The Centrifugal Forces of Identity and Inequality

Short memories recently heralded the news of Durham, North Carolina’s population growth by attributing it to a revitalized downtown.

But that doesn’t explain why Durham was the fastest growing city in the state over the decade of the 1990s, a decade before downtown’s reawakening.

We forget that the Census of 2010 identified 178 million square miles in the U.S. where no one lives, meaning that around 47% of the America is unoccupied.

Carolina Demography reminds us that a decade ago, 40% of the nation’s counties had lost population between 2000 and 2004 including 10 in North Carolina.

But in the period between 2010 and 2014, 53% of the nation’s counties lost population including more than half of those in the South and half of the 100 counties in North Carolina, one of the nation’s fastest growing states.

Some of this is due to out-migration and some because the remaining population is aging out.

Rather than seeking to study and emulate places such as Durham as a “best practice, a few, very frustrated regressives in state legislatures here and across the country are pushing through repeated legislation to defile cities.

Otherwise reasonable people, they fit the definition Gallup uses in studies to identify those who seek to undermine any work environment, as “actively disengaged.”

But this relatively small group of regressives isn’t the reason this ongoing defilement of places is taking place in states such as North Carolina.

The enablers are those peers who are merely disengaged, roughly half, according to studies.

Just putting in time, these enablers fail to study or even read legislation trading the input of constituents for that of special interests paying for access or hoping for reciprocity.

An eventual sea-change when it inevitably comes will be when voters begin to hold accountable this latter group.

People often wonder if cities and towns really matter to people, in part, because it seems so many are in such a hurry to destroy what makes them distinct and marketable.

But surveys which I repeated in a former life after seeing confidential results of polling by news outlets show that individual cities not only matter but so do the neighborhoods and streets where dwellers live.

Since the 1950s, when broadcast licenses were issued for television, those meant to serve Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and more than 20 surrounding counties, used their airwaves instead to try and erase the identities of individual communities.

The reason, of course, was that they could charge more to advertisers if they could hoodwink them into believing consumers would commute long distances to buy something readily available closer by.

Repeatedly, however, opinion polls showed that overwhelmingly, people preferred to characterize where they live by the name of a specific city, town or county.

Next in characterization came specific neighborhoods and streets and a very distant fourth came the notion of region so desperately pushed by broadcasters.

Rather than castrating cities and towns or trying to stamp out their identities, or pit rural and urban areas against one another, we should look at where the problems intersect.

A good start might be to carefully read a Brookings Institution report released last summer entitled The Growth and Spread of Concentrated Poverty, 2000 to 2008-2012 when the number of people living in distressed neighborhoods grew by 5 million.

Secondly is recommended a study of Complete Streets, particularly as they relate to economic development.  Don’t get too literal as you read this.  Strategically, it is relevant to rural areas as urban.

Third is a book entitled, The Vanishing Neighbor and its explanation of the importance of networks, especially those involving the less intimate “middle rings.”

Tying these resources together, a reading is recommended of a new book entitled Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by renowned sociological researcher Dr. Robert Putnum who also wrote Bowling Alone and co-wrote American Grace.

Putnam traces the roots of today’s inequality and lack of upward mobility through towns, neighborhoods, families, parenting, schooling and community and proposes remedies in each area.

What he calls the centrifugal dispersion that altered cities and towns creating economic and class disparities, especially racial, probably also created a vacuum and related suction, as centrifugal forces do in a pump, that similarly also impacted rural areas.

We need to work together not against one another to resolve both.

It must begin, I believe, by electing truly engaged public officials at every level and in every district.

I am referring to representatives who are willing to stand up against special interests and who hear the voices of all citizens equally, even if they are not raised equally.

A Spiritual and Economic Dividend

I was too distracted by the magnificence of the peaks towering ahead to pay much attention a few years ago when with Mugs, my English Bulldog and travel companion, we twice crossed the Two Medicine River.

So too, has most of the mainstream media, failed to notice two remarkable developments there recently.

That afternoon, Mugs and I were on one of our annual cross-country road trips to rendezvous with family lakeside in the Northern Rockies.  The 60-mile Two Medicine River spills out of mountain lakes on the east side of the Continental Divide in Glacier National Park.

But it quickly cuts a deep valley, creating cliffs as it goes through the southwest part of the Blackfeet Reservation, a tiny fragment of the ancestral lands for that people in Canada and the U.S.

Where the Two Medicine drops out of the mountains to create its valley is known as the Rocky Mountain Front, which marks the meeting of the Rockies and the Plains.

As an aside, had it not been for the influence of gold interests in Congress, the front was meant to be the border between northern Idaho and Montana, denying the latter its distinctive western Indian Chieftain-like face and making it more Dakota in shape.

I was born and spent my early years on an ancestral ranch about three hundred miles south just on the western side of the Divide in that Yellowstone nook where Idaho, Montana and Wyoming meet.

This nook is also where several Indian cultures met long before Mountain Men would rendezvous there including the Blackfeet, Shoshone and Crow peoples.

These three groups from my youth really did fit the stereotypes applied to Native Americans in the late 1800s by Dime Westerns and Wild West shows including being great horsemen, living in teepees, and wearing deerskin, war bonnets and beads.

I was most familiar with Northern Shoshone, for whom one of my great-great grandfathers had been an interpreter in the early 1860s during a time of intense misunderstanding.  Tragically, he was unable to prevent a massacre by U.S. Cavalry a few miles from my grandparents place.

These ancestors lived in territorial days along the Cub River and an old Shoshone trail between winter and summer grounds, later also used by the Pony Express.  It was about 175 miles south of the ancestral ranch of my youth.

It has long been thought that around the mid-to-late 1700s while in meeting places such as where I grew up along the Tetons, that Shoshone introduced horses to bands of Blackfoot.

The Shoshone had been introduced to these transformative animals by Cheyenne coming up from what is now Kansas after having first adopted them in 1745.

Of course these are Anglicized names for these peoples.

Blackfoot is the name for the tribe in Canada, Blackfeet is the name given in the United States, which bothers many members.  I grew up taught to use “feet” for the group and “foot” for an individual member or band.

But the name comes from a loose translation in English describing the dark moccasins worn by this nation, a confederation of several groups connected by language.

The group along the Two Medicine would have called themselves Piikáni or Piegan, as they do today.

Until a few months before Mugs and I crossed the Two Medicine, prevailing theory was that individual families and bands organized into larger groups when they came into possession of the horse.

But when oil and gas leasing created an urgency about cultural sites long revered by the Blackfeet, archeologists from the University of Arizona were led to dig into a site along the cliffs above the Two Medicine.

They learned that organizational social changes began not with the horse, but as early as A.D. 900, when a dramatic increase in precipitation along the plains resulted in high grass and led to a dramatic increase in Buffalo populations.

Something remarkable occurred along the Two Medicine by around A.D 1500, still two hundred years before they had the horse, just after Europeans established permanent settlements along America’s eastern shores, and 300 years before the Blackfeet would encounter members of the Lewis & Clark expedition.

Ancestors of the Piegan Blackfoot developed a sophisticated system of coordination and planning needed to develop a series of cairns, which are stacks of stones creating chutes through which they would drive Buffalo over the cliffs as a means to harvest food and hides.

They devised not just one but nearly a dozen of these along a 20-mile stretch of the Two Medicine, roughly bookended by the two westerly routes we traversed across the Rocky Mountain front that day.

Except for those in my native Yellowstone nook, Buffalo were extinguished from Idaho by the 1840s when my ancestors began to settle in the Rockies.  They were gone from Blackfeet country by 1881.

But their preservation on tribal lands is as much spiritual as economic.  Along one of our crossings of the Two Medicine that summer was a tribal herd of 250 Buffalo, part of 20,000 on tribal lands in the U.S. today.

A few months ago, near that crossing, the Blackfeet were among many to sign the Northern Tribes Buffalo Treaty, committing to the preservation and conservation of Buffalo.

A few miles south of my crossings of the Two Medicine, another significant development has escaped the mainstream media.  In December, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law, the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act.

It was the result of 37 years of passion and advocacy including a law that was passed in the early 1980s, after the Forest Service began leasing every acre of the Front for oil and gas development, only to be vetoed by President Reagan.

Along a hundred miles of Front I drove that day, the new bipartisan legislation designates 67,000 acres of National Forest as part of the Bob Marshall Wilderness and the Scapegoat Wilderness.   It protects another 208,000 acres in a conservation management area.

The conservation area prevents the expansion of motorized use, prohibits new roads and protects horse, foot and cycling trails as well as what biologists consider among the top 1% of wildlife habitat in America.

An average of nearly 70% of the private land use in the three counties most involved is still used for pasture, rangeland and cropland.  The legislation had the support of many ranchers including Dusty Crary near Choteau.

Tourism and recreation, along this stretch of Rocky Mountain Front, now generates 19% of employment and growing.

In the West overall, areas such as this along federally protected lands are associated with higher rates of job growth, 345% between 1970 and 2010, compared to 83% in non-metro counties with no protected federal lands.

There is definitely a dividend from conservation.

Tax-Shift Humor and Climate Change

Distinguished as “systemic causation,” if not direct, in a post last week by cognitive linguistic researcher Dr. George Lakoff, even scientists previously skeptical of climate change at Berkley Earth, who are now able to make assessments as far back as 1753, are confident in the “clear agreement between global land ­‐temperature rise and human-­caused greenhouse gases.”

That’s the same year a 21-year-old George Washington rode across the Blue Ridge Mountains and the upper Shenandoah Valley as an ambassador for the British Crown on a mission to assess the intentions of and convey a warning to the French and their Native American allies along the border of what is now Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Following a route I also partially traveled on one of my four cross country trips over the last three years, Washington cut northwest at the Quaker village of Winchester and up through the Forks of the Ohio River, the site of present-day Pittsburgh.

The fall of 1753 was also when the first steam engine arrived in America.  It doesn’t take a crash course in the Industrial Revolution to understand just how much that single machine has influenced our quality of life, but that doesn’t change the fact that we now need another revolution to ensure that quality of life for subsequent generations.

On Washington’s follow up mission in 1754, the first truly global war was ignited which led to the need for British taxes to fund it on this continent which in turn, led to the American War of Independence also led by Washington and the creation of the United States of America of which he was elected the first President.

As Americans were declaring independence, Scottish professor Adam Smith was publishing An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations which upended the notion that wealth could only be achieved by hording and inspired instead our current market economy based on creating wealth.

Ironically, many inspired by Smith have turned to hording wealth and denial of climate change, while, according to public opinion polls, 75% of Americans support regulating greenhouse gases such as CO2 and 60% support revenue-neutral taxes on carbon.

By 3 to 1, Americans believe that protecting the environment “improves economic growth and creates new jobs, while just 17% cling to a notion described by David Jenkins, a Republican conservative and environmentalist (yes they do exist) that:

“we can dig up all of that sequestered carbon from bygone eras, burn it, and send it back into the atmosphere without consequence?”

Jenkins, an official with ConservAmerica then chided a fellow conservative that such a view “is as impious as it is imprudent. It is certainly not conservative.”

Given political will by those elected to office, there is obviously bipartisan support for the ideas promoted fourteen years ago in a book of just 89 pages plus appendix entitled Tax Shift – How to Help the Economy and Improve the Environment, co-written by Alan Thein Durning and a young Reed College research intern named Yoram Bauman.

The now-Dr. Bauman is an environmental economist who teaches at the University of Washington.  He is even more famous as “the world’s first and only Stand-Up Economist.”  Click here for his hilarious five minute explanation of economics textbook author and Harvard professor Dr. Gregory Mankiw’s (pronounced Mank-u) Ten Principals of Economics.

Revenue-neutral tax-shifting has already been shown to work over the last few years in British Columbia, Canada where it was implemented several years ago based on the recommendation of Bauman and others.

It is based on the economic principle that the way to get less pollution is to make polluting expensive.  Revenue-neutral means shifting taxes off of things such as income and payroll and business while shifting them to things such as CO2 emissions.

Beginning in 2008, B.C. began a gradual revenue-neutral tax shift to carbon pollution in 2008 and an assessment four years later by a group of business, environmental, policy and academic leaders shows that it is working by reducing emissions far faster than elsewhere and without any negative effect on the economy there.

The B.C. experiment, while it must to likely be ratcheted up to have the intended impact, is well worth replicating in the United States.  The carbon tax approach is also supported by Mankiw, an advisor on the economy to both President George W. Bush and Republican presidential-candidate Mitt Romney.

In a TED presentation, Bauman quotes conservative columnist George Will, who, when it was noted that he agreed with Al Gore on this issue, paraphrases a quote from 20th-century American newspaper humorist Don Marquis by quipping back that:

“an idea should not be held responsible for the people who believe in it.”

May God Bless America To Be Less Partisan

Not all Independents, such as I, self-identify as ideological moderates but according to Pew Research Center 47% do, and so do 24% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats.

In my opinion, that should be enough to one day soon reclaim our country from it’s paralyzed state of partisan gridlock, but according to some who analyze them, moderates don’t fashion themselves to be like sporting event refs or officials responsible for breaking up fights between rival teams or their fanatic followers.

Key to any eventual resurrection of the influence of moderates will be the findings in a new study entitled Partisan Sorting and Behavioral Polarization in the American Electorate by Lilliana Mason, a doctoral candidate and researcher in political psychology at Stoney Brook University.

Mason found that extreme positions on issues have “an effect that is less than half the size” of what sorting by political identity, such as party affiliation, does on polarization.  She notes the finding that “…partisan identity increases thermometer bias [strength of emotion] by about 43 percent” of in-group bias, concluding that:

“This psychological and emotional sense of attachment to a party, an ideology, a religion or a race, and the extent to which those attachments overlap, is powerfully capable of driving behavioral polarization, even when the presumptive reasons for choosing a party - issue positions - are held constant.”

According to the study, “The strength of a person’s identification with his or her party determines how biased, active and angry that person is, even if that person’s issue positions are moderate…The moderation of issue positions cannot moderate the effect of identity on behavioral polarization…”

Moderates have their work cut out for them, especially the 47% among those who self-identify as unaffiliated with either major political party, approximately half of all moderates, because as Mason states in an article by Tom Jacobs for Pacific Standard, “There is no way to educate people into being less polarized.”

According to columnist David Brooks, who may be moderate but is definitely conservative, moderates like “mixing and matching from columns A, B and C. They try to create harmonious blends of policies that don't, at first glance, go together.”

Moderates tend to avoid both “confirmation bias” and “hindsight bias” which were clearly described last week in the Health Section of the New York Times by Benedict Carey:

“Confirmation bias” describes a condition where individuals or groups start off with an assumption and then pay attention only to information that is supportive.

“Hindsight bias” describes a condition where individuals and groups “retrofit their opinions and judgments” to fit the evidence.

Political parties, before, during and after campaigns, try to exploit both conditions to keep those who are faithful in line as well as to create doubt in the minds of partisans on the other side.  Campaign rhetoric aside, reaching across the isle as true moderates do is something partisans find problematic.

In another study published last summer along with Dr. Phoebe Ellsworth, Ed O’Brien a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of Michigan conducted experiments to determine empathy across the political isle and concluded that -- “Perceived dissimilarity – even in an incidental domain such as political values – may expose deep constraints on people’s ability to appreciate the experiences of those who may be in greatest need of their consideration.”

However, the political party partisans may be powerless to influence incumbent-halo linkages such as is noted in a study reported in a Style Section article by Paul Farhi in the Washington Post.

"Research shows that voters in a college team’s home county tend to reward the incumbent presidential candidate after the local team wins” in the 10 days leading up to the election, with an average bump of 1.61 percent of the vote, and as much as 3.35 percentage points if the team is a powerhouse.

In a parallel experiment involving college basketball fans, the researchers found that the further a team advanced in the Final Four tournament, the higher they rated the President’s job performance.  “Another study found a relatively high correlation between sports teams’ success and mayoral reelection.”

Republicans in particular will probably be heard muttering that “correlation does not equal causation,” that is unless their candidate wins.

The “tribalness” of political affiliation is called “groupishness” when applied to religion and other parts of society by psychological researchers such as Dr. Jonathan Haidt at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Soon-to-be Dr. Mason’s claim that realigning political affiliations is as difficult as changing someone’s religion reminded me of a recent post on this blog about the findings of a scientific poll updated two weeks ago by university researchers on behalf of The Associated Press, which shows that Americans are as divided today as they were at the time of independence by issues of race:

“More than half of all Americans now express explicit anti-black and anti-Hispanic attitudes, 79% among Republicans; but when tested implicitly, the anti-black sentiments are also held by 55% of Democrats and 49% of Independents, much of it refueled, in my opinion, by uncivil discourse and coded rhetoric stoked after the election of the first black President of the United States.”

Mason pointed out to journalist Jacobs the “cleavages” during our history that have resulted in political realignment usually over a period of decades.  Far too many it seems, if not all, have been over race, such as the struggle among the founders during the writing of the Constitution that intensified after its adoption during the presidency of George Washington in the guise of so-called “state’s rights” as a counter to a vigorous federal government.

Another occurred over the same issue, slavery, with the election of President Abraham Lincoln which resulted in secession and all-out Civil War.

Another cleavage occurred with the rise of the Progressive Movement in 1890 to reform the ills of another gilded age and which southern states adulterated with “separate but equal.”  And the most recent realignment which was spurred by race as well occurred when Democratic Party leaders forged the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Only time will tell when realignment will break up the current polarization, but the AP’s survey findings lead me to believe that it will once again be over issues related to race, which are thinly veiled in campaign rhetoric about poverty and immigration including one of the worst examples, the “Food Stamp President,” even though 1 in 3 are white and only 1 in 5 are black.

If race as an issue remains unresolved throughout the nation’s third hundred years, then another cleavage may certainly be forced by climate change and the environment as Mason speculates in Jacobs’ Pacific Standard piece.

Regardless of who wins election as President or to Congress today, may God Bless America and especially moderates in hope that they may finally get it right.

Our Moderate Heritage

Maybe ideologically, we’ve always been a closely divided nation.  Using estimates from various experts, during the years of our Revolutionary War 45% of Americans  were “neutral” or leaning neutral while 40% were patriots and 15% were loyalists.

Even patriots were divided between those seeking protection from pro-British Indian nations, those seeking economic equality and those seeking independence from British laws.  Maybe we only think we’re more divided now than 230 years ago because much of our historical narrative has been rewritten due to what psychologists call a need for cognitive coherence, especially among ideological conservatives.

However, back at the dawning of this country, only 1 in 4 served in the Continental Army or for a few weeks or so in the various local and state militias and at any given time the war actively involved only 8% of all who were patriots.  According to a 2010 article in The Smithsonian:

“After 1777, the average Continental soldier was young, single, propertyless, poor and in many cases an outright pauper.”

Many today forget that in the southern colonies, the war was as much a civil war as a revolutionary one and providence came as much in the form of treasure, soldiers, sailors, ships and endorsement from France and Spain as it did from above.

Even fighting on behalf of colonies divided over race at the time, a quarter of those fighting in the war as victory was achieved were Blacks, which made up 20% of the population at the time.  Many were in front line combat units and fought with distinction.

I like to think I would have been as patriotic as some of my ancestors, who fit the description above and fought not only in Virginia militias but in the 9th North Carolina, 5th Pennsylvania and 4th Massachusetts of the Continental Army some in the north under General Washington and some also during several pivotal battles in the south.

However, I don’t think of those who remained neutral back then as unpatriotic, nor do I believe they were all neutral due to religion such as many Quakers and Amish were, nor were they any more likely than patriots did to seek to profit from the war, something that galled Washington.

I think many who were neutral back then may have been moderates who were very aptly defined last week by conservative columnist David Brooks when he wrote, “Just as the founding fathers tried a mixed form of government, moderates like pluralistic agendas, mixing and matching from columns A, B and C. They try to create harmonious blends of policies that don't, at first glance, go together.”

George Washington himself was a conservative among revolutionaries but a moderate conservative.  In his excellent biography Washington A Life, published two years ago, acclaimed author Ron Chernow repeatedly illustrates that even while he was spearheading the effort to achieve independence – “It took courage for Washington, instead of simply demonizing Great Britain, to study the secrets of its strength.” 

What would eventually emerge as the United States of America that we know today was not at all apparent during the Revolutionary War and partisanship such as we have today was nearly its downfall before it was even formed.

Moderates back then were probably not neutral about independence, just less inclined in the words of Brooks “to know what their solutions are before they define the problems.”  Even the founders admitted to having more questions than answers and were given to much thought and revision and compromise.

According to a scientific poll updated last week by university researchers on behalf of The Associated Press, Americans today are as divided as they were at the time of independence by issues of race.

More than half of all Americans now express explicit anti-black and anti-Hispanic attitudes, 79% among Republicans; but when tested implicitly, the anti-black sentiments are also held by 55% of Democrats and 49% of Independents, much of it refueled, in my opinion, by uncivil discourse and coded rhetoric stoked after the election of the first black President of the United States.

It is no wonder, as reported recently by columnist Charles Blow from a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, that the Republican challenger to become President of the United States has the support of 59% of whites, including 65% of white men while the President, an African American has 79% among nonwhites overall.

Looking deeper into the results by region of the country, these trends among whites are even more pronounced in the South.  Made in his farewell address 216 years ago at the completion of his terms as the first US President, George Washington’s warning about partisanship rings true today as we wonder whether there is any hope for a long-overdue national conversation about race as well as solutions to any number of problems facing this nation.

Any hope of success may lie in the ability of neutrals and moderates to organize themselves again into an effective force. As Brooks describes of moderates in his column:

“The animating principle doesn’t mean that all Americans think alike.  It means that we have a tradition of conflict…over the centuries…

The moderate doesn’t try to solve those arguments.  There are no ultimate solutions.  The moderate tries to preserve the tradition of conflict, keeping the opposing sides in balance…

In most great arguments, there are two partially true points of view, which sit in tension.  The moderate tries to maintain a rough proposition between them, to keep her country along its historic trajectory.”

In a few days, half of the country will be disappointed in the outcome of the election, but regardless of who is elected, (and I have already voted as nearly half have in Durham NC where I live) solutions will only be made possible by a resurgence of moderates.

As a moderate myself, I am deeply disturbed by the stereotypes and bigotry around race.  But I believe much of that intolerance is merely a surrogate for other even harder to discuss issues.

If we don't discuss them openly, rather than in terms of scapegoats, our descendants may be facing another revolution.

The Priority Place-based Trait Across the Political Spectrum

A fascinating new study asked thousands of people who are ideological liberals, moderates and conservatives to rank the attributes and traits important to judging a city or town or area in which to live.

The results confirmed why two North Carolina cities such as Durham and Raleigh, even though they are separated by only two other towns, continue to diverge culturally because they appeal to different groups of people.

But to me, it boils down to what a reporter for a large city daily newspaper once remarked to me, “one of these towns just as well be Tulsa and the other Kuala Lumpur.”  In other words, their difference was like night and day!

However, what was interesting from this survey is that “clean air and water” rank not just first out of 47 attributes for liberals but also second for moderates and third for conservatives and libertarians. (click on the image and scroll down to the second chart.)

More often than not, the challenge is to “connect the dots” for people when it comes to things that threaten clean air and water.  People see a roadside billboard and may or may not even notice the inherent blight it creates, but if they could see or equate it with the fact that, in order for the billboard to be seen, the destruction of trees and vegetation that clean our air and water is necessary, and in addition, soil erosion and stream pollution will be direct results, we would most likely want to become truly billboard-free.

Billboards have continued to pollute roadsides long after all but 8% of the population has ceased to find them useful even over the course of an entire year because that industry is not only very effective at political rent-seeking through heavy contributions to political campaigns and arm-twisting of elected officials, but also because the billboard industry is effective at shaping the pro or against debate as positioning them as the underdog.

In reality, the debate is actually over defense of clean air and water and freedom from blight, values held by more than 7 out of 10 North Carolinians today and even protected by a constitutional amendment in the early 1970s.

I’ve witnessed first hand recently that support instead for an increasingly obsolete and increasingly destructive mode of advertising in the current North Carolina General Assembly such as roadside billboards is more a signal that elected officials, appointees and even some administrators seem far more responsive to special interests than public opinions.

I am not sure if moderates, like me, were studied but psychological research noted in this post by Dr. Brittany Liu at the University of California Irvine shows that conservatives are drawn to cognitive coherence while liberals are better able to handle cognitive complexity.

As a moderate myself, I relate to fact that moderates are probably more mixed.  I was immediately drawn to Durham more than two decades ago by its diversity and authenticity, but I am often puzzled when we seem to take fragmentation to new levels such as the incoherent way we’ve approached urban forestry and way finding signs along roadways which by its very nature must be coherent to mean anything.

Yet remarkably, even though three or four individuals tried their best to undermine it and still refuse to embrace it, Durham is one of the few communities where diverse groups across the community are able to work together to distill an overarching brand to communicate the personality, values and traits distinctive to the community to external audiences.

Regardless of who is elected or re-elected President of the United States, I am persuaded by this post by Dr. Ravi Iyer, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California VIMLab, that we have more in common across the political spectrum than we are led to believe.

We just need to pay more attention to our common values and less to labels.

A Time When Infrastructure Was Bipartisan

During my first five years of grade school in the 1950s, even out west, construction of the Saint Lawrence Seaway seemed to dominate each issue of the Weekly Reader with news about how it would enable huge cargo ships to transit to and from the Atlantic Ocean as far as 2,500 miles inland via the Great Lakes during nine months of the year.

During my recent visit along the eastern shoreline of 7,300-square-mile Lake Ontario and up through the 1000 Island Region where the Saint Lawrence River spills out of that lake as it straddles the US border with Canada, I spent plenty of time on the water with friends but we were still an hour or so below the six huge locks on the up-river end of the Seaway.

Unlike today, Republicans during the 1950s seemed to be inspired by President Eisenhower to make huge infrastructure projects such as the Seaway and the Interstate Highway System, bi-partisan in nature.

Actually there are actually nearly 1900 islands in the lake-like-archipelago that dots the fifty mile stretch as the Saint Lawrence River emerges from Lake Ontario, under the Great Depression-era-150’-high bridge from the US to Canada and heads northeast toward the Seaway locks.

Officially, “the number of islands was determined using the criteria that any island must be above water level all year round, have an area greater than 1 square foot, and support at least one living tree,” and several are populated with late 19th century mansions such as Boldt Castle, operated as public attractions by the bridge authority.

On the trip back home, we couldn’t resist cutting east first through the “green” infrastructure of Adirondack State Park, which encompasses nearly 20.2% of the land area of the State of New York, nearly the size of Connecticut and larger than several national parks combined.

The purpose of our drive a few days ago was recreation but that is only a by-product of the primary purpose of the park.  In fact, the Adirondack was created and then preserved forever by a popular vote of the people of that state as infrastructure to prevent soil erosion, control flooding and preserve watershed and water quality.

My great-great grandfathers x 7 understood the importance of this infrastructure when they settled in the early 1600s just 30 to 40 miles downstream from the southern edge of what is today Adirondack Park.  Skilled at lowland farming, one family settled an island in the middle of the Hudson that was sensitive to flooding.

Shortly after their takeover two decades later, the English began to aggressively deforest the Adirondacks and this accelerated after the American Revolution when New York sold off lands owned by the Crown for pennies an acre to pay off war debt.

By 1850, New Yorkers became alarmed at the huge price of deforestation in terms of soil erosion, flooding and water pollution.  It took another 35 years for the state to begin protecting the sustainability of what became more than 6 million acres including 57% that are privately owned and 1% owned by towns and hamlets.

The Adirondack is truly spectacular, with 3,000 lakes, 30,000 miles of streams and rivers, 2,000 miles of hiking trails and 46 mountain peaks that are more than 4,000 feet above sea level.

But parkland infrastructure such as this is ultimately far more crucial to commerce and water quality as well as prevention of soil erosion and flooding.  Frankly, it is nearly impossible to imagine elected bodies today being that strategic.

Those we elect to safeguard and maintain infrastructure of all types are negligent, if not criminal, when they dismiss infrastructure as mere recreation and then starve it instead of providing much-needed maintenance and upgrades.

The “M” Word- Putting Moderates in the Bull's-Eye

Seemingly not content with attacking the views of progressives, or liberals this they call them, it appears that some candidates campaigning to gain the Republican Party’s presidential nomination are now going after moderates as well.

Having purged the vast majority of moderates from their party, conservatives now feel safe in using that term as a pejorative, just as they've done for decades with the tradition of liberalism which ironically was the ideology of many of the founders of our country.

I assume, if that is successful, ultra conservatives in the party will then take aim at just run-of-the-mill conservatives. Aiding those with these non-inclusive views is the fact that the majority of Americans alive today do not remember or choose not to remember that this line of thinking in the 1980s put an end to the great era of middle-class growth in this country.

Maybe it's because I've always read a lot and been intrigued by viewpoints different than my own that I've always been suspicious of movements based on so-called ideological purity, whether it be those  that claim to be "the only true church or religion" or "the superior race” or “the only valid way to think or believe or feel” especially when the validity of those views is proven only by demeaning others.

If ultraconservatives or any other political ideology truly want to restore American values, they must accept that Americans have always had very diverse views and viewpoints. They must realize that this fact is inherent in “being American.”

I've already highly recommended the recently published book entitled The Price of Civilization by the acclaimed clinical economist Jeffrey Sachs. He notes that the divisions that have always existed in America “were muted by the circumstances” facing this country “during the 1930s and 1940s” when we were “in it together” facing the Great Depression and World War II.

Sachs notes that “these epochal events were great crucible of consensus building” and that “the Cold War created a sense of shared risks and responsibilities as well , meaning that Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all could feel at least until 1965 or so that they were presiding over society that shared certain touchstones."

Maybe the current divide has been intensified, as some think, by some overreaching on social issues during 1960s and 1970s and the similar overreaching on economic issues since the 1980s. But I agree with Sachs that “there is much more consensus than meets the eye” especially judging by scientific public opinion polls, which today are the closest thing we have to true democracy.

Sachs uses the results from these polls to suggest that the great majority of Americans, contrary to what you would think from the political system, still have consensus around several core values such as “a set of national economic policies to promote overall efficiency, fairness, and sustainability [the environment].” Americans have consensus “that there should be equality of opportunity” for all citizens, and that “individuals should make the maximum effort to help themselves.”

We also have consensus around a core value “that government should help those in real need as long as they are also trying to help themselves.” Most Americans also “agree that the rich should pay more in taxes.”

I agree with Sachs that “our politics feel divisive, not because of the raging battle in middle America but because there is a vast gap between (1) what Americans believe; (2) with what the [corporate dominated] mass media tell us Americans believe; and (3) what politicians actually decided, no matter what Americans believe.”

We will restore American values when we  standup for “public policies [that] begin to follow American values.” Listening carefully to even the extreme viewpoints that seem to monopolize the news media we need to then elect politicians who give us views unfettered by powerful special interests including those who fuel biases with campaign financing or demand ideological purity.

The answer, as Sachs prescribes, is for the public “to exercise a new and higher level of political responsibility.” Special interests, including corporate interests are free to hijack the system only when we the people are “disengaged.”

An Artist’s Wisdom Could Save America

One of the most articulate voices about the global transformation of organizations, institutions and business models including today’s political gridlock just happens be, not a scientist or economist or political expert or business leader but one of the 2.1 million artists and arts workers in the United States, a number documented by a new study just released.

This artist is becoming known for something coined by Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor for Wired magazine as the Shirky Principle:

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."

 

This principle explains why so many organizations (private, public and not-for-profit) prefer life-support and mission-creep to what Nancy Lublin calls “death by success” once they have become obsolete or completed their mission, ignoring “systematic abandonment,” one of guru Peter Drucker’s four responsibilities of management.

The far-too-infrequent essay-posts by art professor Clay Shirky on his blog found at this link are always a must read for me including one in 2009 that is still the most insightful explanation I’ve read yet about what’s happening to newspapers and now threatening television as we’ve known them.  Remember that pesky issue of “stranded costs” so prominent in the downfall of Enron?

Shirky’s incredible book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, published a year ago about the time this snippet was taped as a TED presentation on the topic is a must read for anyone seeking a glimpse into the future.

One of Shirky’s posts reminded me of a chilling book entitled The Collapse of Complex Societies by anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter, which was published and already going into reprint as I relocated to Durham a little more than two decades ago.

Unfortunately, until recently I had skipped over Tainter’s prescient-book because back then I had just finished a far longer book but more narrowly focused book called The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers, published a year earlier by British historian Paul Kennedy and dealing predominantly with only economic and military factors.

I was reminded of the importance of an anthropological perspective while reading another blog-essay by Shirky posted last year entitled The Collapse Of Complex Business Models with an excellent introduction to Tainter’s analysis and applying it to issues and events in the news today.

In the post, Shirky summarizes Tainter’s conclusions which indicate that in the past complex societies such as ours today “hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it:”

“Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake — ‘Under a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response’, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.’

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.”

Shirky summarizes Tainter in a way that helps explain the double-dog-dare-standoff over the debt ceiling last summer and among members of the Super Committee with one side beholden to one unelected individual with a self-defeating pledge of no new taxes even when it makes sense and helps explain the resonance of Occupy Wall Street movement when he writes:

“One of the interesting questions about Tainter’s thesis is whether markets and democracy, the core mechanisms of the modern world, will let us avoid complexity-driven collapse, by keeping any one group of elites from seizing unbroken control.

This is, as Tainter notes in his book, an open question.  There is, however, one element of a complex society into which neither markets nor democracy reach – bureaucracy.

Bureaucracies [and here I believe Shirky’s use of the term applies to corporations as well as government] temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than it is to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill off an old one.

…it is people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”

To me the great danger to our society comes from both the extremes of the right and the left, one, defending self-interest but excluding social responsibility while obsessed with personal responsibility and the other defending what hasn’t worked and bureaucratic complexity over common-sense and simplification.

Can the moderate center save America?  I hope so but remember another Shirky-ism, “A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools.  It happens when society adopts new behaviors.”

I still believe that regardless of ideology we all have what Shirky names as one of the two elements helping fuel today’s “cognitive surplus” and that is “generosity of human spirit.

America’s Future Relies on the Radical Center

There is probably only one group more lonely than the 10% of Mormons who are “liberal," American’s most politically conservative religious denomination and that’s the remaining 3% of Republicans who are liberal. 

So the Democratic base must be all liberals, right?  After all, that’s what’s pounded into our brains from the superficial, conflict-driven news reports that mold this as public perception.

Nope, analysis shows that the true numeric base of the Democratic Party are moderates, not liberals, which must be why Republicans have become pathologically adverse to compromise or any sort of “third-way,” moderate solution.

They fear it will benefit Democrats but in reality this aversion may be isolating that party more and more from the ideology of the largest segment of Americans, “moderates.”

The reality that conservative Ronald Reagan understood and rode to victory on in 1980 has been the key to winning every election since then.  It is all about winning over moderates and by nature moderates are less concerned about political power and more concerned about what works and understand that what works is compromise and bipartisanship.

Remember, only a 5 point swing among “moderates” saved George W. Bush from being a one-term president.

Jon Huntsman Jr. gets it and so do the 24% of Republicans who are moderates.  But Mitt Romney and Rick Perry are playing first to the nearly three out of four Republicans who are far to the right of Reagan, let alone the American mainstream, and predominantly driven only by orthodoxy.

A poll earlier this month revealed that Democrats view both themselves as individual voters and their party as “moderate.”  Independents also predominantly view themselves as moderates although they view other Independents as a group as a little more conservative.

Republicans?  They view themselves to the right of their party and Democrats as all liberals.  They are cocooned in this misperception by devotion to myside-biased-news consumption and marooned in an inflexible closed-loop view of their beliefs as possessions.

A positive sign for moderation was the 23 point decline in favorability for Republican leadership among extreme Tea Partiers following the debt ceiling agreement and a 37 point decline in opinion for the Tea Party faction among Republicans overall.

Unleashed, maybe the Congressional Super Committee will be more open to a bipartisan deficit-reduction proposal by the moderate Third Way organization.

But even if a faction of that group chooses to remain isolated, cocooned and marooned, Republicans aren’t doomed as long as they remember that moderates also represented the largest share of the electorate in 13 of the last 14 congressional election cycles.

The 2012 elections will all come down to three things in the opinion of many:

1) economic despair blinded to its origins by rhetoric and memory loss,

2) whether the mainstream news media can see past its obsession with balance to distinguish fact from fiction, and

3) how susceptible my fellow moderates are to memory loss and massive doses of distortion-laced attack adds by 527-organizations and other anonymous groups that thanks to an extremely narrow Supreme Count decision can be anonymously funded by corporations.

Regardless of whether the final outcomes of next year’s presidential and congressional elections ultimately favor Republicans, Democrats or Independents, the final arbiters will be moderates, not conservatives or liberals.

Un-grid-locking America will depend on electing people open to a third-way, regardless of political affiliation.

Why Moderates Matter

The Moral From Two True Stories Of Need

I heard two accounts last week that could be an advertisement for a relatively new book The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks which I’m already re-reading for the third time.

Recently a friend of mind struck up a conversation with a newcomer she met in Durham’s new, award-winning Durham Station Transportation Center only to learn that this community had the dubious honor of being chosen from among several on the East Coast by this newcomer only because it afforded better subsidized housing and welfare benefits.

That’s, of course, not the intent of safety nets and examples such as this person not only fuel insensitivity to and stereotypes of the poor that are held by far more than just Tea Partiers but they can inure those of more fortunate means to the incredible stress currently felt by low income households as benchmarked in a poll released last week by the Pew Center.

Then later that same day, another friend told me the story of a young woman who just graduated from high school even though she has grown up in poverty far deeper and more pervasive than many of the 1 in 4 children who are now living in that condition.

Years ago she took the initiative to master technical skills so she could work her way through secondary school. At the time I heard her story she was living with another of my friends after being kicked out at the home of a sibling where she’d been since, for a variety of reasons, neither parent had ever been capable of fulfilling their legal obligations to this kid.

Still she fought through the adversity to graduate and earn a scholarship to college this fall only to discover she couldn’t make the deposit necessary for housing because the place where she worked had suddenly closed without warning or payment of her earned wages, leaving only a “For Rent” sign in the window. Now she has overcome that obstacle too, just as she has far too many others in a life so young.

Years ago, of her own volition, she reached out and built a long-distance relationship with a disabled grandparent in another part of the state who hadn’t been in her life previously. She has now chosen to go to a college in a school in that city so can go over and help her sightless grandmother out when needed.

While far too many young people her age and younger seem overindulged, bored and unable to weather simple setbacks or disappointments or homesickness or peer pressure, this kid has already shown incredible grit and determination and willpower and resolve while going without the most basic support system.

“Grit,” the perseverance and passion for long-term goals such as hers is proven a far greater predictor of success in life than IQ or prodigy-level gifts according to study published jointly by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan and The United States Military Academy, West Point.

While this young woman has benefited over the last few weeks from the voluntary kindness of a stranger, whom I’m sure is equally impressed by her character and drive, she never plays the victim or shows an attitude or exhibits a sense of entitlement.

As one of the 12,500 young people, on average, who turn old enough each day this year to vote, she has already mastered the Character Tool Kit and she is living testament to Dr. Shelby Steele’s twenty-year classic The Content Of Our Character, published before she was born. Before her first day of college, she is already qualified to teach at The Kenan Institute for Ethics, a “think and do” tank for leadership here in Durham at Duke University.

Her example illustrates why we need to be very careful to only trim fraud and waste away from programs designed to give a hand up to social mobility for people like her and as Brooks pleaded in a February column in the New York Times, “cut wisely not stupidly.”

What true believer in the “American Dream” would hesitate even a second to voluntarily raise the tax on their income to help this young lady"?

Recent polls show that the percentage of people with libertarian views is on the rise but what they don’t realize and Brooks, a Conservative, so ably notes is that the growth of government is a result of flawed “individualist agendas” by both the right and the left when he writes that:

“these two individualist revolutions [‘60s on the left and ‘80s on the right] did not create loose free societies. They produced atomized societies in which the state grows in an attempt to fill the gaps created by social disintegration…”

Given these two examples, I choose to focus on the young, privilege-less girl as the poster child for why government must continue to fulfill its essential duty to promote and foster social mobility. It is as imperative to America’s survival as resolving the credit crisis.

This is why it is imperative that Republican leaders re-engage with bipartisanship. As Brooks noted in a debate at the American Enterprise Institute in March:

“…my problem with the Republican Party right now…is that if you offered them 80-20, they’d say no. If you offered them 90-10 they’d say no. If you offered them 99-1 they’d say no. And that’s because we’ve [Republicans]substituted governance for brokerism, for rigidity that Ronald Reagan didn’t have.

…this rigidity comes from this polarizing world view that they’re a bunch of socialists over there…I’ve spent a lot of time with the president [President Obama]…a lot of time with the people around him. They’re liberals!…But they are not idiots.

And they’re not Europeans, and they don’t want to be a European welfare state…It’s American liberalism, and it’s not inflexible.”

In Common With Jon

We have so many similarities that my Independent-loyalties are wavering now that Jon M. Huntsman Jr. has declared to run for the Republican nomination for President of the United States.

We’re both Intermountain Westerners.  We both ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles and not just on the back or as a publicity stunt.  I think he has a Heritage and I ride a Cross Bones, both in the softail family.  Driving a Harley gives one a unique perspective.

For years, we’ve both developed a premature skunk streak of white hair down the middle of our heads.  We’re both first born and eldest sons.  We’re both moderate politically, he center-right, me center-left.  We were both Cub Scouts as shown in the photos with this blog and we’re both among the 2 million who have earned the rank of Eagle Scout in the BSA’s 101-year history.  It isn’t clear if he is also one of the 180,000 who went on to earn Order of the Arrow.

He dropped out of high school to play in a rock and roll band, while I quit piano lessons at 9 years of age to peruse a little league baseball career.  While she was growing up, his wife spent all of her summers growing up in North Carolina and I live in North Carolina.

He was Governor of Utah, I graduated from college there and went on to be president of my Rotary Club. We share a political and religious heritage but neither of us are particularly religious to use his words.  I suspect he’s less ambivalent.

We both inherited our father’s name along with a unique spelling, although I was spared the Jr. by the grace of a different middle name.  The Huntsman’s met working at the same Marie Callender’s pie shop in high school where my daughter I were known to hang out when she was growing up.

More than a century ago, our paternal grandfathers both built lives along the Snake River in Eastern Idaho, mine as a rancher in the shadow of the Tetons on the north or Henry’s Fork, his as a school teacher just below the merge with the south fork.  His father was president of Olson Farms near the same time I was recruited while in college by one of the brothers Olson, a former Mayor of Beverly Hills, but I’m sure not to be president.

His great-great grandfather crossed the plains by wagon train.  One of mine helped lead that 560-wagon caravan west shortly after helping the previous 72-wagon vanguard wagon train cross into the Great Basin.  He bleeds red having matriculated at the University of Utah where my daughter graduated, I bleed blue as in intense downstate-rival Brigham Young University that is when I’m not bleeding Duke blue. His father has given millions of dollars to each but there is no similarity there.

I like double quarter pounders and his father invented the clamshell in which they were served.  He has one marriage and seven children, I have one child and several marriages.  He never forgets names and faces, I often have to fake it until I can glean a clue or two.

Of course, my net worth falls far short of his $9 to $15 billion even though he is 12 years my junior but at least I graduated from high school before I went to college, so there!

Seriously, making up my mind is more complicated, especially now that President Obama is finally getting us out of Afghanistan, but Jon Huntsman may be our only hope to rescue America by saving the Republican Party from itself and restoring mutual respect, civility and bipartisanship.  Sadly, it is clear they aren’t ready yet to offer that to a black man or even a bi-racial man.

He comes from the deep tradition of progressive and moderate Republicans such as Teddy Roosevelt and like those especially prevalent from 1936 to 1976 and particularly in the West when we were both growing up.

As an Independent, I fear the Republican Party of today won’t return to its original values and join in bipartisan solutions crucial to this nation until guided there when one of its own is once again President.  But when and if we elect the next Republican President, let’s make sure it is a respectful moderate like Jon M. Huntsman Jr.

The Heaviest Tax Of All – “Uncertainty”

My channel surfing was interrupted a few nights ago by a re-run of a fascinating documentary that I had missed on the History Channel during the second of my two recent, 6,000-mile cross-country trips.

Entitled Prophets of Doom (to view online click here if you missed it), about imminent societal threats, it brought back a memory from 41 years ago this month.

It was the dawn of an early morning in mid-1970 and we were stopping to fill a ‘65 Mustang convertible with gas.  Just into a 10-hour drive from Reseda, California en-route back to where I was attending college in Provo, Utah for summer session, we had stopped at a station near Palmdale, California.

When you’re just on the “back-side of 20 years old, ambition blinds you to the significance of some things such as the pricelessness of that Mustang, but I remember that morning like it was yesterday, especially the price-per-gallon on the meter.  On special in the wee hours of that morning, it was 25 cents.

That’s the same price that gas was in 1919, just a decade after the first Model T came off the assembly line, and well below the still wondrous 40 cents it averaged until the mid 1970s. Little did I know as I filled up that morning that the supply of oil was peaking in the United States that summer and tipping into decline, as experts predict it will globally within the next four years.

Even as I fill up today in Durham for $3.50 per gallon, much of society is still in denial about energy while political leaders bury well-documented warnings by experts as they did the Hirsch Report six years ago.

Viewing that one and one-half hour documentary reminds us that regardless of what Conservative David Brooks calls the “Republican growth agenda – tax cuts and nothing else” which he terms “stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible,” we’re already paying what Thomas Friedman describes as a much heavier but hidden “uncertainty tax”, but not just because of the downturn or the deficit which pale in my opinion to two of the more devastating threats to sustainability noted in the documentary:  energy and water.

Each of the six people featured in the documentary roundtable focused on a different aspect.  One of these six experts on the Prophets of Doom documentary, Dr. Nathan Hagens, an economist and former hedge fund manager, paraphrases a behavior phenomena from the 2004 book Collapse- How societies choose to fail or succeed by Dr. Jared Diamond:

“people three miles downriver from a dam that is failing are really afraid, people two miles downstream are really freaked out but people one mile from the dam are unconcerned.”

Brooks’s accusations that “the Democrats are doing nothing” isn’t quite fair.  It is clear that President Obama eschews agenda-driven deficit reduction tactics that are an excuse for ideological social engineering.  It just makes sense to begin first with cutting wasteful past practices such as the one noted when clicking here, and by reforming the tax code and eliminating corporate welfare.

But I’m unimpressed by the fact that neither major political party is coming up with fresh ideas nor are they showing an indication that there is a sense of urgency.

Just as the documentary is not all doom and gloom, there are many policy analysts such as those in the moderate Third Way seeking to avoid “the rigid or outdated orthodoxies of both the left and right..” and the ideologically-driven policies and political gridlock…”, “one that discards the false choices presented by both sides.”

The Third Way demonstrates that fresh solutions are abundant.  Time is running out but if we really care, people on all sides need to park their “confirmation bias” at the door and lower the “uncertainty tax” by tempering argument and debate with cooperation.

If not, then yes, this society is doomed but as the experts note, we don’t have to be doomed with it.

6.7% Is Not A Mandate

It may just be “sword rattling” or post-election hubris which is understandable.  But hopefully the incoming Congressional leadership will take the advice of some of their members and “be humble” and see this as a second chance.

The blog fivethirtyeight computes that only 6.7% more votes were cast for Republicans nationwide in Congressional races than for Democrats, hardly a mandate for anything but bi-partisan “cooperation.”  And exit polls revealed that more people support the healthcare reform legislation than oppose it which is astonishing considering all the millions of dollars spent on disguised campaign ads to distort it.

I can only believe that Representative Boehner is sincere and hopefully he’ll heed his own advice and listen to the “people” and the “people” are clearly divided.  Distorting healthcare reform may have been a good way to energize enough voters to move the needle slightly but 6.7% is a very slim margin on which to govern.

According to exit polls, “it’s the economy, stupid.”  Relatively few voters cited tax cuts or even government spending compared to getting the economy moving.  Governing in our representative form of government means rising above special interests and small factions no matter how energized or threatening and representing “all” of the people by making tough decisions about solutions to “long term” problems.

Use this “second chance” to bring us together.

Will Today’s “Ideological Road Rage” End as Tragically!

Those of us raised by “The Greatest Generation” came up during a brief respite of bi-partisanship. Experts mark the period from the end of WWII until 1964 as a truly unique period in this country’s ideological history. Many of us who came up during that period mistakenly thought it had always been that way and we’re fogging our view of today thinking it still “should” be.

Maybe as some experts believe, “The Greatest Generation” valued bi-partisanship, having been tested like none other first by the Great Depression and then while facing down the unfathomable inhumanity of extremist ideologies.

More than any before or since, that generation’s value for bi-partisanship came closer to embodying what many Founding Fathers hoped for the political process in this Country.

But almost immediately elected officials fell into what some term “boarding house” silos as witnessed by Thomas Jefferson when he bemoaned a Congress that failed to grasp even then “the necessity of accommodation and mutual sacrifice of opinion for conducting a numerous assembly.”

As widely noted, and well documented by this recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the rancor and rhetoric and partisan gridlock was with us almost from the beginning and obviously reached its extreme some 60 years later with the tragic Civil War.

I’m persuaded that today’s partisanship is “bottom up” not “top down” as it is vogue today for some to intimate by demonizing others as Washington “insiders.” Our current divide is evidenced by a dramatic decline in the number of “moderates” elected to Congress, dropping from 45-53% in 1949 to less than 10% today and many of those cowered into block voting with the extremes. We the “electorate” have made it hard to be a moderate and hard to compromise.

Fueling today’s divide is the compressive, effect of insatiable 24/7 news which offers little additional insight while hardening any dissent into a fight to the death while demanding absurdly simplistic solutions to very complex problems.

Unlike that 1860’s War Between The States, the country today isn’t divided up by section of the country. It is much more complicated and to me more dangerous. Salt and peppered around the country are more and more counties and some entire states that are dominated by majorities, eager to cower any other thinking with more and more extreme ideology.

This is best exemplified by the current, block voting-incalcitrance within a Republican Party, where it seems once moderate politicians are now in the “closet,” so to speak. Historians have documented that Its growing extremism took root in 1965 and deepened throughout the 1970’s and since.

Predictable and increasingly extremist statements now by that party’s leaders after every vote in Congress is nothing more than a reflection of an increasingly inflexible and extreme electorate back home.

Today’s civil war of words, like the violent Civil War of the 1860s, is again about culture and economics. On one side are descendants of the era of “social gospel” believing in acceptance of differences and a salvation anchored by creating a better, more tolerant society.

On the other side of this civil war of words is an increasingly extreme and inflexible, sometimes violent group believing everything is a war of good and evil in the fight for individual souls, making every text book, social safety net, court ruling and every “requirement” for the commonweal, an all-out, angry battle.

The two sides, increasingly, only read what reinforces hardened opinions, only speak to those who fully agree, only live around “people just like them.” The vitriol of some talk show hosts and easily angered movements, is what Big Sort authors Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing might term a type of “ideological road rage.”

I sense in extremists today, the same incalcitrance that led to this nation’s tragic Civil War over slavery and other cultural and economic issues a little more than 60 years after its founding.

Ironically, that one was triggered by the election of a Republican President vowing change just as today’s civil war of words and vitriol, in my view, has been triggered by the election of our nation’s first African-American President because it symbolizes a public acceptance that “ideological road ragers” apparently can’t accept because it means other divides can be overcome.

I so hope I’m wrong. Maybe a new generation coming up will repopulate our Congress with moderates who will again be unafraid of bi-partisan dialogue and accommodation and compromise and rescue us from what we know from experience is the result of unchecked “ideological road rage.”

I’m an optimist by nature so maybe it is an alarm that comes with age but I must admit I don’t have a good feeling about this one. God Bless America and I, oh, so hope I’m wrong.

Note: Some of the ideas expressed above evolved or emerged from my recent reading and re-reading of The Big Sort, a must read for anyone who cares about the future of this Country, Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Liberal (or Moderate,) passionate or dispassionate, young or old…