Tag Archives: diversity

Trust

Back in 2009, I published Distrust, American Style: Diversity and the Crisis of Public Confidence. The book was largely written as a rebuttal to Robert Putnam’s argument that America’s diversity was the cause of diminished levels of public trust. That trust levels were (and remain) troublingly low was incontrovertible, but I argued that the culprit wasn’t diversity, but a pervasive loss of faith in a wide variety of American institutions–especially government. I wrote then and believe now that the remedy lies in policy reforms that would make American government (and businesses, nonprofits and religious institutions) worthy of public trust.

Rather than attempting to limit diversity through divisive measures such as building a wall between the United States and Mexico or imposing stricter immigration quotas, I emphasized the need to begin with government reforms: elimination of gerrymandering, electoral wins that reflect the popular vote, and proper functioning of checks and balances. (And this was before the horrifying decisions rendered by a Supreme Court dominated by Trump appointees.)

Research confirms the importance of public trust. Trump’s nasty, gutter-level approach to politics is only possible because we have seen a precipitous erosion of that foundation–the loss of a widespread belief that most people in government and the political class have the public interest at heart and are ethically and intellectually competent.

Because I spent so much time immersed in the literature documenting the importance of trust, I was interested to come across an article from the Guardian about Denmark, and how it became the world’s most trusting country. As the sub-head read, “There are real benefits to a society where people feel safe enough to leave their babies and bikes on the street. How have the Danes achieved this level of faith in their fellow citizens?”

Over the years, Denmark has emerged as the good faith capital of the world. Nearly 74% of Danes believe “most people can be trusted” – more than any other nationality. On wider metrics, such as social trust (trusting a stranger) and civic trust (trusting authority), Denmark also scores highest in the world, with the other Nordic countries close behind.

The article details the various ways Denmark’s trust manifests itself, but the effect is summarized in a statement by one young person:“You have the feeling that people have goodwill. I think it’s a top-down reaction. We have a system that supports, and that creates the baseline for our trust in each other.”

Exactly. It’s the integrity of the system.

America’s White Supremicists attribute Nordic public trust to the relative homogeneity of the population, but research suggests a different source: the welfare state.

 “That was founded very much on mutual trust,” Rosenkilde says. Denmark has a universal model of welfare, which holds that all citizens have the right to certain fundamental benefits and services. In the UK and the US, we have a “residual model”: bare minimum benefits for the poorest and skeleton services for everyone but the richest. “I think the whole idea of people being as equal as possible is very much underpinning this trust,” Rosenkilde continues. “We have this connectedness because you don’t have a lot of people that are very poor or very rich.” Equality, Rosenkilde says, has decreased over the past three decades, as Denmark is caught up in the neoliberal drag of the globe: its Gini coefficient has crept up, but by that measure it’s still the sixth most equal country in the OECD.“

A nation is an imagined community,” Korsgaard says. “What does that mean? It means I’m able to think of myself as part of a community with someone I don’t know. And in order to do that, they have to look more or less like me. They cannot be super-different when it comes to class.” (Emphasis mine.)

Researchers admit that Denmark struggled as immigration made the population more diverse, but they emphasize the importance of class homogeneity–the absence of huge gaps in income–as a major reason the country has been able to cope with other kinds of heterogeneity. As one scholar put it, diversity required renegotiation. “OK, you can be part of this community, even though you’re not white, even though your birth language is not Danish,’ and luckily, I think that is more or less settled.”

As the article concludes, “This really is the most unbelievably equal country, and while trust is a constantly negotiated state, that appears to be a good place to start.”

In November, if we are very lucky, perhaps the U.S. will once again have a functioning government that can address income inequality and begin to restore both the rule of law and public trust.

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Bigotry And Business

Every day, I become more convinced that racism is the foundation of MAGA Republicanism. I do give grudging kudos to MAGA’s activism on behalf of its expansive hatreds–all evidence points to the minority status of these angry White Nationalists, but they are unrelenting–and frequently successful– in their efforts to combat any movement toward civility and inclusion.

Most of us are aware of MAGA’s successful efforts last year during Pride month to cow Target for having the temerity to carry Pride merchandise and thus mortally offending the “Christian” warriors. Those pious folks also rose up to attack Bud Light for working with a transgender person. (Somewhere, there must be an office of “watchers” ready to unleash the troops whenever some business has the nerve to market to “undesirable” folks….)

The most recent example of which I’m aware is a business called Tractor Supply.

Tractor Supply (with which I am wholly unfamiliar) sells animal feed, tractor parts and power tools. It has more than 2,230 stores nationwide, and has been recognized for its inclusiveness; Bloomberg praised it for promoting gender equality, while Newsweek called it one of the best U.S. companies for diversity.

Inclusion was evidently the company’s big sin. The haters came out in force.

The company came under scrutiny this month when conservative podcast host Robby Starbuck denounced Tractor Supply’s diversity and climate policies. An employee recently had messaged him to complain that the company was supporting LGBTQ+ groups, Starbuck told The Washington Post.
 
Starbuck visited Tractor Supply weekly to buy provisions for his farm in Franklin, Tenn., he said, but wasn’t comfortable with the company putting money toward inclusion programs.
“Start buying what you can from other places until Tractor Supply makes REAL changes,” he wrote on X on June 6.

Other customers responded to say they would join the boycott, and the company’s share price fell by 5 percent in the past month, according to the Financial Times.

Tractor Supply backed off, announcing that it will end all “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” programs and will no longer support LGBTQ and global warming causes.

That, of course, enraged a different part of the customer base. A number of customers have indicated an intent to stop doing business with Tractor Supply, and several have issued statements indicating disappointment with the company’s willingness to buckle under. As one wrote, “Tractor Supply’s embarrassing capitulation to the petty whims of anti-LGBTQ extremists puts the company out of touch with the vast majority of Americans who support their LGBTQ friends, family, and neighbors.”

Tractor Supply is a predominantly rural enterprise, which means it faces a more formidable challenge than businesses that cater to a largely urban customer base. As a recent study has found, a growing aspect of rural identity has added to America’s political and cultural divide.

Jacobs and Shea pinpoint the 1980s as when this identity began to crystallize. In different regions, cost pressures on family farms and ranches, suburban sprawl, or water inaccessibility squeezed rural communities economically, which coincided with terrible depictions of country life in popular culture. Just as national news outlets emerged through cable and the internet, regional papers closed, and divisive national narratives enveloped local political context. Separate localized identities merged into a national common rural identity

Simultaneously, globalization shuttered small manufacturers central to communities’ economies, so younger generations moved to bigger cities, and social issues and addiction grew. For Cramer, a key component of this rural identity is a resentment from the perception of being overlooked by government. It has furthered party polarization as rural Americans increasingly vote Republican and see the world opposite from group identities associated with Democrats and vice versa. 

Rural America is whiter, older, and more religious than urban America, but the researchers found that–even after controlling for those factors– living in rural America independently added to support for the Republican party. 

One of the most conspicuous aspects of MAGA Republicanism has been the willingness of its adherents to “act out.” In addition to the more-or-less organized bands of truly dangerous crazies like the Proud Boys and other neo-fascist groups,  members of groups like Moms for Liberty and the American Family Association have become increasingly belligerent, increasingly apt to insist that the schools, libraries and businesses they patronize privilege their particular bigotries. They are primarily active in the rural precincts where Republicanism is high and the fact that they don’t represent majority opinion even there is less obvious.

It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for the businesses caught in the middle–damned by MAGA if they stick to their purported principles, and shunned by tolerant Americans if they abandon them.

And we wonder why success in retail is so elusive…..

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Those Alternate Realities

Paul Krugman had a recent column in the New York Times headlined “Why Does the Right Hate America?”

Although the headline was clearly meant as snark, it wasn’t wrong:  at its base, the division between MAGA voters and the rest of us rests upon MAGA’s clear distaste–even hatred–for the reality of today’s diverse America. That’s really what those anti-“woke” battles are all about; a not insignificant number of American citizens desperately want to “return” to an America that they mis-remember, an America that only existed in a Rightwing fever dream– a manufactured, inaccurate nostalgia for a world that privileged White Christian males.

Krugman began by referencing an essay by Damon Linker that profiled conservative intellectuals. Those writers, he argued, helped to explain where the MAGA right is coming from, and they paint a dire portrait of contemporary America.

For example, Patrick Deneen’s “Regime Change” describes America thus: “Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight. Cratering rates of childbirth, rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair,’ widespread addictions to pharmaceuticals and electronic distractions testify to the prevalence of a dull ennui and psychic despair.” And he attributes all of this to the malign effects of liberalism.

When I read such things, I always wonder, do these people ever go outside and look around? Do they have any sense, from personal memory or reading, of what America was like 30 or 50 years ago?

I am old enough to remember the America of the 1950s and 60s, and like Krugman, my reaction to the quoted paragraph is incredulous.

I clearly recall separate drinking fountains for Whites and Blacks, the “Restricted” billboards on housing developments (warning that Jews and Blacks would be excluded), the rules prohibiting women from opening charge accounts or obtaining mortgages without a male co-signer…

Krugman is a bit younger; he references the Seventies, noting that these right-wing critiques of modern America seem “rooted not just in dystopian fantasies but in dystopian fantasies that are generations out of date. There seems to be a part of the conservative mind for which it’s always 1975.”

Start with those blighted cities. I’m old enough to remember the 1970s and 1980s, when Times Square was a cesspool of drugs, prostitution and crime. These days it’s a bit too Disneyland for my tastes, but the transformation has been incredible.

 OK, that’s something of a Big Apple-centric view, and not every U.S. city has done as well as New York (although it’s remarkable how many on the right insist on believing that one of America’s safest places is an urban hellscape). Chicago, for example, has done a lot worse. But between 1990 and the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic there was a broad-based U.S. urban resurgence, largely driven by the return to city life of a significant number of affluent Americans, who increasingly valued the amenities cities can offer and were less worried by violent crime, which plunged after 1990.

True, some of the fall in crime was reversed during the pandemic, but it seems to be receding again. And Americans are coming back to urban centers: Working from home has reduced downtown foot traffic during the week, but weekend visitors are more or less back to pre-pandemic levels.

This doesn’t look like blight to me.

What about family life? Indeed, fewer Americans are getting married than in the past. What you may not know is that since around 1980 there has been a huge decline in divorce rates. The most likely explanation, according to the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, is that expanded job opportunities for women led to a temporary surge in divorces as women left unhappy marriages, which receded as marriages adjusted to the new social realities. I take this to mean that during the “good old days” there was a lot of quiet marital misery, some of which is now behind us.

Oh, and when we talk about declining birthrates, we should note that a significant factor has been a huge decline in teenage pregnancies, especially among women 15 to 17. Is this an indicator of moral decay?

There’s more, and I agree with all of it.

As Krugman concedes, we Americans do still have big problems. (As he also points out, those “deaths of despair” and similar symptoms of dysfunction are mostly artifacts of rural areas of the country, not the urban “hellholes” that MAGA folks love to hate–those “cesspools” where uppity women and Black people and other minorities have the nerve to flourish…)

I couldn’t agree more with Krugman’s conclusion:

Indeed, some people on the right clearly hate the America we actually live in, a complex, diverse nation, as opposed to the simpler, purer nation of their imaginations.

Says it all….

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Political Diversity

In a recent essay for the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie traced the arc of GOP radicalization.

He noted an undeniable fact: while the Democratic Party overall is more liberal than it has previously been,  it is not nearly as ideologically uniform as the GOP. Neither does it employ a doctrinaire liberalism as a litmus test in most Democratic Party primaries. As he points out,

Joe Biden, for example, is the paradigmatic moderate Democrat and, currently, the president of the United States and leader of the Democratic Party, with ample support across the party establishment. And in Congress, there’s no liberal equivalent to the House Freedom Caucus: no group of nihilistic, obstruction-minded left-wing lawmakers. When Democrats were in the majority, the Congressional Progressive Caucus was a reliable partner of President Biden’s and a constructive force in the making of legislation. If the issue is polarization, then it seems to be driving only one of our two parties toward the abyss.

What accounts for the fact that the Democratic Party still operates as a normal American political party while the Republican Party so clearly doesn’t? Why do Democratic moderates continue to hold the levers of power within the national party, while –as we’ve just seen– extremists completely control the GOP?

One important reason for this fact is the heterogeneity of the Democratic coalition. To piece together a majority in the Electoral College, or to gain control of the House or Senate, Democrats have to win or make inroads with a cross-section of the American public: young people, affluent suburbanites, Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters, as well as a sizable percentage of the white working class. To lose ground with any one of these groups is to risk defeat, whether it’s in the race for president or an off-year election for governor.

Political pundits often note the problems posed by the Democrats’ diversity : phrases like “circular firing squad” and “it’s like herding cats” come to mind. But Bouie reminds readers that the elements that make consensus difficult are also small-d democratic positives:

A broad coalition also means a broad set of interests and demands, some of which are in tension with one another. This has at least two major implications for the internal workings of the Democratic Party. First, it makes for a kind of brokerage politics in which the most powerful Democratic politicians are often those who can best appeal to and manage the various groups and interests that make up the Democratic coalition. And second, it gives the Democratic Party a certain amount of self-regulation. Move too far in the direction of one group or one interest, and you may lose support among the others.

Governing a diverse polity requires an ability to compromise, to operate and negotiate among diverse needs and interests. Whatever terms describe today’s GOP, “diverse” is not one of them.

Consider the demographics of the Republican coalition. A majority of voters in both parties are white Americans. But whereas the Democratic Party electorate was 61 percent white in the 2020 presidential election, the Republican one was 86 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Similarly, there is much less religious diversity among Republicans — more than a third of Republican voters in 2020 were white evangelical Protestants — than there is among Democrats. And while we tend to think of Democrats as entirely urban and suburban, the proportion of rural voters in the Democratic Party as a whole is actually greater than the proportion of urban voters in the Republican Party. There is, in other words, less geographic diversity among Republicans as well.

The GOP is also ideologically monolithic– almost uniformly conservative. There are plenty of moderate Democrats; as Bouie notes, however, moderate Republican politicians are virtually extinct. “The Republican Party exists almost entirely for the promotion of a distinct and doctrinaire ideology of hierarchy and antigovernment retrenchment.”

The key issue for conservative voters and conservative media isn’t whether a Republican politician can pass legislation or manage a government or bridge political divides; the key question is whether a Republican politician is sufficiently committed to the ideology, whatever that means in the moment…

Outdated electoral systems incentivize even further radicalization.

The Republican Party is practically engineered to produce politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And there’s no brake — no emergency off switch — that might slow or stop the car. The one thing that might get the Republican Party back on the rails is a major and unanticipated shift in the structure of American politics that forces it to adapt to new voters, new constituencies and new conditions.

Only if massive losses force the GOP to diversify will the party be capable of participating in democratic governance. Today, it’s just a monolithic tribe.

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Me And Paul (Krugman)

When I quote Paul Krugman, which I often do, it’s almost always for an observation about economics. After all, Krugman won his Nobel Prize for economics, and his columns in the New York Times and the subjects he addresses in his newsletter routinely focus on economic issues.

In a recent column, however, Krugman “sang my song”– explaining why many Americans have deserted rural and suburban residencies in order to live in densely populated urban neighborhoods.

He also addressed the impact of America’s rural/urban split on the country’s political culture wars.

 I have an apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. It’s a very densely populated area — according to census data the area within a one-mile radius of my place has around 100 residents per acre, or more than 60,000 per square mile. This dense (and, to be honest, affluent) population supports a huge variety of businesses: restaurants, groceries, hardware stores, specialty shops of all kinds. Most of what you might want to do or buy is within easy walking distance.

In effect, then, I live in what some Europeans — most famously Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris — call “a 15-minute city.” It’s a catchy if slightly misleading name for a concept that urbanists have long advocated: walkable cities that take advantage of the possibilities of density.

Modern politics being what it is, alas, it’s also a concept that has been caught up in the culture wars and become the subject of wild conspiracy theories. And as usual the people who yell loudest about “freedom” are actually the ones who want to practice coercion, preventing other Americans from living in ways they disapprove of.

I often come across articles glorifying rural life, and promoting movement “back to the earth.” Like Krugman, however, my husband and I are urban people. We lived many years in historic, near-downtown neighborhoods, and when we got too old to comfortably navigate our last (three-story) house, we moved to an apartment in the very center of our city’s downtown.

Krugman’s column described what has been so liberating about that move: urban life is easy. As he points out, “Running errands is a snap; because you walk most places, you don’t worry about traffic jams or parking spaces.”

And those perceptions of crime and grime? They are simply wrong.

Krugman’s New York is one of the safest places in America, and as the Indianapolis Business Journal recently confirmed, Indianapolis’ downtown is the safest area in our city. (It’s pretty clean, too!)

There’s an unwritten rule in American politics that it’s OK for politicians to disparage big cities and their residents in a way that would be considered unforgivable if anyone did the same for rural areas…. There seems to be a widespread sense that only people living a car-centered lifestyle, or a pickup truck-centered lifestyle, are real Americans….

Now, I don’t know how many Americans would choose the walkable-city lifestyle if it were widely available, but surely many more than are living it now. Unfortunately, urban planning — for cities are always planned, one way or another — is yet another casualty of the politics of grievance and paranoia.

That last observation really hits home.

In conversations with people who are clearly flummoxed by our choice to live downtown, we often hear concerns centered on the very elements of urban life that we celebrate. In Indiana, the “buckle of the Bible Belt”), the center of a city is where you find the most diverse population mix–and for far too many Hoosiers and other Americans, diversity equals danger.

It must be dangerous downtown, because there are so many people who don’t look like me…

There’s a reason apartments and condominiums are being built at a rapid pace in the city core. It’s an attractive, vibrant, quintessentially urban place to live. Even with  constant residential construction, occupancy levels are 93- 95%.

When weather permits, my husband and I like to sit in the outdoor/sidewalk section of the restaurant next door to our building, and watch the young, multi-ethnic crowds walk and bike (and scooter) by. We look up Massachusetts Avenue at the multitude of restaurants, bars and shops we regularly patronize.

In an era where media is filled with reports of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and homophobia, our little patch of urban life remains welcoming and enthusiastically “woke.”  And I’m gratified to report that the young people who dominate residency in our apartment building are unfailingly polite and helpful to us “old folks.”

We aren’t the only Americans drawn to what urban life has to offer: According to the Department of Agriculture, in 2020, only 14 percent of the U.S. population still lived in the rural counties that continue to dominate American politics and dictate public policy.

I hope I live long enough to see fair representation for the remaining 86% of us.

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