The Trust Barometer

I’m writing this post after listening to a fascinating podcast (podcasts make treadmill time go faster…) from a site called “Capital Isn’t”–part of the University of Chicago’s impressive podcast network.

The scholars were interviewing Richard Edelman, the CEO of Edelman, a company that describes itself as a “global communications firm that partners with businesses and organizations to evolve, promote and protect their brands and reputations.” In other words, a PR organization. The conversation focused on the withdrawal of hundreds of companies from Russia in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, presumably at some considerable cost to their bottom lines, and the motivations that prompted those companies to become partisans in a geopolitical conflict.

The interviewers, who are economics professors at the University of Chicago, suggested that the willingness of big business to speak up on social and political issues is a relatively new phenomenon, and Edelman agreed. Citing his firm’s extensive research, he sketched out what that research has uncovered about the global public opinion changes that have  led to somewhat surprising changes in corporate and business behavior.

According to Edelman, it all comes down to trust–and it turns out that Americans trust business far more than government, for reasons that won’t surprise anyone who regularly reads this blog (or the comparative few who read my 2009 book, Distrust, American Style.)

The statement that absolutely gobsmacked me–and according to Edelman, absolutely stunned him–was that in the most recent iteration of the firm’s research–and for the first time ever–Republicans trusted business less than Democrats. Evidently, they view most business enterprises these days as “too woke.”

As Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld writes, he has watched this split grow in recent years, and has heard it from CEOs he knows and works with.

What the GOP cares about and what major businesses care about are, increasingly incompatible, he says.

“The political desire to use wedge issues to divide—which used to be fringe in the GOP—has become mainstream,” Sonnenfeld says. “That is 100 percent at variance with what the business community wants. And that is a million timesmore important to them than how many dollars of taxes are paid here or there.”

If you think about it, the implications of the “divorce” between business and the GOP are staggering–at the very least, it would seem to explain the flight of those once dominant “country club Republicans” from today’s cultish GOP, with its singular focus on religious/cultural issues and its abandonment of an economic policy agenda. It is also one more bit of evidence that the impetus for the nation’s polarization–the core  conflict– is between citizens frantically rejecting efforts at inclusion and acceptance of diversity–aka “wokeness”–and the rest of us.

And speaking of “the rest of us,” the survey found that suspicion and distrust of outsiders (however defined) had grown. Trust is increasingly reserved for ones’ co-workers and neighbors.

You can access the “Top Ten” findings of that Trust survey here.The much longer body of the survey is also posted on the company’s website.

Of all the institutions studied, business was the most trusted, at 61%. That was more than NGOs at 59%, government at 52% and media at only 50%. “Seventy-seven percent of respondents, however, trust “My Employer,” making the relationship between employer and employee incredibly important.” Despite business outscoring government by 53 points on competency and 26 points on ethics (!), respondents believe the business community is not doing enough to address a number of social issues–including  climate change (52%), economic inequality (49%), workforce re-skilling (46%) and the dissemination of trustworthy information (42%).

Concerns over fake news or false information being used as a weapon is at an all-time high of 76%. Forty-eight percent of respondents see government and media as divisive forces in society.  Government leaders and journalists are the least trusted social actors  today–fewer than half of respondents trust either, and majorities of respondents–including large majorities of business employees– want businesses to step up.

Across every single issue, by a huge margin, people want more business engagement, not less. For example, on climate change, 52% say business is not doing enough, while only 9% say it is overstepping. The role and expectation for business has never been clearer, and business must recognize that its societal role is here to stay.

The research also found that, worldwide, trust in democracy–already low– fell further over the last year. Given the gridlock imposed on American government by the GOP–not to mention its very public efforts to ensconce autocracy here– the 5-point decline in the U.S. is entirely understandable, albeit very worrisome.

All in all, I encourage you to read the findings and/or listen to the podcast–then join me in pondering the implications.

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Clarence And Ginni

A newsletter from TNR summed up my astonishment over recent revelations detailing the extent of Ginni Thomas’ involvement in the Big Lie. (I can never find URLs for newsletters–sorry about that.)

That stunning Washington Post piece by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa about Ginni Thomas’s text messages to Mark Meadows needs to be read at least twice to take in the full measure of corruption and venality it conveys. Here were people trying to overturn American democracy, saying that this was not politics but war—oh, and while saying all this, invoking the name of Jesus Christ.

The New Yorker described the reaction of legal ethicists to the revelation that Virginia (Ginni) Thomas–wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas–“colluded extensively with a top White House adviser about overturning Joe Biden’s defeat of then President Donald Trump.”

On March 24th, the Washington Post and CBS News reported that they had copies of twenty-nine text messages between Ginni Thomas and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. In those texts, she urged Meadows to help invalidate the results of the Presidential election, and employed QAnon conspiracy theories to justify her assertion that the election was an “obvious fraud.”

It was necessary, she told Meadows, to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.” Ginni Thomas’s texts to Meadows also refer to conversations that she’d had with “Jared”—possibly Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who also served as a senior adviser to the Administration. (“Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am.”)

Not surprisingly, the legal ethicists quoted in the New Yorker article were aghast; all of them agreed that–at a minimum–Clarence Thomas would have to recuse himself from participating in any case involving Trump, January 6th or the election. (In any sane political environment, these revelations would immediately generate an impeachment of Thomas, but given the extent to which partisanship reigns supreme in today’s Senate, the prospects of that outcome seem dim.)

Supreme Court Justices aren’t bound by the judicial code of conduct that applies to all other federal judges, which mandates that they recuse themselves from participating in any cases in which personal entanglements could cause a fair-minded member of the public to doubt their impartiality. Yet Justices are subject to a federal law that prohibits them from hearing cases in which their spouses have “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” The statute, 28 U.S.C. section 455, also requires them to disqualify themselves from any proceedings in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

Some of us have questioned Clarence Thomas’ “impartiality” for many years; the recent disclosures would seem to vindicate our suspicions.

Clarence Thomas was the only Justice to dissent from a Supreme Court decision allowing the House investigative committee to obtain records of Trump’s communications relating to the 2020 election results. It is very possible that those records included communications implicating Ginni Thomas in improper or illegal activities. And Thomas strongly dissented when the Court refused to hear a case filed by Pennsylvania Republicans trying to disqualify mail-in ballots.

Richard Hasen, an expert in election law who teaches at the University of California, Irvine, also believes that Justice Thomas should never have participated in the case weighing whether Congress had the right to review Trump’s papers. Hasen told me, “Given Ginni Thomas’s deep involvement in trying to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election based upon outlandish claims of voter fraud, and her work on this with not only activists but the former President’s chief of staff, Justice Thomas should not have heard any cases” involving disputes over the 2020 election or Congress’s investigation of the January 6th riots. 

A post at Juanita Jean addressed the “coincidence” of Clarence Thomas’ recent hospitalization and emergence of these texts.The post noted that, despite repeated press attempts to get information about the infection that landed Thomas in the hospital,  the requests have been met with silence.–a very unusual circumstance when the health of a Supreme Court Justice is at issue. (Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s every sniffle was reported.)

 Gallup polling shows confidence in the Court hitting an all-time low–continuing a slide that began with the partisan decision in Bush v. Gore, and accelerating through the theft of what should have been Merrick Garland’s seat and the subsequent elevation of a frat-boy beer lover and a cultish theocrat to the high court.

A column from the New York Times sums it up

Yes, married people can lead independent professional lives, and it is not a justice’s responsibility to police the actions of his or her spouse. But the brazenness with which the Thomases have flouted the most reasonable expectations of judicial rectitude is without precedent. From the Affordable Care Act to the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to the 2020 election challenges, Ms. Thomas has repeatedly embroiled herself in big-ticket legal issues and with litigants who have wound up before her husband’s court. All the while, he has looked the other way, refusing to recuse himself from any of these cases. For someone whose job is about judging, Justice Thomas has, in this context at least, demonstrated abominably poor judgment.

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Today’s “Fellow Travelers”

Younger readers of this blog may not be familiar with the term “fellow-traveler.”

As Wikipedia defines the term and its historic usage,

In the early history of the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet statesman Anatoly Lunacharsky coined the term poputchik (‘one who travels the same path’) and later it was popularized by Leon Trotsky to identify the vacillating intellectual supporters of the Bolshevik government. It was the political characterization of the Russian intelligentsia (writers, academics, and artists) who were philosophically sympathetic to the political, social, and economic goals of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but who did not join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.. the Western world adopted the English term fellow traveller to identify people who sympathized with the Soviets and with Communism.

I thought of the term when I read a column in the New Republic describing  the ways in which the Republican Party has “cozied up” to the Kremlin over the past few years.

The column began by quoting Mike Pompeo, who–in an interview in 2020–said  Americans didn’t “give a fuck” about Ukraine.

Things have changed. And as the essay notes, that poses a problem for the GOP.

Whatever Americans were thinking two years ago, when Pompeo gave his NPR interview, they now do give a fuck about Ukraine—and therein lies a problem: For more than 25 years, the party of Reagan has been transforming itself into the party of Putin, only to discover that Vladimir Putin may not be a great role model after all. As a result, one leading Republican after another has begun to perform Simone Biles–level gymnastics in their bids to condemn their party’s most powerful patron.

The author, Craig Unger, emphasizes that this cozy relationship between Putin’s Kremlin and the American Right didn’t begin with Donald Trump, although Trump is pretty clearly in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. As Unger documents,  a “large swath” of the GOP has been closely involved with Russian operatives, who have provided campaign funding via “K Street lobbyists, political consultants, super PACs, campaign fundraising operations, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, social media operations, cyber-warfare efforts, money laundering schemes, think tanks harboring Russian intelligence operatives, and much, much more.”

Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, has observed the relationship for years. “If you go back to the days of Jack Abramoff, when Americans started going to Moscow in the ’90s, and then to Paul Manafort in Ukraine, and so on, you start to see the spine of a secret influence campaign between the Republicans and Russia that has been built up over decades,” he said. “It goes right up to Tucker Carlson rooting for Putin on Fox today. It has been built up over decades, and it is not new, and it deeply infects the Republican Party. You have two forces with deep political ties that are fighting American democracy in order to keep Putin in power and install a Putin-like system in America. And to that end, they have penetrated deep into our think tanks, our media, our journalism—everything.”

Take Ed Buckham, the recently appointed chief of staff for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Today, Buckham handles a congresswoman who proudly attends “white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin” rallies, as Congresswoman Liz Cheney characterized them, and has become renowned for touting conspiracy theories about how the California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers. On Thursday, when the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, Greene, not surprisingly, was one of eight Republicans who voted against it.

Unger traces Buckham’s relationship with Russia back 25 years– to his work for Tom Delay and his relationship with Jack Abramoff–but notes that even Buckham’s sleazy history “pales” in comparison with that of Paul Manafort. Manafort worked for a rogue’s gallery of dictators, but had especially close ties to Putin’s Russia–the Senate Intelligence Committee found that over $75 million Russian dollars had flowed through Manafort’s offshore accounts.

The article is lengthy, and it documents a number of other relationships between the Kremlin and GOP operatives, including the party’s preferred law firms.

Unger says that, as Americans watch the horrifying images from Ukraine, we need to remember those cozy relationships. We also need to remember the Russian trolls exerting influence on social media platforms, “the money laundering through real estate that enriched Donald Trump and his associates, and the Russian conspiracy theories that just happen to be echoed by QAnon, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and the like.”

We need to recognize–and vote to rid ourselves of–the Fellow Travelers.

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Braun: Another Indiana Embarrassment

As if the election of a truly abysmal legislature, courtesy of gerrymandering , wasn’t bad enough, Indiana’s voters keep giving the state hugely embarrassing statewide officials. I have posted several times about Todd Rokita, Indiana’s widely-despised egomaniac Attorney General; currently, it’s intellectually and morally-challenged Senator Mike Braun who is reflecting negatively on Hoosiers.

The Washington Post was one of several media outlets reporting on Braun’s defense of “state’s rights” during the confirmation hearings for Judge Jackson.

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said Tuesday that he would be open to the Supreme Court overturning its 1967 ruling that legalized interracial marriage nationwide to allow states to independently decide the issue.
 
Braun — who made the comments during a conference call in which he discussed the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court — also said he’d welcome the rescinding of several key decisions made by the court in the past 70 years to pass the power to the states.

 Heather Cox Richardson had a historically-grounded response to Braun’s assertion that the country would be “better off having states manifest their points of view rather than homogenizing it across the country as Roe v. Wade did.”  As Richardson reminds us, the whole point of the 14th Amendment was to “homogenize” the fundamental rights of American citizens. 

After World War II, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights in the states, imposing the government’s interest in protecting equality to overrule discriminatory legislation by the states. 

Now, Republicans want to return power to the states, where those who are allowed to vote can impose discriminatory laws on minorities. 

Richardson points out that it’s impossible to limit an evisceration of the Fourteenth Amendment to a single issue. If states are empowered to award or deny rights as they wish –if they are free of federal restraints on their ability to strip reproductive rights from women, for example–“the entire body of decisions in which the federal government protects civil rights, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending segregation in the public schools, is illegitimate.”

Voters need to realize that the GOP’s assault on fundamental rights goes well beyond efforts to overturn Roe. Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn has challenged  Griswold v. Connecticut, the decision that legalized contraception, and Texas Senator John Cornyn has attacked Obergefell, the decision recognizing same-sex marriage.

Braun and the other Neanderthals in the GOP would undoubtedly cheer such results. Most Americans, not so much. Richardson points out that they are “quite literally” making the same “states’ rights” argument used to justify enslaving people before the Civil War.”

More recently, it is the argument that made birth control illegal in many states, a restriction that endangered women’s lives and hampered their ability to participate in the workforce as unplanned pregnancies enabled employers to discriminate against them. It is the argument that prohibits abortion and gay marriage; in many states, laws with those restrictions are still on the books and will take effect just as soon as the Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges are overturned.

Eviscerating the Fourteenth Amendment provision that prohibits states from withholding the “privileges and immunities” of U.S. citizenship from their citizens would invalidate the existing jurisprudence of Equal Protection, a jurisprudence that requires all states to respect the fundamental rights protected by the Bill of Rights–to “homogenize” them.

Richardson points out that Braun’s desired reversal of Loving v. Virginia would criminalize the marriages of both Judge Jackson and Justice Thomas in certain states.

Braun’s willingness to abandon the right of Americans to marry across racial lines was pointed, since Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose confirmation hearing for her elevation to the Supreme Court is currently underway in the Senate, is Black and her husband is non-Black. The world Braun described would permit states to declare their 26-year marriage illegal, as it would have been in many states before the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision declared that states could not prohibit interracial marriages. This would also be a problem for sitting justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni.

Braun is today’s version of  a mainstream Republican, and Richardson revisits a frequently-quoted paragraph written a decade ago by respected scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, who concluded

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream,” they wrote, “it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

So we’ve seen–and it has only gotten worse.

These days, as the Jackson hearings are painfully illustrating, Republicans have made both civil discourse and  basic, substantive governance virtually impossible.

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Asking A Favor

I have previously noted that I learn a lot from the people who comment on this blog. (Even those with whom I strongly disagree provide me with valuable insights about the world-views of people I have trouble understanding.)

Because I continue to be impressed with the breadth of knowledge of so many who comment here, I’m asking for your help with a project I am currently pursuing in collaboration with a (much better informed) colleague.

The project grew out of our joint concern over what I’ll call “the woke wars–” the efforts to label accurate history instruction as the vilified “CRT,”  the accusations of “cancelling” and commissions of “micro-aggressions”–the use and misuse of a whole vocabulary of culture war. We wanted to write a small book (or long article) aimed at the substantial number of Americans who are unfamiliar with that vocabulary–people who aren’t bigots, who believe in racial reconciliation–but who are unaware of the ways in which some behaviors, words and phrases are experienced as stereotypical and/or hurtful. We wanted to communicate with the numerous Americans who fall somewhere between the nationalists and nativists clinging to their hatreds and the”woke”  purists who decry the racism that they detect virtually everywhere.

We define purists as those who elevate the perfect (as they define it) over the good, who tend to view the world as binary– us vs. them, good versus evil—and to view any recognition of nuance, shades of gray  and/or context as evidence of insufficient “wokeness.”

Our working title is: How To Be Anti-Racist Without Being a Jerk.

Below is the current draft of our introduction, explaining why we are writing this and for whom. We follow it in the book with a “glossary” explaining  terminology. A third  section has examples and accompanying tips on how to distinguish between ignorance (lack of awareness) and negative intent, while a fourth section offers what we think are appropriate responses to various common situations. The fifth and final section is a summary re-emphasizing that we consider the proper goal of anti-racist behavior to be a world in which individuals are treated as individuals, not as representatives of any particular “tribe” –a world where each person is treated with dignity and respect until and unless they demonstrate behaviors that divest them of the right to demand such respect.

We have talked mainly to each other, and shared the whole draft with a very limited number of diverse friends; accordingly, we would really appreciate other suggestions as we go forward. What points are important to include? What messages are likely to resonate with our target market (which is neither White Supremicists nor the armies of the rabidly “woke.”)

In case you feel you need to read the entire draft in order to comment, I’ll post it in the comments section.
____________________________

We decided to offer this small book because we think we have a somewhat different approach to the subject-matter, one that we hope will allow people of good will to navigate the increasingly choppy waters of tribal discord.

We live in a time of social change, much of it positive. We especially recognize and celebrate the practical and symbolic progress toward equality. Many people point to the 2008 election of President Obama, the 2015 Obergfell v. Hodges Supreme Court recognition of gay marriage, and the very public rejection of racist behaviors and institutions that animate protest movements and viral messaging on social media as signs of progress.

That said, America is finally coming to terms with the reality that a far-too-substantial portion of our population is composed of White Christian Nationalists—a belief system that goes well beyond prejudice against people of color. It includes anti-Semitism and bigotries against Islam and various other religions, as well as a healthy dose of misogyny. When this book talks about being “anti-racist,” it’s shorthand for combatting that expansive distaste for the “other” to which we’re referring.

What, exactly, is racism, as we are using that term? It is the belief that identity trumps individuality and behavior—the belief that people who share a skin color or religion share essential characteristics that distinguish “them” from “us.” (We use the term identity in its political sense: the tendency of people of a particular gender, religion, race, social background, social class or other identifying factors to develop political agendas that are based upon these identities.) It is a worldview that fails to see people as people—individuals who deserve to be approached and evaluated as individuals. There are certainly cultural and regional differences among Americans, but humans of every color and faith and gender can and do vary from delightful to annoying to truly damaged and/or deplorable. Racism is denial of that reality, accompanied by a belief in the inherent superiority of one’s own “tribe.” Such a worldview is racist whether people harboring such beliefs are members of the majority or part of a marginalized group, whether they act on those beliefs or not, and whether or not they are fully conscious of the fact that they harbor such beliefs.

Recognition of the persistence and outsized influence of White Supremacist ideology, and the emergence of efforts to combat it, are welcome. It’s a truism that you cannot solve a problem of which you are unaware, and many, if not most Americans were unaware of the extent and persistence of these attitudes until the election of an African-American President brought them to the surface. The rise of anti-racism efforts is very welcome. We also recognize, however, that all culture clashes prompt excesses and oversimplifications. Well-meaning—and not so well-meaning—people too often engage in “virtue signaling”—performances meant to signal moral superiority– in situations in which thoughtful, civil discussions would be more productive.

Speaking of productivity–this is intended to be a book about getting the job done, moving the needle, being effective. If you are an activist who is determined to make the perfect the enemy of the good, if your goal is to garner attention, to feel morally superior, to curry favor with this or that constituency—if you believe that your particular experiences or insights entitle you to set the agenda irrespective of the setbacks your behavior might trigger or the harm that could be caused by hasty or unfair accusations– this isn’t a book for you.

It isn’t only physicians who must abide by the admonition: do no harm. Our goal in this little book is to help Americans move toward a fair and equitable society while doing no harm—or at least as little harm as possible. We are firmly convinced that progress toward a more fair and equitable society will be retarded, rather than advanced, by shaming, “cancelling” or self-righteous denunciations, and that social justice is more likely to result from educational interventions communicated with kindness and civility.

Rather obviously, this isn’t a book for those who have bought into the myths of White Christian Supremacy. We are aware that we aren’t going to change the minds or hearts of those who are convinced of their own innate superiority. This is also not a book for people who see racism and bigotry in every offhand remark. It is meant to be a helpful guide for people who recognize the pervasiveness and immorality of both personal prejudice and structural racism, people who don’t see themselves as culture warriors, but who do want to be effective allies in the effort to right systemic wrongs—and who are uncertain of the (often-shifting) terms upon which today’s battles are being fought. This book is for the majority of people who find themselves in the broad, uncharted territory between the more extreme anti-racist activists and America’s increasingly vocal White Supremacists.

Americans are currently awash in advice about how to be an ally—how to combat racism, how to see stereotypical assumptions that underlie seemingly neutral acts and comments, how to investigate one’s own biases and beliefs. Much of that advice is important and useful. There are fewer admonitions—okay, we haven’t seen any—about summoning the courage required to support people who are the target of overblown, unfair and/or unsupported accusations of bigotry. (Those situations aren’t as rare as we’d all like to believe.) Paradoxically, the orgies of condemnation that all too often become part of efforts to combat racism and “cancel” the racists can end up actually impeding progress– creating circular firing squads that silence or antagonize would-be allies. Insisting on fair play helps avoid the angry reactions to unjustified accusations that can end up disrupting organizations and movements and retarding efforts to move us toward a fairer, more equitable society. We need to understand and remember that there are meaningful differences between ignorance, “micro”-aggressions, and bad behaviors—and that even bad behavior does not automatically equal “bad person.”

In short, in this little book, we hope to provide readers with tools to: (1) understand the sometimes-bewildering vocabulary of the anti-racist movement; (2) identify and avoid pernicious stereotypes; (3) distinguish between inadvertent offenses and more harmful and deeply-rooted attitudes; and (4) recognize the most effective ways to deal with both the inadvertent offenses and more intentional displays of prejudice.

In other words, how to be anti-racist without being a jerk.

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