Republican Minority Outreach Will Not Be Easy

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 1 Comment

“White Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party.”
Kevin Phillips, author of The Emerging Republican Majority, in 1968

Republicans are realizing that a willingness to be [mostly] polite to black people is insufficient widen the party’s appeal. Becoming a real national party again will require us to address some painful challenges that will cross deeply felt boundaries of culture and habit. It’s not going to be easy, but we have little choice.

First, we must recognize the awkward relationship between the libertarianism the party has embraced since the ‘60’s and the legacy of segregation. The Civil Rights Movement taught Americans that government is not the only force that can infringe on personal liberty and economic freedom. We need a freedom agenda that absorbs those painful lessons and more reliably protects the vulnerable.

Second, a humbler, less hysterical tone would help a lot. There has been too little tolerance for straight talk on minority issues and too much tolerance for race-baiting rhetoric. A thicker skin and more sensitive ears would serve us well.

Only when we’ve made progress on those two issues can we hope to deal with our third and most critical challenge – to engage minority audiences in forums that allow us to listen as much as we speak. These are the interactions that will, over time, open doors and produce the policy changes that can dampen resentments among blacks and Hispanics and restore our relevance in minority communities.

The process begins with acknowledging our troubled record on race relations. Skip that step, and whatever else we do will be a waste of time. Republicans are quick to point out that the party was a driving force in the early Civil Rights Movement. We are less enthusiastic about describing why that changed and how that legacy continues to complicate our appeal to non-white constituencies.

The Republican Party’s relationship with minority communities changed with Barry Goldwater. His “principled” stance against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unwittingly re-aligned party with the defenders of racial discrimination. Goldwater was a liberal on racial issues who hated Jim Crow. He was also the favorite candidate of Southern segregationists in the 1964 election. That irony continues to frustrate the party of Lincoln today.

Jim Crow belied the fundamental weakness of libertarian thought. The southern states had demonstrated that the single-minded pursuit of small government could bring just as much oppression as statism. The party still fails to acknowledge that ideological conundrum, undermining our appeal to minorities and the broader relevance of our policies.

Never, in any settled portion of America, did a real-world government more closely resemble the libertarian ideal than did the post-Reconstruction South. Taxes were extremely low. Government provided almost nothing beyond police and courts. Infrastructure investment was miniscule. Unions were practically unheard of. Bureaucratic and regulatory constraints were almost non-existent. Business was able to operate with no meaningful government intervention.

By libertarian logic the South should have been a paragon of personal liberty and economic dynamism, but it turns out that government is not the only force that can destroy freedom. Jim Crow started with mob violence. It was transformed into legislation on waves of mob violence. It was held in place, even as its popularity steadily waned, not primarily by government, but by mob violence. Any aspiring Atticus Finch in the 50’s or ‘60’s had far more to fear from his neighbors than from the government.

Terrorist groups like the KKK coordinated with more socially acceptable organizations like the White Citizens Councils to form and enforce policy. Local militias and paramilitaries not only beat and murdered uncooperative African-Americans; they harassed anyone of any race who expressed dissent. Juries exonerated the perpetrators. Jim Crow was crowd-sourced, grassroots oppression. Small government was crucial to its survival.

Goldwater, in his “extreme” defense of liberty, accidentally aligned the Republican Party with the most repressive forces in American culture. Over the following generation the Deep South went from blue to battle red as the most prominent defenders of Jim Crow fled the Democratic Party en masse.

We have to confront our post-‘64 history because the legacy of that era still lingers in policy and rhetoric. Republicans rightly stand for a vision of government that leaves as many decisions as possible in private hands. However, when Senator Rand Paul suggests that “as many as possible” should include a right to exercise racial discrimination in the marketplace, he inspires some well-founded fears.

If we are going to promote an ownership society in a society that let our ancestors own human beings, we need as much distance from that dark legacy as we can possibly get. This is more than just a marketing problem. Our insensitivity to legitimate concerns expressed in minority communities leads us to develop policies that are often doomed from inception.

A stronger respect for states’ rights, for example, would give us more innovative health care, more effective schools, and more responsive social welfare programs. At the same time a sloppy retreat from Federal authority can provide openings for petty tyrants to push fringe agendas that frustrate those same goals. As a party, we cannot realize the benefits of one while ignoring the other. We can’t succeed in devolving health care policy to the states, where it belongs, so long as voters fear putting matters of genuine personal importance in the hands of characters like Rick Perry.

Core Republican values of market economics, strong families, and education offer a better path to prosperity for minority communities than anything the left has developed. Unfortunately, as long as we refuse to acknowledge our history, our ideas will remain suspect and their practical effectiveness will be limited. Worse, we will stumble through our most critical challenge – listening with honest interest and legitimate concern to the concerns of minority communities.

The small government bandwagon cannot afford to pick up random hitchhikers. Credibility is fundamental to the success of our agenda. Earning trust in minority communities will require us to examine ourselves more closely and be open to change. With enough wisdom and humility, the reward could be a rejuvenated, optimistic Republican Party, but we won’t see that gain without enduring some painful reflection.

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Posted in Civil Rights, Neo-Confederate, Race, Republican Party, Tea Party

When Does Life Begin?

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

Texas Governor Rick Perry has called a second Special Session of the Legislature in order to pass new abortion rules that were thwarted last month by Sen. Wendy Davis’ filibuster. The legislation would ban abortion after 20 weeks. More importantly it imposes new “safety” rules designed to shutter most of the state’s abortion clinics and eliminate the practice of remote abortions by medication.

The debate over abortion rights usually turns on the question of when human life begins. The pro-life movement has for the most part settled on the moment of fertilization for that threshold. A recent effort in Mississippi along with similar proposals in Arkansas and North Dakota have sought to legally define the beginning of life at conception.

At that developmental stage the fertilized ovum has not yet implanted into the uterus, so a standard pregnancy test will not even detect the condition. Yet, for those who turn to religion for answers to life’s questions, that extremely early stage may still be too late.

The Bible is silent on abortion, yet it speaks very loudly about the sanctity of an earlier participant in that process. In Genesis 38, the Bible says that God personally killed Onan in retribution for the atrocity of “wasting” the most vital element in the creation of life – semen. Early church fathers had little to say about abortion, but the sanctity of semen was a common theme. Jerome and Clement of Alexandria both used the Onan story as support for the idea that wasting semen was a terrible crime. The story forms a pillar of modern Catholic teaching about contraception and the purpose of sex.

Until a generation ago in the US, the debate over the beginnings of human life would have focused on matters long before fertilization and centered on the moral legitimacy of contraception. Those attitudes about reproductive rights have not disappeared from mainstream thought on the right, as evidenced by recent debates over insurance coverage for contraception.

From a scientific perspective, both a sperm cell and an ovum are absolutely alive and both contain genetic material vital for defining a human identity. Like an embryo, either of them if allowed to continue their processes without some specific failure or intervention will produce a person.

This pre-conception analysis is important because so much of the pro-life position hinges on “butterfly effect” reasoning, which reaches backward from the existence of a person to establish the sanctity of each random coincidence which led to their existence. That logic, taken to its ends, establishes no more moral latitude for the casual masturbator than it does for a late-term abortionist. There is one factor that most persuasively explains why conception has become the rallying point for the pro-life movement – it is the earliest moment in the reproductive process at which a man’s sexual choices are no longer at issue.

If the question of when life begins must be limited to events after intercourse, then what can we learn from medical research on fetal development? When does a fetus acquire the characteristics that would require us to balance its right to existence equally with the mother’s right to control her own body?

A fertilized ovum may take up to a week for the cell makes its way into the uterus for implantation. That fertilized cell, or zygote, contains the full genome necessary for development.

At this stage the zygote is about the diameter of a human hair, the largest cell in the human body. Some scientists believe that this is the stage at which the “morning-after” pill operates, preventing the structure from implanting in the uterine wall. The science on this question is not absolutely settled.

Prior to implantation, the zygote will begin to divide forming a multi-cellular structure called a blastocyst. After implantation, the structure is referred to as an embryo and it begins dividing into new cells at a rapid pace. The woman’s body begins the adaptations we recognize as pregnancy and the embryo develops specialized cells which will develop into the body’s various structures and organs. For the first nine weeks, a chemical abortion can be induced with the drug RU-486.

For the next few weeks there is little about the fetus that we would recognize as human. Pro-life activists point to the presence of a detectible heartbeat as early as 12 weeks in an effort to stress the relatable human-ness of this early structure. Along the way they conveniently ignore some very interesting developmental stages that remind us of human evolutionary origins.

During the first trimester the developing fetus includes some odd features tied to our evolutionary past, including gill slits (pharyngeal arches), a tail, a yolk sac, and a primitive autonomic neural system which we seem to have inherited from a fish ancestor. That nervous system, unlike the tail and gill slits, remains with us throughout life even after our more complex brain develops.

By 16 weeks the fetus is about four inches long and looks very much like a baby. It has a complete vascular system, most of the organs have formed, and it has begun to take on very individual features like fingerprints.

Between 18-21 weeks the fetus begins to “kick.” This is the stage of development described as “quickening” which in tradition was regarded as the beginning of person-hood and marks the approximate halfway point in a pregnancy. At this point an ultrasound can reliably determine gender.

The earliest ever successful premature birth occurred at 21 weeks. Based on the Supreme Court’s “viability” standard for balancing fetal rights against the privacy rights of a mother, this is theoretically the point at which a state may begin an abortion ban. Seventeen states ban abortion after 22 weeks or earlier. Another 11 ban abortion after “viability.” A third-trimester abortion is only legal in 11 states. Late term abortion accounts for a fraction of a percent of abortions performed annually.

At 24 weeks, the fetus has developed almost all of the structural features necessary for life, though many of its organs are not yet ready to function unaided outside the womb. In particular, its lungs need considerable further development.

The survival rate for premature births at 25 weeks is about 50%. Although births occurring at this stage sometimes lead to survival, about half of premature births before 26 weeks result in permanent disability. Premature births after the 32nd week routinely survive, though they often need significant medical intervention and run higher risks of disability. Pregnancies are regarded as full-term after about 37 weeks.

From the precious possibilities of the sperm and egg to the visceral reality of a crying infant, at what point do the rights of that potential life outweigh the rights of a father or mother to control over their bodies? Science can tell us, based on the current state of our medical technology, the point at which a fetus is probably capable of survival outside the womb, but is that the same as person-hood?

It is tough to make a credible argument that a viable fetus should be subject to abortion-at-will right up to the moment of birth. It is equally difficult to justify full protection of the law, over the competing rights of a woman, to a collection of cells with a tail and gill slits. At any point in between there is no political position, whether through action or inaction, that doesn’t potentially threaten the critical rights of either an unborn person or a woman.

Wisdom suggests that issues of such emotional power and moral ambiguity are a poor place to make an extreme political stand. The Republicans in the Texas Legislature are determined to charge ahead and let history count the cost.

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Posted in Religious Right, Reproductive Rights

Breaking the Abortion Stalemate

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

What if it were possible to end the political stalemate over abortion? Such a lofty goal may be politically impossible in the current climate, but not because policy solutions are unavailable.  If the public were given a chance to consider practical approaches that respect the competing interests at stake it might be possible to build a consensus that would force an end to the hollow grandstanding that has defined the abortion debate for decades.

What might be the shape of such a settlement?

Imagine Federal legislation that formally, nationally, protected a woman’s right to an at-will abortion up to 20 weeks of gestation, pre-empting state laws on the matter. Beyond that point, an abortion would still be available to deal with instances of physical or psychological danger to the mother or severe fetal defects. Those situations would have to be certified by two doctors.

State authorities would continue to regulate abortion from a purely medical perspective, but standards would have to rise from state medical boards, not legislatures. State level regulations would be subject to pre-review and approval from the Secretary of Health and Human Services. In other words, legislators would no longer be able to haze pregnant women with politically motivated “health standards.”

There would be alternatives available for states wishing to adopt more intensely “pro-life” standards. A state could lower the threshold for “at will” abortion to 12 weeks if they also implement the following, subject to pre-review and certification by the Secretary of Health and Human Services:

–       Comprehensive, fact-based sex education in all public schools including information on contraceptives, effective contraceptive use, and abortion.

–       Requirement that all insurance policies include contraceptive coverage.

–       The state provides contraceptive coverage for the uninsured.

–       All uninsured have state-provided access to pre-natal care and coverage of birth expenses.

If you want to know what people really care about, look at what they do with their money. To the extent that a state finds a vital interest that justifies intruding further into the rights of a woman over her body, the state should shoulder the burdens of that intrusion. “Pro-life” would finally mean something more than “forced birth.”

What about rape and incest? Women would have unfettered access to abortion through the first trimester. Later, that access would still be available in severe cases, which would presumably include instances of violence or abuse under the standards of psychological health.

What about the viability standard in Roe v. Wade? A full discussion of the Supreme Court’s evolving position on abortion rights is beyond the scope of this effort, and would strain the capabilities of your this author. That said, there are certain aspects of this proposal that are unique, setting it apart from anything the Court has previously reviewed.

Justices have only ever been given the opportunity to review laws restricting abortion rights. This would be the first review of an abortion regulation that also created and regulated a national statutory right to an abortion.

Roe was an extremely broad decision. It may be possible for the Court in light of social and scientific developments in the past 40 years, to de-emphasize “viability” if given the right law to consider. With the appropriate protections for women’s health the Court could perhaps allow tighter abortion regulations earlier than viability without abandoning half a century of jurisprudence on privacy rights.

What would pro-life forces gain from this legislation? Even the base standard of the law would be more restrictive than any abortion legislation that has ever been upheld by the courts. States willing to back their “pro-life” values with real support for women’s liberty could enact fetal protections stretching farther into pregnancy than at any point since Roe.

What would pro-choice forces gain? Abortion would be available, everywhere, to women in extreme scenarios at any stage of pregnancy. A basic right to an abortion would finally be established in federal statute, not just in judicial opinions. Women would be freed from state legislation that harasses them for choosing an abortion. Abortion, as a political question, would be largely settled on a consensus basis in favor of a woman’s right to her own body.

How is this proposal different from the 20-week standard proposed by House Republicans? There are subtle problems with that bill. The entire exercise is founded on a dozen introductory paragraphs of embarrassing bunk “science” of a style that has become a Republican trademark.  More important, the House’s bill is a pure abortion ban that does nothing whatsoever to respect, establish, or protect a woman’s rights.

The House bill would not pre-empt state laws, merely creating a new Federal ceiling for abortion rights. States could senact more restrictive provisions on their own. State laws harassing pregnant women and shutting down access to reproductive health would be unaffected. The House bill is a fundraising and GOTV effort created to motivate a political base. It is already doing everything it was ever intended to accomplish.

Over the past forty years, our culture has experienced a steady growth in its respect for life and its willingness to protect the quality of life by expanding the rights of women. Abortion law under the Roe standard has put those two interests at tension in ways that is straining our political system.

The country needs a comprehensive, consensus-based legislative settlement, respecting the inescapable rights and ambiguities at stake in the debate. A proposal like this might achieve a new balance based not on unreasonable absolutes, but on our growing humane respect for life both before and after birth. Our political system is currently in no condition to deliver something so bold, but if the public has access to tangible policy beyond the increasingly irrelevant pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy, we may in time be able to move past the political dysfunction this issue has helped to feed.

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Posted in Reproductive Rights

Protecting All Unborn Life in Texas

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

life

Many are not so lucky. Every year trillions of spermatozoa are senselessly destroyed, most of them murdered for pointless pleasure. Each death is a harrowing indictment of a culture of sexual anarchy which places pleasure ahead of life.

The Texas Legislature is working hard, over the objections of Senators like Wendy Davis, to protect unborn life, but their insufficient efforts so far reflect an insulting bias against men. Government is quick to recognize the vital reproductive power of women and seek to protect them with thoughtful pro-life legislation. Meanwhile men are ignored, their contributions to the reproductive process devalued and denigrated by society. This anti-male bias must end. Life in all its forms deserves protection.

The Bible describes in explicit detail God’s anger at senseless slaughter. In Genesis 38, God demonstrated the punishment due for spermicide. Not waiting for human justice, God in a rare act of vengeance intervened personally to execute Onan for destroying his own irreplaceable seed.

Christianity, from its earliest thinkers like Clement of Alexandria and Jerome recognized the meaning of this passage and the primacy of life over passion. By direct act, God placed an exclamation point in the scripture making clear the utter sanctity of every sperm.

Science has not yet definitively measured the pain experienced by slain spermatozoa as they struggle vainly to survive. Needless to say, if the public were forced to watch the heart-wrenching end of these beautiful fountains of life, destroyed before they can see their fathers or know God’s love, opinions about spermicide would change overnight. That’s why the Godless voices of the mainstream media never cover this vital issue.

Bible-believing Christians are not free to pick and choose which scriptures they will respect. Especially when God’s word is so inarguably explicit, Christians are compelled to use their influence in the political arena to bring God’s justice in the world. Anything less would bring judgment on our own heads and call down holy wrath on our nation.

Government must act immediately to see that every discharge is conducted in a sincere effort to allow living sperm to pursue the possibility of birth. Anyone destroying these precious lives or encouraging others to do so should be brought to justice.

Legislation should be enacted requiring men to account for every discharge. This legislation should not be unreasonable or unnecessarily intrusive. It should provide exemptions from prosecution for innocent accidents. Any affected sheets or undergarments must be produced and the materials should be disposed of with the appropriate solemnities.

Naturally, repeat cases should be subject to heightened scrutiny. Those found guilty of deliberate spermicide without procreative intent should be punished for the murder they have committed.

To avoid appearing too severe, the law should contain humane provisions to protect the father’s health. If a discharge is necessary to protect the life of the father, there should a process by which a man can obtain a license for permissible waste. Even in such an extreme and presumably rare case, the father should be forced to view microscopic images of the sperm and he must have all of the consequences of his actions explained to him, including the possibility of spermal pain.

He must also be forced to hear stories of those who successfully held their sperm, discharging it later in a manner that led to procreation. The father must be notified of the potential to donate his sperm so that it may enjoy a chance at birth.

The doctor conducting the procedure must warn him of the possible psychiatric consequences, sometimes referred to as Post-Discharge Syndrome. Though medical science dismisses the syndrome, many prospective fathers report feelings of deep sadness and shame for the destruction of unborn life in which they participated, along with an elevated risk of blindness. These measures would protect men’s interests by providing them with the information they need to make informed choices.

Only after judicial review, a cold shower, and an appropriate waiting period should a man be able to conduct the discharge, and then only in a facility equipped to handle the most sophisticated surgical procedures. These precautions express not only society’s great concern for life, but the desire to protect men from physical or emotional harm at this time when they are so emotionally fragile.

Thanks to beer, a great mix tape, and a youthful disregard for consequences, you received your precious chance to be conceived. So many people never got the opportunity you enjoy. The death cries of trillions of sperm ring out to heaven, calling down judgment on us all. Wise legislation could end this abomination and bring a fresh respect for life to our nation.

Protecting the sanctity of every human life means affording men the respect they deserve for their critical role in the reproductive process. As Texas moves to protect women from the dangers of abortion, let’s not forget that life begins long before the act is consummated. Fathers deserve equal respect and compassion.

Never forget to thank your father for choosing life.

A resource for men who need help to “take that energy and use it in more productive ways”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOHm6q3kqRo

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Posted in Reproductive Rights, Texas

How Texas Disciplines Unchaste Women

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 1 Comment

alvarado-probe1The anger that’s pouring out against the Legislature over a new round of draconian anti-abortion rules has actually been building up for several years. Religious fundamentalists, let off the leash by the Texas GOP, have been placing provisions on the books to humiliate and harass women over reproductive choices with relatively little national attention.

Most Texans would favor a ban on late term abortions, but few voters realize what the state has already done to limit abortion rights earlier in a pregnancy. Those provisions are starting to impact Texas women who were otherwise unaware of them. Texas’ tragi-comically punitive abortion rules are beginning to spark a backlash that pro-life forces may come to regret.

The process of seeking an abortion begins with a woman facing the gauntlet of characters who hang out in front of abortion clinics. Any hope she had of retaining some sense of privacy in this unhappy moment goes out the window as these folks loiter around with their offers to “help.”

Sometimes protestors are thoughtful enough to display blood-soaked images from late-term abortions. Imagine for a moment you are about to have a malignant mole removed or perhaps undergo a root canal or a vasectomy. You’re uncomfortable and nervous, but steady. Before you enter the doctor’s office you are confronted by characters holding ten-foot blow-up color banners of rotten gums, infected scrotums, or runaway skin cancer. Wouldn’t that be helpful and informative?

The scene outside may be unsettling, but the real misery begins inside as the clinic is forced to undergo a state-mandated shaming ritual. Pregnancy is not just a way to have children. It is a highly effective means to chasten sexually wayward women. You may be a scared, college-bound valedictorian. You may be trying to leave an abusive husband. You may be a 38-year old married mother of three worried about the physical consequences of another pregnancy. Regardless, in the eyes of Texas, your situation is the fault of your desires. In a perfect world you would be redeemed through childbirth, as the scripture says.

Thanks to a few Godless Yankees on the Supreme Court the Texas Legislature cannot force you to give birth, but they are not going to miss their opportunity to express what they think of women like you. Texas Legislators in 2011 crafted an elaborate liturgy which all abortion providers in the state are forced to perform prior an abortion. The ritual has three steps, a sonogram, a waiting period, and a scripted reading.

Texas requires that a woman be shown a sonogram that accurately displays the developmental stage of the fetus. The technician must describe in detail each of the developmental characteristics of the fetus. The law does not merely mandate that the provider offer this service, the law requires the woman to experience it.

The sonogram must be performed either by the doctor who will perform the procedure or one of their technicians. A sonogram obtained elsewhere will not meet the requirement, thus compounding the unnecessary cost and inconvenience.

For the first ten weeks of pregnancy, this sonogram mandate can only be met by using a ten-inch wand inserted into the vagina. The pregnant woman is legally required to lean back and let the Texas Legislature demonstrate their concern for her in the most intimate way possible.

Victims of rape or incest, or those receiving an abortion because of a fetal medical condition do not have to hear the description of the fetus or listen to the heartbeat, but they still have to endure the procedure (Texas Health and Safety Code Section 171.0122(d)). Mull that over for a moment. In Texas, a pregnant rape victim who seeks an early-term abortion still has to experience the Texas Legislature’s loving, caring, entirely-for-her-benefit, plastic penetration.

The second component of the shaming ritual is the waiting period. Forcing a delay adds costs to the process by adding an unnecessary visit and an unnecessary procedure. It emphasizes to the woman how little the Legislature thinks about her decision-making capacity and the quality of this decision in particular. Finally, it forces her to repeat the perp-walk through the protestors outside the clinic.

But wait, there’s more.

The doctor must also read aloud a sort of semi-secular prayer, carrying the suitably condescending title: “A Woman’s Right to Know.” Women in Texas are blessed with a legislatively mandated right to know several pages worth of information, much of which is deliberately misleading.

Doctors are required to notify women of medical risks from abortion that exist only in the fevered minds of the religious fundamentalists in the Texas Legislature, including a line about breast cancer risk which has no scientific support. The doctor has to give the woman information about fetal pain which is medically false. Throughout this extended liturgy, the woman is described as aborting not a “fetus,” but an “unborn child.”

The woman is read a detailed description and expansive list of potential side effects of every medically sanctioned abortion procedure, not just the one she is undertaking. For good measure, this even includes a gruesome description of so-called “partial birth abortion” which is not performed in Texas and has been illegal for years under Federal law.

The state has taken a remarkably compassionate interest in “disclosing” the “medical risks” a woman faces from an abortion. Strangely though, they left out a few relevant details. For some reason, a “Woman’s Right to Know” does not include a right to be told that abortion is enormously less dangerous to her than delivering a full-term pregnancy. A woman is 14-times less likely to die from abortion complications than from childbirth. And, although the Post-Abortion Syndrome the state warns women about apparently doesn’t exist, post-partum depression is a fiercely real and occasionally lethal issue.

Want to hear about permanent damage from a full-term pregnancy? Ask your mother. Or, if she’s too proper to tell you, listen in while the ladies in your neighborhood Bunko group discuss theirs at length. Have a drink first. Then plan on having several more afterward. There is no drug or procedure that will remove the resulting scar tissue from your brain.

The new legislation passed by the Legislature will add fresh misery to the state’s sadistic pre-abortion hazing ritual by immediately closing down all but five of the state’s clinics. The remaining clinics face serious doubts about their ability to comply with technical requirements specifically tailored to shut them down. The Legislature is attempting an unstated comprehensive abortion ban.

Disciplining Texas women is tough, thankless work. How can Legislators be confident they are doing it right? Rick Perry summed it up nicely in a recent speech, “The louder they scream, the more we know we are getting something done.”

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Posted in Reproductive Rights, Republican Party, Texas

Reconstruction 2.0 and the Neo-Confederate Backlash

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 1 Comment

paulThe Federal Reconstruction effort that followed the Civil War is generally regarded as a failure, but over the past few decades a powerful combination of Federal intervention and global capitalism is transforming Southern life in ways that Yankee armies never could. Though resistance to this transformation is approaching a powerful climax, there is reason to expect that Reconstruction 2.0 might bring a brighter future for the South and the nation.

Northern states experienced a surge of immigration in the 19th century that ended the unchallenged cultural supremacy of the white Protestant majority there. Resistance to the change was fierce, but ineffective. Waves of racist and anti-Catholic paranoia tore apart the precursor to the GOP, the Whig Party, in the 1850’s. Despite the obstacles and turmoil, the North by the end of the century was a mosaic of cultures living together successfully.

The South missed the entire episode, smothered beneath a slave economy. Southern states received a tiny fraction of the immigration and industrial development that swept the north in the 19th century, preserving a relatively monolithic racial culture and insulating the region from the dislocating force of merit-based capitalism.

Losing the Civil War might have opened the region to development, but the first effort at Reconstruction accomplished little. Defeated Southern soldiers brought their weapons home and used them to re-establish the old order in a slightly modified form under weak Federal control.

Before the Federal occupation even ended, white paramilitaries successfully fought and won pitched battles from New Orleans (where former General Longstreet was captured by a white army) to North Carolina, stripping freed slaves in practice from rights still officially guaranteed in law. When US troops finally gave up and went home, most of the work was already done.

By the early 1890’s Jim Crow laws made official what the mob had already established. The Lost Cause survived the Civil War little worse for the wear.

The generation at the peak of their political influence today in the South spent their youth drinking from whites-only fountains. There was something special in that water.

When Rick Perry was a boy white workers faced no competition from African-Americans, immigrants, women or anyone else. The “n-word” was as ordinary as salt & pepper. The best jobs and housing were all set aside for white men. The best schools served them alone. White men mediated all access to the economy. Their power, authority, and God-ordained superiority was an unchallenged assumption.

Women were finally allowed to enroll in Perry’s beloved Texas A&M on a very limited basis just two years before he started there. Throughout his college years, each female applicant had to receive the direct approval of the university’s President. Women were not granted full admission rights at A&M until 1971.

Southern men in their fifties launched their lives in an atmosphere of near-total protection from competition. God had made them racially supreme, the benevolent protectors of the weaker sex and even weaker neighboring races. Law and culture made that supremacy feel like a reality until the Federal government and global economic competition began to strip it away.

The landmark Civil Rights Acts of 1964-5 broke the legal foundations of white supremacy in the South, but that was not the only force at work. The acceleration of global capitalism that came later eroded the cultural and economic power of Southern whites. Federal intervention and capitalism are a hammer and anvil pounding away at traditional Southern values.

With the frightening specter of Jim Crow out of the way, America for the past thirty years has been busily exploiting the developing nation within its borders. Southern states are America’s very own China, complete with loose worker protections, weak pollution controls, under-developed bureaucracies, low taxes, and developing infrastructure.

With that growth has come immigration, both internal and foreign. Texas, like the other Southern states, is politically under siege. The Perry Generation in the South is doing everything the Federal government will tolerate to shut down voter participation, cut off women’s terrifying sexual freedoms, and strip every pipe and wire from the public sphere before the brown people start running things.

Though not an exclusively Southern phenomenon, the end of a white America inspires a uniquely potent fear in the South. The Tea Party’s determination to “take our country back” is not just an empty slogan or a hyperbolic gripe about taxes or bureaucracy. For an aging generation it represents the last stand of Neo-Confederate politics, a desperate attempt to preserve a culture of white superiority that many outside the South have already forgotten.

For that formerly insulated generation, accelerating technological dynamism has undermined much of their economic value just at the moment when global capitalism has broadened the range of competition. They have lost privileges and protections they barely realized they had and the terror is palpable. Southern Republican politics in this moment is pure, distilled fear; rhetorical moonshine that rushes straight to the heart before dimming the eyes.

Ironically, Reconstruction 2.0 is bringing the South a more authentically diverse racial culture than the country experiences anywhere else. For the all opportunity they offered to immigrants and African-Americans for decades, northern cities like Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia remain intensely segregated down to a finely calibrated scheme of ethnic and cultural identities. Dallas and Atlanta today are among the country’s least segregated major cities.

Younger southerners with no memory of Jim Crow carry less and less of the racist coding that marked previous generations. For all the struggle and challenge, it is the South, not the North, offering America her greatest opportunity to make a post-racial society real.

Reconstruction 2.0 is a relentless juggernaut bringing a brighter, freer, more prosperous future to the South. The aging Neo-Confederates that have seized control of the GOP are tilting at windmills. Cooler heads might regain political control before the party goes the way of the Whigs, but the country at large is already moving on. When the dust settles and the dead-enders have given up, the Southern states may be positioned to breathe vibrant new life into the American Dream.

*****

Ron Paul describes the central premise of his Neo-Confederate politics:

It was all Lincoln’s fault…

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Posted in Economics, Libertarian, Neo-Confederate, Political Theory, Race

The Cost of Living in Houston

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

Houston is famously cheap. Gov. Perry is buying radio ads touting the benefits of cheap to Yankees who may be puzzled by Texas’ success in delivering such a wondrously low cost of living. As a Texan in exile, I can fill in some of the gaps in Perry’s message and explain where the costs are hiding inside Perry’s Texas miracle.

For years after taking a job in the Chicago area I would engage in a sad, annual ritual. Every spring I would shop for homes in Houston.

Why spring? They say the winters here will kill you, but it’s spring that really kicks you in the crotch. The Chicago winter is a spectacle, like watching tornados spawn in a giant thunderstorm. It may be bad, but it’s entertaining as hell.

Spring, on the other hand, is cold, wet, snowy and cruel, without any compensating amusement. Spring is the season of half-frozen mud and chunks of grey ice. Spring is the season for planning to go home.

My spring ritual ended a few years ago when I got serious, briefly, about going back to Texas. What started with euphoria melted into surprise, which puddled down to resignation as I realized what it would really cost my family to return to Houston.

Housing was the first cruel shock. Conventional wisdom says that we should be able to own a big, beautiful home with every feature but the gold Elvis-toilets for a fraction of the cost of our home in Chicago. That is not the case. The calculations get squirrely real fast when you start comparing more than just square footage.

I started making a list of what we had in our Chicago home and began looking for a comparable value. We have fantastic schools in walking distance. A community around them fanatically dedicated to education. A library like nothing I had ever seen, in walking distance, which including the ability to request any book online and go pick it up.

We have a suburban home with a white picket fence (literally), but we only need one car. We put about 12k miles a year on that car, a quarter of which comes from our annual trip to Texas. The train station is a ten-minute walk. The town center, with grocery store, restaurants, movie theater, coffee shops, bars, and so on is just a ten minute walk. Church is a little farther, but we ride our bikes there sometimes in the summer. The kids walk to meet friends. The airport is 15 minutes away by cab.

Though we don’t live in Chicago, I can walk with the kids to the train station and be there in 25 minutes. We used to go see the Astros at Wrigley every season (until their move to the repugnant AL), maintain a different annual museum membership each year, and occasionally ride there just to play around at Millennium Park.

Understanding that you’re not going to get Wrigley or Millennium Park in Houston, I went looking for something otherwise comparable and found nothing at any price range. There is no option for urban, or near-urban living in Houston with effective mass-transit, great schools, and well-maintained public infrastructure. Unless you have an additional $10-15bn to spare, you aren’t going to move to Houston and buy your own commuter trains.

And to get just some of the items on the list along with a driving commute reliably less than an hour I would have to pay significantly more than I would in Chicago. Plus the property taxes would be stupendous.

If I gave up everything else just to get good schools at an affordable price, I would have to sign up for a lengthy commute from a sprawling suburb, at costs still comparable to my house here in Chicago’s near-suburbs. And with five million people packed into a place with no zoning, I still can’t be confident someone won’t build a 20-story condo on the lot next door.

If Rick Perry is to be believed then the tax burden for all this “government dependence” must be staggering. When we first moved here in 2004 I was shocked by the decline in my taxes. I didn’t earn as much money back then so the shift to an income tax state was a significant savings. The property tax rate on our Houston home was double what we experienced in Chicago.

Many years later I earn a lot more and my tax burden is higher than it would be in Texas, but I don’t care. Now that my income has increased I can afford it and I do not want to give up what that tax burden buys me.

I could save thousands of dollars a year in taxes by heeding Perry’s call, but what would I do with that money? It would disappear immediately into the second car I would need to get around. Then I would buy hundreds of gallons of gas and maintenance for the hundreds of additional driving hours I would have to spend each year.

Those thousands dollars would not be enough to buy a walkable community, schools that teach evolution and sex-ed without flinching, a useful library, well-maintained parks, trails and other open spaces every few blocks. The money I could save on taxes would not buy me commuter rail.

There is good reason to expect that Houston is America’s future. That’s a disturbing prospect. As we grow steadily less capable of working together to improve our lives, our public spaces will get uglier and the private costs of our public dysfunction will mount. The wealthy can absorb some of these losses, but not all of them. Mostly they just wall themselves off. Meanwhile middle earners watch their future dim in return for a few hundred dollars a year in tax savings.

Chicago may never be home for me. I still harbor a fantasy of living on a piece a land somewhere in the Hill Country with a few cows and a creek. The longer I live here the harder it may be to one day live without urban amenities, but I still sit on the porch with a Shiner and my monthly copy of Texas Highways and get misty. We’ll see what happens.

As I still have kids to raise I’m going to resist Perry’s off-key siren song. He can have his low taxes and sprawl and I’ll keep that empty second bay in my garage. For now, if he wants to get rid of my “government dependence” he’ll have to come and take it.

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Posted in Neo-Confederate, Republican Party, Tea Party, Texas

An Agenda for Republican Dissidents

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

The time may finally have come when rational Republicans will stop hiding and start making some plans.

For almost twenty years, traditional Hamiltonian Republicans have been heckled in caucuses, hounded out of local party positions, and out-maneuvered in the nominating process by ideological revolutionaries. The rationalists refused to lower themselves to fight back, expecting that the Jacobins would burn themselves out soon enough.

Their passive strategy failed miserably. Now the era of patient longing may be closing.

The cascade of disasters spawned by Republican extremists over the past decade is finally stirring a response. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is openly turning his temper toward the right. New York Congressman Peter King is urging people to halt donations to the Congressional Republicans.

Major Republican donors are pushing back against the Tea Party. Illinois’ GOP chairman is supporting gay marriage. Eric Cantor is proposing a major course change. Even David Brooks is dropping the pretense and calling for an open split in the GOP. It’s about time.

It makes sense now to start building an alternative agenda, a foundation for Republican dissent. A party that has come to rest so solidly on fundamentalist religion, latent racist appeals, and paranoia needs a nudge back toward reality and a new sense of purpose. Building that new brand will take time, discussion, compromise and pain. No one has the whole recipe, but here are a few ingredients that might help us get started.

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Social Conservatism: Traditional values are as relevant as ever. When you look closely at the households experiencing the greatest success in our society, regardless of their political bent, you find values of hard work, fidelity and respect for education. More often than not you find two-parent homes with a heavy emphasis on child-rearing. In short, you find the traditional core values of our civilization.

There is no reason for the Republican Party to abandon traditional values, but we must reject the authoritarian tone social conservatives have embraced.  Successful social conservatism is open-minded, positive, and community focused. It’s not about book-banning or science denial, but creating an atmosphere in which families can thrive. Republicans should reject the shrill, fear-based social values of the moral scolds, replacing them with an optimistic message born of confidence and compassion.

Immigration: We punish drunk drivers with fines and jail time. We punish tax cheats with financial penalties. Isn’t it strange that the only punishment we can accept for the crime of coming to America to work is deportation? As long as “immigration reform” really means “getting rid of brown people” immigration will continue to be a losing issue for Republicans.

Punish illegal immigrants with an appropriate fine. Create real opportunities for legal immigration more generally, and a path to legitimacy for those who have built responsible lives here. Illegal immigration doesn’t start at the border. It starts at the workplace. Devise a plan that will require real, enforceable immigration status checks for employment and let’s turn our attention to attracting the world’s best and brightest to our shores.

Health care – Instead of Federalizing medicine, give states wider latitude and greater incentive to change the way we deliver health care.  That means encouraging good faith efforts at the state level to change doctor certification, medical billing practices, electronic communication in medicine, and other innovations stifled by a federal bureaucracy that can drive down the cost of health care.

Climate Change – Blanket climate denial is developing into a dangerous embarrassment. Conservatives have a key role to play in preventing the left from using climate change as a lever to further unrelated goals. Carbon reduction, no matter how extreme, will not stop global warming in our lifetimes, and perhaps not within centuries. We will need technology and infrastructure to cope with a changing climate. Mitigation will require lots of cheap energy. Republicans need to be in the thick of the debate over dealing with climate change.

The Knowledge Economy – The unemployment rate for college graduates is currently less than 4%. Our “struggling” economy is starving for workers to fill some of the best jobs that have ever existed.

It takes more than good schools to get people ready for college and careers. Few can afford tuition and the cost of many long years out of the job market without the support of healthy families, strong communities and financial assistance. A more intelligent, compassionate social conservatism may be the missing policy key that opens up opportunity for more people to enjoy a better financial future.

Real Financial Reform – The age of blind deregulation may have ended, but Obama has replaced it with a blizzard of paper regulations that obscure the problems in our financial markets rather than addressing them. We need fewer, better rules designed to bring real transparency. Republicans have an opportunity to develop sensible reforms that would end the worst abuses in derivatives, proprietary trading, and mortgage finance. We cannot do this unless we abandon our fantasies about self-regulating markets.

Education – Our public schools are not a jobs program for teachers and administrators.  Our education system is the most critical component of our economic infrastructure.  We must clear the way for schools to adapt to present needs without interference from unions on one side, and anti-science hacks on the other. Our Industrial Age schools need to evolve to meet Information Age demands.

By challenging public employee unions and local bureaucracies that stand in the way of meaningful education reform, Republicans could find our best opportunity to restore our foothold in America’s big cities.

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These ideas are only a beginning, but they represent a shift from the current Republican mindset toward something with a stronger basis in the real world. There is little in this message that would alienate people on the basis of race or religion. Little of it would be controversial outside the fringes of the right or left.

This approach would be a departure from the 50%+1 strategy of the Rove Era, when base enthusiasm reigned supreme and the need to govern was a secondary concern. It is time to reject contrast in favor of consensus, to embrace pragmatism over ideology. We cannot meet that goal if we remain trapped in paranoid echo-chambers, isolated from the concerns of new constituencies.

Americans want a government that will work. No one is better suited than Republicans to deliver that vision. Let’s climb out of our bunkers, let our eyes adjust to the sunlight, and start building a better future.

More of this discussion and other links at Building a Better GOP on Facebook

Other links:

Jeb Bush’s Immigration Proposal: Solving the Immigration Puzzle

A more hopeful social conservative agenda: Candy Cigarettes and Social Conservatives

How long will it take for CO2 levels to decline: Carbon is Forever

Education reform and vouchers: The Battle Over School Choice

A simple argument for smaller government: Complexity Demands Smaller Government

Why we should not fear immigration: The End of America…Again

A roadmap to replace Obamacare with a real solution: Toward a New, Conservative Health Care Agenda

Making peace with the welfare state: The Purpose of the Social Safety Net

The changing shape of work in the knowledge economy: Generation 1099

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Posted in Republican Party

Hamilton vs. Jefferson

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

When General Lee handed Ulysses S. Grant his surrender and my ancestors went home in defeat, there was reason to believe that one of the great unresolved conflicts over the meaning of the American experiment had been laid to a bloody rest.

I’m not talking about slavery, and it did not in fact prove to be the end. The most important original argument over American’s identity was best encapsulated in the competing visions of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

Simply put, Hamilton was a proto-capitalist New York banker who wanted to see the country embrace a commercial model. His vision would require a strong central government to invest in infrastructure and regulation.

Jefferson was a Southern plantation owner who wanted a republic of small landholders where each was practically sovereign on his own property. His model required almost no central government. It was simple and in the beginning it was dominant, especially in the South.

In the years after the American Revolution Northern states began a shift toward Hamiltonian capitalism. Over strenuous Southern objections those states and the Federal government wherever possible, began chartering banks, building canals, expanding ports, and laying railroad tracks. You can’t develop a coal industry in Pennsylvania if you can’t ship the product to New York. Building that infrastructure would require more organization and capital than individuals could fund on their own, but would yield massive benefits to a wide swath of the country.

Southerners struggled to block most Federal expenditures for infrastructure. President Jefferson himself dismissed the Erie Canal as “little short of madness.” His fellow Virginian, President James Madison, vetoed an effort to fund it. It was eventually financed by New York State. It brought massive new wealth to the Great Lakes basin and solidified New York City as the commercial capital of the nation.

It brought nothing to the South.

My Southern ancestors lived quiet rural lives. The harshest and most dangerous labor in their world was performed by slaves, giving them a sort of borrowed dignity regardless of whether they owned any slaves themselves. Religion was paramount, followed by family, clan and country. Their agricultural model and warm climate left them free from the need to organize any meaningful government beyond basic police and courts.

There were trains and factories, but few of them. Southern states resisted any organized industrial planning and fought federal efforts to build infrastructure. When Civil War came they never had a chance. The Jeffersonian model didn’t just leave them trailing in factories and railroads. As James Webb pointed out in his book, Born Fighting:

With only one-third of the white population, the south had nearly two thirds of its richest men and a large proportion of the very poor…In 1860 seven eighths of [foreign] immigrants came to the north…In the north, 94% of the population was found to be literate by the census of 1860; in the south barely 54% percent could read and write. Roughly 72% of northern children were enrolled in school compared with 35% of the same age in the south.

Their martial spirit made them formidable fighters, but they were lousy at coordination and unable to match the North’s infrastructure advantages. They were plowed under by the massive organizational power of a capitalist civilization. They lost because they had built a weaker system.

Wars don’t necessarily change cultures. The South has experienced waves of Federal Reconstruction, including the post-war occupation, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement. Yet my people have never openly confronted the central question that still hangs in the air.

Will we decide – deliberately – to join a modern capitalist nation with all the complex responsibilities and spectacular benefits it brings, or will we continue to cling to the dead vision of The Confederate Dream?

Now we have fielded a Republican Congress which is determined to burn down the Hamiltonian Republic that has emerged since the war and return to a “simpler” time. Along the way they would damage (or even destroy) the benefits we’ve gained from our reluctant capitalism. If you want to know what a Neo-Confederate political model looks like in a modern country, try to find a good public school for your kids in Mexico.

We may not think that’s what we voted for. No one can say out loud that they are fighting for the Confederate way of life, and some who embrace it may not even recognize it. You can get some hints at what’s going on if you probe Ron Paul’s fans for their thoughts on Lincoln. The weird AM radio and Tea Party rhetoric of fighting “socialism” sounds absurd, but only if you take it literally. We want to relive a fleeting moment of Jeffersonian simplicity.

The rebellion against the Neo-Confederate Revolution must start inside the Republican Party. If we fail to manage the complexity of our age, there are horrors that await. Jefferson’s world is gone, but we can still have a banana republic if we so insist.

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Posted in Neo-Confederate, Political Theory

The Fall of the Roman Republic, Revisited

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

In the modern American mind the fall of the Roman Republic is generally understood to be the story of Julius Caesar; an ambitious man who leveraged mob power to destroy liberty and become a dictator.  Perhaps, by focusing on the wrong drama we’re missing a more powerful message hiding in that familiar tale.

The genius of the Roman Republic was its talent for channeling the popular will into policy.  By basing its legitimacy on representative institutions, the Republic encouraged citizens to consider the interests of the nation as an extension of their own interests.

For the first few centuries of the Republic, each new internal challenge to the authority of the Republic was resolved by expanding the circle of representation.  Rome was not a democracy, but in a steady march it came to incorporate the will of a wider and wider swath of the society it ruled.

By the second century BC Rome was far more than a city.  With borders stretching from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, the institutions that had for centuries allowed the Republic to incorporate the opinions of the citizenry were badly strained.

There were simple logistical aspects to this challenge.  How could a citizen in North Africa participate in elections?  By what means could an illiterate pleb working on the docks make intelligent political decisions on the basis of any factor more sophisticated than a bribe?

These technical challenges may have been daunting, but they could have been resolved.  When America embarked on its republican experiment it possessed far worse communications infrastructure than the Romans, a much larger land area surrounded by hostile forces, and a population hardly better informed.  It succeeded and thrived.

Romans could have overcome a mere logistical challenge.  The real danger to their institutions was the growing concentration of power among a narrow elite.  That concentration would dangerously unbalance the complex machinery of the Republic.

Victories in war brought vast new territory and piles of stolen wealth into the hands of the city’s tiny patrician class.  Those families flouted the old laws that would have prevented them from keeping captured land for themselves.

Matters came to a head in 133 BC when Tiberius Gracchus was elected Tribune.  As a military commander, for years he had watched legionaries detained on long deployments losing their farms in bankruptcy.  Conquered land, which legally belonged to the state, was falling into the hands of a few well-connected rich in Rome who worked their estates with slaves.  Displaced peasants and discharged soldiers with nowhere to go and no means to survive flowed into Rome.

Tiberius and his brother Gaius launched a campaign of reforms aimed at curbing the worst abuses of the patrician class and expanding representation.  For his efforts, Tiberius was murdered by the Senate along with hundreds of his supporters, the first outbreak of civil violence in the Republic.  Gaius, continuing his dead brother’s campaign, was driven from Rome by the Senate in another spasm of mass violence.  He took his own life in 121 BC.

Why did the Gracchan brothers fail to expand the representative institutions of the Republic where so many others had succeeded?  The Republic succumbed to simple political physics.

Though Rome possessed fine, inclusive public institutions, the vast new wealth from the conquests had come to rest in very few hands.  This gave a privileged minority an opportunity to concentrate enormous power.

By the late second century BC, they were strong enough to bend Rome’s traditional institutions away from their previously inclusive character and leverage them instead to close off threats to their own interests.  Instead of expanding the government’s base of legitimacy, they were able to replace Republican institutions with raw force.  When the Republic ceased to be a credible avenue for popular representation, it was little more than an empty slogan.

Julius Caesar didn’t destroy the Republic, he unmasked it.  In the decades after the Gracchans, the average Roman understood that the game was fixed.  No matter how successful they might become, the pathways of power were controlled by a few families and no one could challenge their will.

When Caesar used his military command to turn the tables on the patricians, they appealed to the people to protect liberty.  It was a hollow plea.  For ordinary Romans by Caesar’s time, the rise of an Emperor claiming absolute power just meant that their oppressors now had a rival.

Legitimacy, from that time on, was based on violence rather than popular will.  For the remainder of Roman history, the mantle of authority belonged to whoever could control the legions.  Almost every transfer of power required civil war and murder.

It is hard to build a dictatorship in a healthy society.  Where public institutions are open, strong, supportive of fact-based debate, and flexible enough to evolve with social changes, there is little fuel for a tyrant.  When wealth and power are highly concentrated and political institutions can be perverted into fear-based, winner-take-all arrangements, it is difficult to preserve liberty.

The Caesars of the world only arrive when the ground has been prepared for them.

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Posted in Political Theory
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