One of the more galling recent debates in Indiana’s dysfunctional General Assembly was over the question whether Indianapolis could ask its own citizens whether we want public transportation enough to tax ourselves to support it. The Grand Poobahs of our legislature were reluctant to allow us that measure of self-government, but after restricting the scope of our decision-making, they finally authorized a referendum.
There are lots of reasons why public transportation is essential to urban America’s economic vitality and quality of life. Frequent, reliable and attractive public transportation reduces traffic congestion, improves air quality and saves citizens’ money. Businesses that employ lots of entry-level workers rely on transit to get employees to and from work. And of course, low-income folks, the disabled and the elderly are particularly dependent upon public transportation.
A new study from Harvard adds social mobility to the list.
The research found that access to good, reliable transportation is “the single strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty.” In fact,
The relationship between transportation and social mobility is stronger than that between mobility and several other factors, like crime, elementary-school test scores or the percentage of two-parent families in a community, said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the researchers on the study.
For most middle-class folks, good public transportation is an amenity–an attractive convenience of urban life that is unfortunately missing in central Indiana.
A few days ago, I posted about emerging indications that American society might be coming to its senses. One of those signs was the diminishing reach of Rush Limbaugh and the hate-filled rhetoric he spawned on the nation’s airwaves.
There’s continuing good news on that front. Evidently, WRKO-AM, a longtime distributor of right-wing content in Massachusetts, has decided to drop Limbaugh’s radio show after carrying it for nearly two decades.
Limbaugh, of course, has never recovered from the advertiser backlash following his 2012 rhetorical assault on Sandra Fluke. As former iHeartMedia executive Darryl Parks noted earlier this year, Limbaugh has essentially killed his own industry:
Today’s talk radio, as we know it, is fast fading into the sunset because of a format stuck with 1990’s rhetoric, each day addressing topics few care about. A constant right-wing political drumbeat that no longer resonates. A format where its practitioners can’t define the word entertainment. A format attracting fewer people, men or women, under 65.
Probably the most important problem for rabid rightwing media is that the audience–not just for Limbaugh and his clones, but also for Faux News, and other propaganda outlets– is increasingly aging. As Parks put it,
All was good until the world changed and the aging, pissed off Baby Boomers (I’m one of those too – Baby Boomer – not pissed off) were no longer relevant. Extreme political ideas no longer resonated with listeners as generational power shifted from Boomers to Gen X’ers and now Millennials, groups that have a more centrist belief in regards to many social issues. They’re mostly OK with Hispanics, lesbians, smoking pot and women using birth control. Many are even OK with the first African American President.
A relative of mine in the radio business once told me that the primary audience for talk radio was over-50 white guys who wanted to hear their resentments and prejudices validated.
Like so many words echoing through today’s content-free political tantrums, “democracy” gets thrown around by folks who don’t seem to understand how it is supposed to work. (“Liberty” is similarly misused; in the recent RFRA debate, defenders of the law used it to mean retailers’ right to discriminate against customers whose identities or behaviors offended their religious beliefs.)
My observation about the misuse of “democracy” is prompted by a recent blog–diatribe, actually–posted by an Indianapolis school board member named Gail Cosby. (Full disclosure here: I wouldn’t have seen the post, nor would I be following the school board’s “inside baseball” disagreements if our daughter and a former graduate student of mine weren’t both members of that body. So while I am a constituent of Cosby’s, I come with a somewhat amplified point of view.)
In the wake of the most recent school board elections, Cosby has found herself in the minority (alone, actually) on several issues, and has taken to accusing those with whom she disagrees of bad faith, hostility and “undemocratic” behavior. She is absolutely entitled to her opinions, whatever one may think of the propriety or accuracy of these accusatory posts, but like too many other Americans, she quite clearly does not understand the democratic process.
And that leads me to my larger point.
When voters elect a legislative body–the General Assembly, the City-County Council, the School Board–the majority rules. Losing a vote, failing to have your opinion carry the day, or failing to have all your demands met is not evidence of anti-democratic behavior, or “failure to collaborate.” It is the way the system works. The obligation of those of us who find ourselves in a minority position–and believe me, I’ve been in minority positions a lot— is to persuade enough other people of the wisdom/prudence/soundness of your position that you become a majority.
Of course, that takes effort, and persistence, and a willingness to listen and to compromise.
One of the reasons American politics is so debased these days is that too many people share Cosby’s evident disinclination to participate in the hard work required by the democratic process. Too many legislators want to blame their inability to get their own way on other people’s bad faith, or ulterior motives, or “undemocratic” behavior.
To say that the majority isn’t always right is an understatement. But that doesn’t make majority rule undemocratic.
It is not news that demographic data poses long-term problems for the GOP–at least unless the party returns to its more responsible roots. For a decade or more, pundits have pointed to the disaffection of Latinos and other immigrant populations, the continuing Democratic self-identification of African-Americans, and the reduced religiosity and increasing social liberalism of younger Americans–characteristics that correlate with voting Democratic.
What has been less remarked-upon is the widening urban/rural political divide. In our familiar red/blue political map, cities are dots of blue in even the reddest states. And in America, as elsewhere, people are increasingly moving to the cities.
The political dilemma this poses for Republicans is obvious. Thus far, the party has responded with efforts to make it more difficult for poor people and minorities to cast their ballots, and (in states they control) with aggressive gerrymandering aimed at diluting urban political power. (And yes, Democrats, in states they control, gerrymander too.)
Is Congress’s job to represent people, or just voters? Currently, all states are required to redraw their political boundaries based on the Census’s official count of total population every 10 years, which includes minors and noncitizen immigrants. But the Texas plaintiffs argue that states should be allowed to apportion seats based on where only U.S. citizens over 18 years of age live…..
A move toward counting only eligible voters, as logistically difficult as it may be, would drastically shift political power away from the urban environs with minorities and noncitizens, and toward whiter areas with larger native-born populations. That’s bad news for Democrats: Of the 50 congressional districts with the lowest shares of eligible voters, 41 are occupied by Democrats (nearly all are Latino-majority seats). Meanwhile, of the 50 districts with the highest shares of eligible voters, 38 are represented by the GOP.
Those “logistic difficulties” would be substantial, with opportunities for all sorts of mischief; the blog FiveThirtyEight notes that calculating the number of eligible voters would “require statistics that no one has.” (In a rational world, Evenwel v. Abbott would never have made it to the Supreme Court for that reason alone.)
What this lawsuit really highlights is that the partisan division between today’s Republicans and Democrats is also geographic, with Republicans primarily rural and Democrats, urban. (Of course there are Republicans in cities and Democrats on farms, but they are the outliers.) The problem for the GOP is that the U.S. population is increasingly urban–city dwellers vastly outnumber rural folks, and movement into metropolitan areas continues to accelerate. The problem for Democrats (and city dwellers) is that state governments are still largely controlled by rural interests, thanks to legal structures originally created for an agrarian nation.
There are plenty of flaws in the arguments advanced in Evenwel–practical, democratic and legal–and election law experts are quite properly focusing on those flaws. But at its root–and at the root of the increasingly hysterical attacks on “elitists” and “intellectuals” and “progressives”–is rejection of the values and diversity and complexity that characterize modern urban life.
That hysteria may attract insecure folks for a while, but over the long haul, resentment isn’t a viable political strategy.
According to a recent article in Time Magazine, political science professors Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox asked more than 4,000 high school and college students if they would be interested in running for political office in America someday: 89% of them said “no.”
Think about that.
This aversion to public office certainly isn’t because young Americans don’t care about their communities or about the common good. Their generation volunteers at rates higher than preceding age cohorts. Their Facebook posts and tweets focus significantly on issues of justice and “fair play.” They are demonstrably concerned about the environment. Surveys confirm that they are less bigoted and more inclusive than previous generations, and that they feel an obligation “give back” to their communities.
But they’ve written off the political process. Whatever “public service” may mean to them, it doesn’t mean participating in government.
Evidently, they’ve looked at the current, toxic political environment–where SuperPacs and billionaires evidence the disproportionate influence of money, where pundits and politicians alike flaunt anti-intellectualism and tribalism and engage in the politics of personal destruction; where electoral success requires pandering to rabid and uniformed “base” voters–and they’ve decided to put their time and effort elsewhere.
I wonder what sort of students are in the remaining 11%–those who do express an interest in running for public office, who haven’t been turned off and disillusioned. Are they the idealistic ones? Or do they find the current cesspool attractive–and if so, why?
