Really, Pretty Centrist

I am a self-described moderate but people who know me say I can sound “pretty liberal.”

But a core of regressives in our state legislature as well as in the U.S Congress make moderates and even true conservatives sound liberal.

In truth, I get exasperated with a tendency by some liberals to sound as though they are always trying to absolve groups and individuals of personal accountability.

An example is a story last week on New Republic by Dana Goldstein entitled, Inexcusable Absences about some truancy laws that hold parents accountable.

My concern as I read the recent DOJ report on the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, is that as a society we have an obsession now with institutional accountability.  That blinds us to an even more significant underlying problems in neighborhoods and homes.

In fact, there is ample evidence that even the problems of some individuals within institutions can be traced back to the homes and neighborhoods where they were raised.

But if you get “bleeding heart” beginning of Goldstein’s story, she makes several very valid data-driven points about how we can institutionally deal better deal with truancy institutionally, but few to enlighten societal interventions at home.

Okay, am I sounding moderate enough now?

I may have dismissed the article too soon had I not read Goldstein’s phenomenal book recently entitled The Teacher Wars, a well-written and documented overview of 175 years of American education.

It was particularly enlightening when read, as I did, in tandem with the just published revision of The Libertarian Mind written by David Boaz.  There is actually more agreement than people who only judge them by their titles might think.

This country was founded by liberals and libertarians who did not see those outlooks as incompatible.

The Teacher Wars illustrates just how old, tired and ineffective the polices are that are now being rehashed by regressives elected to high office across the country.  The far right still fails to grasp that we are not all born equal.

The book also illustrates how misguided teacher unions have been to shield unengaged teachers from consequences.

The Libertarian Mind brought to mind a friend I see on occasion frequenting a restaurant in our neighborhood.  Get him started and he will spend all the time you have and more explaining how the federal government is to blame for the collapses that brought about the Great Recession.

He has a point but fails to grasp that it is the free market that fails to incorporate the full cost of its actions into a fully sustainable cycle, instead pushing what are called negative externalities off onto society.

Taking responsibility for consequences is also a theme in The Libertarian Mind whose adherents would probably agree with the right of Michael Brown’s parents to sue the Ferguson Police Department as a rightful consequence.

But it is much more complex when consequences are enforced on poor parenting or neglectful neighbors and landlords or on personal behavior regardless of circumstances.

This is also an area today’s liberals avoid, seeming instead to absolve consequences by viewing personal responsibility through the lens of victims of circumstance such as objecting to work requirements for safety net benefits even though those were required when the nets were first erected, ironically by liberals.

Everything seems to revolve around that pesky little issue of free will.  Libertarians seem to reject any other influence and liberals often seem to sweep away free will altogether.

The sticky wicket seems to be what is blameworthy.

But none of us has been held entirely responsible for each of our actions so criminalizing poor or inadequate parenting may not ensure personal accountability either and certainly doesn’t seem fair or consistent with any of the world’s spiritual cultures.

Consequentialism and Communitarianism, are to me at the opposite ends of a spectrum, one seeming to view the world only through individual responsibility and the other viewing responsibility as a result of community interactions rather than personal behavior.

So there too, I find myself clinging as a centrist, though as I get older liberals probably see me as “pretty conservative” and my more conservative friends see me as “pretty liberal.”

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!

The Priority Place-based Trait Across the Political Spectrum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choices and Entitlement

The sentiment has been expressed before in many variations but none better than how it was phrased by CBS Television Studios’ writer Sarah Byrd (credited in part to supervising producer Adam Targum) for an episode of CSI: New York two weeks ago in lines delivered by Det. Mac Taylor played by actor Gary Sinise:

“The events of our lives shape us. But it’s our choices that define us.”

That, and in my personal experience, an awful lot of luck.

As Wall Street Journal conservative columnist and humorist Joe Queenan once wrote for another publication referring to his own upbringing in poverty - “It is a pathologically enduring, immutable condition.  Not a lifestyle choice.”

When some of the first government social safety nets emerged during the Great Depression in the mid-1930s, they were accompanied by volunteer and work requirements to ensure dignity, self-reliance and self-respect.

With common roots in Chicago’s Hull House, the vaunted welfare program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) was launched in 1936 and is structured even today around a recipient volunteer program.

But for the entire 400 years since colonization of this continent began, we as a society have worried, as phrased by business professor and ethics researcher Dr. Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind, that people might “rely upon the safety net for more than an occasional lifesaving bounce.”

Who knows how much better safety net programs would be today if partisan hostility had not stripped funding out of the government programs that enabled associated oversight of conditional volunteer and “pay it forward” programs.  The Mormon welfare program is as successful as it is because of the more than 870,000 of associated volunteer-days on welfare farms and in storehouses and distribution centers.

Mormon officials report that individual recipients typically receive aid for three to six months while they volunteer, but my experience growing up in that culture tells me there is a small percentage of recipients, some multi-generational, who, just as is seen in government programs, never seem to be able to fully escape the vicious cycle of poverty described by Queenan.

Entitlement is no more common among the poor than it is with people who are educated or middle class or rich or in parasitic, rent-seeking corporations such as billboard companies.  A classic example appeared in a news story last week from Raleigh, which is near Durham, where I live.  A person quoted in the story questioned, while noting she had a PhD, why she should have to refrain from interrupting her boss and I suspect other forms of social and business etiquette?

It seems that both liberals and conservatives are too caught up in playing offense and defense over the condition of entitlement and other issues and have been for more than 20 years.

While more willing to join moderates in compromise, liberals have been far too dismissive of concerns raised by economists and sociologists, both White and African-American, about the troubling by-products of safety net programs, many of which these experts helped devise.

These included The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy by the late Dr. James Q. Wilson, The Moral Quandary of the Black Community by Dr. Glenn C. Lowry, now at Brown University or The Content of Our Character by Dr. Shelby Steele, now a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, all penned between 1985 and 1990.

As noted by researchers at the non-partisan Center for Evidence-Based Policy and the Brookings Institution in a Washington Post op-ed last April written by Daniel Stid a partner in The Bridgespan Group, since 1990 rigorous government evaluations of 10 overarching social programs using randomized trials found “9 out of 10 yielded weak or no positive effects.”

Gridlock, primarily forced by conservatives, has made a more nimble and entrepreneurial approach impossible; although to his credit, President Obama has found ways to fuel program innovations anyway, often by end-running the bureaucratic process.

Economic conservatives, having abandoned half of their “intellectual ammunition,” to paraphrase New York Times columnist David Brooks, have forgotten a founding principle of that movement that it is “best to reform steadily but cautiously” and turned instead to fiscal strangulation and a social mobility Dance of Death.

As Thomson Reuters Digital editor Chrystia Freeland wrote in yesterday’s New York Times in an article entitled The Self Destruction of the 1 Percent, adapted from her book published last week entitled Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, today’s conservatives seem to be following the playbook of Venetians at the turn of 13th century.

And that didn’t turn out too well.

The New Era of Stewardship

American concern for the environment isn’t static.  At its roots in the years before 1850, life was breathed into the movement as much by artists such as Henry David Thoreau and my favorite landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt, as from science.  The term ecology wasn't even coined until 1866.

Experts break our concern for stewardship of our environment down into three eras and perhaps now a fourth:

• Pre-1970, environment was more about natural conservation
• Post-1970, environment was more about pollution control
• Post-1990, environment was more about pollution prevention
• Post-2010, environment is more about sustainability

As I was making my home in Durham, North Carolina in the late 1980s, a global conference was defining sustainability simply as “an activity that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (1987 UN Conference on Environment and Development).

I’m persuaded that “sustainable resilience” is a better term as proposed by Professor Emeritus Dr. Roger Caldwell of the University of Arizona because in his view lots of experimentation is required to achieve or maintain sustainability and also because it transcends just the environment.

Caldwell even suggests that sustainability may be the next great era after technology, but not in my mind, if conservatives have their way.  According to researchers working at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Sheps Center, which just 10 miles from my house in Durham, conservatives are much more likely to distrust what they stigmatize as “regulatory science” because it doesn’t support their world view prejudices.

What do I know?  The study by Dr, Gordon Gauchat, released just a little over two weeks ago, illustrates that conservatives’ trust in science has been declining since 1974, especially among the higher educated.  But maybe as capitalist George Soros suggests what new really need is to “move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility in order to have a proper understanding of the problems.”

Gauchat’s UNC-CH study also reveals that moderates like me tend to be less educated than conservatives and especially liberals, but we’re definitely not stupid.  Quibble about degrees here or there but who can argue that we don’t owe it to future generations to be better stewards of this planet? Really!

The study rules out some long-held theories about the long gradual decline in trust for science among conservatives settling on politicization.  The study is particularly enlightening for those of us living in Durham, home to two major research universities, world-renowned Research Triangle Park and scores of major corporate and government research facilities.

Duke University in Durham is also the gold standard for sustainability, both in policy and practice.  Next month when I go to Duke Eye Center for my annual exam, I will park in a green parking deck with living green walls, cisterns, a retention rain garden and a clematis covered rooftop level.

Adjacent buildings sport an award-winning green roof and heliport and across the street is an area where University Trustees have approved construction of a new tree lined 6-acre reclamation pond that alone will save 100 million gallons of Durham drinking water each year.

The 23-million-gallon pond will collect and retain rainwater and storm run off from more than a fifth of Duke West Campus to be recycled for other uses such as cooling towers.

Any organization, private, public or non-profit would do well to study and emulate both the Duke policy and the extensiveness and intensity with which it is being put in practice, much of it driven by my friend Dr. Tallman Trask III.

There are obvious contradictions such as the outdoor billboard messages either bought by marketers or enabled as donations for Duke Medicine Marketing.  While sacrificing roadside forests and undermining community values they are easily corrected anomalies and understood given the difficulty of entrenching sustainability in every nook and cranny of such a large enterprise.

Those who distrust science as an objective means of making and informing democratic decisions, public or private, are well advised to suggest anything better.  While they may thwart or retard government sustainability initiatives, this is a movement now so pervasive as to make such obstinacy anything more than a speed bump.

The Need to Burn Each Other at the Stake

The excellent investigative report State for Sale, published last week, reminded me of when I first learned of the now forty-year-old then-confidential playbook for the take-over strategy described in the report ( you may need to wait for a moment at the acrobat screen before it opens.)

I was briefed on the playbook while attending law school at night and working days at a chamber of commerce out west during a 29-month stint during which I was helping to shape and launch a free-standing community/destination marketing organization (DMO.)

No one at work asked, they just just assumed everyone was a Republican even though business people were evenly divided by party-affiliation, as they still are today. This is similar to the ego-centrism among Carolina fans today who assume everyone in Durham is a Tar Heel fan, even though scientific polls show most people here root for the home teams, Duke and NCCU.

The secretive memo/playbook had been written a couple of years before I learned about it in 1974 and, as any law school student would, I immediately recognized the author as Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. who wrote it just weeks before being appointed by President Nixon and confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Powell was already famous as the Justice appointed to replace the legendary Hugo Black who during his lifetime evolved from a young Alabama Ku Klux Klan member to an outspoken center-liberal defender of free speech, separation of church and state, etc.

Like Black, during his time as a Supreme Court Justice, Powell moved much more to the center than he had been in private practice as a corporate attorney or as expressed in his pre-court, 1971 memo/Republican playbook. In retirement, Powell even expressed some regret for some of his more conservative opinions on the Court.

His memo/playbook foretold the formula described last week in the State for Sale and being perverted in several other places across the nation to control or purge public institutions:

• fund think tanks, scholarly works and op-eds
• flood the news media with columns and op-eds
• attack higher ed. to undermine liberals (and moderates)
• reverse policy in local schools
• intervene in court cases
• directly use business funds to finance political campaigns etc.

The playbook eventually fell into the hands of wealthy ultra-conservatives who deployed it, in the extreme, first to purge their own Republican Party of moderates and liberals and then stigmatize any other viewpoint or ideology as liberal and socialist including the swollen ranks of Independents, often through financing extremely negative, hostile and distorting campaign attack-ads while claiming to be the defenders of morality.

Except that through the hubris of power and money and what is described as a condition called “confabulation” in books such as Brain Fiction and the more recent and humorous Being Wrong – Adventures in the Margin of Error, their “rock-like certitude” convinces them that these distortions and lies are fact.

Confabulation has enabled ultra-conservatives, recently, to absurdly proclaim with a straight face that Mitt Romney isn’t a Christian because he belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints (Mormons) or that the Bill of Rights does not apply to non-Christians.

The rigors of succeeding in business transform a few to become like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or many closer to home such as Jim Goodmon. But many emerge not only successful and wealthy but entitled and retaining a huge “chip on their shoulder” feeling marginalized, angry, hurt and judgmental.

Rather than humbled by just how much “luck” is also required to succeed in business, they emerge blinded to the public services and infrastructure that under-pinned their success while, at the same time, seeming far too often disdainful and judgmental of the customers upon whose exchanges their success was built.

Turning away from philanthropy, they seem locked into a self-proclaimed Jihad against the minimum wage, environmental protection, consumer, voter and civil rights, immigration, education, social safety-nets and much more only to learn that inherently fragmented moderates and liberals are easy prey and not their polar opposite at all but only midway along an ideological “ring” where the seeming opposite ends of of ultra-conservatism and Marxism rest side by side, separated only by Totalitarianism.

Seemingly ensnared in a perpetual closed-loop of inductive confirmation bias and rock-jawed homophily, some often resemble more the abused child than either part of ideological typology offered by linguists where conservatives are the strict, authoritative father and liberals are the nurturant mother.

When the pendulum of power swings back again, and it always does, hopefully we can all put an accepting and inclusive arm around the shoulders of those who are currently wreaking so much havoc in the name of morality and remember together the words of poet Mark Nepo in the book entitled Facing the Lion, Being the Lion -- Finding Your Inner Courage that:

“…as we grow, we often start to perch alongside of life, watching while leaning on the rail of whatever values we were taught to uphold. Before we know it, we become cold messengers whose message is muted because of our detachment.

…Compassionate justice is rarely just about right or wrong, but more about our courage to see and embrace the fallen part in others as the humanness in ourselves. This does not preclude holding ourselves and others accountable for the moments of trespass we engender.

Rather, compassion deepens our response to such trespass, demanding that we lean into what went wrong- together. The recognition of trespass with honesty is often more helpful than unconsidered judgment that exiles the fallibility of being human.

Unconsidered and unfelt judgment often provides a way to remove ourselves from people and situations.

When we feel justified judging others, we give ourselves permission not to stay involved…This is the hard gift of compassion, that it allows us to stay involved in a meaningful way with the living. It allows us to respond to the splendor and messiness in life.”

…Ultimately, the urge to hush our anxiety is not the same as facing it. Ultimately, creating noise or a list of good deeds won’t keep us from ourselves or the fact that time is precious and that life will end. Isn’t this at the heart of our noisy obsessions with fame and crisis? Isn’t it all a way to feel important and needed?

In running from the basic questions of living haven’t we become a society of firefighters whose identity of goodness so rests on putting out fires that we never face our secret life as arsonists?

Nevertheless, whatever situations we are left to mend, we all face the ache…and the challenge of being led by our compassion and not our anxiety. Otherwise, we risk becoming all that we abhor. And if we keep setting fires with our judgment and putting them out with out with our guilt, the face of humanity will be scorched.

This is the cost of our busy need to save each other and our righteous need to burn each other at the stake.

These dilemmas – of turning judgment into compassion, of letting vengeance disperse into forgiveness, of sinking below the noise of our anxiety till we can take pain out of the mind – these quandaries are ageless.

…our endless dream of having the courage to face our judgment, our vengeance, our anxiety, our resentments and live with them.”

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

America Is Far More Discerning Than Color-Coding Suggests

The out-of-date labels thrown about by nearly all politicians pre-date my lifetime and unfortunately they are still the ones predominantly used by the news media.

The categorization of Americans according to values, political beliefs and political party affiliation has been re-sorted by the Pew Research Center five different times in just the last 14 years using scientific surveys.

Results unveiled several weeks ago reflect just how much has changed since 2005.  For non-readers or those required to spoon-feed them, here is a great four and a half minute video.

Below are eight take-aways and below that five potential positives were the news media to adopt this much improved typology:

 

• The good news is that only 10% are “bystanders” but that becomes more disturbing when coupled with another 11% of Independents who are disaffected.  Alarmingly 41% of those “disaffected” and 40% of “bystanders” are in the South.

 

• Independents such as me are termed “post-moderns.”  Collectively post-moderns are moderate but center-left on social issues and make up 13% of Americans (14% of voters.)  Another group of Independents are “Libertarians” and make up 9% of Americans.

 

• “Staunch conservatives” are Republican Tea Partiers and make up 9% of Americans and 11% of voters.  They are outweighed in numbers if not vociferousness by the 14% of the general public including 16% of voters who are “solid liberals” of the Democratic Party.

 

• “Main street” Republicans are also conservative but less staunchly and less consistently and they make up 11% of Americans including 14% of voters.  Moderates appear to have vanished from that party, moving more Independent, as the lines have blurred between economic, social and pro-business conservatives.

 

• Democrats, while more of the population than Republicans, are far more pluralistic.  In addition to “solid liberals,” 10% of Americans including 9% of voters are “new coalition” Democrats and another 13% of the general public including 15% of voters who are “hard-pressed” Democrats.

 

• Revealing how far right most legislators went this past year is the finding that the two Republican groups of conservatives are divided when it comes to opinions about business and the environment.

 

• Conservatives and Libertarians along with liberals and all three groups of Independents are predominantly white while “new coalition” and “hard-pressed” Democrats are more diverse.

 

• “Post-modern” Independents tend to be younger, conservatives much older.  Conservatives have morphed into a solid bloc giving a misperception much larger than their numbers.

If the news media had the means and diligence to break elected officials down into these groups, rather than just Republican or Democrat or conservative and liberal, I can see at least five positive effects:

• Revealing the small base of those demanding lock-step allegiance might engender more bipartisanship and greatly reduce grid-lock.

 

• It would be far more useful to voters and inform better decisions at the ballot-box.

 

• It might re-engage “disaffected” Independents and “bystanders.”

 

• It would moderate the influence of lobbyists and better reveal the outsized influence of campaign contributions.

 

• It would better inform “sound-bites” and provide a better weighting of those trying to out shout or demonize other groups.

State-by-State Political and Religious Makeup

Gallup scientific public opinion polls revealing the current breakdown of political ideology and religious affiliation, state-by-state, are enlightening. It would be so interesting to contrast this with breakdowns during the "progressive era” but I don’t believe it exists that far back, at least in a context that would be “apples to apples.”

It may not such a surprise (when you click on the links above) to learn that 26% of California adults self-identify as liberal, but I bet it will be news to learn that 15% of adults in states like Alabama and Idaho are likewise. Even Alaskans, notoriously “independent” politically but presumed by many to all be “conservative” due to Sarah Palin’s notoriety, are 20% “liberal,” one in five.

Oregon and Vermont, assumed by many to be liberal are in fact, almost even.

Equally interesting are the state by state results for religious affiliation. But the chart above (click on the image to enlarge or go to the link above) showing the percentage with no affiliation, may be the surprise. That of course, isn’t the same as “not religious,” just no affiliation with any particular organized religion.

That’s one area, my birth state, Idaho and my adopted home state, North Carolina seem to have in common.

The Most Conservative and Republican Of All Faiths Has Deep Progressive Roots

As a progressive-independent who, though lapsed most of my adult life, was born and raised in that faith, I find it ironic that polls of all faiths in the U.S. reveal that Mormons self-identify as the both the most conservative (59%)) and the most Republican (49%.)

To me that’s ironic, in part, because up until the late 19th century, members of the then-60 year old denomination were overwhelmingly Democrats, in part, because Republicans at the time opposed statehood for parts of the West.

In fact, at one point back then, a Church official, John Henry Smith, was dispatched to visit congregations and explain it was okay to be a Republican and specific families were even assigned to join that party to create balance.

Fast forward a little more than a hundred years later and a Church leader was asked to give news interviews explaining that it is possible to be a good Mormon and a Democrat.

Up through the 1960s, Democratic candidates fared well among Mormons and several figures in national politics today are both Mormon and Democrats, in fact liberal Democrats. While the Church itself is generally politically neutral, beginning in the 1970s, a majority of members of that faith took a hard turn to the far right.

Today only 8% of active Mormons currently self-identify as liberal but that belies the deep progressive roots of that very Christian denomination. For instance, the Church pioneered a welfare system for the poor that served in part as a model for the one developed by the Federal government in the 1930’s.

Another example is that Utah where this Church is headquartered was the second state in the U.S. to grant women the right to vote, following adjacent Wyoming.

In the mid-1850s, the Church openly experimented with voluntary, New Testament inspired, communalistic or egalitarian living designed to increase group self-sufficiency but also to aspire to eliminate poverty and reach income equality.

The hard turn to the right over the past four decades and away from those progressive roots may be taking a toll though. Lapsed or inactive Mormons (29%) are more like me, considerably less conservative and significantly more likely to be moderate and two and a half times more likely to be liberal.

Church policy generally prohibits promoting candidates in congregations or church buildings but it took a strong position this week opposing an on-again, off-again threat by the pastor of a small church in Florida pastor to conduct a burning of the Quran.

It also played a role in the recent and narrow 5 percentage point passage of a California proposition prohibiting Gay marriage.

Mormon is a nickname often used to identify members of this restorationist (branch of Protestantism) faith initially called The Church of Christ and later formally named The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day-Saints (LDS.)

With 14 million members worldwide and one of the fastest growing of all Christian denominations, its roots go back to the Second Great Awakening of the 1830’s, a very un-conservative period that fueled many evangelic or conversion-oriented faiths, that while different from fundamentalist, are typically very socially conservative.