Politics

Yearning to Breathe Free

~ John ~ Leave a comment


photo by Hannah McKay, Reuters —

Reacting to images of US government forces tear gassing children in diapers, pundits have accused President Trump of playing to his narrow base.  But I think he’s playing to a far wider audience.

Progressives are endlessly amazed at our president’s inability to read, write, and pay attention to the basic work of governance.  But we underestimate how Trump’s intelligence exceeds our own in one key respect: the mastery of raw power, and how humans fundamentally respond to it. Not only is he smarter than we are, he is nakedly willing to use this lizard-brain intelligence to attain whatever goals he seeks.  His core belief is that the blunt use of power renders all other forms of intelligence – indeed, all objective fact – superfluous. History teaches that societies ruled this way tend steadily towards self-destruction and collapse.  But in the short run, Trump’s style of governance can be quite successful.

Thus on immigration: Trump deeply believes that high immigration flows are harmful to “America,” by which he means the immediate interests of European-American children and grandchildren of immigrants.  For those ancestors, America shone as a beacon of opportunity, a face of hope symbolized by the Statue of Liberty.  The actual deeds of the US as a global superpower may be the subject of a more complicated conversation.  But the ideal of America as the global lighthouse of freedom has persisted undimmed.

That, frankly, is a problem, because it draws people to our shores in greater numbers than our president – and the many constituents who share his views — would like.  And he knows this.  Better than most of us, he understands the power of advertising and publicity, both good and bad.  To stop immigrants from coming, he has to make America perceived as a worse option than staying where they are. And if “where they are” is a place wracked by death squads, beset by gang violence, plagued by sexual and gender violence, and unpoliced by any meaningful governmental authority, then the international face of America must fundamentally change.

The rebranding campaign began shortly after his inauguration.  Nicholas Kristof reported that the official photo in embassies around the world, that had long shown the beaming visages of many Presidents, was replaced by Trump actually scowling.   Since then Administration policy has passed through an escalation of steps and stages, from General Kelly’s initial “get tough” memo in 2017, the revocation of DACA, the infamous family separation debacle, the children’s detention camps, the militarization of the southern border, up to the tear-gassing of children in Tijuana.

But Trump’s goal, and the most enduring “face” of the new America he wants to leave as his legacy for generations to come, is the Wall.  No longer will it be the Lady with the Lamp, but a blank inhuman colossus of concrete – high, uncaring, impenetrable.  A face with no face, offering no hope.

Fox pundits express disgust that Honduran mothers would thrust their diapered children against our gates.  But we don’t get it.  These caravan parents are seeking to make good on a generations-old offer.  They persist in the belief that if they can only prove with the most persuasive evidence they have – the tender flesh of their kids — that they are in fact the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” carved on that stone tablet, that Donald Trump will reveal himself to be an American after all.  That we will open the Golden Door.  Last week, the demand to “breathe free” was answered with tear gas.  And Lady Liberty is weeping.

So when Congress meets to consider building the Wall, it will debate the merits of border security and the means to provide it.  But it should also debate what kind of new national monument we are deciding to build, and whether we will allow Donald Trump to permanently, physically deface the American brand, in a manner that no election can undo.  And we should remember that the whole world is still watching.

Are We Becoming a “Demogracy”?

~ John ~ Leave a comment

My last blog post referred to our country’s “racist fringe,” implying that its numbers are relatively small.  I guess I have to stand corrected.  A poll cited in a recent NYT Sunday Magazine puts that “fringe” at over 30 million Americans, with about twice that many responding that it’s “okay” to have white supremacist views.

As final election results trickle in and Democrats grow increasingly self-satisfied, we might think that it’s enough to repudiate Trump’s politics of hatred at the ballot box.  But nobody should be naïve enough to think this growing cancer on our democracy will be solved by simply electing a Democrat to the White House in 2020.  We have to understand, at a deeper level, what’s made Trump’s tactics so successful to begin with.

Discussions typically focus on three things: (a) a polka-dot political landscape, with urban islands of blue surrounded by oceans of red; (b) an upsurge of nativist sentiment caused by economic anxiety among displaced white workers; and (c) increasingly pinpointed appeals of both parties to regional, cultural, and racial differences, sharpening the process by which party becomes tribe.  All feed the maw we collectively bemoan as “polarization.”

But that’s only the mouth of the beast.  Its bloodstream runs deeper, pulsing with long-term demographic trends of America today.  We’ve come to a historic population tipping point — one that deeply affects how we feel about race and democracy.

First, the demographics underlying the urban-rural divide: in 1965, about 70% of Americans lived in cities.  Now, nearly 84% does, and that ratio is increasing fast — by half a percent per year.  By 2050, the US will be 90% urban.  Rural America is inexorably losing the demographic race.  By the hard logic of these numbers, the political power of rural elites faces steady erosion and eventual doom.

Second, the demographics underlying the rise of white hate: it’s been recently recognized that rust-belt economic distress doesn’t really explain resurgent right-wing racism.  Population shifts are likely a more powerful driver.  In 2017, the white population declined, and actually dropped below 50% for the 0-10 age group.  Both of these things are new, but they are expected to last. They scare white racists, and it isn’t surprising that they feature prominently in alt-right propaganda.  If your race defines your identity and your life is a glorious racial struggle, these numbers mean you’re inevitably going to lose.

Third, the demographics underlying polarization: this is where we get beyond recent headlines, and a little wonky.  As societies go from poor to rich, they pass through a “demographic transition.”  Grossly oversimplified, this is a progression from (1) high birth rates and high mortality, and thus low population growth; then (2) to high birth rates low mortality, as advances in economics and health care improve survival rates, leading to high population growth; then (3) to slower birth rates as societies adjust to later stages of development, resulting in a return to low population growth.  Some demographers find that the second phase of the transition corresponds to an explosion of democracy, with younger, urbanizing populations rebelling against an established order.  They suggest that the third phase of the transition represents a “mature” phase of democracy, as older populations settle into more established methods of political participation.

Other demographers paint a direr picture, arguing that at a certain level of overpopulation, liberal democracy will cease to function altogether.

I wonder whether right now we have “phase 2” – i.e., growing younger urbanite — and “phase 3” – i.e., stagnating older rural – types of democracy going on at the same time, in different regions and different cultures.  It follows that they will obey different norms, respond to different messages, and generally distrust one another.  A recipe for polarization.

Nate Cohn’s “538” piece this week illustrates how these dynamics played out in the Texas Senate race.  The five fastest-growing counties in Texas broke solidly for O’Rourke — with unprecedentedly high turnout — making the overall race more competitive than any in recent memory.  In contrast, Texas’ far-flung rural counties are demographically stagnant, with comparatively lower voter turnout increases.  The slower-growing the county, the stronger its preference for Cruz.  Cohn, the ruthless demographer, draws the lesson that in future Democrats can essentially write off rural voters and simply let urbanites disenfranchise them over time.

I look to the character of our democracy and draw a different conclusion – partly from Beto’s campaign, but partly from my own family.  My father’s line hails from a ranch in Knickerbocker Texas, in Tom Green County, where some of my cousins still live.  The county is conservative, but my cousins are a complicated, heterogeneous lot, as are most people if you actually get to know them.  In 2012, Democrats won just 25% of Tom Green County’s vote.  This year, O’Rourke did not write off rural Texas – he campaigned in every county, speaking to all kinds of voters statewide.  As a result, his showing in Tom Green County improved to 28%, and his results across rural Texas improved incrementally was well.   I’d argue that Beto’s near-success is not just because he ran up the score in Austin and Houston, but that he inched it up in San Angelo and Big Spring too.

It’s not just O’Rourke.  Congresswoman-elect Lauren Underwood, a 32-year-old African-American, won Dennis Hastert’s old seat in Illinois by knocking on every door in her district, over 80% of which is white.  “People who hadn’t been spoken to in ten years,” she said in an interview.

My point is that, for our democracy to revive, we should listen to Beto and Lauren, and reject Nate, understanding our demographics but not allowing them to control us.  We should broaden our efforts, not compartmentalize them.  Unless we keep dialogue and deliberation at the center, our electoral process will simply devolve into a quadrennial census — you could call it a “demogracy” — and polarization and hatred will be our just reward.

What Divides Us

~ John ~ Leave a comment

This bloody week, like too many bloody weeks before it, we face the dread that Americans are descending into a state of deepening, unresolved conflict, and wonder how we can pull back from it.  It is entirely appropriate to line the streets in condemnation of presidential hate speech.  But we can do more.  We can cut our consumption of fear and ditch the word “they”.

The focus on Trump as one driver of our polarized society is readily understandable.  The president has positioned himself as a cyclone at the center of our politics, spinning off epithets and labeling opponents with heedless force, in an obvious – and highly successful – electoral strategy of divide and conquer.  We know from social science that fear makes people more conservative, so Trump sells fear.

But we should also acknowledge that progressives sell fear too, because for both sides, fear sells so well.  And progressives also sell division, both for honest reasons and for cynical ones.  As to the former, by ideology and by custom, progressives have practiced the politics of difference, as a way of honoring and making space for the diversity of human experience.  But now that Trump is successfully portraying this as the politics of division, and using it as a point of leverage to unify his own base, progressives have defended themselves by ramping up efforts to stereotype Trump’s cultural center and identifying religious conservatives with their racist fringe, in order to magnify the threat from the right.

How can this dynamic be de-escalated?  How can a broad array of Americans reclaim the discourse of democracy?

First, we have to start taking the belief systems of Trump’s base seriously, to understand what unites them.  According to Pew, fully half of Trump’s supporters call themselves “highly religious.” The Biblical worldview that God created Man in His image, that Woman was created from Man, and that Earth is God’s creation for Man’s bounty, is deeply and honestly held by millions of Americans.  It also has profound political ramifications.  One is that men and women are intrinsically different creatures.  Another is that the planet does not have an existence independent from the connection between God and Man.  From these precepts flow other, essentially political, conclusions.  One is that men are intrinsically prone to sinful behavior, for which they must be periodically punished, and more often forgiven, but it is utterly unrealistic to think that men can ever be fundamentally changed.  Another is that the planet’s degraded condition is fundamentally God’s will, and if the planet is to be consumed in fire, then that is a sign that the Apocalypse is at hand.  Polls indicate most evangelicals hold such “End Times” beliefs.

Opposed to this is the strictly scientific worldview, sometimes identified as atheism, which accounts for up to 25% of Americans, according to Gallup. It holds that humans are a biological species of animals on a planet that came into being by the evolutionary process of natural selection, that our genders are one of our many traits, and that we inhabit a planet which is alive insofar as it is a vast interconnected web of living things of which we are one small, but increasingly troublesome, part.  Among the political implications of these beliefs are that gender is not subject to political fiat, and that the moral claims of the other life forms on the planet, both now and in future generations, vastly outweigh any human claim  to short-term enjoyment of planetary resources.

In between these two is the ecumenical worldview, informed by both scientific knowledge and religious belief, and characterized by humility in the face of the mysteries of that which we do not understand; by the experience of a divine presence that science cannot explain, but the broadminded intelligence that accepts and engages with scientific inquiry and discovery.  This view swallows the biological pill that we’re animals, but chases it down with the moral liquor that we also possess souls.  It speaks from various demoninations, various faiths.  The political implications of these beliefs can be all over the map, depending on how that mixture goes down for each of us.

This spectrum of belief, and its corresponding political hues, have populated our country since at least the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, which tested the teaching of evolution in schools.  We will not ever dismantle it, any more than the Sunni will eradicate the Shia or the Bosnians will exterminate the Serbs. We should stop trying.  For better or worse, this is the American political family, the “pluribus” from which we must make an “unum” if our democracy is to survive.

What is new about our current political moment is that our president has encouraged – and many of the rest of us have succumbed to – an addictive cycle of fear, igniting dark impulses and awakening latent tendencies that cut across the spectrum described above, tearing old scars of race, gender and national origin into open wounds, and increasingly, open violence.  This confounding overlay turns fear into terror, and risks pushing polarization into war.

The antidote is to remember bravely who we are.   George Washington wrote that the first principle of democracy is “that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately.”   In every one of our spiritual traditions described above is a common belief in the equal worth, dignity, divinity, or salvation – depending on the vocabulary each group might choose – of the individual person.  Rising from that bedrock of belief is the edifice of personal independence which differentiates America from other nations and attracts immigrants to our shores.  When conservatives call for the rights of religious freedom, and progressives champion the rights of gender diversity, aren’t they both proclaiming the basic rights of individuals to exercise liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

FDR, famous for the phrase “the only thing to fear is fear itself,” confronted a racist threat far more powerful than anything we face today.  His last public speech, undelivered because he died before he could speak it, contained the following:

“Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships – the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace.  The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.  Let us move forward with a strong and active faith.”

A monumental task — far greater than anything we would conceive today — which he knew would require both the “science of human relationships” and “strong and active faith.”  What FDR had no use for is the word “they.”