The other day, my husband shared a great cartoon with me: a lecturer was standing by a whiteboard containing a list of actions to combat climate change, most of which would also result in cleaner air and water. A man at the back of the lecture hall is asking “But what if we make the world better and it turns out the scientists were wrong?”
It is difficult to understand opposition to efforts to ameliorate climate change, since most of the measures being proposed are things we ought to be doing anyway. (I do understand why people who make their living from fossil fuels pooh-pooh climate change, and “explain away” the unusual number of unusually destructive hurricanes, not to mention the droughts, the fact that it’s the end of October and in Indiana the trees have barely begun to change color…)
The problem with taking a head in the sand approach–or just making outright war on all environmental protection measures, a la Scott Pruitt–is that it is getting costly. Ignore, if you will, predictions of future crop failures and massive numbers of refugees from no-longer-habitable regions. Let’s just look at current costs and those we can predict with confidence.
Thanks to the unprecedented number and severity of hurricanes, FEMA has already had to ask Congress for billions of extra dollars. To the extent the fires in California were connected to that state’s long drought, we can add the costs of that disaster. Those disasters, however, are small potatoes next to the extra costs incurred on otherwise run-of-the-mill projects as a result of climate change.
When engineers build roads, they use weather models to decide what kind of pavement can withstand the local climate. Currently, many American engineers use temperature data from 1964 to 1995 to select materials. But the climate is changing.
A recent paper in Nature Climate Change asserts that newer temperature figures are needed to save billions of dollars in unnecessary repairs. Using data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Shane Underwood of Arizona State University and his colleagues show that road engineers have selected materials inappropriate for current temperatures 35 percent of the time over the past two decades.
The researchers concluded that a failure to adapt the engineering to warmer temperatures is adding 3 to 9 percent to the cost of building and maintaining a road over 30 years. Those are tax dollars being wasted at a time American infrastructure is desperately in need of repair and rebuilding.
The research analyzed two potential scenarios, one in which global temperatures rose less than current estimates, and one that reflected current predictions. Their results suggest that somewhere between $13.6 and $35.8 billion in extra or earlier-than-normal repairs will be required for roads now being built if the current predictions are accurate. In the lower-temperature warming model, they calculate annual extra costs of between $0.8 billion and $1.3 billion; in the higher-temperature warming model, they predict annual extra costs between $0.8 billion and $2.1 billion.
Other findings included:
A road built to last 20 years will require repairs after 14 to 17 years under these models.
In some cases, government transportation agencies are paying too much for materials to withstand cold temperatures that do not currently (and perhaps no longer) exist.
Because municipal governments in the United States work on tighter road-maintenance budgets than state and federal transportation departments, the extra financial strain will largely impact cities and towns.
There are undoubtedly other expenses that will be generated by our changing climate–some that we can anticipate, and others that will come as unwelcome surprises. Scientists in a number of fields are investigating likely consequences–everything from the loss of hundreds of insect and animal species to the negative effect on coffee beans.
There will be significant and unpleasant costs to taking the road marked “Science Denial.” Unfortunately, these days–at least, in the United States– that road isn’t the “one less traveled.”
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, people in Puerto Rico are still suffering. Thousands are drinking polluted water, much of the island (they’re American citizens, President Trump, even though they’re brown) is still without power and many are without food and medicine.
To say that the federal government’s response has been inadequate would be kind.
A tiny Montana utility company that received a $300 million contract to help restore power to Puerto Rico after its electrical grid was devastated by Hurricane Maria is financed by major Trump donors and run by a CEO friendly with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a series of recent reports has revealed.
The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s granting of the huge contract to Whitefish Energy Holdings, a two-year-old company that reportedly had two full-time employees when the hurricane first hit, was first reported by the Weather Channel last week.
Both the Washington Post and the Daily Beast have offered intriguing–albeit nauseating– details on the company’s investors. The Post noted the “coincidence” that the firm is based in Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s hometown and that its CEO, one Andy Techmanski, is a friend of the Interior secretary. The Daily Beast reported that Whitefish’s general partner “maxed out” donations not just to Trump’s primary and general election campaigns, but also to a Trump super PAC.
I’m sure those generous contributions were just “coincidental” too.
Gee, why do you suppose that Whitefish–with all of two employees– was awarded the contract to restore electricity to hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rico residents? Zinke’s office and Techmanski both told reporters for the Post that the Interior secretary “played no role in securing the contract.” (And I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you….)
After news of this “arms length” contract emerged, a number of publications pointed out that the type of work Whitefish will be doing is typically handled through what are called “mutual aid” agreements with other utilities, not by for-profit companies. Again, from Talking Points Memo,
“The fact that there are so many utilities with experience in this and a huge track record of helping each other out, it is at least odd why [the utility] would go to Whitefish,” Susan F. Tierney, a former senior official at the Energy Department told the Post. “I’m scratching my head wondering how it all adds up.”
In addition to Techmanski’s relationship with Zinke, Joe Colonnetta, partner at Whitefish and founder of HBC Investments, the private-equity firm that finances the energy company, is a significant power player in Republican politics, according to the Beast.
Colonetta donated a total of $74,000 towards Trump’s presidential victory and $30,700 to the Republican National Committee, the Beast reported. His wife, Kimberly, separately gave $33,400 to the RNC shortly after Trump’s win, and was photographed with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson during inauguration week, per the report.
In the midst of the disaster in Puerto Rico, it appears that someone may have engaged in graft as large as the hurricane that hit the island. Like other electrical utilities, the state-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority has multiple mutual-aid agreements with other utilities. It can call on these agreements for help in repairing the power grid in an emergency. These are the same kind of arrangements that allowed utilities in Florida to get power there restored so quickly following the passage of Irma. But even though 79 percent of the island remains without power, PREPA isn’t calling on those agreements.
A constellation of companies, including those controlled by Tesla’s Elon Musk, have offered to work with Puerto Rico to transform the island into a model for the nation using a series of micro-grids, distributed solar, and local storage. The resulting system would be clean, flexible, and resistant to large-scale failure. But, so far at least, none of those companies have the nod to proceed.
Before getting this contract, Whitefish’s largest contract was to install a single electrical line less than five miles long. They had a year to do it.
As I have previously noted, I am a capitalist, an advocate of market economics.
Most members of today’s GOP are not.
In order to work properly, genuine capitalism requires regulation. Much as I hate sports analogies, this one fits: just as you cannot have a fair sporting contest without referees/umpires, you cannot have a working market economy without rules that ensure a level playing field. (You also have to distinguish between areas of the economy in which markets work and areas–like healthcare– where they don’t, but that is a subject for a different post.)
When people with little or no bargaining power have little or no choice but to do business with large, powerful institutions, government has an obligation to insure that the powerful are not taking advantage of the powerless. And that brings me to yesterday’s Senate vote to protect Wall Street from those annoying people from whom they profit .You will not be shocked to find that Mike Pence (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers) cast the deciding vote.
Vice President Pence cast a tie-breaking vote late Tuesday to block new regulations allowing U.S. consumers to sue their banks, handing Wall Street and other big financial institutions their biggest victory since President Trump’s election.
The rules would have cost the industry billions of dollars, according to some estimates. With the Senate’s vote, Wall Street is beginning to reap the benefits of the Trump administration focus on rolling back regulations it says are strangling the economy. The vote is also a major rebuke of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which wrote the rules, and has often found itself at odds of Republicans in Congress and the business community.
The issue is that fine print in the agreements that we consumers have to sign when we apply for credit cards or bank accounts– fine print that requires us to settle any disputes that may subsequently arise through arbitration, in which a third party generally favorable to the Big Guys rules on the matter, rather than going to court or joining a class-action lawsuit.
The CFPB rule would block mandatory arbitration clauses in some cases, potentially allowing millions of Americans to file or join a lawsuit to press their complaints.
After more than four hours of debate, the Senate voted 51 to 50 to block its implementation. Pence was forced to cast the deciding vote shortly after 10 p.m. when two Republicans, Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Kennedy of Louisiana, opposed the resolution. House Republicans already passed legislation to block the rule, which now needs the approval of President Trump.
“Tonight’s vote is a giant setback for every consumer in this country. Wall Street won and ordinary people lost,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray said in a statement minutes after the vote. The legislation “preserves a two-tiered justice system where banks can have their day in court but deny their customers the same right.”
Proponents of the roll-back trotted out the “usual suspects”–those slimy lawyers and their class-action lawsuits–and pretended that the rule wouldn’t really protect consumers and that it would infringe on our freedom to contract. (Because you can always negotiate your credit card terms with MasterCard…) There may be some lawyers who abuse the system (although courts have ways of punishing such abuses), but class action lawsuits are a very important tool for justice. They’re one of the very few ways consumers can force changes to unethical and predatory business practices.
Class action lawsuits allow large groups of people to seek small amounts they individually wouldn’t have time or money to pursue. Large companies employing legally questionable practices rely on the ability to make a lot of money by cheating individual consumers just a little, not enough to justify hiring a lawyer and bringing an individual suit.
Reading about the Senate vote, my husband asked me why any Senator would vote to roll back the rule. I suggested he look at where those Senators’ campaign contributions came from.
If markets are for buying and selling, the Senate is evidently a thriving marketplace.
Last night, I spoke at the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library, addressing–what else?–the Constitution and our current governmental dysfunctions… Regular readers have seen the following arguments before…
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Over the past several years, American political debate has become steadily less civil. Partisan passions routinely overwhelm fair-minded analysis, and the Internet allows people to choose their news (and increasingly, their preferred realities). During the recent election cycle, it was clear that in many cases, Americans were pontificating past each other rather engaging with opponents through thoughtful public discourse.
The title of this talk is “How the Constitution Drives Policy.” I’m going to expand that a bit. In America, the Constitution certainly should drive policy, because the Constitution and Bill of Rights provide a framework for legislation and limits on the sorts of measures policymakers can legitimately enact. But I am also going to talk about the ways in which our political and electoral systems—some embedded in the Constitution and some not—are distorting Constitutional norms and undermining democratic values. Those systems are also driving policymaking—and the result is a federal government that isn’t working properly, and sometimes not working at all.
Speaking of “drivers,” I am firmly convinced that there are three primary “drivers” of the rancor and partisan nastiness that is distorting our efforts at civil communication and preventing the operation of genuinely democratic governance. One is the pace of social and technological change, especially but not exclusively the Internet and social media; one is what I call civic illiteracy—widespread ignorance of the historical foundations and basic premises of American government; and the third is a combination of systemic malfunctions that have left us at the mercy of what pundits have accurately described as “tyranny of the minority.”
There is not much we can do about the pace of social and technological change, beyond recognizing the degree to which people find it disorienting. Despite desperate attempts to keep things as we mis-remember they were, “Stop the world I want to get off” doesn’t work. But we can and should address civic ignorance and we can and should fix our broken political systems.
I first recognized the degree to which our schools don’t teach civics when I began teaching at IUPUI. My undergraduate students had never heard of the Enlightenment, often couldn’t define government, and had little to no constitutional knowledge. I don’t want to belabor this lack of civic literacy, but I do want to share some statistics that should concern all of us. A few years ago, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs asked high school seniors in that state some simple questions about government. Let me share a few of those questions and the percentages of students who answered them correctly:
What is the supreme law of the land? 28%
What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution? 26%
What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress? 27%
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? 14%
What are the two major political parties in the United States? 43%
We elect a U.S. senator for how many years? 11%
Who was the first President of the United States? 23%
In a recent national survey, only 26 percent of Americans could name the three branches of government. That is actually down from 2011, when a still-pathetic 36% could name them. More than a third (37 percent) couldn’t name a single one of the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment. Fewer than half of 12th graders can describe federalism. Only 35% can identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. Only five percent of high school seniors can identify or explain checks on presidential power. During the recent attempt by Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act, polls found that a third of Americans didn’t know that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act were the same thing.
Productive civic engagement is based on an accurate shared understanding of the “rules of the game,” especially but not exclusively the Constitution and Bill of Rights– the documents that frame our policy choices in the American system.
An acquaintance with the history and philosophy that shaped what I call “the American Idea” is critically important for understanding why we do things the way we do; when we understand the roots of our national approach to government, to civil liberties, and to civil and human rights, we are better able to decide what proposals and policies are consistent with that approach. We are also better able to hold elected officials accountable if we know what they are supposed to be accountable to.
The American Constitution was a product of the 18th Century cultural, intellectual and philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. Most of us know that the Enlightenment gave us science, empirical inquiry, and the “natural rights” and “social contract” theories of government, but what is less appreciated is that the Enlightenment also changed the way we understand and define human rights and individual liberty.
We are taught in school that the Puritans and Pilgrims who settled the New World came to America for religious liberty; what we aren’t generally taught is how they defined liberty. Puritans saw liberty as “freedom to do the right thing”—freedom to worship and obey the right God in the true church, and their right to use the power of government to ensure that their neighbors were worshipping and obeying the right God too. The Founders who crafted our constitution some 150 years later were products of an intervening paradigm change brought about by the Enlightenment and its dramatically different definition of liberty.
America’s constitutional system was based on an Enlightenment concept we call “negative liberty.” The Founders believed that fundamental rights are not given to us by government; instead, they believed that rights are “natural,” meaning that we are entitled to certain rights simply by virtue of being human (thus the term “human rights”) and that government has an obligation to respect and protect those inborn, inalienable rights.
Contrary to popular belief, the Bill of Rights does not grant us rights—it protects the rights to which we are entitled by virtue of being human against infringement by an overzealous government. The American Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things that government is forbidden to do. For example, the state cannot dictate our religious or political beliefs, search us without probable cause, or censor our expression—and government is forbidden from doing these things even when popular majorities favor such actions.
In our system, those constraints don’t apply to private, non-governmental actors. As I used to tell my kids, the government can’t control what you read, but your mother can. Public school officials can’t tell you to pray, but private or parochial school officials can. If government isn’t involved, neither is the Constitution. Private, non-governmental actors are subject to other laws, like civil rights laws, but since the Bill of Rights only restrains what government can do, only government can violate it. I’m constantly amazed by how many Americans don’t know that.
Unlike the liberties protected against government infringement by the Bill of Rights, civil rights laws represent our somewhat belated recognition that if we care about individual rights, just preventing government from discriminating isn’t enough. If private employers can refuse to hire African-Americans or women, if landlords can refuse to rent units in their buildings to LGBTQ folks, if restaurants can refuse to serve Jews or Muslims, then society is not respecting the natural rights of those citizens and we aren’t fulfilling the obligations of the social contract that was another major contribution of Enlightenment philosophy.
The Enlightenment concept of human rights and John Locke’s theory of a social contract between citizens and their government challenged longtime assumptions about government and the divine right of kings. Gradually, people came to be seen as citizens, rather than subjects. This new approach to individual rights and the nature of citizenship also helped to undermine the once-common practice of assigning social status on the basis of group identity.
The once-radical idea that each of us is born with the same claim to rights has other consequences. For one thing, it means that governments have to treat their citizens as individuals, not as members of this or that group. America was the first country to base its laws upon a person’s civic behavior, not gender, race, religion or other identity or affiliation. So long as we obey the laws, pay our taxes, and generally conduct ourselves in a way that doesn’t endanger or disadvantage others, we are all entitled to full civic equality, no matter what our race, religion, gender or other identity. When our country has lived up to that guarantee of equal civic rights, we have unleashed the productivity of previously marginalized groups and contributed significantly to American prosperity. And I think it is fair to say that—despite setbacks, and despite the stubborn persistence of racial resentments, religious intolerance and misogyny, until recently we had made substantial progress toward a culture that acknowledges the equal humanity of the people who make up our diverse nation.
In addition to civic equality, however, respect for individual rights also requires democratic equality—an equal right to participate in self-government. We now recognize—or at least give lip service to—the proposition that every citizen’s vote should count, but on this dimension, we not only aren’t making progress, we’re regressing, as anyone who follows the news can attest. And that brings me to the systemic issues we face, and the ways in which outdated elements of our election system—some of which are rooted in the Constitution—are driving undemocratic and even destructive behaviors.
One element of civic literacy that gets short shrift even among educators is the immense influence of systems in a society—an appreciation of the way in which institutions and norms and laws shape how we understand and interpret our environments, and how familiarity with the “way things are” can obscure our recognition of systemic problems. For quite a while now, familiarity with “the way we do things” has obscured the degree to which American democracy has become steadily less democratic—and the extent to which we are denying more and more of our citizens the right to participate meaningfully in self-government.
The current operation of the Electoral College gives disproportionate weight to the votes of rural voters and those from small states, and discounts the votes of urban Americans. It’s not simply the fact that in two of the last four elections, the candidate with fewer votes won the Presidency; the lopsided influence of rural America has also given us legislation and policies that are demonstrably at odds with the desires of most Americans and arguably at odds with important Constitutional principles.
Vote suppression has been on the rise, especially but not exclusively in Southern states that have not been required to get preclearance from the Justice Department since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Constitution allows each state to manage its own voter registration and election processes, and that facilitates a lot of mischief. Voter ID laws that target the virtually non-existing problem of in-person voter fraud intimidate and discourage poor and minority voters—and that is their real purpose.
Unequal resources have always been a problem, but ever since the Supreme Court decided Buckley v. Valeo, and equated money with speech, and especially since Citizens United, which essentially held that corporations are people, money spent by special interests has overwhelmed the votes, voices and opinions of average citizens.
The most pernicious erosion of “one person, one vote” however, has come as a consequence of gerrymandering, or partisan redistricting. There are no “good guys” in this story—gerrymandering is a crime of opportunity, and both parties are guilty.
You all know the drill; after each census, state governments redraw state and federal district lines to reflect population changes. The party in control of the state legislature at the time controls the redistricting process, and draws districts that maximize its own electoral prospects and minimize those of the opposing party. Partisan redistricting goes all the way back to Elbridge Gerry, who gave Gerrymandering its name—and he signed the Declaration of Independence—but with the advent of computers, the process became far more sophisticated and precise, leading to a situation which has been aptly described as legislators choosing their voters, rather than the other way around. Recently, the respected Cook Report looked at the nation’s political map, and concluded that only one out of twenty Americans lives in a competitive Congressional district.
Thomas Mann and Norman Orenstein are political scientists who have written extensively about redistricting. They have tied partisan redistricting to the advantages of incumbency, and they have also pointed out that the reliance by Congressional candidates upon maps drawn by state-level politicians reinforces what they call “partisan rigidity” — the increasing nationalization of the political parties.
Interestingly, one study they cited investigated whether representatives elected from districts drawn by independent commissions become less partisan. Contrary to their initial expectations, they found that politically independent redistricting did reduce partisanship, and in statistically significant ways, even though the same party usually retained control.
The most pernicious effect of gerrymandering is the proliferation of safe seats. Safe districts breed voter apathy and reduce political participation. After all, why should citizens get involved if the result is foreordained? Why donate to a sure loser? (For that matter, unless you are trying to buy political influence for some reason, why donate to a sure winner?) What is the incentive to volunteer or vote when it obviously won’t matter? It isn’t only voters who lack incentives for participation, either: it becomes increasingly difficult for the “sure loser” party to recruit credible candidates. As a result, in many of these races, voters are left with no genuine or meaningful choice—last year, out of 100 candidates for the Indiana House of Representatives, 32 ran unopposed. Ironically, the anemic voter turnout that gerrymandering produces leads to handwringing about citizen apathy, usually characterized as a civic or moral deficiency. But voter apathy may instead be a highly rational response to noncompetitive politics. People save their efforts for places where those efforts count, and thanks to the increasing lack of competitiveness in our electoral system, those places often do not include the voting booth.
If the ability to participate meaningfully in self-governance should be considered a civil right, partisan game-playing making elections meaningless should be seen as an assault on human rights. And increasingly, citizens see it that way. We can only hope that Gill v. Whitford, a Wisconsin gerrymandering case currently before the Supreme Court, will give us a tool we can use to put an end to partisan redistricting that disenfranchises so many voters.
It’s important to recognize that the safe districts created by gerrymandering do more than simply disenfranchise voters; they are the single greatest driver of government dysfunction. In safe districts, the only way to oppose an incumbent is in the primary–and that almost always means that the challenge will come from the “flank” or extreme. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, the battle takes place among the party faithful, who also tend to be the most ideological voters. So Republican incumbents will be challenged from the Right and Democratic incumbents will be attacked from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they create a powerful incentive for incumbents to “toe the line”— to placate the most rigid elements of their respective parties. Instead of the system working as intended, with both parties nominating candidates they think will be most likely to appeal to the broader constituency, the system produces nominees who represent the most extreme voters on each side of the philosophical divide.
One consequence of this ever-more-precise state-level and Congressional district gerrymandering has been a growing philosophical gap between the parties— especially but certainly not exclusively in the Republican party— and an empowered, rigidly ideological base intent on punishing any deviation from orthodoxy and/or any hint of compromise.
When you combine civic ignorance with extreme partisanship, constitutional compliance gets lost.
American citizens aren’t asking “Is this proposal or law constitutional? Is it consistent with America’s distinctive approach to the proper role of government and the rights of the individual?” Instead, too many of us approach our political affiliations in much the same way as we do our favorite sports teams. Rather than asking whether a proposal or law is consistent with America’s constitutional philosophy, or even whether it advances the common good, Americans ask “Is this good for my team?”
We have substituted tribal loyalty for constitutional fidelity.
For a number of years, social scientists have tracked declining trust in our social and political institutions—primarily, although certainly not exclusively, government. Restoring that trust is critically important—but in order to trust government, we have to understand what it is and isn’t supposed to do—we have to understand how the people we elect are supposed to behave. We need a common, basic understanding of what our particular Constitutional system requires.
Now, let me be clear: there are plenty of gray areas in constitutional law—plenty of situations where informed people of good will can come to different conclusions about what the Constitution requires. But by and large, those aren’t the things Americans are arguing about. We aren’t having disagreements at the margins between well-informed people who agree on basic facts. We are having tantrums, thrown by people who surf the internet for confirmation of their preferred realities.
Think about it: if I say this podium is a table, and you say no, it’s a chair, we aren’t going to have a very productive discussion about its use—for that matter, we’re each likely to think the other person is nuts. We’re certainly not going to trust his or her other observations.
Constitutions are expressions of political theory, efforts to address the most basic question of any society—how should people live together? What should the rules cover, how should they be made, who should get to make them and how should they be enforced? Those who crafted our Constitution came up with certain answers to those questions, and if we are to communicate with each other, we need to know what those answers were.
The Constitution our founders created reflected their assumptions about human nature and accordingly, privileged certain values—values that need to be explicitly recognized, discussed and understood, because they provide the common ground for our citizenship and they define our understanding of public morality.
Governments are human enterprises, and like all human enterprises, they will have their ups and downs. In the United States, however, the consequences of the “down” periods like the one we are experiencing now are potentially more serious than in more homogeneous nations, precisely because this is a country based upon covenant, upon an idea. Americans do not share a single ethnicity, religion or race. Culture warriors to the contrary, we never have. We don’t share a comprehensive worldview. What we do share is a set of values, a set of democratic institutions and cultural norms, and a legal system that emphasizes the importance of fair processes–and when our elected officials aren’t obeying those norms, when they are distorting and undermining the underlying mechanics of democratic decision-making, our government can’t function properly.
In a country that celebrates individual rights and respects individual liberty, there will always be dissent, differences of opinion, and struggles for power. But there are different kinds of discord, and different kinds of power struggles, and they aren’t all equal. When we argue from within a common understanding of what I call the constitutional culture—when we argue about the proper application of the American Idea to new situations or to previously marginalized populations—we strengthen our bonds as Americans, and learn how to bridge our differences. When we allow powerful partisans to rewrite our history, reinterpret our Constitution, pervert our basic institutions, and distort the rule of law, we undermine the American Idea and erode the trust required to make our democratic institutions work.
When it comes to accountability and trust, civic ignorance matters. When we don’t understand how our systems are supposed to work, we don’t recognize when they have become corrupted, and we can’t fix our problems. Without shared ground—without trust in a common understanding of our nation’s foundations and commitments– we cannot have civil dialogue, let alone political agreement. Without it, we can’t repair our broken government.
If we are to rescue our electoral systems, restore our democratic norms, and come together as an American community rather than a collection of warring tribes, we have to start where this nation started—with the Constitution. We need to inform ourselves—accurately–and we need to insist that those political figures who love to whip a small copy of the Constitution out of the pockets of jackets with flag pins on the lapels actually understand what that document means, and where it came from—and that they behave in accordance with its values and principles.
It may be that this very difficult time we are going through is a test. If so, we’re in danger of failing. We Americans need to get our act together before the bell rings. The way to make America great is to make America live up to its Constitutional commitments and principles.
A few days back, I posted a blog praising George W. Bush’s recent speech decrying Trump’s bigotry. The responses were varied–some agreed that such a message coming from a former Republican President whose own tenure was unsuccessful (to put it mildly) was welcome. Others recited the multiple misdeeds of his administration as proof that nothing he could ever do should be considered praiseworthy.
There is a degree of partisanship that makes its adherents loathe to agree with any sentiment, no matter how anodyne, coming from the other “team”–a dogmatism that makes them unwilling to believe that agreement by one of “them” with a position of “ours” could possibly be authentic, let alone grounds for amicable discussion.
That’s too bad, because those partisans will miss an essay in the National Review that is well worth reading. I would be surprised if thoughtful political liberals wouldn’t approve of most of the points made.
A couple of examples:
Conservatives have a weakness for that “acting white” business because we are intellectually invested in emphasizing the self-inflicted problems of black America, for rhetorical and political reasons that are too obvious to require much elaboration…
Republicans, once the party of the upwardly mobile with a remarkable reflex for comforting the comfortable, have written off entire sections of the country — including the bits where most of the people live — as “un-American.” Silicon Valley and California at large, New York City and the hated Acela corridor, and, to some extent, large American cities categorically are sneered at and detested. There is some ordinary partisanship in that, inasmuch as the Democrats tend to dominate the big cities and the coastal metropolitan aggregations, but it isn’t just that. Conservatives are cheering for the failure of California and slightly nonplussed that New York City still refuses to regress into being an unlivable hellhole in spite of the best efforts of its batty Sandinista mayor. Not long ago, to be a conservative on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the most ordinary thing in the world. Now that address would be a source of suspicion. God help you if you should ever attend a cocktail party in Georgetown, the favorite dumb trope of conservative talk-radio hosts.
We’ve gone from William F. Buckley Jr. to the gentlemen from Duck Dynasty. Why?
American authenticity, from the acting-even-whiter point of view, is not to be found in any of the great contemporary American business success stories, or in intellectual life, or in the great cultural institutions, but in the suburban-to-rural environs in which the white underclass largely makes its home — the world John Mellencamp sang about but understandably declined to live in.
Shake your head at rap music all you like: When’s the last time you heard a popular country song about finishing up your master’s in engineering at MIT?
There is much, much more, and I strongly encourage readers to click through and read the entire essay–not just because so many of the writer’s observations are dead-on, but because those on the political Left who identify strongly with other progressives and with the resistance to Trump and Trumpism need to remember that genuine conservatives also disdain the know-nothings and bigots who have appropriated the conservative label.
Before the GOP was taken over by conspiracy theorists, racists, religious fundamentalists and Big Money, principled Democratic and Republican political figures used to engage in civil conversation and even productive policymaking.
We will never recover the art of civil conversation, let alone policymaking intended to serve the public good, if we refuse to see any merit in anyone who doesn’t agree with us 100%. That sort of political intransigence–prominent among the GOP base and so-called “Freedom Caucus”–is what has destroyed the Republican party. Democrats shouldn’t emulate it.
