This Ongoing War 150 Years Later

In North Carolina, it’s no surprise to learn that “since 1960, one third of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion.”  Nor, according to scientists, that “46-58 thousand square miles of forest are lost each year – equivalent to 36 football fields every minute.”

Tar Heels have witnessed the link between depleted soils and deforestation in the decades before the Civil War when more than a third of North Carolinians moved away.

By 1850, 31% of native North Carolinians then living in the United States resided in some other state.

Backwardness regarding slavery and race relations as well as resistance to public education and infrastructure played a big role in the out migration as did poor land use practices by plantations.

It’s well documented by unapologetic historians such as the late Dr. William S. Powell.

I’ve been reading or rereading two others recently, one written the year I was born (1948) entitled From Slavery to Freedom and another just released entitled, The Old North State at War: The North Carolina Civil War Atlas.

Both shed new light.

The latter shows the population breakdown by race and freedom-status broken down by county just prior to the Civil War, as well as the vote by county for or against succession.

You can see a divide back then running down between what is now Durham and Wake/Raleigh with 5 points more slave-holders in Wake.

Wake/Raleigh also had twice the number of slaves as Durham/Orange and nearly three times the number of free Blacks out of 30,463 statewide.

There were a little more than 125,000 households in North Carolina in 1860 and 28.2% owned slaves.

Yet in 1861, Durham/Orange voted by more than 3 to 1 against succession from the Union while Wake/Raleigh voted for it by a few hundred votes.

As the rhetoric heated, the state as a whole was almost evenly split on the issue with a slight nod against.  People’s minds back then were more focused on the wealthy paying more in taxes here.

Within weeks though, secessionists won out both because of a general sentiment of “you can’t tell us what to do” and being surrounded by states that had or were succeeding.

The North won the Civil War that resulted, which effectively ended with a surrender in Durham.  Thanks to resistance by Southern Generals Lee and Johnston there wasn’t the subsequent guerilla war Southern leaders wanted.

But that didn’t mean war was over.

Another war erupted almost immediately between Democrats who were controlled by white supremacists and Republicans.

Just as a small percentage of the population had monopolized power in North Carolina and kept it backward, then pushed it into a war to defend slavery as a way of life for a few, a similarly small percentage held power in this follow up war.

Political rhetoric is powerful as we still see today.  It can close minds more easily than open them, something given comprehensive coverage a few days ago in an On the Media radio show entitled Lies, Lies, Lies.  

Republicans lost this follow up war and soon became all but extinct across the South because the party had became divided into an increasingly conflict-weary faction seeking social justice leading to a takeover by its Wall Street wing.

Just as Democrats had become divided into factions over slavery leading up to the Civil War, resulting in President Lincoln’s election, factionalized Republicans lost the follow up-struggle.

Following the South’s defeat and preservation of the Union in the Civil War, reunited Democrats fell sway to the rhetoric of a small fraction of white supremacists who this time sought not only to reinstate limitations on civil liberties, but to virtually annihilate the Republican Party in the South, which they did.

As a result, civil rights in the reunified country were put on hold for another hundred years and even today, seem lodged between ongoing institutionalized bias on one hand and a futile obsession with effacing racist symbols on the other.

The two political parties have switched roles today.

It began gradually in the decades leading up to the 1930s on issues of social and environmental justice, then became increasingly apparent after WWII and symbolized by the 1960s.

As someone who was raised a staunch Republican which I remained until nearly 25, I have been particularly interested in the history of the Republican and Democratic parties.

My Republican roots go back to the party’s founding.  But many of those ancestors would no longer be welcome there.  People who sense I lean Progressive probably don’t realize that it is the Republican Party that has shifted.

Understanding how the parties have evolved helps me understand how I briefly moved to the left in my mid-20s before finding my comfort zone as an Independent except wherever forced to briefly sign up so I could vote in primaries.

Today it is Republican ideology that seems to view everything as a threat to way of life, dominated by a few who seem to want to annihilate not only Democrats but anyone who dares to be moderate.

We see it in the refusal to negotiate or reach bipartisan agreement, even when Democrats sign on to Republican-generated innovations such as carbon credits or healthcare overhaul using exchanges that emulate the requirement for car insurance.

Further evidence is research showing that the root of Republican opposition to addressing climate change is the knee-jerk stereotyping of anyone concerned about the environment as a “watermelon,” green on the outside, red (as in Commie for you Millennials) on the outside.

The one thing that remains constant is that just as a tiny minority held North Carolina back after the U.S. was founded and the Civil War was fought to preserve the way of life lived by only 28% of Tar Heels, policies here are still driven by a small percentage in power.

The only thing certain is that the pendulum will swing yet again, but not the problem.

The parties may reverse roles yet again one day and apologists, as always, will try to smooth everything over like propagandists did between 1866 and 1966 by transforming the issue of slavery into “states’ rights.”

Democracy truly exists only when a majority of people vote, not just when the vote is a majority of those showing up.   Maybe similar to governing boards, popular elections should be valid only when there is a quorum?

As a moderate Independent who more and more has a little “time on him” as they say in my native Idaho, I am more and more aware of the dangers of failing to admit to myths when in pursuit of greatness as a nation or perpetuating a way of life.

I know far too many reasonable Republicans and far too many crazy Democrats to believe the rhetoric when one or the other party gives in to zero sum thinking.

But as President George Washington lamented in 1795, the problem may be in the nature of political parties, meant as a means to help people make decisions but then used as a reason not to think:

“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Lament indeed!

Unmoored

Members of the Republican Party often repeat an old saw - “If you’re young and not a Democrat, you’re heartless. If you grow up and you’re not a Republican, you’re stupid.”

This quip though, was first uttered with quite a different meaning by the mid-nineteenth century French historian and statesman François Guizot when he stated, “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.”

Today, some former Republicans argue that the party has become anything but “republican.”

Between the ages of 20 and 30, I went from Republican to Democrat to Independent.  A new Pew study refers to that as becoming “unmoored” as I did from several institutions during that period including organized religion.

According to the study, 50% of Millennials, a generation now ranging in age from 18 to 33, are political Independents and about 3-in-10 are religiously unaffiliated.  However, they also stand out as voting heavily Democratic and for liberal views.

They are also far less trusting than other generations, especially boomers, my generation, but also more upbeat about the future.

The study sheds light on why Republicans are so desperate to take away privileges they see as benefiting Democrats such as early voting, funding check offs on tax returns, voter ID requirements, etc.  The party is losing ground even faster with Millennials than Democrats.

The study charts the rise of Independents among every generation in recent years and the dramatic drop in every generation except the very oldest for Republicans.

Boomers, for instance, are now 37% Independent, 32% Democrat and 25% Republican, although a new survey shows Americans who are 65 and older now leaning slightly Republican, unfortunately because they are more white the analysis finds.

In North Carolina, where I live, Independents are now the fastest growing group, and consultants project these voters are likely to outnumber registered Republicans in most counties by 2016.

Independents leaning Republican are also in decline among younger generations, flat among boomers and up only among the very oldest of Americans, giving thought that those using the old saw mentioned above should adjust the age of transition by several decades.

After years of nomenclature demonization, more than a little of it self-inflicted, it is interesting to note in the study that the percentage identifying themselves as liberal has trended up in every generation during this century while favorable views of the major parties have trended down.

Maybe Republican demonization of government has had unintended consequences.  Millennials are much less patriotic than other generations as well as less likely to consider themselves religious or environmentalist and far less loyal to employers.

They are becoming “unmoored” from Republicans as well.

The Revolution Behind Our Revolution

Ideologies evolve.  In a documentary aired a few months ago, a North Carolina conservative spokesman dismissed the participants in Moral Mondays by claiming comparisons with the civil rights movement were laughable.

More sincerely and without revealing any sense of irony, he questioned “those who equate it with the 60s and 50s and some of the great struggles in history,” movements that were opposed by conservatives at the time.

To an Independent like me, it seems ideologies on the right or left tend to make progress in a circular, two steps forward and one step back but usually moving forward.

Two books that I read in 1991 and 1992, shortly after moving to Durham, seem even more relevant today.  One was entitled The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office by journalist Alan Ehrenhalt.

It traced a number of localities as case studies where a relatively few members of an ideology - both on the right and left – were out of step with the general local electorate at the time, but still able to assume power and execute change.

His latest book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, is a particularly good read in light of recent efforts in the North General Assembly to override this progress, including a new effort this week by a powerful state senator to strip away tree ordinances.

The other book I read in the early 1990s is entitled, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Dr. Gordon S. Brown.

Packed with citations and statistics, the book makes the argument that what we view as the American Revolution in the narrow sense was really the culmination of more than two decades of social and cultural disruption here.

In fact, the war was in opposition to a conservative effort to turn back those changes.  Following Independence, the founders made a concerted effort to evolve a new, more modern set of social and cultural adhesives to hold the new society together.

Conservative resistance to social and cultural change may go back at least to two thousand BC and the requirement for people to have last names, something more broadly but gradually implemented in the English-speaking world after the Norman invasion of William The Conqueror.

But this was nothing like the reaction to the wholesale changes in the American colonies leading up to the Revolution.  There was a breakdown in vertical social strata among classes.  Wealth was no longer viewed as trickle down.

Land ownership and working for a living became the standard across classes along with rampant land speculation.  The patriarchal family devolved including introduction of divorce laws and inheritance changes.  Hundreds of evangelical religions surfaced.

The population, which doubled in 25 years (six-fold in North Carolina,) included hundreds of thousands of immigrants.  Manners gave way to defiance of authority.  People no longer stayed in place and transience and poverty increased.  No longer did “everyone belong somewhere.”

People began to run for office regardless of their station in life and voting increased.  Entrepreneurism took hold and people began to produce surplus for trade rather than subsistence.  Contracts replaced handshakes.

Gone was the notion held by social conservatives that “only poverty and starvation would induce common people to work.” Hierarchal structure was eaten away or transformed by classical style republicanism which became used as a pejorative much as the label “liberal” has been made today.

In general, there was a radical, two-decade long, counter-cultural desacralization in America that makes the 1960s seem very tame by comparison.

Conservatives responded back then by desperately trying to make it hard to move, harder to vote and run for office and advocating a general return to cultural norms.

This was the period from around 1750 until 1775, a time of great anxiety and change like none other witnessed before or since in such a concentrated span.

As a society we seem to work best when those reluctant about change serve as a soft brake on the pace of change rather than a dogmatic regression.  The genius of the American Revolution set the stage for eventual emancipation and the full extension of equal rights.

The founders did not limit their development of social and cultural adhesives to just government institutions.  They set about through promotion of a liberal arts education to socially re-engineer America, including using utensils to eat, brushing your teeth and not talking loudly in public to name a few.

By the second decade of the 1800s, Americans were “already referring to themselves as a society dominated by the ‘middling” sort’, a term for the middle class.

But the founders were never able to resolve an issue that raised its head almost immediately and still plagues democracy today.  They were unable to protect government for the common good from self-interests which has become overwhelming since the bicentennial of the Revolution in the mid-1970s.

Those who profiteered during the Revolutionary War pushed to see that continued, overwhelming the wishes by the founders to focus government on the collective, common good.

It is painful to read Brown’s account of the debate over special interest group politics, especially in light of its predominance today.  In the lament of President George Washington:

“the few, therefore, who act upon Principles of disinterestedness are comparatively speaking, no more than a drop in the Ocean.”

Today, we’re still locked into what The Economist magazine’s Lexington Blog calls “zero sum politics” where we hear and believe only the worst each political party says about the other:

“the Right has done a fine job of convincing lots of Americans that Democrats are the party for the undeserving poor…The Left, meanwhile, has successfully portrayed Republicans as the party for the heartless rich.”

As an Independent, I just want to rid government of self-interests.  Period.

An Unlikely End-Run

So much of what is wrong with society today can be traced back to about the time I was just graduating from college in 1972.

Back then there were just 175 registered lobbying firms according to an incredible article published this month by Stanford professor Dr. Francis Fukuyama, one of the neo-conservative founders of the magazine, The American Interest.

Roadside billboard barons back then were busy gutting the Highway Beautician Act but they stood out as exceptions and now I know why.  Today, having pacified virtually any enforcement of that act, a group such as this has become the rule at every level of government.

It is no coincidence that Americans now rank Congress next to last among professions regarding honesty and ethical standards.  Even lower is the ranking for lobbyists.

Reading that the number of lobbying firms increased 14-fold alone during just the first decade of my now concluded four-decade career in sense-of-place economic development before reaching a whopping 13,700 by the time I retired years ago, brought to mind an eloquent rant I listened to on the return leg of a cross-country road trip last fall.

One of the advantages of being a long-time political independent is being free to glean insight from all along the ideological spectrum.  The End Game for Democracy by progressive-leaning journalist and commentator Bill Moyer goes hand in hand with Dr. Fukuyama’s article on the other end of the spectrum.

The conservative columnist, David Brooks recommends that strengthening the executive branch is the solution.  A moderate Republican friend of mine and former local official would probably agree.  He speculates that regulations have become cumbersome and rigid primarily because so many executives fail to enforce them.

Fukuyama’s article appeared a few days after New York Times coverage of a new report by investor-inspired CDP showing that nearly 30 of America’s largest corporations including five major oil companies are not waiting for Congress to break free of special interests blocking it from taking action to control global warming.

Realizing that a market based cap and trade system such as that working so well to reduce Acid Rain will ultimately be the most cost effective way to reduce emissions, these corporations have already begun to incorporate a price on carbon in long range plans.

This hopeful news followed a report a week earlier in The Atlantic magazine about a community of more than 830 businesses across 28 countries and 60 industries worldwide enrolled in B Corps, a way to use market-based, scalable solutions “to compete not just to be the best in the world but the best for the world.”

The authors of the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, who categorize themselves as libertarian paternalists, would likely agree.  These efforts are nudges to do the right thing.

Many states (20 have passed laws including Delaware and 18 more are working on it) are even establishing a new category of business incorporation called Benefit Corporations.  Unfortunately, North Carolina, where I live, lagging behind its neighbors to the north and south, is still one of 15 states failing to make progress, if not moving backwards.

The designation recognizes in a corporation’s legal DNA a signal to investors and consumers that this types of business considers what’s good for the earth and its inhabitants as good for good for business, a new style capitalism.

Together with certification programs such as Durham, NC-based Green Plus and a ground swell toward social entrepreneurism, I have hope that democratic institutions will one day be reclaimed from the stranglehold of “winner-take-all” special interests.

If reading all of this makes you feel as optimistic as it does me, click here for a report disclosing corporate and investor exposure to deforestation in terms of “operational, reputational and regulatory risks and opportunities and the value creation and erosion.”

Deforestation today contributes as much to greenhouse gas emissions as all of the cars, trucks, motorcycles, ships, airplanes and trains put together.  Look soon for “deforestation-free” designations in the marketplace.

And one day soon, this report will also help corporations understand their contribution to deforestation and value erosion from marketing departments that still condone roadside billboards.

Just sayin!

Green Infrastructure Is By Definition Moderate

Friends and readers of this blog often kid me that based on some of the topics in this blog, I often appear more progressive than moderate, as I claim.

I can see their point.  Moderates are eclectic in their views by nature.  But reading closely they will see that while I am passionate about green infrastructure, I often kid “eco-Talibans.”  I prefer bans such that result in recycling and recovery to those on consumer use.

I also believe biotech, or genetically modified, foods (GMO) can be extremely beneficial and not just because I live in Durham, NC, a center for biotechnology research, development and entrepreneurs.

I am also wary of mainframe solutions or one-size-fits all approaches institutionalized by regulations, uninformed by or restricted from practicality and inflexible to the spirit in which they were created.

I am particularly intrigued with solutions forged across seemingly ideological divides such as the case made for green infrastructure over gray infrastructure in a white paper published last month by scientists for The Dow Chemical Company, Shell, Swiss Re and Unilever in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy.

These organizations have unique histories.  About the time Dow was founded in Michigan in 1897, the business that pioneered bulk oil tankers in 1892 was being renamed Shell.  Swiss Re, a wholesale reinsurance pioneer against catastrophes, took on the hazards of operating railroads, following insuring the conveyance of visitors to the World’s Fair in Chicago.

At the time, Unilever had just created Lifebuoy Soap and was launching Sunlight flakes to revolutionize household cleaning.  Two decades later The Nature Conservancy (TNC) found roots first as a society for ecologists to “publish research and pursue an agenda to preserve natural areas.”

World War I had started and baseball slugging legend Babe Ruth began his career as a pitcher in Boston.  Officials in New York State had protected the Adirondacks and Cornell professor Liberty Hyde Bailey published The Holy Earth, elevating conservation stewardship to an ethical imperative.

Bailey had been born on the shores of Lake Michigan, 168 miles west and south of where Dow was founded - and is still headquartered - near Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron.  In 1908, he headed President Theodore Roosevelt’s national Country Life Commission.

L.H. Bailey died in 1952 when I was shy of four years old,  two years after The Ecological Society of America had been renamed The Nature Conservatory and less than three years before the organization founded the first “land preservation fund.”

Seadrift, Texas lies roughly midway between Houston and San Antonio, encompassed by the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge which protects it from the Gulf of Mexico.  Dow’s 4,700 acre plant in North Seadrift was established in 1954 by Union Carbide which it assumed as a subsidiary in 2001.

The two companies had been founded a year apart but Dow took a special interest in the Seadrift plant not because it makes plastics for wiring and drip irrigation or glycols for antifreeze and fabrics, but for its use of green infrastructure.

To expand in 1996, regulations required expanded water treatment facilities that would cost $40 million.  But an engineer, possibly inspired by witnessing the power of wetlands in the surrounding wildlife refuge, staked his career on an unconventional solution, construction of a wetland next to the plant.

At $1.4 million, it was far less expensive and now treats 5 million gallons of water per day while meeting all regulatory standards.  As a bonus it provides habitat for wildlife.  One of the few downsides, as noted in the white paper, is that it first required a 1 to 2 year pilot project and it covers 110 acres as opposed to 4-5 acres for a treatment plant.

Dow is currently taking this tactical success to a strategic level and re-evaluating the feasibility of green infrastructure substitutes to a number of its gray infrastructure practices.  The paper also discussed a project in Oman where Shell is using commercial wetlands to treat water from oil drilling.

The white paper also gives a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) of green infrastructure, an overview of risk management solutions, as well as recommendations for how to make green infrastructure alternatives scalable.

Experts from Swiss Re have a special purpose for their involvement.  The company is in the business of managing risks, including that from global climate change, for which it has been a harbinger.  While many in high office hold solutions to that issue hostage, the free market is taking it very seriously.

Officials in my adopted home of Durham are working hard to deploy green infrastructure by taking a page from its past.  As can be seen by torrential downpours here of late, the city’s park, many of which were created on floodplains, also serve as giant retention ponds to slow and cleanse run-off.

Now in an effort to purify two of Durham’s urban streams, Ellerbe and South Ellerbe creeks, as well as a Durham lake created in the 1970s as a water supply for Raleigh located further downstream, storm water officials are proposing to create a wetland where an abandoned fitness center sits in the floodplain.

The proposed site sits at a low spot that drains nearly 480 acres of storm water runoff from Downtown and the lower part of the historic Trinity Park neighborhood.  It would cleanse this water of pollutants gathered from the impervious surface of the urban core and then slowly release them to control flooding.

Hopefully, when complete, The Dow Chemical Company’s strategic assessment of a holistic, company-wide application of green infrastructure applications will include full-cost accounting.  To fully address sustainability, it will have to not only offset the company’s footprint on the environment but give back.

As its founder, Herbert H. Dow. once remarked – “If you can’t do it better, why do it?”  Companies may never be able to outperform nature, but there is a stewardship obligation to first, do no harm.”

As disheartening as it is to see those in high office try to undo stewardship, I am heartened by what may become the full embrace of the marketplace.

Tracing Partisanship

Moderates are nearly extinct in the Republican Party.  In an interview today (28.25 mark) on the Diane Rehm Show, Olympia Snowe, a Republican moderate who has just retired from the U.S. Senate seemed to date the divide only to President Obama’s administration.

But a recently published study shows that the partisanship that gridlocks Congress today actually began during the first President Bush, also a moderate Republican, after gradually growing during the the terms of conservative President Ronald Reagan.

It really picked up steam during the so-called Conservative Republican Revolution of 1994 and its subsequent attempt to remove from office a moderate-Democrat, President Bill Clinton.

Present-day partisanship reached its zenith under the second President Bush, a conservative, and has actually moderated under President Obama, considered a liberal but who by many measures has actually governed more from the center.

My take comes from an analysis that was mapped senator by senator, session by session from 1975 through 2012 by two researchers. One is Dr. James Moody a sociology researcher and leader of the Duke Network Analysis Center here in Durham, North Carolina.

He teamed up with research mathematician Dr. Peter Mucha at the main campus of the University of North Carolina, several miles south in Chapel Hill, North Carolina which is part of the same metro area north and east of one centered around North Carolina’s capital city, Raleigh (just to be non-partsian.)

To my eye, the analysis, published last month, also appears to reveal that while endangered, moderate Republicans as of 2012 may even be more apparent today than moderate Democrats, a party home to a far greater proportion of moderate voters.

The mapping also seems to reveal that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was far more divisive than the 2010 overhaul of healthcare.  It also shows that during the prior event Congress was more polarized than a previous high in 1910 but fell below that benchmark during and after the latter.

It also revealed to me more about the relatively new discipline of network science which cuts across social and physical sciences to study relationships and interactions in areas like health, culture, organizations, science and politics.

Maybe it just because I am a moderate, independent of either political party, but this statistical and behavioral analysis has certainly given me a much better appreciation of the depth and breadth of political partisanship.

One of the Most Dangerous Occupations is Wasteful

Yesterday was the day in the Durham, North Carolina neighborhood where I live, for “getting it up” as sanitation workers often refer to the weekly pick up of garbage and recyclables.

A sleek, newer model, Leach rear-loader came up the street interrupting an exchange with my neighbor about food waste and his past as an underwear model and Broadway musical performer.

That line of work (picking up garbage and recyclable, not modeling underwear/musicals) was the fourth most dangerous line of work in 2011.  It varies slightly each year but it is always more dangerous than law enforcement or firefighting.

Our neighborhood is usually served by one of those one-person trucks with a long arm that reaches out and empties the container.  A crew of three operated the rear-loader yesterday, reminding me of my job as a summer vacation replacement working on a a much earlier rear-loader model out west in 1967 between my first and second year of college.

Back then the waste stream for food was proportionately 50% less than it now.  Even so, my parents may not have known the danger I was in.

Or maybe they knew that work on a ranch or a farm such as the one where I was born and spent my early years in the nook of Idaho just outside Yellowstone Park ranks during most years just ahead of or slightly behind refuse and recyclable collectors as the most dangerous.

Maybe they were just glad that my stint spraying Lodgepole Pines to fight an infestation of Mountain Pine Beetle in the northern reaches of Targhee National Forest lasted only a month.  Logging is almost always the second most dangerous occupation, although I’m sure inhaling DDT overspray had its risks, too.

Picking Up is a new book by anthropologist Dr. Robin Nagle at NYU.  Focused on New York City, it is an informative and funny history of sanitation work over the last several hundred years, including a time when people who picked up the garbage were celebrated even more than doctors as lifesavers doctors.

Discarding unused food may be one of the most wasteful behaviors in America.  A recent report by food and agriculture scientist Dana Gunders, entitled Wasted: How America is Losing Up to 40% of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill, is fascinating.

In the U.S. food eats up 10% of energy, uses 50% of land and 80% of all freshwater consumed here.  According to the analysis, “Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion of food each year,” fueling a significant portion of greenhouse gases and climate change.

It hasn’t always been this way.  In the 1970s, a few years after my stint on a sanitation truck, Americans were wasting half as much food. Currently, throughout the supply chain and in places such as our homes and restaurants, we’re wasting 38% of the grain, 50% of the seafood, 52% of the fruits and vegetables, 22% of the meat and 20% of the milk produced.

Part of the solution is eating food grown closer to home.  The number of farmer’s markets have more than doubled to more than 6,000 in just the last 10 years.  Unfortunately, in supermarkets up to one in seven perishables delivered is thrown away.

Losses such as these are also a problem in conference hotels and convention centers.  Within a couple of years from when we launched the community-destination marketing organization for Durham in 1989, that organization became one of the first in a network called “Food for the Hungry.”

Coordinated by Profession Convention Management Association (PCMA,) it launched one of the first programs to coordinate the donation of unused perishable or prepared food from banquets to organizations here serving people in need.

The issue of food waste has also spawned worldwide growth in a phenomena known as “Freeganism” including a reality TV show called Waste Cooking, not to be confused with the episode of Seinfeld where the character George Constanza gets caught rescuing an éclair from the trash at a dinner party.

A report in the U.K. estimates removing food scraps there from landfills would abate the equivalent in greenhouse gases of a fifth of all the cars in that country.

Hopefully, I haven’t used any semantics that a new study shows can turn off many Conservatives.  But at least I know they may be attentive from the perspective of sanitation workers.  Conservatives are nearly twice as likely to watch TV shows about blue-collar jobs as Liberals.

Only slightly less likely are Independents such as me!

Gun-Loving, Tree-Hugging, HOG-Driving and Flag-Waving

I love guns, so imagine my surprise last Friday when the Governor of Texas labeled me as among those “who hate guns, hate gun owners.”  It reminded me of a time shortly after I moved to Durham, North Carolina to jumpstart the community’s destination marketing organization.

Part of my job was to defend Durham, which I did every day.  Not long after I got here, I received word from a colleague that a law enforcement official in a nearby county noted that I had best careful if ever traveling through there.  Gulp!

Guns were a part of life where I was born.  I spent my early years on a horse and cattle ranch along the Henry’s Fork on the Idaho side of the Tetons, but it wasn’t my grandfathers or even my rancher father who first taught me to shoot.

They all viewed guns as useful tools around ranch and farmland to protect livestock or occasionally to harvest a head as food, usually including one or two for neighbors or friends.  Occasionally they would hunt with friends, but my father who was a 35th Tank Battalion veteran, always seemed ambivalent about firearms.

It was my substitute 4th grade teacher who first taught me to handle a rifle and enjoy target shooting, along with her son and our mutual best friend.

Similarly, I learned that my proud Roosevelt Democrat great-grandfather would famously stop the school bus he drove for years along the route out to Cedar Fort, Utah and teach the kids how to handle and shoot a rifle.  Earlier in life he had been a sharpshooter atop trains transporting gold from the mines at nearby Mercur.

My brush with a kindler, gentler and far more reasonable and collaborative NRA was while obtaining a marksmanship merit badge on my way to earning Eagle Scout in the years before that organization was hijacked by the gun hardliners.

With all due respect to Governor Perry and the NRA, a lot of people who love guns also believe that more thorough background checks are reasonable and won’t “take them out of the hands of those who use them properly and legally” as he threatens.

Based on the views of my 84-year-old conservative Republican mom who sees the universal background checks as reasonable, maybe the Governor was just playing to the narrative to which his NRA audience has been restricted.

My mom could easily ascertain that the checks were designed not to enable a registry which the legislation prohibited or to stop criminals but to make illicit sales more difficult and illegal trade in firearms easier to trace.  We are both among the 86% of Americans who support the extension of background checks to those buying online and at gun shows.

To be fair, one should listen to the Governor’s speech in context.  He and his audience are equally well-advised to read the now-tabled legislation and its failed bi-partisan amendment rather than rely on paid lobbyists and special interests.

As a political independent, I’m disgusted when people pander to any ideology at the expense of good policy, regardless of their party affiliation or where they fall on the political spectrum.

I lose patience for those who want to make it harder to vote but easier to have firearms.  Or those who want safety-net recipients checked for drug use but want to protect the illicit gun trade or those who resent federal interference but make every attempt to override democracy at the local level.

There are reasonable arguments for all of these each issues but this inconsistency and hypocrisy undermines them.

It is easy to demonize opposing views as many speakers have at the recent NRA event.  To better understand both gun “lovers” and “haters,” I recommend a humorous new book entitled Gun Guys: A Road Trip, by journalist and gun guy Dan Baum.

My gun guy cred is limited to family keepsakes but I found that Baum put a more human face on people involved with guns than does the NRA.  He also gives a much better perspective on views across the ideological spectrum on the issue.

Unfortunately though, it seems that far too many on the right are now making decisions not in the tradition of intellectual curiosity championed by the late William F. Buckley Jr., but on semantics.

A just-published study co-authored by Dr. Rick Larrick at the Duke Fuqua School of Business here in Durham, reveals that many conservatives reject projects marketed as “green” merely because they see it as a liberal agenda.

Really?  Of course, along with being a gun-lover, you can count me as a tree-hugger. While you’re at it count me also a card-carrying, HOG-driving, Eagles-for-Equality, trout-protecting, flag-waving all-American who supports better regulatory management of firearms.

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.

Do Tax Cuts Generate Growth?

There are some really smart people who run for President of the United States of America and many who may be even smarter serving as advisors to these candidates.  One of them, Mitt Romney, who was a richer if not also smarter classmate of mine at Brigham Young University during the 1970s, is promising to cut taxes even further as a means to quicken economic growth.

To moderate Independents such as me that may sound reasonable, in the same sense that any stimulus is also reasonable, until you look at the result of past tax cuts as illustrated in the chart in this blog which appeared last month in a New York Times piece by David Leonhardt.  

Looking at the period covered by the terms of our previous four presidents, it turns out that when taxes were increased during the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations growth occurred – indicating that their tax increases actually generated or were not adverse to economic growth.

The complete opposite happened, when in the both the early and mid 2000s, George W. Bush cut taxes.

Of course it is more complicated than that and anyone interested or swayed one way or another to base his/her vote on this issue alone would be well advised to read Leonhardt’s piece.

One reason tax cuts have so little, if any, impact is that tax rates are are currently so low.  Tax cuts also don’t make much sense at a time when our most important priorities are to make significant reinvestments into aging infrastructure, research and development to achieve energy independence and to restore strategies to generate social mobility and pay down the deficit.

Any tax priority now seems better aimed at revising the code and eliminating loopholes and especially favors carved out by rent-seeking groups that rather than create value-added to the economy seek to use lobbying and campaign donations to rig the system in their favor.

As for the so-called 47% who Romney claims don’t pay federal income taxes, which is more like 1%, it appears to me from recent analysis that they disproportionately live in red-states and that the proportion has tended to increase during my lifetime mostly during Republican administrations.

There has to be more to the fact that so much analysis reveals that states dominated by factions who seem to despise government and taxes the most, including reforms such as those being made to healthcare, are the same states where residents take far more than they give in terms of federal benefits, who are more obese and drive up healthcare costs, scam Medicaid while going to college and have higher teenage pregnancy and the worst credit.

Maybe some of this can be chalked up to “inversed projection,” a condition where individuals or groups subconsciously rationalize a contradiction by painting themselves as the victim instead.

But just maybe, across the political spectrum, we all need to be a little less impious and spend more time looking into the mirror than down our finger.  Humility in a candidate may be the attribute that most swings my vote in this election.

Who can Stop our State from Killing the Things it Loves?

Thirty years ago, Charlotte, NC, where Democrats will gather this week for their national convention, beautifully landscaped the parkways leading to and from its airport and other parts of the city, in part to ensure a positive first and last impressions for visitors arriving by air.

In 1999, an out-of-state billboard company desecrated that stretch by committing what then-Charlotte Mayor and now-Republican candidate for governor, Pat McCrory termed “an environmental crime” and described as “the worst I have seen in 10 years.”

Today, thanks to a powerful eastern NC Senate Republican from the eastern part of the state, that crime has been legalized while stripping out, during a last minute conference committee, any local say or respect for local values along state roadways including those running through Charlotte.

Decriminalized, those who perpetrated the crime McCrory spoke so passionately about a few years ago are now rapidly clear-cutting huge swaths of trees throughout the state, enabling soil erosion and flooding in places such as Charlotte and scaring the last impressions given visitors as they depart North Carolina via routes such as those shown in the image in this blog taken along I-40 heading west out of Asheville.

McCrory courageously spoke out against the new billboard legislation in his first debate with Democratic opponent Walter Dalton.  These aren’t the only times McCrory has stated his opposition to the desecration wrought by roadside billboards.

Good friends in Charlotte report that, as mayor, he vetoed several measures passed to enable billboards to litter those same roadsides that were violated in 1999. Dalton on the other hand has been an enabler of billboards and, not surprisingly but coincidentally I’m sure, has been one of their largest beneficiaries of campaign contributions.

Even worse, as a legislator, Dalton spearheaded legislation a few years ago to strip away the ability of communities to use a tool called amortization after it had found legal by several courts during long years of struggle by Durham NC, where I live, as a means to remove billboards by giving owners a set number of years to withdraw any value.

Several months ago, Dalton defended billboards in writing to a group in Durham as “good for the economy.”  I’ve only spent 40 years in economic development, but that was certainly news to me and unbelievable by any measure.

As a political Independent, I try not to rely only on specific policies such as this to make a ballot box decision, but I am definitely among unaffiliated voters who by double digits are leaning toward voting for McCrory as are some progressives I know.

I wouldn’t expect him to govern the entire state through a Charlotte lens but this issue definitely gives a sense of his ability to think and act beyond party ideology or politics.

At the very least McCrory would give a “backbone infusion” to several departments and agencies that seem to serve more as billboard sycophants, if not passive enablers, leaving no one to stand up on behalf of a public shown in polls as overwhelmingly in opposition.

He may even inspire or at least give a NCIS-Gibbs-head-slap to some out-of-state tourism beneficiaries of the state’s marketing, such as two restaurant chains, who keep this obsolete form of advertising on “life support” while making a bewildered public wonder why “tourism so often kills the things beloved by tourists.”

I met McCrory and listened to him in person during a meeting with a small handful of other tourism leaders a few years ago.  I got a sense of him as a person and a politician.  He reminds me of Nick Tennyson, a friend and former Mayor of Durham who also happens to be a Republican, and who, like McCrory stands out as far more moderate and pragmatic than those who dominate headlines for that group.

Some who read this blog may think I’m drawn to McCrory who grew up in Guilford County, because I’ve written previously about one of my 4th-great-grandfathers, James McCrory, who initially settled after immigrating here in the hamlet of Guilford Courthouse before enlisting a few months later in the Continental Army and later relocating after the War of Independence across the Blue Ridge Mountains and eventually making his home in Pickens County, Alabama.

But before relocating to Durham, a quarter-century-ago, I was born and raised and lived nearly 40 years in the Pacific Northwest with a stint in south-central Alaska.  Pat McCrory, while now also a long-time North Carolinian, hails from Irish, German and Swiss ancestors who congregated near Milwaukee after immigrating to the United States in the early 1800s.

He was born and spent his early years in Ohio and comes by his pragmatism honestly as his roots reflect the American dream likely inherited from ancestors who worked as farmers, a blacksmith, a pipefitter, a plumber, a high school teacher, an engineer and inventor.

A reader might think that I sound Republican and that I might also vote for presidential candidate Mitt Romney because we were classmates at BYU and members of a small group known as Cougar Club and share some cultural heritage.

But I’m certain that I’ve voted for as many or more Democrats as Republicans during my lifetime beginning with the first presidential election after I became eligible (I just missed benefiting from the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution) when I cast a ballot for former South Dakota Senator George McGovern after swinging from an ultra-conservative upbringing to my left of center of my college years before settling as an Independent moderate except where forced to pick a party in order to vote in some primaries where I have lived.

I probably would have leaned toward voting for the Romney of my college years or even the Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts.  But he appears no longer free to be that Romney and I’m just not persuaded that the same ideological rigidness that got us into our current mess is what we need to dig out of it, although some seem to betting a lot on “teflon” memories these days.

Hopefully, McCrory won’t become similarly constrained and his courage in speaking out against a powerful legislator from his party will remain steadfast.

Somehow the mess with billboards tells me he will stand his ground.

Infographic – Differences In Independent “Leaners”

If clicking on the image doesn’t enlarge it, click here for the source.

The Role of Regulations in the Free Marketplace!

I smiled to myself when I heard a so-called political Independent and small business owner comment on a national television newscast that he just wanted government out of ours lives.  I think he was nervous and just parroted an empty political slogan.  More disappointing still was that the interviewer didn't probe.  Most newscasters doesn’t these days.

In regular surveys to determine why businesses lay off workers, only 13% cite regulations as a major factor. The percentage has not increased in the past few years, according to a column last month by conservative David Brooks.  He notes that only 0.18 percent of the mass layoffs last year were attributable to regulations.

Even free-market zealots admit that many businesses, thanks in part to strong lobbies, do not charge the true price for their products.  For example, long-haul trucking does not pay the true cost of the public highways they chew up.  Utility and cable companies claim it is too expensive to bury power lines, but they don't factor into their expenses the cost to the public of things like hacking street trees to death.  Outdoor billboard companies, whose only value is parasitic on public roadsides, chop down publicly owned trees (or illegally poison them) without paying the true value or replanting and never shoulder the cost of the scenic easements they destroy.

Regulations, if done properly and evenly enforced, are merely a means of adding what economists call corrective pricing or market value to compensate for spillover effects like these which are called externalities.  Coal-fired power plants don't pay the true cost they levy on the public because conservatives have blocked putting a price on carbon.  Automobile companies became conscious about safety and fuel efficiency because regulations made them realize that by failing to do so they were levying a huge spillover cost on the public.

The gentleman I noted at the beginning of this blog wanted government out of his life but I assume that didn't mean he wanted the air he and his customers and his grandchildren breathe or the water they drink or the food they eat to be unsafe.  I assume he didn't want to go without roads or streets or public safety or consumer protection from loan sharks.

Ultraconservatives argue that the votes individual consumers make in the free marketplace are a better way to make decisions about these things than might be made by representative democracies prone to winner-take-all decisions largely controlled now by special interests.

But the reason we have a mixed economy is that few of us want to wait for good roads, national defense, public safety, consumer and environmental protection and good public health until businesses react to the votes consumers make with their purchases.  And few of us are naïve enough to believe that we still wouldn't be subject bottom feeders.

As Brooks wrote in his column, as a reminder to other conservatives, especially those prone to hyperbole:

“There are two large lessons here. First, Republican candidates can say they will deregulate and, in some areas, that would be a good thing. But it will not produce a short-term economic rebound because regulations are not a big factor in our short-term problems.

Second, it is easy to be cynical about politics and to say that Washington is a polarized cesspool. It’s true that the interest groups and the fund-raisers make every disagreement seem like a life-or-death struggle. But, in reality, most people in government are trying to find a balance between difficult trade-offs. Whether it’s antiterrorism policy or regulatory policy, most substantive disagreements are within the 40 yard lines.”

And as far as fearing the person Newt Gingrich loves to mischaracterize as a socialist and the most dangerous President ever?

Conservative Brooks points out in his column that “Nineteen-eighty-eight, under Ronald Reagan, 1992, under George H.W. Bush and 2008, under George W. Bush, were monster years for new regulations. In his first years, Obama has not increased regulatory costs more than Reagan and the Bushes did in their final years.”

Being Independent Doesn't Mean Ambivalent

I wasn't always an Independent, politically, or a moderate. I was raised in what was then an ultraconservative part of the state of Idaho by very conservative parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles. Exposed to many different and equally valid perspectives in college and law school, I became progressive in many ways before evolving into the moderate Independent that I've remained for the last several decades.

Independents are not ambivalent, as some people claim, but they simply cannot be pigeon-holed into one or the other major political party or ideology.  I'm conservative on some issues, even libertarian, and progressive on others and I find myself a pragmatic moderate when it comes to problem solving.

According to surveys the vast majority of members of the Democratic Party are moderate so, when my pragmatic moderate side shows itself, many people assume I'm a Democrat.

But when my now-concluded career in visitor-centric economic development would frequently take me into business circles, many people there assumed I must be Republican even though ideologically business owners and managers are equally distributed among Republicans, Democrats and Independents.

I've always found organizations built around orthodoxy, whether religious, political or social, to be more than a bit disconcerting. It just seems that for the vast majority of people who seek strict affiliations it becomes a reason for not thinking and, even  worse as a means to prevent others from thinking and sometimes to try and control what they think.

When I became a Rotarian in the early 1980s I was drawn not only to the purpose of the organization but but also to the fact that a key value of Rotary is being nonsectarian. When I became president of the 200-member Durham Rotary Club, which will soon turn 100-years-old, I learned the hard way that many members confused nonsectarian with being secular.

There is a a huge difference and that can be clearly seen by clicking on the links in the previous paragraph above.

Several members of that club objected to the fact that one of the club’s charitable outreach programs was being sole-sourced at the time to one organization that required that recipients benefiting from their aid had to be proselytized to be Christians.  I took the issue to the Board of Directors and a roundtable of past club presidents and then checked with Rotary international and we determined that, indeed, this violated the organizations nonsectarian values.

I wasn't surprised that a few members objected when we announced the decision to broaden that particular project to include other organizations. Unfortunately, one member even resigned but I wasn't bothered by the controversy.  It seems like that is always been part of my job description.

However, I was surprised at the vitriol and personal attacks expressed by a few members in repeated e-mails including, surprisingly, many by a local government official and fellow Rotarian whom I expected to be be particularly sensitive to the importance of maintaining our nonsectarian position and values.

Frankly, it jaded me a bit on the club and after my term concluded, I drifted away for a few years. Many people get personal and vindictive when it comes to religion and politics. I've never been afraid to stand up to these individuals, but I usually find their stances distasteful as well as the impact their views reflect on the organizations they control.

That experience is just one small personal example that shows why a growing part of our population is becoming independent of religions and social organizations as well as political parties.

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

Referendum On Racism & Sense of Fairness

To me and I believe confirmed by studies, “fairness” is a central American value. That belief has been tested since 2008.

It may be sleazy but marketers for the Republican Party have been extremely effective in framing negative messages and behaviors that tap into racism, without being overtly racist.

Being overtly racist runs counter to current American norms but substituting other types of condescension and intolerance is apparently acceptable and just as effective.

Studies have shown that negative framing is much more powerful than positive but also that negative framing results in less cooperation such as bipartisanship.

Because President Obama is African-American, condescension about his birthplace, his education, his faith and sudden disregard for long-standing protocols of respect, e.g. calling him a liar, rebuffing requests for speeches, suddenly becoming hawks after sitting quietly while Republicans ran up 7 of every 10 dollars of deficit is a way to play a “coded” race card.

Republicans in denial about their party’s behavior toward the President over the last three years must remember that one of the definitions of racism is “a belief that there are inherent differences in people’s traits and capabilities used to justify treating those people differently.”

But how can this be tolerated in a party now dominated by the 20% of Americans who score highest on the “religiosity index” and who researchers Drs. David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam describe as having “an ideological commitment that values authoritativeness and obedience,” otherwise termed “authority-mindedness.”

As noted in their incredible book American Grace, which details scores of studies including their own, Campbell and Putnam note that when asked the question, “what is more important for a child to be taught: obedience or self-reliance?” …religious people emphasize ‘obedience’ and secular people emphasize ‘self-reliance’.”

The answer, noted below is that the:

“…fundamental correlation between religiosity and intolerance has been confirmed in dozens of studies over the last half century. It is true even with many other background factors held constant – age, race, religion, education, income, gender, political ideology, homeownership, marital and parental status and general civic engagement.”

“Unchurched conservatives are more tolerant of difference and dissent than devout conservatives, churchgoing liberals are less tolerant than secular liberals.”

…”Religious tradition or denomination seems to play a very small role…frequent church attendance is associated with less tolerance across the board…

In an op-ed piece last month the book’s authors went further based on new research to be included in a paperback edition of the book next winter, noting:

“So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.”

Well I guess we’re about to find out just how dear a sense of fairness and a revulsion to racism are with American voters.

Nationwide, there are now as many self-proclaimed Independent voters (34%) as Democrats and far more than the 28% who are Republicans, which remains flat since 2008.

Independent is good. I’m a moderate Independent although many conservatives would say I'm “progressive-leaning.” Today's Republican orthodoxy appears to have moved the center so far to the right that many conservative friends will often now deny that even famed-conservative columnist and "thinker" David Brooks is really a conservative.

But the percentage of Republican-leaning Independents has increased since 2008 from 11% to 16%, pulling that party within four points of Democrats and Democrat-leaning Independents.

Troubling though and possibly another reflection of the effectiveness of Republican strategists in “coding” racism in the framing of messages is that the 2 point lead that party held with white voters in 2008 has now swelled to 52% compared to 39% who affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic.

American Grace makes a compelling case about "…what has changed in American religion over the past half century…the most noticeable shift is how Americans have polarized along religious lines….the highly religious at one pole, and the avowedly secular at the other. The moderate religious middle is shrinking.”

Unfortunately, while more vast in numbers, moderates and Independents are also less likely to vote.

The election of 2012 may be setting up to be a referendum on race in America and a test of our vaunted sense of fairness and treating people of different ethnicities as equals. As usual, it may all come down to turnout.