Distortions Through Rose-Colored Glasses

Stephen Prothero had a recent column in the Washington Post, discussing his latest book, “Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars, Even When They Lose Elections.” Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University whose previous books—especially “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn’t”—were New York Times bestsellers.

I found these passages particularly illuminating:

In almost every case, these culture wars have been conservative projects, instigated and waged by people anxious about the loss of old orders and the emergence of new ones. Their anxiety finds expression first as a complaint about a particular policy, and second as a broader lament about how far the nation has fallen from its founding glory and how desperately we need to restore whatever is passing away. Or, to put it in Trumpian terms: The nation has been schlonged, but it will be great again.

Anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism were right-wing reactions to 19th-century Catholic immigration and Mormon migration, and to the moral, theological, social and economic threats those communities posed to Protestant power. Similarly, the culture wars of the 1920s and 1930s were conservative responses to the rise of the saloon and the speakeasy — and to the cultural pluralism brought on by rapid urbanization and immigration waves. In the contemporary culture wars, conservatives give voice to their anxieties about the loss of the traditional family and a homogeneous society. Cultural politics are always a politics of nostalgia, driven by those who are determined to return to what they remember (rightly or wrongly) as a better way of life.

Father knows best, anyone?

It always amuses me to hear people talk about the 1950s as if the fifties were an idyllic time. I suppose they were— if you were a white, Protestant member of the middle or upper class.

Otherwise, not so much.

I went to college in the South for one year, in 1959; there were separate black and white drinking fountains and restrooms everywhere, and new subdivisions sported billboards informing passers-by that home sites were “restricted” (no Jews or Blacks). In the “idyllic” fifties, women couldn’t generate credit histories separate from their fathers or husbands, and help-wanted ads explicitly excluded women and minorities from the better-paying jobs. That was everywhere, not just in the South. McCarthy and HUAC flourished; dissenters cowered. The list goes on.

As Stephanie Coontz felicitously put it, Americans are notoriously nostalgic for “the way we never were.”

Rose-colored glasses sure can obscure your vision.

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Primary Racism?

With political attention focused on the Nevada caucuses and the South Carolina primaries, Iowa and New Hampshire are rapidly disappearing in the media’s rear-view mirror. But before we bury ourselves in more current analyses and prognostications, it might be well to consider the peculiar order of America’s primary lineup.

I thought about this because I recently came across a post raising an issue I had not previously considered; that the choice of Iowa and New Hampshire as the sites of our earliest political primaries operates to support racism—or at least white privilege—in American life.

This is my epiphany of 2016. Our primary system – like the rest of our political system – is one more example of the racism we so deeply entrench and protect. I don’t pretend that moving the first primaries to more representative states would end racism, but, like pulling down Confederate flags, it couldn’t hurt.

In defense of this conclusion, he points to media coverage of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries—coverage strongly suggesting that the results from these two states tells us something important about the desires of the “American people”— and he places the outsized importance attributed to those contests alongside voting requirements, slating, and gerrymandering, as examples of structures “designed to exclude minorities and protect white privilege.”

Frankly, it would difficult to find two states less representative of America than Iowa and New Hampshire. Only 3% of Iowans and 1% of New Hampshire residents are black in contrast to 13% of the nation. Only 5% of Iowans and 3% of New Hampshire residents are Latino in contrast to 17% of the rest of America. Indeed, having our first primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire is a little like reserving the front of the political bus for “whites only.” When the political parties suggest America has spoken in Iowa and New Hampshire, they imply that white America- the America that really matters to them – has spoken.

Indeed, Iowa and New Hampshire represent an America that hasn’t existed for two hundred years. Thirty-six percent of Iowans and forty percent of New Hampshire residents live in rural communities while only 19% of Americans are rural dwellers. Claiming white farmers and woodsmen are the most politically important people in our nation may have made some demographic sense in the 1800s, but it is patently ridiculous and racist in 2016. Allowing the opinions of whites in Iowa and New Hampshire to have such an inordinate influence on our national election is wrong.

I am less inclined to attribute the structures the author identifies to conscious racism; they are equally likely to be a result of partisanship and happenstance. That said, his larger point is worth considering: although this country has eliminated most of the legal disadvantages and inequities that operated to tilt the playing field in favor of white Americans, even people of good will have yet to recognize–let alone disassemble–the myriad social structures that facilitate racist practices and foster racist assumptions and stereotypes.

There are actually all sorts of good reasons to revisit the importance of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries—reasons having little or nothing to do with race. Even if one finds the post unpersuasive, even if moving the primaries to more representative states wouldn’t really represent a blow against racism, the author is clearly right about one thing: it sure couldn’t hurt.

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Stop the World–Mike Pence Wants Off

Religion News Service reports on an interesting recent survey in which people were asked about the purported conflict between religious liberty and civil rights for LGBT Americans.

The short version? Most Americans oppose religious exemptions to LGBT non-discrimination laws.

The details?

  • 71 percent– including majorities in all 50 states and 30 major metropolitan areas — support laws that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public accommodations.
  • 59 percent oppose allowing small-business owners in their state to refuse service to gay and lesbian people, if doing so conflicts with their religious beliefs.
  • 53 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, compared with 37 percent (including most evangelical Protestants and Mormons) who oppose it.

Even among groups opposed to same-sex marriage, support for protection from discrimination crosses all “partisan, religious, geographic, and demographic lines,” according to Public Religion Research Institute CEO Robert P. Jones.

The survey results demonstrate something that many of us have suspected: opposition to civic equality for LGBT folks is not coming primarily from religious denominations or organizations. (Click through to see the breakdown.) Anti-gay bias is primarily a political position, not a religious one, and the difference between the political parties is stark: the survey found that 74 percent of Democrats but only 40 percent of Republicans support civil rights protections for LGBT citizens.

Of course, that’s little comfort for those of us who live in blue cities located in bright red states like Indiana.

In our gerrymandered state, it would take a lot of organization, a lot of energy, and a truly superior “get out the vote” effort even to reduce the legislative super-majority enjoyed by the GOP. But those of us who disapprove of the legislature’s failure to add four words and a comma to the state’s civil rights law—and those of us embarrassed by our Governor’s homophobic and theocratic impulses—do have the opportunity to send a very clear message to the political establishment by decisively defeating Governor Pence this November.

Unlike the majority of religious folks, Mike Pence hasn’t come to terms with social progress. It isn’t just LGBT Hoosiers; his views on education, the environment and women are wildly at odds with the views of most of our citizens. His disinterest in the nitty-gritty of governing, and the damage he’s done to the state’s business climate, make him eminently beatable.

Maybe we can’t stop the world to let him off—but we can retire him and get on with the business of making Indiana a state that welcomes everyone.

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What’s the Weather Like on Your World?

I don’t know whether anyone reading this remembers it, but there used to be a popular song titled “Two Different Worlds.” Clearly, Americans are now living in different worlds—albeit not the benign ones referred to in the song. Indeed, we seem to occupy different universes.

Consider:

Franklin (son of Billy) Graham says that there is only one election left to “save America” from godless secularism.

The secularists, he claimed, want to prevent people from praying anywhere other than inside a church, so that “having a service like this in a few years could be illegal.”

A pastor named Bickle has endorsed Ted Cruz, because he is confident that Cruz will “hunt down” Jews who refuse to accept the “grace” of Christ.

Recently, Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign proudly announced the endorsement of Mike Bickle, the head of the controversial International House of Prayer and an extremist pastor who believes, among other things, that Oprah Winfrey is a forerunner to the Antichrist. Among Bickle’s more radical views is his prophecy that as the End Times approach, all Jews will be given a chance to accept Jesus, warning that if they do not accept “the grace” of Christ, God will then “raise up a hunter” who will kill two-thirds of them “and the most famous hunter in recent history is a man named Adolf Hitler.”

A certain Rick Wiles, identified as an “End Times Radio Host,” says Obama had Scalia killed.

Wiles said that the assassins who killed the conservative justice “deliberately left the pillow on his face as a message to everybody else: ‘Don’t mess with us, we can murder a justice and get away with it.’ And I assure you, there’s a lot of frightened officials in Washington today, deep down they know, the regime murdered a justice…. This is the way a dictatorial, fascist, police state regime takes control of a nation.”
It’s reasonable to assume that few people are as disconnected from reality as these and similarly-disturbed folks. I take comfort in the belief that there have always been unstable, frightened and angry people blaming all the world’s ills on some group or other— that we just didn’t hear about them as often before the Internet.
But how rooted in reality are the rest of us?
A recent article from the Washington Post suggests that the Right and Left see each other as very different countries—and that what both see is wildly inaccurate. Republicans think that 46% of the Democratic party is African-American; double the actual percentage of 24. They estimated the percentage of Democratic atheists at 36%–the actual percentage is 9. And they were equally off-base estimating the percentages of union members (44%) and LGBT voters (38%); those actual percentages are 11 and 6, respectively.
For their part, Democrats think that 44% of Republicans earn over 250,000/year, although the actual number is 2%.  They estimate the percentage of Republicans over the age of 65 at 44%; the actual number is 21%. They came closer with their estimates of the percentages of Southerners (44%, actually 36%) and Evangelicals (estimated 44%, actual 43%).
The remainder of the article describes the very different worldviews and reactions of voters listening to President Obama’s State of the Union Speech. It was hard to believe they were listening to the same words.
All of this leads to some pretty sobering questions.
What produces such gaps in the polity’s understanding of the world we inhabit? And more importantly, how do people who occupy such dramatically different worlds live together?
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Advice and Consent and Gerrymandering

Sometimes, it’s illuminating to connect the dots.

Senate Republicans are refusing to hold hearings to consider a nominee to replace Antonin Scalia, and I have been critical of that refusal (by “strict constructionists,” no less) to discharge their constitutional duty. A reader emailed to say the Democrats would probably do the same if the political roles were reversed; I replied that I hoped they would at least be more subtle about it—go ahead and have hearings, and then reject the nominee.

His essential point, of course, was that both parties’ excessive partisanship and the polarization that characterizes today’s politics threatens our ability to govern ourselves, and he’s right.

One of the reasons for that excessive partisanship is gerrymandering. (And yes, I know that Senate seats cannot be gerrymandered. Bear with me here.)

I have posted for years about the anti-democratic effects of gerrymandering. As I have repeatedly noted, gerrymandering contributes to political polarization and gridlock; 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 by the Right and Democratic incumbents will be attacked from the Left.

Even where those challenges fail, they leave a powerful incentive for the incumbent to “toe the line”— to placate the most rigid elements of each party. Instead of the system working as intended, with both parties nominating folks they think will be most likely to appeal to the broader constituency, we get nominees who represent the most extreme voters on each side of the philosophical divide.

The consequence of ever-more-precise state-level and Congressional gerrymandering has been a growing philosophical gap between the parties and— especially but not exclusively on the Republican side— an empowered, rigidly ideological base intent on punishing any deviation from orthodoxy and/or any hint of compromise.

In a post to SCOTUSblog considering the current standoff and potential nominees, Tom Goldstein makes two points in passing that illuminate this toxic situation. Noting that the political parties are in “a deadly embrace from which neither will easily budge,” he says

The administration feels a constitutional responsibility to press for the confirmation of a nominee and every political advantage in doing so. Republicans cannot accede to that effort because their base will not permit it.

After suggesting that the GOP will eventually choose to pursue the “slow walk and reject” option, he predicts that Senate Republicans will vote to reject “essentially as a block. Any other course than a decisive vote against the nominee invites a certain primary challenge from conservatives in the next election.” (emphasis mine)

What gerrymandering has done is radicalize the political bases. It is naive to assume that the consequences of that radicalization are confined to carefully-drawn, noncompetitive state legislative districts and House Districts.

Making matters worse, many of the most impassioned members of those radicalized bases—in both parties—have very tenuous understandings of  how American government actually works, let alone the country’s history or constitutional principles. They are ripe for demagoguery and bumper-sticker slogans.

They are the electorate that gerrymandering has helped to create, and they are the electorate to which Senate Republicans are pandering.

Connect the dots.

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