhaps that is an unfair reaction, but several other people I’ve spoken interpret it the same way. That is, I know, totally anecdotal, but it does reflect national differences between the parties on issues of policing.

The Republican emphasis on law and order has gone hand-in-hand with reflexive and uncritical support for the police. Republican politicians warn that even modest efforts to restrict police tactics will make communities less safe. They also tend to attribute criminal behavior to minorities–and to focus on street crime rather than corporate or other white-collar criminal behavior.

Democrats have been more supportive of criminal justice reform, increased police accountability and transparency. Democratic candidates tend to express concerns about police brutality, racial profiling, and excessive use of force, and to call for the implementation of policies to address those issues.

Criminal justice scholars tell us that aggressive policing approaches have been disproportionately applied in communities of color, and that, politically, “law and order” policies  purporting to be tough on crime are particularly appealing to White Republicans who hold negative attitudes towards minorities and immigrants. A 2018 study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that White Republicans were more likely than other groups to believe that police officers treat whites and minorities equally, despite almost daily disclosures to the contrary.

Republican politicians are far more likely to frame crime and violence as problems caused by minorities and immigrants– framing that has been shown to motivate the GOP base. Maybe I’m unduly cynical, but that’s the actual message I hear conveyed–a message underscored in the accompanying, grainy videos– by those unending Shreve advertisements.

On the other hand, perhaps I’m just overreacting to the sheer number of those fatuous commercials….Maybe there’s more to this candidate than his promise to “let the police do their jobs” and his assurances that such unquestioned support defines “leadership.”

Unless Abdul beats him on May 2d, or he runs out of money, I guess we’ll find out.

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The ReCenter Response

As promised, here is ReCenter’s response to yesterday’s post.

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In her blog post of April 20, Sheila Kennedy expresses dismay, if not outright despair, over the current deep polarization in American political life.

We at ReCenter Indiana can relate. In fact, that’s why we formed this non-profit, bipartisan organization.

Our friend Sheila, who once was a proud Republican, likens today’s GOP to a cult. Again, there’s plenty of evidence of that. A group in the thrall of an authoritarian, charismatic leader, abandoning its long-held principles? Check.

Nonetheless, Indiana needs the balance of a healthy two-party system. Our state also needs the ideas of reasonable people across the political spectrum. Fortunately, as Sheila acknowledges, there are still people like that in the Republican Party. One of ReCenter Indiana’s goals is to give them encouragement to stand up to the strident voices of fear and division.

Sheila’s additional concern is that “the contemporary Republican Party is autocratic,” requiring “adherence to extremist and antidemocratic positions.” On the national level, she accurately points out, “Republicans who put people over party and patriotism over politics are promptly ejected from positions of influence.” And she correctly decries the blatant gerrymandering that enables a “radical supermajority” to keep getting elected to state offices here in Indiana.

To be clear, the supermajority is radical because, in so many gerrymandered districts, the only real competition is in the primary, and the only imperative is to avoid being outflanked on the right.

But we still find room for hope. Carmel and Evansville are two of Indiana’s largest cities. Both have successful centrist Republican mayors who are not seeking re-election. Each of those cities this spring has a competitive Republican primary to nominate a potential successor.

In Carmel, two of the three mayoral candidates in the GOP primary impress us with their willingness to listen to and represent all the residents of their community. The third candidate did not respond to our requests for an interview.

In Evansville, both candidates in the Republican mayoral primary talked with us. And one of them clearly appreciates that complex problems don’t have simple solutions. She also understands the importance of building consensus.

Sheila concludes that “the only way America will emerge from our current divisions is a massive electoral defeat of the GOP, and its subsequent dramatic reformation or replacement.”

Our concern with that is what might emerge from the rubble. That outcome is unknown and terribly risky. First, because if just one political party remains standing, it is all but certain to prove the axiom that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  Second, because even more antidemocratic and violence-prone forces could well take the GOP’s place.

No one supposes that moving Indiana politics back to the center will be easy or fast. But we think it will be easier, faster and safer to save the Republican Party from its worst instincts than to try to build a viable second party on its ruins. We are heartened that notable Republicans in our state have not given up on their party; we’re not ready to give up, either. (And if Indiana Democrats ever succumb to the siren song of extremism, we’ll try to help them save their party, too.)

We agree with Sheila that the political marketplace is broken. We also agree that a sound electoral defeat of extremism can lead to a more normalized marketplace. Voters in arch-conservative Kansas eased the conversation back to the middle in 2018 and again in 2022.

If Indiana can shake off the stranglehold of supermajority rule, we Hoosiers might even embrace concepts – now gaining traction across the country – that give power back to the voters. Concepts such as ranked choice voting, nonpartisan redistricting, maybe even campaign finance reform.

If ReCenter Indiana is to succeed, it will be because of an enlightened and passionate electorate who are willing to transcend divisive politics. Especially young Hoosiers, who historically have had low political participation but are showing signs of increased participation and engagement, demanding accountability and results.

ReCenter’s goal is to spread awareness of the issues at stake and the choices at hand. And that also means encouraging centrist candidates to enter the fray.

Sheila is right that we may not succeed.  But we are certain to fail if we don’t try.

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That Elusive Center

I’m torn.

I recently agreed to serve on the advisory committee of ReCenter Indiana alongside several people I like and admire. It is a bipartisan organization with laudatory goals.

Convinced that  “divisive Indiana politicians don’t represent Hoosier values,” the organization wants to elevate candidates who “represent the center, where most Hoosiers are.”

As ReCenter’s website argues, “the loudest and most extreme voices have drowned out sensible solutions,” a situation that has taken faith in government to an all-time low, making it critical that we restore “trust, respect, and accountability to our political system.”

Importantly, the organization defines “centrism” as behavior, not ideology– a willingness to engage in respectful dialogue with those holding different views, a willingness to negotiate in good faith and to compromise to achieve solutions that serve a majority of their constituents. It defines moderation as an attribute of character, not ideology.

The website identifies ReCenter’s values as

●      People over parties;
●      Results over rhetoric;
●      Patriotism over politics.

ReCenter’s political action committee intends to endorse candidates of both parties who display centrism/moderation defined in this way.

It is hard to argue with any of this, which is why I agreed to join the advisory committee. But I am increasingly concerned that the unprecedented nature of today’s American polarization will defeat these very reasonable–even noble– goals.

When I first became political “back in the day,” both of America’s major political parties were what I would describe as ideologically expansive. There were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and although the GOP was essentially center-Right and the Democrats were essentially center-Left, there were few if any philosophical “litmus tests” determining partisan affiliation.

That has changed–and the change threatens to foreclose our ability to negotiate our differences in good faith.

There are two contemporary realities that I see as barriers to the laudable goals of ReCenter Indiana and a number of other well-meaning political organizations.

The first is the effective sorting of voters between a political party and a cult. A recent example was highlighted by Pew research. Pew found that Americans support the continued availability of medication abortion by a margin of nearly 2 to1. The report of that survey result, however, also noted a “stark divide in partisanship in Americans’ views of the issue.” Virtually every respondent who opposed abortion was a Republican.

It isn’t only abortion. Public opinion on a wide range of issues has found a significant majority of Americans holding a range of relatively progressive opinions–while those holding minority far Right and/or extremist positions are clustered in the GOP. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that–no matter how one defines “moderation” and “centrism,” it is rarely to be found in today’s GOP.

That doesn’t mean there are no moderate or reasonable people left in the party, and ReCenter’s mission to identify candidates rejecting extremism so that those moderate and reasonable people can vote for them–especially in primaries–would make perfect sense, if it wasn’t for a pesky second reality. 

The cult that is the contemporary Republican Party is autocratic. It does impose litmus tests–and those tests require adherence to extremist and anti-democratic positions. The rare Republicans who put people over party and patriotism over politics are promptly ejected from positions of influence–Congresspersons Cheney and Kinzinger are gone, while Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and their ilk have increasing prominence in the House of Representatives and the GOP.

Here in Indiana, the legislature’s radical super-majority is firmly in the thrall of the rural White Christians who–thanks to gerrymandering– still elect them.

So–here is my dilemma: how do those of us who agree with ReCenter’s definition of moderation and centrism– those of us who applaud efforts to return our state and country to a saner, more civil politics–accomplish that?  We live in a time when an organization formed to identify civil, reasonable candidates is likely to omit most Republicans–and a time when any that we do find are highly unlikely to influence the current trajectory of the GOP.

I am increasingly convinced that the only way America will emerge from its current divisions is a massive electoral defeat of the GOP, leading to its subsequent reformation or replacement. That conviction is at odds with the very laudable mission of  ReCenter.

Several of the people who comment on this blog are obviously highly intelligent, articulate and creative, so I’d appreciate the posting of practical solutions to ReCenter’s challenges.  

I shared the draft of this post with ReCenter‘s officers, and invited their response. It will post tomorrow.

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