Playing the Race Card

I have spoke at tedious length about identity, here. For those of you who don't want to slog through my prose again, let me review for you. 

1. Humans reflexively identify themselves as members of groups. 
2. Any collection of individuals can be the basis of an identity group, no matter how arbitrary or trivial the basis of membership in the group. This is known as The Minimal Group Paradigm.
3. For every group with which an individual identifies, there is also an implied "out-group", of individuals who are not seen as members.
4. Members of the group are always "preferred" to non-members by the individual. They are seen more positively than non-members in any given dimension. This is known as In-Group Bias.
5. We all have multiple groups with which we identify. But generally, only one of these identities is salient at a time. The salient identity is determined by the social context we're in at any given moment.

And now, for something completely different...

The practice of democracy has as its ethical basis Utilitarianism. Democracy's advocates claim that it is the political arrangement that results in the greatest "good" for the greatest number of people. The assertion groans under the weight of all its unspoken assumptions but we will treat it as true for now. And in fact, I believe it to be true.

Democracy is supposed to let everyone protect and promote their personal interests. Everybody gets to say what they want the group to do. The group then does what most of its members wanted. And there you have it, the greatest good for the greatest number of members.

Now, about those assumptions...

let's start with "personal interests". What is in your interest? Shall I sit and tell you what YOUR interests are? How do I know? Wouldn't it be a bit authoritarian for me to tell you what those interests are? What if I get it wrong?

Roger Zelazny said it well. "When people start doing things for my own good, I reach for my gun." (Also, he had a black belt in judo.)

(Image from Wikipedia)

In a Democracy, people get to make their own call about what their interests are. They get to decide what public policies are going to advance those interests. People perceive those interests on the basis of the salient identity. People define their interests on the basis of the group with which they identify at the moment.

Another assumption...

democracy assumes rationality. It assumes that individuals are capable of discerning what their interests are. But humans AREN'T rational. We take cognitive shortcuts. We don't sit down and make a list of every public policy alternative, and calculate it's cost-benefit profile to us in the short, medium and long term. Unless we're professional actuaries.

Instead, we look to elites from the salient group to tell us what our interests are, and which public policies will advance them. There's more to it than that; in-group bias guarantees that you will think fellow members of the salient group are nicer, more honest people than non-members.

(Images from wikimedia commons)

This has profound (and somewhat subversive) implications for Democratic Theory, particularly Pluralism. Much more importantly, it has profound implications for the PRACTICE of democracy, in the United States, in 2012.

Elections are not won on the basis of good policy. They're not won on the basis of past policy performance or anticipated policy innovations. Elections, God help us, are not decided on the basis of policy outcomes.

That last point deserves some elaboration. It is more accurate to say that elections are not TYPICALLY decided on the basis of policy outcomes. The actual outcome of most public policies is usually obscure. It changes from year to year. And remember, people's identity is contextual; their own perception of their self-interest fluctuates with whatever identity they're wearing at the moment. Their belief about the effect of a public policy is equally unstable. (Incidentally, this is the basis of public opinion volatility)

The outcome/effectiveness/desirability of a particular public policy is usually defined by salient group elites. If we're discussing gun policy, a salient identity group is "gun-owners" and a salient group elite is the NRA. Which is why gun-fetishists think concealed-carry is a better public policy response to mass shootings than gun control.

(image from Wikipedia)

There are numerous bases for an identity group. Gender, race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, region, sports fandom, sexual preference, fashion, musical preference... any noun that can be applied to a person is a potential basis for identity, thanks to the Minimal Group Paradigm. In the context of a presidential election, typically salient identities are partisan and ideological.

Consequently, elections ARE won on the basis of identity politics. Most voters don't know what happened. Most voters have no idea what might happen if either party, or any particular candidate gets their way. What voters do know is which side they're on. Because their side is right, and good and serves the national interest, and the other side is wrong, and evil, and is only interested in gaining power for its own selfish ends.

And all of this is made manifest in the tactical decisions of both campaigns in the 2012 presidential election.

Partisanship is an increasingly salient identity for many voters. It's important for candidates to stoke that identity in those who hold it. This is why the in-boxes of so many of us are stuffed full right now, packed with dire warnings about the nefarious designs of the other party. (In the interests of full disclosure, let me acknowledge that I believe with all my heart that the Republicans harbor nefarious designs).

(image from wildsoundmovies.com)

But there aren't enough partisans out there to get you to 51% of the electorate. You can expand your coalition a little bit more by activating ideological identity; there's lots of overlap with partisanship, but they're not congruent. But that still doesn't get you to 51%.

Religious identity is another marginal expansion of your vote count, at least in 2012. Appealing to the religious identity of conservative Christians has realigned American politics from '78 to the present day. But that very success has created sufficient overlap with political and ideological identity to have reached a point of diminishing returns. There just aren't that many extra votes to be had there, particularly for a Mormon candidate.

And remember, for every in-group, there's an out-group. The  incestuous little three-way between the GOP, Conservatives and the Religious Right has begun to make Women uncomfortable as their reproductive rights, legal protections and maternity benefits have all come under attack.

Hispanics are looking at the blatant appeals to ethnic identity disguised as conservative immigration policy and becoming Democratic voters. Homosexuals have had their sexual identity made salient to their politics around the issue of gay marriage.

There are fewer and fewer identities to be activated by the Republicans. This is indicative of a party in decline; the Republican Party just doesn't LOOK like America in the early 21st century. 

But, at least this year, there remains an identity which can be activated which might wring enough votes out to push them across that magical 51% threshold.

I'm talking about race, obviously.

And so we've seen the Romney campaign activate the race issue with a shamelessness that has taken the tame Beltway media by surprise. Willard Romney has intentionally trolled the NAACP, hoping for (and getting) footage of himself being booed. He has deliberately and with calculation made a Birther joke. He has refused to acknowledge the complete falsity of his claims regarding the welfare to work requirement, despite having been universally condemned even by the tame Beltway press.

If Romney can get you to think of yourself as "white", instead of as "middle-class", he knows that in-group bias will take over and you'll assume his sincerity and good intentions, while simultaneously becoming more suspicious of Barack Obama.

It is a despicable ploy, and manipulative, and one which undermines the public policy debate which would be at the center of a RATIONAL political process.

And, it might work.

"They're all the same": A Pathology of Citizenship

Politics is important to me. I think about it a lot. I follow it closely. And I'm absolutely tiresome on the subject; most of my friends are political junkies as well, and those that aren't are fortunately a tolerant bunch. But I'll talk politics with total strangers. It's all data, and even if the people I'm speaking with aren't well informed or very interested it sharpens my understanding of the current political climate.

(This and unlabeled images from Wikimedia Commons)

The opinion I hear most frequently is some variation of "All politicians are alike", or "There's no difference between the two parties". It's not intended as a compliment. Politicians as a class are regarded with cynicism and contempt by the people they represent. They're regarded as corrupt, as lazy, as completely self-interested and utterly removed from the concerns and needs of their constituencies. The polling data on this is unambiguous.

But this nearly ubiquitous insistence that both parties are equally contemptible is held by different people for different reasons. People may fail to differentiate between the parties because they're simply disinterested in politics generally, and can't be bothered to look for nuance. People may be Libertarians and regard any manifestation of government as undesirable. And people I think of as "the Hard Left" are convinced that our politicians are nothing more than sock puppets for an ultra-wealthy elite, regardless of the party to which the politician belongs.

(Corrupt Democrat and sock-puppet Chris Dodd)

If we treat the entire American electorate as a single unit (admittedly committing some analytical violence in the process), then its defining characteristic is its political inattentiveness. This is a more controversial point than it ought to be. There's a great deal of political science literature devoted to attributing some sort of meta-rationality to citizens who don't vote, don't watch the news and who can't tell you the name of their elected representatives.

Apologists for the electorate have blamed a sensational, celebrity obsessed media for people's lack of awareness. This fails to account for what the media is in this country: a profit maximizing business. And while a simplistic supply-demand curve understates the extent to which sellers create demand, it is absolutely the case that sensational, celebrity driven coverage is simply a more popular product than political information. The media doesn't "cause" apathy. The nature of the media is the "effect" of apathy. There's no money in making people think too hard about their politics.

This is one of the origins of that bane of political news, "Beltway false equivalence". If a Republican claimed the Earth was flat, (and is it really a stretch to imagine that they might?) lazy, insider journalists more concerned with their membership in the clubby, get along community in D.C. would report that "Democrats say the Earth is round, Republicans disagree". Any more detailed analysis would challenge the electorate's own laziness, and cause them to flee to the safety of some mindless, idiotic sitcom.

(image from CBS. The Republic is doomed.)

The truth is, America is a democracy. Any such political system makes the citizens ultimately responsible for forming their own political views. If there were a popular demand for insightful political analysis, some entrepreneur would attempt to make a buck providing it.

(Rupert Murdoch, aka The anti-Christ)

Furthermore, the view that "they're all alike" is ACCURATE, in some highly limited contexts. And to the extent the view is accurate, it reinforces the INACCURATE belief that there's no meaningful difference in the two parties.

All politicians, from both parties, are single minded seekers of reelection. The system selects for that kind of monomania; politicians who take their eye off the electoral ball lose, and go into another business. Voters see the extent to which politicians will sell their soul to hold office, and it confirms their inaccurate view that politicians are indistinguishable by any standard.

Political parties also share an important similarity; the defining characteristic of the two major political parties is that they seek to win elections. Consequently their electoral behaviors will appear to be similar, at least superficially.

But to focus on the similarities between the two parties, and their candidates is to lose sight of their only relevant aspect: policy.

Politicians, and the two parties which sponsor them advocate very different public policy alternatives. The Republican Party is wedded to policies which in every case protect and advance the interests of those with power. Their economic policies are grounded not in the science of Economics, but in the financial interests of the wealthy. Their social policies are grounded not in the findings of social science, but rather in the preservation of the privileged place of the white patriarchy. In every single area of public policy debate, Republicans advocate policies which protect and enhance the power of wealthy white men.

(image from The Atlantic)

By the same token, the policies advocated and advanced by the Democrats aim at distributing wealth and power across the society more broadly.

These are non-trivial differences. They have affected, and will affect the daily life of every single resident of the United States. If you are a woman, or if you are a member of a racial minority, or if you are not wealthy, you absolutely have a stake in which party's candidates are put into positions of power. Your vote will exert a near-term impact on your life. This stuff matters.

And an intellectually lazy dismissal of this fact can be likened to the thoughtless shuffling of livestock to the killing floor.

The Republicans won't Blink before the Election

There's been lots of breathless reporting this week about the "fiscal cliff". In 6 months, the Bush Tax Cuts expire just as the budget sequestration begins. People wonder if the two parties will be able to work out a compromise on taxes and spending before the twin axes fall. 


It can't happen before the election.


Six months from now, the country is scheduled to "fall off a fiscal cliff". The Bush Tax Cuts will expire, resulting in a $3.8 trillion dollar tax blow to our barely ambulatory economy. At the same time, $1.2 Trillion dollars in automatic budget cuts will go into effect, starving the economy further. It is important to realize that these things will happen without any additional action by Congress. Congress must act to prevent them. And for the last 2 years, Congress (particularly the Senate) has seemed unable to act.

It is worth remembering how we got to this point... in 2010, voter turnout changed drastically from what it had been in 2008. The electorate was older and whiter. Many in this demographic were energized by a Tea Party movement more radical in its ideology than establishment Republicans in Congress. This mobilization of a more extreme slice of the electorate became  evident in the primaries, when a number of incumbent members of the Republican Conference were defeated by challengers claiming to represent the Tea Party.


Tea Party nominees prevented the Republicans from taking the Senate, as Tea Party candidates proved to be unelectable at the State level. But with the lower level of scrutiny and vetting faced by House candidates, Tea Party amateurs managed to win, the Republicans took the House and the House became much more conservative.

(This and unlabeled images from Wikimedia Commons)

The Lame Duck session between the election and the creation of the new Congress left a very small window for the Democratic majority Congress (if one counts tools of the Plutocracy like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln) to enact any final legislation. But the Republicans vowed to block all legislation unless the Bush Tax Cuts were extended. Democrats wanted to partially extend them as well, but given the absolute ass-whipping the GOP was giving the Dems on the deficit, Dems were insisting on additional revenue, as well. Specifically, they wanted to end the cuts for those earning more than $250k per year. 


The Republicans wouldn't go for it. 


The Democrats came back with a proposal for ending the cuts only for people earning more than $1 million per year. 


The Republicans wouldn't go for it. 


Finally, to avoid a major tax increase while the economy was still recovering from the Bush Collapse, and to keep President Obama's campaign promise not to raise taxes on the Middle-Class...


the tax cut was extended for ALL income groups. (I will leave the topic of the GOP's utter hypocritical dishonesty on the topic of the deficit to Dr. Krugman.)

But the extension, like the original cuts, had an expiration date...


in two years. To expire in January of '13.


The month following the tax extension, the new Congress was sworn in. The Tea Party represents the exact same element of conservative populism formerly represented by the John Birch Society and the Moral Majority. The first thing these self-educated "constitutionalists" did was pick a fight over the debt-ceiling increase. The resulting power struggle over the normally routine measure came within a few days of forcing the nation's default and caused a (meaningless, as it turned out) downgrade in our credit rating.


The price of getting these newly elected Republican extremists to permit the debt ceiling increase was the creation of a "Supercommittee", composed of key members of both parties, from both chambers, who would meet with the goal of reducing the budget deficit. And to insure that committee would carry out on its mandate, REALLY draconian budget cuts were scheduled to go into effect, automatically... 


in January of 2013.

(This is a Mayan Calendar. I am told the metaphor is obscure. Sorry.)

The supercommittee failed to agree on anything of course. Over Republican opposition to raising any revenue, whatsoever. And we are confronted with the prospect of massive tax increases taking place at the same time as massive spending cuts, in an economy stuck above 8% unemployment, and Europe sliding into recession ahead of us.


In January of 2013.




The timing on these deadlines is intentional. Both these fights got scored as a couple of short-term "wins" for the Republicans. The GOP got an extension of the tax cuts for their wealthy constituents, and the Tea Party Freshman got to pose as implacable deficit hawks. Even supporters of the President were accusing him of caving in.


But almost immediately smart people noticed what the Republicans had given away to get their wins. They were going to have to defend keeping those tax cuts for millionaires during a Presidential campaign. And half of those draconian budget cuts caused by the Supercommittee are coming out of Defense. NONE of them are coming out of Social Security or Medicaid.


People have speculated (and been mocked for it) that the President has been engaged in "3 Dimensional Chess" with the Republicans, suckering them into turning themselves into campaign fodder for the Obama Reelection Campaign. 

So at the moment, the Republicans find themselves in an uncomfortable position. The Defense lobby is raising hell with their pet congressmen on the Armed Services Committees. Defense contractors are looking at a MAJOR revenue hit beginning in 2013 if the cuts Republicans agreed to actually go through. But Defense Hawks in Congress can't reverse the cuts without Democratic cooperation. Meanwhile the whole country, including Republican campaign donors are looking at a major tax increase. Which Republicans agreed to.


And thus nothing can happen until after the election. If the Republicans win the Presidency and the Senate, their problems are solved. The very first thing they'll do is end the filibuster.  Then, they'll reset the tax rates, probably cutting them for Mitt's friends at the country club. And they'll simply legislate away the defense cuts. Deficits are NEVER a problem when Republicans generate them.


If the Republicans win the Senate and not the Presidency, then President Obama has left himself in a very good negotiating position; no conceivable Republican victory leaves him in office and also elects a Senate that can over-ride his vetoes. The tax plan that replaces the expiration of the Bush rates will have to be to his liking, or he can just do nothing and watch all the rates go back to the Clinton levels. That solves the deficit "problem" over-night. He can save a lot of his signature programs from the Republican axe by threatening to allow the defense cuts to go through. If the Democrats hold the Senate, which is tough but perhaps do-able...


all of that negotiating leverage can be brought to bear on the House. 

Until we know what the balance of power is going to be AFTER the election, though...


no policy can be made on taxes OR spending.

The Conservative Slander Machine, Part 2: Crying Wolf

(The Conservative Slander Machine, Part 1)

Every Wednesday, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform hosts a weekly meeting of the "Leave Us Alone Coalition". This is a collection of conservative activists and politicians who use the time to discuss current issues and coordinate their message and response to those issues. They are an important source of the seemingly unending string of outraged accusations, pure slander and fictitious talking points that our current President has had to weather from the moment he took the oath of office. Many of these controversies have involved accusations about the President himself; others have been phony controversies unrelated to the President personally, but used to oppose his policies and delegitimize his Presidency.

(This and unlabeled images from wikimedia commons)

Norquist's meeting is not the only source, of course. Americans for Prosperity plays an important role as well, disseminating tactical advice and talking points to numerous local Tea Party groups around the country. Conservative talk radio hosts serve not only to echo the outrage, they make up new accusations, sometimes as simple on-air improvisations. And of course the Conservative blogosphere invents new "crises" out of whole cloth. These are repeated on radio and FOX television using the disingenuous "Some people are saying..." throw away line, followed within a few days by "Why isn't the mainstream media reporting..." intimidation tactic.

The system works. If the Clinton administration was the test run for the conservative slander machine, the Obama Administration is the machine's operational deployment. The last 3 and a half years have been an unending string of phony charges, fake outrage and distractions. All of them have originated on the Right. Virtually all of them have been shown to be without substance. Some of them have been outright frauds, promoted by people who know they are false. Consider some of them...

President Obama was born in Kenya, and is a secret Muslim

I start with this one, because it has more lives than Michael Myers. The President's release of his short-form birth certificate in 2008, confirmation of the document's legitimacy from the State of Hawaii, verification from the hospital in which he was born, birth notices placed in the local papers at the time of the birth and the President's release of his long-form birth certificate in 2011 have all been rejected by the "Birthers"

Related to this claim is the idea that President Obama is secretly a Muslim. Interestingly, this delusion is often held by the same people who claim that Christian clergyman Jeremiah Wright is Obama's "spiritual advisor and mentor". The President's public statement that he is a Christian, his Christianity based "sermons" at the National Prayer Breakfast, his occasional discussion of the importance of his Christian faith in interviews, have failed to prevent adherants of this myth from repeating it.

We will "draw the curtain of charity" over the poor stupid bastards who insist the President is actually the anti-Christ.

The utility of the Birther controversy in undermining the Administration has been marginal. No one sane ever really believed it, although the lazy false-balance of some in the Beltway Press prevented them from calling it what it is: a crazy conspiracy theory. After the release of the president's long form birth certificate, the main-stream media became more openly dismissive of Birtherism. It became harder for Birthers to get air time. But the full embrace of Birtherism by Donald Trump served to revive the story. Birtherism still isn't respectable, but it is news once again. 

The Administration's use of policy "Czars" represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional expansion of Executive power

This was a favorite Glenn Beck crusade in the early days of the Administration; his panic has since subsided as other boogeymen have arisen. It should be noted that there is no such thing as a "czar"; the term is one invented by the press to denote officials in the Executive Office of the President with responsibility for oversight of specific policy areas.

The EOP should not be confused with the Cabinet, which is a body described within the text of the Constitution. The EOP works directly for the President; most of its staff is not ratified by the Senate. The EOP was created in 1939 and has steadily increased in size since then, in tandem with the increased size and complexity of government. Since there's actually no such thing as a "czar", Right Wing conspiracy mongers have felt free to apply the totalitarian sounding title to anyone in the White House whose area of policy oversight they didn't like. 

(Czar Alexander III)

The whole Czar controversy culminated with the firing of Van Jones, widely viewed as a win for Glenn Beck. After his subsequent campaign to get Cass Sunstein fired went nowhere, Beck quietly moved on to new irresponsibilities and the Czar issue became less of a rallying cry for conservatives. The approach of the election has revived this phony issue, at least to some extent.

Health care reform would create "Death Panels" which would deny care to elderly, terminally ill and handicapped patients

This particular calumny was started by Conservative activist Betsy McCaughey (note: the linked Wikipedia article badly overstates the influence of her Committee to Reduce Infectious Deaths. I think she must have edited it herself.) in an attempt to duplicate the career bump she enjoyed from helping torpedo the Clinton Health Care Plan.

Sarah Palin picked up on McCaughey's ravings, using the term "death panel" to describe different provisions of the bill at different times. The phrase created a firestorm of controversy, leading to the contentious town hall meetings vividly depicted on television, and nearly killing the bill before the myth was finally debunked.

Since then various politicians, including Palin have attempted to recapture the moment, applying the term to the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board, with only marginal success.

The Obama Administration targeted Republican donors in "deciding" which Chrysler dealerships to shut down as part of the auto industry bail-out

This one failed shortly after launch, providing a cautionary tale to non-statisticians who attempt to use statistical methodologies. Some conservative blogger announced that a large percentage of all the car dealerships being closed as part of the automotive industry's bailout and restructuring were Republican political donors. This charge was immediately adopted by conservative talk radio, FOX news and the Washington Examiner before someone with an education pointed out that the vast majority of all car dealers, closing or staying open, were Republican campaign donors. The outrage was quietly dropped. But the beauty of this type of accusation is...

it NEVER dies.

Twenty years from now, it will be easy to find an aged ex-Tea Bagger who will swear to you that the dealership myth was true. Just like you still find people who insist Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Moslem fundamentalists are building a "victory mosque" at Ground Zero.  

This one was started by Pam Geller and Robert Spencer, and is a good example of the most overtly racist views being mainstreamed by FOX.

This started with the announcement of a proposed Islamic Center at Park Place in Manhattan. The facility was to include a fitness center, a theater, a pool, a daycare... in fact, it sounds one hell of a lot like the JCC. But it also included a prayer space, which racism entrepreneurs immediately mischaracterized as a "mosque".

But these kind of manufactured controversies must be elaborated on in order to stay in the news cycle. So there were attempts to link the public face of the mosque, Feisal Abdul Rauf, to Islamic extremists. There were rumors that extremist money was behind the project. Then, the politicians saw an issue and started exploiting it, with Sarah Palin famously calling on peaceful Muslims to "refudiate" the project.

I am happy to point out that my President, Barack Obama, refused to demagogue on this issue, saying: 

"Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances."

Finally, as it became clear that this big, elaborate vanity project was going nowhere very quickly, the controversy died down. Last September the prayer center opened in the existing building. No terrorists were inspired.

I could go on for this like hours. Remember Obama's trip to India, that was going to cost $200 million a day? Except, it didn't cost a fraction of that? The story went from rumor to Drudge to Limbaugh to the Tea Bagger caucus in the House within days. They claimed that the President was taking 507 hotel rooms and a carrier battle group of 35 vessels. The main stream media started asking about it...

and then realized how nutty all this was (with some help from the White House) and quietly dropped it.

Remember Shirley Sherrod? The black civil servant who was videotaped saying that "She hadn't done as much as she could have" for a white farmer, because he was white? From  a video blogger to Andrew Breitbart to FOX, and even the Department of Agriculture bought into it, forcing Sherrod to resign before it was revealed that the videotape had been deceptively edited so as to convey the OPPOSITE meaning of what Ms. Sherrod had actually said.

Or that Beau Obama had been flown back from Hawaii on his own airplane?

Or that the President didn't wear a flag pin?

Or that the BP spill was Obama's Katrina?

This stuff isn't true. It's not even convincing. But the rise of new media has given political entrepreneurs tools to disseminate falsehoods to willing and eager listeners that they haven't had since the media became professionalized at the end of the 19th century.

There was a time when the repetition of so much inaccurate information would destroy the credibility of anyone repeating it. But outlets like Brietbart, and FOX, and Drudge don't have a business model involving accuracy, they have a business model involving partisan orientation. Their credibility with their consumers stems from their partisan orientation, not their veracity.

And finally, the purpose of this stuff is not to convince anyone, of any single thing. Each new crisis, each new display of theatrical, feigned outrage...

is only a single bullet, being fired from a battery of slanderous machine guns. It's great if one or more of the bullets actually draw blood, but mostly the purpose is to make the other guy keep his head down.

Each lie needs only to dominate a single news cycle to be succesful. If it can dominate 6 or 7 consecutive news cycles, and perhaps one round of the Sunday morning talk shows, the lie will have served its purpose. The Democrats will be responding rather than initiating. They'll be getting funny looks from constituents. There'll be vid of them answering questions about embarrassing things, even if those things have no substance.

Conservative media news items currently serve the exact same purpose as negative campaign spots. Combined with the coming tsunami of conservative special interest money, Republican Air Power may be an insurmountable advantage this Fall.

Remember Wisconsin.