The State of Our State

Welcome to a new year, fellow Hoosiers.

Given that 2016 will be an election year, Hoosiers will hear lots of rhetoric about Indiana’s economic performance, both from the incumbent administration and those seeking to replace it; a credible analysis of that performance is thus essential if we are to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Morton Marcus is an economist who spent nearly 40 years at IU’s Kelley School of Business,  where he presided over a center that generated data about Indiana’s business climate. He is now retired (but by no means retiring), and he still writes a column carried by a number of newspapers around the state.

A recent Marcus column measured Indiana’s economic performance.

Let’s start with Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which Marcus defines as  “the value (adjusted for inflation) of all the goods and services produced in a nation or a state, over the course of a year or a quarter of the year.”  “

And how has the Hoosier state done by this measure?

The United States’ Real GDP has grown by about 13 percent in the last decade, while Indiana has added only 7 percent….If you look at the nation’s Real GDP each spring (the second quarter of the year), the progress made by Indiana every year since 2012 lags the growth of the nation. Indiana ranked 32nd with 2.8 percent compared with 5.8 percent for the U.S.

Then there is the question of jobs and wages.

The total of wages and salaries takes into account both how many people are working and what they make for their labors. Nationally, from the third quarter of 2005 to 2015 and after adjusting for price changes, wages and salaries grew by 13.2 percent. Here, in the Hoosier Holyland, the growth was 5.5 percent.

The news isn’t unremittingly negative: as Marcus tells us, “Non-durable goods were a winner; Indiana up one percent while nationally that sector was off by seven percent.”

But in durable goods, like autos, RVs and steel, the news was less cheery: “Indiana was down eight percent at the same time the country slipped six percent.”

All in all,

Over the past decade, the nation’s output and wages both grew by about 13 percent. In Indiana, however, they both trailed the U.S.; Hoosier output (Real GDP) grew by only 7.1 percent and wages by a mere 5.5 percent. Why aren’t Hoosier businesses and workers keeping pace?

As we head into 2016 and the inevitable political spin, it may be worth revisiting this analysis of actual economic performance—and considering whether we’d be better served by replacing our current Governor with someone less fixated on protecting retailers who want to refuse service to same-sex couples, and more committed to conventional economic development.

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The Year of Lost Trust

Tomorrow, we will welcome a new year. It will come with significant challenges, among them, pervasive suspicion of our social and governing institutions.

Ask the person on the street, who do you trust? and increasingly, at least in America, the answer is “no one” or “very few.”

We can debate the reasons for our sour national mood and pervasive distrust of our institutions and fellow-citizens, but the cynicism and skepticism are not debatable.

One reason: the Internet has exponentially expanded our ability to live in a “filter bubble”—a reality of our own creation, where (in defiance of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous dictum) we can indeed choose our own “facts.”

Convinced that Obama is the anti-Christ? Watch Fox News, visit right-wing websites and listen to talk radio for confirmation. Positive that bankers and evil corporations are intentionally crushing the “little guy”? Subscribe to lefty blogs, read conspiracy websites and respond to hysterical emails.

Political psychologists call this behavior “confirmation bias.” We used to call it “cherry picking”—the intellectually dishonest process of picking through information sources from the bible to the U.S. budget looking for evidence that confirms our pre-existing beliefs.

When the realities we have constructed encounter an inconsistent “real world,” the resulting cognitive dissonance makes us uncomfortable, angry and wary.

And thanks to a media environment that no longer includes news sources with widespread credibility, non-ideological Americans who just want to know what is happening in their cities and country no longer know what or whom to believe.

As we are seeing, one of the most dangerous consequences of this widespread distrust is a growing acceptance of demagoguery.

When citizens no longer share a reality, they are susceptible to messages confirming their worst fears and most pernicious biases—and human nature being what it is, there is no scarcity of opportunists, megalomaniacs and unhinged bigots prepared to sell us their particular snake-oil.

(The willingness of high-profile political figures to make untrue, outrageous and frequently ridiculous allegations is undoubtedly one reason so many people think satirical articles posted to social media are real. Gee—it sounded like something Sarah Palin would have said…)

This retreat into an “us versus them” worldview isn’t confined to traditional bigotries based upon race, religion and sexual orientation. It is glaringly evident in our political life. In our increasingly dysfunctional Congress the villain is partisan distrust; these days, ideas are rarely considered based upon their merits, but accepted or rejected based upon who proposed them, and both parties are guilty.

A few years ago, I wrote a book titled “Distrust, American Style” in which I explored the importance of social trust to democratic self-government. One conclusion: We live in a world where globalization and technology have combined to create a complex environment in which no one person has the knowledge needed to independently evaluate foreign, regulatory or environmental policies. We have no choice but to rely on experts—and that means figuring out which experts–and which information and media outlets– we can trust.

There are many reasons for our current “trust deficit,” but as the saying goes, fish rot from the head.

When citizens don’t trust their social institutions, they become suspicious of each other. When government, especially, no longer works—when authority figures from Congress-people to Governors to Mayors to police officers are seen abusing their powers and ignoring the common good—the resulting distrust infects every aspect of our communal lives.

Add in economic inequality and rapid social change, and you have a dangerously destabilized polity—a recipe for extremism, division and constant discord—and a nearly irresistible invitation to blame it all on “those people.”

Let’s hope that 2016 is the year we begin to inch back from the precipice.

Happy New Year…..

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In Memoriam

The end of a year is a time for contemplation–for considering how the world has, or has not changed, and evaluating the apparent trajectory of our social institutions…for considering who and what has been lost….

In that vein, I share this quotation from Theodore White’s Making of the President: 1960. I came across it again recently, and was struck by its current relevance.

Read it and weep….

The Republican Party, to be exact, is twins and has been twins from the moment of its birth—but the twins who inhabit its name and shelter are Jacob and Esau: fratricidal, not fraternal, twins. Within the Republican Party are combined a stream of the loftiest American idealism and a stream of the coarsest American greed….

[I]t is forgotten how much of the architecture of America’s liberal society was drafted by the Republicans. Today they are regarded as the party of the right. Yet this is the party that abolished slavery, wrote the first laws of civil service, passed the first antitrust, railway control, consumer-protective and conservation legislation, and then led America, with enormous diplomatic skill, out into that posture of global leadership and responsibility we now so desperately try to maintain.

The fact that all this has been almost forgotten by the current stylists of our culture is in itself significant. For until this century and down through its first decade the natural home party of the American intellectual, writer, savant and artist was the Republican Party. Its men of state and diplomacy were, as often as not, thinkers and scholars; and it is doubtful whether any President, even Wilson or the second Roosevelt, made the White House so familiar a mansion to writers and artists as did Theodore Roosevelt (who, indeed, was also one of the founders of the Authors’ League of America).

The alienation of the Republican Party of today from the intellectual mainstream of the nation stems, actually, from the days of Theodore Roosevelt. For when in 1912 the twins of the Republican Party broke wide apart in the Roosevelt-Taft civil war, the “regulars” of the Taft wing remained in control of the party machinery, and the citizen wing of progressive and intellectual Republicans was driven into homeless exile.

An exile within which we remain, nearly 60 years after this was written.

Despite the fact that I consider myself an optimist, I doubt very much that 2016 will see a return to reason and moderation.

The United States desperately needs two sane, adult political parties. We don’t have them now, and the prospects for the near term are not promising.

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Horse and Rider

Who’s the horse and who’s the rider?

As the spectacle of Donald Trump continues, as we come to grips with the hitherto unthinkable possibility that he might actually ride a simmering stew of fear, rage and hate to the nomination, political observers are speculating about possible reactions and consequences.

At Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton looks back at other candidates who have caused heartburn—from Barry Goldwater to David Duke—and quotes Jeff Greenfield for a surprising prediction:

With Trump as its standard-bearer, the GOP would suddenly be asked to rally around a candidate who has been called by his once and former primary foes “a cancer on conservatism,” “unhinged,” “a drunk driver … helping the enemy.” A prominent conservative national security expert, Max Boot, has flatly labeled him “a fascist.” And the rhetoric is even stronger in private conversations I’ve had recently with Republicans of moderate and conservative stripes.

This is not the usual rhetoric of intraparty battles, the kind of thing that gets resolved in handshakes under the convention banners. These are stake-in-the-ground positions, strongly suggesting that a Trump nomination would create a fissure within the party as deep and indivisible as any in American political history, driven both by ideology and by questions of personal character.

Indeed, it would be a fissure so deep that, if the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run—from the Republicans themselves.

Greenfield’s entire column, linked by Brayton, is worth reading and pondering. But even more thought-provoking is Brayton’s “take” on Greenfield’s analysis and the current deep divisions within the GOP:

As much as some on the left like to think of the enemy as a single monolith, there are very deep divisions within the GOP. If you don’t believe that, ask John Boehner. I’ve been writing about this since 2010, when the Republican party made the fateful decision to try to ride the Tea Party horse into power. It worked then, allowing them to take over the House and most state legislatures and governerships.

But as I said at the time, this was not a horse that they could break and they quickly realized that when they lost control of their own caucus in the House to extremists who view any compromise as a literal betrayal. This is what spawned the likes of Ted Cruz, and it’s the kind of temperament that Trump is giving voice to. There is a war within the GOP that at some point has to open up into open warfare, as it has for both parties at various times in the past. And Trump could either declare the war himself or have it declared upon him.

This is the sort of scenario that gives new meaning to the old admonition: be careful what you wish for.

And before you saddle up that horse, be sure you can ride it….

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You Do Know Those Things Never Happened, Right?

It’s the time of year for “summing up,” so in that spirit, I thought I’d share an amusing (albeit also depressing) roundup  from Right Wing Watch, listing some of the crazy predictions from various rightwing cranks that—surprise!—failed to materialize during 2015.

You’d think the fact that none of these things happened would cause at least a few of these characters to reign in the crazy, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. They are too far gone.

Some of the predictions were doozies.

Several Religious Right pundits jumped on a nonsensical and convoluted tale about how blood moons and the Shemitah, a biblical day of debt relief, would lead to some sort of disaster in America on September 13.

Apparently, prophecies about ancient Israel are also applicable to the U.S. because–wait for it—the Founders made a covenant with God. (An assertion that would undoubtedly have surprised the Deists among them.) The catastrophe most frequently predicted was a 30% or greater decline in the Dow Jones.  Unaccountably, the stock market actually gained around that time.

There was a rash of dark warnings about God’s vengeance in the wake of the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage (and adding insult to injury, the White House’s LGBT Pride Month celebration with rainbow lights). Prominent among them was the prediction that Hurricane Joaquin would strike Washington, D.C. and New York. (It didn’t hit either city). Other “prophets” predicted violence in the streets. (Well, there was, but it was totally unconnected to same-sex marriage.) The WorldNutDaily predicted that “millions” of Americans would emigrate.

Pat Robertson warned of financial calamities as a sign of God’s judgment for the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling and Massachusetts-based pastor Scott Lively said the Antichrist could emerge around September 23.

(Gee–I thought Obama was supposed to be the anti-Christ…but he “emerged” way before then….)

My personal favorite was the Jade Helm conspiracy. Jade Helm was the name given to a routine military exercise scheduled to take place in Texas; Texas being the epicenter of insanity these days, Republican politicians fed fears of a “federal invasion” of Texas. One poll found that one in three Republicans, including half of Tea Party supporters, agreed that “the government is trying to take over Texas.”

Not to burst your bubble, fellas, but the federal government already HAS Texas. (Although I personally would favor giving the Lone Star State back to Mexico, if Mexico would take it….)

Ever since President Obama won the 2008 election, right-wing activists have claimed that he is on the verge of creating a private army akin to Hitler’s Brownshirts.

With 2015 coming to a close, it looks like Obama has just one year left to create such a force, but conservative talk show host Michael Savage has a pretty good idea of what Obama has in mind. Savage, who believes that Obama is bent on committing anti-white genocide and rounding up conservatives, has alleged that the president intends to create a personal force composing of Syrian refugees, Black Lives Matter demonstrators and members of the Crips and the Bloods, whom he thinks will be armed and deputized by Obama.

There’s a lot more.

We can probably explain all the unhinged hysteria by recognizing that there are people in our country who reject modernity, who are threatened by the very existence of gay people and many other “others”, and who really, really, really resent having a black President.

They’re also obviously bat-shit crazy, and I’d feel sorry for them if most of them weren’t armed.

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