Critical Race Theory

I was really hoping I could avoid ever posting about the asinine debate over Critical Race Theory–but the other day, I saw that our bootlicker-to-the-Right Attorney General had entered the fray, a clear sign that the racists and their enablers think they’ve found a winning formula for 2022.

So I guess I do need to weigh in, in a (probably useless) effort to clarify what all the noise is about.

I didn’t encounter Critical Legal Studies and its cousin, Critical Race Theory until I was a college professor. Both approaches were–and are–relatively arcane, primarily the preoccupation of a subset of legal scholars. As Heather Cox Richardson recently explained it,  Critical Race Theory was a theory conceived in the 1970s by legal scholars trying to understand why the civil rights legislation of the past twenty years had not eliminated racial inequality in America.

They argued that general racial biases were baked into American law so that efforts to protect individuals from discrimination did not really get at the heart of the issue. While this theory focused on the law, it echoed the arguments historians have made—and proved—since the 1940s: our economy, education, housing, medical care, and so on, have developed with racial biases. This is not actually controversial among scholars.

While CRT explicitly focuses on systems, not individuals, and while it is largely limited to legal theory classes rather than public schools, Republicans have turned this theory into the idea that it attacks white Americans and that history teachers are indoctrinating schoolchildren to hate America. In the past three and half months, the Fox News Channel has talked about CRT nearly 1300 times.

I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked to discover that people who couldn’t define either “socialism” or “capitalism” if their lives depended on it are having trouble distinguishing between their fear of being “replaced” by Jews and scary Black people and a graduate-level study of how and where racial stereotypes are reflected in the country’s legal system. (I guess they never heard of redlining…)

Assertions that CRT is being taught in America’s elementary and high schools is ludicrous–as I have been complaining pretty much forever, schools aren’t even teaching the most basic concepts required for civic literacy, let alone a theory that requires a familiarity not just with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but with significant elements of America’s legal structures.

The GOP-hyped hysteria over Critical Race Theory is just another effort to mask garden-variety racism  by pretending that the fight is really about something else. It takes its place beside the party’s rejection of “political correctness” (i.e., I refuse to abide by your social expectation of basic civility) and “cancel culture” (i.e., I should be free to spew my venom but you shouldn’t be free to respond by signaling your disapproval).

 One of the biggest disappointments of my adult life has been my reluctant recognition of the extent and depth of American racism, and the degree to which it infects our politics. That said, despite the evidence of the past few years–the hysterical reaction to Obama’s election, the subsequent election of an ignorant blowhard willing to demonize the “other”– I  still refuse to believe that the majority of Americans are in thrall to hate and fear.

The problem is, the rabid racist minority–thanks to gerrymandering,  vote suppression (and let’s be honest, voter apathy) and the Electoral College– has seized outsized control of America’s government. And when it comes to turnout, rage is a great motivator. If dishonest and dishonorable politicians can drum up fear and anger by emphasizing culture-war issues like the “threat” of a mischaracterized CRT, they may yet overwhelm the majority.

We live in an incredibly dangerous time.

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All Art Is Political

It isn’t much of an exaggeration to say that in the past several years, the performing arts have been dominated by Lin Manuel Miranda. The Broadway version of In The Heights was followed by the overwhelming event that was and is Hamilton and more recently, we’ve had the updated movie version of In The Heights. 

These productions secured Miranda’s reputation as an impresario, and his activism and demeanor secured his reputation as a nice guy with good political values. Given his prominence, it wasn’t a surprise to come across recent references to an essay he wrote in December of 2019 for the Atlantic.

It was titled “The Role of the Artist in the Age of Trump,” and it argued that the arts are always and inevitably political.

I was particularly open to Miranda’s thesis because I had just finished reading Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. I lived through the events of that time-period, and I was familiar with many–but certainly not all–of the artists and philosophers and cultural icons that Menand meticulously describes (and frequently deconstructs), but I hadn’t recognized how deeply they were influenced by the times they lived in, nor how deeply they influenced those times in turn. (I recommend the book, but with the warning that it’s a pretty dense read.)

Miranda’s opening paragraph makes his thesis explicit:

All art is political. In tense, fractious times—like our current moment—all art is political. But even during those times when politics and the future of our country itself are not the source of constant worry and anxiety, art is still political. Art lives in the world, and we exist in the world, and we cannot create honest work about the world in which we live without reflecting it. If the work tells the truth, it will live on.

What Miranda’s essay and Menand’s book both underscore is that “art” and “political art” are not the exclusive province of the more rarified and snobbish precincts we call “high” art.

Miranda makes that point by looking at the messages conveyed by–of all people– Rogers and Hammerstein.

Consider The Sound of Music. It isn’t just about climbing mountains and fording streams. Look beyond the adorable von Trapp children: It’s about the looming existential threat of Nazism. No longer relevant? A GIF of Captain von Trapp tearing up a Nazi flag is something we see 10 times a day on Twitter, because all sorts of Nazis are out there again in 2019. As last spring’s searing Broadway revival of Oklahoma! revealed, lying underneath Hammerstein’s elephant-eye-high corn and chirping birds is a lawless society becoming itself, bending its rules and procedures based on who is considered part of the community (Curly) and who is marginalized (poor Jud … seriously, poor Jud). Or consider your parents’ favorite, South Pacific. At its center, our hero, Nellie Forbush, must confront her own internalized racism when she learns that the new love of her life has biracial children from a previous marriage. Let your parents know if they forgot: Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals form the spine of Broadway’s “golden age,” and they also deeply engage with the politics of their era.

In the essay, Miranda discusses the “message” of In The Heights, and its depiction of immigrants as human beings (a “radical act!”), the contrast of that portrayal with the dehumanizing rhetoric of then-President Trump, and the reason such portrayals are important.

What artists can do is bring stories to the table that are unshakably true—the sort of stories that, once you’ve heard them, won’t let you return to what you thought before.. ..I believe great art is like bypass surgery. It allows us to go around all of the psychological distancing mechanisms that turn people cold to the most vulnerable among us.

At the end of the day, our job as artists is to tell the truth as we see it. If telling the truth is an inherently political act, so be it. Times may change and politics may change, but if we do our best to tell the truth as specifically as possible, time will reveal those truths and reverberate beyond the era in which we created them. We keep revisiting Shakespeare’s Macbeth because ruthless political ambition does not belong to any particular era. We keep listening to Public Enemy because systemic racism continues to rain tragedy on communities of color. We read Orwell’s 1984 and shiver at its diagnosis of doublethink, which we see coming out of the White House at this moment. And we listen to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, as Lieutenant Cable sings about racism, “You’ve got to be carefully taught.” It’s all art. It’s all political.

No wonder so many reactionaries hate Hollywood.

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Cost Of Doing Business

Politico recently reported on a proposed law in Maine that would tax food wrappers. Before you react (either by yawning or rolling your eyes), consider the likely motive for imposing such a tax, and the potential implications.

Maine’s bill is an effort to recoup at least some of the costs governments incur when recycling tons of packaging waste. Managing America’s trash is expensive, its costs continue to escalate, and a significant percentage of those costs are paid with tax dollars. 

According to the report,  business groups actually asked lawmakers to tax food wrappers and containers. Industry groups did emerge to oppose certain parts of the proposal–mainly, who would control the tax revenue and how it’s spent. Packagers and consumer brands wanted authority to manage the money and use it exclusively for recycling. Maine regulators and their allies in the Legislature wanted the revenues to reimburse municipalities for hauling waste to landfills, too.

The industry won that battle, and the bill–that has now passed– designated revenues for recycling. This legislation appears be the first of its kind in the country; it could give momentum to a broader push to curb plastic waste and rationalize a recycling system that is outdated and varies from town to town. 

What I find really hopeful, however, is that I see  this as an (admittedly small) step toward dealing with the serious challenges posed by  externalities.

As I have often noted, I am a proponent of markets and capitalism–properly understood and properly regulated. The usual description of a working–and workable–market is that it is characterized by transactions between willing buyers and willing sellers  who are each in possession of all  information relevant to the transaction. That description is an accurate depiction of the ultimate purchase and sale, but it elides other, equally important assumptions–including the assumption that the pricing of a good accurately reflects the costs of its manufacture plus a reasonable profit.

That assumption isn’t necessarily accurate.

If I am manufacturing widgets, and the process involves the use or creation of a pollutant, the cost of production–and the price charged to the consumer– should include the expense of properly disposing of that pollutant. If –instead of following the rules for such disposal– I dump my contaminated waste in the local river (where it will have to be cleaned up by adjacent municipalities) I can price my widgets more advantageously than widget manufacturers who follow the rules and pay to dispose of their waste properly.

In a properly operating marketplace, the price of goods will reflect the complete cost of their manufacture–the expense of raw materials, all costs of turning those raw materials into a salable item, and the associated expenses of marketing and packaging. Appropriate regulations are those aimed at preventing some companies from gaining unfair advantage by “offloading” a portion of what should be their costs onto unsuspecting taxpayers.

Properly operating markets benefit us all. What doesn’t benefit us are (1) markets in clearly inappropriate economic sectors, like health care, where there is a huge (and unbridgeable) disparity in information and urgency between the parties to a transaction, and (2) inadequately or improperly regulated markets that allow–or even encourage–companies to profit by cheating.  

The packaging issue being addressed in Maine isn’t an instance of cheating; technically, I doubt that the need to recycle packaging is even a true externality–at least, as economists would categorize it–but the need to recycle packaging waste clearly does impose a cost that is currently being covered by taxpayers rather than manufacturers.

Maine appears to be the first state to address the allocation of that expense, and it will be interesting to see how many other states (if any) follow suit. At the very least, efforts of this sort raise awareness of an issue that is all too easy to ignore.

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From Your Mouth…

My grandmother used to have a favorite response to rosy predictions: “From your mouth to God’s ears.” In other words, “I sure hope so, but whether God is listening remains to be seen.”

That was my reaction to a recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times.In a very real way, Brooks column–titled “The American Renaissance Has Begun “–  put flesh on President Biden’s frequent assertion that “America is back.”

He began the analysis by harkening back to the post-World War Two period, when West Germany and Japan emerged from widespread devastation to experience “miraculous” economic growth, while Britain, with its institutions more intact, entered a period of slow economic growth.

Brooks cited a 1982 book by Mancur Olson, which offered an explanation:

“The Rise and Decline of Nations,” Olson concluded that Germany and Japan enjoyed explosive growth precisely because their old arrangements had been disrupted. The devastation itself, and the forces of American occupation and reconstruction, dislodged the interest groups that had held back innovation. The old patterns that stifled experimentation were swept away. The disruption opened space for something new.

Brooks hypothesizes that the pandemic may have ushered in similar disruption, and he bolsters that argument with a number of data points: the 4.4 million new businesses that were started in 2020 represent a modern record.  The 38 percent of workers who took some additional training during 2020 was a substantial increase from the 14 percent who did so in 2019. U.S. start-ups raised $69 billion dollars, which was a 41 percent increase over the previous record, set in 2018. Productivity is up. Perennially low savings rates increased.

After decades in which consumption took preference over savings, Americans socked away trillions of dollars in 2020, reducing their debt burdens to lows not seen since 1980 and putting themselves in a position to spend lavishly as things open up.

Brooks says these and other data points are signs of three major shifts–growing worker power, a “rebalancing” of population between urban and suburban America, and a similar rebalancing of work and domestic life. I think the latter two predictions are “iffy”–it remains to be seen how many businesses will institutionalize remote work and how, and those decisions will affect workers’ need–and willingness–to relocate and commute.

If population dispersal does occur, our political polarization might ease; Brooks quotes a professor of urban studies who predicts such movement and as a result, forecasts a decline in the economic and cultural gaps between coastal cities and inland communities.

It remains to be seen whether these predicted population movements and changes in the culture of work will materialize, but the shift of power from employers to workers is clearly underway, and just as clearly overdue.

Power has begun shifting from employers to workers. In March, U.S. manufacturing, for example, expanded at the fastest pace in nearly four decades. Companies are desperate for new workers. Between April 2020 and March 2021, the number of unemployed people per opening plummeted to 1.2 from 5.

Workers are in the driver’s seat, for now, and they know it. The “quit rate” — the number of workers who quit their jobs because they are confident they can get a better one — is at the highest in two decades. Employers are raising wages and benefits to try to lure workers back.

This is a “rebalancing” that matters. Unions were formed originally to counter the disproportionate power of employers. Over time, in some industries, unions then became dominant–more powerful than employers. Over the past decades, however, as technology and gig work and successful corporate lobbying eviscerated union power, employers once again gained the upper hand–and a number happily exploited both their regained advantage and their workforces.

The operation of supply and demand, referenced by Brooks, is returning a measure of power to workers. (The recent Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare will also help with that “rebalancing.” Employers’ positions were substantially strengthened by America’s insistence on tying health insurance to employment –workers with pre-existing conditions were effectively precluded from quitting and losing their coverage.)

The next few years will tell the economic story. But we also need to recognize that America  won’t truly be “back,” let alone “better,” unless we repair our infrastructure–physical and social–and protect our democracy.

If there’s a God, I hope she’s listening…..

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More Than One Way To Skin The Filibuster Cat…

Americans who may never have heard of the filibuster–or who were previously only dimly aware of that parliamentary mechanism–are passionately debating its continued existence. One reason so many of us favor its elimination is that the filibuster in its current iteration bears little or no resemblance to the original rule.

Whatever the original purpose of the filibuster, for many years its use was infrequent. For one thing, it required a Senator to actually make a lengthy speech on the Senate floor–unlike today. In its current form, it operates to require government by super-majority–it has become a weapon employed by extremists to hold the country hostage.

A bit of history is instructive.

The original idea of a filibuster was that so long as a senator kept talking, the bill in question couldn’t move forward. Once those opposed to the measure felt they had made their case, or at least exhausted their argument, they would leave the Senate floor and allow a vote. In 1917, when filibustering Senators threatened President Wilson’s ability to respond to a perceived military threat, the Senate adopted a mechanism called cloture, allowing a super-majority vote to end a filibuster.

In 1975, the Senate again changed the rules, making it much, much easier to filibuster.

The new rules allowed other business to be conducted during the time a filibuster is (theoretically) taking place. Senators no longer are required to take to the Senate floor and publicly argue their case. This “virtual” use has increased dramatically as partisan polarization has worsened, and it has effectively abolished the principle of majority rule. It now takes the sixty votes needed for cloture to pass any legislation. This anti-democratic result isn’t just in direct conflict with the intent of the Founders, it has brought normal government operation to a standstill.

Meanwhile, the lack of any requirement to publicly debate the matter keeps Americans  from hearing and evaluating the rationale for opposition to a measure–or even understanding why nothing is getting done.

There is really no principled argument for maintaining the filibuster in its current iteration. But there may be alternatives to simply jettisoning it, as Ezra Klein points out in a recent column about Joe Manchin.

Klein is clear-eyed about Manchin’s purported reasons for maintaining the filibuster– devotion to a long-gone “bipartisanship.”

At his worst, Manchin prizes the aesthetic of bipartisanship over its actual pursuit. In those moments, he becomes a defender of the status quo and, paradoxically, an enabler of Republican partisanship. But over the past 24 hours, a plausible path has emerged through which Manchin could build a more cooperative and deliberative Senate. It’s narrow, but it’s there.

Part of the strategy relies on changing the rules. Manchin has said, over and over again, that he will not eliminate or weaken the filibuster. I wish he’d reconsider, but he won’t. The possibility remains, however, that he will strengthen the filibuster.

Klein points out how dramatically the filibuster has morphed from its original form, and considers–in lieu of simply getting rid of it–how it might be returned to something approximating its historical form.

It’s possible to imagine a set of reforms that would restore something more like the filibuster of yore and rebuild the deliberative capacities of the Senate. This would begin with a variation on the congressional scholar Norm Ornstein’s idea to shift the burden of the filibuster: Instead of demanding 60 votes to end debate, require 40 (or 41) to continue it.

That would return the filibuster to something more like we imagine it to be: Impassioned minorities could hold the floor with theatrical speeches, shining public attention on their arguments, but the majority could end debate if the minority relented. To sustain this kind of filibuster would be grueling, which is as it should be. The filibuster is an extraordinary measure, and it should require extraordinary commitment to deploy.

The majority, for its part, would have to carefully weigh the consequences of proceeding with partisan legislation: They would gamble weeks or months of Senate time if they chose to face down a filibuster, with no guarantee of passage on the other end. A reform like this would demand more from both the majority and the minority and ignite the kinds of lengthy, public debates that the Senate was once known for.

In leaked audio published by The Intercept on Wednesday, Manchin appeared to favor exactly this kind of change. “I think, basically, it should be 41 people have to force the issue versus the 60 that we need in the affirmative,” he said.

I think that most of us who are exasperated by the constant, dishonest and sneaky use of the filibuster in its current form would be willing to give this modification a try. 

Fingers crossed.

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