On the Other Hand….

Yesterday’s blog bemoaned the skepticism–and the sound reasons for that skepticism– with which so many of us have come to view media reports.  A couple of commenters noted what we might call “the flip side” of that phenomenon–people  distrustful of both government and the media who are anything but skeptical when it comes to wild and crazy conspiracy theories.

One of my regular reads is Juanita Jean’s: The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc., written by a Molly Ivins-like Texan. A recent post began

If you haven’t heard, there’s going to be a large military exercise around the country from July 15th to September 15th. It’s called Jade Helm 15 because all military trainings have names and that one wasn’t taken, I suppose. Texas has five counties involved and the rightwing is damn sure that it means Obama is taking over and gonna put all them in a concentration camp Just! Like! Hitler!

The post included a local newspaper’s report of a public meeting in Bastrop County, where the exercise was to take place.

Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria answered questions for two hours from a crowd of more than 150 people at a special meeting of the Bastrop County Commissioners, hoping to allay locals’ concerns that the training operation is a way for the federal government to take over Texas and much of the Southwest. Instead, Lastoria was told that he couldn’t be trusted and was asked whether Jade Helm 15 will involve bringing foreign fighters from the Islamic State to Texas, whether U.S. troops will confiscate Texans’ guns and whether the Army intends to implement martial law through the exercise. (The answer for all three was no.)

As Juanita Jean noted,

Cowboy! Think about it. If the military wanted to take over, they would not ask your permission first. They would just do it because I do not care a hill of beans how many guns you have, they have tanks. And bombers. And stuff you have never even heard of.

How lost and terrified must people be in order to believe things like this? How paranoid?

And how much do they have to hate having an African-American President?

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Why Nobody Trusts Anything They Read Anymore…

Newsweek recently ran an article arguing that wind power really costs more than people think. The story’s italicized tagline identified the author thusly: “Randy Simmons is professor of political economy at Utah State University.”

A respectable (and presumably reliable) credential. As the Daily Kos reported, however,

The Erik Wemple Blog yesterday asked Simmons whether his Newsweek blast at wind power should have contained more information about his ties to some key players in the U.S. energy sector. For instance, between 2008 and 2013, Simmons served as the Charles G. Koch Professor of Political Economy from 2008 to 2013, in what he terms a “fixed-term professorship.” And Simmons currently supervises a program known at Utah State University as the “Koch Scholars” program, which runs on an annual grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. It’s a “reading group” that meets on Tuesday evenings. “The Koch Foundation grant buys the books, and food and provides a scholarship for each of the 15 students chosen that semester,” writes Simmons in an e-mail to the Erik Wemple Blog.

Surely the Koch’s major fossil fuel holdings and generous underwriting had no effect upon Simmons’ research conclusions. (If you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you.)

When special interests can “buy” (or at least influence) presumably objective research results, is it any wonder that all research is viewed with skepticism?

In an environment where everything is suspect, it becomes so easy to engage in “confirmation bias”–to believe those sources that confirm our preferred worldview, and to dismiss contrary evidence.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Distrust, American Style, arguing that constant revelations about corrupt practices in so many major institutions of American life–not just government, but also major league sports, the Catholic Church’s molestation scandals, big business (Enron, Worldcon, et al)–had eaten away the fabric of trust needed in order for society to function. That was before the ubiquity of cell phone cameras had given us evidence of pervasive police misconduct, before stories emerged about phony FBI forensic testimony, before the “banksters” and the Great Recession they triggered…the list goes on.

Democratic governments require a robust civil society in order to function properly. Civil society requires social capital. Social capital–our connection to one another–requires trust and reciprocity.

That trust is hard to come by these days.

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That Sound You Hear is Me Gnashing My Teeth…

And Thomas Paine thought that his were the times that tried men’s souls….

Recently, the Oklahoma House has approved legislation purporting to protect ministers who refuse to conduct same-sex weddings from civil liability.  

Evidently, they don’t teach basic civics in Oklahoma. (As I have previously noted, they aren’t too keen on American history, either.) News flash, Oklahoma legislature! The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment got there first! It already provides the religious liberty you want to “restore.” For the zillionth time: churches and their clergy are exempt from civil rights laws that conflict with their theology. They’re protected from the nefarious “gay agenda” by that Constitution you all pretend you’ve read.

It’s maddening enough that state legislators–including a not-insignificant number from Indiana–are clueless about the actual application of the religion clauses, but it is mind-boggling when a (presumably plausible) candidate for President of the United States exhibits abject ignorance of the most basic Constitutional principles.

Recently, Mike Huckabee spoke to a group of rightwing pastors about the pending Supreme Court case on same-sex marriage, and he began by repeating the same tired lie: if the Court rules for marriage equality, pastors will be sued or jailed for refusing to preside over same-sex nuptials. It’s hard to know whether Huckabee is really that uninformed, or whether his statement was just reflexive demagoguery of the sort he regularly delivered during his stint at Fox News.

What really set me off, however, was his follow-up to that bit of dishonest rabble-rousing:

Getting a decision from the court, it’s not tantamount to saying ‘well that settles it. It’s the law of the land.’ And when I hear people say that I just cringe and I’m thinking ‘How many people pass 9th grade civics?’ This is not that complicated. There are three branches of government, not one. We don’t like it if the executive branch overreaches and pretends that it can act in difference to the other two. And neither can we sit back and allow the court, one branch of government to overrule the other two. And so when a court rules that same sex marriage is okay, it doesn’t mean that the next day, marriage licenses should be issued for same sex couples. It simply means that if the legislature agrees with that court decision and the representatives of the people—the elected officials—if they then put that into legislation and it is signed and enforced by the executive branch, then you have same sex marriage. But until those other two branches act, what you have is a court opinion and nothing else.

I hate to tell you, Mike, but when the Supreme Court issues a decision, that does settle it. Short of a constitutional amendment, it’s over.

How can a man who was a Governor of a state, a man who has run for President of this country, who has debated legal and policy issues with knowledgable people, have so little grasp of the most basic operation and structure of the American legal system?

If Huckabee really does know better– if he is just counting on the ignorance of his audience–the fact that he can make such statements secure in the knowledge that no one listening will know enough to challenge him is even more depressing.

Evidently, no one ever took 9th grade civics.

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Power, Voice and Bowling Alone

Americans are increasingly focused on economic inequality, and especially the growing and dangerous gulf between the 1% and everyone else. But of course, no element of our social ecosystem is separate and distinct from the other elements, and the financial gap between wealthy and working class citizens is closely connected to other kinds of inequality.

Children from poor families attend poorly performing schools. The streets and sidewalks and parks in poor neighborhoods are rarely as well maintained as those in wealthier precincts. The prevalence of “food deserts” in poor neighborhoods—the lack of markets selling healthy foods at reasonable prices—has been the subject of numerous articles. These and other tangible manifestations of unequal access to social goods (health care, for example) are relatively obvious.

But there is a less-often recognized kind of inequality: disproportionate access to the public square and the marketplace of ideas. This lack of access to contending perspectives, abetted by the steady erosion of what sociologists call voice, doesn’t just disadvantage the poor. It hurts us all, by depriving us of perspectives we need to hear and understand.

It is certainly true that many Americans, not just the poor, have historically opted out of democratic deliberations. But they had voice–and influence–through a multitude of civic organizations.

As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently wrote

 Political scientists after World War II hypothesized that even though the voices of individual Americans counted for little, most people belonged to a variety of interest groups and membership organizations – clubs, associations, political parties, unions – to which politicians were responsive.

 “Interest-group pluralism,” as it was called, thereby channeled the views of individual citizens, and made American democracy function.

 What’s more, the political power of big corporations and Wall Street was offset by the power of labor unions, farm cooperatives, retailers, and smaller banks. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith approvingly dubbed it “countervailing power.” These alternative power centers ensured that America’s vast middle and working classes received a significant share of the gains from economic growth.

 Beginning in 1980, those organizations—a vibrant part of civil society—began to wither. Robert Putnum famously documented the decline in Bowling Alone.

The decline of unions has been especially consequential. As Reich notes, however, other former centers of countervailing power – retailers, farm cooperatives, and local and regional banks – also lost ground to national discount chains, big agribusiness, and Wall Street. Many of these changes were an intentional result of public policies—everything from Right to Work laws to slackened banking regulations. Others reflected economic and technological shifts.

Meanwhile, political parties stopped representing the views of most constituents. As the costs of campaigns escalated, parties morphed from state and local membership organizations into national fund-raising machines.

Although Reich does not include it in his list, we might add the effects of so-called “privatization”—especially the practice of government contracting with nonprofit organizations to deliver public services. Nonprofit scholars have long expressed concern that the growing dependence of human services nonprofits on government dollars has operated to “hollow out” their essential character as mediating institutions.

Reich concludes that the only way to turn this situation around is through greatly increased political activism. I agree.

The open question is whether average Americans have the time, the energy, or the will to  reassert their right to be heard, and to insist on retaking their rightful place at the civic table.

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As Long As We’re Talking About Religious Liberty…

Can we at least examine whose religion deserves to be “protected” by giving businesses an exemption from otherwise applicable civil rights laws?

Despite the ignominious fate of RFRA (the so-called “Religious Freedom Restoration Act”) in Indiana, other states–most notably Louisiana–are moving to enact similar measures. Louisiana’s increasingly bizarre Governor, Bobby Jindal, insists that he won’t be dissuaded by crass business interests from “protecting religious liberty.”

The rhetoric around this issue would have us believe that measures like RFRA are needed to protect a monolithic and undifferentiated Christianity from the vast secular army bent on its destruction. So we see Mike Huckabee warning that the “criminalization of Christianity” is imminent, while Shawn Hannity recently proclaimed that the “three most persecuted groups in America today are Christians, the wealthy, and white males.”

I don’t know what planet Huckabee and Hannity live on, and there is no point in debating people who’ve clearly been drinking the kool-aid. But as a non-Christian, I do want to stick up for the numerous thoughtful and actually “Christian” Christians who are getting a bad name from these culture warriors who claim to speak for them.

As Political Animal recently reported,

Next time you hear somebody talk about “Christians” being opposed to same-sex marriage, or being “persecuted” for their refusal to acknowledge same-sex marriages, you might want to direct them to fresh data from the Public Religion Research Institute about the different attitudes of different denominational categories of religious folk on this subject (h/t Sarah Posner).

PRRI shows that while white evangelical Protestants do indeed oppose same-sex marriage by a 28/66 margin, white mainline Protestants support it by a significantly larger margin (62/30) than the general public (54/38). And if you want to believe us mainliners are a dying breed, there’s U.S. Catholics, who despite their church’s teaching support marriage equality by 60/30.

There are also plenty of Christian churches that support reproductive choice.

I personally know a lot of Christians who read their bibles for clues on how to be better, kinder people, rather than for evidence of their moral superiority and their right to tell everyone else how to live.

In fact, the only “embattled” Christians I’m aware of are the theocrats who find it intolerable to live under a system that accords heretics and nonbelievers an equal place at the civic table.

People like Jindal, Huckabee and Hannity look a lot more like the Taliban than like the good Christians I know.

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