Why Cynicism is Growing

I’ve been distressed by the growing cynicism of the students I teach–a cynicism about the motives of those in business and public life that has seemed to grow over the past few years. There have always been a few who sneered that “public service” was an oxymoron, who believed that given the chance, everyone would demonstrate greed and disregard for others, but most students were more charitable in their judgments.

Still, as I detailed in my book “Distrust, American Style,” we’ve seen a lot of corrupt institutional behavior over the past couple of decades. Enron, WorldCon, the various scandals in major-league sports, the Catholic Church’s cover-up to protect pedophile priests, the Bush Administration’s assaults on civil liberties and its dishonest case for war in Iraq–there has been plenty of reason for cynicism and distrust. While I’m sure similar examples have existed throughout our history,  the growth of Facebook and Twitter and blogs has brought news of the misbehavior to many more people than might previously have known what was going on.

Student cynicism began to grow more pronounced around the time we headed into the Great Recession, as the public learned much more about the behaviors and compensation levels of the “banksters.” (Rhymes with gangsters….). The widely publicized emergence of SuperPacs funded by corporations intent upon protecting  favorable tax rates and corporate welfare hasn’t helped.

This morning’s news provides two examples, noteworthy only because they’ve become utterly commonplace.

The first example–Brian Bosma’s appointment of a lobbyist with his law firm as parliamentarian–prompted this editorial language from the Indianapolis Star:

Whetstone is coming back to work for Speaker Brian Bosma as the House parliamentarian, even though he will continue to work with the lobbying firm of Krieg DeVault LLP. Whetstone has pledged not to lobby the legislature during his employment as parliamentarian, a job that pays $12,000 a month through the legislative sesion.

Whetstone says Krieg DeVault holds itself to the highest ethical standards. Even so, there’s a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one. As parliamentarian, Whetstone will advise the House Speaker on rules challenges and other procedural questions that arise. What happens if he’s asked to weigh in on a challenge that would affect legislation supported by one of his former clients, or by clients of other lobbyists working for Krieg DeVault?

The second was a report that the executives who took Hostess into bankruptcy and blamed that decision on “greedy unions” unwilling to take yet another round of pay cuts even while those executives tripled their own compensation have petitioned the bankruptcy court to approve the payment of their bonuses as part of the court-supervised demise of the business. (There’s a yiddish word for this: chutzpah.)

When the daily news consists of little but reports of self-dealing and ethical obtuseness, of evidence that politicians continue to put special interests above the national interest, how can I fault the students who assume that the whole world works that way?

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A Planet of Their Own Devising

I have a friend who takes perverse delight in “sharing” the American Family Association’s newsletter with me. (He’s one of several people I know whose receipt of that “publication” is for monitoring purposes; sometimes, I wonder what percentage of the AFA audience actually agrees with them and what percentage is composed of gay liberals…but I digress.)

The first “article” was an incoherent rant about the IU Law School students who reviewed the Indiana Code and discovered 614 provisions that would be affected by the pending measure to place a ban on same-sex marriage in the Indiana Constitution. Evidently, the report–which included a list of the provisions–should be disregarded because it wasn’t “peer reviewed” (alert: even articles published in prestigious law reviews are not peer reviewed; such review is an attribute of science and social science journals), because the students are “activists,” and because it doesn’t matter anyway. Or something.

The next article presented what purported to be a quotation from Pravda (no kidding!), explaining that the reason American voters returned Obama to office is that we have become an irremediably immoral people. This rant is replete with “quotations” from America’s founders about the importance of religion–not just any religion, of course, just Christianity–and explaining how far the country has fallen from those glorious days of religious purity. The writer bemoaned the fact that the quotations go largely unreported by America’s corrupted media. Hint: this may be because they are bogus. These are David Barton-generated, wholly manufactured sentiments the authenticity of which has long been discredited. (Civic literacy sermon alert! Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the founders to whom these quotes are attributed would recognize how inconsistent the statements are with the philosophy of those to whom they are attributed.)

I could go on, but you get the picture.

The people who generate these sad diatribes are obviously feeling beleaguered. It’s hard not to sympathize; like Rip Van Winkle, they awoke one day to a world they don’t recognize or understand, and these frantic jeremiads are a response–a way of keeping threatening and unfamiliar realities at bay. Take this example:

Such people are the product of America’s decaying society whose reality has been warped by drugs and other selfish pleasures. America has gradually become worse from the drugs, rock and roll of the 60′s and 70′s to the drugs and rap music of today. The communists won while Americans smoked pot.

The alienation of God in society began in the classroom. Today, blasphemies can easily be seen on TV and the cinema. Hollywood portrays the sane as the insane. The abnormal and perverted as normal. The unborn babies are seen as nothing. The silent holocaust continues. Is it any wonder America is in trouble?

The economy destroyed by white-collar crimes were done by men of immoral character. They are not personally responsible for all of America’s failings but are a symptom of America’s spiritual illness most commonly referred to in previous centuries as “sin”. This is the connection that most fail to see. Where there is no God there is chaos.”

Sex, drugs and rock and roll….

What amazes me is a definition of morality that centers on personal behaviors. It never seems to occur to the denizens of Planet AFA that morality might better be measured by how we treat our fellow human beings.  Of course, if righteousness consists in human kindness, in recognition that all creatures created by the God they purport to worship are entitled to human dignity–the inevitable conclusion is that the true immorality is theirs.

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Pot and Kettle

Yesterday, the head of Indiana State Police did something police officers rarely do: he gave a candid answer to a question posed by a legislative study committee. State police Superintendent Paul Whitesell told members of the State Budget Committee on Tuesday that he had followed the issue during 40 years in law enforcement and believed we should legalize and tax possession of small amounts.

Whitesell had the guts to say publicly what numerous police officers and judges have said privately for years. The “War on Drugs” is a failure by any measure you want to apply: it’s illogical, expensive, and ineffective. The inclusion of marijuana in that war–in contrast to hard drugs–makes even less sense.

Current laws are illogical for a number of reasons. Drug abuse (which, by the way, is nowhere defined in our drug laws, which focus on any use of a “scheduled” substance) is a public health issue. Behaviors connected to the use of drugs–driving while impaired, theft to support a habit, etc.–are matters to be addressed by the criminal law, but the mere use of a substance deemed harmful is a health issue, and should be addressed as a health issue. Marijuana is less harmful to users than tobacco, yet we have wildly different approaches to pot and tobacco use–undoubtedly the result of a much more effective tobacco lobby. According to police officers I know, people who use pot are significantly less likely to become violent than people who abuse alcohol, yet we outlaw pot, but regulate and tax alcohol and tobacco.

Current laws are fiscally wasteful. The US spends roughly 60 billion dollars annually on drug prohibition, and we get virtually no bang for those bucks (see ineffective, below). We also forgo collection of billions of dollars in potential tax revenues that we would collect if we simply taxed pot like we treat alcohol and tobacco. We waste criminal justice resources that would be better used elsewhere, to treat drug abuse or to deter nonconsensual crimes that actually harm others. (Whitesell made this point in his testimony.)

We’ve lost this war. Not that the War on Drugs has ever been effective; the percentage of Americans who use hard drugs is pretty much the same as it has always been. Pot use has ebbed and flowed over time, providing the only real changes in the numbers. Thirty plus years of research has consistently demonstrated the utter failure of American drug policy, and the error of the premises upon which it has been constructed. (Pot smokers become hard drug users in about the same percentages as milk drinkers do, and we don’t outlaw milk as a “gateway drug.”) The only thing the Drug War has done effectively is ruin the lives of (disproportionately black) teenagers who are imprisoned for non-violent drug crimes.

What is frustrating is the number of policymakers who respond to this mountain of evidence with a renewed enthusiasm for failed interventions.

What would you think of a doctor who had performed a certain operation 200 times, with the same result: all the patients died. How convinced would you be by his conviction that he just needed to do more of that operation?

When are we going to learn from our mistakes?

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Bartlett’s Oddyssey

Bruce Bartlett has written a rather sad article in the American Conservative , detailing his estrangement from the conservative movement–or at least, the folks who have current ownership of that title. He begins by listing his past service to the Republican party and conservative causes, service that should have earned him the right to dissent from orthodoxy without being shunned.

Of course, it didn’t. When your economic and political beliefs take on the character of religious dogma–when they become matters of faith rather than opinions grounded in experience and evidence–dissent becomes blasphemy.

As Bartlett describes his journey into the “reality-based world” (his own description), he makes some discoveries that startle him.

For the record, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman. The blind hatred for him on the right simply pushed me further away from my old allies and comrades.

The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.

Of course, Bartlett is correct about Obama’s centrism. It drives the left wing of the Democratic party nuts.

When I read “The Audacity of Hope,” I remarked that Obama’s philosophy as described in that volume was virtually identical to that of a moderate Republican–at least, as moderate Republicans defined ourselves in the 1980s. His positions were pretty much the positions I’d espoused in my run for Congress back then, when I was actually considered part of the conservative wing of the party.

When I left the GOP in 2000, the party had already left me. It had shifted dramatically to the Right, and it has continued its radical transformation. That so many thoughtful people fail to recognize how different today’s GOP is from the party of Goldwater and even Reagan is something of a statement on our very human tendency to resist recognition of change.

It’s like looking in the mirror every morning for years without noticing that your formerly black hair has been slowly turning  grey, that your once-rosy complexion is becoming a bit more wrinkled each day…and then somehow, suddenly and without warning, actually seeing that you’ve aged thirty years. When did that happen?

Bartlett looked in the mirror. It’s a sad article, but well worth the read.

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Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Economy

There have been a number of Facebook posts noting the contrast between our tradition of giving thanks for what we have on Thursday, and then joining the frenzy of acquisition that begins the next day with Black Friday. (Does anyone know why we call it “Black Friday?”)

Tis the season to consume. And while it may make us feel morally superior to condemn the orgy that is the Christmas shopping season, reality is more complicated than such condemnations might suggest.

Individually, most of us don’t need the gadgets, trinkets, toys and–let’s be honest–mountains of disposable trash that we buy during this time of year. Collectively, however, our economy depends in significant measure upon the Christmas buying season. Should I complain about the forty emails I’ve already had this morning urging me to buy this or that on “cyber Monday”? Or should I hope for a robust season of buying unneeded stuff, as welcome evidence of economic recovery?

This structure of culture is what students have difficulty appreciating. Why do Americans have only two political parties? Why don’t we start another? Well–one tries patiently to explain–our entire political system grew up around a two-party reality. Changing that structure wouldn’t be impossible, exactly, but it would be a massive undertaking–far more massive than most of us appreciate.

Haven’t civil rights laws mostly eliminated racial discrimination? Well, those laws have certainly changed many behaviors. But the structure of discrimination still operates. Your company has a job opening, so you call a friend. Until your friends are truly integrated, that friend is likely to look a lot like you. Attitudes about “those people” persist. Neighborhood “complexions” change slowly. Civil rights laws nudge us toward cultural change, but the pace of that change is slow.

So what do we do about the waste inherent in a consumerist culture? On the one hand, the mountains of unneeded “stuff” pose an environmental hazard–there is enormous waste involved, energy expended, resources consumed. On the other hand, our economy depends upon the activity of buying and selling and consuming. It’s a conundrum.

Merry Christmas.

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