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katherineharron

The religious roots of today's partisan divide - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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shared by katherineharron on 22 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The religious and cultural divide between Democratic and Republican voters is widening, pointing toward even greater partisan polarization and social tension as the nation careens into a possible impeachment vote against President Donald Trump and potential record turnout in the 2020 presidential election.
  • An extensive national study released Monday by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute showed that voters in each party now hold antithetical views not only on issues that dominate the immediate political debate -- such as health care and impeachment -- but also on deeper changes in the nation's demography, culture, race relations and gender roles, according to detailed results the institute provided to CNN.
  • This separation in attitudes is rooted in an even deeper divergence between the two sides: While whites who identify as Christians still represent about two-thirds of all Republicans, they now compose only one-fourth of Democrats, according to results provided by the Pew Research Center from a new study it released last week. Americans unaffiliated with any religion, and racial minorities who identify as Christians, now each make up a bigger share of the Democratic coalition than white Christians do, Pew found. Both groups remain only relatively minor components of the GOP coalition.
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  • On the religious front, just as in those other arenas, the groups that favor Democrats are clearly growing. Not only have the religiously unaffiliated expanded since 2009 from about 1 in 6 to 1 in 4 adults, but the share of Americans who ascribe to non-Christian faiths, a group that also leans strongly Democratic, has edged up from 5% to 7% of the population over that time, Pew found. Simultaneously, white Christians have fallen as a share of all American adults -- from just over half in 2009, according to Pew and other data, to around two-fifths today.
  • The challenge for Democrats is that their potential gains from the growing groups are being muted by an increasing tilt toward the GOP among the groups that are shrinking, in this case whites who identify as Christian. (The same dynamic is evident among other contracting groups such as whites without college degrees.) The combined result has left the parties on something of a treadmill, as Republicans offset at least some of the demographic change that benefits Democrats with improved performance among the key groups of shrinking white voters.
  • But even as white Christians have declined as a share of the population, more of that shrinking group is aligning with Republicans. In 2009, Pew found 51% of white Christians identified as Republicans, while 37% considered themselves Democrats (the rest were independents). Today that 14-point partisan gap has more than doubled: In the latest Pew results, 63% of white Christians identify as Republicans, compared with 30% who identify as Democrats.
  • The movement has been even sharper among white evangelical Protestants. Their share of the overall population is also shrinking: It fell to 16% in the latest Pew results, down from 19% in 2009. In 2009, they were about twice as likely to identify as Republicans (61%) as Democrats (30%), according to figures provided by Gregory Smith, Pew's associate director of research. Today 75% of white evangelicals call themselves Republicans, while just 19% identify as Democrats, a ratio of nearly 4 to 1.
  • As a result, even as white Christians have fallen below majority status in the country, they remain a clear majority of Republicans. In all, 64% of Republicans identify as white Christians in the latest Pew data. (The PRRI findings put the figure even slightly higher, at nearly 70%). That means white Christians now represent about the same share of Republicans as they did in the country overall in 1998. White evangelical Protestants alone represent 30% of Republicans, about double their share in the general population, Pew found.
  • The Democrats' religious profile could not be more distinct. White Christians now make up only 25% of Democrats, Pew found, down sharply from 40% in 2009. (White evangelicals compose only 7% of all Democrats.) Today, a larger share of Democrats in the Pew results are either not affiliated with any religion (34%) or are nonwhite Christians (30%), Pew found. Another 9% of Democrats adhere to non-Christian faiths. In each of those three latter cases, that's about double the share of Republicans in those categories.
  • While two-thirds of white evangelicals, for instance, say discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minorities, more than 7 in 10 among the religiously unaffiliated disagree. Two-thirds of white evangelicals say immigrants are "invading" America; three-fourths of the religiously unaffiliated disagree. Three-fourths of white evangelicals say socialists have taken over the Democratic Party; two-thirds of the unaffiliated say racists now control the Republican Party.
  • The groups diverge in their assessment of every element of Trump's performance. Three-fourths of the unaffiliated say Trump has encouraged white supremacy; 70% of white evangelicals say he has not. Four-fifths of the unaffiliated disapprove of Trump's job performance; more than three-fourths of the evangelicals approve. More than three-fifths of the unaffiliated support Trump's impeachment and removal; nearly 9 in 10 evangelicals oppose it.
  • That means that if Republicans can't make more inroads with the diverse groups that are growing, they will constantly need bigger margins from their diminishing white groups just to stay in place. As Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, noted in an email, "Republicans look about like 65-year-old America or about like America did back in the mid-1990s, while Democrats look about like 30-year-old America or about like [what the] country is going to look a decade from now, if current trends continue."
mattrenz16

Why Blue Places Have Been Hit Harder Economically Than Red Ones - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-blue-economic-recovery.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • different mix of jobs in red and blue places.
  • The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July.
  • Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
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  • Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won.
  • In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016.
  • local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home.
  • Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living — perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher.
  • So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living.
  • Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs.
  • The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories).
  • Still, the future looks far more promising than the present for blue states’ economies.
  • mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20
     
    " different mix of jobs in red and blue places. The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July. Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won. In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016. local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home. Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living - perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher. So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living. Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs. The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories). Still, the future looks far more promising t
Javier E

Opinion | Trump vs. Biden Is an American History Rerun - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-biden-race-2020-election.html

politics racial liberalism conservatism inequality resentment partisan gop Democratic party

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Not long ago, the struggle between racial liberalism and racial conservatism was a battle fought inside the Democratic and Republican parties. Now it’s a battle fought between the parties.
  • As African-Americans and other racial minorities increasingly occupy positions of influence and authority in American society, they also face backlash from those on the right whose opposition to ceding power is fierce, whether their opposition is veiled or out in the open. This opposition is now lodged solidly in the contemporary Republican Party, and the two parties regularly confront each other with rising intensity over the issue.
  • the importance of ethnicity and race in American politics is growing, not diminishing.
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  • Fanning the flames of racial animosity lies at the core of Trump’s election strategy, as it did in 2016.
  • “Race relations and racism have emerged as a focus of American politics in the last twenty years unlike at any time since the Civil Rights movement,” Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, wrote in an email.
  • The intensity of the conflict between the two parties over demographic change has been a driving force shaping politics, often in ways that on the surface seem peripheral to race.
  • Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, replied that what stands out to himis how animosity is driving the current versions of both parties. The electorate in 1988 was far more likely to view the other side with respect. Voters believed that both candidates sought to better the American way of life. Contrast this with today’s candidates who are both focused on corralling anger to their advantage, with Biden searching for those angry with Trump and Trump searching for angry middle-class whites.
  • “The race and religion gap jumps out to me, specifically white Christians vs. everyone else,” Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote in an email describing how the parties have changed in recent decades.
  • While “the Republican Party doesn’t look terribly different than it did in the 1980s: about 88 percent were white Christians in 1984; in 2018, it’s still 75 percent.”In contrast, the Democrats have changed radically, Burge continued: “About 68 percent of Democrats were white Christians in 1984, today it’s 38 percent.”
  • “The new culture war is not abortion or same-sex marriage, the new culture war is about preserving a white, Christian America,” Jones said, addingThat’s what Trump’s really leading with. The "Make America Great Again” thing — the way that was heard by most white evangelical Protestants, white working-class folks, was saying: “I’m going to preserve the composition of the country.”
  • As the Republican Party has continued to remain fairly homogeneous and has organized itself, fueled by decades of deploying the so-called Southern Strategy, around a politics of white racial grievances, the Democratic Party has become the default party for those who do not share those grievances and has come to more closely reflect the changing demographics of the country.
  • As a result, the Democratic coalition, in terms of race and religion, is notably more diverse today than it was when Biden first ran for president in 1988. And issues of religious and racial identity are more salient today in defining the partisan divides.
  • By the start of 2020, Gallup found that 53 percent of Democrats called themselves liberal, while self-identified Democratic conservatives had shrunk to 11 percent and moderates fell to 35 percent.
  • As the share of white Christians has eroded within the Democratic Party, the share of Democrats describing themselves as liberal has more than doubled. In 1994, only a quarter of Democrats described themselves as liberal. An equal share called themselves conservatives, and 48 percent said they were moderates according to Gallup.
  • White Democrats are driving an increase in liberal self-identification: over the past 20 years, Gallup found that the percentage of white Democrats who said they were liberal grew by 20 points, from 34 to 54 percent. For Black Democrats, the increase was 9 points, from 29 to 38 percent, and for Hispanic Democrats, the increase was 8 points, from 25 to 33 percent.
  • In 1992, six out of ten Democrats had only a high school degrees or less, while 17 percent had taken some college courses and 24 percent had college degrees. 26 percent of Republican voters had degrees
  • Since then, the Democrats have eclipsed Republicans as the party of the college-educated. The percentage of Democrats with college degrees grew from 22 to 37 percent, from 1999 to 2019, according to Pew. Over the same period, the percentage of Republicans with college degrees barely changed, growing by one point to 27 percent.
  • In the presidential election of 2016, all of the Midwest except for Minnesota and Illinois turned red, along with 10 of the 11 Confederate states.
  • Compared with the Democratic Party of today, the Democratic Party of 30 years ago was geographically dispersed, and not concentrated on the two coasts. Look at the map of the 1992 election, with a sea of blue states in the Midwest and four that had been part of the confederacy.
  • “Basically the two parties have in just 10 years gone from near-parity on prosperity and income measures to stark, fast-moving divergence,”
  • With their output surging as a result of the big-city tilt of the decade’s ‘winner-take-most’ economy, Democratic districts have seen their medium household income soar in a decade — from $54,000 in 2008 to $61,000 in 2018. By contrast, the income level in Republican districts began slightly higher in 2008, but then declined from $55,000 to $53,000.
  • In just a decade, Democratic-voting districts, according to Muro’s analysis, “have seen their share of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree rise from 28.4 percent 2008 to 35.5 percent” while voters in Republican districts “have barely increased their bachelor’s degree attainment beyond 26.6 percent and have meanwhile become notably whiter and older.”
  • People are much more ‘one-dimensional’ in their preferences today. That is, there used to be many people that were liberals on economic issues and conservatives on cultural issues such as abortion or race (or vice versa). But today most people have views that largely fall upon a single ideological/partisan continuum. So if you’re liberal on cultural/social issues you’re probably also liberal on most economic issues.
  • conservatism and liberalism both became one dimensional — consistent across economics, race and sociocultural issues:
  • Political scientists like to compare the effect of “mutually reinforcing” and “crosscutting” divides in a polity, with the typical hypothesis being that crosscutting divides contain and dampen societal conflict, while mutually reinforcing divides deepen it.
  • In recent years, Kitschelt continued,political divisions in the United States became progressively less crosscutting than reinforcing and have now configured the country into two warlike camps, with deep mutual hatred and anger, more so than at any time since the Civil War.
  • In one camp, he wrote are thehighly educated; postindustrial economic sectors; nonreligious/atheist or non-Christian religion; almost all ethnic minorities; sympathy with non-heterosexual orientations; the more urban than rural; the distinctively younger; and the slightly more female, particularly if single
  • In the opposing camp are theless educated; industrial and agro-/extractive industries economic sectors; evangelical Christians; European stock whites; heterosexuals; the more rural than urban; the distinctively older; the slightly more male, particularly if married.
  • While left and right have multiple concerns, among the most prominent of these is race and its first cousin immigration, and both of these concerns have become more and more central to partisan politics.
Javier E

Be an Ideologue, Not a Partisan - Bloomberg View - 0 views

www.bloombergview.com/...be-an-ideologue-not-a-partisan

partisan ideology politics closure faction polarization

shared by Javier E on 22 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • when rivalry hardens into a sullen standoff -- not a contest of ideas but a bloody-minded refusal to engage -- you have a problem. And to put it mildly, the U.S. has a problem.
  • The quantity of polarization isn't the main thing; what counts is the quality of polarization.
  • The Pew study shows that the ideological gap between the median Democrat and the median Republican (measured on a 10-point scale of political values) has widened a lot over the past 20 years
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  • Today, according to Pew, 92 percent of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, compared with only 64 percent in 1994; 94 percent of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican, up from 70 percent.
  • Also, more liberals than before are consistently liberal -- that is, liberal in most or all of their views. The same goes for conservatives.
  • Ideological rivalry is fine. What's worrying is the changing character of the rivalry.
  • Thirty-eight percent of Democrats now have a "very unfavorable view" of the Republican Party (up from 16 percent in 1994); 43 percent of Republicans (up from 17 percent) feel the same way about the Democratic Party.
  • Liberals would rather live in cities, while conservatives prefer rural areas and small towns
  • liberals are more likely to say racial and ethnic diversity is important in a community; conservatives emphasize shared religious faith.
  • 73% of consistent liberals say it’s important to them to live near art museums and theaters, just 23% of consistent conservatives agree
  • Fully half of consistent conservatives and 35 percent of consistent liberals say it is important to them to live in a place where most people share their political views
  • This physical and cultural separation militates against the contest of ideas
  • There's no contest unless people who disagree actually engage. Apparently, that's something many of the most committed conservatives and liberals would rather avoid. Instead, they talk among themselves about the stupid or evil people on the other side.
  • this paper by Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University and colleagues. It proposes a different definition of polarization -- one based not on ideology but on "social distance."
  • "Using data from a variety of sources, we demonstrate that both Republicans and Democrats increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents,"
Javier E

Opinion | Do You Live in a 'Tight' State or a 'Loose' One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-blue-tight-loose-state.html

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.
  • In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”
  • Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”
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  • titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.
  • Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.
  • states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.
  • In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.
  • “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned
  • The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.
  • The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”
  • Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?
  • Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).
  • cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”
  • The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,
  • The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive
  • My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.
  • The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina
  • Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.
  • If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?
  • Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.
  • Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.
  • She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals
  • Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.
  • Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.
  • Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values
  • conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”
  • As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals
  • Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.
  • Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.
  • We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)
  • Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.
  • For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).
  • What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them
  • Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles
  • Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:
  • I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).
  • Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world
  • Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.
  • I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?
  • There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio
  • A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.
  • I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”
  • Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:
  • t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier
  • They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.
  • Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.
  • Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?
  • It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”
  • The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.
  • there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:
  • While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments
  • For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.
  • “political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective
  • We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”
  • In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”
  • Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.
  • Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.
  • In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:
  • society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.
  • The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”
  • While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.
  • or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio
  • Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio
  • Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.
  • Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.
  • The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges
  • — or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.
Javier E

A Blow Against the Malice Theory of American Politics - The Dispatch - 1 views

thedispatch.com/...ce-theory-of-american-politics

malice trump culture history US politics anger negative partisanship animosity

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Why were partisans so oblivious to the escalating tensions that were tearing America apart? Why were they so confident that the solution to American polarization was domination and not accommodation? 
  • The answer was clear. For decades, winners and losers alike spun virtually every American election as the sign of things to come, the harbinger of a permanent victory (or permanent defeat). You don’t even have to be that old to see the recent pattern. The thrill of Democratic victory in 1992 turned into the agony of defeat in 1994, then the thrill of victory again in 1996
  • Then Obama won in 2008. But for Republicans, that was an aberration—a fluke caused by the housing crash and an unpopular war. The real majority came to the polls in Tea Party 2010. But wait: Obama won again in 2012, and suddenly all the momentum was on the side of the “coalition of the ascendant.” Remember that phrase? It signaled permanent Republican doom—the alleged party of white people couldn’t possibly keep winning in a nation that was growing more diverse by the year, could it?
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Then came 2016. The overreading began once again. The old electoral college “blue wall” had become a “red wall,” and Trump had supposedly unlocked the key to lasting control. But, well, you know the rest.
  • Everyone keeps looking for the political Battle of Yorktown—that moment when your opponents lose once and for all and they march out slowly before you while the band plays “The World Turned Upside Down.”
  • Instead, in a closely-divided nation that’s characterized mainly by negative polarization and calcification, the better analogy is to trench warfare—grinding, bloody attrition, with gains often measured in yards rather than miles and true breakthroughs few and far between. 
  • Thus, the question after any given election isn’t so much, “Who is ascendant?” Rather, it’s “In which direction did the lines move?” 
  • often the more important cultural changes can be harder to discern
  • in this instance one of those more important changes was the blow to the malice theory of American politics. 
  • The malice theory is a core element of Trumpism, and it’s a natural temptation of negative polarization. Negative polarization (or negative partisanship), as I’ve written many times, is the term for politics that is fundamentally motivated by animosity for the other side more than affection to your own party’s leaders or ideas. 
  • Under the malice theory, the key to electoral victory is unlocking that anger. That means highlighting everything wrong with your opponents. That means hyping their alleged mortal threat to the Republic.
  • who should be kind to the “godless communist orcs” who are “trying to ruin this great country”? 
  • then persuasion is a waste of time. Defeating the enemy isn’t about persuading the enemy, but rather about mobilizing the righteous.
  • inspiring people is hard. Scaring them is easy—especially when the internet gives you constant access to the worst and weirdest voices on the other side. 
  • here’s where the malice theory collides with human nature. Most people aren’t content with simply thinking their opponents are terrible. They still want to see themselves as good. They want to see the world as “good versus evil,” not “lesser evil versus evil.” 
  • That’s why the argument that voters should always swallow deep moral objections to vote for the lesser evil are ultimately unsustainable
  • When confronted with relentless wrongdoing from your own partisans, one of two things happens—over time you’ll either redefine evil as good, or you’ll abandon evil for the good. 
  • The first response is core to much of the MAGA movement. It’s how someone goes from holding their nose and voting for Trump in 2016 to being the first bass boat in the boat parade in 2020. We all watched it happen.
  • The ultimate expression of this faction was represented by what’s been called the “Stop the Steal” slate of Republican candidates. These were the folks who were all-in, not just on Trump, but on some of the most transparently, incandescently absurd political conspiracies in modern American history. 
  • I don’t want to make the very mistake I identified at the start of this newsletter and overstate my case. Talk of a true MAGA “repudiation” is overblown
  • remember, the question isn’t whether anyone achieved ultimate victory or faced a final defeat. It’s in which direction the lines moved in our nation’s political trench warfare. And they most definitely moved back towards reason and our most basic moral norms. 
  • since politicians so often follow voters far more than they lead voters, it is ultimately up to us to demonstrate to them that the malice theory of American politics is truly a dead political end
  • The worst thing for American politics would be for the Trumpist narrative—that decency is for the weak—to prevai
  • If cruelty truly is the sole or best path to partisan victory, then the continued temptation to yield to our worst impulses would grow overwhelming. The temptation was already strong enough to distort and transform the political culture of the right simply based on Trump’s single, narrow win.
  • the opposite message seems to be true
  • Ever since Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the Trumpist GOP lost and kept losing. A movement that prioritized vicious political combat lost the House in the 2018 midterms, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, and has likely blown a virtually unlosable election in 2022, despite the fact that the country is struggling under the great weight of the worst crime and inflation in at least a generation.
  • It turns out that there’s some life left in decency yet. Even when times are hard, there are voters who are unwilling to call good evil and evil good
  • It turns out that it’s hard to escape the need to persuade and inspire, and that might be the best—and most important—consequence of a midterm election that gave neither party a mandate but reminded the Republicans that malice and lies can do far more political harm than good. 
Javier E

Why Partisans Can't Explain Their Views - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-cant-explain-their-views.html

politics partisan extremism knowledge ignorance discourse

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • we have grown so accustomed to this divide that we no longer flinch at the brazen political attacks on either side — even when the logic underlying these attacks is hard to fathom.
  • attack ads work, in large part, because we don’t understand them. Statements take advantage of a fact about human psychology called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” an idea developed by the Yale psychologist Frank Keil and his students. We typically feel that we understand how complex systems work even when our true understanding is superficial.
  • it is not until we are asked to explain how such a system works — whether it’s what’s involved in a trade deal with China or how a toilet flushes — that we realize how little we actually know.
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  • asking people to justify their position — rather than asking them to explain the mechanisms by which a policy would work — doesn’t tend to soften their political views. When we asked participants to state the reasons they were for or against a policy position, their initial attitudes held firm. (Other researchers have found much the same thing: merely discussing an issue often makes people more extreme, not less.)
  • The real surprise is what happens after these same individuals are asked to explain how these policy ideas work: they become more moderate in their political views — either in support of such policies or against them. In fact, not only do their attitudes change, but so does their behavior
  • we report on experiments showing that people often believe they understand what is meant by well-worn political terms like the “flat tax,” “sanctions on Iran” or “cap and trade” — even when they don’t.
  • asking people to “unpack” complex systems — getting them to articulate how something might work in real life — forces them to confront their lack of understanding.
  • rarely is anybody — candidate or voter — asked to explain his or her positions. American political discourse, in short, is not discourse at all.
  • The answer implied by our research is not that we should all become policy wonks. Instead, we voters need to be more mindful that issues are complicated and challenge ourselves to break down the policy proposals on both sides into their component parts. We have to then imagine how these ideas would work in the real world — and then make a choice: to either moderate our positions on policies we don’t really understand, as research suggests we will, or try to improve our understanding. Either way, discourse would then be based on information, not illusion.
  • whether or not we citizens make this effort, our leaders should. We should demand that Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney explain how in addition to why.
  • We have a problem in American politics: an illusion of knowledge that leads to extremism. We can start to fix it by acknowledging that we know a lot less than we think.
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...litics-in-a-post-truth-america

post-truth politics journalism media fake news crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
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  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
Javier E

Politics - Jonathan Merritt - The Religious Right Turns 33: What Have We Learned? - The... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...258204

religion politics lessons evangelicalism US experience

shared by Javier E on 10 Jun 12 - Cached
  • As we look back on more than a quarter century of political engagement by the religious right, two things now appear obvious.
  • First, partisan religion is killing American Christianity. The American church is declining by nearly every data point. Christians are exerting less influence over the culture than even a few years ago, organized religion no longer garners the respect of the masses, and two in three young non-Christians claim they perceive the Christian church as "too political." Church attendance is declining, and the percentage of Americans claiming no religious affiliation is rising.
  • The question we must now answer is not, "Can we save this nation?" but "Can we save our faith?" And the only way it seems we will be able to do the latter is through abandoning the partisan, divisive strategies adopted by the Christian right and begin engaging the public
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  • ore prudent ways
  • again in m
  • Second, we learned that partisan Christianity cannot effectively change our culture
  • Little progress has been made despite their best efforts, and an increasing number of individuals now recognize the religious right strategy has largely been a failure. The irony of this turn of events is that Christians above all others know that true change must occur in hearts -- not just the halls of power.
Javier E

How Jeb Bush Triggered an Iraq War Watershed - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...riggered-an-iraq-war-watershed

iraq war origins partisan consensus politics history mideast

shared by Javier E on 15 May 15 - No Cached
  • It was one thing when John Kasich and Chris Christie said they would not have invaded Iraq - guys who would run as relative moderates and either aren't running or don't realize they're not running for president. (Rand Paul said the same but that's no surprise.) But now we have Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz saying they would not have either. Rubio is the big tell here since he among all the 2016 contenders is angling for the support of the neoconservative foreign policy intelligentsia. If he can say categorically that it was a mistake, the debate is probably really finally over.
  • With everything that has happened over the last dozen years, including events of just the last year, it's very hard to say that the invasion was a good idea. But people say lots of things that are either hard or downright ridiculous to say. Indeed, we should note that as recently as two months ago, Rubio was saying just the opposite, that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.
  • In the years just after the war, support for the war was an article of faith for most Republicans. That fixed much of the public debate in place. Many elected Democrats, meanwhile, were trapped by their own votes in favor of Bush's authorization to use force.
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  • In the 2008 presidential race, the Iraq 'debate' was largely fought over who was right about the surge.
  • We all sort of know that the ground has shifted on this issue. We can see it clearly in public opinion polls. But it is as though it's been years since we actually had a show of hands - especially among national Republicans. Good idea? Bad idea? As I was writing this, Jeb Bush himself has now come forward and, on the fourth try, said the Iraq War was a mistake. What I've called that showing of hands seems to show virtually no one of any consequence standing up for the decision to invade. Maybe we all kind of knew that that was where people had gotten to. But seeing people say it is a transformative event.
  • the ground has shifted not just on the facts of the issue, but on what is in many ways a more consequential front: Time has passed and Republicans simply don't feel the same sort of partisan responsibility for the conflict. It's drifting back into history. The sense of ideological and partisan commitment has just loosened - the intuitive reflex that says our guy did it so it must be right and I need to defend it
  • Cruz and Rubio especially are fighting for base Republicans. If they were still committed to the wisdom of the Iraq War, they wouldn't be saying this. And yet they are. That is a major watershed in the country's reckoning with the war. If Republicans running as hawks say it was a mistake, then the debate is really over.
  • with a consensus in place that the Iraq War was a bad idea, the whys and hows of just how we made this decision are up for discussion in a very new way.
Javier E

Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...419118

GOP conservatism tea party middle-class white election strategy

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • In the 1996 presidential election, voter turnout had tumbled to the lowest level since the 1920s, less than 52 percent. Turnout rose slightly in November 2000. Then, suddenly: overdrive. In the presidential elections of 2004 and 2008, voter turnout spiked to levels not seen since before the voting age was lowered to 18, and in 2012 it dipped only a little. Voters were excited by a hailstorm of divisive events: the dot-com bust, the Bush-versus-Gore recount, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the bailouts and stimulus, and the Affordable Care Act.
  • Putnam was right that Americans were turning away from traditional sources of information. But that was because they were turning to new ones: first cable news channels and partisan political documentaries; then blogs and news aggregators like the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post; after that, and most decisively, social media.
  • Politics was becoming more central to Americans’ identities in the 21st century than it ever was in the 20th. Would you be upset if your child married a supporter of a different party from your own? In 1960, only 5 percent of Americans said yes. In 2010, a third of Democrats and half of Republicans did.
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  • Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.
  • Meanwhile, the dividing line that used to be the most crucial of them all—class—has increasingly become a division within the parties, not between them.
  • Since 1984, nearly every Democratic presidential-primary race has ended as a contest between a “wine track” candidate who appealed to professionals (Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and Barack Obama) and a “beer track” candidate who mobilized the remains of the old industrial working class (Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton).
  • The Republicans have their equivalent in the battles between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” candidates. Until this decade, however, both parties—and especially the historically more cohesive Republicans—managed to keep sufficient class peace to preserve party unity.
  • The Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S. economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In 2014, real median household income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well below the level in 1999. The country has recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have not. Many Republicans haven’t shared in the recovery and continued upward flight of their more affluent fellow partisans.
  • What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors—himself included!—as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite.
  • It’s uncertain whether any Tea Partier ever really carried a placard that read keep your government hands off my medicare. But if so, that person wasn’t spouting gibberish. The Obama administration had laid hands on Medicare. It hoped to squeeze $500 billion out of the program from 2010 to 2020 to finance health insurance for the uninsured. You didn’t have to look up the figures to have a sense that many of the uninsured were noncitizens (20 percent), or that even more were foreign-born (27 percent). In the Tea Party’s angry town-hall meetings, this issue resonated perhaps more loudly than any other—the ultimate example of redistribution from a deserving “us” to an undeserving “them.”
  • As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
  • Owners of capital assets, employers of low-skill laborers, and highly compensated professionals tend to benefit economically from the arrival of immigrants. They are better positioned to enjoy the attractive cultural and social results of migration (more-interesting food!) and to protect themselves against the burdensome impacts (surges in non-English-proficient pupils in public schools). A pro-immigration policy shift was one more assertion of class interest in a party program already brimful of them.
  • The Republican National Committee made it all official in a March 2013 postelection report signed by party eminences. The report generally avoided policy recommendations, with a notable exception: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.
  • Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid. Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership
  • In 2011–12, the longest any of the “not Romneys” remained in first place was six weeks. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated among social and religious conservatives.
  • The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”
  • Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.
  • Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.
  • What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans
  • More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim.
  • Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”
  • He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told The Washington Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”
  • He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”
  • Trump has destroyed one elite-favored presidential candidacy, Scott Walker’s, and crippled two others, Jeb Bush’s and Chris Christie’s. He has thrown into disarray the party’s post-2012 comeback strategy, and pulled into the center of national discussion issues and constituencies long relegated to the margins.
  • Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.
  • there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.
  • Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.
  • Yet even if the Republican donor elite can keep control of the party while doubling down, it’s doubtful that the tactic can ultimately win presidential elections.
  • The “change nothing but immigration” advice was a self-flattering fantasy from the start. Immigration is not the main reason Republican presidential candidates lose so badly among Latino and Asian American voters, and never was: Latino voters are more likely to list education and health care as issues that are extremely important to them. A majority of Asian Americans are non-Christian and susceptible to exclusion by sectarian religious themes.
  • Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.”
  • Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.
  • Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuitio
  • Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right
  • True, center-right conservative parties backed by broad multiethnic coalitions of the middle class have gained and exercised power in other English-speaking countries, even as Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012. But the most-influential voices in American conservatism reject the experience of their foreign counterparts as weak, unprincipled, and unnecessary.
  • “The filibuster used to be bad. Now it’s good.” So Fred Thompson, the late actor and former Republican senator, jokingly told an audience on a National Review cruise shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency for the first time. How partisans feel about process issues is notoriously related to what process would benefit them at any given moment.
  • There are metrics, after all, by which the post-2009 GOP appears to be a supremely successful political party. Recently, Rory Cooper, of the communications firm Purple Strategies, tallied a net gain to the Republicans of 69 seats in the House of Representatives, 13 seats in the Senate, 900-plus seats in state legislatures, and 12 governorships since Obama took office. With that kind of grip on state government, in particular, Republicans are well positioned to write election and voting rules that sustain their hold on the national legislature
  • Maybe the more natural condition of conservative parties is permanent defense—and where better to wage a long, grinding defensive campaign than in Congress and the statehouses? Maybe the presidency itself should be regarded as one of those things that is good to have but not a must-have, especially if obtaining it requires uncomfortable change
Javier E

Roberts, Leader of Supreme Court's Conservative Majority, Fights Perception That It Is ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ohn-roberts-supreme-court.html

supreme court partisan

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • he has taken Justice Kennedy’s place as the swing vote at the court’s ideological center, making him the most powerful chief justice in 80 years.But all of that new power comes at a dangerous time for the court, whose legitimacy depends on the public perception that it is not a partisan institution
  • Controlling the pace of change on a court whose conservative wing is eager to move fast will be the central problem of the next phase of Chief Justice Roberts’s tenure, said Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
  • “If he’s smart, and he is, what he’s probably thinking is, ‘I do have a substantive agenda of things I want to accomplish. But it’s a lot easier to do that when the court retains its legitimacy. Let’s do as much as we can get away with, but maybe that’s a little less than some of my colleagues to my right think we can get away with,’” Professor Epps said
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • “One of the greatest crises facing the Supreme Court since Marbury v. Madison was F.D.R.’s court-packing plan,” Chief Justice Roberts said in 2015 at New York University, “and it fell to Hughes to guide a very unpopular Supreme Court through that high-noon showdown against America’s most popular president since George Washington.”
  • “There are things to learn from it,” he said, and he has seemed to apply those lessons to a series of clashes with Mr. Trump, who has attacked the very idea of judicial independence.
  • . He insisted, against the weight of substantial evidence, that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges
  • Political science data refute that assertion, as do the fights over judicial confirmations. Indeed, the most recent battle, over Justice Kavanaugh, damaged the court’s reputation precisely because the court was portrayed as a political prize.
  • he must view the idea that judging is wholly separate from politics as a useful fiction, a worthy aspiration and, most important, crucial to the court’s standing.
  • The court’s other four Republican appointees — Justices Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — sent a different message not long after, all attending the annual gala dinner of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group
  • court watchers could not recall a show of force like the one by their conservative colleagues in 2018.
  • Enthusiasm among conservatives for the chief justice has tempered since President George W. Bush nominated him in 2005. They point to his two votes to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care law and a leftward drift documented by political scientists
  • In the term that ended in June, for instance, Chief Justice Roberts’s voting record was almost indistinguishable from that of Justice Kennedy.
  • There is no question, however, that Chief Justice Roberts’s voting record has been generally conservative. On issues of racial discrimination, religion, voting and campaign finance, his views are squarely in the mainstream of conservative legal thinking.
  • He voted with five-justice majorities in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Second Amendment decision that established an individual right to own guns; Citizens United, the 2010 campaign finance decision that amplified the role of money in politics; and Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 voting rights decision that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act.
  • But by casting the decisive vote to save Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, he transformed his reputation. Liberals hailed him as a statesman. Conservatives denounced him as a traitor.
  • Mr. Trump, years before he ran for president, was in the second group. “I guess @JusticeRoberts wanted to be a part of Georgetown society more than anyone knew,” he wrote on Twitter, citing a fake Twitter handle. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump called Chief Justice Roberts “an absolute disaster.”
  • “Moderation, not just in terms of ideological moderation but also humility, is kind of his thing,” he said. “He seems to write limited opinions. He doesn’t reach any further than he has to. He clearly distinguishes between what he is doing as a judge and what he might believe in terms of policy.”
  • The court will have to soon decide whether to hear two sets of cases concerning Trump administration initiatives to revoke protections for unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children and to bar transgender people from military service.
  • While Chief Justice Roberts may be inclined to avoid politically charged issues and quietly rebuild his court’s authority, it takes only four votes to add a case to its docket
Javier E

In a Volatile Climate on Campus, Professors Teach on Tenterhooks - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...hing-amid-partisan-divide.html

campus discussion censorship free speech Culture

shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Today’s students bring a multiplicity of personal identities to campus — their sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, religion, political leanings — and they want to see that reflected in course content. The values in readings, lectures and even conversations are open to questioning. All good — that’s what college is supposed to be about — except that now the safety screen around the examination of ideas has been pulled away. Higher education is increasingly partisan, and professors must manage these disconnected ideologies, which are sometimes between themselves and their students.
  • With so many professors identifying as liberal or far left (60 percent, according to a U.C.L.A. poll last year), it’s not surprising that the right distrusts the profession. In a Pew Research Center survey released in September, respondents indicated on a thermometer scale how they felt about professors. Democrats rated them a warm 71 degrees, Republicans a chilly 46 degrees.
  • It’s a charged climate and professors know it. The culture wars playing out in the classroom have made them fearful of being targeted.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • An English professor at Northern Arizona, Anne Scott, did end up on Fox News. After she deducted one point from a first-year student’s paper last spring for using “mankind” instead of “humankind” — she said she had told the class that “inclusive” vocabulary is required — the student contacted the website Campus Reform. She received more than 400 emails, rude voice mail messages and dropped calls. This semester, when the student’s name appeared on the wait-list for a course she was teaching, Dr. Scott said, “I was terrified.”
  • These clashes are affecting curriculum. After meeting with a professor to plan a spring course on fascism and anti-fascism, “we decided it was probably not worth it,” said Lori Poloni-Staudinger, head of the department of politics and international affairs, who has also received threats. The class won’t be offered. “People are more guarded,” she said. “They are watching what they say.”
  • Tools she shares are new to professors focused on conveying content. On the first day, she urges instructors to work with students to create ground rules for class discussions, including what to do when talk gets heated. She shares tricks like asking students, before peers pounce, to rephrase or repeat a provocative utterance (often it’s less harsh). If someone suggests that people who ride busses are poor, instead of calling him “classist,” she said, a teacher could reframe: “Let’s talk about the labels that come up when we talk about social class.”
  • It’s also important to openly discuss cultural identity with students, rather than make assumptions. “You can be from the same background and be very different,” she said. “Or you can be from very different backgrounds and think very similarly.” Digging below the surface is critical because students “are asking for more opportunity to be complicated individuals.”
  • Professors who once skipped pre-semester faculty workshops now want to know “how to model productive disagreement,”
  • In “Conflict in the Classroom,” a sketch recently staged at Skidmore College, a statistics “class” discusses correlation and causation. The “professor” posits an example: the link between infant mortality and maternal income. The “students” raise questions that have nothing to do with math. “It becomes a debate about the variables,” said Sara Armstrong, the artistic director: One student wonders why the example doesn’t consider household income, and defines a household as man and woman. Another objects. The first accuses the other of attacking. The instructor interjects, “I don’t think this is appropriate for this class. We really can’t talk about this.” The upset student insists, “This is a problem! We have to talk about this!” A student records on his phone.
  • In the post-performance discussion, the faculty members backtrack: What could the instructor have done ahead of time to prevent problems? What could the instructor do in the moment? And afterward? Approaches involve addressing not just what is taught, but how and why. The professor might explain why he chose the case study, pause the discussion, or email the class, acknowledging the disruption and, perhaps, apologizing.
Javier E

Americans Remain Deeply Ambivalent About Diversity - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583123

diversity identity us politics culture

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • These survey results suggest that Americans are deeply ambivalent about the role of diversity in their families, friendships, and civic communities. Some people, it seems, prefer to stay in their bubble.
  • just under a quarter of Americans say they seldom or never interact with people who don’t share their partisan affiliation. Black and Hispanic people were more likely than whites to describe their lives this way, although education made a big difference among whites: 27 percent of non-college-educated whites said they seldom or never encounter people from a different political party, compared with just 6 percent of college-educated whites.
  • Less than half of respondents said they encounter political differences among their friends. Only 39 percent said they see political diversity within their families, and vanishingly few people said they encounter ideological diversity at religious services or community meetings.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The PRRI/Atlantic findings add to growing evidence that these institutions are becoming weaker—or, at the very least, more segregated by identity
  • Almost one in five of the survey respondents said their interactions with people of a different political party are negative
  • “As these other social identities have moved into alignment with partisanship, we’re seeing more animosity across partisan lines—not necessarily because we’re disagreeing about things, but because we believe the [person from the] other party is an outsider, socially and culturally, from us,”
  • “It also becomes really easy to dehumanize people who we don’t have identities in common with.” In recent decades, social scientists have seen increased use of the language of dehumanization, Mason said: people calling their political opponents monsters, animals, or demons, for example.
  • When asked how they would feel about their child marrying someone from the opposite political party, 45 percent of Democrats said they would be unhappy, compared with 35 percent of Republicans.
  • Perhaps more than any other, this was the fracture line that animated the 2016 election. Even the iconography, from the Trump campaign’s “Make America Great Again” trucker hats to the Clinton campaign’s forward-pointing “H” and “Stronger Together” slogan reflected this divide
  • Roughly one out of five survey respondents reported that they seldom or never encounter people who don’t share their religion, and a similar proportion said the same for race.
  • Certain subgroups were more cloistered than others: 21 percent of Republicans said they seldom or never interact with people who don’t share their race, versus 13 percent of Democrats
  • Similarly, more than a quarter of white evangelicals said they rarely encounter people of a different race, slightly more than any other major religious group included in the survey.
  • among white people, education level made a huge difference: Those without a college degree were more than twice as likely as their college-educated peers to say they rarely encounter people of a different race, and more than four times as likely to say they seldom or never encounter people from a different religion or political party.
  • Many respondents pointed to political parties and the media as two major causes of all this discord, with stark differences along partisan lines: 85 percent of Republicans said the media is pulling the country apart, versus 54 percent of Democrats.
  • Americans today are sharply divided over the value of multiculturalism: In the survey, 54 percent of Democrats said they prefer the United States to be made up of people from a wide variety of religions, compared with 12 percent of Republicans. By contrast, 40 percent of Republicans said they’d prefer a nation mostly made up of Christians, compared with 14 percent of Democrats.
  • a far greater number of Americans may have only cursory interactions with people unlike themselves.
  • “As certain groups reach a critical mass, I think it throws Americans as a whole back into a conversation about affirming these principles [of pluralism] or not,” he said. “If you think culture war today, it’s less about gay marriage and abortion than it is about American identity.”
  • When people largely surround themselves with sameness, they may find themselves left shouting across perceived divides, unable to see their reflection in anyone who stands on the other side.
Javier E

How Should We Talk About the Israel Lobby's Power? - 0 views

nymag.com/...t-the-israel-lobbys-power.html

tolerance partisan polarization liberal immigrants fraud israel lobbying

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Is it possible to write honestly about the Israel lobby’s power in D.C. without using any anti-Semitic “tropes” at all?
  • A very powerful lobby deploys the money and passions of its members to ensure that a foreign country gets very, very special treatment from the U.S.
  • defending Israel is a core interest of not only Jews but all of us in what’s left of the West.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The question, it seems to me, is one of proportion.
  • The average aid for high-income countries like Israel, according to USAID, is $79 million a year. Israel gets 48 times more.
  • In return for giving Israel $3.8 billion a year … the U.S. is expected to consent to anything and everything Israel wants. When you look at this from a distance, it is really quite amazing.
  • And, of course, Israel won in the end. Under Trump, Israel has achieved almost every goal it aimed for: the scrapping of the Iran deal, the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, a surge in settlements, and an intensification of the abuse of the Palestinians
  • Again you might ask: What did the U.S. get in return for all this from Israel? And again the answer is: Nothing.
  • Actually, worse than nothing. The U.S. suffers internationally from this alliance. Don’t take it from me. Here’s General James Mattis: “I paid a military price every day as the commander at CentCom because the Americans were perceived as biased toward Israel and that moderates all the moderate Arabs who want to be with us.” Or David Petraeus: “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of American favoritism toward Israel.”
  • Now observe the public discourse in Washington. Here is Nancy Pelosi last year: “If this capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to aid — I won’t even call it aid — our cooperation with Israel.” Chew on that a minute. If the United States were to collapse, its one objective would be to aid a foreign country
  • The first bill introduced into the Senate in this Congress was one that made it illegal for any American to boycott goods from the West Bank, without suffering real economic consequences from their own government. It’s a federal bill designed to buttress several state bans on Americans’ right to boycott Israeli goods. Now here’s a clear case of conflict between the free speech rights of Americans and Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank. And the Senate voted for Israel’s occupation over the rights of its own citizens by a margin of 77– 23
  • It seems to me that it is simply a fact that the Israel lobby uses money, passion, and persuasion to warp this country’s foreign policy in favor of another country — out of all proportion to what Israel can do for the U.S.
  • History matters. But it’s not a rational way for a great power to conduct foreign polic
  • The one-way street has also corrupted Israel, wrecked its moral standing, and enabled the country to keep ratcheting toward the far right in self-destructive ways.
  • The reason seems quite simple: Migrants now know that the U.S. border system is overwhelmed. More to the point, they now know that if they bring their children with them, they will not be abruptly sent back, and cannot be detained for longer than 20 days, after which they will be free to go and work anywhere in the country. That incentive is much stronger now than it was a year ago
  • What has happened in Guatemala to produce such a growing mass of asylum seekers? The truth appears to be some food insecurity after a failed harvest — but mostly the news that the U.S. border is effectively open, and if you bring your kids and show up, you’re home free
  • The Democrats for their part keep saying that there is no crisis at all, berate the administration for insufficient care or tougher enforcement at ports of entry, and actually attempted to restrict the number of beds assigned for detention in their last negotiation with the president (it didn’t happen). At some point, they’re going to have to grapple with this genuine emergency.
  • But how do we stop this? Congress has to act to change the law that enables this. Asylum, traditionally understood, was once for those fleeing political or ethnic persecution. It wasn’t a catch-all for any economic migrant, who can be coached to say the right words to the right official. It’s a vast loophole in the immigration system — and if it isn’t fixed legislatively soon, the current massive wave will keep building
  • If you think that won’t empower more nativist demagogues and help reelect Trump, you’re dreaming.
  • “among white liberals … 79.2 percent agreed that ‘racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.’ 18.8 percent agreed that ‘blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition. … Among blacks, 59.9 percent identified discrimination as the main deterrent to upward mobility for African-Americans, and 32.0 percent said blacks were responsible for their condition.”
  • These white super-liberals are also, according to a fascinating survey featured in The Atlantic, the most blinkered. Money quote: “The most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves
  • The survey found that the city most intolerant of other people’s views was Boston, specifically around Cambridge
  • This most tolerant town is in a county that voted for Trump by a 20-point margin. Let’s absorb that fact for a while, shall we?
  • the results suggest a damning verdict on American higher education. My alma mater Harvard, a university where free speech, ideological differences, and competing arguments should flourish is, in fact, a nest of smug intolerance. Our elite colleges may be the most “diverse” ever. But they have also become machines for closing students’ minds.
Javier E

Can Better Angels Fix Politics Without Ending Partisanship? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...578539

partisan polarization politics culture

shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • What is intriguing about Better Angels is that it isn’t seeking to formulate a broadly acceptable centrist platform, nor appeal to the vast middle who (Americans are told) really truly just want the country to work
  • It’s not trying to end partisanship; the group’s very concept, with its red versus blue structure, presupposes polarity. Its premise is not that everyone needs to agree, but simply that they need to be able to talk to one another, and that such a skill has been lost
  • That seems more manageable and realistic than getting everyone to see eye to eye on policies, but it’s still no easy feat—and even if the group is successful, is fostering an open dialogue within a polarized system enough to fix American politics?
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  • The men decided they needed to do something to bridge that emotional gap, and within a few weeks, they’d gathered 10 Trump voters and 10 Hillary Clinton voters for a discussion in Ohio. With a nod to the notion that the U.S. was a house divided against itself, they recruited Bill Doherty, a veteran family therapist, to design and lead the talk.
  • “It was just really for all of us a transformative experience,” Blankenhorn said. “We felt we had lightning in a bottle. You remember right after the election, emotions were very high. Words of real anger, passion, fear. At the end of the day, they decided that they wanted to continue to talk together. They said it was the first time they’d actually talked together after a year and a half of talking at and about each other.”
  • After introductions, the reds and blues split up, each with a facilitator, and were asked to list stereotypes that they believe the other side has about them. Then they were asked to assign a “kernel of truth” to each stereotype—that is, to accept why the other side might hold it.
  • The goal is simply to create a space and method for people who disagree to talk politics, conversations that have become surprisingly rare.
  • A 2017 study by political scientists at the University of California at Davis found that three in four Americans almost exclusively talk politics with people with whom they agree. More and more, Americans avoid discussing politics with people they know hold opposite views—if they mix with them at all.
  • The workshop I attended in Cary was the three-hour version. What immediately jumped out was how little time blues and reds spent talking about the opposite side. Instead, the format forced them to speak almost exclusively about themselves
  • So the nascent Better Angels hosted another session. And then another. Then they had a bus tour. They created a day-long workshop, and then a three-hour truncated alternative. They began recruiting members and held a national convention in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in summer 2017. The group has now hosted hundreds of workshops and claims roughly 5,400 dues-paying members
  • The exercise also demonstrated how difficult self-critique is. I sat with the red group, and while the crew quickly named racism as a stereotype, they were deeply reluctant to identify the kernel of truth. Linda Gupton, a member of the red group, tried to argue that there are white-supremacist elements in the Republican coalition, but was shut down. Only as the exercise finished did she convince the rest of the reds, pointing to the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
  • What was surprising was that rather than just come up with different answers, they almost seemed to have been answering different questions. The red group compiled a list almost entirely composed of feelings—“closed-minded,” “racist.” The blue group, meanwhile, brought back a list of policy-heavy words, such as “socialist.”
  • After a break came the fishbowl exercises, as participants laid out why they believed their side’s policy prescriptions were good for the country, and then what reservations they had about those ideas
  • The fishbowl exercises seemed to build real goodwill. The reds were excited to hear blues voice concern about self-righteousness on the left, and about their fears that a social safety net might create a culture of dependency. The blues were heartened by red concerns that conservative social policies would leave people behind.
  • Nonetheless, there was a warm, fuzzy feeling as the workshop wrapped up. I left feeling a little better about partisans’ ability to have reasoned conversations. That’s exactly what Blankenhorn said Better Angels workshops can provide. The goal is to lower negative partisanship.
  • A bigger reach also means expanding offerings. In addition to holding workshops and national conventions, Better Angels has started local chapters where people can get together on a semi-regular basis, in a less structured format. Better Angels is also working to establish debates, having found that some reds prefer that to the arguably touchy-feely vibe of the workshops.
  • The bigger problem is that the kind of people who are willing to spend a morning or a day on such an exercise are the kind of people who are already convinced that dialogue is important, and are more willing to hear the other side out. As participants went around, many had strong political views, but many had also participated in other efforts at cross-partisan dialogue.
  • “I have a lot of friends who are much more conservative than me, and they are very hesitant to come to a table with people from the other side of the table because they’re afraid they’re going to get beat up,” she said. “But here, you’re not debating people from the other side of the table.”
  • There was also a conspicuous absence of strong Trump supporters. The reds mostly fit into the more classic business-friendly conservatism of, say, Mitt Romney. They weren’t necessarily Never Trumpers, but many were Reluctant Trumpers.
  • Selbst thought the format was good as far as it went, but he worried it didn’t go very far. “[The facilitators] tended to give equal weight to everyone’s argument and were not interested in any negativity toward that argument [from] the other people,” he said. “I firmly believe everyone should be treated with respect, but not every opinion is equally valuable.
  • That’s the rub, even if you don’t agree with Selbst about which opinions are valuable and which aren’t. Ultimately, politics is about issues—not just the ability to talk, and not just procedures
  • Blankenhorn is disarmingly open about these challenges, though he told me, “I’ve worked for lost causes in this country. I know what it’s like to not get much response for something you’re trying to do. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Javier E

The West Virginia primary shows Trump's election was no aberration - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-9c91-7dab596e8252_story.html

election partisan polarization demagogue trump culture politics

shared by Javier E on 08 May 18 - No Cached
  • the West Virginia GOP primary confirms that this sort of vulgar demagoguery is becoming routine. Trump’s election was no aberration. Rather, he exploited deep problems in American politics that had been building for years — and others, following his example, will exploit those same problems after he’s gone.
  • Before Trump, there was Sarah Palin, the tea party movement, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), the Republican Study Committee, the Freedom Caucus. The Republican Party tried to harness the rage of the nativist right but ultimately couldn’t contain it.
  • Now we have Blankenship, Roy Moore, Joe Arpaio and a proliferation of name-calling misfits and even felons on Republican ballots. They are monsters created by the GOP, or rather the power vacuum the GOP has become.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Political scientists have observed that American politics has deteriorated into an unstable combination of weak parties and strong partisanship — dry brush for the likes of Trump and Blankenship to ignite.
  • The 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform restricted party fundraising, and the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling in 2010 essentially destroyed parties by giving everybody else freedom to spend unlimited sums to buy politicians. The moderating influence of parties was replaced by the radicalizing influence of dark money.
  • Related to this, partisanship in Washington escalated, aggravated by partisan redistricting that puts almost all House members in safe seats where the only threat comes from primaries. Primary voters tend to favor extreme candidates — who, once in Congress, turn politics into warfare.
  • the problem is most severe among Republicans, and it’s no small irony that the man who arguably did the most to create the current system is now under attack by it. McConnell, who championed unlimited dark money, cheered Citizens United and dramatically accelerated the partisan revenge cycle on the Senate floor, is now the victim of extremists his own actions created.
  • this much we already know: McConnell unleashed the forces now shredding his party. Blankenship, like Trump, exploited those forces. And nobody controls them.
Javier E

Justin Amash: Our politics is in a partisan death spiral. That's why I'm leaving the GO... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-b27f-ed2942f73d70_story.html

partisan polarization constitution washington

shared by Javier E on 04 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • My parents, both immigrants, were Republicans. I supported Republican candidates throughout my early adult life and then successfully ran for office as a Republican. The Republican Party, I believed, stood for limited government, economic freedom and individual liberty — principles that had made the American Dream possible for my family.
  • In recent years, though, I’ve become disenchanted with party politics and frightened by what I see from it. The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions
  • George Washington was so concerned as he watched political parties take shape in America that he dedicated much of his farewell address to warning that partisanship, although “inseparable from our nature,” was the people’s “worst enemy.”
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  • “It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection
  • It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”
  • True to Washington’s fears, Americans have allowed government officials, under assertions of expediency and party unity, to ignore the most basic tenets of our constitutional order: separation of powers, federalism and the rule of law
  • The result has been the consolidation of political power and the near disintegration of representative democracy.
  • These are consequences of a mind-set among the political class that loyalty to party is more important than serving the American people or protecting our governing institutions.
  • The founders envisioned Congress as a deliberative body in which outcomes are discovered. We are fast approaching the point, however, where Congress exists as little more than a formality to legitimize outcomes dictated by the president, the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader.
  • These strategies fuel mistrust and anger, leading millions of people to take to social media to express contempt for their political opponents, with the media magnifying the most extreme voices.
Javier E

Opinion | How Racist Is Trump's Republican Party? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-republicans-racism.html

racism language definition variety gop trump policies

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Is the modern Republican Party built on race prejudice, otherwise known as racism?
  • Has it become, as Stuart Stevens — a media consultant with an exceptionally high win-loss record who was a lead strategist for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 — puts it,
  • the “white grievance party”?
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  • Stevens’s forthcoming book, “It Was All A Lie,” makes the case that President Trump is the natural outcome of a long chain of events going back to the 1964 election when Barry Goldwater ran for president as an opponent of the Civil Right Act passed earlier that year.
  • What were the lies? That the Republican Party “espoused a core set of values: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party.”
  • There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.
  • “I have no one to blame but myself,” he declares on the first page. “What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.”
  • “As much as I’d love to go to bed at night reassuring myself that Donald Trump was some freak product of the system — a ‘black swan,’” Stevens writes, “I can’t do it”:
  • And what is the truth? The Republican Party is “just a white grievance party.”
  • Race, Stevens writes,has defined the modern Republican Party. After Goldwater carried only southern states and received a record low of 7 percent of the black vote, the party faced a basic choice: do what was necessary to appeal to more nonwhite voters, or build a party to win with white voters. It chose the latter, and when most successfully executed, a race-based strategy was the foundation of many of the Republican Party’s biggest victories, from Nixon to Trump.
  • With Trump, the Party has grown comfortable as a white grievance party. Is that racist? Yes, I think it is. Are 63 million plus people who supported Trump racist? No, absolutely not. But to support Trump is to make peace with white grievance and hate.
  • Ordinary citizens, without being racists themselves, may do and say things that are consistent with a racist ideology. It does not make the outcomes any less egregious or harmful.
  • even though individual and group motives may not be racist, the outcomes achieved can be identical to the ones that racists would seek:
  • My overall point is that we have forgotten what racism means. In doing so, we have focused attention on bigots and white nationalists and not held ordinary citizens accountable for beliefs that achieve the same ends.
  • Chloe Thurston, in turn, cited as specific examplesPresident Trump’s or Steve King’s comments about certain types of immigrants being unassimilable or not sufficiently American and suggesting that other (e.g. white) immigrants do not have those characteristics.
  • While both Trump and King, an anti-immigrant congressman from Iowa, “balk at the label ‘racist,’ she continued, “it is descriptively accurate and necessary from the standpoint of keeping track of the role and uses of racism in American society and politics.”
  • People can participate in and perpetuate racist systems without necessarily subscribing to those beliefs.
  • People can recognize something they participate in or contribute to as racist but decide it’s not disqualifying
  • And people can design racist policies and systems.
  • These are distinctive manifestations of racism but not all of them require us to know whether a person is expressly motivated by racism.
  • As a social scientist, I would entertain the possibility that people’s actions are guided by a variety of motivations, potentially including racial considerations but also values (i.e., a commitment to a free market; egalitarianism; moral conservatism); economic considerations; self-interest (concerns about my child’s ability to get into a high school or my child’s commute to a faraway school), or even factual beliefs.
  • Because of the wide variety of possible motivations, Kam wrote in her email, she “would hesitate to label an action as ‘racist’ — unless racial considerations seem to be the only or the massively determinative consideration at play, based upon statistical modeling or carefully calibrated experiments.”
  • Kam notes that she worries “about excessive use of these labels” because describing someone or some action as racist “can easily escalate conflict beyond the point of return.”
  • Eric Kaufmann voiced similar caution, noting that racism and racist are highly charged words, the deployment of which can in some cases prove damaging to liberals and the left. He cited the “unwillingness to talk about immigration for fear of being labeled racist,” giving free rein to populists who do address immigration “and thus get elected. Trump’s election is exhibit A.”
  • In addition, according to Kaufmann, thefear of being labeled racist may be pushing left parties toward immigration policies, or policies on affirmative action, reparations, etc., that make them unelectable.
  • None of the examples I cited, in Kaufmann’s view, “are racist” unless it could be explicitly demonstrated “in a survey that those espousing the policies were mainly motivated by racism.” If not, he said, the “principle of charity should apply.”
  • Jardina joined others in calling for caution in the use of the word racist because itoften has a backlash effect. One reason is that people disagree on what is racist, another is that people are offended when they are called racist because they do not believe their acts or behaviors or racist (even if they are).
  • In addition, she continued,many whites see accusations of racism as disingenuous. They believe that Democrats in particular “play the race card” by calling people or beliefs racist as a political strategy, rather than as a sincere effort to combat racism.
  • There is, in fact, a huge partisan divide over what is considered racist and what is not.
  • The powerful tendency of Democrats to perceive racism has a significant, if unintended, adverse effect on minority candidates seeking to be nominated in Democratic primaries
  • The result? Believing themselves to be realists, Democrats actually foreclose some outcomes they would favor:Democrats who perceive high levels of explicit prejudice toward a group also believe presidential candidates from that group would be less electable.
  • Clearly, there is a large divide not only over the definition of racism, but also over the level of racism in the nation.
  • one of the most relevant questions before the electorate is whether voters agree with Stuart Stevens on whether Donald Trump is a racist.
  • The answer to that question, according to a July 2019 Quinnipiac University national poll, is that 51 percent say Trump is a racist; 45 percent say he is not.
  • There are huge racial, partisan, gender and religious differences: whites say Trump is not racist 50-46; blacks say he is racist 80-11; Democrats 86-9 say yes, Republicans 91-8 say no; men 55-41 say no, women 59-36 say yes; white evangelicals say no 76-21, Catholics 50-48 say no; the unaffiliated say yes, 63-30.
  • What this boils down to is that racism is detected, determined and observed through partisan and ideological lenses.
  • what is still quite striking is how much the perception of the importance of racism has changed in recent years. How else is it that the United States, a nation that declared 244 years ago that “all men are created equal,” has a president seen as a racist by a majority of the electorate?
Javier E

Opinion | In the American South, a Perfect Storm Is Gathering - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...Tennessee-southern-states.html

South states pandemic response gop trump policy

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • On March 30, when Mr. Lee issued an executive order shutting down nonessential businesses, he stopped short of requiring Tennesseans to stay home. “It is deeply important that we protect personal liberties,” he said, ignoring tens of thousands of health professionals who argued that nothing less than a stay-at-home order would save this state from disaster. And not just this state.
  • Out of fear of what Tennessee’s delays might mean for their own populations, Fort Campbell, a U.S. Army base that straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky border, restricted travel to Nashville.
  • Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, urged his citizens not to enter Tennessee: “We have taken very aggressive steps to try to stop or limit the spread of the coronavirus to try to protect our people,” Mr. Beshear said. “But our neighbors from the south, in many instances, are not. If you ultimately go down over that border and go to a restaurant or something that’s not open in Kentucky, what you do is you bring the coronavirus back here.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Most Southern states, like Tennessee, did not expand Medicaid, and in those states a perfect storm has gathered force.
  • What does it mean to live though a pandemic in a place with a high number of uninsured citizens, where many counties don’t have a single hospital, and where the governor delayed requiring folks to stay home? Across the South, we are about to find out.
  • Finally, on April 2, Mr. Lee acknowledged epidemiological reality and issued a stay-at-home order. The rest of the red-state governors will also capitulate to reality before this is all over. But the time for decisive action has long since passed, and their delays, like the president’s, will end up costing thousands of lives.
  • Viruses are not partisan. Science itself is not partisan. Nevertheless, Covid-19 has become a partisan issue here in the South because our governors have followed the lead of both the president, who spent crucial early weeks denying the severity of the crisis, and Fox News, which downplayed concerns about the pandemic as Democratic hysteria.
  • That’s why every governor who has issued a deeply belated shelter-in-place order is a Republican.
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