Disorganized Religion

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 2 Comments

Anyone who has traveled in Europe may have experienced surprise at finding the pews of its beautiful, ancient churches occupied only by tourists.  After World War II religion slipped to the periphery of public life.  Europeans are commonly regarded as living in a ‘post-Christian’ age, contrasted with the relative religious enthusiasm of their American cousins.  However, the thundering roar of American Bible-thumping may be drowning out the patter of footsteps leaving the pews.  America may be trailing Europe, but it seems be on the same path.

Travel a few minutes from downtown Houston on the endless lanes of the Southwest Freeway and you’ll find the arena where the Houston Rockets won their World Championships in 1994-95.  The last jump-ball was thrown there almost two decades ago and the Rockets have moved on to a gleaming home downtown.  A new star graces the old arena, bringing in more than 40,000 fans each week.  Houston’s Summit is now home to Lakewood Church, one of the flagships of the megachurch phenomenon in America.

Churches like Lakewood might seem to represent America’s immunity to the religious decline evident in Europe, but look carefully and you’ll see a more complex story.  Ask what denomination Lakewood belongs to and you’ll get an interesting and increasingly typical answer – none.  Lakewood was an entrepreneurial effort by “venture-pastor” John Osteen back in the ‘50’s.  His heirs own the enterprise.  Scan the charismatic religious landscape in America and you’ll see that pattern repeated over and over again.

Attendance figures make clear that churches in America are overall in steady decline, just a few decades behind Europe.  The growth of fundamentalist congregations has not arrested the slide. They seem to act as the exit foyer of organized Christianity, swelling for a time as people leave.  Even charismatic denominations like the Southern Baptists which had benefited from earlier declines in mainline Protestantism are beginning to see their numbers fall off.

What’s emerging in the wake of this decline is a uniquely American brand of post-religious spirituality. The Big Round Church that is replacing America’s Little White Churches incorporates Christian themes into an unapologetically consumer-oriented experience.  The receding authority of a religious denomination is being replaced by the magnetism of a charismatic pastor, attracting a hardened remnant of fundamentalist believers unconcerned about the moral implications of commercialized faith.  Organized Religion is giving way to Disorganized Religion.

Disorganized Religion is replacing traditional religious identities with a model in which the customer is always right.  It drives an uncompromising line on popular, crowd-pleasing propositions – fiercely condemning broadly unpopular things that ‘other people’ do.  Claiming to embrace strictly literal Biblical interpretations these congregations often take a literalist approach on homosexual rights, abortion, and the notion that only born-again Christianity can offer a path to truth.  On the other hand they employ subtle, almost tortured scriptural contortions to avoid being stuck with the less commercially viable byproducts of literalism.

Women, who make up half the market after all, aren’t required to “remain silent” as the Apostle Paul explicitly demands.  Instead they are popular television preachers and authors.  Old Testament admonitions which are perfectly useful to support a hard line on gay rights are toned down where they require the optically unpleasant stoning of disobedient children and blasphemers.

Divorce gets a carefully nuanced treatment since a literal line on that subject would be market suicide.  The Bible’s disappointing failure to make any mention of the vital issue of abortion is overlooked entirely.  And Jesus’ unreasonable demand that his followers give up their worldly possessions to pursue a life of service is, well…, rendered a bit more reasonable.

Thomas Jefferson used a razor to carefully remove all the passages from his copy of the Gospels that mentioned miracles or elements of the fantastic.  He discovered in what was left behind a deeply inspiring guide for life, freed from delusions and superstition.  Fundamentalists recoil from such a heretical exercise while refusing to put down the knife.

The steady move toward disorganization is a fully global phenomenon.  In countries less prepared for the experience like Pakistan and Afghanistan it poses an existential threat while Europe and Canada have walked through it with barely a whisper.  The process of religious devolution creates anxiety for many, anxiety that’s often displayed in the shape of fanatical extremism and desperate efforts to shore up a disintegrating religious culture by political mandate.  We are not immune.

America seems unlikely to suffer as much pain as the Middle Eastern countries, but it seems unwilling to give up that old time religion as gracefully as the Europeans.  One day the dominant branches of Christianity in America may be as philosophical in outlook as the bulk of Western Judaism.  The mainline Protestant denominations are, for the most part, already on their way.  Catholicism may not be far behind. Even the Big Round Church Movement, as it begins to grow older, is starting to show some signs of maturity.

Megachurch pastor and author Rob Bell recently drew anger (and lost his job) by embracing a relatively rational interpretation of Hell.  Other figures are beginning to think more critically about Biblical approaches to environmental issues and the culture war.

Religion isn’t going away.  It seems to be wired into the fabric of our minds.  In the absence of some organized form we’ll construct it out of whatever spare parts we can find.  Just spend some time with radical environmentalists to witness a demonstration.

Regardless what else happens to our culture, Christians will likely for the foreseeable future continue to gather to discuss the meaning of their faith and build our communities.  They still do this in Europe, though on a much smaller scale than in the past.  A mature disorganized Christianity might grow less enthralled by the fantastic while still remaining a significant cultural force.  We’ll see.

Perhaps one day tourists will quietly marvel at the architectural splendor of our great glass megachurches while token services are carried on in the background.  They’ll make much better site-seeing stops than European cathedrals since they are already equipped with coffee houses, restaurants, and book stores.

Be sure to stop by the gift shop on the way out.

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Posted in Religion, Religious Right, Social Capital

Complexity Demands Smaller Government

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

The Affordable Care Act is 2409 pages of largely technical language.  It’s the equivalent of about two and half Bibles consisting only of the ‘Jehasephat begat Flimflameram’ passages.  Most of it reads like this:

(1) GENERAL COST-SHARING LIMITATIONS.—Section 1916 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 10 1396o) is amended in each of subsections (a)(2)(B) and (b)(2)(B) by inserting ‘‘, and counseling and pharmacotherapy for cessation of tobacco use by pregnant women (as defined in section 1905(bb)) and covered outpatient drugs (as defined in subsection (k)(2) of section 1927 and including nonprescription drugs described in subsection (d)(2) of such section) …

The fact that I don’t understand the text of the law does not reflect on its merits.  However, the fact that so few of the men and women who voted on the ACA know what it says raises troubling questions about our political process.

Friedrich Hayek anticipated this problem.  He wrote The Road to Serfdom in Britain during World War II in response to growing calls for political and economic centralization.  Hayek explained that intrusive efforts to control economic activity, no matter how well-intentioned or popular, would be stymied by complexity:

It would be impossible for any mind to comprehend the infinite variety of different needs of different people which compete for the available resources and to attach a definite weight to each.

We might all agree that we want a certain highly detailed and complex government program enacted, but a truly responsive political system will be pulled in a million directions as it confronts each of the elements of its execution.  An originally clear mandate disintegrates into a muddle as the vast spectrum of conflicting interests each get their say:

The inability of democratic assemblies to carry out what seems to be a clear mandate of the people will inevitably cause dissatisfaction with democratic institutions.  Parliaments come to be regarded as ineffective “talking shops”, unable or incompetent to carry out the tasks for which they have been chosen.  The conviction grows that if effective planning is to be done, the direction must be “taken out of politics” and placed in the hands of experts, permanent officials or independent autonomous bodies

In Hayek’s view, the public desire for increasing government planning ultimately threatens democratic legitimacy.  However, Hayek was a realist when it came to regulation.  He embraced laws to manage externalities and improve living conditions.  He supported pollution controls, a minimum wage, and safe working conditions.  He acknowledged that government isn’t the only potential source of oppression and that government action is necessary to maintain a free market.

He explained that competition requires the “adequate organization of certain institutions like money, markets, and channels of information – some of which can never be adequately provided by private enterprise.”  It is only when government attempts to solve the most complex, individual human problems through expert planning that democracy sputters.

As a nation becomes more diverse, wealthy, representative, and populous, the ability of the central state to effectively regulate private activities in detail declines.  Denmark has a population slightly larger than metropolitan Houston.  Its citizens overwhelmingly share the same language, cultural heritage, and deeply intertwined social institutions.  The Danish public sector comprises almost 60% of the country’s GDP (compared to less than 20% in the US).

The Danes can, to an extent, support a big government.  Their small population is deeply interconnected through robust institutions of social capital that incorporate their will into public decision making.

America is not Denmark.  Our Federal government has to account for the needs of more than 300 million people spread across a continental land mass, representing a global microcosm of cultural, religious, economic and regional interests.  We cannot make expert government work while preserving the personal liberty we treasure.  Federal authority could operate differently and still protect the public from pollution, monopoly, and abuse by the powerful, but neither party is sincerely interested in exploring ways to do this.

Democrats long for panels of smart people to shape our world; picking our energy sources, industrial policy, educational priorities, groceries, and making all the choices that we as citizens are too stupid to make for ourselves.  The present crop of Republicans would, if turned loose, tear down nearly every barrier that protects ordinary people from abuse while building a government that would follow you all the way home, up the stairs, and into your bedroom.

There is plenty of room for government to operate between these two poles if we demand it, but how?  What would regulation look like if it were constrained by a greater sensitivity to Federal overreach?

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Posted in Political Theory

Does the Tea Party Have Scots-Irish Roots?

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

Grandma said we’re Scots-Irish.  The answer didn’t help much with my fourth grade class project on ancestry since she couldn’t tell me much more about it.  “That’s what my Grandfather said we are,” she explained in that tone which meant the conversation was over and it was time to turn her attention back to frying chicken.

The surprising rise of the Tea Party has sent experts scrambling for explanations.  Along the way some commentators, political figures, and bloggers are casting a fresh eye at my culture.  Who are the Scots-Irish?  Do they actually exist as a distinct identity or is “Scots-Irish” an imagined heritage cobbled together out of legend?  Has the ornery cultural legacy of the Scots-Irish inspired the Tea Party Movement?

If you’ve never celebrated Christmas in a trailer park or spent a blistering summer Saturday at the dirt-track, you may be unfamiliar with the term “Scots-Irish.” The Scots-Irish as an ethnic group are illusive, but a few facts can be established.

They trace their roots to the fiercely Protestant colonists who participated in England’s long effort to subdue Ireland. In the Tudor Era England began moving settlers onto lands confiscated from Irish Catholic Lords mostly in the northern counties.  As the Reformation gained momentum the conflict in Northern Ireland grew savage.  The settlements developed into more than an aristocratic land-grab; they were a deeply emotional religious crusade.

Over time settlers imported to Ireland from the long-embattled Scots Borders came to dominate the culture, but ethnically the Northern Irish colonies included Protestant migrants from England, France, Germany, Ireland and elsewhere.  Former Sen. James Webb in his history of the Scots-Irish grants them a romanticized legacy.  He imagines them in an unbroken cultural line, stretching back to battles with Norman aristocrats and Roman Legions.  Though the Borders legacy is strong, the people identified as Scots-Irish in the U.S. seem to lack a uniform ethnic identity older than the Irish Plantations.  This fact is important in understanding the development of the Scots-Irish in America, as they easily melded with anyone else who shared their values.

“Scots-Irish” was perhaps always less an ethnicity formed by centuries of common ancestry than an affinity shaped in the forge of Ulster.  That commonality of values and experience was enough to set them apart as a people and give them a cultural influence that reaches beyond ethnicity.

In the 18th century the Protestant colonists in Northern Ireland, frustrated by interference from their absentee Lords in England and angry over religious constraints launched a century-long mass migration to the American colonies.  They usually established themselves in the frontiers where land was abundant and the arm of the hated aristocracy was weak.

There they developed a reputation for turd-disturbery, constantly fueling conflict with the Indians and rebellions against local authorities.  The Conestoga Massacre in Pennsylvania established a familiar pattern.

In the 1760’s, Scots-Irish settlers were moving into lands granted to the Indians by treaty.  In confusing logic, the settlers in the Susquehanna Valley complained that the Colonial authorities were failing to defend them from Indian retaliation for their land grabs.  A pastor famous for bringing his rifle to the pulpit stirred up a mob that slaughtered and mutilated a band of unarmed Christian Indians unconnected with the attacks, who had long-before settled peacefully among the whites.

When the authorities tried to bring murder charges, the settlers organized a mob that marched on Philadelphia.  No one was brought to justice.  Ben Franklin had some harsh words for these folks, but the tactics of Ulster were loose in the colonies and he couldn’t stop them with words.  As my Grandmother would have pointedly insisted, this kind of violence does not mark the whole culture, nonetheless it set a familiar, oft-repeated tone.

Grandma was sensitive to this image.  She tartly refused to field questions about the various outlaws and bushwhackers that weighed down the less celebrated branches of the family tree.  Her efforts were futile.  It’s tough to protect the public image of a culture that mostly doesn’t give a damn what you think.

As they moved farther west or deeper into the hills the Scots-Irish shed more and more of their Old World roots.  That diffusion, along with the ethnic amalgam that formed the Scots-Irish identity all along, makes it difficult to define them today.  It also helps explain why Grandma could tell me little of what it meant to be Scots-Irish beyond “that’s just who we are.”

Is the Tea Party a Scots-Irish movement?  There is no explicit link.  There is however something distinctive in the fight-first, think-later style of the Tea Party that sounds eerily familiar.  The appeal of the Tea Party in regions of the South and West where the Scots-Irish once predominated suggests at a bare minimum some overlap, an unconscious legacy. The knee-jerk resistance to taxes, a spiteful stubbornness and the combination of religious and martial imagery are all pretty familiar trademarks.

Regardless of whether the Scots-Irish can claim to have inspired this movement I expect we will eventually play our standard role as the folks who ruin things for everyone by going too far.  It’s all good fun till somebody gets hurt.  Whether at church, at war, or at a party, my people are usually the first to get carried away.

If the rhetoric doesn’t cool soon, expect trouble.  There are folks out there right now, listening to blowhards like Michelle Malkin or Glenn Beck and coddling their resentments.  They are building up to a big show.  Besides NASCAR and Country Music, that’s the contribution to American culture for which we are most famous.  We don’t always start the party, but you can count on the Scots-Irish to close it out with a spectacle. Like Grandma said, that’s just who we are.

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For fun, a few comments on the Scots-Irish in media:

Jennifer Lawrence arguably auditioned for her part in The Hunger Games by playing the same character in the heavily Oscar-nominated film, Winter’s Bone.  It’s perhaps the best portrayal of life among the Scots-Irish mountain remnant anyone has ever made, based on the excellent book by the same name.

Mel Gibson’s film, The Patriot, is loosely based on the British experience confronting the Scots-Irish settlers of the South Carolina backcountry in the American Revolution.

Do I need to mention the Dukes of Hazzard?

The Scots-Irish national anthem may be Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road, but there are some notable runner-ups.  James McMurtry’s Choctaw Bingo is a close contender.  One writer has nominated it as the most appropriate modern replacement for the Star Spangled Banner.

But the most appropriate theme song for the Scots-Irish may be Never Gonna Change, by the Drive-by Truckers.

Feel free to post other examples.

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Posted in Neo-Confederate, Tea Party

The Very First Tea Party Speech

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 3 Comments

The Tea Party movement plainly has roots in earlier political trends, but it’s tough to pinpoint a seminal moment, a spark out of which this ideology of tribal rage took its modern form.  By accident over the weekend I think I may have found it in the form of an obscure old speech.

Allow me to put off identifying the speaker or the circumstances.  First, let me share a few excerpts.  Recognize any familiar themes?

The threat to the Constitution:

We sound a call for a return to constitutional government in America…

[We] stand beside the constitution of the United States with drawn sword.  [We] are ready to stand, even at the expense of life itself, as Crocket, Bowie and Houston stood in Texas, for individual liberty and freedom, for the right of the people to govern themselves.

Awkward comparisons to Communism:

The Democratic Convention followed a pattern and a blue-print … for lifting the face of America and giving [it] the “new Russian look.”

We have recently learned of the infiltration of communist spies into our government and our critical industries.

Even more awkward comparisons to Hitler:

Hitler offered the people of Germany a shortcut to human progress.  He gained power by advocating human rights for minority groups.  Under his plan, the constitutional rights of the people were destroyed.

Washington bureaucrats are building a police state:

The proposed federal police state, directed from Washington, will force life in each hamlet in America to conform to a Washington pattern.  Russia is ruled from Moscow.  May God forbid that your state and my state, your country and my country, your city and my city, your farm and my farm, shall ever be subjected to Washington Bureaucratic police rule.

State sovereignty is the key to liberty:

The proposal to take from you your right to deal with your local problems in a way that is satisfactory to you and to invest the right to deal with those problems in Washington is a way that is wholly unsatisfactory to you is so antagonistic to our form of government, and so contrary to everything that we have stood for since 1776 that it is obliged to be communistic in concept, un-American in principle, and undemocratic in execution.

The Justice Department is building an American Gestapo:

Its [Justice Dept.] agents would circulate throughout the land, meddling with private business, policing elections, intervening in private lawsuits, breeding litigation and keeping our people in a constant state of apprehension of harassment…The people do not want the Federal government to usurp the police power, and thereby sow the seeds of a Gestapo in America.

Hate crimes legislation is designed to destroy freedom:

…the federal government…is trying to trying to take their police power from the states.  When this occurs, the last vestige of local control of the police and local exercise of the police power, so essential if we are to remain a free people, will have been destroyed.

How did he anticipate the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?”  He warns that progressives force their policies on the military:

…even at the sacrifice of the morale of the soldiers and the safety of the country itself, against the advice of the military leaders charged with the defense of the nation.  Our boys in service should not be subjected to an unnecessary hazard.  The American people do not want their sons placed in such a position, when the military leaders say it is unsafe, simply, to allow politicians of this country to appeal to bloc voters.

Progressives are afraid of clean elections:

It is fundamental in this whole American system that, if liberty is to be retained in this country, the control of our elections must remain at home.  There can be no tyrant, there can be no dictator, in America, if the people in the communities of the nation control their elections, fix voting qualifications, and say who can and who cannot vote.

New Federal laws are inspired by Stalin:

The proposed American FEPC was patterned after a Russian law written by Joseph Stalin about 1920, referred to in Russia as Stalin’s “All-Races Law”… Stalin was commissar of Nationalities of the time that he wrote this law and he used it as a means of advancing himself to supreme dictator of Soviet Russia.  The FEPC might as well be entitled a law to sabotage America.

These are excerpts from Strom Thurmond’s 1948 speech accepting the Presidential nomination of the States’ Rights Democrats (the “Dixiecrats”) at their convention in Houston.  What are the dangers that inspired the young Democratic Governor of South Carolina to break from his party and warn of a mortal threat to representative government?

The Democratic Party in the summer of 1948 had embraced platform planks calling for anti-lynching laws, an end to the poll tax, desegregation of the military, and a law barring racial discrimination in hiring.  Those were the proposals so intolerable to a free people that he compared them to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.

It is important to remember that Thurmond was an energetic supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal.  An activist Federal bureaucracy didn’t become a danger to liberty until it began to undermine white supremacy.

After President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Thurmond switched to the Republican Party.  His move led a long wave of defections of racist Southern political figures to the nearly-empty Southern GOP.  Thurmond never renounced his positions on race, the Old South, and segregation.  He brought them with him, quietly but without compromise, where they remain an awkward fit today with the Republican Party’s long Hamiltonian tradition.

Thurmond’s 1948 acceptance speech is no masterpiece, but it marks an important political watershed.  In the speech, Thurmond is composing a new language through which Southern “racial conservatives” could communicate their complaints beyond the region.

He was pioneering the use of “Communism” as a proxy, building a new dog-whistle for racists. This language allowed the Dixiecrats to climb out of their sweaty Southern box and expand the Neo-Confederate campaign without stinking up the room with N-bombs.

In time, Thurmond would add fundamentalist language to the mix.  His technique of channeling racist concerns into racially-neutral rhetoric would influence the Birchers in the 50’s and ’60’s, religious conservatives in the ‘70’s, and has been resurrected almost intact in the Tea Party movement.

Sixty years before the Obama Administration, Strom Thurmond delivered what can perhaps be considered the very first Tea Party speech, so perfect in its carefully couched language that with only a few variations Glenn Beck could deliver it on the air today.  As it says in Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

***

I highly recommend reading the entire speech.  It’s not transcribed online, but I obtained a scanned copy from the Thurmond Institute at Clemson and posted it here:

Strom Thurmond Accepts the Dixiecrat Nomination for President, 1948

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Posted in Neo-Confederate, Race, Tea Party

Republicans, Minorities, and the Myth of Income Redistribution

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

Republicans have to broaden their appeal beyond the grumpy old white man demographic, how are we supposed to do it? There may be a simple answer, but like many simple answers it will be difficult to swallow.

We could go a long way toward breaking out of our racial rut if we could only outgrow The Myth of Income Redistribution.   This myth has played a vital role in the post-Cold War GOP, attempting with mixed results to unify whites behind a phony sense of racial solidarity.  The currently circulating version of the myth can be summarized as follows:

“WE are people who work hard for what we have and contribute through our taxes to pay for government.  THEY are people who pay for nothing and expect government to give them everything they need.  OUR work keeps this country going.  THEIR laziness drags this country down.  Liberals use the evil of ‘income redistribution’ to take money from US and give it to THEM in order to create dependency and buy votes from the ignorant and the shiftless.”

There are three problems with this delusion.  First, its central implication – that there is a distinct group of noble “creators” preyed on by a separate group of parasitic “takers” is a lie.  Second, the myth is so pungently hypocritical that it practically burns your eyes.  Finally, it takes conservatives out of the discussion on poverty issues, stripping them of their vital role in shaping the form and values of the social safety net.

In this election, the role of the supposed “takers” was often played by food stamp recipients.  A quick look at the realities of the food stamp program demonstrates the falsehood of the myth.

For starters, few Americans realize how little we spend on food stamps.  Even at the height of the great recession the food stamp program was about 2% of the 2011 budget.  By comparison, food stamps for struggling families cost markedly less than the $100bn we lay out each year to subsidize home mortgage interest .  Incidentally, about two-thirds of the government handout for mortgages goes to the top 20% of wage earners.

Who receives food stamps?  African-American households receive a quarter of the benefits and Hispanics receive about 20%.  Who gets the rest?  Do the math.

A large chunk of the food stamp budget goes to support working households.  That’s right, 40% of the “takers” on the food stamp programs are families working hard to make ends meet. And how high are these “moochers” living?  In Texas, for example, the average monthly benefit is $125 a month.  Have fun feeding your family on that.

So, most food stamp recipients are white and a large minority are “working poor,” but perhaps the myth still holds because the very notion of “income redistribution” is fundamentally wrong, or “socialist,” or unsustainable.  That idea runs into some problems.

Income redistribution is one of the principle functions of civilization.  It’s what America does and Somalia and Haiti do not do.  Americans of all income groups and political parties benefit from income redistribution all the livelong day.  If income redistribution makes people “dependent” on government, then humankind has been “dependent” since we gave up hunting mammoths for food.

Never mind the more obvious examples like roads, police, and courts.  Without income distribution in the form of government agencies, mortgage market supports, and very generous tax subsidies there would be practically no middle class home ownership in this country.  The elderly, other than the extremely wealthy, would not be able to afford modern medical care in almost any form.  Almost none of the medicines you use would have been invented.  Without income redistribution very few of us would be capable of reading this.

Income redistribution is the reason those highly independent red state conservatives who live on farms far from cities and claim they need nothing from the government have access to electricity, roads, hospitals, schools, doctors, telephones, and the Internet.  Not to mention that without direct government subsidies most of what remains of family farming in this country would disappear overnight.

Government takes money in the form of taxes and uses it to produce infrastructure and welfare programs that benefit all of us in incalculable ways.  If you want to see the portrait of a “taker” find a mirror.

So should Republicans become the party or more food stamps, more housing credits, and welfare for all?  Of course not, but denigrating struggling families who need help is repugnant.  Politically, it demolishes conservatives’ credibility in the debate over the priorities and goals of the welfare system.

Our role is to see that government programs are focused on making all Americans more independent, with greater options to use our talents and efforts toward our own personal goals.  Isaac Hayes, an African American Republican from Chicago put it best, “You don’t tell a 3rd-generation welfare recipient, ‘Fend for yourself.’ You say, ‘Let me show you how you can break the cycle.’”

Our purpose is to build an optimistic system in which all forms of government activity, from food stamps to small business loans, function more like a trampoline and less like a spider web.  Moreover, conservatives understand the ways in which personal moral values can impact economic outcomes.  We cannot serve our vital role while bashing the poor or wallowing in fantasies of superiority.

Republicans do not need to fashion some customized message specifically for minorities. Simply replacing a few cherished myths with facts and humility would help us wash away the odor of Old Dixiecrat that hangs over us.  If the only reform we embraced was adopting a more adult understanding of entitlements, spending, and the role of government we would be well on our way to serious deficit reduction while opening the party to authentic participation by Americans of all descriptions.

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Posted in Neo-Confederate, Political Theory, Race, Republican Party, Tea Party

Confronting a Post-Middle Class America

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

If it seems like the middle class in America isn’t what it used to be perhaps that’s because it doesn’t exist anymore.  There is no longer a coherent block of Americans in the middle income range that shares a common culture, goals, and identity.  Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing will depend on whether we are willing to adapt to the demands of this new reality.

That will not be easy because the middle class, for Americans, is not so much a sociological concept as a symbol of our civic religion.  We use the term as shorthand for “ordinary folk” or “us.” In our minds, “middle class” refers to people who earn a comfortable, reasonably secure living from work.  They aren’t so wealthy that their income comes from investments or so poor that they collect welfare. The middle class is America.

There may have been some reality to that myth, briefly, in the post-war doldrums.  In the 50’s, incomes for most people who worked for a living were bunched in a relatively narrow range.  The earnings of the middle class peaked in the late 50’s, when nearly 55% of the nation’s income was claimed by households in the middle cohorts.  By comparison, in 2011 the middle income cohorts earned only 45% of the nation’s income.  The middle is no longer king.

The common interests that once made middle earners a “class” were cultural, not just economic.  Many bankers, lawyers, plumbers, and factory workers lived together in cookie-cutter houses in the same neighborhoods.  Almost all of them had done mandatory service in the military. The lawyer might be marginally more likely to drive a new car, but the features of the vehicles wouldn’t have varied much.

That commonality is gone.  We can still identify a middle class of sorts by bracketing households earning around the median income.  Someone will always sit in the middle.  However, apart from income that cohort of people will share few of the other overlapping interests that define a class.  Our civilization has diverged into dozens of identifiable cohorts that cross and re-cross each other on certain criteria or at certain stages of life, but mostly they just seem to be heading in a thousand different cultural directions.

The decline of the middle class is often blamed on increasing wealth concentration among the highest earners.  There are several problems with this theory, but the focus on wealth concentration at the top hides a much more interesting phenomenon that is perhaps more important to understanding the declining power of the great American middle.  The changes in America’s income structure and class alignment may have less to do with concentration than with shearing.

A close look at the data shows that the middle earners have been split.  White collar professionals who fifty years ago earned only marginally more than their neighbors at the factory may be the largest beneficiaries of America’s shift toward global capitalism.  The widening fault line that has divided the former middle class has aligned professional workers more closely with wealthier households.

Perhaps there is no middle class in America because for a very large portion of the population, the values and goals of the middle class worked.  More people than ever before are experiencing real affluence.  Though the claim is a sort of civic heresy, the middle class may be experiencing a crisis born largely of success.

It is true that the top 5% of households have seen the greatest increase in their income share since the late 50’s.  However, the same phenomenon has led to a rising share of national incomes for roughly the top 33% (links to income tables posted below).  The upward shift in income distribution over the past fifty years has sheared away professionals and information workers, who have seen their share of national income increase along with the wealthiest households while the economic value of manual labor has sagged.

There is more to this phenomenon than just earnings.  The unemployment rate for IT workers, for example, is about 4% – beyond full employment.  In fact, unemployment for knowledge workers and professionals has hovered at about half the broader unemployment rate across most of the downturn.  Not only are knowledge workers earning more than their blue collar peers, their career arc, retirement expectations, and relative security are a world apart from traditional labor.

A very large chunk of workers have graduated into a new, more affluent way of life; leaving behind a large number of formerly middle class Americans who are seeing their lifestyles deteriorate. Knowledge workers in the top 10-33% of households may share little economically with the wealthy, but thanks to shearing, they are much more closely aligned culturally and politically with higher earners.

This economic realignment can’t be blamed on Reagan or Bush.  Every administration since Eisenhower has presided over a creeping erosion in the share of national income earned by the middle quintile.  This phenomenon is far bigger than tax policy.

A free, globalized economy rewards those who can accumulate either capital, knowledge, or both.  Progressive taxation may blunt inequality around the edges and help fund programs that expand opportunity.  However, if conceived purely as a means to halt income concentration, higher marginal rates are just boulders in the stream. The radical expansion of freedom and economic opportunity that has swept the whole planet over the past half-century has, and will continue to disproportionately reward those who can accumulate knowledge and capital no matter what we do (within reason) about tax rates.

There is little to gain from trying to cram people back into some ersatz vision of middle classness.  Our goal in coping with the end of Middle Class America is to preserve meaningful equality of opportunity in an era of vast economic and cultural dynamism. In particular, we need to find ways for those in lower income households to get a solid shot at participating in a knowledge economy.

That solid shot may depend on family stability as much as anything.  Lower earners increasingly lack the resources of all kinds needed to support career transitions, marriages, child rearing, and most of all the very long cycle of education required for access to the knowledge economy.  With that in mind, religious conservatives will have a vital role to play if they are ever half as concerned about the real economic forces that affect people’s lives as they are about sex.

Values, culture, and choices matter to success.  Likewise, the economic health of the surrounding environment influences the choices people have open to them.  Poor personal decisions contribute to poverty.  Poverty, likewise, can spread like a disease, narrowing the range of choices available to those affected by it.  This interplay between choice and environment explains why social conservatives are crucial to the future of American opportunity.

America might reach a very hopeful turning point if social conservatives ever recover an interest in economic justice, discrimination, and the circumstances affecting the less fortunate.  They hold the key to a vision of opportunity that properly balances the role of government with the freedom that accompanies individual responsibility. As terrifying as it sounds, the health of the American dream may depend in a sense, on Rick Santorum.

As we confront the demands of a post-middle class America, social conservatives are the broken bridge to a brighter future.  If prominent social conservatives ever move beyond their fear, their apocalyptic pessimism, and their creepy sexual fascinations, we might have a chance to create an economic revolution among today’s less fortunate.  A healthy social conservative movement could allow us to one day look back on the end of the middle class era not as a disaster, but as the stepping stone to something far greater than we might have imagined.

Resources:

Share of Aggregate Income, 1947-1994:  US Census

Share of Aggregate Income, 1967-2011 (Excel file):  US Census

How the tax burden has changed over time: New York Times

Analysis of tax burden among different groups: Econbrowser

Employment rates among different occupations over time: Wall Street Journal

And a teaser to a future, related discussion about population and affluence – A look at labor participation rates from Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture.

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Posted in Economics, Ownership Society, Social Capital

The Danger in Republican Climate Denial

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

Climate change is an issue so uniquely suited to the needs of the dying global left that it feels too perfectly tailored to be a coincidence.  We are being asked to accept that the accumulating exhaust of the Industrial Revolution is cranking up the planet’s thermostat, threatening to turn our blue marble brown unless we all decide to ride bikes and eat bugs.  Climate change sounds very much like a dead Hippie’s revenge.

Republicans can’t be blamed for harboring skepticism, but we must realize that our strategy of blind blanket denial is developing into a political suicide pact.  We must find a smarter approach to this problem while we still have time.

The Earth’s climate is getting warmer and our carbon emissions are a factor in that heating.  There is no credible scientific consensus that questions those two facts.

We must stop wheeling in crank “scientists” who wield tactics borrowed from the tobacco industry to “debunk” the credible research on climate change.  Once we accept those two undisputed realities there is an absolute wonderland of authentic uncertainty waiting beyond those them.  That is the realm where real uncertainty lies and where the policy response to climate change can still be shaped.

For example how much, exactly, of the Earth’s warming can be attributed to human activity?  Certainly a lot, but no precise figure can be agreed on.  How much warmer will it get and under what circumstances?  Three researchers can give you five answers.

Let’s not forget the most troubling unanswered question: how much do we need to reduce our carbon output to achieve a specific decline in warming?  No one can respond with confidence, let alone precision.  Some scientists expect that regardless what action we take, it may take centuries to mitigate the impact of human-influence climate change.

So how do we address policy questions like whether to implement a carbon tax?  Conservatives will lose the credibility required to even participate in that and other policy debates if we continue to tolerate the ridiculous notion that climate change is a hoax.

On a political level, Republicans must not confuse climate change with other science vs. belief issues.  On this issue public opinion will eventually move in the direction of established facts regardless of how much distortion we generate.

We can give hedged answers on the age of the universe with little consequence.  Denying the reality of evolution won’t cause anyone to lose their favorite beach house, or for that matter, their favorite island.  Climate change, on the other hand, is becoming apparent enough to the average layman to affect their holiday plans.  We cannot swim against this scientific tide much longer.

When public opinion comes into line with the established science, our denialist position will cost us our opportunity to participate in shaping policy.  We are setting ourselves up for a sudden, catastrophic political collapse which could spread beyond this single issue.

Ironically, conservatives are probably in the best position of anyone to shape sensible responses to this problem.  America over the past decade scored a shocking, yet hardly noted achievement which hard-core climate activists in the 90’s would have thought nearly impossible.  We slashed our carbon emissions by nearly 10%.  In fact, by 2020 we are on track to meet all of the emissions reductions envisioned by the cap and trade program that we did not implement.

These reductions are not primarily caused by the recession. The reasons for the drop are far more awkward for both sides of our political divide.

The largest factor in the reduction of US greenhouse gas emissions has been an aggressive natural gas drilling campaign sparked by fracking.  That’s right.  If you love Mother Earth and worry about climate change you should come down from that tree and hug a roughneck.

This shift toward natural gas will not be enough by itself to achieve the kind of carbon reductions that are probably necessary over the long term, but it points to a reality forgotten in this debate.  As in most cases, cautious conservative approaches to this problem will likely be more successful than heavy-handed central planning.

Instead of chaining ourselves to denialism, conservatives could be promoting solid science, calming the alarmists, and shaping climate policies that harness the power of private enterprise and respect property rights.  If Democrats are free to define the response to climate change purely in terms of energy austerity and central planning, the world will be poorer and we will suffer much more from the effects of warming.

Real solutions are much more likely to emerge from technology and markets than from centrally imposed want, but conservatives cannot participate in shaping these alternatives if the party allows itself to be defined politically by a pack of ridiculous cranks.  Categorical climate denial might be the single greatest threat to the long term future of the conservative movement.

For the Republican Party in the U.S., denial is a river that is rapidly running dry.

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Posted in Climate Change

Politics, Gun Control, and Psycho Killers

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 4 Comments

In the wake of the killings at Sandy Hook it appears that we’re going to have a fairly serious debate about gun rights.  In recent years we’ve shown little skill in handling such complex policy matters.  If we’re going to address firearm regulation in a coherent way, we need to boil the discussion down to a few fundamental questions.

First and foremost, how much firepower do we need to satisfy our rights under the 2nd Amendment?  Pistols?  Hunting rifles?  Assault Rifles?  How many of each?  What about hand grenades and RPG’s?  If a ban on AK-47’s is the gateway to Communism, then why exactly can’t I protect the American way of life by ringing my lawn with land mines?

In short, where should we draw the line between individual rights and public safety?

Further, what is the legitimate purpose of my gun ownership?  Tradition?  Hunting?  Preparation to serve in the militia? Defending my home from criminals?  Defending my home from Obama?  If there is a vital public interest served by my ability to buy an AR-15 this weekend at a gun show, then let’s go ahead and state clearly what that is.

Personally, I like guns a lot.  I learned to shoot as a kid in my back yard.  I’ve had a lot of fun with friends firing weapons that were barely legal.  Guns were everywhere growing up in Texas, so I’m not persuaded that guns are the reason that psycho killers do what they do.  Mass killings still happen in places with much tougher gun laws than ours.

That said, guns are the reason that a deranged loser incapable of performing life’s most basic tasks is able to kill so effectively, so efficiently, and in such mass numbers.  A lunatic armed with a baseball bat can hurt some people, but his arms would get tired long before he could pull off something as serious as we saw in Aurora or Connecticut.  There is no question that the broad availability of heavy firepower is a factor in the frequency and severity of mass killings in America.

Guns don’t kill people.  People kill people.  However, people kill a lot more people, a lot faster, with a Bushmaster.

Some would say claim that Americans aren’t heavily armed enough.  It’s true I suppose, that if we all had minefields in our yards and Gatling guns mounted on our roofs we would, for example, suffer fewer burglaries.  We would also have fewer limbs.  Life is full of tradeoffs.

We are paying a price in public safety for my ability to play with serious firepower.  That’s an unavoidable fact.  The political question is whether that price is worth paying.

Some think America needs millions of assault rifles in circulation to defend ourselves against criminals. Now would be a great time for them to explain in some minimally coherent language why that makes sense.

Some think America needs millions of assault rifles in circulation to defend our freedom from Obama, or Communists, or ACORN, or Yankees, or God knows what.  Let them explain their position.  Hopefully they can do it without using quotes taken directly from either version of Red Dawn.

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, in defending everything you weaken your defenses everywhere.  The NRA strategy of defending gun rights by opposing every imaginable form of firearm regulation, no matter how well-reasoned, raises the potential for a sudden, unanticipated political failure.  It might be a good idea to start thinking about sensible gun regulations we can live with instead of continuing this scorched earth tactic.

Our gun laws do not make a lot of sense.  The arguments in general circulation on both sides are usually poorly directed, aimed less at persuasion than at motivating a political base.  In short, this debate, like so many others in recent years, suggests a culture in desperate need of grown-up supervision.

It not entirely clear whether tighter gun laws would prevent mass shootings.  It is matter we need to weigh.  Regardless what decision we make, if we can find a way through this debate to grow into the adults this country needs then the effort will not have been wasted.

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Posted in Gun Rights

Smart People, Stupid Politics

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

A friend shared with me some very disturbing information this week.  He has evidence that seems to suggest that the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged by the government as a pretext to take away our guns.

This shocking news came from a perfectly sane adult, a good father and husband, who is one of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with.

Though the claim is completely nuts, the person sharing it is as sane as the day is long.  A startling number of people who make sound, well-reasoned decisions in their personal lives are comfortable engaging in political ideas that are empirically, provably false and sometimes downright insane.

There’s nothing new about conspiracy theories in politics, but the degree to which they have entered mainstream political discourse is shocking and unprecedented.  From Benghazi to Agenda 21, there seem to be no filters remaining to prevent ludicrous ideas from reaching the highest levels of policy.  Somewhere over the past decade or so, the politics of crazy jumped the tin-foil barrier and started to influence the political opinions of ordinary people who are otherwise competent, intelligent and even educated.

Although the politics of paranoia has become a Republican staple in the past few years, it is a mistake to imagine that this is a unique illness of our political right, or to blame it purely on the Internet.  The Age of Crazy is a product of broad social forces that will soon affect Democrats just as deeply as Republicans. We cannot begin to formulate some response until we acknowledge the forces responsible for undermining our political sanity.

Reason in politics does not come from the same sources as individual reason. In our personal lives, we learn to shun stupid or loony ideas because we recognize or experience first-hand the damage they produce. Many of the same people who are scanning the skies for UN helicopters nonetheless do a very good job caring for their children, performing surgery, or operating heavy machinery.

We seldom apply the same rigor to politics that we bring to decisions affecting our work or families.  The consequences of accepting poor advice in our personal lives can often be sharp, immediate, and expensive.  The consequences of believing stupid political rumors are usually distant, deferred, and diluted among millions of people.

We account for the lack of individual feedback in politics by filtering public opinion in two ways.  First, instead of direct democracy, we have a system of representative democracy in which we elect trustworthy citizens to decide political matters on our behalf.  We hold these representatives accountable in broad sweeps, but defer to their judgment on the fine details.

Second, a dense network of social capital institutions has always mediated our political environment, filtering out the stupid and the crazy while promoting into higher positions people who show promise in dealing with local matters.  The stark, sudden decline of reason in our politics can be traced to the combined effects of a generation of social and political changes that have left us more distant from public affairs, undermined our interest in responsible citizenship, and corroded the social institutions that once filtered the toxins from our political swamp.  The factors behind those changes seem to be:

1) The spread of consumer capitalism

2) The decline of social capital

3) Political centralization

In 1995, Benjamin Barber published Jihad vs. McWorld, predicting that unrestrained global capitalism would destroy the subtle, traditional social bonds that formed the foundation of participatory politics.  Barber claimed that consumerism kills real democracy by replacing traditional social ties with an emphasis on individual pleasure.  The rise of consumerism leaves in its wake a choice between reactionary tribalism and a cold commercial society unable to govern itself.

Barber’s work wasn’t taken all that seriously for a couple of reasons.  First, as an old-school leftist he was far too skeptical of capitalism, failing to appreciate the degree to which this consumer ethic he hated would bring new freedom and opportunity to people he claimed to care deeply about.  Second, he made the mistake of branding tribalism with the term “Jihad” which confused readers.  That mistake inspired readers to overlook the truly global implications of his theories and fail to fully consider their impact on the US.

Nonetheless, Barber was dead-on in his assessment of how consumerism would crush older, critical “social capital” institutions. McWorld has evolved into a far freer, more inviting place than Barber ever imagined, but its impact on the social capital that makes American politics work has been even more devastating than he warned.

The consumerism Barber described has encouraged us to view politics as we would any other product.  As citizenship steadily dies, politics is taking on the shape of a sport whose purpose is to entertain us.

Our enthusiasm for politics has less to do with any investment in real outcomes than with a sense of loyalty to a team.  Instead of representatives, we are sending to Washington a colorful collection of entertaining mascots. We have moved away from electing trusted characters and listening to their judgment, instead choosing our most enthusiastic partisans and expecting to dictate their every move.

Consumer culture is also taking a toll our social institutions.  It would be hard to find an element of our social capital infrastructure that is not in steep decline.  From kid’s sports leagues to organized religion, we are rapidly becoming a nation of people who are, as Robert Putnam described, “Bowling Alone.” With that network of mediating institutions losing their punch, there are few forces left to check the creeping growth of crazy.

Two generations of political centralization are exacerbating the impact of consumerism and the death of social capital. We have developed a Supreme Court willing in too many cases to legislate on our behalf.  Our schools and health care are intensely regulated by nameless Federal bureaucrats.  Centralization erodes the already weak feedback loop that limits the crazy.

For example, our representatives are free to say anything they want, no matter how stupid, about a subject like abortion because that topic has been pre-empted by our black-robed guardians. Centralization of power may briefly shield us from the impact of political dysfunction, but by doing so it exacerbates the root problem, planting weeds in the gardens of democracy.

What can we do to stem the tide of stupidity lapping at our political foundations?  I don’t know, and that scares me. In truth, the forces of freedom and capitalism that are contributing to this problem are also our greatest allies in spreading liberty and prosperity.  We don’t need to stop them, we just need to adapt our politics to live with them. Greater local control sounds good, but it’s tough to figure out how to make that work when our political system is gripped by so much lunacy.

Perhaps by merely recognizing the nature of this problem we will be taking the first steps toward alleviating its effects.  If we were more conscious of the ways that irresponsible discourse impacts our political ecosystem maybe we would take more caution.  Like anti-litter campaigns, simple social pressure against wildly irresponsible claims might bring that critical degree of humility we require in order to maintain open institutions.

Perhaps a nation of smart people can have smart government just by figuring how to handle our garbage.

Related posts:

Why the crazy wave is affecting Republicans more than Democrats, and why Democrats will catch up very soon.

More on the decline of social capital

Books:

It’s Even Worse Than it Looks

Gardens of Democracy

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Posted in Social Capital, Tea Party

Libertarianism Failed African-Americans

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 2 Comments

Want to feel better about the Republican Party’s problems in minority communities?  Spend some time with the Libertarians.

You won’t find a lot of black Libertarians because libertarian theory runs counter to every lesson learned by African-Americans in the real world struggle for civil rights. The long, sad decline of the Republican Party as the primary vehicle of black political expression corresponds closely to the rise of libertarian philosophy as a force in Republican politics. It is a story of unintended consequences and unwelcome alliances that offers crucial lessons for Republicans as we struggle to restore the party’s influence in minority communities.

Republicans began embracing libertarianism about a decade before the term found its modern American meaning.  Barry Goldwater embraced individual liberty as a paramount political value in the early ‘60’s. Libertarians formed a separate political party in the early 70’s when a small core of anti-war conservatives broke from the Soviet hawks over Vietnam, but the two movements never fully disentangled from each other.

To this day figures like Ron Paul or Gary Johnson move easily between Libertarian and Republican circles because the boundaries are muddy. The libertarian movement today is still the heir of the Goldwater Republicans.  It was Goldwater who launched the Republican shift toward libertarianism and it was under Goldwater that the libertarians failed Black America.

The proposed Civil Rights Act of 1964 presented the libertarian wing of the conservative movement with a wrenching choice. Libertarians loathed segregation, but breaking Jim Crow would demand a sweeping expansion of Federal power that would intervene deeply into private life. The dilemma was that African Americans repression rose not only from government, but from the culture and personal choices of their white neighbors.

The Civil Rights Acts proposed to do something that libertarian ideology insisted was impossible –expand personal freedom by expanding central government power. Goldwater made a fateful decision to break from the core of the Republican Party and oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His decision alienated the black community and shone a glaring light on a fatal weakness in libertarian theory.

Libertarianism protects personal liberty from being impaired by government. It creates weak states on the assumption that without government intrusion personal freedom will blossom.

The black experience is a living reminder that government is not alone as a potential threat to personal liberty. It is possible, as in the Jim Crow South, to build a government so weak that no one’s personal liberties can be protected.

The libertarianism Goldwater embraced had its eyes fixed firmly on Communism. In the fight against the tyranny of a totalitarian ideology, the right failed to recognize that tyranny can flourish under a weak state. Libertarian conservatives watched Medgar Evers’ funeral without recognizing small government oppression at work.

The high-minded pursuit of personal freedom from government made Goldwater an accidental hero for segregationists. In the most noxious irony of the 1964 election, Goldwater as the standard-bearer of personal liberty earned the endorsement of segregationist Democrat Strom Thurmond and became the first Republican to win the Deep South since Reconstruction.

Goldwater’s awkward alliance with racists launched a troubling trend. By elevating ideology over experience, the party of Lincoln was forging a strange new path. Those alliances, and the stubborn refusal to re-examine the choices that inspired them, continue to make the Republican Party a tough sell not just for African Americans, but for anyone with an ethnic or religious identity outside the white community.

A closer look at the weakness of libertarian ideology would provide ready opportunities for Republicans to right some wrongs. Our message of small government works only when it is tempered by a respect for the very real role that good government plays in guaranteeing freedom.

A more carefully crafted message of less intrusive government could appeal to a black urban working class who can’t get access to good schools because of the power of government employee unions.  Personal freedom and accountability are a strong fit with the values of a deeply religious community torn by violence and social collapse.

Our message has potential to appeal to minority audiences, but it will never ring true unless it accounts for some realities that many Republicans are loathe to acknowledge. For example, many hard-working, successful African Americans got their start on the economic ladder with progressive hiring and promotion policies at the Post Office or other Federal agencies.  It was a muscular, activist Federal government that gave African-Americans their first opportunities to participate in the American Dream.

Extreme anti-government rhetoric devoid of nuance or constraint creates well-justified fear in minority communities.  Libertarian values have historically failed them, leaving them exposed to terrifying oppression. Republicans cannot continue to clumsily paint government as a fount of endless evil and hope to appeal to minority communities whose own family stories render that message hollow.

In appealing to minority communities, we need a message of small government that is more nuanced than libertarians will tolerate. Smaller government is a better prescription for personal liberty and economic success, but only if it remains strong enough to protect basic civil rights. A government small enough to “drown in a bathtub” turns society into a playground for petty tyrants.

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Posted in Civil Rights, Libertarian, Neo-Confederate, Political Theory, Race, Tea Party
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