I have noted before that the Phoenix Theater is an Indianapolis gem. Yesterday, attending its most recent offering, I was once again reminded why.
Clybourne Park is a two-act play about a house, a neighborhood, and race. The first act takes place not long after the Korean War; the second, set in the same living room of the same house, is fifty years later. The basic story line is the familiar trajectory of white flight, neighborhood decay and later regentrification, told by way of a very personal human tragedy. It is well worth seeing.
It was easy to watch the first act–in which we learn the family has sold the house to a black family–from a position of moral superiority. Those neighbors are embarrassing racists! Glad we’ve gotten beyond that! It was a bit harder to watch the second act, in which the yuppie couple purchasing the now-trashed home are meeting with representatives of the neighborhood group to discuss their plans to demolish the house and build anew. The surface racial amity and self-congratulatory color-blindedness mask attitudes that are not as “evolved” as their owners evidently believe.
As my husband said at one point, “I’ve been in that meeting!”
The Newtown parents have recently reminded us that ordinary citizens with a compelling story can move policy, even in Washington. They were able to do what even the President could not: prevent a filibuster by Republican Representatives intent upon blocking action. The filibuster threat wilted in the face of bereaved mothers and fathers–a different kind of lobbyist from the pin-striped suits with whom they are familiar.
There are many lessons we might draw from this episode, but something Dana Milbank wrote in a column about the parents struck me. He noted that “Hockley [one of the mothers] and her peers succeeded precisely because they weren’t the usual actors following the usual script. ‘At the start of the week I didn’t even know what a filibuster was,’ Hockley told me Thursday beneath the cherry blossoms outside the Hart Senate Office Building.”
And therein lies a lesson for us all.
I don’t know how many citizens have no idea what a filibuster is, or how it has been used and abused. We know that only 36% of Americans can name the three branches of government; if I had to guess, I’d wager fewer than 10% could explain the filibuster. Could a population that knew the basic structure of our government, a citizenry that actually followed events in the nation’s capital, change the nation’s trajectory? Could they marry righteous wrath to informed participation, and end the petty game-playing and toxic power struggles that increasingly characterize our government?
The Newtown parents had to understand the filibuster in order to prevent one from blocking the action they supported.
Knowledge really is power. No matter how uneven the contest between ordinary citizens and moneyed interests, people armed with information and determination can make a huge difference.
When the only people who understand the system are those who use it to their own advantage, however, it’s no contest.
Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion on equality. The panel was part of the 10th Annual O’Bannon Institute for Community Service, held at Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington.
Our panel’s charge was very broad: we were supposed to discuss “equality” and consider America’s progress toward achieving it. In addition to me, the panel included a retired Pastor who heads the Bloomington Human Rights Commission, a social worker who founded and runs an organization called “Fair Talk” focused on equal rights for GLBT folks, and an 86-year old former football star who was the first African-American recruited by the NFL.
Beyond sharing stories from our different perspectives, we confronted a question: what do we mean by equality? No two people, after all, are equally smart, equally good-looking, equally talented or hardworking. What sorts of equality can we reasonably expect to achieve?
At the very least, we agreed that all Americans are entitled to equality before the law. Laws that disadvantage people based upon race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—laws that treat people differently simply based upon their identity—cannot be justified. America’s greatest promise has been that our laws treat individuals as individuals, and not as members of a group. As a country, we are making progress toward that goal. The progress is halting, and the culture sometimes lags, but we’re getting there.
That’s the good news. The bad news, as the pastor reminded us, is that inequalities of wealth and power in this country are enormous and growing. The wealthiest Americans not only control a huge percentage of the country’s resources, their wealth also allows them to exercise disproportionate political power. America is in real danger of becoming a plutocracy.
I hasten to assure my readers that there weren’t any socialists on that panel; no one was advocating class warfare or massive redistribution of wealth. We all understand the benefits of market economies, and recognize that inequalities are inevitable in such systems. The problems arise when the inequities become too large, and when they are seen as the product of privilege and status rather than entrepreneurship and/or diligence. It is then that they breed social resentment and create political instability.
America is doing a reasonable job of leveling the legal playing field. But you can’t eat legal equality, you can’t pay the rent with it, and it won’t cure cancer.
From the rhetoric routinely employed by politicians trying to curry favor with voters, you’d think Americans were struggling under a massive tax burden. You’d also think service delivery and taxation were unconnected–that we can all have our cake and eat it too. (Just ignore that decaying bridge…and by the way, it might be a good idea to hire a private security guard, seeing as how we can’t afford to hire those extra police officers we need…..)
The next time one of our legislators is crying crocodile tears over our high levels of taxation, you might share this study.
When Margaret Thatcher died earlier this week, articles on her legacy reflected the very different political filters of those doing the reflecting. Much as Reagan’s legacy has been distorted by highly selective recollections of his tenure by critics and worshippers alike, the real Thatcher got buried somewhere between “she saved Capitalism” and “she screwed the poor.” Both perspectives begin with a belief that Thatcherism was equivalent to current Republican philosophy, with its insistence on reducing both taxes and spending. However, as Bruce Bartlett noted a few months ago in the New York Times,
Although she cut the top personal income tax rate to 60 percent from 83 percent immediately upon taking office, the basic tax rate was only reduced to 30 percent from 33 percent. And in 1980, the 25 percent lower rate of taxation was eliminated so that 30 percent became the lowest tax rate.
More importantly, Mrs. Thatcher paid for her 1979 tax cut by nearly doubling the value-added tax to 15 percent, from 8 percent. Among those who thought Mrs. Thatcher was making a dreadful mistake was the American economist Arthur Laffer. Writing in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 20, 1979, he excoriated her for taking with the one hand while giving with the other.
“The Thatcher budget lowers tax rates where they have little economic consequence and raises tax rates where they affect economic activity directly,” he complained.
In the 1982 forward to the British edition of his American best-seller, “Wealth and Poverty,” George Gilder was also highly critical of Mrs. Thatcher for failing to cut either taxes or spending: “The net effect of the Thatcher program has been a substantial increase in taxation on virtually all taxpayers.”
The “fiscal conservatives” who exhalt Reagan are similarly loathe to mention the fact that the Gipper raised taxes. Several times.
In fact, Americans are so polarized that they sanitize and cherry-pick real history–the messy realities in which real people had to operate, make compromises and mistakes, and in which they often championed contradictory policies. The same people who read the bible and the Constitution selectively bring that idiosyncratic approach to history–highlighting that which confirms their pre-existing biases and ignoring inconvenient inconsistencies.
The extent of our contemporary polarization is a matter of some debate. It is certainly true that we have historical precedents for American divisions and our very different world views.(Civil War, anyone?) But a recent report at the blog Daily Kos is sobering. The site announced that it had computed voting results by Congressional District, and was making that information available to anyone interested in congressional-level analysis.
Perhaps the most notable statistic to emerge from this endeavor is just how few “crossover” districts there now are—that is to say, seats represented by a Democrat in the House but carried by Mitt Romney on the presidential level, and vice versa for Republicans sitting in seats won by Barack Obama. There are just nine of the former variety and 17 of the latter, for 26 crossover seats in total. Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics says that this is the smallest number since 1920, which underscores how polarized elections have become in recent years in the United States.
There’s an old saying to the effect that the victor writes history. It’s hard to say who will write ours, but the odds are that the results will be skewed.
