I want to pick up where I left off in my previous post, One Reason Hillary Lost. This is a subject that's important to me.
I said in that earlier post that Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump for many reasons. The one I highlighted was that she did not "grok" the white working class ... and Donald Trump, even though he's a billionaire, did.
To "grok" somebody, in terms of their attitudes and general mindset, is "'to understand [them] intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with [them]' and 'to empathize or communicate sympathetically [with them]." Hillary could not do that with America's white working class — particularly the men in that group. So that group went overwhelmingly for Trump.
The members of the white working class that most concern me are the "hillbillies" that J.D. Vance has written about in his 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. They come mainly from people of Scots-Irish descent who live in southern Appalachia (though many of their families moved to northern cities to find work during WWII).
I come from a family background about three-eighths Scots-Irish. Though none of my forebears lived in the South, many lived in the Ozark region and elsewhere in Missouri. My grandparents were occasionally poor but most of the time occupied the middle part of the economic spectrum. One of my great-great-grandfathers was a wealthy slaveholder in central Missouri prior to the Civil War.
Even with that sort of thing in my family background, I'm not entirely sure I can tell you why I grok the "hillbillies" J.D. Vance writes about. In fact, my own father used to laugh at and about the "hillbillies" he encountered in the Ozarks during his formative years, saying for instance that they all had one leg shorter than the other so that they could easily run along mountain ridges. My Uncle Preston — the husband of one of my mother's sisters, who became a millionaire in St. Louis — used to joke that he was born a "hillbilly," but I have no idea how true that was.
Anyway, I grok the white Americans who have been derogated as "hillbillies" far better than I do the other members of the white working class who lack a college education and whose jobs have disappeared or are at risk. But I do know that both groups feel like they're outsiders in their own land, and both cohorts voted overwhelmingly for Trump. So I feel justified in saying that Hillary does not grok either cohort, having once said that half of Trump supporters constitute a "basket of deplorables."
Democrats — of whom I am one — have in my lifetime taken up the causes of numerous other groups who have felt like outsiders in their own land. Notable among these groups have been African Americans. When Democrats hitched their wagon to the civil rights movement in the 1960s and '70s, white people in the South who were once Democrats switched to Republican. Many of the newly Republican southerners who resented the Democrats' civil rights agenda were working-class, and some of those working-class southern whites were "hillbillies."
President Richard Nixon, through his first term, "pursued a Southern Strategy with policies, such as ... desegregation plans, that would be broadly acceptable among Southern whites, encouraging them to realign with the Republicans in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era." That was in the late 1960s and early '70s. After the realignment, Democrats and white working-class southerners were like oil and water: they didn't mix.
White working-class southerners get derogated as not only "hillbillies" but also "rednecks," "rubes," "yokels," "hayseeds," "bumpkins," and the like. Other social groups that get derogated by the use of equally ignorant, equally stereotypical terms have drawn much sympathy and support from us Democrats, but white working-class southerners have not. The reason: White working-class southerners are often the ones whose utterances have been known to slander African Americans and other cohorts that Democrats strive to help.
There's a conundrum here. Democrats believe they are the first to support any and all victims of slandering and stereotyping, but they look the other way when the slanderers and stereotypers themselves get slandered and stereotyped.
This is quite understandable. It's human nature to find it hard to hate the sin (racism, say) yet love the sinner (white working-class folks whose culture has long promoted racism). But it's wrong to give in to that difficulty.
One reason it's wrong was illustrated by Election 2016. Our Democratic champion Hillary Clinton couldn't pick up enough electoral votes to win the presidency because (I'd say) she has tin ear when it comes to the white working class, many of whom vote in the South, and many others of whom, though once southerners, today vote in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These are states that went to Trump this year. Quite a few of states like these once voted reliably Democratic. Hillary desperately needed them to vote her way if she were going to win. They didn't. She lost.
Another reason having a tin ear for "hillbillies" and other members of the white working class who have often been racist in their outlook is wrong is that it perpetuates the wide gulf that currently separates many Americans from many other Americans. Democrats and Republicans bemoan the gulf, but neither party seems willing to do what is necessary to bridge it. Democrats are not the only ones at fault, true ... but they are at fault. Specifically, Democratic elites are at fault. These elites, because they are elite "somebodies," cannot really hear the voices of the "nobodies" who cry out that they have become strangers in their own land.
Democrats — elites and ordinary folks — need to open their minds, hearts, and ears to the likes of the "hillbillies" whom J.D. Vance celebrates, despite all their flaws, in his book.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Thursday, November 10, 2016
One Reason Why Hillary Lost
I voted for Hillary Clinton, and I was admittedly stunned when she lost to Donald Trump in Election 2016. The pundits on TV gave at least a hundred reasons why she lost. I'd like to focus on just one.
That particular reason for her losing has to do with the Trump voters themselves, half of whom she insensitively called a "basket of deplorables." Such disdain tells me that, deep, deep down, she simply cannot grasp the mindset of that group of Trumpists.
That's not uncommon among us (upper) middle-class whites with a college education, whether we are male or female.
White working-class voters voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Exit polls showed that white voters without a college degree are nowadays down to just 1/3 of the electorate. Yet they turned conventional wisdom on its head by voting Trump into the Oval Office.
"In the end, the bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength among white working-class voters fell to Mr. Trump," wrote Nate Cohn of the New York Times. "White working-class voters may not have commanded enough of Clinton’s attention," wrote Matthew Cooper of Newsweek, "but Trump put a spotlight on them. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir and study of these voters, became a best-seller and a must-read for political types."
I think those post-election analyses miss a point that may or may not be relevant. (I think it is relevant.) I'd say the "bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength among white working-class voters" are not "hillbillies" by J.D. Vance's characterization in Hillbilly Elegy. "Hillbillies" are mostly white people of Scots-Irish descent who live in southern Appalachia or whose families have moved north to find work. The term "hillbilly" applies also to other (often poor) white people from other mountainous areas of the country, such as northern Appalachia or the Ozarks.
We need to keep in mind that the term "hillbilly" is frequently used by non-hillbillies in a derogatory way — suggesting that a fair number of America's non-hillbillies consider hillbillies to constitute a "basket of deplorables."
I'm saying that the erstwhile "bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength" and the "hillbillies" are two different sets of working-class whites, even if both sets voted heavily for Trump.
The following is admittedly a guess on my part: Hillary Clinton has more trouble grasping the mindset of the "hillbillies" than she does the mindset of working-class descendants of the erstwhile "bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength" — people whose family background can be that of those who once were thought of as "ethnic" whites: Italians, Irish, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Hungarians, Slovaks, French-Canadians, Portuguese, Croats, etc. Many of these are people who typically became blue-collar workers after their families arrived in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As people who furnished labor to grow America's economy, they were generally ill-treated until they unionized during the early 20th century. Such white union members once voted reliably Democratic.
*****
But "hillbillies" were not part of the original union movement of the early 20th century. They were nonetheless typically Democratic. But as southerners, they voted Democratic (if they voted at all) for different reasons — often deeply entrenched racial ones — than did the "ethnic" whites of the North.
The "hillbillies" of J.D. Vance's narrative are often the people of whom President Obama has said:
This was a somewhat ham-fisted attempt by the president to show he understood their plight. Yet his "cling to guns or religion" remark was called out as false stereotyping, just as has Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment deservedly was. Both comments gave off more than a whiff of disdain. Disdain for any group of Americans implies a lack of understanding, a lack of listening, a lack of honoring.
Over the past fifty years many Americans have ceased stereotyping and showing disdain for groups that are not just like themselves. These groups have included (for men) women; (for whites) African Americans; (for straight people) gays and lesbians; etc. etc. etc.
But just as importantly, "hillbillies" have not been included in that list.
One reason has been that the general stereotype of America's "hillbillies" includes the adjective "racist" — and there is a fair amount of accuracy to that attribution. Many whites from the South are not disposed to see black people as their equals. And many of those whites are "hillbillies."
Since at least the 1960s, the Democratic Party has invested itself heavily in furthering the civil rights of black Americans. That is a marvelous and much-needed thing. But at the same time, it has made it harder than ever for the upwardly mobile white folks who form the "elites" of the Democratic Party — Hillary Clinton is included in that group — to "grok" the mindset of white "hillbillies." To "grok" means "'to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with' and 'to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment.'"
Hillary did not understand (or enjoy) the "hillbillies" of the white working class "intuitively or by empathy." I have to compare her unfavorably with Bobby Kennedy. During the 1960s, Kennedy became a hero of ordinary African Americans and black civil rights leaders. But at first, he (as his brother John F. Kennedy's attorney general) tended to talk at, rather than listen to, leaders of the civil rights movement. In a crucial meeting with them in New York, according to Larry Tye's biography Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, they pretty much handed him his head.
The fundamental problem was that Kennedy didn't yet understand black Americans "intuitively or by empathy." He didn't grok their mindset. This was a problem that Bobby would soon rectify, during a period of deepening of his personal understanding as he mourned the assassination of his brother. In that period, he took the trouble to look first-hand into the poverty many African Americans were forced to live in.
Then, when Kennedy was running for president in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated on an evening when Kennedy happened to be campaigning in a black community in Indianapolis. His sensitive extemporaneous remarks to African Americans on that night, which became one of his most famous speeches after he himself was struck down by an assassin's bullet, were proof that he had learned to grasp their mindset intuitively and precisely. That speech kept Indianapolis from erupting in riot and flame the way many other cities did in the wake of the Reverend King's slaying.
*****
Back to "hillbillies." They (and other working-class whites) were not truly understood by Hillary Clinton the way Donald Trump seemed to be able to grok those supporters' wants and needs. She tried to talk at them, offering policy proposals that might help them economically, but she did not really listen to them.
We aspire upward in the social-class hierarchy. We want to climb the ladder, so we identify with those above us on the ladder. That means we tend to disdain downward.
It takes a special person to grok downward instead. Bobby Kennedy was just such a special person. In his early life, that third son of a wealthy Boston Irish businessman named Joseph P. Kennedy took his designated part in Joe's aspiration that a Kennedy son would become president. The first son, Joe Jr., died in WWII, making Jack the presidential aspirant. The Kennedy children were groomed by their father and mother to possess the characteristics typical of the powerful Protestant leaders in this country, such as attending Harvard University. They had little reason not to somewhat disdain those below them on the social ladder, including African Americans.
Jack became president, with Bobby his attorney general and closest advisor, at a time in our history when African Americans were demanding their rights. Reluctantly, Jack and Bobby had to deal with their push for equality. It was in that context that Bobby met with civil rights leaders in New York in 1963 and failed to impress them. He did not yet listen to them. So he could not yet grok them.
After Jack Kennedy was assassinated, Bobby's "better self" began to emerge out of his intense mourning. He started to study the great philosophers of ancient Greece and to read Shakespeare. He took ever more seriously the Catholic adjurations to help the poor. He traveled to places where poor "Negroes" lived and painfully witnessed the conditions of their impoverishment. He became involved in their struggle to better their lives. The revised and matured version of Bobby began at last to grok them.
To grok someone is to lose the tendency to disdain them. To lead, you first must grok. Bobby Kennedy, in grokking the "Negroes" of this land, had become able to be one the few white civil rights leaders in America.
Hillary Clinton does not seem to be a special person to the perhaps unique extent Bobby Kennedy was. Coming from a family lower in social and economic class than the Kennedys, Hillary has so successfully aspired upward as to become a first lady, a U.S. senator, a U.S. secretary of state, and the first female U.S. presidential candidate to win the national popular vote. In climbing the ladder, she has formed a vast network of movers and shakers who support her assiduously. What she has not done is the kind of homework Bobby Kennedy did that allowed him to set aside his earlier disdain and to grok the lives and minds of needy people lower down in the social hierarchy. Bobby, once he was open to honoring their plight and their unfulfilled needs, earned their trust, loyalty, and political support.
The Hillary Clinton of the "basket of deplorables" utterance is clearly not yrt open to honoring the plight and socioeconomic needs of lesser-educated working-class whites. she wants to help them via programmatic but she hasn't really listened to them — especially not the "hillbillies." She hasn't learned to grok them. Hence, they don't see her as an eligible leader in Washington.
It's a big reason why she got too few electoral votes and lost the election.
That particular reason for her losing has to do with the Trump voters themselves, half of whom she insensitively called a "basket of deplorables." Such disdain tells me that, deep, deep down, she simply cannot grasp the mindset of that group of Trumpists.
That's not uncommon among us (upper) middle-class whites with a college education, whether we are male or female.
White working-class voters voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Exit polls showed that white voters without a college degree are nowadays down to just 1/3 of the electorate. Yet they turned conventional wisdom on its head by voting Trump into the Oval Office.
"In the end, the bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength among white working-class voters fell to Mr. Trump," wrote Nate Cohn of the New York Times. "White working-class voters may not have commanded enough of Clinton’s attention," wrote Matthew Cooper of Newsweek, "but Trump put a spotlight on them. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir and study of these voters, became a best-seller and a must-read for political types."
I think those post-election analyses miss a point that may or may not be relevant. (I think it is relevant.) I'd say the "bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength among white working-class voters" are not "hillbillies" by J.D. Vance's characterization in Hillbilly Elegy. "Hillbillies" are mostly white people of Scots-Irish descent who live in southern Appalachia or whose families have moved north to find work. The term "hillbilly" applies also to other (often poor) white people from other mountainous areas of the country, such as northern Appalachia or the Ozarks.
We need to keep in mind that the term "hillbilly" is frequently used by non-hillbillies in a derogatory way — suggesting that a fair number of America's non-hillbillies consider hillbillies to constitute a "basket of deplorables."
I'm saying that the erstwhile "bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength" and the "hillbillies" are two different sets of working-class whites, even if both sets voted heavily for Trump.
The following is admittedly a guess on my part: Hillary Clinton has more trouble grasping the mindset of the "hillbillies" than she does the mindset of working-class descendants of the erstwhile "bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength" — people whose family background can be that of those who once were thought of as "ethnic" whites: Italians, Irish, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Hungarians, Slovaks, French-Canadians, Portuguese, Croats, etc. Many of these are people who typically became blue-collar workers after their families arrived in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As people who furnished labor to grow America's economy, they were generally ill-treated until they unionized during the early 20th century. Such white union members once voted reliably Democratic.
*****
But "hillbillies" were not part of the original union movement of the early 20th century. They were nonetheless typically Democratic. But as southerners, they voted Democratic (if they voted at all) for different reasons — often deeply entrenched racial ones — than did the "ethnic" whites of the North.
The "hillbillies" of J.D. Vance's narrative are often the people of whom President Obama has said:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
This was a somewhat ham-fisted attempt by the president to show he understood their plight. Yet his "cling to guns or religion" remark was called out as false stereotyping, just as has Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment deservedly was. Both comments gave off more than a whiff of disdain. Disdain for any group of Americans implies a lack of understanding, a lack of listening, a lack of honoring.
*****
Over the past fifty years many Americans have ceased stereotyping and showing disdain for groups that are not just like themselves. These groups have included (for men) women; (for whites) African Americans; (for straight people) gays and lesbians; etc. etc. etc.
But just as importantly, "hillbillies" have not been included in that list.
One reason has been that the general stereotype of America's "hillbillies" includes the adjective "racist" — and there is a fair amount of accuracy to that attribution. Many whites from the South are not disposed to see black people as their equals. And many of those whites are "hillbillies."
Since at least the 1960s, the Democratic Party has invested itself heavily in furthering the civil rights of black Americans. That is a marvelous and much-needed thing. But at the same time, it has made it harder than ever for the upwardly mobile white folks who form the "elites" of the Democratic Party — Hillary Clinton is included in that group — to "grok" the mindset of white "hillbillies." To "grok" means "'to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with' and 'to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment.'"
Hillary did not understand (or enjoy) the "hillbillies" of the white working class "intuitively or by empathy." I have to compare her unfavorably with Bobby Kennedy. During the 1960s, Kennedy became a hero of ordinary African Americans and black civil rights leaders. But at first, he (as his brother John F. Kennedy's attorney general) tended to talk at, rather than listen to, leaders of the civil rights movement. In a crucial meeting with them in New York, according to Larry Tye's biography Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, they pretty much handed him his head.
The fundamental problem was that Kennedy didn't yet understand black Americans "intuitively or by empathy." He didn't grok their mindset. This was a problem that Bobby would soon rectify, during a period of deepening of his personal understanding as he mourned the assassination of his brother. In that period, he took the trouble to look first-hand into the poverty many African Americans were forced to live in.
Then, when Kennedy was running for president in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated on an evening when Kennedy happened to be campaigning in a black community in Indianapolis. His sensitive extemporaneous remarks to African Americans on that night, which became one of his most famous speeches after he himself was struck down by an assassin's bullet, were proof that he had learned to grasp their mindset intuitively and precisely. That speech kept Indianapolis from erupting in riot and flame the way many other cities did in the wake of the Reverend King's slaying.
*****
Back to "hillbillies." They (and other working-class whites) were not truly understood by Hillary Clinton the way Donald Trump seemed to be able to grok those supporters' wants and needs. She tried to talk at them, offering policy proposals that might help them economically, but she did not really listen to them.
We aspire upward in the social-class hierarchy. We want to climb the ladder, so we identify with those above us on the ladder. That means we tend to disdain downward.
It takes a special person to grok downward instead. Bobby Kennedy was just such a special person. In his early life, that third son of a wealthy Boston Irish businessman named Joseph P. Kennedy took his designated part in Joe's aspiration that a Kennedy son would become president. The first son, Joe Jr., died in WWII, making Jack the presidential aspirant. The Kennedy children were groomed by their father and mother to possess the characteristics typical of the powerful Protestant leaders in this country, such as attending Harvard University. They had little reason not to somewhat disdain those below them on the social ladder, including African Americans.
Jack became president, with Bobby his attorney general and closest advisor, at a time in our history when African Americans were demanding their rights. Reluctantly, Jack and Bobby had to deal with their push for equality. It was in that context that Bobby met with civil rights leaders in New York in 1963 and failed to impress them. He did not yet listen to them. So he could not yet grok them.
After Jack Kennedy was assassinated, Bobby's "better self" began to emerge out of his intense mourning. He started to study the great philosophers of ancient Greece and to read Shakespeare. He took ever more seriously the Catholic adjurations to help the poor. He traveled to places where poor "Negroes" lived and painfully witnessed the conditions of their impoverishment. He became involved in their struggle to better their lives. The revised and matured version of Bobby began at last to grok them.
To grok someone is to lose the tendency to disdain them. To lead, you first must grok. Bobby Kennedy, in grokking the "Negroes" of this land, had become able to be one the few white civil rights leaders in America.
Hillary Clinton does not seem to be a special person to the perhaps unique extent Bobby Kennedy was. Coming from a family lower in social and economic class than the Kennedys, Hillary has so successfully aspired upward as to become a first lady, a U.S. senator, a U.S. secretary of state, and the first female U.S. presidential candidate to win the national popular vote. In climbing the ladder, she has formed a vast network of movers and shakers who support her assiduously. What she has not done is the kind of homework Bobby Kennedy did that allowed him to set aside his earlier disdain and to grok the lives and minds of needy people lower down in the social hierarchy. Bobby, once he was open to honoring their plight and their unfulfilled needs, earned their trust, loyalty, and political support.
The Hillary Clinton of the "basket of deplorables" utterance is clearly not yrt open to honoring the plight and socioeconomic needs of lesser-educated working-class whites. she wants to help them via programmatic but she hasn't really listened to them — especially not the "hillbillies." She hasn't learned to grok them. Hence, they don't see her as an eligible leader in Washington.
It's a big reason why she got too few electoral votes and lost the election.
Thursday, November 03, 2016
Vote!
My purpose in this post is to convince you to go ahead and vote in the 2016 presidential election. Don't not vote because you don't like either major candidate particularly well.
I'm assuming you prefer one of the two major-party candidates, either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, even if the candidate you prefer doesn't thrill you.
Since I'm an "old-style liberal," I prefer Hillary Clinton. I don't love her, but I prefer her. Yet what I'm saying here applies just as well if you happen to prefer Donald Trump.
The reason is that this election is going to be close. As of today — the Thursday before Election Day, which is Tuesday, November 8 — the polls are showing a virtual tie. The Real Clear Politics average of several national polls is (as of this date; it could change over the next few days) showing Clinton with a 1.7 percentage point lead. Most polls have a margin of error of at least 3 percentage points, so +1.7 points is basically a dead heat.
Electoral votes
The election will be won by whichever candidate gets at least 270 votes in the Electoral College — whether or not he or she wins the nationwide popular vote. Votes in the Electoral College are awarded state by state. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes. That number depends on the population of the state. The more populous states get more electoral votes than the less populous states.
We had close elections in 2000 and 2004. In 2000, George W. Bush won the electoral vote over Al Gore when the populous state of Florida went very narrowly for him — in a contested statewide result that went all the way to the Supreme Court — even though Gore won the national popular vote.
In 2004, the Republican Bush won again, this time over the Democrat John Kerry, in an election that came down to the winner of the extremely populous state of Ohio: Bush.
Who will determine the next president?
When elections are that close, it's the people who don't show up and vote that can determine the outcome. Or, voters who don't vote for one of the two major-party candidates; in 2000, third-party candidate Ralph Nader took enough votes from Gore in Florida to tip the election to Bush.
If you live in a very populous state that is also quite close in statewide pre-election polls, your state can swing the way you don't want it to if you and just a few other people with the same candidate preference don't express your preference in the voting booth. That can tip the entire election!
If you live in a state with a smaller population, but one that is close in the polls, your absence might likewise tip the entire election. It's not as likely that this year's election (or any year's) will pivot on a smaller state, but it's not impossible.
So vote!
P.S. If your state has "early voting," you can avoid Election Day lines by taking advantage of it. If you are eligible to vote but haven't registered, your state may permit "same day registration" that will still allow you to vote.
I'm assuming you prefer one of the two major-party candidates, either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, even if the candidate you prefer doesn't thrill you.
Since I'm an "old-style liberal," I prefer Hillary Clinton. I don't love her, but I prefer her. Yet what I'm saying here applies just as well if you happen to prefer Donald Trump.
The reason is that this election is going to be close. As of today — the Thursday before Election Day, which is Tuesday, November 8 — the polls are showing a virtual tie. The Real Clear Politics average of several national polls is (as of this date; it could change over the next few days) showing Clinton with a 1.7 percentage point lead. Most polls have a margin of error of at least 3 percentage points, so +1.7 points is basically a dead heat.
Electoral votes
The election will be won by whichever candidate gets at least 270 votes in the Electoral College — whether or not he or she wins the nationwide popular vote. Votes in the Electoral College are awarded state by state. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes. That number depends on the population of the state. The more populous states get more electoral votes than the less populous states.
We had close elections in 2000 and 2004. In 2000, George W. Bush won the electoral vote over Al Gore when the populous state of Florida went very narrowly for him — in a contested statewide result that went all the way to the Supreme Court — even though Gore won the national popular vote.
In 2004, the Republican Bush won again, this time over the Democrat John Kerry, in an election that came down to the winner of the extremely populous state of Ohio: Bush.
Who will determine the next president?
When elections are that close, it's the people who don't show up and vote that can determine the outcome. Or, voters who don't vote for one of the two major-party candidates; in 2000, third-party candidate Ralph Nader took enough votes from Gore in Florida to tip the election to Bush.
If you live in a very populous state that is also quite close in statewide pre-election polls, your state can swing the way you don't want it to if you and just a few other people with the same candidate preference don't express your preference in the voting booth. That can tip the entire election!
If you live in a state with a smaller population, but one that is close in the polls, your absence might likewise tip the entire election. It's not as likely that this year's election (or any year's) will pivot on a smaller state, but it's not impossible.
So vote!
P.S. If your state has "early voting," you can avoid Election Day lines by taking advantage of it. If you are eligible to vote but haven't registered, your state may permit "same day registration" that will still allow you to vote.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Abortion: It Terminates a Biography
 |
| Ruth Marcus |
The "they" in that sentence refers to professional women, mostly attorneys, who have told the Supreme Court that having undergone abortions has enhanced their personal biographies. They could not have attained their present status as women professionals had they carried their fetuses to term, and so they urge the justices to, in a pending court case (Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole), disallow recent attempts by states to make abortions harder to get.
Marcus's sentence mentioning professional women's biographies, however, has persuaded me in the exact opposite direction. It occurs to me, as a result of pondering Marcus’s column, that an abortion abruptly terminates a biography: that of the fetus.
True, the fetus's biography is more potential than actual, but so is the rest of yours.
True, the bio of a woman who does not abort her pregnancy will turn out to be vastly different than if she does have the abortion. Possibly it will be, from a certain quite reasonable point of view, worse. But it's also true that she might wind up with a better life, owing to the fact that she will very likely wind up as a different sort of person with different intentions and values. Put another way, her biography might well have a different happy ending.
Being a successful professional woman is a good thing. Keeping a fetus alive and bearing a human being into the world is also a good thing. I believe the latter to be a better thing than the former, though, because abruptly terminating a potential biography is worse than constraining the biography of someone who is already born. People can find happiness despite constrained biographies. People can find no happiness at all if they have no biography whatsoever.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Pope Francis Weighs In On Climate Change
Thank you, Holy Father!
Your encyclical Laudato Sí ("Praise Be To You") arrived on Thursday to the joy of liberal Catholics, myself included. Also, it drew great consternation from conservatives, Catholic or otherwise. The reason: it establishes a crucial link between the Catholic Church's traditional social-justice agenda and the need for us all to be concerned about what we are doing to the planet, namely, engendering adverse climate change.
An op-ed appearing in today's Baltimore Sun captures the gist of your argument. David Cloutier, an associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary's University here in Maryland, writes:
Francis calls us "to recognize that other living beings have a value of their own in God's eyes." The rest of the world — animals, plants, even mineral resources — is not merely raw material for human consumption. Pope Benedict [your predecessor] insisted that there is a "grammar of creation," an "inbuilt order" that is from God and must be respected and cherished.
Also:
... proper care for the environment is only really possible if we love our neighbor rightly. The idea that "everything is connected" is repeated throughout [your] encyclical.
So we need, all of us, to do more than just cease misusing the Earth's natural resources to our own selfish ends. We must likewise change "the dynamic of an economy where workers are just another 'resource' ... [as well as] the dynamic of a sexual culture where we use other people for our own pleasure."
Not caring for the environment and not caring for people are really rooted in the same [unjust] moral stance [Cloutier writes]: a practical relativism that, in Francis' words, "sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one's own immediate interests."
We are all connected by virtue of the fact that we are all creatures of God — humans, animals, plants, even mineral resources and the fertility of the soil. I begin to see that your extending the template of social justice to include all of Mother Nature ought not to be as much of a surprise as, frankly, I myself find it to be.
At one of his talks, I once asked Father Thomas Reese, SJ, senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter, "Why is it that the words Catholic and environmentalist are not often found in the same sentence?" His bemused answer suggested to me that he found my question well taken.
Until now.
You show in your encyclical, manifestly, the extent to which the pronouncements of our previous two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, agree with your core ideas, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe care for the natural world is indeed part of "Catholicism 101," as has been said of Laudato Sí (see "Why Pope Francis’s climate message is so hard for some Americans to swallow," from a recent issue of the Washington Post).
That article has it that
The Pope’s entire case for caring for “our common home,” as he puts it, is moral.
We as Christians and as human beings accordingly have a moral duty to "address the planet’s vulnerability," in other words.
As Americans in particular, moreover, we need to rein in our vaunted individualism, replacing it with a newfound "communitarianism." That's a tough one, I admit. All of what you say in Laudato Sí amounts to as hard-to-follow a moral prescription as any aspect of Catholic teaching is. Yet I do see that your encyclical weaves for us a "seamless garment" of commitment that we all need to put on right now.
An op-ed appearing in today's Baltimore Sun captures the gist of your argument. David Cloutier, an associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary's University here in Maryland, writes:
Francis calls us "to recognize that other living beings have a value of their own in God's eyes." The rest of the world — animals, plants, even mineral resources — is not merely raw material for human consumption. Pope Benedict [your predecessor] insisted that there is a "grammar of creation," an "inbuilt order" that is from God and must be respected and cherished.
Also:
... proper care for the environment is only really possible if we love our neighbor rightly. The idea that "everything is connected" is repeated throughout [your] encyclical.
So we need, all of us, to do more than just cease misusing the Earth's natural resources to our own selfish ends. We must likewise change "the dynamic of an economy where workers are just another 'resource' ... [as well as] the dynamic of a sexual culture where we use other people for our own pleasure."
Not caring for the environment and not caring for people are really rooted in the same [unjust] moral stance [Cloutier writes]: a practical relativism that, in Francis' words, "sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one's own immediate interests."
We are all connected by virtue of the fact that we are all creatures of God — humans, animals, plants, even mineral resources and the fertility of the soil. I begin to see that your extending the template of social justice to include all of Mother Nature ought not to be as much of a surprise as, frankly, I myself find it to be.
At one of his talks, I once asked Father Thomas Reese, SJ, senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter, "Why is it that the words Catholic and environmentalist are not often found in the same sentence?" His bemused answer suggested to me that he found my question well taken.
Until now.
You show in your encyclical, manifestly, the extent to which the pronouncements of our previous two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, agree with your core ideas, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe care for the natural world is indeed part of "Catholicism 101," as has been said of Laudato Sí (see "Why Pope Francis’s climate message is so hard for some Americans to swallow," from a recent issue of the Washington Post).
That article has it that
The Pope’s entire case for caring for “our common home,” as he puts it, is moral.
We as Christians and as human beings accordingly have a moral duty to "address the planet’s vulnerability," in other words.
As Americans in particular, moreover, we need to rein in our vaunted individualism, replacing it with a newfound "communitarianism." That's a tough one, I admit. All of what you say in Laudato Sí amounts to as hard-to-follow a moral prescription as any aspect of Catholic teaching is. Yet I do see that your encyclical weaves for us a "seamless garment" of commitment that we all need to put on right now.
Tuesday, June 03, 2014
More on Misogyny
Amanda Bennett, author-journalist and former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote the piece "Snapchat CEO’s e-mails show need to confront misogyny" for the the June 2 Washington Post op-ed page. It echoes my own beliefs about the rise of shameless misogyny in today's America.
Bennett writes of certain e-mails, recently published, that went back and forth among Kappa Sigma frat boys at Stanford back in 2009-10 and how those messages betokened a craze for misogynistic sexual behavior among many — though by no means all — young men nowadays.
 |
| Snapchat Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel |
Snapchat Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel, who has apologized for his crass undergraduate behavior, was apparently one of the frat boys who took part in the Kappa Sigma crudities.
"Let us .... thank both him and the anonymous leaker," Bennett writes, "for the x-ray vision they have given us into a world that many suspected existed but had no real way to know for sure. Then, after giving thanks, I would like to exhort all mothers, fathers, college administrators, young men, young women and, above all, employers to take a deep breath and read the e-mails in their entirety."
Then, says she, all those concerned should "consider: Are these just words? Clearly there is a lot of hormonal prancing there. Yet, given what we know about binge drinking on campus, I think we all know that the references to blackouts are real. Aren’t the references to sexual domination and contempt real, too? And if we long ago acknowledged that what we now only coyly refer to as the N-word is a real word with real powers to hurt, then why do we feel differently about allowing ourselves, our daughters, our sisters to be called bitches and whores as if it were funny?"
My attitude: Bennett is being, if anything, way too tentative here. There can be no doubt — none at all — that applying the B-word and the W-word to women in general is beyond the pale of honorable, decent, civilized behavior. It always has been, it always will be.
There was a time, long ago, when the prancing hormones of young men led them to become knights errant, sworn to uphold the dignity and honor of womankind. Women have more recently said, "We don't need to have our dignity and honor upheld by men; we can do that ourselves. And we don't want to be put on a pedestal."
Men seem to have responded by now dragging women through the sexual mire instead.
Can't there be a happy medium?
 |
| Amanda Bennett |
Finding it is mainly up to the young men themselves, I'd say. Bennett writes, "Young men: I completely agree with the #notallmen hashtag. It is clearly not all men who are this vile. You who are not need to stand up against those who are."
I'd add that there needs to be a way for men to swear an oath of proper behavior towards women. Oaths are sworn before others, publicly. They are not taken privately. Wouldn't it be nice if the oaths they swear to when joining a college fraternity would contain such language?
Finding the happy medium, Bennett says, also will have to involve parents, schools, employers ... and the young women themselves. She addresses this last group by saying, "You are party to this, too. Read those e-mails. If you like what you see, keep going to those [fraternity] rages. Sex on your own terms is great, ladies. But are you sure it is on your terms? Is it sex you read in those e-mails, or power? Is that really where you want to be on the power spectrum."
Feminists point out that sex was really about power, back in women's pre-liberated past. It still is today. It's just that men have nominally lost their former positions of power ... so they've now begun trampling women beneath their prancing hormonal feet instead. The relative power relationship is the same. But now it's concealed not by the veil of centuries-old tradition but by the haze of alcoholic stupor.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Code of Honor
Petula Dvorak's May 27 Washington Post column, "#YesAllWomen: Elliott Rodger's misogynistic ravings inspire a powerful response on Twitter," reveals how appallingly crazy the culture has gotten in terms of men's attitudes toward women.
Rodger is the young man who went on a shooting rampage in California last week, targeting young college women — women who, he said in a previously made "selfie" video posted on YouTube, would not deign to go to bed with him. Rodger died of a gunshot wound to his head, possibly self-administered, during the ensuing police chase.
Dvorak (@petulad on Twitter) says Rodger was but an extreme example of the misogyny that affects "millions [of men] who share the same twisted view of women that he did."
Women by the "hundreds of thousands," Dvorak writes, have posted their resentment of this widespread misogyny on Twitter, using the hashtag #YesAllWomen. Here's an example:
Dvorak adds:
Elliot Rodger has exposed the sick world of the Men’s Rights Activist movement, self-described "alphas" who fume about any and all the times they don’t call the shots with women, specifically the airbrushed, inflated and photo-shopped creatures they assume are there for them.
Mostly, it’s about sex. Or the lack thereof.
A group of them call themselves Pickup Artists. And some sell their wisdom — tips that include stale bar tricks, ways to insult and ignore women as part of their seduction — as online courses, apps or seminars. They call this ability to get women to sleep with them "Game."
When desperate men who shell out cash thinking it will buy them Game fail, they lash out online. Not at the men who try to sell them Game, but at the women who didn’t buy the act.
Of Elliott Rodger himself, Dvorak writes:
He may have been mentally ill, but he was also the product of a culture that objectifies, demeans and sexualizes women. Nearly one in five American women report being raped at some time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The raging sexual assault epidemic in our military and on our college campuses is a reflection of the entitlement too many men feel they have to women’s bodies.
Every day we hear of another military man — powerful, disciplined, bulging with Game — who sexually assaulted a woman in uniform. This month, investigations began at 55 colleges and universities over the way their officials have handled sexual assault. These are our nation’s thought leaders — privileged, educated, bursting with tweedy Game — who have rebranded rape as 'non-consensual sex' so they won’t have to deal with the misogyny on display on their campuses.
Think it’s not real? Consider the texts and e-mails allegedly exchanged between members of a banished frat at American University. The young men — who also were identified as scholars, interns at prestigious nonprofits and senators’ offices — show a shuddering hatred and objectification of their female classmates.
Hatred of women? Objectification? Sexualization? "Game?" Sexual assaults? Rapes? Why is all this happening? And what can we do about it?
Those two questions, I realize, might draw our attention in different directions. The why question suggests we might be able, if we but knew the answer, to pluck out the entire problem by its taproot, as we would dig up a dandelion in our garden.
The what question suggests the problem will have to be solved more indirectly, as when we spray a dandelion with weed killer instead.
My own first inclination would be to go for the taproot. But what, then, is the deepest source of all this blatant misogyny?
*****
I suppose there were misogynists in earlier times, most of them secret, undeclared woman-haters. Today, it's different: misogyny is rampant and blatant. What's changed, and why? Well:
- Women nowadays occupy societal roles they were once excluded from: as students at coed universities, as soldiers in the military, in professional careers.
- The sexual revolution put paid to virginity and chastity as cultural norms, particularly for women.
- Women and men now wait longer to settle down and get married, leading to a time of life experts call "post-adolescence" or "adultescence." (This has to do in part with how long young people are staying in school today. Elliott Rodger was 23 and still a college undergraduate.)
- The Internet has made porn readily available.
- Social media have opened up avenues for misogynist rants and other craziness to reach a critical mass.
These fairly recent changes in our culture fall generally into two overlapping categories:
- The victory of individual liberty over censorship, as with the availability of online porn, the sweep of unfettered social media, and even our having gotten out from under yesterday's sexual norms of purity, virginity, and chastity.
- Changes that no feminists or right-thinking progressives would ever want to roll back: more college- and graduate-level education for both sexes; women in all walks of life; women, unlike in the olden days, being "allowed" to enjoy sex.
If changes of this sort are the taproot of today's blatant and rampant misogyny, or at least the feeder roots, then I guess I'd better reconsider my first inclination, which was to pluck out the misogyny by its roots. The deepest feeder roots are, after all, sacrosanct to feminists, to right-thinking progressives, and to proponents of civil liberties and open exchanges of ideas.
Putting weed-killer on the dandelion of rampant misogyny can, though, only go so far, I feel. We hear of reconfiguring how the military handles sexual assault. We hear of the Obama administration trying to get universities to do more to stop abuses on campus. Worthy approaches, I'd say, but not nearly sufficient.
What we really need is a new code of honor: individual young men need to swear themselves to proper behavior toward women.
It could come as part of a 12-step program, à la Alcoholics Anonymous. Call it Misogynists Anonymous. AA participants are encouraged to confess to their fellows that they have a drinking problem. MA participants would have to confess that they have a woman-hating problem. Then the healing could begin.
As part of it, they would have to pledge to give up what amounts to their "bottle": calling women sluts and whores after picking them up and having sex with them; calling women stuck-up snobs after failing to pick them up and sleep with them; and like expressions of misogynist hostility.
Blush Before You Flush
The Maryland General Assembly recently passed Senate Bill 212, which Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) has just signed into law. Officially called the "Fairness for All Marylanders Act," it protects the rights of transgender people not to be, due to their gender identity, discriminated against in:
- places of public accommodation
- the housing/real estate market
- employment and the job market
"Places of public accommodation" include public restrooms and "saunas, shower rooms, locker rooms, etc.," as long as these facilities are available in some degree to the general public. That is the understanding I get from the Web site of MDPetitions.com, an organization that is trying to gather enough signatures to force a November ballot initiative. The initiative would, if passed, set aside the act.
MDPetitions says transgender persons can now, under the new law which they call the "Bathroom Bill," use restrooms and similar facilities heretofore considered off limits to anyone not of the designated sex. So, those men who “sincerely [hold] as part of [their] core identity” that they are actually women, despite what their body says, cannot be barred from public ladies' rooms.
A real worry is, accordingly, that men will falsely claim to be transgender so they can prey on women performing their most private acts.
And, of course, vice versa.
How would it be handled? Say a person who is outwardly male walks into a ladies' room. Perhaps a female patron complains to the management, and the police are called. The nominally male person comes out of the ladies' room only to be put into handcuffs. Later in court, s/he tells the judge s/he sincerely self-identifies as a woman. Case dismissed.
S/he may have been telling the truth, in which case s/he has been needlessly inconvenienced and embarrassed.
Or, this person may have been lying about being transgender ... but how would the prosecutor ever prove that to the judge?
*****
Let's now studiously ignore that legal conundrum and look just at the situation without regard to the inner gender identity of the one who, outwardly male, walks into a ladies' room. Let's look at it from the perspective of the woman who went in just before (I'll use the masculine pronoun) he did.
All she really knows is that a man followed her into the loo.
She may or may not call to mind the notion that his inner gender identity is the same as hers. She may even support the right of a transgender individual to occupy the adjoining stall. But she can't really be sure this guy isn't just a sexual predator, can she?
Put bluntly, she's doing her business in a stall next to an individual who had a penis. That's the bottom line. It's downright odd, at the very least. It's discomfiting. It's threatening.
Now turn the situation around: A woman walks past a row of men using the urinals in a men's restroom at the ball park. She goes into a stall. (Or does she actually belly up to a wall-mounted fixture? Such things are never out of the question.) Is this act an assertion of her inner maleness, or is it just a way to avoid the long line at the ladies' room? Whatever ... if she is detained and required to go before a judge, she legally has an out.
Meanwhile, the shoe of discomfiture and embarrassment, undoubtedly well known to truly transgender individuals, is now firmly on the other foot. Pre-SB 212, those unusual individuals had to do their business in the "wrong" room, the "wrong" facility, every time. And one does feel sorry for them.
Still and all, there clearly is no practical way to make sure no one experiences such discomfiture and embarrassment. It's an imperfect world, and there will always be someone, no matter the laws on the books, who will have to blush before they flush.
*****
I am a liberal democrat who generally is in favor of LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) rights, but I do not support the new law as presently configured. It will subject untold numbers of people to discomfiture, embarrassment, and even implicit threats of sexual predation, just so a tiny minority can feel more comfortable in places of public accommodation. I don't think that's right.
The law does provide for the possibility of gender-neutral restrooms alongside more standard ones ...
... and I think that's good. People could use them or go to the usual men's/ladies' rooms. But few establishments have these extra added attractions. So my objection still stands, and I invite all who agree with me to sign the petition.
*****
The law does provide for the possibility of gender-neutral restrooms alongside more standard ones ...
... and I think that's good. People could use them or go to the usual men's/ladies' rooms. But few establishments have these extra added attractions. So my objection still stands, and I invite all who agree with me to sign the petition.
Monday, November 04, 2013
Obamacare and Cancelled Individual Health Coverage
I support the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare; let that be stated at the outset. Its rollout since Oct. 1, though, has been abysmal. The HealthCare.gov website where many Americans need to go to sign up for coverage has been down way too often, slow way too often, and so poorly implemented that insurance companies can't be sure who in fact has signed up for coverage.
The kerfluffle over that has however been overshadowed in the last week by the issue over cancelled insurance. President Obama promised on many occasions going back to 2009 that "if you like your current health plan, you can keep it." Well, as it turns out, that's not exactly so.
Glenn Kessler, the "Fact Checker" at The Washington Post, recently awarded the president a maximum number of hated "Pinocchios" — four — for "Obama’s pledge that ‘no one will take away’ your health plan."
Obama said in a speech to the American Medical Association, June 15, 2009, "... no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”
Alas, it wasn't, and still isn't, exactly true. Kessler writes:
... a key part of the law is forcing insurers to offer an “essential health benefits” package, providing coverage in 10 categories. The list includes: ambulatory patient services; emergency services; hospitalization; maternity and newborn care; mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services; preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management; and pediatric services, including oral and vision care.
Health benefits packages that lack those features will have to be discontinued as of next year. Some people who get their health insurance through their employers may notice increased premiums to help pay for additional coverage. But hundreds of thousands of those who buy their own insurance are now receiving outright cancellation notices.
In many cases, those unfortunates will have to buy completely new health packages that will probably cost them a lot more.
Yet some luckier ones will get no cancellation notices. They will find that their existing plans were "grandfathered" into the government's implementation of the Affordable Care Act, meaning they can keep them.
The unfortunate ones whose plans were not grandfathered in are very likely ones who bought those plans after the magic cutoff date, March 23, 2010, when the ACA was signed into law. Only individual plans that were in hand prior to that date are grandfathered in.
Those who have to scramble to get new, expensive insurance, says the lead article in today's Washington Post, "For consumers whose health premiums will go up under new law, sticker shock leads to anger," are finding the plans that are claimed by their insurers to be the lawfully mandated replacements for their cancelled plans are way more costly:
And:
And:
In fairness, I have to note that the plans that are now being forced into cancellation by the ACA are ones in which the insureds were able to cherry-pick the types of coverage he/she/they wanted. Don't need maternity coverage? Leave it out. Never expect to need pediatric services? Bypass it. That keeps the buyer's premiums and deductibles down.
But it also keeps dollars from said cherry-pickers from moving through the system to help cover maternity and pediatric care for those buyers of individual coverage who need them but truly otherwise can't afford them. I imagine Marlys Dietrick, who makes $80,000 a year, can scrimp and save and ultimately afford the $490-per-month plan that would make her, sad to say, need to switch doctors.
Yet it's also true that nothing the president said in the last four years adequately prepared Ms. Dietrick — or the Prestins, or Ms. Persico — for this.
 |
| HealthCare.gov home page |
The kerfluffle over that has however been overshadowed in the last week by the issue over cancelled insurance. President Obama promised on many occasions going back to 2009 that "if you like your current health plan, you can keep it." Well, as it turns out, that's not exactly so.
Glenn Kessler, the "Fact Checker" at The Washington Post, recently awarded the president a maximum number of hated "Pinocchios" — four — for "Obama’s pledge that ‘no one will take away’ your health plan."
Obama said in a speech to the American Medical Association, June 15, 2009, "... no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”
 |
| President Obama addresses the American Medical Association June 15, 2009 |
Alas, it wasn't, and still isn't, exactly true. Kessler writes:
... a key part of the law is forcing insurers to offer an “essential health benefits” package, providing coverage in 10 categories. The list includes: ambulatory patient services; emergency services; hospitalization; maternity and newborn care; mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services; preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management; and pediatric services, including oral and vision care.
Health benefits packages that lack those features will have to be discontinued as of next year. Some people who get their health insurance through their employers may notice increased premiums to help pay for additional coverage. But hundreds of thousands of those who buy their own insurance are now receiving outright cancellation notices.
In many cases, those unfortunates will have to buy completely new health packages that will probably cost them a lot more.
Yet some luckier ones will get no cancellation notices. They will find that their existing plans were "grandfathered" into the government's implementation of the Affordable Care Act, meaning they can keep them.
The unfortunate ones whose plans were not grandfathered in are very likely ones who bought those plans after the magic cutoff date, March 23, 2010, when the ACA was signed into law. Only individual plans that were in hand prior to that date are grandfathered in.
Those who have to scramble to get new, expensive insurance, says the lead article in today's Washington Post, "For consumers whose health premiums will go up under new law, sticker shock leads to anger," are finding the plans that are claimed by their insurers to be the lawfully mandated replacements for their cancelled plans are way more costly:
Marlys Dietrick, a 60-year-old artist from San Antonio, said she had high hopes that the new law would help many of her friends who are chefs, actors or photographers get insured. But she said they have been turned off by high premiums and deductibles and would rather pay the fine.
“I am one of those Democrats who wanted it to be better than this,” she said.
Her insurer, Humana, informed her that her plan was being canceled and that the rate for herself and her 21-year-old son for a plan compliant with the new law would rise from $300 to $705. On the federal Web site [HealthCare.gov], she found a comparable plan for $623 a month. Because her annual income is about $80,000, she doesn’t qualify for subsidies.
A cheaper alternative on the federal exchange, she said, had a premium of $490 a month — but it was an HMO plan rather than the PPO plan she currently has. “I wouldn’t be able to go to the doctor I’ve been going to for years,” she said. “That is not a deal.”
And both the HMO and PPO exchange plans she examined had family deductibles of $12,700, compared with her current $7,000.
And:
David Prestin, 48, who operates a gas station and diner at a truck stop in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, was unhappy to learn recently that his premiums are slated to rise from $923 to $1,283 next year under Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. The insurer said it needed to add maternity care to comply with the Affordable Care Act.
The issue of maternity coverage is a sensitive one for Prestin and his wife, Kathie. They had one child seven years ago, but after she had five miscarriages, they discovered she had an immune issue that prevented her from successfully completing a pregnancy.
At the same time, Prestin said, the new plan would reduce coverage for things he and Kathie need, such as free annual checkups.
The Prestins explored HealthCare.gov. They are not eligible for subsidies, but they found a cheaper plan than the one being offered by their insurer. However, there was another problem: It would have required the couple to switch from the doctors they have seen for more than 16 years and travel more than 100 miles from their home to the nearest major hospital center for treatment — in Green Bay, Wis.
And:
After receiving a letter from her insurer that her plan was being discontinued, Deborah Persico, a 58-year-old lawyer in the District, found a comparable plan on the city’s new health insurance exchange. But her monthly premium, now $297, would be $165 higher, and her maximum out-of-pocket costs would double.
That means she could end up paying at least $5,000 more a year than she does now. “That’s just not fair,” said Persico, who represents indigent criminal defendants. “This is ridiculous.”
 |
| Deborah Persico, whose individual health insurance plan is being cancelled |
In fairness, I have to note that the plans that are now being forced into cancellation by the ACA are ones in which the insureds were able to cherry-pick the types of coverage he/she/they wanted. Don't need maternity coverage? Leave it out. Never expect to need pediatric services? Bypass it. That keeps the buyer's premiums and deductibles down.
But it also keeps dollars from said cherry-pickers from moving through the system to help cover maternity and pediatric care for those buyers of individual coverage who need them but truly otherwise can't afford them. I imagine Marlys Dietrick, who makes $80,000 a year, can scrimp and save and ultimately afford the $490-per-month plan that would make her, sad to say, need to switch doctors.
Yet it's also true that nothing the president said in the last four years adequately prepared Ms. Dietrick — or the Prestins, or Ms. Persico — for this.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Stop Arguing, Start Growing
 |
| Economist Lawrence H. Summers |
Data from [the Congressional Budget Office] imply that an increase of just 0.2 percent in annual growth would entirely eliminate the projected long-term budget gap. Increasing growth, in addition to solving debt problems, would also raise household incomes, increase U.S. economic strength relative to other nations, help state and local governments meet their obligations and prompt investments in research and development.
In other words, Congress and the president should stop arguing "about the precise timing of continuing resolutions and debt-limit extensions" and start working together to spur economic growth.
Summers says this can be done — indeed, must be done — in a bipartisan way:
Spurring growth is an area where neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on good ideas. We need more public infrastructure investment, but we also need to reduce regulatory barriers that hold back private infrastructure. We need more investment in education but also increases in accountability for those who provide it. We need more investment in the basic science behind renewable energy technologies, but in the medium term we need to take advantage of the remarkable natural gas resources that have recently become available to the United States. We need to ensure that government has the tools to work effectively in the information age but also to ensure that public policy promotes entrepreneurship.
 |
| Infrastructure investment is sorely needed today |
There is ample room here for Republicans and Democrats to "meet in the middle" and to take the conversation from wrangling over the budget to talking instead about America's economic growth. Says Summers:
If even half the energy that has been devoted over the past five years to “budget deals” were devoted instead to “growth strategies,” we could enjoy sounder government finances and a restoration of the power of the American example.
 |
| Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. |
The United States should build [a strong economy], not just cut [the federal budget]. We should invest again in an infrastructure whose decayed condition ought to shame us. We should deal with high ongoing unemployment, reverse the rise of inequality and give poor and working-class kids real opportunities for upward mobility.
My fellow liberal Dionne sadly doesn't mention the conservative priorities Summers lists as needing also to be included in any eventual deal.
A recent opinion column by moderate-to-conservative Post economics writer Robert J. Samuelson, "The shutdown heralds a new economic norm," however, takes a similar pro-growth tack:
 |
| Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson |
Slow economic growth now imperils [the post-WWII order that saw much economic expansion]. Credit standards have tightened, and more Americans are leery of borrowing. Government spending — boosted by an aging population eligible for Social Security and Medicare — has outrun our willingness to be taxed. The mismatch is the basic cause of “structural” budget deficits and, by extension, today’s strife over the debt ceiling and the government “shutdown.”
Samuelson agrees with Dionne and Summers (and me): what we most need today is government policy — a compromise policy, as Summers says — that boosts economic growth.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive
You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between
— Song lyric by Johnny Mercer
During these tense times when the government is partially shut down, we may wonder what has gone wrong. Why are we so polarized between liberal Democrats and hard-line Republicans that we can't pass a budget or even a continuing resolution through Congress, and possibly can't head off the threat of a default on paying our government's bills?
George F. Will has a column in today's Washington Post that gives some insight. "When liberals became scolds" has it that liberalism went wrong in America as far back as the time of the Kennedy assassination in 1963. President John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963, and within two days liberals were downplaying the identity of the putative assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and playing up a kind of collective American guilt that stemmed from “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots," per then-Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Will extends the thought:
The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the right.”
(Oswald was actually a self-styled communist, not an "extremist on the right," nor a "bigot." The Warren Commission, headed by the then-Chief Justice, determined that Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, though many have since believed he had co-conspirators.)
Will's point is this:
The bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial culture were about to erupt through society’s crust. Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.
Liberalism’s disarray during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s ...
... and, he adds, led to the election of the conservative President Ronald Reagan, who was first sworn in in 1980.
Adversarial culture? Will says:
Under Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him — especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal, drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.
As a 16-year-old in 1963, I lived through those times. And, yes, we had a lot of material well-being ... though we also discovered the "other America": a large minority of our citizens who were mired in poverty from one generation to the next. Too, we all had to confront the reality of racial prejudice in the land. But as of the time of JFK's assassination, most Americans of a liberal bent were still inclined to "ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive" more than rue the negative.
By 1968, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War and in the wake of the twin assassinations that year of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, that had flipped. To many who were then speaking from and for the left, America was now considered a poisonous place. The country's history was mainly one of several negative -isms: racism, sexism, imperialism, and the like. "Tear down the walls!" went the leftist mantra.
If you were a liberal, no matter how close to or far from the center, you were infected by it. America: angry leftists wanted to end it, moderate liberals wanted to mend it ... but all on the left came to think more in terms of its historical poison than about the sheer nobility of the grand American enterprise.
That's what George Will is getting at:
Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment ...
Hence:
The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.
Those "lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom" which took over the liberal mindset were typically couched, accordingly, in negative terms. Liberals' occasional perfunctory nods to America's greatness were at odds with an overarching narrative of American guilt. This is a narrative which — I think Will is correct here — has not played well with American audiences in general.
Thus during the Obama presidency we have heard the president called, by his enemies, not a real American. Thus the endless foolish assertion that he was not really born an American citizen. Thus the claim that Obamacare is actually a foot-in-the-door for an alien socialism. And thus the tea party, which would rather bring down Obamacare than make sure the federal government has enough funds to stay solvent.
I think Will is right: liberals started shooting themselves in the foot as far back as the JFK assassination. I call myself oldstyleliberal because I would rather we liberals take back the night and start talking up America's fundamental greatness again. Then, after we have stopped demonizing the right, and vice versa, perhaps our politicians can get back to doing what they're supposed to do: engaging in the fruitful art of compromise.
E-lim-i-nate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between
— Song lyric by Johnny Mercer
 |
| Washington Post columnist George F. Will |
Will extends the thought:
 |
| New York Times columnist James Reston |
(Oswald was actually a self-styled communist, not an "extremist on the right," nor a "bigot." The Warren Commission, headed by the then-Chief Justice, determined that Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, though many have since believed he had co-conspirators.)
Will's point is this:
The bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial culture were about to erupt through society’s crust. Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.
Liberalism’s disarray during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s ...
... and, he adds, led to the election of the conservative President Ronald Reagan, who was first sworn in in 1980.
Adversarial culture? Will says:
Under Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him — especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal, drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.
 |
| 35th president John F. Kennedy |
As a 16-year-old in 1963, I lived through those times. And, yes, we had a lot of material well-being ... though we also discovered the "other America": a large minority of our citizens who were mired in poverty from one generation to the next. Too, we all had to confront the reality of racial prejudice in the land. But as of the time of JFK's assassination, most Americans of a liberal bent were still inclined to "ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive" more than rue the negative.
 |
| Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. |
By 1968, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War and in the wake of the twin assassinations that year of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, that had flipped. To many who were then speaking from and for the left, America was now considered a poisonous place. The country's history was mainly one of several negative -isms: racism, sexism, imperialism, and the like. "Tear down the walls!" went the leftist mantra.
If you were a liberal, no matter how close to or far from the center, you were infected by it. America: angry leftists wanted to end it, moderate liberals wanted to mend it ... but all on the left came to think more in terms of its historical poison than about the sheer nobility of the grand American enterprise.
That's what George Will is getting at:
Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment ...
Hence:
The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.
Those "lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom" which took over the liberal mindset were typically couched, accordingly, in negative terms. Liberals' occasional perfunctory nods to America's greatness were at odds with an overarching narrative of American guilt. This is a narrative which — I think Will is correct here — has not played well with American audiences in general.
 |
| President Obama ought to look like this more often |
I think Will is right: liberals started shooting themselves in the foot as far back as the JFK assassination. I call myself oldstyleliberal because I would rather we liberals take back the night and start talking up America's fundamental greatness again. Then, after we have stopped demonizing the right, and vice versa, perhaps our politicians can get back to doing what they're supposed to do: engaging in the fruitful art of compromise.
Tuesday, October 08, 2013
Polarization in America
We are currently in the throes of a fiscal showdown in which the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, the Democratic-controlled Senate, and our Democratic president, Barack Obama, can't agree on how to reopen a partially shut-down government or how to avoid, come October 17, risking a default due to failure to raise the legal ceiling on the size of the federal debt. The deadlock can be traced in large part to how the various members of the House of Representatives came to office in the 2012 election.
The map above shows how politically polarized was the 2012 vote for members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It comes from a recent Washington Post article, "Shutdown’s roots lie in deeply embedded divisions in America’s politics."
Each congressional district in each state is represented by a colored square. The deeper the color in each district, the more one-sided the vote was for either the Republican winner in 2012 (red) or the Democratic winner (blue). (Two districts that are now vacant are shown in gray.) The pastel colors represent districts where the vote was "close," while deeper blues and reds signify "safe" districts where the 2012 winner is either very likely to be re-elected in 2014 (the medium shades) or a virtual shoo-in (the deepest shades).
Notice how blue the states from New Jersey and New York up into New England are, and likewise the West Coast states. Also notice how red the states of the Deep South are. But even the reddest state has its pockets of blue, while some (but not all) of the blue states have their own pockets of red.
Why does this geographic variation exist in "one nation under God" America? Post opinion writer Colbert King blames part of it on "The rise of the New Confederacy": "... an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government."
The insurgents of the New Confederacy equal, of course, the tea party. It is in the reddest districts that we are most apt to find a tea party-affiliated member of the House. King writes: "[The] conservative extremists, roughly 60 of them by CNN’s count, represent congressional districts in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia."
Many of these states are ones that made up the Old Confederacy during the Civil War (shown here in yellow):
Yet it seems that tea partiers in Congress also come from Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, and West Virginia. Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia were "border states" where slavery was legal, but which did not secede from the Union. Some of the remainder of the tea-party states were territories during the 1861-1865 Civil War, and were settled in large part by whites who originated in the Confederate States. Yet others, though they were "free states" where slavery was illegal, arguably were settled by people of the same cultural backgrounds as the southerners, which might explain why certain districts in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, went to tea partiers in 2012, and why Ohio is such a crazy quilt of red and blue that it so often acts as the decisive "swing state" in presidential elections.
Colin Woodard writes in American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America of how North America was — except for "First Nation," which has maintained its original Native American culture — settled by ten now-hidden "nations." Those "nations'" cultural antecedents in Europe, so different from one another, have been carried forward to the present day, says Woodard.
Here's a map of the eleven "American nations," including "First Nation":
Compare this map with the first one above showing the blue and red congressional districts. Notice in the first map how blue most of "Yankeedom" is, both in its original East Coast wing and in its later-settled Upper Midwest wing. Ever wonder why Minnesota is so traditionally blue? Well, it was settled in large part by people moving westward from New England and New York, in the East Coast part of "Yankeedom." And those people of eastern "Yankeedom" had their Old World roots in Puritan society in England during the 1600s. The Puritans brought certain cultural assumptions with them to the New World — ones that have led their descendants to be abolitionists who opposed slavery in the nineteenth century, and to be progressives who have voted solidly Democratic in the twentieth. Moreover, it was their "Yankeedom" posterity who were the main non-Hispanic whites to settle the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington — and on up into Canada — to make up the solid-blue nation Woodard calls "Left Coast."
In terms of its power base, meanwhile, the Confederacy was largely made up of the nation Woodard calls, unsurprisingly, the "Deep South." Yet certain northern and western parts of the Confederacy, including much of Oklahoma and Texas, were sections of "Greater Appalachia," and "Tidewater" — coastal North Carolina, Virginia, and much of the Delmarva Peninsula — also played a big role in the rebellion against the Union. All of these "nations" are conspicuously red today. Though the three had distinct cultural roots in the Old World, in the New World they banded together (sometimes uneasily and, in the case of "Greater Appalachia," in split fashion) to defend the South's "peculiar institution" of slavery. So why is, say, much of Indiana so red today, even though there were no slaves there in 1861? Woodard would say it's because the southern two-thirds of the state remain part of "Greater Appalachia," and the denizens of the entire nation-within-a-nation of "Greater Appalachia" largely tend to vote red nowadays.
Look at the "Midlands," a "nation" that sprang from the westward movement of settlers coming from much of Pennsylvania. Those Pennsylvanians in "Midlands" were originally Quakers who, though they had different cultural norms than the Puritans, were notably tolerant of all peoples and engendered a polity that today favors the liberal desideratum of multiculturalism. That polity in the present day tends to the blue end of the spectrum. Notice that "Midlands" crosses through Illinois, just below Chicago, explaining why the blue parts of Illinois in the first map are not just centered in the Windy City, which is actually in "Yankeedom" anyway. Bluish "Midlands" widens out in Missouri, Iowa, and points south and west, possibly explaining many of the blue squares in those areas on the first map.
The "Far West" provides few squares of any color to the first map because it remains so thinly populated. Look at Colorado in the first map; it's both blue and red. Since much of the "Far West" was settled, late in the game of spreading westward, by people who came from the Confederacy or its cultural soulmates on its periphery, it's no wonder there are so (relatively) many red squares in Colorado and in the other states of the "Far West" nation.
Admittedly, there have to be yet other factors helping to explain why some regions and states are solid red, some are solid blue, and some are mixed. But Woodard's concept of eleven separate "nations" that we are no longer very aware of but explain a lot of our entrenched cultural and political attitudes goes a long way toward answering that question.
 |
| Polarized 2012 vote for U.S. House of Representatives (Click on map to enlarge) |
The map above shows how politically polarized was the 2012 vote for members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It comes from a recent Washington Post article, "Shutdown’s roots lie in deeply embedded divisions in America’s politics."
Each congressional district in each state is represented by a colored square. The deeper the color in each district, the more one-sided the vote was for either the Republican winner in 2012 (red) or the Democratic winner (blue). (Two districts that are now vacant are shown in gray.) The pastel colors represent districts where the vote was "close," while deeper blues and reds signify "safe" districts where the 2012 winner is either very likely to be re-elected in 2014 (the medium shades) or a virtual shoo-in (the deepest shades).
Notice how blue the states from New Jersey and New York up into New England are, and likewise the West Coast states. Also notice how red the states of the Deep South are. But even the reddest state has its pockets of blue, while some (but not all) of the blue states have their own pockets of red.
 |
| Washington Post columnist Colbert King |
The insurgents of the New Confederacy equal, of course, the tea party. It is in the reddest districts that we are most apt to find a tea party-affiliated member of the House. King writes: "[The] conservative extremists, roughly 60 of them by CNN’s count, represent congressional districts in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia."
Many of these states are ones that made up the Old Confederacy during the Civil War (shown here in yellow):
 |
| (Click on map to enlarge) |
Yet it seems that tea partiers in Congress also come from Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, and West Virginia. Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia were "border states" where slavery was legal, but which did not secede from the Union. Some of the remainder of the tea-party states were territories during the 1861-1865 Civil War, and were settled in large part by whites who originated in the Confederate States. Yet others, though they were "free states" where slavery was illegal, arguably were settled by people of the same cultural backgrounds as the southerners, which might explain why certain districts in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, went to tea partiers in 2012, and why Ohio is such a crazy quilt of red and blue that it so often acts as the decisive "swing state" in presidential elections.
Here's a map of the eleven "American nations," including "First Nation":
 |
| The eleven American "nations" (Click on map to enlarge) |
Compare this map with the first one above showing the blue and red congressional districts. Notice in the first map how blue most of "Yankeedom" is, both in its original East Coast wing and in its later-settled Upper Midwest wing. Ever wonder why Minnesota is so traditionally blue? Well, it was settled in large part by people moving westward from New England and New York, in the East Coast part of "Yankeedom." And those people of eastern "Yankeedom" had their Old World roots in Puritan society in England during the 1600s. The Puritans brought certain cultural assumptions with them to the New World — ones that have led their descendants to be abolitionists who opposed slavery in the nineteenth century, and to be progressives who have voted solidly Democratic in the twentieth. Moreover, it was their "Yankeedom" posterity who were the main non-Hispanic whites to settle the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington — and on up into Canada — to make up the solid-blue nation Woodard calls "Left Coast."
 |
| Journalist-author Colin Woodard |
Look at the "Midlands," a "nation" that sprang from the westward movement of settlers coming from much of Pennsylvania. Those Pennsylvanians in "Midlands" were originally Quakers who, though they had different cultural norms than the Puritans, were notably tolerant of all peoples and engendered a polity that today favors the liberal desideratum of multiculturalism. That polity in the present day tends to the blue end of the spectrum. Notice that "Midlands" crosses through Illinois, just below Chicago, explaining why the blue parts of Illinois in the first map are not just centered in the Windy City, which is actually in "Yankeedom" anyway. Bluish "Midlands" widens out in Missouri, Iowa, and points south and west, possibly explaining many of the blue squares in those areas on the first map.
The "Far West" provides few squares of any color to the first map because it remains so thinly populated. Look at Colorado in the first map; it's both blue and red. Since much of the "Far West" was settled, late in the game of spreading westward, by people who came from the Confederacy or its cultural soulmates on its periphery, it's no wonder there are so (relatively) many red squares in Colorado and in the other states of the "Far West" nation.
Admittedly, there have to be yet other factors helping to explain why some regions and states are solid red, some are solid blue, and some are mixed. But Woodard's concept of eleven separate "nations" that we are no longer very aware of but explain a lot of our entrenched cultural and political attitudes goes a long way toward answering that question.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Assault weapons ban dead in Congress :-(
 |
| Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid |
Sales of semiautomatic rifles of the AR-15 type, such as the Bushmaster .223-caliber recently used by Adam Lanza in Newtown, CT, to kill 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, ought to be banned by law, but lobbying pushback by the National Rifle Association in the aftermath of Newtown has nixed the deal. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced legislation reinstating the 1994 ban which lapsed in 2004, and it even managed to get out of committee. The Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), on March 14 approved Feinstein's bill. But Reid, needing 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster on the Senate floor, said he could get fewer than 40 votes for it.
"Lacking the numbers to overcome a likely Republican filibuster," says an editorial by The Washington Post, "[Reid] was reluctant to force a floor vote that could imperil the reelection prospects of several of his fellow Democrats. Lacking the numbers to overcome a likely Republican filibuster, he was reluctant to force a floor vote that could imperil the reelection prospects of several of his fellow Democrats."
Not exactly a profile in courage, I'd say, Sen. Reid.
So it's dead, for now, at the federal level. Unless someone manages to amend the bill that actually has reached the Senate floor to put the assault weapons ban back in. Fat chance of that happening, though.
How sad.
 |
| Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley |
That's a bad idea, and a recent editorial from The Baltimore Sun tells why. I think everyone should read it and consider it. It says that
... such weapons show up again and again in mass shootings. According to Mother Jones magazine, which has cataloged every mass shooting in the United States since 1982, about a quarter of all mass shooters had assault weapons, and more than half had assault weapons, high capacity magazines, or both ...
What makes these weapons so deadly? They are civilian copies of military weapons designed with features that make them more lethal.
The AR-15, for example, has a pistol grip, which helps a shooter pull the trigger more quickly and to better control the recoil, allowing him to fire more rapidly with more accuracy. It also enables shooting from the hip and spraying fire from side to side — something that would be deadly when firing into a crowd but useless in a self-defense situation.
When fired rapidly, a gun's barrel can quickly become too hot to handle. A barrel shroud, common on many of the models listed in the governor's bill, enables a shooter to hold the gun with a second hand without burning himself. A forward grip, which is somewhat less common, achieves the same purpose.
A folding, detachable or telescoping stock helps make an assault weapon easier to carry and conceal. That is frequently a factor in mass shooting situations.
A threaded barrel allows the easy attachment of a silencer or a flash suppressor. The latter prevents the shooter from being temporarily blinded by the muzzle flash, particularly in low-light conditions, enabling him to fire more quickly and accurately. It also helps conceal the position of the shooter ...
Yes, the same rifle models are often used legitimately for target shooting and hunting. Yes, some semiautomatic handguns that would not be banned can be just a lethal as the semiautomatic rifles that would. And yes, there are huge numbers of these rifles already out there that will still pose a threat: guns that many potential miscreants will have easy access to if they, as Adam Lanza's slain mother would have done, can but pass a background check.
But banning the sale of new military-style assault weapons, even if that has to be done at the state level only, will save innocent lives. And that's what counts most here.
Monday, February 04, 2013
Whither the Art of Compromise?
A shibboleth is "a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning." The word "birther" has become a shibboleth of the left, used to castigate the right. The saying "Obama wasn't even born in the U.S." has likewise become a shibboleth, used to scorn the left.
So a shibboleth can be a word, a phrase, a sentence ... or, I would suggest, an entire column such as "Walking the Walk," by Hendrik Hertzberg, in this week's The New Yorker.
Not that I disagree with much Hertzberg (pictured at left) says. He's a liberal chortling about how President Obama, in his Second Inaugural Address last month, let loose the dogs of progressivism and urged all the various and sundry groups that voted to return him to the White House to form an ongoing coalition that will henceforth marginalize all those voting to send Obama to the showers. I'm a liberal who voted for Obama and who celebrated his victory with the best of them. But, still ...
... what about the 49 percent who voted for Mitt Romney? What about the large minority of Americans who live in red states, or red congressional districts, and have increasingly resented not only Obama and his Democratic Party, but the whole mindset/worldview that party stands for?
They are Americans, too, last time I checked. Why do we liberals need to so smugly smirk that we've had a closet monopoly on truth for the last 50 years and more, and now that Obama's become the first Democratic president since F.D.R. to be re-elected by a popular-vote majority, it's about time we flaunted it?
This isn't smart politics, not for the long run, because it's bad for the country to continue with divided, nothing-can-really-get-done government in an era when we need to tackle big problems like the federal deficit, the semi-stalled economic recovery, America's widening inequality of income and opportunity, global climate change, immigration reform, gun-control legislation, a crumbling infrastructure, etc., etc., etc. — not to mention our evolving defense posture and our seems-to-be-dwindling ability to lead abroad.
Politics is said to be the art of compromise ... yet compromise is an art that we've mostly forgotten.
So a shibboleth can be a word, a phrase, a sentence ... or, I would suggest, an entire column such as "Walking the Walk," by Hendrik Hertzberg, in this week's The New Yorker.
 |
| Hendrik Hertzberg |
... what about the 49 percent who voted for Mitt Romney? What about the large minority of Americans who live in red states, or red congressional districts, and have increasingly resented not only Obama and his Democratic Party, but the whole mindset/worldview that party stands for?
They are Americans, too, last time I checked. Why do we liberals need to so smugly smirk that we've had a closet monopoly on truth for the last 50 years and more, and now that Obama's become the first Democratic president since F.D.R. to be re-elected by a popular-vote majority, it's about time we flaunted it?
This isn't smart politics, not for the long run, because it's bad for the country to continue with divided, nothing-can-really-get-done government in an era when we need to tackle big problems like the federal deficit, the semi-stalled economic recovery, America's widening inequality of income and opportunity, global climate change, immigration reform, gun-control legislation, a crumbling infrastructure, etc., etc., etc. — not to mention our evolving defense posture and our seems-to-be-dwindling ability to lead abroad.
Politics is said to be the art of compromise ... yet compromise is an art that we've mostly forgotten.
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