The Dilemma

I have found Charles Blow to be one of the most thoughtful and incisive columnists at the New York Times, and a recent column is an example.

Like many of us, Blow is ready to “move on,” but unsure what such “moving on” requires. Worse still, we are (choose your image) caught between a rock and a hard place, or faced with the perennial choice between chicken and egg. Blow uses an everyday dilemma faced by Blacks as an example:

You are receiving a service for which tipping is a customary practice. Maybe you’re taking a cab or receiving a beauty treatment; maybe having a drink at a bar or eating at a restaurant.

Your service provider is not Black. The service is poor. Your server is not at all attentive. You wait for things far longer than you believe you should or far longer than you believe others in the space are waiting.

When the check comes, what should the customer do? Blow says that there are studies showing  that Black people on average tip less. Studies also show that servers on average provide Black people inferior service. Given the accuracy of those results, a good-sized tip that rewards poor service might help erode the perception that Black folks don’t tip well–and as Blow says, perhaps make the next Black person’s service better. On the other hand, an average or below-average tip, the size merited by the poor service, risks cementing, in the server’s mind, the belief that Black people are poor tippers.

Neither alternative is particularly attractive.

Blow then points out that this is very similar to the dilemma faced by members of minority groups when the party that wants to keep them unequal loses an election.

There is always so much talk of unity and coming together, of healing wounds and repairing divisions. We then have to have some version of the tip debate: Do we prove to them that we can rise above their attempt to harm us or do we behave in a way that is consummate with the harm they tried to inflict?

There is a legitimate argument to be made that a spiral of recriminations will always descend into a hole of collective harm. Still, there must also be an acknowledgment that the prejudiced were trying to harm you and that, but for a few hundred thousand votes in the right states, they would have succeeded in exacting that harm.

There has been, as the column notes, ample evidence of Trump’s bigotries–against Blacks, against women, against (brown) immigrants. The vast majority of people who voted for him were well aware of that evidence. What Blow doesn’t say–but I will–is that Trump’s bigotries and racism were features, not bugs, of his campaign. His endorsement of bigotry– his normalization of racism and sexism–was at the heart of his appeal to more voters than we like to recognize.

The best you can say is that his voters certainly didn’t consider his “out and proud” racism disqualifying. So we are back to the chicken and egg.

Joe Biden, as he has always said, is seeking to be a unifying president, to be the president of the people who didn’t vote for him as well as the ones who did. I want to have that same optimistic spirit, but I must admit that my attempts at it may falter.

I don’t want to be the person who holds a grudge, but I also don’t want to be the person who ignores a lesson. The act of remembering that so many Americans were willing to continue the harm to me and others and to the country itself isn’t spiteful but wise.

Next month Joe Biden will be sworn in and the next chapter of America will begin. I plan to meet that day with the glow of optimism on my face, but I refuse to vanquish the shadow of remembrance falling behind me.

We share the conundrum. How do we model better, more truly patriotic behavior without inadvertently giving unacceptable and harmful behaviors and attitudes a pass?

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Another Embarrassing Indiana AG

Indiana has a habit of elevating legal embarrassments to the position of Attorney General. I still remember pompous Theodore Sendak, who made people call him “General.” Sendak led the fight against revamping Indiana’s archaic criminal code, arguing that modernization would “just make defense attorneys rich,” and he was a major proponent of capital punishment.

Curtis Hill, our outgoing AG, was initially known for his Elvis impersonations and more recently for groping female legislators and staffers. When he did take legal positions, they were equally embarrassing: the sorts of anti-choice, anti-gay, last century arguments we’ve come to expect from Republican officeholders playing to the GOP’s base “base.”

Todd Rokita, who will assume the office in January, is arguably even worse. There has never been a Republican derriere Rokita wouldn’t kiss in his ongoing efforts to feed at the public trough.

As Secretary of State, Rokita helped to write the nation’s first Voter ID bill–despite the fact that, like the rest of the country, Indiana had never experienced a problem with in-person voter fraud. (In Rokita’s worldview, we do have a problem with “urban” people actually being allowed to vote…)

More recently, he enthused over Texas’ bonkers lawsuit, insisting that measures in other states making it easier to vote during the pandemic somehow diluted the votes of Indiana citizens. (Presumably, he sees no problem with the state’s “winner take all” allocations of Electoral Votes, which totally erase Democratic ballots cast in the state..)

What else has Rokita opposed or supported? Let us count the ways:

  • He has compared African Americans who vote Democratic to slaves., and ran an ad against Colin Kaepernick that was widely considered racist.

  • He has opposed allowing migrant children to be placed in American homes, claiming they carried Ebola.

  • He’s certainly no friend to women: he opposes abortion even in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, and NUVO has reported that Rokita does not support equal wages for equal work for women.

  • He doesn’t believe in climate change, and he doesn’t believe that immigration reform should include a path to citizenship.

There’s much more. When he was in Congress, ten former staffers accused him of maintaining a “toxic work environment,” abusing staff members and insisting that they perform menial tasks like cleaning his car and emptying his trash.

The Chicago Tribune accused Rokita of violating ethics laws during his tenure as Secretary of State. And for truly bizarre positions, it’s hard to beat his insistence that the FAA should be privatized (because, he asserted, the federal government cannot do anything as well as private-sector businesses), and his opposition to rules requiring pilots to get periodic medical exams. (He said he trusted the pilots to decide whether they were medically-fit to fly.)

In Congress, Rokita authored a bill that would have reduced the availability of subsidized lunches for public school students. But he sure supported “feeding” students his brand of “Americanism.” According to the Chicago Tribune,

A Jasper County teacher asked Rokita to leave his high school civics class in November 2016 after a talk that was supposed to be about the Constitution got off on the wrong foot, according to two students. Rokita had asked the class if they were taught about ‘American Exceptionalism.’ But when a number of students seemed puzzled by the concept, he had a testy exchange with their teacher, Paul Norwine, whom he criticized for not including it in the curriculum, the students said. Tensions eased and the talk proceeded, but the class was dumbfounded, the students said. ‘Mr. Rokita got very angry and said, ‘You have an American congressman in your class, what are you doing?’ said Marcus Kidwell, 19, a Donald Trump supporter who was a senior at the time. ’He seems like a pretty hot-headed guy. That disappointed me because he’s a Republican and I was pretty excited to meet him.’” 

Sources for the foregoing–and much more–are at the link. The organization, Restore Public  Trust, says his past behaviors disqualify Rokita for public office.

But not in Indiana, a state that is getting steadily closer to its goal of displacing Mississippi as the laughingstock of states.

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The Real Checks And Balances

It always comes back to culture–the paradigms into which we are socialized. We call the color of the sky “blue” because that’s what everyone else calls it. We wear clothing that (usually) covers our genitals because we have been socialized to believe such coverage is appropriate. (I’m waiting for the anti-mask “patriots” to insist that laws requiring such clothing are an assault on their liberties…but I digress.) 

We accept society’s expectations for large areas of our behavior: the side of the road we drive on, what we consider edible, how many people there are in a marriage…(my students are always shocked to discover that–despite the anti-same-sex-marriage insistence that marriage is between “one man and one woman,” in many countries those unions are between one man and two or three women…)

Culture is incredibly important. True, changing a culture is a very slow process, a fact that tends to “bake in” unjust rules and attitudes. But without cultural expectations, we humans would have to make decisions about every aspect of our daily lives. I once heard a lecturer ask why men in certain businesses/professions routinely and unthinkingly wore a patterned piece of cloth around their necks. (A tie.)That expectation does appear to be changing.

All this is to say that most behaviors are not simply the result of explicit laws or rules. We call expectations of many behaviors, especially ethical ones, “norms,” and those expectations are frequently more potent that statutes and ordinances–especially when they guide political behavior.

A recent column from the New York Times is on point.Tim Wu asked “What really saved the Republic from Trump?” Assuming the Republic actually was saved–I worry that the jury is still out–I think Wu makes an important point.

Americans are taught that the main function of the U.S. Constitution is the control of executive power: curtailing presidents who might seek to become tyrants. Other republics have lapsed into dictatorships (the Roman Republic, the Weimar Republic, the Republic of China and so on), but our elaborate constitutional system of checks and balances, engineered largely by James Madison, protects us from despotism.

Or so we think. The presidency of Donald Trump, aggressive in its autocratic impulses but mostly thwarted from realizing them, should prompt a re-examination of that idea. For our system of checks and balances, in which the three branches of government are empowered to control or influence the actions of the others, played a disappointingly small role in stopping Mr. Trump from assuming the unlimited powers he seemed to want.

What really saved the Republic from Mr. Trump was a different set of limits on the executive: an informal and unofficial set of institutional norms upheld by federal prosecutors, military officers and state elections officials. You might call these values our “unwritten constitution.” Whatever you call them, they were the decisive factor.

Wu described the failures of multiple, explicit “checks and balances” over the last four years, pointing out that Senate Republicans mostly allowed Trump to do whatever he wanted. They allowed “acting” appointees who could not have been confirmed to run the federal government. They treated the impeachment process as nothing but a party-line vote. It’s hard to dispute Wu’s conclusion that the Senate “became a rubber stamp for executive overreach.”

Wu identified as “firewalls” what he called the three pillars of the unwritten constitution.

The first is the customary separation between the president and federal criminal prosecution (even though the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch). The second is the traditional political neutrality of the military (even though the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces). The third is the personal integrity of state elections officials.

I had considerable concern about the first of those firewalls under William Barr, but it ultimately did hold; Barr refused to find massive vote fraud where it didn’t exist. And a large number of lawyers with the DOJ protested, quit and otherwise made it clear that efforts to turn the Department into Trump’s personal law firm were a violation of DOJ culture.

Members of the military have been pretty uniformly admirable, and to my great surprise, so have Republican election officials–even in Georgia.

The question going forward is:  how do we sustain and nourish those democratic norms? How do we reinforce a small-d democratic culture, and ensure that future generations share its expectations? I don’t have the answer, but I’m fairly certain it involves a significant improvement in civics education. 

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Time For A New Center-Right Party?

So here is where we are. We have a sitting president pretending that he won an election he resoundingly lost, and nearly 90 percent of the GOP members in Congress refusing to challenge the assertion.

Top officials in 18 states and more than half of House Republicans supported a bonkers lawsuit trying to reverse the result of the election–even though a number of them owe their own seats to that same election.

Meanwhile, Proud Boys (a White Supremacist gang) prowl the streets of Washington and were actually invited into the White House by a deranged and dangerous almost-ex President.

To say that this is all insane behavior is to belabor the obvious. Even Trump ally Chris Christie has called the Texas lawsuit “absurd.”

Prior to the Presidential campaign, former GOP strategists and conservatives–including Rick Wilson, George Conway, Steve Schmidt, Reed Galen, Jennifer Horn, John Weaver, Ron Steslow, and Mike Madrid formed the Lincoln Project, “accountable to those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans.” Wilson, Conway and Schmidt have been particularly vocal in repudiating the Trumpism that has radicalized and infantilized what remains of the GOP. There have been other groups of disaffected Republicans, like Republican Voters Against Trump, and large numbers of former Republican officeholders ( especially DOJ lawyers and military personnel) who have issued letters and statements pointing out that various Trump actions and statements weren’t simply wrong, but in violation of American values and the rule of law.

Ex-Republicans, including conservative “names” like Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol, established the Bulwark, “a project of Defending Democracy Together Institute, a 501(c)(3) organization.” They are joined philosophically by media figures like Joe Scarborough, who was once a Republican Congressman.

These dissidents from Trumpism are largely drawn from what we might call the brains of the former GOP–strategists, political philosophers (and to be fair, a number of self-regarding blowhards. But still…)

Thoughtful people understand that America needs two responsible, adult political parties. That need is especially significant in a country that has only two major parties. When the political system works properly, both of those parties will be bigger “tents” than today’s GOP, but one will be generally more conservative and one generally more liberal.

People of good will who are focused on the common good will disagree about many things. They will bring different perspectives and life experiences to the nation’s problems. And in what should be an inevitable process of negotiation and compromise, broadly acceptable public policies will be hammered out.

That process is impossible when one party is a fundamentalist cult.

When one of only two political parties is dominated by people who believe that God is not only on their side, but has directed them not to negotiate, compromise or accept any reality other than their preferred one, government cannot function. And that is the alternative reality in which members of today’s GOP live.

As Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times,

The postmodern blood libel of QAnon will have adherents in Congress. Kyle Rittenhouse, a young man charged with killing Black Lives Matter protesters, is a right-wing folk hero. The Republican Party has become more hostile to democracy than ever. Both the Trump and Bush presidencies concluded with America a smoking ruin. Only Trump has ensured that nearly half the country doesn’t see it.

As Paul Krugman observed in that same issue, the GOP has become hostile to the very idea that there’s an objective reality that might conflict with its political goals.

There are certainly similarly ideological, intransigent people among the Democrats–but they don’t control it, and they do not come close to being a majority of that party’s base.

Today, what remains of the GOP is a seething, angry mob. Scholars can research the roots of this devolution; psychiatrists and political psychologists can investigate the personality quirks that predict attraction to whatever it is that being a Republican these days represents. But what is abundantly clear–not just to Democrats and Independents, but to anti-Trump Republicans–is that the current iteration of the Grand Old Party is incapable of participating in governance.

Tantrums are not policy positions.

In my opinion (not that anyone is likely to ask for my opinion), if the United States is to return to a semblance of sanity, or to any adult version of governance, the principled conservatives who have exited the GOP need to form a new center-right party, and leave the current Republican Party to the howling, racist remnants that currently dominate it.

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That WSJ Column…

There has been a very vigorous blowback triggered by a Wall Street Journal column by one Joseph Epstein, counseling Jill Biden (or, as he patronizingly referred to her, “kiddo”) to forego use of the title “Doctor.” (I am not linking to that column; if you want to read it in its sexist entirety, Google it.)

Now, there are legitimate issues about the use of titles. When I was married to a medical doctor, I was frequently embarrassed by his compulsion to insist on being called “Doctor” in venues where it was clearly unnecessary; I ultimately realized that it was a crutch–a way of reassuring himself of his superior status.

People in my generation did tend to reserve it for medical doctors, not those of us holding other types of doctorates.That convention has dissipated, however. My students either call me professor or doctor, and I answer to either. (Or sometimes, just to “hey”!)

No matter what your opinion about the social propriety of its use, the sneering, dismissive tone of the column made it abundantly clear–as many others have noted–that it wouldn’t have been written about a male with a doctorate. About Dr. Kissinger, for example.

I think the personality of Mr. Epstein–who holds a BA, and proudly reports that he doesn’t use “Doctor” despite the fact that he was once awarded an honorary doctorate–is pretty amply telegraphed by the self-satisfied tone of the column itself, but if we needed any confirmation, it came in a post from a FB friend of my sister:

I’ve briefly noted this on some friends’ threads, but it’s worth posting a full account: when I was a Northwestern undergraduate, I took a required class with Joseph Epstein. He constantly jingled the change and keys in his pockets, and told us not to bother complaining about it as all his students did. He didn’t care. He told us rather proudly that he never lay awake at night worrying about the future of the blue whale (?). He NEVER called on the women in class, and spent most class time talking about how amazing he is. I imagine he would use the verb ‘regale’, clearly thinking he would have been welcomed at the Algonquin Round Table. There was one brave woman who insisted on talking. He ignored her. He rang me in my apartment on a weekend, after we turned in our final essays, demanding to know who had written the essay for me. He asked me several questions about Joyce, about whom I’d written, and kept asking how I knew this or that. When I started to cry, he said I was getting hysterical and hung up. I asked a couple of professors who knew me and my work to intervene. He got back to me to say I seemed to have gotten my little boyfriends (??) to speak to him. I was younger than my years and terrified, ignorant of how to stand up for myself. I got the paper back, with a ‘C’, and a one-sentence comment: ‘This is an A paper, but you and I know why I can’t give you an A.

Apparently, he is also an “out and proud” homophobe.

When the offensive column triggered huge criticism, the Journal’s editor dismissed the blowback by insisting that it was part of “cancel culture” and a co-ordinated effort by Democratic Party strategists.

I beg to differ.

That highly critical response was the spontaneous voice of thousands of women (and men who aren’t threatened by them), telling entitled and clueless old White guys to shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.

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