The Need for Certainty–Content Optional

A couple of years ago, I ran into a casual friend I hadn’t seen in many years–since college days, in fact.  Back then, in the early 1960s, he’d been a black sheep in his decidedly apolitical family, joining a young socialist group and participating in various protests. I was taken aback to discover that he has remained equally ideological, but is now somewhere to the Right of the Tea Party. Or Genghis Khan.

This sort of switch from far left to far right and/or vice-versa is actually not all that rare.

Libertarians often point out that the political spectrum should not be conceived as linear, going from left to right, but as a circle: at the top, where the left and right meet, are the authoritarians. (They may have different agendas that they want government to impose on the rest of us, but they’re both in favor of having government make the rest of us behave as they think we should…)

There are, of course, people who are authoritarian because they are passionate about a consistent political agenda, and absolutely convinced that it should be imposed because it represents Truth, Justice and the American Way. But there also are people like this old college friend who rather clearly have a need for bright lines and easy certainties–people who find the ambiguities of modern reality intolerable. Much like religious fundamentalists who switch from the literalism of religion A to that of religion B, they are people for whom having a dogma is ultimately more important than the content of that dogma.

The rest of us are left to muddle through contending prescriptions for what ails our body politic, uncomfortably aware that recognizing “it depends,” “I’m not sure” and “it’s more complicated than it seems” lack the appeal of rousing calls to arms.

As another friend of mine says, True Believers are often warriors, but you will search in vain for the armies of the Marching Moderates.

Actually, that may explain Congress….

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When We Feed the Wolf….

In the aftermath of (yet another) movie theater shooting, my friend Chris Douglas posted a thoughtful warning–one we should take seriously but won’t, if history is any guide.

“Accounts from acquaintances, law enforcement officials and court records portrayed Mr. Houser, 59, of Phenix City, Ala., who also took his own life, as a man with a diffuse collection of troubles and grievances — personal, political and social — who had a particular anger for women, liberals, the government and a changing world.”

By the way, our political currents have a lot of people like this swimming in them…Angry and just shy of mentally unstable, if not already there, their emotions and incomplete thoughts are easily whipped up by calculating politicians. It’s what McCain was referring to when he said Trump was whipping up the crazies. It isn’t a minor phenomenon; it’s a major one. It destroyed Germany and produced war in Europe, and genocides all over.

The fellow could be dismissed as an isolated nut job… or viewed as a glimpse of what lies beneath the surface… ISIS is an eruption of such people, given free reign to do their worst when all else has failed in the Middle East… when societies fail to deliver the goods, other forces are there to take over. Let’s not fool ourselves that we are different from the rest of humanity.

One of the “goods” that governments are supposed to deliver is a fair economic system that provides citizens with a genuine chance to improve their conditions– a truly level playing field.

As Chris points out, one of the dangers of extreme inequality is social unrest. Most people can live with an economy that rewards some jobs and some workers more than others, but when the prevailing order is seen as rigged and grossly unfair, when the magnitude of reward is clearly disproportionate to the value of the social contribution, tolerance for disparities disappears. Grievances grow. People already on the edge go over it.

There’s a parable I’ve always loved, attributed to various Native American tribes:

One evening, an elderly Cherokee brave told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said “my son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is evil. The other is good.

When the grandson then asked his grandfather:”which wolf wins?..,” the grandfather replied, “the one that you feed.”

We need to think long and hard about what our policies are feeding.

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Indiana’s Children

Sunday sermon.

According to the Indianapolis Star, the improving state economy touted by Gov. Mike Pence at campaign stops “has yet to trickle down to the 345,000 Hoosier children, or more than 1 in 5, living in poverty.”

In a recent editorial, the Anderson Herald Bulletin urged lawmakers to deal with the reality of Indiana’s working poor.

The Herald Bulletin has reported extensively this year on a group labeled Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE) in a study released in 2014 by the Indiana Association of United Ways.

About 23 percent of Indiana’s population and about 28 percent of people living in Madison County belong to the ALICE group. While they earn too much income to qualify for most forms of welfare, they earn too little to afford necessities, pay monthly bills and save enough money to handle unexpected expenses such as illnesses and car repairs. Hoosiers who belong to this group find themselves in a spiral of debt toward poverty.

Many belonging to the ALICE group have children and find that paying for child care while they work is often a money-losing proposition. In Indiana, the Child Care Development Fund provides subsidies to help financially insecure families pay for child care.

It’s a great program, but it has a major flaw. A slight rise in income level can cause a family to lose eligibility, providing a disincentive to work hard and earn a raise. If CCDF subsidies were set up on a sliding scale, hard work would be rewarded.

Tweaking the CCDF program with a sliding scale is something we should do. And we should provide adequate resources for the Department of Children’s Services. But important as individual programs may be,  the inconvenient truth is that the welfare of Hoosier children is inextricably connected to the welfare of the families that are raising them.

When wage levels are too low to allow those families to provide decent housing, adequate nutrition and reliable child-care, children suffer. Recent research also suggests that the higher stress levels common to low-wage households take a particular toll on the children in those families, who arrive at school unready to learn,  and who have poorer health prospects and lower life expectancies.

A policy agenda focused upon keeping Indiana a low-wage state not only fails to create the promised jobs–it hurts children.

Politicians uniformly insist that they care about children, but aside from efforts to ensure that every conception ends in the birth of a child, I haven’t seen much evidence for that concern.

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Rules for Thee but Not for Me….

The two-year-olds who currently dominate America’s political landscape may be riding different hobby-horses, but the common thread that runs through their various tantrums is an assault on the rule of law.

The essential difference between regimes based upon raw power and those based on the rule of law is that in the latter, the same rules apply to everyone. No one, we like to say, is “above the law.” In democratic rule-of-law regimes, partisans may contend bitterly over the wisdom or efficacy of any particular rule, but once it is enacted, like it or not, they abide by the law unless and until it is repealed or overruled.

Adherence to the rule of law is an essential condition of government legitimacy–a point that is seemingly lost on the various county clerks refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, or police officers who believe their commands are the law, to use just a couple of contemporary examples.

Closer to home,  Indiana Gov. Mike Pence says he will refuse to implement the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan. In a letter to President Obama, he wrote that he would not abide by the plan “if the final rule has not demonstrably and significantly improved.”

“Improved” evidently meaning “acceptable to Mike Pence.”

If Pence and others who object to the EPA’s rule truly believe it represents a wrongful exercise of the agency’s authority, they can litigate that issue. If they win, good for them. If they lose, they have to abide by the law.

In a country with the rule of law, none of us gets to decide for ourselves which laws we will obey.

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Pence Postures

Watching Indiana Governor Pence frantically trying to save his political skin may be the best show in town.

We’ve had the announcements spinning Indiana’s lackluster economic performance. We’ve had the new state slogan, proclaiming that Indiana is “a state that works.” (A former student asked the pertinent question: who, exactly, does it work for? Certainly not for ALICE, or for Hoosier working families.)

However, these fairly typical campaign efforts are unlikely to overcome the “Pence Must Go” sentiment that has continued to grow in the wake of the RFRA controversy.

So over the last few days, we’ve also seen determined efforts to pander to his (declining) base.

Pence has been positively salivating over the heavily doctored video attacking Planned Parenthood. (See yesterday’s post.) He immediately ordered Indiana’s Attorney General and its Department of Health to investigate, to “make sure” Planned Parenthood wasn’t “trading” in fetal tissue.

Indiana citizens will recall that the Governor spent most of his time in Congress fighting  the culture wars, and especially trying to defund Planned Parenthood. (Perhaps that’s why he was responsible for passing exactly zero pieces of legislation in his eleven years in Congress.) Planned Parenthood has vehemently denied the allegations, and the Indiana Department of Health recently inspected and recertified Planned Parenthood’s facilities. Attorney General Greg Zoeller, of course, has his own culture war history….In any event, Pence clearly sees the emergence of this phony issue as a gift.

I assume the Governor also sees it as a golden opportunity to mend the rift with his Religious Right supporters, who have been angry about what they view as his “capitulation” on RFRA. (Honest, guys, I’m still the radically theocratic guy you used to love….)

Then there was his ostentatious arming of National Guard troops at recruiting centers in the wake of the tragic shooting in Tennessee. I’m sure he thinks the NRA, not to mention the anti-Muslim and/or anti-immigration members of his base, will respond positively to this display of unnecessary machismo. (He’s probably right about that.) And just in case we missed the symbolism, there was Tuesday’s order to fly flags at half-staff in Indiana, and the declaration of a period of mourning for those killed in Tennessee (a gesture of respect not accorded to the many Hoosier soldiers who died in Iraq).

Will any of this work? Will Pence be able to eke out an electoral victory now that more Hoosiers have seen the real Mike Pence? Or will Indiana’s often-feckless Democrats fail to take advantage of the political opening they’ve been handed?

Pass the popcorn. The show’s starting.

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