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.

Opening Up to Infidels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Sanders is actually making their point.

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

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

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

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

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

Inattention Where It Most Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clarifying Durham Poverty

It doesn’t take away from the importance of such an issue that news stories comparing the poverty rates in various cities and counties in North Carolina nearly always fail to index the percentages.

A question was raised in the Raleigh paper on New Year’s Day about why Durham’s poverty rate is higher than Raleigh and Cary’s.

If when reported, the percentages had been indexed to ethnic make-up, the more obvious question would have probably been, “Why are poverty rates in Raleigh and Cary so high.

Give or take, Durham’s rate of 19.4% is about three points higher than Raleigh’s and Cary’s but Durham is also a significantly much more diverse community.

This is noteworthy because poverty rates in North Carolina for African American and Latino residents are two and a half times that for Caucasians.  Durham is, respectively, as much as three times more diverse than Cary or Raleigh.

Just as puzzling is why so many people are disturbed by the poverty rate when they move to Durham from Greensboro.  They are seemingly unaware that the poverty rate there is as high or even higher.

Perhaps the misperceptions are fueled by the tendency of Durham residents to talk more openly and passionately about issues it wants to improve.

This is also why in the mid-1990s, to avoid being caught up with just headlines, Durham officials followed the lead of its agency for visitor-centric economic and cultural development and began to benchmark community comparisons against a comp set of communities across the state and nation.

This is a best practice means of not just explaining away issues, but putting them in a context where true anomalies can be readily detected which would otherwise be clouded by passions or news headlines.

Unfortunately, this benchmarking approach has not been applied broadly or deeply enough.  Not only has it been neglected in reference to problems such as poverty, but also areas such as cultural facilities, urban forestry and overall community curb appeal.

Even where they have been effectively applied in areas such as crime and school scores, often the results have not been used strategically to buffer problem-solvers from news reports which according to analysts, are only slightly biased toward negative news but heavily biased toward extremes.

An example in Durham is the media’s obsession with crimes and rates of crime, particularly violent crimes such as homicides. Durham is not exceptional or out of the norm in its overall crime or its violent crime, so it diverts officials from addressing types of crimes where it is above the norm, such as burglary and robbery.

While the communities weren’t indexed for variables, the report by a long-time Durham resident and columnist in the Raleigh paper was loaded with useful context to inform yesterday’s 50th anniversary of the declaration of the War on Poverty.

In 1960, four years before that declaration, 4-in-10 North Carolinians lived in poverty, including nearly 1-in-3 Durham County residents.

We can debate whether the programs responsible for wiping out so much poverty need to be perpetually overhauled or have become too brittle, or whether they were shortchanged, but the fact that they made a huge difference seems indisputable.

Another view of the statistics shows that poverty levels in America dropped precipitously from 1959 to 1970 before efforts to eradicate it became politicized and gridlocked.

Not coincidentally, in my opinion as a political Independent, this is also the time span where we invested heavily to broaden the middle class.  Maybe it would be worthwhile revising that span for solutions to help get back on track.

The answers still aren’t clear to me although I’ve read and thought about the issue a lot.  But as conservative critic Joe Queenan, who was raised in poverty, has written so eloquently, “Poverty is a pathologically enduring, immutable condition. Not a lifestyle choice.”

So I wasn’t at all surprised that the mandatory drug testing conservatives sought to impose (to varying degrees) in 30 states found that only 2.6 percent of poor people receiving public assistance tested positive for drugs compared to 8.7 of the general population.

The rate testing positive was as low as 1.2 percent or less in some states, leading one policy analyst to refer to this testing as “a bad cure in search of a problem.”

Similar analysis has found that poor people are less likely to turn to crime than those with much higher incomes.  We also know now that the stereotypes used to demonize the poor in the late 1970s and 1980s were misleading.

Far too much brain power is being wasted on playing ideological offence and defense at the expense of the poor.   We can do better, and we must do better, because “there, but for the grace of God” go any of us.

An Unlikely End-Run

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just sayin!

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.

America’s Next “Hero” Generation

A month ago I spoke to Dr. Dana Clark’s large class of potential “community-destination marketers” at Appalachian State University (ASU) perched in the northwest mountains of North Carolina.

Weeks from graduation for most, I told these students that should they land a position with a destination marketing organization (DMO) they would already be among the top 1% in knowledge about the topic.

Two things will be required of them.  One, patience with co-workers and supervisors who will be stuck in out-dated approaches, and two, a realization that within 3 to 5 years what they have learned at ASU will be obsolete.

Using a quote I had read in my local newspaper, I relayed the wisdom of a friend of mine, Dick Brodhead, who is the president of Duke University in Durham, where I live.  In a speech to faculty, he had noted just the day before my trip to ASU that a liberal arts education:

“…aims to engage multiple forms of intelligence to create deep and enduring habits of mind, an active, integrative spirit naturally disposed, when it comes upon a new fact or situation, to go to work trying to understand it, updating preexisting understandings in a new light.

…It is, in the fullest sense, equipment for living.”

These kids to whom I spoke at ASU are bright, energetic and very thoughtful.  They asked great questions, and I could also see it in their eyes as each one filed by to shake my hand later.

Any DMO will be lucky to land one of them but I wish for them that they will find one smart enough to listen to and engage them in contemporary applications of community marketing such as the one in Durham.  Unfortunately, those odds aren’t good even if they limit their availability to just those that are accredited.

I offered to these students that the college courses most beneficial to community marketers today outside of those about destination marketing and development will be historical analysis and statistics just as they were during my now-concluded 40-year career in that field.

Many people misunderstand the value of historical analysis because they think of history as linear.  Actually, it is cyclical.  It doesn’t exactly repeat itself but the cycles are similar.  However rather than predestined, outcomes depend on the reactions of generations to times of crisis (e.g. Civil War, Great Depression/World War II.)

To understand their role in historical cycles, I recommended to these students a book first published when they were preschoolers entitled An American Prophecy, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny by William Strauss and Neil Howe.

First published in 1997 and now available as an iBook, it accurately forecast what we now know as the financial crisis.  It traces cycles over the past five centuries.  Cycles span a human life or roughly eighty to one hundred years.  Each cycle has turnings that follow seasonal rhythms, e.g. “growth, maturation, entropy and destruction.”

The turning dating from the 1980s until the financial crisis has seen an “unraveling” of society, similar to other cycles in our history.  I told the generation to which I spoke last month at ASU, that if I read the book accurately, their generation is potentially a “hero” generation, much like the G.I. Generation of my father.  They will also face a similar crisis in their lifetime.

Just short of a week after that presentation, the New York Times published two columns.  One, by liberal-turned-conservative David Brooks summarizes a paper by a Yale senior describing the generation to whom I spoke at ASU and the influences that have shaped it.

The author, Victoria Buhler describes how she and her peers in that class grew up in a time of prosperity in the 1990s.  That was shattered first by 9/11 and then by the jadedness and moral ambiguities created by two long wars followed by the financial crisis.

As they enter their adult years, Buhler, according to Brooks, writes that this generation is now more anxious and cynical.  They are less idealistic about America and the world.  In Brooks’ assessment of Buhler’s thesis, this generation emerges empirical.

They “require hypothesis to be tested and substantiated with the results replicated before they commit to a course of action.”

To me, this means they will be far more capable of bringing America back from the unraveling of the last forty years based on a sound, “what works” policy rather than the ideological gridlock of many in high office today.

The same day as Brooks’ column was published, the New York Times published one by liberal economist Dr. Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winner who as a young man worked in the Reagan administration just as the unraveling so now apparent was set in motion.

Krugman argues that we’re cheating our children all right, but not from debt.  We’ve been cheating them for decades by neglecting public investment in infrastructure, disabling regulatory oversight of the food and water supplies and undermining upward mobility and the middle class to the advantage of the 1%.

I saw the future in the eyes of those students with whom I spoke at ASU and I have faith they can help us recover from this most recent unraveling and a crises yet to be manifested.

However, it will all come down to whether they are able to turn things around as we did during the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Depression/World War II, each of which could have gone another way.

It isn’t a given but my hopes and prayers are with them.  God bless America!

Making It Hard To Remain A Moderate

I subscribe to a quote, written by the conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., as a litmus test for anyone I encounter who still purports that there is any value in increasingly obsolete, outdoor, roadside billboards.

To anyone still advocating for billboards, I suspect the acerbic Buckley would quip, oh, “do you have one in your front yard?”, as he wrote in an essay in his 1968 collection entitled The Jeweler's Eye: A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections.”

Buckley, who passed away in 2008, famously wrote in that same essay, “billboards are acts of aggression, against which the public is entitled, as a matter of privacy, to be protected.”

In the essay entitled “The Politics of Beauty,” Buckley challenges anyone owning or advertising on roadside billboards “to construct (one) facing his own homestead rather than the public highway, in order to remind him, every time he looks out his window…certainly should be left free to do so.”

There may be an exception, but billboard company execs don’t like to live in neighborhoods with or near billboards.  Fearing backlash from neighbors they usually reserve the big boards for poorer neighborhoods instead.

In the essay, Buckley also challenged Libertarians, the most conservative of conservatives to take on what he saw as an abuse of the argument for the principle of private property by billboard companies.  Often billboard companies buy or lease property to erect a billboard that is behind a grove of pre-existing roadside trees and then apply for a permit to cut them down, arguing the right to be seen.

In my opinion, billboard companies are not really free marketers, they are more like freeloaders, paying little in fees and less than the cost of a couple of steak dinners in annual property taxes.  They weasel out of compensating the public for the trees they destroy, if not exempted entirely such as was done for them by recent legislation passed in North Carolina.

Most egregious is the fact that they pay nothing for the scenic easements they destroy.  Economists view these companies as rent seeking because rather than creating value, they use campaign contributions and lobbying to secure gratuities along public roadways that they didn’t pay to create.

Courts call this parasitic, but lawmakers seemingly blinded by cash and strong-armed in the hallways of the legislature, have yet to prioritize the electorate’s right to a view of nature along public roadways.

I am a moderate and an Independent but I miss Buckley and the thought-provoking stimulation of his essays in the National Review as well as the wit he exhibited during interviews on his long-running television talk show, Firing Line.

To me Buckley represented the now nearly extinct traditional conservatives so eloquently described a few days ago in a column in the New York Times by David Brooks entitled The Conservative Mind.

Brooks laments that “conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.”

Ironically, Buckley and Russell Kirk, who are credited with giving form to modern conservatism following World War II, and the late President Reagan who also represented a more diverse and thoughtful conservatism, might be excommunicated by today’s conservatives.

One thing is for sure: Locked in “polarized political conflict with liberalism” as Brooks writes and with seeming disdain for mutual respect or the common good, those who dominate today’s conservatism make it incredibly difficult to remain a moderate.

However, whenever I find myself tempted to tune out today’s robotic conservatives and shift away from my moderate comfort zone, I reread the Ten Conservative Principles by the late Russell Kirk, who lived in Durham, NC, where I now live, in the 1940s as a graduate student at Duke University and whose 1953 Ph.D. dissertation “The Conservative Mind – From Burke to Eliot” was published as a book.

If you are a liberal or a moderate like I am, or a conservative who is dismayed by today’s robotic brand of conservatism, reading Buckley and Kirk is a way to regain perspective and appreciation and understanding for the best in that ideology.

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.

Infographic – Racist Stereotypes In Campaign Ads

Click here for related article in Newsweek.  Click here for the book upon which it is drawn.

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.

Sleazy Marketing Is Polarizing America

I was always proud of my now-concluded four-decade career in marketing but it is disgraceful now to witness marketing techniques being perverted to tear our nation apart.

Granted, I was sheltered by my specialty in community/destination marketing which is bound by a strict code of ethics.

But isn’t it ironic that the process for selecting or influencing our nation’s civic leadership is one of the few remaining, if not the last sector, of our society that is not compelled to be transparent, honest and ethical?

Instead of marketers showing leadership in this regard, most seem conspicuously silent while a few are instead perverting marketing to make politics even more sleazy.

I always felt marketing was honorable not only because in my profession I used it to better communities but because I came up in the school that taught that:

marketing at its core, like good parenting, is about helping other people make distinctions and good decisions, decisions that are best for them even if in the end your product or service or community or world-view is not selected.

Okay, that may be a little "Kumbayah" but believe me, it works much better than the old-school sales or product-driven approach of hoodwinking customers into buying what you have to sell rather than what they need, often involving unethical subsidies and kick-backs.

Here are two ways I see marketing being perverted in politics not just by some secular Americans but by a group to which this would seem anathema: a small sliver of the 1 in 10 Americans who score highest on the religiosity index and form the core of the so-called Religious or Christian Right now “rebranded” as the Tea Party.

The popular media misuses the term “rebranded” because it is also misused by so many newly-appointed corporate executives eager to stamp their ego on a company or product or to attempt to outrun bad publicity and low public opinion with what in reality is a simple a “renaming” or “refreshing” of the most superficial elements of a brand.

The classic example of the power of renaming is when in 1947, after being known as the as the U.S. War Department for 160 years, the name was changed to The Department of Defense, in part, to make lobbying more palatable.

The news media didn’t miss it when AIG was renamed Chartis after it was caught up at the center of the financial scam that created and deepened the Great Recession and in turn generated the deficit/debt controversy, most of which occurred much earlier. The media didn’t miss it, primarily, because the company publicized the change to comply in part, I suspect, with securities regulations and truth in advertising etc.

But the popular media has failed to see through the crafty story marketers created for the origin of the Tea Party even after revelations a year ago by prize-winning investigative reporter Jane Meyer in an article entitled Covert Operations. I was amused and taken back in time when I read the connection with the John Birch Society, a similarly ultra-conservative movement that opposed the Civil Rights movement.

That the Tea Party is a simple but highly effective “rebranding” of older movements that had fallen out of favor in public opinion and particularly with generations that came of age during the 1990s and 2000s was given even more credibility in an Op-Ed piece earlier this month published in the New York Times.

The authors of the op-ed, David Campbell now at Notre Dame and Robert D. Putnam at Harvard, also collaborated an incredible book, I just finished reading, entitled American Grace – How Religion Divides and United Us based on many surveys including the two-year Faith Matters Survey.

Their op-ed is a preview to a follow-up study that will be detailed in a new edition due out early next year. The book is incredibly easy to read and highly recommended for both the 83% of Americans who belong to a religion and the 17% who do not identify with a religion but 80% of whom believe in God.

The book is also a reminder that, while the current involvement of religion in politics is fueled around a relatively small sliver of the 1 in 10 Americans who are conservative ultra-traditionalists, both socially and economically, religionists were also at the heart of many liberal movements such as the American Revolution, antislavery, the social gospel and both the Progressive and Civil Rights movements.

The divide is so extreme today simply because marketers helped political operatives identify, exploit and exaggerate differences using premarital sex, homosexuality and abortion. They have also used demographic and psychographic projections to panic extremes because the generations coming of age, including those who profess to be religious, are less concerned about the first two issues and are moving to the center on the third.

Marketing is being perverted not to help people understand distinctions and see solutions but to blind them through fear, exaggeration and misinformation.

One last example occurred to me after reading this quarter’s issue of Good Magazine featuring an article by William Wheeler entitled The Information Arms Race.

It summarizers the perversion in politics of a marketing best practice called predictive analytics or micro-targeting. When I worked there before my recent retirement, our community/destination marketing organization for Durham became one of the first to use micro-targeting so I have a modest understanding.

We used it nationwide to identify households that mirrored the characteristics of visitors who had already visited and liked Durham as a destination and shared a predisposition for activities and interests this community can deliver. This informed the decisions on which marketing tactics were most efficient and effective to reach such prospects.

The ultimate goal was to not only to find people we could help in making distinctions and good decisions but to more closely identify the people for whom Durham would be distinctive, appealing, fulfilling and a good fit overall as a destination.

As you will read if you click on the link to the Good magazine article, marketers are instead helping political operatives identify and exploit areas of ambivalence in people predisposed to favor opposing views. Their goal isn’t helping people make distinctions and good decisions but to muddy their thoughts and further widen the partisan divide.

Politics, thanks in part to a polarized Supreme Court decision last year, is probably now even more “no-holds-barred” and vulnerable to sleazy marketers than at any time in the last 100 years.

To me, to be ethical is a particularly American value. Now is the time to infuse the same ethical behavior that is required of other elements of our society into the process of selecting civic leadership for our cities, towns, counties, states and the nation that is required of other elements of our society.

Ethics and politics should not be mutually exclusive.

The Relationship of Politics, Religion and Race

Nothing can stir up tension around the family barbeque as much as “politics” and “religion” and for still far too many, “race.”

The results of a new Gallup survey released last Friday show some interesting findings about religiosity, politics and ethnicity especially when viewed through the lens of the new categorization by the Pew Center according to values, political ideology and affiliation.

As a spiritual, post-modern Independent who is proud of his religious heritage but ambivalent about religious organizations, I wasn’t surprised to see that Independents overall divided as 9% very religious, 13% moderately religious and 15% non-religious.

White Americans tend to lean Republican if they are very religious and more toward the Democrats if they are moderately or non-religious.  But the surprise is that very religious Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans are all more likely to identify as Democrats.

Black Americans are 53% “very religious” compared to 45% for Hispanic Americans, 39% for White Americans and 29% for Asian Americans.  They fall in the same order when “moderately religious” respondents are added.

Another survey by the Pew Center reveals that last year, voters’ affiliations varied by type of religion.  While Protestants overall were only +6% Republican, White evangelicals and Mormons were +45% and +52% Republican respectively, while Black Protestants were +81% Democrat.  Political affiliation among Black Americans cannot just be attributed to the election of President Obama.  It has been consistent since at least 1992.

While Catholics overall were only +5% Democrat, Hispanic Catholics were +49% Democrat.  Those affiliated with the Jewish faith and those unaffiliated were +27% and +28% Democrat respectively.

After pulling even in 2007, the percentage of Americans believing Places of Worship should stay out of politics is back up to 52% compared to 54% in 1996.

The only sub-groups of Americans where a majority believe there is too little protestation of faith by political leaders are conservatives, White evangelicals and Black Protestants at 54%, 56% and 51% respectively.

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.”