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!

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.”

Seeking To Understand a Puzzle

At least one “gamer” agrees with the Speaker of the House of Representatives that the strategy by a small cadre of his members is not a game.  Instead, it’s a puzzle.

Negotiating in a political sense has always been the work of moderates, but the problem today,  according to Pew Research, may be that the majority of moderates are Democrats or swing Independents such as me.

This breakdown is based on how people identify themselves in surveys.

Moderate doesn’t mean squishy as those on the right mean when they use it as a pejorative.  To adapt a description used by Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Media, I prefer to think of moderate as being willing “to find a way forward.”

An analysis posted on “Third Way” found that on average over the past thirty years, nearly half of American voters have been moderates, close to the proportion of conservatives and liberals combined.

This probably means the mayor of Blount County, Tennessee took a moderate position last week.  Blount County lies on the Tennessee side between Knoxville and the Great Smoky National Park, due west across the amazing national treasure from Asheville, NC.

Last Friday, the mayor sent a request to the Federal Government, which was shut down, not by a majority of lawmakers but by a very few using parliamentary maneuvers, asking if the county could pay on its own to reopen the national park, a key part of the economy there.

That’s one way forward.

The four House members representing districts along the Tennessee-North Carolina line that dissects the Great Smoky Mountains are among the 18% of the House of Representatives responsible for the shut-down strategy.

I didn’t vote for any of them, nor did the overwhelming majority of Americans, and thus is the flaw in the “representative” form of democracy.  Due to partisan redistricting, those in that tiny group feel ensured re-election and thus willing to put a proverbial gun to the nation’s head.

A fascinating study released this month provides a glimpse into the mindset of not only this estranged minority but the political party that harbors them.  It notes that Republican moderates (1-in-4) want no part of the small group responsible for the shut-down, but they also don’t want to be ostracized as “illegitimate.”

Worse, word is they are blackmailed with threats from within their party to unseat them.  Many are speaking out anyway.

This means that while those holding the nation hostage demand negotiation the Republican moderates likely to pursue a way forward are reluctant to be at their table, robbing Democrats of those who would truly negotiate.

Ostensibly this is all about the Affordable Care Act, and the story this small group tells themselves, but that claim is largely symbolic.  Ironically, many of those creating the shutdown in hopes of defunding the program represent parts of the ten states with the worst healthcare.

These folks seem to be telling themselves a story that the Act is a conspiracy to expand government and ensure Democratic majorities by expanding Medicaid.  Ah, attributing motive is one way fuel confrontations.

This worry has repeatedly proven unfounded since the 1930s.

But an analysis for Wall Street investors notes that Medicaid actually plays a very small role, not to mention the Affordable Care Act is based on a Republican idea.  True, but half of Republicans according to the recent study are either Evangelicals or Tea Party partisans.

According to experts quoted in the report, the real problem is that the private insurance provided by employers and relied upon by 65% of Americans is no longer sufficient.

“All of the ten states with the lowest overall health insurance coverage rates had among the lowest rates of employer provided insurance.”

I wonder if Republicans actually understand this but oppose it because, as the study notes, many have convinced themselves that Affordable Care will become another way Democrats build up constituencies, ones they tell themselves are grounded on dependencies.

There is a kernel of truth about the issue of dependencies and safety nets, but I believe, deep down, if they have actually studied the Affordable Care Act they understand it is truly an attempt to control hidden healthcare costs.

The costs from leaving so many Americans uninsured are ultimately shifted onto taxpayers as well as increasing premiums for those who have insurance, something no longer sustainable.  It isn’t a problem resolved by “shoulds,” it is simply a business issue.

No, there must be much more to the hostage taking debacle.  But one thing is for sure, telling stories and attributing motive which in turn creates a lack of trust are at its foundation.

Years of research into organizational and individual behavior has shown this is usually at the basis of all confrontations.

I know from experience, it is nearly impossible to negotiate with people who are telling themselves stories.  I am also pretty good at telling myself stories and attributing motive.

A way to understand the current dilemma is to view it through the Doonesbury lens on a state where the hostage takers are now in control of all three branches of government, such as North Carolina.

Then, apparently “negotiation” suddenly becomes a one way street.

I want to believe those holding a gun to the nation’s head are well meaning but regardless of intent, I keep remembering that the first time this was done, we ended up embedding slavery in the U.S. Constitution.

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 the Roots of A Sensibility

I found a scribbled note of condolence recently written by my literature teacher during first semester of my high school sophomore year.

I had learned of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) on November 22, 1963 from friends as I was walking up the hall from my biology class to the literature class where we were reading To Kill A Mockingbird and discussing its relationship to past and current events.

In my native Pacific Northwest it was still morning.

A month earlier, the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives had just passed the JFK’s Civil Rights Act (CRA) out of committee after a series of hearings, giving us plenty of context for class discussion around the prize-winning book that Alabama-native Harper Lee had published a few months before Kennedy’s election three years earlier.

It was in this literature class with its focus on “Mockingbird” that I first felt the powerful resonance from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream Speech,” delivered three months earlier, and a poignant contrast to the hate expressed during coverage of the debate of the CRA.

I can’t recall when the semester began if was aware that civil rights leader Medgar Evers had been gunned down in Jackson, Mississippi within hours of when President Kennedy had announced his intent to submit CRA legislation to Congress, or that federal marshals had integrated the University of Alabama only hours earlier.

Even without today’s hyperactive attention deficit fueled by 24/7 news at the time, these events seemed distant and siloed as we were coming of age in the Northwest when interspersed with rights of passage such as drivers training.

But we were all in shock following news of the assassination as we settled into our desks to pick up continued discussion of “Mockingbird” and the CRA, which even more personal from that day forward.

Then, very subtly, the grief expressed by a few whose parents opposed both Kennedy and the Act gave way to sickening relief-tinged inferences that the country had somehow been saved, similar to a few my conservative-Republican father made at dinner that night before being shushed by my equally conservative but more sensitive mom.

My Dad always had difficulty with grieving.

This is when my political ideology began a move toward the center, away my family’s and away from party affiliation.  Six weeks later and just 13 days after the U.S. release of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles,  the House passed the CRA.

People forget that while 96 representatives voted against it, only 34 were Republicans.  Racism and intolerance were far more open and blatant back then but they were also more bipartisan than they seem today.

By March of 1964, as the Senate moved the bill to the floor for debate, the rank of Eagle Scout was pinned to my uniform.  I remember being revolted by the racist rhetoric in the national news and how hollow it seemed to make the Scout Oath sound.

I didn’t feel comfortable with President Johnson, probably because I was still mourning JFK’s murder.  As the Senate voted to close off nearly three months of filibuster and then pass the CRA, I was high in the Rockies on a ten-day, 60-mile hike with friends using pack-horses to march through the Bob Marshall Wilderness in northwestern Montana.

As we heard the news on our return, conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater was wrapping up that party’s nomination for President.  I had been leaning toward Goldwater because he was a westerner but then I heard the rhetoric he used to appeal to southern states and learned he had been one of six Republicans along with 21 Democrats to vote against the CRA in the Senate.

Controversy raged for several years over the CRA, much as it has the Affordable Healthcare Act, because it applied to private businesses as well as public agencies.  Goldwater’s opposition was ostensibly not about race but about states’ rights, an argument that had also been used to justify more than 250 years of slavery, subsequently perpetuated by peonage and then Jim Crow laws.

His candidacy marked the beginning of the purge of liberal and moderate Republicans from that party to the degree that near the end of his life in 1998, Goldwater appeared very moderate, even liberal, by comparison.

His campaign loss launched Ronald Reagan’s political career.  The CRA and that party’s transformation also launched an exodus of entire neighborhoods from southern California up into Idaho, marking the beginning of the end of my native state’s progressive, moderate and bipartisan heritage.

My own ideology stayed center through graduation from high school and into college at BYU, which was much more moderate itself in those years.  I was initially hawkish on the war in Vietnam and leaned more progressive on issues such Civil Rights.

Through the late 1960s my support for the war waned and significant levels of student concern about civil rights and the war (even small protests) took hold even at BYU in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The CRA continued to be an issue through the 1968 Presidential election.  We know now from memoirs and other documents that the Republicans led by soon-to-be elected President Richard Nixon had learned to code images and appeals to those who were racially intolerant by racializing references and images as crime.

We know from his chief counsel’s 1970 book, Witness To Power, that the campaign “went after the racists” as supporters while Democratic candidate and CRA-spearhead Hubert Humphrey’s campaign was marginalized by “Yippie-led” protests at the Democratic Party convention in response and outrage to the tragic events of 1968.

It can be argued that this movement still haunts progressives more than 40 years later but America still underwent a major shift toward greater racial acceptance during the 1970s due to the CRA and subsequent voting rights act.

Maybe it is always less painful to view events through literature.  The writers of last year’s hit HBO TV-series The Newsroom gave an excellent and concise summary of the impact of the “Yippes” on Democratic Party politics in 1968.

More relevant to today, the clip contrasts this with the way ultra-conservatives and racists have coopted the Tea Party and its influence on Republicans today, only as the dialogue clarifies, Democrats wouldn’t have nominated or elected “Yippies.”

This literary analysis is an excellent lens through which to understand the zaniness of the Republican-led legislature in my adopted North Carolina today, where each day brings a new outrage, marginalizing legitimate issues.

Maybe literature has always had a tremendous influence on events.  Remember, President Lincoln’s quip in 1862 upon being introduced to Harriet Beecher Snow, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  He stated, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

Similarly, in my opinion, the influence of the Academy Award-winning 1962 adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird on the passage of the CRA cannot be overstated.

My preferences for insight today are biographies and historical analysis. Two books have provided me a clearer lens through which to view how racism in this country has moved between bigotry by individuals and groups to structural racism still so evident today although much harder to detect.

Making it even harder, ironically I was at this point in writing this post when it was announced that in a 5 to 4 vote, the Supreme Court had struck down portions of the Voting Rights Act, which had stood since 1965 until they can be updated by our dysfunctional Congress, which is gridlocked by representatives of the offending states who make up half of the Republicans in congress.

The Man Who Saved the Union by H. W. Brands was published last year, at the time another great book published in 2010, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander was updated.

They also provide a lens through which to see the realignment of today’s political parties through different eras.

The Democrats of that day were forced to compromise with Republicans on the issue of slavery to get the Constitution adopted.  By the time of the Civil War, southern Democrats defended slavery and Republicans opposed it.

After the Civil War, Republican-President Ulysses S. Grant  had to repeatedly send federal troops into the South to thwart attempts to intimidate blacks and find alternatives to slavery as a means to undermine civil rights, including amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

However, when he was succeeded by Republican-President Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republicans gave in to its business/financial wing of the party and withdrew troops from the South, abandoning it along with their support of civil rights to the so-called “redeemers” of the Democratic Party who were rabidly intent on finding alternative ways to enslave.

This enabled various surrogates for slavery that only began to give way after WWII, first to watered-down civil rights legislation passed after being proposed by Republican-President Dwight. D. Eisenhower and then the landmark legislation in 1964 and 1965, which unfortunately many in the Republican Party are trying to undermine today.

It is the World War II generation, shamed by our own country’s hypocrisy while defeating the Nazis, that came home passed those bills, not hippies or yippies and definitely not John Birchers.

Alexander’s book gives an excellent overview of attempts to undermine racial tolerance and equality from the advent of slavery through colonial times, and up to the CRA and after but its thesis supports the view that a form of structural racism was substituted by Republicans in the early 1980s through policies and racialized images of crime in a reiteration of another war on drugs.

More in a subsequent blog on my personal observation of Alexander’s thesis at work when I relocated to North Carolina in 1989 and how her book has helped me to audit my own stereotypes.

Litter as a Cue To Who We Are

I was pleased to see an op-ed in the New York Times last Sunday authored by Dr. Adam Alter, a psychologist, researcher and professor of marketing at at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

The op-ed, entitled Where We Are Shapes Who We Are, is only a taste of his relatively new book which I read last spring entitled Drunk Tank Pink – And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave.

We know from other studies that only 4% of Americans are intentionally litterers while 17% just dispose of their trash improperly.  One of the many research findings Alter summarizes in his book was when researchers studied how many drivers discarded windshield flyers improperly.

When the parking lot was pristine, only one in ten tossed the flyers on the ground, when the lot was already littered, half of the drivers improperly disposed of the flyers by tossing them on the ground as litter.

“The researchers then asked a “stooge” to conspicuously drop an unwanted flyer on the ground” just as other drivers came to their cars.  If the stooge highlighted how neat the lot was before discarding a flyer, only 6% followed suit.  If the stooge noted how cluttered the lot already was, 54% did.

Alter’s fascinating book is about a number of cues that influence our behavior, pre-existing litter being just one example.  But it made me wonder how local government agencies came to dupe themselves into swapping places with volunteers when it comes to litter removal.

It ranks right up there with the crazy notion that those with mental health problems could be dumped out onto city streets based on the now well-proven fallacy that they would all take crucial medications as out-patients.

The cost to society - not to mention families -  has been many times greater than the cost of alternatives this was meant to save.

At one time, the paradigm was that public agencies would be funded to aggressively maintain the cleanliness of roadsides and water ways, supplemented episodically by volunteers.

Then to save a few dollars, this was reversed and community’s such as Durham, NC where I live largely abandoned clean-up to volunteers while agencies were funded only enough to barely fill in on occasion during the year.

The result has been a disaster illustrated by a stretch of freeway here where McDonalds often advertises on a billboard, (aka litter on a stick) near one of its outlets, whose customers then litter this stretch of highway with litter from their meal.

The solution, according to studies, is a zero-tolerance for litter.  For those who role their eyes because society has much more important things to worry about, consider for a moment all of the things to which litter is a cue or link:

• public health issues
• increased racism/intolerance
• increased crime
• suppressed property values and tax base
• inhibited philanthropy
• soil and water contamination
• increased infrastructure costs

There are more.  Still think litter reduction is light weight or something scalable for only volunteers?

Rarely do litterers view themselves as litterers.  As Alter makes clear with numerous cues in his book, studies about things such as litter “tell us something profound and perhaps a bit disturbing about what makes us who we are: there isn’t a single version of ‘you’.”

Our “norms change from minute to minute…It’s comforting to believe that there’s an essential version of each of us, that good people are good, bad people are bad, and that those tendencies reside within us.”

In many ways I am not the person I was as a child or at various other times in my life.  My political views aren’t the only values that have evolved over time, swinging from conservative to liberal before settling at the moderate center.

As conveyed by memoirs sprinkled on occasion through this blog, memories, according to Dr. Alter, are “the building blocks that construct the evolving story of who we are across time….[they] are tagged with the locations where they are formed.”

Often they are contextual.  A disposition to historical analysis has given me the ability to revisit the historical memories of my ancestors and to place them in context.  It is also a means I use to evaluate current events and to discern the motives of others without telling myself too much of a story.

As Alter explains in Drunk Tank Pink, now a best-seller, sometimes illusions are cultural, “legacies” that “influence how we perceive people and social interactions.”

This may explain why in retirement both Tea Party groups and liberal groups have me on their mailings lists to enlist contributions.  I provide enough information in this blog for each end of the spectrum to attempt fundraising, even though I am an Independent moderate with leanings that vary depending on the topic.

Even before I began to publish this blog in mid-2005, people often pegged me as conservative or liberal based on the context in which they met me. Business-types often judged me conservative and neighborhood types as liberal.

You can also be judged by a context you find yourself in.

I remember in the 1980s when those prone to suddenly start telling racist, sexist or misanthropic jokes felt more free to do so.  I learned quickly to signal or voice my displeasure or risk escalation.

Litter is only part of one of the nine cues that Alter reviews in his book, which I highly recommend to anyone but especially those still involved in community-destination marketing.

Education Entitlement Imperative

In March of 1867, during battles with ultra-conservative-Democratic President Andrew Johnson over how to re-organize the South following the Civil War, the Republican Congress, controlled by liberals and moderates, managed to pass, and the President subsequently signed, new legislation establishing a national department of education to collect statistics.

Conservatives had long opposed compulsory public education.  Fearing even the collection of statics, the department was soon-after demoted from cabinet level to the status of office.  However, in 1870, under the new act and the new administration of President and Civil War hero U.S. Grant, the government began to conduct statistical surveys.  In 1872, Congress authorized the hiring of the first statistician.

This is how we now know that between 1870, around the time many of my great-grandparents were born and 1952, two years after I was born, “every decade was accompanied by an increase in 0.8 years of education.”

Unfortunately, that annual bump in the level of education stopped thirty years ago.  It probably isn’t coincidental that this was also when the middle-class went into decline and about the time conservatives -- by this time mostly Republicans -- took power as well as aim at government and education policy.

Ironically, it was conservatives who, in 1642, first put compulsory education into law.  The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were ultra-conservatives, but they believed education was a moral and social imperative.

However, it would be another 210 years before Massachusetts established compulsory attendance, which reminds me of a hotelier-friend of mine in Durham, NC where I live, who found that asking prospective employees if they had a car was insufficient, so added the question, “and does it run?” 

By 1900, pressed by the Progressive Movement, 34 states including four in the South had legislated compulsory schooling if even for as little as a few weeks a year.  This included my native Idaho, first settled by my great-grandparents in 1860, which embedded education in its pre-statehood constitution in 1887. 

By 1907, North Carolina, my adopted home now for nearly 25 years, followed suit and finally, Mississippi became the last state to do so in 1917.  By 1910, 72 percent of American children were attending school.

Back then, half the nation's children attended one-room schools as my father did during the 1920s and 1930s in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho.  By 1918, near the end of the Progressive Era, every state required students to at least complete elementary school.

It isn’t clear why conservatives have so often opposed education.  You almost need a scorecard to keep track of when conservatives have been in control of each of the major political parties in the US.

When I need a break from writing essays such as these, I often pick up a small book entitled The Good Of This Place, a collection published by Dick Brodhead, a friend of mine in Durham, who is currently President of Duke University.

Before ascending to become president of Duke, Dick had been the long-time Dean of Yale College.  One of my favorites in the book, which was published just as I retired, is entitled Taking Democracy to School, a 2001 pre-9/11 lecture he made as part of the De Vane series to mark Yale’s 300th anniversary.

Here, Dick tells the story of an 1778-80 public education legislative proposal made by Thomas Jefferson entitled “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” during the time he was elected Governor of Virginia while the American Revolution was in full swing.

To me, Jefferson and James Madison were the conservative Republicans of their time, resisting change, especially when it came to proposals by other founding fathers to abolish slavery.

The bill was repeatedly submitted by each of these men and a watered-down version was finally passed by the Virginia Commonwealth in 1796, well after formation of the United States of America and a constitutional compromise that would leave slavery in place until the Civil War triggered passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In this speech, Dr. Brodhead points out several “paradoxes of democratic education” contained in Jefferson’s proposal:

1. “It failed partly because Virginia voters were unwilling to entrust their local schools to a statewide system…largely because they refused to assume the tax burden…”
2. “Jefferson would make the school the great equalizer, the tool for neutralizing differences of income and family standing [except slaves.]
3. His whole three-tier apparatus is an elaborate sorting device, a mechanism for separating the persons of superior parts and blessing him with further advancement.”

I can imagine the characteristic twinkle in Dick’s eye as he dryly notes that – “When Jefferson speaks of best geniuses being “raked from rubbish,” the limits of his egalitarianism comes clear.”

Today, education is an entitlement but a sense of “entitlement” is not limited by socio-economic status or level of education or privilege.  In 2011, while summarizing some of his research, Ed O’Brien, phd candidate in psychology at the University of Michigan noted that – “For some, a dull moment can seem like an eternity, whereas for others there is no such thing as a dull moment.

Fortunately, for the most part, I have always been more like the latter but especially now in retirement.  The study found that, unfortunately, for people who feel entitled, time passes oh, so slowly.

According to a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute survey, there are 75 million unemployed youth around the world, one in eight between the ages of 15 and 24.  For them, time is excruciatingly slow. The figure increases to 225 million when counting those who are underemployed.

Yet, paradoxically, only 43% of the employers surveyed in nine countries including the United States could find enough skilled entry-level workers.

Of those of student-age who didn’t attend post-secondary school, 57% are “too cool” (in my opinion, a form of entitlement) and 43% are “too poor.”  Another 18% are “disengaged” and 26% are “struggling.”

The McKinsey report analyzes three “critical intersections” for students, educators and employers: 1) enrolling in post-secondary education, 2) building skills, and 3) finding a job.

“Cost” is the top barrier to enrolling in college, denying nearly a third of high-school graduates access.  Among those who go on, only “46% are convinced they made the right choice as far as selecting institution or field of study.”

For those who do go on, there is a big disconnect at “building skills,” the second intersection, with 60% citing on-the-job training and hands-on learning as the most effective instructional techniques, “but fewer than half of that percentage are enrolled in curricula that prioritize those techniques.”

In my experience, many of the students in the surveys seem to feel “entitled” as do many prospective employers which are as much impediments as any failure by educational institutions to make adjustments.  At the third intersection, a quarter of youth fail to make a smooth transition to work.

The report proposes some improved models and in the United States, a Career Readiness Partner Council coalesced just a few months ago to evolve a new model between employers, policy-makers, educators, students and families.

However, I am more persuaded that a critical part of the answer is to be found by expanding the social and moral imperative for education into pre-school years.

Programs such as Smart Start, which brings together all the people involved in a pre-schooler’s life— “families, teachers, doctors, caregivers, social workers, and many others” as well as the More at Four program, have been proven effective by researchers at Duke University.

A recent Gallup survey of students reveals that student engagement with learning and education is highest during elementary school at 76%, falling to 61% by middle school and 44% in high school.  Fixation on standardized testing is one of the culprits.

I am convinced that even early intervention, well before elementary school is the answer to creating a lifetime enjoyment of learning.

“Rewarding Pragmatism, Compassion, Working Together, Compromise and Sincerity”

As even casual observers of this blog know, I truly am a moderate Independent when it comes to political ideology.  I voted both for Republican Pat McCrory for Governor of North Carolina, where I have lived for nearly 25 years, and to re-elect President Barack Obama.

To me, they are both moderate realists, a group that could be credited with making a significant difference in their election victories.

I frequently read commentary on both the right and the left to keep informed, but I personally identify with one published last week by Rob Ellsworth, a moderate and former Republican.

We share links with my native state of Idaho and adopted home of North Carolina as well as a love of English bulldogs and I too have been disturbed by hyperbole on both the left and right following the outcome of the Presidential election but more so with that coming from the right.

Exasperated with his former colleagues Ellsworth lamented that:

“Your inability to reason, compromise, or let new facts and evidence challenge your predetermined outcomes led millions of moderates to no longer be able to stand on stage with you.”

But he also cautioned that “there isn’t a mandate for Democrats in this election. Liberalism wasn’t rewarded in this election. However, calm pragmatism, compassion, working together, compromise and sincerity were rewarded.”

Nor was there a mandate for Republicans in 2000 when they lost the popular vote and only won the White House via the electoral vote aided by a determination from the US Supreme Court that split along party lines.  Liberals then may have only been slightly less disrespectful than conservatives are today who are now as they fly the American flag upside down to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with last week’s election.

I have no doubt that Mitt Romney, who was a college classmate of mine, would have made an excellent President. Both he and President Obama are moderate realists.

In the end, I was ultimately swayed not by any particular difference between these two gentlemen but by the fact that I just felt less comfortable with extremely partisan forces surrounding Romney.  I doubt that even the seemingly more resolute Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush could have survived the drag created by these “wackanoodles,” to use the term used by a Republican operative attributed to their ilk.

I grew up a Republican when a moderate Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was President, but in the 1960s I supported both a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, and a Republican, Barry Goldwater, both of whom were more moderate than either is often portrayed.

In the 1972, the first election in which I was eligible to vote,  I supported the late Democrat George McGovern because I thought he was more sensible and moderate, especially about the war in Viet Nam.

There is some substance to the perception that I became Independent because, in my 40-year career in community-destination marketing, it was a wise career choice and a way to avoid the ebb and flow of local partisanship, even in communities where elected office is supposed to be non-partisan.

Once or twice over the years, in places where registered Independents were not eligible to vote in primary elections, I’ve even briefly changed my affiliation so that I could vote.  I’ve probably supported as many Republicans as Democrats, with moderates always being the common denominator.

I truly wish the value political parties bring to the electoral process could be supplanted by a “No Labels” approach to which I subscribe, but that paradigm-shift will take decades if ever it occurs.

Voting itself, which was one of the first moves by government to be participative (the creation of trial juries by England’s King Henry II being the first) is too slow and infrequent.  Social networking initiatives such as crowdsourcing is being used by the US Patent office and may provide a window into what to expect in the future.

Moderates dating from George Washington, our first President, have cautioned about the dangers of hyper-partisanship.  I am persuaded by pieces such as one posted by Dr. Robert Reich a day before last week’s election and entitled “We the People, and the New American Civil War.”

While America is known as “the land of opportunity,” the emergence of the middle class is a relatively recent phenomena as shown in this Pew Research Center graph published last summer in The Atlantic.

The middle class emerged in the 1950s and 1960s during a time of moderation and bipartisan cooperation.  During the 1970s, it sputtered for a decade, fueled by the inflation created by the war in Viet Nam and two oil crises.

During the 1980s and 1990s, tax cuts and technology fueled the markets and the growth of the investment class but not the recovery of the middle class.

I agree with Reich who summarizes his election eve assessment by writing that:

“So we come to the end of a bitter election feeling as if we’re two nations rather than one. The challenge – not only for our president and representatives in Washington but for all of us – is to rediscover the public good.”

However, I am even more persuaded by a post-election assessment by conservative columnist David Brooks.  After a wonderful job of giving historical context to the obsessive suspicions many Americans have over the size of government, Brooks makes an observation about the values of some Americans who made a significant difference in last week’s election:

“The Pew Research Center does excellent research on Asian-American and Hispanic values. Two findings jump out. First, people in these groups have an awesome commitment to work. By most measures, members of these groups value industriousness more than whites.

Second, they are also tremendously appreciative of government. In survey after survey, they embrace the idea that some government programs can incite hard work, not undermine it; enhance opportunity, not crush it.

Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs.”

Numerous sensible and moderate solutions (many by Governor Romney such as capping tax deductions) have been proposed to each of the problems and challenges our country faces if as Americans we can rise above the only obstacle, partisanship.

Maybe we should also listen very carefully to some of our newer Americans who made the difference in this election.

May God Bless America To Be Less Partisan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Moderate Heritage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Priority Place-based Trait Across the Political Spectrum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Exploring My Moral Matrix

Friends who know I haven’t been inclined toward organized religion since the early 1970s rib me about my religious zeal when it came to standing up for the communities I represented during my now-concluded career which is now evident in my defense of the sanctity of trees and the environment.

I descend from ancestors who immigrated to this country as Swiss Mennonites, Welsh Quakers, Palatine Lutherans, French Huguenots, Dutch Remonstrants, Scots-Irish Presbyterians and Mormons to escape severe persecution and I’ve always been curious about how I came to my own blend of values, ethics and morals.

Many more traits are to varying degrees more heritable than we once thought, especially when innate is viewed a “first draft, revised by experience” and that “morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply intuitions within a particular culture.)”

Dr. Jonathan Haidt is an expert in moral psychology now teaching and researching at the NYU Stern School of Business.  It is reassuring that he holds the Thomas Cooley Chair of Ethical Leadership and he is also a popular TED presenter.

He is also the author of a must-read book, published in March, entitled The Righteous Mind – Why Good People are Divided over Politics and Religion from which the earlier quotes were taken.

Haidt substantiates in the book that morals are more intuition than reason and that “we’re born righteous, but we have to learn what exactly, people like us should be righteous about.”

He describes six areas of moral beliefs including ethics and values that we each personalize much as we slide the channels on a music equalizer mixer such as the one we used to have on stereos and now have on smartphones.

Along with a friend, I took a brief quiz on yourmorals.org, a website developed by Haidt and others, and received my results (green bar) shown in the image in this blog.  The higher the bar the stronger that element is manifest.

My mix is compared to the averages of more than 132,000 others shown for proclaimed liberals in blue and conservatives in red.  The labels only show one of the words used to describe each moral foundation and the sixth is so recent it hasn’t been added to the assessment I guess.

The full names the six moral foundations are:

1. Care/harm
2. Fairness/cheating
3. Loyalty/betrayal
4. Authority/subversion
5. Sanctity/degradation, and
6. Liberty/oppression.

It is well worth reading the book to understand how these were defined, what they mean and how they influence various groups and how misinterpretations can lead to divides.

Haidt provides compelling evidence that instead of demonizing each other, liberals and conservatives are “Yin and Yang,” “seemingly opposed forces that are in fact complementary and interdependent. Night and day are not enemies, nor are hot and cold, summer and winter, male and female.  We need both, often in shifting or alternating balance.”

The book also provides scientific proof of why we are at our best as a nation when we have a strong, moderate center regardless of party affiliation or un-affiliation.  Lost on news coverage and partisan bickering is that nearly 40% of Americans are politically Independent (37%) and/or moderate (36%.)  Moderates may also be the moral center.

The book is an insightful and funny blend of a research, psychology, anthropology, neurology, public policy and mixed with excellent story telling.  It also reminds us that “morality binds and blinds.”

It is fast and entertaining to read but every sentence offers up a nugget so don’t plan on skimming.  Anyone trolling for cocktail nuggets will be surely busted.  Haidt takes the reader through the evolution of his own learning and thinking and just when you think you have it all figured out, a new dimension is introduced.

Easily one of the most interesting and useful books I’ve ever read.