Americans Can Hold Contradictions – Why Not Lawmakers

Anyone bent on loosening regulations on water quality and environmental protection overall is well advised to look at the new Harris Poll.

It shows that 77% of Americans support stricter environmental protection, a ratio of more than 3-to-1. This includes 58% of Republicans.

Showing the strength of those sentiments, those who feel strongly are 4 to 1 in favor of stricter environmental protection.

Americans also support less government regulation by a ratio of 2.4 to 1, including 57% of Democrats and 76% of Independents.

Those who feel strongly are 4.6-to-1 in favor of less government regulation.

Of course, according to Republican friends of mine who have held high office, opposition in that party is more about the fact that regulations aren’t being enforced and when they are, all too often it is unevenly.

So why is it then, that seemingly well-intended Republican lawmakers at the state and national level seem so indiscriminate when it comes to what they call regulation reform?

Some pundits speculate that it is a passive-aggressive reaction among those who have not had to actually govern before.  Others think it is because they hear or listen only to an eco-chamber of confirmation bias.

Others fear it is due to “solution aversion,” or what’s called “motivated skepticism.”

But it might be as simple as the inability for many people to “hold contradictions in creative tension,” a condition that seems to escalate when people are elected to high office where they become adversarial listeners.

It’s the same discomfort that prevents so many of us from thinking strategically, a discomfort with uncertainty, paradox and ambiguity.

There is a term for the inability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously.  Researchers In psychology call it cognitive dissonance.

It makes some elected officials seem suddenly too stupid to accept what their constituents obviously can, the seeming paradoxical views that we need stricter environmental protection and less government regulation.

Or is it that special interests won’t let them?

The issue of gun rights is another example.  By a margin of 59% to 41%, Americans support stricter gun control including more than a third of Republicans.

Americans opposed to stricter gun measures also include 43% of Independents and 20% of Democrats.

Those who feel strongly in favor of stricter gun control (38%) outnumber those strongly opposed (24%) according to the Harris poll.

Even more telling though, according to recent Pew poll, is that even a majority of NRA member households while adamant about protecting gun rights are also heavily (74%) in favor some measures of gun control such as background checks for private gun sales.

In fact, a third also support bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.

Political ideology has been defined as “an interrelated set of moral and political attitudes that possesses cognitive, affective, and motivational components.”

It may be useful as a means to funnel and align ideas but it can also make us blind to subtleties and contradictions we hold.  At its worst though, in the words of Pope Francis, it makes us “hostile and arrogant” as well as stupid.

Many of us want desperately for our states and nation to be led by lawmakers who can hold contradictions such as those I’ve used as examples in this essay but that will mean more than a swing of the pendulum of whose in the majority.

As Americans, we each need to be better at expressing the contradistinctions we hold rather than just hoping elected officials more diligently read opinion polls.

In his extraordinary book entitled Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, Dr. Parker J. Palmer, a Quaker educator and writer, notes that five interwoven habits of the heart are needed.

He uses two words to summarize all five: “chutzpah and humility.”

By chutzpah he means having “a voice that needs to be heard and the right to speak it.”

By humility he means “accepting the fact that my truth is always partial and may not be true at all – so I need to listen with openness and respect, especially to “the other,” as much as I need to speak my own voice with clarity and conviction.”

Usually, anyone running for office has the first on steroids.

When we elect representatives, I dare say that it is the latter that should guide our choice.

A Promising Sign Regarding Sign Desecration

Results of a new poll of North Carolina voters shows that when it comes to provisions of a new billboard bill, legislators who have felt insulated may finally be risking support at the ballot box.

As smoothly and many feel deceptively crafted as SB 320 and HB 304 were  by the billboard lobby, North Carolinians are overwhelmingly opposed to its provisions.

But bi-partisan voter opposition to bills that favor out-of-state billboard companies isn’t new.  More telling this time is that the opposition is strong regardless of gender and geography.

Historically, men have been less protective of scenic preservation but this time they poll even more opposed to these bills than women.

Opposition to provisions such as permitting digital even where they are now prohibited runs 2 to 1 in the northeast and southeast and 3 to 1 along the mountains and metro areas where cities have already permitted them.

Of course, opposition is also high across the age groups billboarders and their remaining advertisers are trying hardest to reach.  The poll shows 5-to-1 opposed for those between age 30 and 45, increasing to 8-to-1 opposed among those age 46-65.

Of particular note to the few advertisers still using billboards is the high turn-off to turn-on ratio they have among consumers they are hoping to reach.

But most revealing is how voters plan to hold supporters accountable.

For a decade now, studies have found that elected officials are rarely held accountable at the ballot box, in part, because “the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally,” opening the door for special interests.

This is why a tax loophole, one of the six largest, permits billboard companies to escape paying their share of taxes by claiming their profits are only “rents.” 

Ironically, “rent-seeking” is also the word economists use to describe when companies such as these work the political system to gain favorable treatment rather than working to create economic value in the marketplace.

Similarly, this new legislation would also create another big loophole, permitting thousands of illegal billboards to become legal overnight, further desecrating the North Carolina brand.

To further assault North Carolina taxpayers, if passed and signed by the Governor, this new legislation will also guarantee billboard companies millions of dollars for each one that is removed when it comes time to widen the roadway.

This, even though the courts have ruled the billboards parasitic property because they would have no value in the first place were it not for the taxpayer funded roadways.

However, according to the poll, Tar Heel voters recognize that this is essentially a tax increase on them to benefit out-of-state billboard companies, not exactly the kind of tax-shifting voters like.

This provision in the proposed North Carolina legislation made voters overall less likely to support a legislator who votes for the bill by almost 5-to-1, including 4-to-1 among Republican voters.

If voters remember and follow through come election time, this would represent a sea-change where elected officials are held more accountable for actions they felt were safe in the past because they harmed only those who were not their constituents.

It is a mistaken calculus often used by organizations such as chambers of commerce and more passively, some tourism organizations, which align with the 1/5th of Carolinians who ally with the billboarders, including some doing so in direct opposition to the wishes of businesses and residents in their communities.

This latest poll may reveal not just overwhelming opposition but emergence of a resentment that could drive North Carolina voters to ban billboards altogether one day as voters have in some other states.

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.

Opening Up to Infidels

In my late 20s I developed the habit of reading and listening to a lot of sources with which I didn’t always or even often agree, something that served me well and that readers may detect from time to time in these essays.

The John Locke think tank here in North Carolina has been one of those sources after it was founded just after I was recruited in 1989 to Durham, NC, where I finished the last half of my career.

Ostensibly non-partisan, to me and many others it leans right.

Even though I am a Progressive-leaning Independent, a friend there kiddingly reassured me that “they let in a lot of infidels” when I heard from a public policy scholar I have followed for the past decade or so, that he was slotted to speak this week to that Raleigh-based foundation.

Dr. Heywood Sanders flew into RDU last Sunday for a luncheon speech at the extremely business friendly Locke Foundation.  I couldn’t make it down to Raleigh at his invitation or even to the airport to meet in person due to people here who were picking my brain.

A word about misuse of airport reference before I get into his message.

For readers who think airports are always synonymous with places, Raleigh is a separate metro area east and slightly south of the airport it co-owns with Durham which lies upland and further west.

Located in Morrisville, NC, the name of the airport is misleading because more than 70 years ago, a Raleigh developer hoodwinked a Federal agency into reversing the order of the names in the airport.

I am not sure he was so strategic as to know that pilots, FAA beacons, flight crews and gate agents notoriously truncate the names of shared airports, ultimately confusing visitors, irritating more than half of their passengers and while not intentional, playing favorites.

The Locke Foundation must be credited because researchers there had already noted the complicity of urban businesses and land owners in what Sanders terms “convention  center follies” in his new book by that name, detailing more than a hundred years of public facility development.

Feel free to substitute stadiums, arenas or performing arts centers.

Sanders has been personally defamed by most of my then-peers in community marketing since January 2005 when he published research on the topic at Brookings, a national think tank.

He sounded a warning that Locke researchers also relayed a year later to no avail to policy makers and businesses here in North Carolina.

At the same time, North Carolina tourism expert Dr. Dana Clark at Appalachian State University and a former DMO exec began to publish cautions in tourism journals.

Had they read or listened, Raleigh officials would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars up front and hundreds of millions more downstream and still have achieved the same ratio of convention delegates to overall visitors.

But as one news editorial there put it, officials were consumed with “Charlotte-envy,” a variant of what political science researchers call “ego rent” in studies of elected officials.

But Sanders-vilifying community marketing execs shouldn’t have been surprised except at how detailed his research was taking shape.

Seven years earlier, consultants at ERA had similarly cautioned urban economic development executives in 1998 in a presentation entitled:

“If You Build It, Will They Come?: Stadiums, Arenas and Convention Centers.”

A year before Sanders published his Brookings paper, consultant Ernst & Young wrote a white paper warning cities, community destination marketing organizations, other consultants and urban developers that the supply of convention center space was ignoring the long term decline in demand as early as 1995.

In fact, Sanders had begun publishing studies and making presentations since the early 1980s noting the flawed use of urban infrastructure and the disturbingly opaque combinations formed among elected officials, private property owners and urban development advocates.

Sanders’ specialty after earning a PhD. at Harvard in 1977 has been the politics of urban renewal and revitalization.  One of his early warnings about misuse of public infrastructure is 1984’s “Urban Politics and Local Public Facilities.”

He first sounded warnings about convention centers specifically as early as 1992, each time digging deeper and deeper into reports and public information easily available if so inclined to the mainstream press or to policy makers eager to learn from past miscalculations.

One of his first warnings about convention centers is a classic 1997 white paper published by the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research, a Massachusetts free market think tank and predecessor to the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina.

Anyone paying attention to data back then, as I happened to be while reviewing some of the very first trend reports on conventions and meetings published in the mid to late-1970s, could see that the emerging decline in demand from conventions and meetings was systemic, not anecdotal.

One or two hotel chain executives even began to remark about the decline in the early 1980s as those meeting facilities gained popularity over convention centers.

Yet the amount of convention center space across the nation skyrocketed from just 7 million s.f. in 1973 as I began my four-decade career in community marketing in Spokane to nearly 15 million by 1989 when I started the last half of my three-city career in Durham.

It had nearly quadrupled by 1995 when Charlotte, NC inexplicably tore down one convention center and opened another five times larger, but destined to only perform on par despite huge subsidies to lure groups.

Raleigh officials had no excuse a decade later when, driven by envy and in part by the sniping they read from a consultant to the Charlotte project, did likewise. 

Even those who did look at the data often made two tragic errors.  They would zoom in too tightly on a timeframe to truly see a long term trend and/or fail to notice that each dip went lower than the last and each rebound peaked lower than the last.

Those anecdotally driven would dismiss this, rationalizing that with  tens of millions in more development, surely their cities could buck the trend, showing projections mysteriously going straight up.

Heywood doesn’t talk from his book in the speech in Raleigh a few days ago but at the request of Locke researchers, filled in part of what a North Carolina chapter would have been.

He uses an illustration in a new update to the Downtown master plan for Raleigh that calls for expansion of its underperforming, heavily subsidized convention center, which is hypothesizing that somehow performance in the future will skyrocket by 18% a year.

Sanders’ study of urban politics and accountability dates back to the 1980s.

His co-edited collection, The Politics of Urban Development, was already a classic when I arrived in Durham in 1989, and the perfect companion to urbanologist Alan Ehrenhalt’s The United States of Ambition published in 1992.

Dr. Sanders’ work is about the misuse of tourism or visitor-centered economic and cultural development such as his presentation in 1998 entitled “A Plethora of Disneylands: The Promise and Politics of Conventions and Tourism.”

Rather than vilifying Sanders, those in my former field of community marketing need to pull their heads out of their cognitive feedback loop where they incessantly mutter among themselves that politicians and supply-side economic developers just don’t get it.

Dr. Sanders is actually making their point.

Except far too many in that profession fail to grasp what point that is.

Everyone thinks they are rationale, enlightened and open-minded but we’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs.

But according to Dr. Jonathan Haidt, fundamentally we are intuitive, not rational.  However, studies show that “forced to reflect for two minutes on a different point of view can make us substantially more tolerant.” 

Try it and then invite Dr. Sanders as a conference speaker.  Even the John Locke Foundation welcomes infidels.

My bet is that one day a new generation of grateful DMO execs will give him a lifetime appreciation award.

Inattention Where It Most Matters

I read the news and I vote.  But frankly like a lot of people, I always end up on voting day finding myself standing there unprepared to make a choice for some offices.

A friend of mine recently pointed me to a solution.  In North Carolina, a non-partisan group, the North Carolina Center for Voter Education has teamed with UNC-TV to provide a website called the 2014 N.C. Voter Guide.

You plug in your address and the website takes you through your ballot, office by office, candidate by candidate with a summary of their background and positions.

At each step you can choose if you like to mark a preference and then at the end you can print out a completed ballot to take with you inside the voting booth.

It is also a place you can go to check your registration, find a polling place and see any new changes to voting requirements.

It is a lot easier to use than other past guides provided by news outlets which turned into something more like homework.

But I also wish there was a way when we vote, to reconsider candidates for whom we voted in the last election who have turned out to be a disappointment, even if just to send them a signal.

I’ve worked very closely, especially with state and local elected officials in my former life.

Sure, a few have been slimy, corrupt and passive aggressively smug in the realization that they won’t be detected behind the image they craft for public and media consumption.

But as a whole, locally elected officials are incredibly hard-working and honorable.

However, there have always been some, who once in office, seem to morph into someone else.  They go undetected even in personal interviews only to become the antitheses, once in office, of what you were led to believe when voting for them.

Maybe it is a case of what political science researchers call the “ego rent” some individuals begin to collect once elected to office.

Bored with executing the mundane policy preferences of constituents, pursuit of “ego rent” is why some start playing political games, making decisions based on incomplete or imbalanced feedback and ultimately fronting for special interests rather than voters.

But unfortunately, elections don’t come with a rescission period like there is for other decisions.

Local and state services represent about 40% of overall government spending and yet state decisions are often driven by officials for which only a few North Carolinians are given a choices.

For example, the horrific changes made a few years ago to clear cut public forestland along roadsides in favor of billboard blight was driven by just 19,381 voters, representing only one of the state’s 100 counties.

That is one of the inherent flaws in representative vs. popular democracy, the former now nearly obsolete.

But there is also growing evidence that as voters, we are far less likely to hold state and local officials accountable, even though they have far more influence over quality of life and the quality of the places we love.

There is also far too little news coverage in local elections.  Most is the superficial “he said, she said” type.  Taking editorial stances does not suffice for in-depth coverage and fact-checking.

For decades too, researchers have measured the bias toward national election coverage noting that in part, it is because it is easier and cheaper to cover.

Adverting simultaneous side-by-side fact-checking is no substitute, especially at the local level, where even cable channels do not reflect voting jurisdictions.

According to analysis by Borrell Associates, politicians and political organizations now spend $37 per eligible voter to sway opinion with media advertising, soon to be $51 in 2016, up 21% from the record setting 2012 Presidential election.

Are we really feeling more informed?  Or are the lies just getting more entertaining?  It is ironic that in the guise of so-called free speech this form is largely exempt from “truth in advertising” requirements.

At the local level, we also don’t have non-partisan, though often ideological, think-tanks making sense of budgets and rarely, okay never, are news outlets inclined or resourced sufficiently to go back through local decisions to analyze and report if the results were ever as claimed.

Voters also have no guarantee that the candidates are invested in the places they seek to represent, since many so-called local offices such as some levels of judges and prosecutors aren’t even required to be residents of the places they serve.

Partisan gerrymandering of districts over the last two decades have also estranged voters from those who are their only hope of representation in the legislature.

It is no wonder so many elections have such little turnout.  I feel patriotic when I vote but many now just don’t see the point.

Websites such as the one I noted at the beginning help.  But the systems needs an overhaul and not just the less than veiled partisan elimination of early voting days and I.D. complications.

Government and public policy has never been more complicated nor the news media less empowered to unwrap it than it is today.

It isn’t much enough to know that the closer government is to the people, the more trust we have in it today.  Even at the local and state level, it is about where it was during the Watergate Era and that isn’t saying much.

A friend of mind once rationalized the flat, dispassionate lack of defense of public policy by rationalizing that voters have a lot of ways to find that out.

Oh really?  Maybe that’s where reform needs to begin.

By making budgets and regulations easier to decipher, by requiring audits and reports on every outcome promised, by making democracy responsive.