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.

Unmoored

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are becoming “unmoored” from Republicans as well.

A Community’s Deeply Rooted Progressiveness

Progressive roots in Durham, North Carolina go back at least to the 1880s, a few years after the business wing of the Republican Party overwhelmed its social justice wing putting an end to a decade of “Reconstruction” following the Civil War.

Agrarian populists filled the void, standing up to a Democratic Party dominated by white supremacists.  Even Durham’s conservatives at the time manifested a progressive streak back then when they stood up against white supremacists as well.

But today’s progressivism in Durham can be traced to a local insurance executive in the late 1940’s when the city’s population was cresting 60,000, with just 80,000 countywide.

John Leslie Atkins Jr. was a Durham native and Duke graduate, who sharing that name with both his father and his pre-school son at the time, preferred to go by Leslie.  When I lived in Trinity Park for a time, I would often walk past his 1939 family home on Dollar Avenue  which was built when nearby Northgate Mall was a cow pasture.

A disease similar to polio in one of his legs resulted in the use of a brace to be able to walk.

In the late 1940s following World War II, Atkins, then in his mid-30s, began holding extraordinary meetings for the time.

Just a few floors below the office of George Watts Hill in a building now undergoing adaptive reuse as one of a handful of 21C Museum Hotels in the nation, Atkins was forging a coalition of labor unions with members of the black community and other progressive whites.

Labor unions had taken hold in Durham’s booming factories as well as among workers on the trolley line here as Atkins was growing up.  But in 1938 during his time at Duke, he witnessed the closing of a cotton mill, leaving the neighborhood of Smoky Hollow (now called Edgemont) in decline.

In addition, Atkins’ progressive sensibilities were probably also greatly influenced by Dr. Howard Jensen, one of the first sociologists at Duke and a Durham community activist on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged such as those in Edgemont, then an all white neighborhood.

In 1949 this unique coalition helped secure the election of a forward thinking mayor, Daniel K. Edwards, a lawyer, former U.S. Army colonel and also a Durham native who had been serving in the state legislature.

Atkins had passed away a decade before I arrived in Durham in 1989 but I was able to talk in passing to former Mayor Edwards back then as he passed by daily near the temporary offices we had in the Brightleaf District.

The year after Edwards was elected mayor, Dr. Jensen helped found the community fund, a precursor to a United Way chapter and famously gave a speech entitled “Durham’s Unmet Needs,” which evolved into a series of op-eds and essays.

Atkins’ fledgling coalition didn’t stop with the election of Edwards.  In the early 1950s, they successfully elected two women to the City Council, including the progressive Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans.

Mary, who became a good friend after my arrival and who passed away only recently was the great-grand daughter of Washington Duke who helped bring what became Duke University to Durham in the 1800s.

In 1953, the Atkins coalition spearheaded the election of retail executive Emanuel “Mutt” Evans, one of the first Jewish people elected mayor in the south.

Evans by then had crossed over norms by adding bathrooms for blacks in his stores and famously removed stools at the lunch counter in his stores to circumvent a prohibition against whites and blacks sitting together.

During his six terms as mayor, Evans, who passed away a few years after I came to Durham, led Durham collectively through tumult around desegregation.

In 1953, the Atkins coalition also spearheaded the election of Durham’s first black city council member, Rencher Nicholas Harris, a real estate appraiser.

Durham’s progressiveness in the early 1950s transcended politics.  This is a period when Durham natives working in the same building as Atkins began working with Durham native and North Carolina Governor William Umstead to make Research Triangle Park here a reality, transforming the state’s economy from textiles and tobacco.

This is also a period when two Durham movement entrepreneurs began to coalesce around a proactive plan to achieve equal civil rights.  This was an unusual nexus at the time across so many areas but especially for a community in the South with not yet a population of 80,000.

Atkins’ coalition was ripped apart by reaction to the Supreme Court’s dramatic ruling in 1955 based on the 1954 case Brown vs. Board of Education declaring separate facilities on the basis of race unconstitutional.

But Leslie Atkins kept working to bring people back together into the 1970s when he served on the City Council.  Before his death in 1977, he had passed Durham’s progressive torch to an extraordinary new generation, nearly all of whom, such as former mayor and long-time state senator Wib Gulley have become friends during my tenure here.

Gulley continued Durham’s long heritage for progressive politics through coalition building, surviving an attempted recall in the late 1980s for endorsing gay rights.  He deepened Atkins’ commitment to affordable housing in Durham.

Atkins’ influence is still felt today in elected officials including a newly arrived IBM engineer back then named Bill Bell with whom he crossed paths and whose span in local elected office of nearly 40 years includes his now-seven terms as Mayor of Durham.

In addition to what I have gleaned by living here now 25 years, I owe some of this information to historians and friends such as Jim Wise and Jean Bradley Anderson and the recollections of his father shared with me by John I. Atkins III, an acclaimed architect in Durham.

As I set out in 1989 in my former life charged with reclaiming and fostering Durham’s story and identity, I was inspired by a story of passion involving the younger Atkins, who is only a few years older than I am.

He must have identified with the challenge I faced because as a college student body president, he fought to preserve the storied name and identity of North Carolina State University when state officials sought to change it to the University of North Carolina at Raleigh.

This essay is intended to reinforce my belief that a community’s personality is almost temporal and manifestations today can be found rooted in the past.  These are among the things that make a community distinct.

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.

The Flood That Reshaped America

When months and months of torrential rain and heavy snows soaked the vast watershed of the Mississippi River in 1927, including more than 1.2 million sq. miles, 31 states and hundreds of rivers draining 41% of America, it created a great flood of truly Biblical proportions.

It was natural for many to view it as cleansing America of the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan and its influence over elections and policy.  In the Presidential election of 1924, the first in which women and Native Americans were permitted to vote, KKK members represented a percentage of voters 50% greater than the percentage who affiliate with the Tea Party today.

KKK members probably attributed the flood to the fact that 1924 was the first Presidential election in which women and Native Americans were eligible to cast ballots.  Like the Tea Party, the KKK was resurrected in 1915 in response to an era of progressiveness, only they were predominantly affiliated with Democrats while Tea Party members are predominantly Republican.

They have something else in common.  People who dominated each of these movements are those seeking to legislate ways to make it harder for minorities to vote.  They each obsess about immigrants and they despise government.

In 1924, blacks were overwhelmingly Republican, north and south.  In the previous Presidential election, 95% voted Republican.  It was slightly less in 1924 but by a ratio of 3 to 1, those who didn’t, voted for the Progressive candidate, not the Democrat.

In 1904 the Republican Party platform even called for reducing congressional representation for states that did not allow blacks to vote while the Democratic convention voted down a condemnation of the KKK.

According to historian and researcher John Barry, “in 1927, Senate Republicans threatened to investigate disenfranchisement of southern blacks” after the party had deserted blacks and reconstruction of the south nearly fifty years before.  Yet black voter loyalty remained with the party of Lincoln.

Even as the great flood of 1927 began to inundate and cleanse the heartland of America, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court of the United States outlawed whites-only primaries.  Republicans of that era had grown to see the black vote as belonging to that party by default.

So, what changed?

Why today, are blacks affiliated predominately with the Democratic Party?  Why has the Republican-dominated Supreme Court overturned provisions of the Voting Rights Act, signaling free reign for Republican-dominated legislatures passing laws making it harder to register and vote?

After reading Barry’s excellent book “Rising Tide,” I’ve drawn the conclusion that it may have been brought about most by events manifest just before, during and subsequent to the great flood of 1927.

The greatest flood disaster in U.S. history changed everything.  Below Memphis, the river spread 60 miles wide.  Overall, it affected 27,000 sq. miles, about the size of the entire New England region.

It destroyed 130,000 homes and displaced 700,000 people in a nation of only 119 million at the time.  Nearly 250 deaths were reported, but many probably never were.  It generated $350 million in property damage ($5 billion today,) and severely weakened the nation’s the economy.

Culturally, politically and socially, America matured overnight.

• The myth that self-help and philanthropy is sufficient without government assistance was shattered.
• When asked, the federal government assumed full responsibility for the Mississippi River, the largest project in the nation’s history other than war.
• More than half of the blacks in the region headed north, a labor supply that spelled the end of the feudal south.
• In the next Presidential election blacks began to dramatically desert the Republican Party.
• The economy began to lurch, collapsing two years later.
• The KKK receded into history again.
• Republican strategists seduced the south by driving a wedge between blacks and whites.
• The disaster marked the end of the Progressive Era.  Southern whites who supported the KKK began moving to the Republican Party after the Democratic Party nominated a Catholic in 1928.
• Republicans became the party of “no” and embraced its laissez-faire big business wing.  Southern left-wing populists took root in the south while Democrats formed a new and diverse coalition of activism.

The great flood of 1927 spawned a shift among African-Americans from the Black Wall Street economic philosophies of Tuskegee and Booker T. Washington to the activism of the NCAAP of W.E.B Debois.

Blacks who had been free from slavery for decades had been forced into concentration camps along the river’s massive levees as they were inundated by the flood.  There they were surrounded by armed guards and forced to sandbag and even act as human sandbags while most whites rode out the flood like an inconvenient vacation.

When food aid arrived, whites refused to distribute many types of food to blacks because they would become “spoiled.”  Latent racism ran rampant.  Every myth of the “Southern Redeemers” was exposed and the reality set in motion changes in the understanding of civil rights that would reverberate for forty years and culminate in the Civil Rights Act.

Beginning in the 1970s, the pendulum has swung hard right again, and  many things once washed away by the great flood - while more subtle  – have been re-entrenched.

It may take another great flood to cleanse America.

Telling Religious Progressives Apart From Religious Conservatives

To me, two of America’s core beliefs have always been “freedom of religion” and “separation of church and state.”  This influenced my selection of three of the books I read during my now-concluded 7,000-mile cross-country road-trip

It’s personal.  Many of my ancestors suffered religious persecution, some fleeing to America 375 years ago to escape it, others fleeing America 167 years ago to escape it.

These issues are not just historical.  Even today, “75% of the world’s population lives under high or very high legal restrictions on religious freedom,”  and as I departed a month ago lawmakers where I live were bent on superimposing religious beliefs on my adopted state of North Carolina, as has often been tried in various states since the 1970s.

On my trip, I read these:  If you are open to learning more about freedom of religion from both a sides of the coin, I highly recommend reading:

“Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul” by John M. Barry

“The First Muslim” by Lesley Hazleton

“Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” by Dr. Reza Aslan

The book about Mohammad is coincidentally written by a woman who is Jewish, the one on Jesus by a religious scholar and former Muslim turned Christian, turned Muslim.

It is clear that Mohammad had alliances with Jewish tribes.  Late in life, he also had a Jewish wife and was grateful to Christians who gave Muslims safe harbor at the beginning during times of persecution by Arabs.

Cast out of Mecca for his beliefs, Mohammad was sensitive to official persecution.  It is also clear that six hundred years earlier, Jesus was very disturbed by the close connection between religion and government during his lifetime.

The Puritan cleric Roger Williams first brought to America the values of religious freedom and tolerance as well as English Common Law.

His influence on England regarding those issue extends many years after his immigration to America and both before and after the English Civil War.  Incredibly, he spans King James, Edward Coke, Roger Bacon, Oliver Cromwell. King Charles and John Locke.

The colony Williams established and nurtured in America was plausibly the first in the world to outlaw slavery in 1652.  An interesting example in the book dealt with Quakers, a belief we associate today with pacifism but whose members when they first arrived in America in the 1600s were confrontational activists and demonstrators.

The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony cracked down hard on Quakers, whipping and deporting them.  Williams was no fan of Quakers but he truly believed in not only freedom and tolerance for all religious beliefs but that government and religion should be very separate.

The book also delves into the impact of Williams on the issue of liberty.  Even under the U.S. Constitution, Americans still seem to struggle today between the Puritan view of liberty as a group vs. Roger Williams’ concept of individual liberty.

It seems that whenever the influence of religion on society is perceived to wane, those who see that as negative are alarmed and try all the harder to embed it in laws and government.

A Gallup tracking poll this year shows that 77% of Americans see the influence of religion on society as decreasing while 20% see it as increasing.

Many of those seeing the decrease as a bad thing seem to seek in desperation to embed it in laws and government, while many of those who see it on the increase fear a blurring the lines between church and state.

America seems to work best when the two perceptions are in check as they were in 1963, 1978, 1988 and 2003. Either way, many seem conflicted about the separation of church and state.

Interestingly, another newly published study documents that 19% of Americans are religious progressives, 38% religious moderates, 28% religious conservatives and 15% nonreligious (which does not mean they are not spiritual.)

Moderates outnumber progressives and conservatives combined but telling is the survey finding that:

“Nearly 8-in-10 (79%) of religious progressives say being a religious person is mostly about doing the right thing, compared to 16% who say it is about holding the right beliefs…

By contrast, a majority (54% of religious conservatives say being a religious person is primarily about having the right beliefs, while less than 4-in-10 (38%) say it is mostly about doing the right thing.”

More than 80% of religious conservatives believe that if enough people had a personal relationship with God, social problems would take care of themselves.  Nearly 7-in-10 religious progressives disagree.

Blacks are often presumed to be overwhelmingly religious conservatives but the study shows that more than half are religious moderates (30%,) religious progressives (14%) or nonreligious (7%.)  Only 28% of Hispanics and 40% of whites are religious conservatives. 

Republicans may misjudge the level of overall religious moderation or religious progressivism in this country because they are twice as likely as Independents or Democrats to be religious conservatives.

Religious progressives are also younger and more diverse and far more heterogeneous when it comes to religious affiliation.

Belying the gridlock among lawmakers today, only 25% of Americans are economic conservatives compared to 42% who are economic moderates and 34% who are economic liberals.  However, four times as many white Americans are economic conservatives as black Americans and Hispanic Americans.

Also different than what is reflected in the media or by lawmakers, only 29% of Americans are social conservatives compared to 46% who are social moderates and 24% who are social liberals.  Democrats and Independents are primarily social moderates as are 43% of Republicans and even 41% of Tea Party followers.

All of this is masked, it seems to me, by the fact that America is only representative when it comes to democracy and that representation is gerrymandered by politicians and political parties.

As a moderate Independent, it seems to me that the preponderance of social and economic moderates and liberals compared to conservatives on those issues should be of far more concern to Republicans than views on immigration.

It may also explain why so many Republicans, when they are in the majority as they are in North Carolina, appear so desperate, un-statesmanlike and prone to menace and mischief rather than seeking to govern on on behalf of all of the people of the state.

Doing a great disservice to other members of that party, they forget that it because of Independents, mostly moderate that they were elected at all.

To the issues of religious freedom and separation of church and state which came down to the founders through Locke from Roger Williams, nearly 9-in-10 religious progressives believe religion is a private matter and should be kept out of public debates while only 49% of religious conservatives hold that view.

I find this information fascinating and a useful context in which to understand the extreme actions of lawmakers today and how far out of synch they seem to be with public sentiment or democracy.

Unfortunately, far too many people are not open to information and as found in research reviewed by Dr. Keith Stanovich in his book “What Intelligence Tests Miss”, seem to “hold their beliefs like possessions.”