I hope you all had a happy 4th of July celebration. (For those in my age cohort, I hope you were able to stay up for the fireworks….I’m happy to report that, with the help of an afternoon nap, I made it!) I also hope that at some point during the festivities, you thought a bit about the meaning of citizenship.
I know my periodic diatribes about the importance of civic knowledge often makes me sound like a broken record, so today, I’m ceding my position as annoying sermonizer to this guy.
I hope you take the time to read the whole column. It isn’t long. But in case you are disinclined to click through, here’s the conclusion:
For good or for ill, the education reform movement of the last few decades has achieved a nearly unquestioned consensus that the big picture goal of K-12 education is to ensure that all of America’s children leave school “college or career ready.”
By all means, let’s prime the pump of our economic competitiveness with more college-goers, more science, math and technology graduates. Let’s ensure every child has a shot at a private piece of the American Dream.
But let’s also make sure schools still perform the greatest possible public service: preparing our children to be the informed citizens a stable, self-governing country needs.
Today, as we celebrate the birthday of our country, we might take a few moments to consider our polarized and paralyzed legislative process.
To take just one example, the odds are high that the GOP-controlled House will block immigration reform. Wonder why?
Blame gerrymandering.
Jared Bernstein laid it out recently in the Washington Post:
First, “only 38 of the House’s 234 Republicans, or 16%, represent districts in which Latinos account for 20% or more of the population.” Second, “only 28 Republican-held districts are considered even remotely at risk of being contested by a Democratic challenger, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.”
So for about 200 of the House’s Republicans, a primary challenge by conservatives angry over “amnesty” is probably a more realistic threat than defeat at the hands of angry Hispanic voters, or even angry Democrats.
This state of affairs is pernicious, but it is also difficult to change. Thanks to partisan redistricting and the precision of modern computer programs, voters no longer choose their representatives. Representatives choose their voters. And as I have previously noted–and Bernstein’s article amply documents-gerrymandering exacerbates political polarization and gridlock.
In competitive districts, nominees know they have to run to the middle to win in the fall. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, the battle takes place among the party faithful, who tend to be much more ideological. Republican incumbents will be challenged from the Right and Democratic incumbents from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they are a powerful incentive for the incumbent to protect his flank. So we elect nominees beholden to the political extremes, who are unwilling or unable to compromise.
Since both parties gerrymander when they are in power, it has been virtually impossible to replace the current corrupt system with nonpartisan redistricting. We are stuck with the crazies for the foreseeable future.
With their disdain for intellectuals, their flat refusal to acknowledge global warming, their denial of evolution and their inability to comprehend that rape can result in pregnancy, the modern, heavily tea-stained version of the Republican Party is simply unpalatable to the vast majority of scientists, professors and other educated professionals. As GOP candidates continue to pander to aging white religious fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists, they undermine their own hopes for reclaiming the White House in 2016.
….
As the Republican Party continues to dismiss man-made climate change, continues to ignore the biological realities of the female body and continues to appeal to xenophobia and anti-intellectualism, they will continue to dig their political grave. The GOP has become entirely dependent upon the White Evangelical Christian vote for its political survival. In the 2012 election while White Evangelicals gave Romney a whopping 78-21 margin, the rest of the nation collectively chose Barack Obama by a 60-37 landslide. Since White Evangelicals are now just over a quarter of the electorate and shrinking as a percentage each election cycle, the GOP’s pandering to their anti-science, anti-woman agenda will only hasten their demise as a competitive political party. If the party wishes to continue to disregard the theory of evolution, they may do so at their own peril. For if the GOP fails to evolve into a party that high information voters can again support, they will eventually face political extinction. The Republicans may do everything they can to suppress the votes of students, senior citizens, and minority voters with photo ID laws, but if they continue to remain politically toxic to the highly educated, they will continue to lose elections consistently, and no amount of voter suppression will be enough to save them.
If Politico is right, consciously choosing to remain “the party of stupid” is not a formula for continued success. I tend to agree–but boy, they’re doing a lot of damage in the meantime.
A former student–President of the Chamber of Commerce in his small Indiana town–sent me a link to this Ted Talk.
There are several “nits” one might pick, but it is a fascinating argument, and well worth the 20 minutes it takes to listen. At the very least, it’s a reproach to arrogant assumptions about the way others should live….
That said, it brings to mind an important point raised by Fareed Zakaria in his book The Future of Freedom: the issue is not democracy, it is liberty. Living under the tyranny of a majority is not appreciably different than living under the tyranny of an autocrat. There can be a wide variety of mechanisms for making decisions about governing. We should judge them not just by their effect on the material well-being of the governed, but by the degree to which they respect fundamental individual rights.
The dictionary defines “propaganda” as “information of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view, and the dissemination of such information as a political strategy.”
We live in an age of propaganda.
I don’t know about others, but I have gotten to the point where I doubt the accuracy of virtually everything I read that has political implications–not just the right-wing fantasies that are embarrassingly obvious, but even ostensibly factual reporting from more moderate and progressive sources that seems to confirm my own biases. We live in an age where propaganda is increasingly driving out objective, fact-based reporting–where we have to double-check everything.
Take the various (misnamed) “think tanks.” Perhaps I was simply more naive a couple of decades ago, but my recollection was that even the private research institutions with an ideological preference generated intellectually respectable studies. They might draw different conclusions from the facts of a matter, but by and large, they began with verifiable facts. They resided in what has come to be called “the reality-based community.”
No longer.
Today’s exhibit: The Heritage Foundation, now run by former Tea Party Senator Jim DeMint. The first report issued after he took over the leadership was a “study” of immigration that was so ridiculously untethered from honesty that even foes of immigration distanced themselves from it. (The author was later found to have produced previous articles “documenting” the inferiority of certain minority groups.) This week, I was intrigued by an article posted to Facebook by an economist friend, analyzing Heritage’s most recent “economic freedom index.”
As the author, Bill Black, points out at The Big Picture, Heritage defines “freedom” as lack of regulation–it rates financial, environmental, and worker health and safety regulations as indicators of less freedom. Similarly, the index treats government spending–even when that spending increases education or health–as diminishing freedom.
Black focuses on the Index’ treatment of Ecuador–treatment which, as he notes, exposes the fallacies of Heritage’s index.
Under its current administration, a million Ecuadorians (out of 15 million) have been brought out of poverty. The prior high levels of emigration have turned around, and the country now has net immigration. Despite Heritage’s description of Ecuador’s growth rate as “moderate,” it was 7.8%–pretty robust by today’s standards, and considerably better than a U.S. 4.4% rate of growth in the 1980s that they had described as “spectacular growth” and attributed to a tax cut. (It’s worth noting that the U.S. economy grew at an average annual rate of 3.4% under Reagan.) The same index that dismissed Ecuador’s 7.8% growth described Peru’s (very respectable) 6.9% growth as “strong.”
Peru is a relatively conservative country, and Ecuador’s President Correa (an economist) is progressive, so 6.9% is strong and 7.8% is moderate.
Agree with Correa or not, he is enormously popular in Ecuador, where his policies have dramatically reduced inequality and poverty. Ecuador’s real growth in wages in 2012 was 3%. (Heritage has a chart that describes a 1.4% growth in wages as a “Rapid Growth Scenario.” Unless, of course, the growth is inconsistent with Heritage ideology.)
After I read Bill Black’s post, I did some independent research. (That trust deficit again….). I found that International Living has ranked Ecuador a top retirement destination for the past five years in a row, citing excellent health care, low crime, and a low and stable cost of living. Business Insider ranks Ecuador as one of the best places in the world to retire.
None of this is intended to paint Ecuador as some sort of Shangri-La. What the facts do show is that Heritage’s wildly misleading index is propaganda, not research.
I wish I could conclude this post by saying that this blatant dishonesty is confined to Heritage and a few other so-called Think Tanks, but it isn’t. It isn’t universal, but it is anything but rare. And that poses a huge problem for citizens who are genuinely trying to understand current policy debates.
My mother used to counsel my sister and me to “consider the source” when we heard something questionable or defamatory. It was good advice.
