Americans Can Hold Contradictions – Why Not Lawmakers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inattention Where It Most Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Tracing Partisanship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8 Take-Aways From Each Side Of The Helmet Law Debate

My late father would become apoplectic at mention of the law mandating the use of seat belts after it was enacted in 1986 where he lived and now in force in every state except New Hampshire for anyone in the front seat and for all passengers in 26 states and the District of Columbia.

So I have a window into the seemingly absurd objections by lobbyists for motorcycle owner organizations to laws in many states, including North Carolina, where I live, requiring the use of DOT-approved helmets, even going so far as to muzzle government-sponsored educational programs.

The battle over helmet laws has been raging since the late 1970s when many began to be rolled back.

Personally, lessons learned in my formal training on how to ride a motorcycle were enough to convince me not only to wear a helmet, but a full-face helmet, since injury to the jaw and face is more prevalent than to the top of the head.

Dad understood the logic of seat belts, he just objected to being “required to use them”  so debating with him about this and a variety of other issues taught me to look behind controversial issues to try to learn why otherwise reasonable people might be contrary to something that seems to be in their own best interest as well as the interests of society.

Here are 8 take-aways from reports for and against helmet laws:

• Helmet use is estimated to prevent 37% of fatalities among motorcycle operators and 41% of fatalities among passengers.

 

• There were 8.2 million owned and registered motorcycles in 2010, compared with 4.3 million in 2000,) but the 1.8 fatalities per 1000 vehicles has increased only 0.3 percentage points.

 

• Helmet use saved the lives of 1,544 motorcyclists, and an additional 709 lives might have been saved if all motorcyclists had worn helmets (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, unpublished data, 2012).

 

• Helmets do not prevent motorcycle crashes:
  • 34% of all motorcycle fatalities involved alcohol making awareness and intervention programs  more effective than helmet laws.

 

• 25% of all motorcycle fatalities involved invalid licenses making promotion of safety programs and licensing and testing more effective than helmet laws.

 

• Half of all motorcycle fatalities involve another vehicle and that vast majority of these are the fault of the other driver so motorist awareness programs as well as motorcyclist “conspicuity” programs would be more effective than helmet laws.

 

• While motorcyclists are as likely to be covered by insurance as other motorists, studies show that insurance doesn’t cover the costs of investigating accidents which studies show average more than $7,000 each.

 

• Enactments of universal helmet laws have consistently been associated with a 90- to 100-percent increase
  in helmet usage, a 20- to 40-percent decrease in fatalities and fatality rates, and approximately a 67-percent decrease in serious head and brain injuries.

Prior to the most recent recession, the economic impact of motorcycling was nearing $30 billion annually.  Riders on average are over 40 years old, college educated with above average household incomes.

Studies are showing that motorcycle accidents are higher for younger riders, higher for sport bikes than cruisers and most are unrelated to speed.  In my experience, the biggest danger to riding a motorcycle comes from drivers of cars and trucks who are distracted by everything from billboards to putting on make up to texting.

The respective arguments by safety officials and motorcycle organizations all make sense, but rather than obsessing with helmet laws, my overall take-away is a hope that they spend more time listening to each other and mutually prioritizing and working toward solutions that make the most sense.

Being Independent Doesn't Mean Ambivalent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holding Contradictions - Open-Hearted Decision-Making

Last night as I re-read, for the millionth time it seems, an incredible essay entitled The Politics of the Brokenhearted, I was reminded that part of my diverse religious heritage is Quaker.

Author, Parker J. Palmer, tells the story of John Woolman, a Quaker-contemporary of Sarah Buzby, my great-great-great-great grandmother; they were actually separated by less than thirty miles, she on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River and he on the New Jersey side.

More than a hundred years before the Civil War, Woolman began explaining to Quaker groups throughout America that slavery was wrong. Quakers, as one self-satirist quipped, “came to this country to do good and ended up doing very well,” often by owning slaves.

Quakers at the time disagreed with Woolman and could have thrown him out of their society based on their version of majority-rule. Similarly, Woolman could have become unobservant of formal religion as I did nearly 40 years ago but this is where the “brokenhearted” in the title of the essay comes in. Brokenhearted also means “open-hearted” and Quakers told him to keep sharing his opinion with others.

Both the Quakers in general, and John Woolman specifically, spent the next twenty years “open-hearted to the tensions between practice and belief.” Just before he died but more than 80 years before the Civil War, the Quakers agreed with Woolman and they abolished slavery.

As Palmer notes in this essay, “open-heartedness,” or the ability to hold contradictions in creative tension, is deeply woven throughout each of the three traditions of American life: Judaism, Christianity and secular humanism.

Whenever we see impatient list-checkers preempting consensus by calling for the vote on governing boards or while politicians are dealing with issues such as immigration or prohibitions on the right to marriage or even refusing to compromise on debt reduction, we’re actually observing fear and arrogance prevail over true democracy.

Palmer clarifies that:

“Consensus does not mean that we can make a decision only when everyone involved is equally enthusiastic about a course of action; if it did, very few decisions would have been made this way! Consensus means that we can make a decision only when no one in the group feels a deep need to oppose it, usually on the grounds of conscience.”

Majority-rule often makes us into adversarial listeners, seeking only to find out who agrees with us and then to ridicule those who disagree with how wrong they are. The democratic alternative of consensus described by Parker suspends the premature resolution to the tension of ideas or seemingly conflicting viewpoints until solutions surface that were not predetermined at the outset.

Increasingly devoid of diverse opinion, the Republican Party of today is feverish in its attempt to codify extremist views for two reasons. Those dominating that party sense the huge demographic opinion-shifts from those who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s that may soon marginalize both them and that party.

Having been marginalized themselves, not just by Hippies but by the arrogance of the liberal Christianity of the “long-1960’s,” equally arrogant fundamentalists are defiantly falling into the trap of equating their idea of the holy with the holy itself when in fact as Palmer so eloquently articulates, our religious beliefs can only “point in the general direction of a truth that will always elude capture by concept or creeds.”

The challenge I find myself facing is how to keep my heart open and listening to what may be valid critiques while dissenting vehemently to remedies such as those that would deny the rights of marriage to everyone in society or pollute the Earth for which God has made us stewards or resurrect xenophobia.

As Parker summarizes “we know that when we step back, breathe, allow our agitation to settle, and simply start paying attention, we often see new possibilities in situations that once seemed intractable.”

Especially during campaign season, The Politics of the Brokenhearted is a must read for every true American.

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.

Unholy Alliances - Lessons From Prohibition

This is a book you’ll want to read before you see the film.

As a series the Ken Burns’ documentary Prohibition will premiere on PBS, October 2nd, 3rd & 4th, airing here in Durham both at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on WUNC-TV.

It is based on a book I’ve nearly finished entitled Last Call – The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent and published last year.  In my opinion, reading the book, now out in paperback, will only deepen and enrich the documentary.

There are certainly some comparisons with today, especially given the findings in another book I read last month entitled American Grace – How Religion Divides and Unites Us based on hour-long surveys conducted with a huge number of Americans and then repeated over several years.  Combining scores of other studies, the book illuminates the changing trends in the lives of real Americans and it is full of surprises about American religious life.

What stood out for me in Okrent’s book was the unholy alliance between prohibitionists and Southern racists, without whom the former would have failed.  For the 14 years it was in effect, the Constitutional amendment on prohibition stood as only the second time in history that the Constitution had been amended to curb citizen behavior instead of government behavior, the other being the amendment that ended slavery.

The book documents, in their own words, the motives most Southerners had for supporting prohibition which among others included “sticking it to” the urban and industrialized North and retribution for Reconstruction but primarily to reinforce myths and fears and prejudice about African-Americans and as a means to bolster local and state Jim Crow Laws.

Keep in mind this was the same era when the KKK was revived by a white, nativist, protestant minister and fueled a toxic brew of anti-black, anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, anti-union and anti-immigrant sentiment to reach a zenith when 1 in every 29 Americans belonged to the Klan.

Historians such as American University’s Dr. Allan Jay Lichtman in the 2008 book entitled White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement and Stanford University’s Dr. David M. Kennedy in a book published a decade earlier entitled Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War trace the roots of today’s Conservative movement, including “cut, cut cut, states’ rights, balanced budget and worries about a dependent welfare class, forward to this era.

As you’ll read in Last Call and may see in the documentary, prohibition entailed many unlikely alliances and hidden agendas, particularly in the home stretch of the 50-80 year movement’s culmination.  While some such as racism, anti-immigration and intolerance of religious and lifestyle choices seem abhorrent to the American way or did at least were until the advent of the Tea Party.  Others such as women’s suffrage and the progressive income tax are now indelibly part of the American way.

But for me the most eerie of the resemblance with today was the how a very small, single-minded and well organized, fearful minority can overwhelm a democracy.  The prohibition lobby systematically bullied and cowed politicians into ignoring human nature, behavioral science, marketplace innovation and the law of supply and demand and a much larger but less motivated and under-mobilized constituencies much as the polarizing anti-tax pledge does today.

The story of prohibition and its repeal is another lesson about unintended consequences and the importance of striking balanced solutions, something extremely relevant to our America of today.

A good start, regardless of where you fall along the ideological spectrum is to read the book, especially if you are a moderate or an Independent for whom it is a must-read. 

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.

The Moral From Two True Stories Of Need

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs A New Generation Will Finally Shift Two Paradigms

Even as the 150th anniversary of the Civil War brings reflection on a time when our founding principles legitimized slavery, it is heartening to note the studies showing that African-Americans today are more optimistic about the future of the American Dream than other groups, even those who give it lip service.

Another study reveals that African-Americans are also significantly more likely than Caucasians to value and be involved with causes -- meaning they “walk the talk.”

I’m going to dig next into a fascinating new book, The End of Anger: A New Generation’s Take on Race and Rage by Ellis Cose, but from what I’ve read this book gives hope even though many in my generation and the generation before me remain trapped in a “tangle of racial stereotypes” as clearly evidenced by radio talk show callers, whether it be national audiences like Rush Limbaugh’s or any afternoon that Durham is a topic on nearby Raleigh’s WPTF Bill LuMaye show.

According to Cose, for generations my daughter’s age and younger, born between 1970 and 1995, especially those who are African-American, “race is no big deal.” Maybe it will also take these younger generations to also shift another, but related, paradigm.

In his newly published book, The Social Animal, conservative commentator David Brooks makes a compelling case for the fact that over the last several decades, “whether on the left or right, we’ve focused too much on individualism to the exclusion” of what he describes as “society, social obligations, communal bonds” and “invisible norms.”

As an Independent voter, I can also see myself in his descriptions.

I think he’s right to describe the two major political movements of the last 50 years, one in the 1960s and the other in the 1980s as both being far too much about “individualism.” To paraphrase:

- Liberals have been obsessed with anything that threatened individualism in social areas such as the role of women and matters of life and death, marriage and family structure.

- Conservatives have been obsessed with anything that threatens individualism in economic areas such as lower taxes, privatization of things like social security and now Medicare and vouchers.

Brooks calls out both liberals and conservatives for gravitating toward “economic explanations for any social problems and generally coming up with solutions to this problem that involved money.”

In the book, he makes a solid case for the fact that both ends of the political spectrum have neglected matters of “character, culture, and morality.”

I didn’t realize it until Brooks pointed out that Adam Smith is not only famous for authoring The Wealth of Nations, but he also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Brooks believes both liberals and conservatives have split Smith right down the middle giving too much attention to the first book and “not knowing what to make” of the second.

Including a citation of Phillip Blond, Brooks a truly dissects today’s political conundrum.

… “these two individualist revolutions did not create loose free societies. They produced atomized societies in which the state grows in an attempt to fill the gaps created by social disintegration…

…without healthy social fabric, politics become polarized. One party came to represent the state. The other came to represent the market…both neglected and ignored the intermediary institutions of civil life…

…Politicians, and media polemicists took advantage of the psychic vacuum and turned [political] parties into cultures, demanding and rewarding complete loyalty to the tribe…

…Amongst this partisan ugliness, public trust in government and political institutions collapsed…

…Instead of being bound by fraternal bonds and occasionally responding to a call for joint sacrifice, a cynical ‘grab what you can before the other guy steals it’ mentality prevails..

…Without social trust, the political system devolved into a brutal shoving match.”

This not only makes so much sense to me, but Brooks is equally eloquent and insightful about the road map back to the American Dream we all should seek to merit.

I’m very optimistic about future generations of leaders.

Some Recent Signals From Texas Are All Smoke

I haven’t heard much from Texas Governor Rick Perry since his Fed Up! book tour touting states as incubators for great ideas and that his state hadn’t been hit by the recession and now come some oversized reports of Super Bowl impact.

Perry makes a good point, but the Federal Healthcare Reform Act he hates so much was patterned after one pioneered in Massachusetts by another Republican Governor.

So who said you couldn’t shoot yourself in the foot while making your point?  Be sure to buy the book online, by the way, so you don’t have to pay state sales tax.

I noticed in the New York Times last Sunday that the Texas state budget is short 13.4% for 2012 but as a percentage of its current budget it is short more than 30%.

Don’t brag to me when you’re relying on reserves funded from oil production, the cost of which is born by everyone in the nation who buys gas or uses petroleum.

His state ranked 35th on national standardized tests of 4th and 8th graders while Massachusetts and Vermont ranked first and second respectively.  Given the philosophy of his book, I assume the Texas governor is on the phone to those liberals up in Vermont and Massachusetts right now. 

The tests include math, but unfortunately for some in Texas, they don’t include geography.  Officials in Dallas didn’t sound very astute  on either count last week.

They crowed that the Super Bowl would pump $600 million into their economy and generate $10 million in tax revenue.  That may or may not be accurate, they didn’t reveal the methodology.  Regardless, what the news media didn’t report or maybe failed to realize is that those figures are “gross,” not “net,” and it isn’t valid or “value-added” unless reduced by the amount the mega-event displaces.

The game will actually occur in Arlington, Texas not Dallas but even so, research for years has shown that the huge event displaces as much impact as it generates, for a net impact of, well “negligible.”  The Game and attendees may generate taxable spending but it will displace as much as it generates.

The game will displace visitors who would have been in the area anyway, it will disrupt resident consumer habits etc.  Studies of “sales” related tax receipts on dates the year before, the year of and the year after hosting a Super Bowl show no increase.

The article lamented that the “outer suburbs” (I guess Dallas is an inner suburb to Arlington) wouldn’t feel the impact.  Lucky them!  Ironically though, if any of the visitors who would normally be traveling to that part of Texas still dare to go, they will probably be dislocated out into those very “outer” suburbs. 

President Eisenhower may have put his finger on the “military-industrial” complex in his gutsy speech delivered 50 years ago yesterday, but that complex is rivaled by today’s “mega-event-industrial” complex including many cities and counties, destination marketing organizations, facilities, consultants, sports-advertising reliant news media, and major sports organizations.

There may be good social and cultural reasons for communities to host big events like the Super Bowl but it isn’t to add value to their economies or to generate visitors or future visitors or billboard effect.  There is just too much established research now to the contrary.

Such delusions aren’t limited to Texas though.  If Tea Partiers want something to get their anger “fix,” they need look no further than the smoke screens put up around major sports events.

Robo-Decisions

There are good reasons we have a "representative" democracy. If we wanted robo-decisions, it would be easy enough to turn everything over to polling computers and do away with elected officials altogether. As much as I value scientific, generalizable public opinion polling, I say we stick with a representative form of decision making.

Republicans bent on repeal of healthcare reform are driving an agenda that represents only 26% of Americans (page 2) and less than half of the just-more-than-a-third who affiliate with their Party.

But, of course, they weren't elected to just represent Republicans or those who support repeal of healthcare reform.

They represent everyone in their districts and states, even those who choose not to vote at all. They definitely don’t just represent bully-pundits or lobbyists or anonymous corporate campaign donors either.

Representative democracy requires conversations, informed by reading, analysis, thoughtful discourse plus courage and open minds.

The AP-GfK poll referenced above which was conducted a week ago on healthcare reform also shows overwhelming support for nearly every element of the reform enacted last year with less than a third opposed to the most unpopular element, a requirement for virtually all Americans to carry healthcare insurance.

By the way, the largest group of Americans who want the act changed, more than 4 out of 10, want the reform to do even more to change the healthcare system.

Given the amount of misinformation and distortion about healthcare reform, it is astonishing that anyone at all favors any of it.

Suppose there were a way to let the 1 in 3 who object to the requirement to carry insurance to completely opt-out on the condition that they or their families never run up even the most indirect or hidden costs to the system.

That just isn’t possible. It would be like saying one is never use streets or roadways or the monetary system or to breathe unpolluted air.

A free society doesn't come free. It comes with responsibilities. And those responsibilities must be carried by everyone. No one gets to pick and choose. No one gets a free ride.

Threats Up 400% and 300% Respectively on the White House and Congress

A 400% increase in threats against the White House following President Obama’s election and the 300% increase in threats against all members of Congress in the first few months of 2010 bring the Arizona shooting into sharper focus.

The good news is that actual follow through is rare in this country even though it is the most open society on this planet.  Disturbing, however, is  the coincidence between dramatically more hate-filled, anti-government rhetoric in political discourse and disproportionate news coverage and the increased number of threats on elected officials.

My source including links to the original sources for this information is FiveThirtyEight which became one of my favorite blogs from the day I learned about it many months ago from Mike Woodard, a good friend and Durham City Councilman.

This blog also provides an excellent ongoing primer on how to interpret information and distinguish good, solid research which is the most universally valuable element of decision-making, including good community/destination marketing.

Are You With Us, Or Against Us?

Karl Albrecht wrote a great post a couple of days ago entitled the “Tyranny of Two.”  It reminded me of when a former Mayor and friend of mine explained why it always seemed that no matter how hard we tried, we could never get the head of another community organization to be on the same page.

“With that guy,” he said, “you’re  either on his team or you’re not.”  Or a guy I know who calls to whine if a source ever tries to give balanced feedback to a reporter’s questions but is only partially quoted.  He believes news reports about his interests must be exclusively Pollyanna.

Karl’s review of current brain research indicates we don’t always have to be what he terms “dichotomous thinkers.”  He also uses another term, “polarized thinkers,” which is an apt description it seems to me for what one former Republican congressman noted in an interview Saturday discussing how these days the Republican Party is deriding anything proposed by another party but purposely refusing to put any ideas on the table.

They are able, I surmise, to pull this off because unfortunately, as Karl points out in his blog, “bipolarized conflict is the very essence of most of the news” these days, making “dichotomizing their religion.” 

And as the authors of the book The Big Sort note, one of the reasons people all over the country are sorting into places populated with “people just like them” is to avoid having to hear any information with which they disagree and polarization is a convenient way to be able to dismiss anything else.  Karl refers to it in his blog as “option fatigue.”  They just don’t “want” to hear any other sides to an issue.

Noting near the end of his blog, that if “we’re predisposed to polarize…And not all polarization is dysfunctional…"How can we improve our thinking and reacting, so as to liberate ourselves from the extremes…” Karl gives 7 mental tricks to keep dichotomization from sapping our creativity. 

I chuckled both to and at myself as I read them because not one of the 7 comes naturally to me.  Most I had to learn the hard way over the years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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