Now that Net Neutrality rules have been eliminated by Trump’s FCC, the question is: how will the repeal affect ordinary Americans? What consequences will be seen by the millions of Americans who turn increasingly to the Internet for everything from information to entertainment to commerce?
On June 11, 2018, the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of the Open Internet Order—the net neutrality rules—went into effect. In the wake of this change, Americans are wondering how the repeal will affect them, and what it means for the future of internet access. Though consumers may not see changes quickly, the shift on net neutrality undermines the nation’s history on network regulation, creating a new era in how these networks operate in America.
So–in this brave “new era,” what can we expect?
The “quick and dirty” answer is: it depends. For one thing, there is a pending court challenge to the FCC’s authority to repeal Net Neutrality. For another, the Senate has passed Senate Joint Resolution 52, officially disapproving the repeal. (Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress can undo recently created rules by federal agencies.)
It still has to pass in the House, and then be signed by the president, which makes its prospects dicey, but perhaps Mueller will have completed his investigation…
That said, the need for a vote in the House should make protection of Net Neutrality an issue in the upcoming midterms. Every Congressional candidate should be asked whether they will vote to reinstate the rules. In December of last year, the Hill reported that 83% of Americans support Net Neutrality.
(If there is a Justice Kavanaugh sitting on the Supreme Court, and the case reaches the high court, its prospects dim: Kavanaugh is on record opposing Net Neutrality on the grounds that Internet providers are publishers, and protected from government interference by the First Amendment. Equating companies like Verizon and AT&T with media outlets like the New York Times requires some convoluted logic. )
More encouraging, a number of states aren’t waiting for Congress or the courts. California, not surprisingly, looks to be first out of the gate with a “robust” protection of Net Neutrality, but a number of other states are in the process of crafting similar bills.
The latest version of the bill restores provisions that would prevent broadband providers from exempting some services from customers’ data caps and would ban providers from charging websites “access fees” to reach customers on a network or blocking or throttling content as it enters their networks from other networks, according to a fact sheet released by Wiener, Santiago, and state senator Kevin de León.
The enumerated practices are those that big telecom companies are expected to engage in now that the FCC has repealed national protections.
The new version of the bill needs to be approved by both houses of the California Legislature, then be signed by Governor Jerry Brown. From there, it could face legal challenges from the FCC, which prohibited states from adopting their own net neutrality protections when it repealed the national net neutrality rules. During the press conference, Santiago said the California bill would stand up to legal scrutiny. Legal experts have told WIRED they are unsure whether the FCC has authority to preempt state law on the issue.
As 83% of Americans understand (at least in this context), this administration’s indiscriminate war on all regulatory activity more often than not just favors big business over the rest of us.
IU Northwest sponsored several lectures during its recent Public Affairs Month. I was asked to participate; here is the talk I gave, slightly edited for length. (Regular readers will notice considerable repetition of themes I revisit often.)
Americans talk a lot about civic engagement. What we don’t talk much about is civic literacy, and why effective engagement requires that we understand how our government is supposed to function.
In fact, in the wake of the last election, we are just beginning to understand the extent to which civic engagement depends upon two characteristics of the American polity that are currently in dangerously short supply: a basic understanding of the American constitution and legal system—what I call civic literacy—and the old-fashioned but essential virtue of civility.
Over the past several years, America’s political environment has become steadily more toxic. Partisan passions and previously suppressed bigotries have erupted, overwhelming reasoned analysis. Cable television and the Internet allow people to choose their news; it encourages citizens to indulge in confirmation bias and construct their own preferred realities. During the 2016 election cycle, voters often seemed more interested in scoring points than engaging in substantive conversation. Civility was scorned as “political correctness” and racist and misogynist expression was excused as “telling it like it is.”
As discouraging as today’s incivility is, I am firmly convinced that a significant amount of the rancor and partisan nastiness we see comes less from actual differences of opinion and more from a tribalism that is abetted by civic illiteracy—widespread ignorance of the history and basic premises of American government. Clearly, in our age of high-stakes testing, schools are shortchanging civic education.
Why does civic literacy matter?
For one thing, when citizens don’t understand America’s foundational values and legal system, they don’t share a standard by which to evaluate the promises of candidates or the performance of public officials. During Donald Trump’s campaign for President, for example, he promised to uphold “Article 12” of the Constitution—an article that doesn’t exist. He said he would “make all Muslims register,” which would be a blatant violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. He was going to institute a national “stop and frisk” program that would have violated the 4thAmendment, and he accused Clinton of planning to unilaterally “get rid of” the Second Amendment—something she couldn’t legally do. (There’s a constitutionally-prescribed process for changing the constitution.) Since the election, his ignorance of such constitutional basics as separation of powers, Executive pardons, and freedom of the press have become even more obvious. Recently, he suggested that Congress could pass a law to overturn a Supreme Court decision that the line-item veto was unconstitutional.
Competent citizens would recognize situations in which a public official is betraying a total lack of familiarity with the Constitution and legal system he is sworn to uphold. Clearly, millions of Americans didn’t recognize that incongruity and unfamiliarity. Citizens’ ignorance is especially corrosive in a country as diverse as the U.S., because commitment to our Constitutional system is what unites us—it is what makes us Americans, rather than a collection of constituencies contending for power.
Only 26 percent of Americans can name the three branches of government. Fewer than half of 12th graders can describe federalism. Only 35% can identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. Only five percent of high school seniors can identify or explain checks on presidential power.
We can’t fix what we don’t understand.
Productive civic engagement is based on a basic but accurate understanding of the “rules of the game,” especially but not exclusively the Constitution and Bill of Rights– the documents that frame and constrain policy choices in the American system.
Pundits and politicians have spent the last thirty plus years denigrating both government and public service to citizens who are increasingly ill-equipped to evaluate those criticisms. With the current administration, we are paying the price for our neglect of civic education—not to mention our unwillingness to defend the importance and legitimacy of government and collective action supporting the common good.
The American Constitution was a product of the 18thCentury cultural, intellectual and philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. Many people know that the Enlightenment gave us science, empirical inquiry, and the “natural rights” and “social contract” theories of government, but what is less appreciated is that the Enlightenment also changed the way we understand and define human rights and individual liberty. Very few students—even graduate students—enter my classroom with any knowledge of the ways in which this enormously consequential period of intellectual history shaped the United States.
Students are taught in school that the Puritans and Pilgrims who settled the New World came to America for religious liberty; what they aren’t generally taught is how those settlers definedthat liberty. Puritans saw liberty as “freedom to do the right thing”—freedom to worship and obey the rightGod in thetruechurch, and their right to use the power of government to ensure that their neighbors toed the same line. The Founders who crafted our constitution some 150 years later were products of an intervening paradigm shift brought about by the Enlightenment, which ushered in a dramatically different definition of liberty: personal autonomy. Liberty became your right to do your ownthing, free of government interference, so long as you did not harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as you were willing to accord an equal liberty to others.
America’s constitutional system is based on an Enlightenment concept we call “negative liberty.” The Founders believed that fundamental rights are not given to us by government; instead, they believed that rights are “natural,” meaning that we are entitled to certain rights simply by virtue of being human (thus the term “human rights”) and that government has an obligation to respect and protect those inborn, inalienable rights.
Contrary to popular belief, the Bill of Rights does not grant us rights—it protectsthe rights to which we are entitled by virtue of being human against infringement by an overzealous government. The American Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things thatgovernment is forbidden to do.For example, the state can’t dictate our religious or political beliefs, search us without probable cause, or censor our expression—and government is forbidden from doing those things even whenpopular majorities favor such actions.
In our system, those constraints don’t apply to private, non-governmental actors. As I used to tell my kids, the government can’t control what you read, but your mother can. Public school officials can’t tell you to pray, but private or parochial school officials can. If government isn’t involved, neither is the Constitution. Private, non-governmental actors are subject to other laws, like civil rights laws, but since the Bill of Rights only restrains what government can do, only government can violate it. I’m constantly amazed by how many Americans don’t understand that. (It’s quite obvious that Donald Trump doesn’t.)
Unlike the liberties protected against government infringement by the Bill of Rights, civil rights laws represent our somewhat belated recognition that if we care about human rights, just preventing government from discriminating isn’t enough. If private employers can refuse to hire African-Americans or women, if landlords can refuse to rent units in multifamily buildings to LGBTQ folks, if restaurants can refuse to serve Jews or Muslims, then society is not respecting the rights of those citizens and we aren’t fulfilling the obligations of the social contract that was another major contribution of Enlightenment philosophy.
The Enlightenment concept of human rights and John Locke’s theory of a social contract between citizens and their government challenged longtime assumptions about the divine right of the kings. Gradually, people came to be seen as citizens, rather than subjects. This new approach helped to undermine the once-common practice of assigning social status on the basis of group identity. It also implied that citizens have an affirmative responsibility to participate in democratic decision-making.
The once-radical idea that each of us is born with an equal claim to fundamental rights has other consequences. For one thing, it means that governments have to treat their citizens as individuals, not as members of a group. America was the first country to base its concept of citizenship on an individual’s civic behavior,rather than gender, race, religion or other identity or affiliation. So long as we obey the laws, pay our taxes, and generally conduct ourselves in a way that doesn’t endanger or disadvantage others, we are all entitled to full civic equality, no matter what our race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or other identity. When our country has lived up to that guarantee of equal civic rights, we have unleashed the productivity of previously marginalized groups and contributed significantly to American prosperity. And I think it is fair to say that—despite setbacks, and despite the stubborn persistence of racial resentment, religious intolerance and misogyny, we have made substantial progress toward creating a culture that acknowledges the equal humanity of the people who make up our diverse nation.
That brings us back to civic engagement, because in addition to equality before the law, respect for rights also requires democratic equality—an equal right to participate in the enterprise of self-government. We now recognize—or at least give lip service to—the proposition that every citizen’s vote should count, but on this dimension, we not only aren’t making progress, we’re regressing, as anyone who follows the news can attest.
One element of civic literacy that gets short shrift even among educators is the immense influence of systems in a society—an appreciation of the way in which institutions and conventions and laws shape how we understand our environments. Right now, a number of longstanding, systemic practices are obscuring the degree to which American democracy is becoming steadily less democratic—and the extent to which we are denying citizens the right to participate meaningfully in self-government.
Vote suppression has been on the rise, especially but not exclusively in Southern states that have not been required to get preclearance from the Justice Department since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Thanks to population shifts, the current operation of the Electoral College gives disproportionate weight to the votes of white, rural voters, and discounts the franchise of urban Americans. (Estimates are that each rural vote is worth 1 1/3 of each urban vote). Unequal resources have always been a political problem, but ever since Buckley v. Valeo, which equated money with speech,and especially since Citizens United, which essentially held that corporations are people, money spent by special interests has overwhelmed the votes and opinions of average citizens. The outsized influence of the NRA is a recently prominent example.
The most pernicious erosion of “one person, one vote” however, has come as a consequence of gerrymandering, or partisan redistricting. There are no “good guys” in this story—gerrymandering is a crime of opportunity, and both parties are guilty.
Those of you in this room know the drill; after each census, state governments redraw state and federal district lines to reflect population changes. The party in control of the state legislature at the time controls the redistricting process, and its legislators draw districts that maximize their own electoral prospects and minimize those of the opposing party. Partisan redistricting goes all the way back to Elbridge Gerry, who gave Gerrymandering its name—and he signed the Declaration of Independence—but the process became far more sophisticated and precise with the advent of computers, leading to a situation which has been aptly described as legislators choosing their voters, rather than the other way around.
Academic researchers and political reformers alike blame gerrymandering for electoral non-competitiveness and political polarization. A 2008 book co-authored by Norman Orenstein and Thomas Mann argued that the decline in competition fostered by gerrymandering has entrenched partisan behavior and diminished incentives for compromise and bipartisanship.
Mann and Orenstein are political scientists who have written extensively about redistricting, and about “packing” (creating districts with supermajorities of the opposing party) “cracking” (distributing members of the opposing party among several districts to ensure that they don’t have a majority in any of them) and “tacking” (expanding the boundaries of a district to include a desirable group from a neighboring district). They have tied redistricting to the advantages of incumbency, and they have also pointed out that the reliance by House candidates upon maps drawn by state-level politicians has reinforced what they call “partisan rigidity” –the increasing nationalization of the political parties.
Interestingly, one study they cited investigated whether representatives elected from districts drawn by independent commissions become less partisan. Contrary to the researchers’ initial expectations, they found that politically independent redistricting did reduce partisanship, and in statistically significant ways. Even when the same party maintained its majority, elected officials were more likely to co-operate across party lines.
Perhaps the most pernicious effect of gerrymandering is the proliferation of safe seats.The perception that some seats are “safe” for one party or another breeds voter apathy and reduces political participation. After all, why should citizens vote, or get involved, if the result is foreordained? Why donate to a sure loser? (For that matter, unless you are trying to buy political influence for some reason, why donate to a sure winner?) What is the incentive to volunteer or vote when it obviously won’t matter? It isn’t only voters who lack incentives for participation, either: it becomes increasingly difficult for the “sure loser” party to recruit credible candidates. As a result, in many of these races, voters are left with no genuine or meaningful choice—the perception of inevitability ends up creating the reality, because if everyone in a safe district were to vote, it probably wouldn’t be safe.
Ironically, the anemic voter turnout that gerrymandering produces leads to handwringing about citizen apathy, usually characterized as a civic or moral deficiency. But voter apathy may instead be a highly rational response to noncompetitive politics. People save their efforts for places where those efforts count, and thanks to the increasing lack of competitiveness in our electoral system, those places often do not include the voting booth.
If the ability to participate meaningfully in self-governance is a bedrock of democracy, partisan game-playing that makes elections meaningless should be seen as an assault on both democracy and the American system.
Safe districts do more than disenfranchise voters; they are the single greatest driver of governmental dysfunction. In safe districts, conventional wisdom has convinced us that the only way to oppose an incumbent is in the primary–and that almost always means that the challenge will come from the “flank” or extreme. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, the battle takes place among the party faithful, the so-called “base”—and they tend to be the most ideological voters. So Republican incumbents are challenged from the Right and Democratic incumbents are attacked from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they create a powerful incentive for incumbents to “toe the line” in order to placate the most rigid elements of their respective parties. Instead of the system working as intended, with both parties nominating candidates they think will be able to appeal to the broad middle, the system produces nominees who represent the most extreme voters on each side of the philosophical divide. If you wonder why Republicans in Congress aren’t standing up to President Trump, the answer is that they are in effect being held hostage by that party “base”—a small group of empowered, rigidly ideological voters intent on punishing any deviation from orthodoxy and/or any hint of compromise.
Of course, vote suppression and civic ignorance aren’t the only reasons for a lack of civic engagement. There are other challenges to equal political participation. Poverty is one. A citizen working two or three jobs just to put food on the table doesn’t have much time for civic engagement, and in Indiana, that’s a lot of people.
Poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor threatens social stability and democratic decision-making in a number of ways, but one clear effect is that people engaged in a daily struggle for subsistence are unable to participate fully in the political activities that characterize democratic societies, and as a result, the national political conversation is skewed. The voices of the poor aren’t heard.
Poverty and inequality are huge problems in America right now, but they certainly aren’t our only challenges. Climate change, the loss of jobs to automation, the worrisome tribalism and racism that is tearing at our national fabric, inadequate funding of public education, the multiple, obvious flaws in our justice system…a majority of Americans realize that these and other major problems—far from being solved or even addressed—are being exacerbated by an administration that ranges from inept to corrupt.
Let me end by acknowledging that the 2016 election has also had positive consequences: for one thing, this administration’s bumbling is reminding the American people of the importance of competent government, and the damage that can be done when those in office have no idea what they are doing. The election has also rebutted—pretty conclusively— the widespread belief that any successful businessperson or celebrity can run the government. People who would never go to a dentist who hadn’t gone to dental school or filled a cavity were nevertheless perfectly willing to turn the nation and the nuclear codes over to someone who had absolutely no experience with or knowledge of government. We shouldn’t be surprised by the result.
Most important, however, the election unleashed more civic engagement and political activism than I’ve seen in my adult life.
The question is, can this impressive wave of civic engagement turn the tide? Can engaged Americans reverse the declines in civility and civic literacy, and reinvigorate the American idea?
Reviving America’s democratic norms, turning back the assaults on the rule of law and equal access to the ballot box, fixing the gerrymandering that feeds apathy and makes too many votes meaningless…the list of needed repairs to the system is long, and it will require political action and persistent civic engagement by an informed,civically-literate citizenry.
Two of the most clear-eyed and knowledgable observers of the American legislature have once again weighed in on the disaster that is the current Congress.
In the past three days, Republican leaders in the Senate scrambled to corral votes for a tax bill that the Joint Committee on Taxation said would add $1 trillion to the deficit — without holding any meaningful committee hearings. Worse, Republican leaders have been blunt about their motivation: to deliver on their promises to wealthy donors, and down the road, to use the leverage of huge deficits to cut and privatize Medicare and Social Security…
Eleven years ago, we published a book called “The Broken Branch,” which we subtitled “How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track.” Embedded in that subtitle were two assumptions: first, that Congress as an institution — which is to say, both parties, equally — is at fault; and second, that the solution is readily at hand. In 2017, the Republicans’ scandalous tax bill is only the latest proof that both assumptions are wrong.
Mann and Ornstein are blunt: today’s Republicans are to blame for destroying Congressional integrity and credibility. They point to three tactics that have brought us to this point: the constant demonization of government and the norms of lawmaking; the so-called “Obama effect”; and the use of the right-wing media echo chamber to keep their “troops” enraged.
As they described the “Obama effect”
When Mr. Bush became president, Democrats worked with him to enact sweeping education reform early on and provided the key votes to pass his top priority, tax cuts. With President Barack Obama, it was different. While many argued that the problem was that Mr. Obama failed to schmooze enough with Republicans in Congress, we saw a deliberate Republican strategy to oppose all of his initiatives and frame his attempts to compromise as weak or inauthentic. The Senate under the majority leader Mitch McConnell weaponized the filibuster to obstruct legislation, block judges and upend the policy process. The Obama effect had an ominous twist, an undercurrent of racism that was itself embodied in the “birther” movement led by Donald Trump.
My only quibble with this analysis is the use of the term “undercurrent.” From my vantage point, the racism was anything but subtle. And as numerous people have pointed out, Trump’s only discernible agenda is to reverse anything and everything his black predecessor did. Unlike many observers, however, Mann and Ornstein do not see Trumpism as a deviation from past GOP priorities and practices:
Mr. Trump’s election and behavior during his first 10 months in office represent not a break with the past but an extreme acceleration of a process that was long underway in conservative politics. The Republican Party is now rationalizing and enabling Mr. Trump’s autocratic, kleptocratic, dangerous and downright embarrassing behavior in hopes of salvaging key elements of its ideological agenda: cutting taxes for the wealthy (as part of possibly the worst tax bill in American history), hobbling the regulatory regime, gutting core government functions and repealing Obamacare without any reasonable plan to replace it.
Perhaps the most important point they make is that the chaos and incompetence of this White House, and the elimination or reduction of important government functions by disastrous cabinet and agency appointments, is being encouraged and enabled by Congressional Republicans.
The failure of Republican members of Congress to resist the anti-democratic behavior of President Trump — including holding not a single hearing on his and his team’s kleptocracy — is cringe-worthy. A few Republican senators have spoken up, but occasional words have not been matched by any meaningful deeds. Only conservative intellectuals have acknowledged the bankruptcy of the Republican Party.
We have never suggested that Democrats are angels and Republicans devils. Parties exist to win elections and organize government, and they are shaped by the interests, ideas and donors that constitute their coalitions. Neither party is immune from a pull to the extreme.
But the imbalance today is striking, and frightening. Our democracy requires vigorous competition between two serious and ideologically distinct parties, both of which operate in the realm of truth, see governing as an essential and ennobling responsibility, and believe that the acceptance of republican institutions and democratic values define what it is to be an American. The Republican Party must reclaim its purpose.
What Mann and Ornstein didn’t do in this hard-hitting and absolutely accurate article is tell readers how they are supposed to make the GOP “reclaim its purpose.” For my part, I can only see one way: the GOP must be crushed at the polls in November of 2018. Only a truly massive rejection by American voters will get the message across.
They don’t just need to be beaten; they need to be crushed. And then we all have to pray that democratic and constitutional norms and rational public policies can be salvaged.
From Reuters (as well as a number of other media outlets) we learn that
President Donald Trump is expected to rescind an Obama administration policy that protects from deportation nearly 800,000 immigrants who as children entered the country illegally, setting the stage for a fight with U.S. business leaders and lawmakers over tough immigration policy.
The article goes on to detail the negative response of the business community to the proposed action, and economists’ prediction that such a move would hurt economic growth and depress tax revenues.
Leave aside the economic consequences. Trump’s willingness to inflict immense human misery is what’s truly appalling. This would be the most immoral action taken thus far by a profoundly immoral administration.
The targets of this move are not criminals. They aren’t even immigration scofflaws; they didn’t choose to come to the United States illegally. They were children. They were brought here by their parents. Most of them have never known another home; significant numbers speak only English. They are productive citizens, small businesspeople and dependable employees, whose value to their communities has been amply documented. Why on earth would Trump want to deport them?
I think we all know the answer to that.
Reuters tells us that the overwhelming majority of the Dreamer immigrants came from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Most are brown, and brown and black people are by definition un-American “others” to the White Supremacists, neo-Nazis and other assorted bigots who are Trump’s core supporters.
Trump’s utter lack of human empathy has been obvious for a long time; it was prominently on display during his trip to Houston. So it is pointless to expect him to understand or care about the wrenching reality of his proposed order.
Hundreds of thousands of families in the US are anxiously awaiting a decision from President Donald Trump that could change the course of their lives. Will they lose their jobs? Will they have to drop out of college? Will immigration agents knock on their doors to kick them out of the country they consider home? And what will happen to their American kids if they have to leave?…
In the five years since DACA went into effect, thousands of undocumented immigrants have been able to go to college, get driver’s licenses and get jobs and pay taxes for the first time. Many now have their own children, who are American citizens. Parents with DACA are wrestling with the question of what to tell their children, and whether it would be best to leave them in the United States or take them away if they are forced to leave.
When comprehensive immigration reform once again failed to pass Congress, Obama addressed the situation of the so-called “Dreamers” with an executive order creating DACA–Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It allowed a defined subset of young undocumented immigrants to get temporary Social Security numbers and deportation protection. They had to pass criminal background checks, pay taxes, and renew their DACA status every two years. The program was a temporary fix, but during the campaign, Clinton vowed to maintain it.
Trump, of course, made anti-immigrant rhetoric the centerpiece of a campaign that pandered, bigly, to rightwing bigotries.
It is heartbreaking to read the comments of DACA recipients interviewed in the Vox article. These are good people who are in an untenable situation because for years, Congress has consistently failed to pass an immigration bill. Most recently, rather than give President Obama a political “win,” the GOP simply blocked efforts to negotiate a legislative solution to a problem everyone recognized.
Now we have a President whose terrifying ignorance of government is matched only by his inability to think of anyone but himself. If Congress cannot be moved to action by the plight of 800,000 innocent DACA immigrants, there’s no reason to believe they will ever summon the moral courage to defy this bigot-in-chief.
This is a test, and I’m very much afraid America will fail it.
As a current Internet meme puts it: It’s no longer about whether Trump has any decency. It’s about whether we do.
In his Phoenix rally, Donald Trump doubled down on his appeal to racism–both through a self-serving (and inaccurate) defense of his remarks after Charlottesville and in a coy reference to a potential pardon for notorious Arizona racist Joe Arpaio. It was red meat for his supporters.
The question is: who are those supporters?
I have previously expressed my belief that Trump’s election owed much more to racial resentment than to economic distress. But I do understand the connections between cultural and economic anxiety.
It is true that Trump voters on average were better-off financially than Clinton voters (and it is also true, and worth repeating, that there were three million more of the latter than the former), but as sociologists will confirm, economic anxiety is not the same thing as economic deprivation. And multiple studies confirm that anxiety and insecurity trigger bigotries and other behaviors that are suppressed in less tumultuous times.
LAST year over 102,000 people died in nearly 50 armed conflicts across the world, according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a think-tank. Much of this violence is caused by tensions between ethnic groups—two-thirds of civil wars have been fought along ethnic lines since 1946. Yet historians differ over whether cultural differences or economic pressures best explain how tensions explode into violence.
A new study by Robert Warren Anderson, Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama suggests that, historically, economic shocks were more strongly associated with outbreaks of violence directed against Jews than scholars had previously thought.
The research cited an intriguing example: some 57% of people living in medieval England relied on farming, and a decline in average temperatures of only a third of a degree increased the probability of a pogrom or expulsion by 50% over the next five years. In other words, incidence of violence against Jews weren’t caused by religiously-motivated anti-Semitism. That animus was undeniably– and constantly– present, but its eruptions were triggered by social and economic ills.
Echoes of these patterns are discernible today. Many economists have linked the weather—particularly droughts and heatwaves in agricultural economies—to outbreaks of intercommunal violence in developing countries. Another paper published last year, by Carl-Friedrich Schleussner and his colleagues, found that between 1980 and 2010 23% of civil wars coincided with climate-related disasters in countries with deep ethnic divides. Global warming may worsen this problem further. The lesson of history is that better political institutions can help soothe tensions.
If better political institutions can soothe tensions, it stands to reason that worse political environments can encourage them.
The emergence of the so-called “alt-right” (and no, Mr. Trump, there really isn’t such a thing as an “alt-left”) is widely attributed to Trump’s barely-veiled encouragement of racism and other forms of bigotry, the expression of which was preceded by the years of GOP “dog whistles” that have become one of the party’s routine political tools in the wake of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
The success of that strategy required both pre-existing bigotry–mostly latent, but undeniably potent–and an increase in appeals to social and/or economic anxiety.
Social anxiety in an age of constant and accelerating change is a given. There isn’t much lawmakers can do about that. But they can ameliorate economic insecurity. Legislators can strengthen America’s porous and inadequate social safety net; they can expand access to healthcare; they can make the tax code simpler and fairer; they can raise the minimum wage; they can fashion rules to ensure that the water in our cities remains lead-free and drinkable and the air breathable (and they can require Scott Pruitt’s EPA to abide by those rules).
In short, lawmakers can remove a significant number of the uncertainties that feed economic anxiety. They can also act responsibly and constitutionally, sending a reassuring signal that America’s institutions are functioning properly. None of that, however, is happening.
Nero is said to have fiddled while Rome burned. Congress could give him lessons.
