Five things we agree on

As I’ve looked at the polls, including my own; as I’ve talked to people across the political spectrum; as I’ve read the news from various angles: I’ve come to the conclusion that for all our disagreements, we largely agree on five things. There are always a few outliers, of course; but each of these gets agreement from around three-fourths of the electorate. That should be enough to hold us together.

1. Diversity is a good thing

Diversity has become a polarizing issue; but on a closer look, there has been a huge and nearly-consensual move towards greater inclusion. The disagreements are only at the edges.

As a country today, we appreciate differences of culture and ethnicity. We think they should be celebrated. We know that it’s often difficult: diversity leads to misunderstandings, conflicts, hurt feelings. But very widely we feel this enriches us. 75% agree that “People from other places and cultures help us to grow, we should learn from them.”

This is a huge shift in the last fifty or sixty years. Just for example: Between 1958 and 1999, the percentage who said they could vote for “a generally well-qualified man for president who happened to be Black” went from 38% to 95%. In the South, it went from 13% to the same 95%. We actually elected a Black as President, twice – which would have been so far beyond thinkable a half century ago that it only fringe lunatics might have believed it possible. In much of 1950s America discrimination was widespread, open, and often brutal; today open racism is consigned to the margins, and battles are increasingly fought over “unconscious” and “structural” bias.

When the pressures of diversity lead us to name-calling and blaming and insulting each other – that divides us. The left has a tendency to claim moral superiority in a way that infuriates and divides on something that should unite.

2. We love our country

“Unpatriotic” has become in a sense the Right’s epithet  of choice against the Left – the counter to charges of “racism” lobbed at them. Ann Coulter’s best-selling book has accused liberals of decades of “treason” and “treachery.” Again, the actual disagreements are only at the margins. Over 80% of Democrats say they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be Americans. Democrats I know are generally deeply offended at being called “unpatriotic,” to say nothing of “traitors.” They love their country, which is why they want to improve it.

Democrats are sometimes more willing than Republicans to voice criticisms of the U.S., and sometimes more open to learning from and admiring other nations. Neither of those indicates lack of patriotism. Republicans and populists, after all, are often viciously critical of their country over the last half century, or maybe century; and they admire foreign thinkers like Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Edmund Burke. Anyone not involved in a partisan fight will acknowledge you can criticize your country, as you can criticize your wife or children, while still loving them – in  fact, it can be a mark of true love.

3. The future is scary

We don’t fully admit this to ourselves, but there’s a very general feeling of anxiety about the future. The older folks fret and fume. According to their politics, they may focus their anxiety on different things: social media, terrorism, artificial intelligence, biological engineering,  environmental damage, the other party. But at bottom we all feel things are moving too fast and out of control. Many young people I’ve talked to about this just throw up their hands and say: We’re screwed, but what can you do? We react to that anxiety in different ways, but the underlying feeling is widely shared.

4. The government has lost touch with the people

Here’s a distressing statistic: three-fourths of the electorate believes that “most elected officials don’t care what people like me think.” In 1964, less than 30% Americans felt that government was run by a few big interests; in 2016 it was over ninety percent.

The collapse of trust in government began in the 60s, mostly among the the young and educated on the Left. Here they marched against Johnson and McNamara and the War; in Paris they marched against DeGaulle; and pretty much across Europe confidence in government started to collapse. Nowadays it’s been taken up by populists on the Right –generally less-educated, many working-class. They have knocked the survey numbers on trust in government down to the vanishing point.

5. Polarization sucks

Finally, we widely agree that the partisan battles of the last few decades are bad: exhausting, unpleasant, demoralizing. Over three-fourths are bothered by “politics being too divisive and there being a lack of respect for people who disagree with each other.” Many studies have shown a lack of ideological consistency among most voters; a 2018 study finds that over ⅔ of the population constitute an “exhausted majority”who do not fit well in either of the polarized camps.

Let’s let the partisans rant. We need to get to work on making the future less threatening and building policies most can support. There is room for agreement on important issues if we can stop labeling and insulting each other.

Where the Right is not wrong, part 4: We don't know how to solve poverty

How can we reduce poverty? There are two main answers with strong moral foundations. The liberal one is, more or less: the government should provide aid to the poor. The conservative one is: communities should provide encourage the poor to take responsibility for themselves. For liberals, the conservative approach is cruel and heartless in the short run and completely ignores the power of systemic and structural forces that keep people in poverty despite their best efforts. For conservatives, the liberal approach encourages dependence and undermines self-respect.

What do the facts say? Well, it’s complicated. According to the official poverty statistics in the US, poverty fell from 22% to about 14% between 1964 and 1967 – that is, before Johnson’s ambitious Great Society legislation. As of 2014, it was still 14%. That doesn’t indicate success for the government programs. However, liberals point out that if you include the government subsidies that are not counted in the poverty rate – tax credits and noncash benefits – then the poverty rate has indeed dropped a lot since 1967, to below 5%. But, the Republicans reply, that just proves our point: a massive redistribution via government aid has only made people dependent on government – it hasn’t increased their own earned income.

Something is definitely wrong. We all know that there are large sections of the country that are desperately poor in both material and cultural terms – whether it’s the ghettos of Philadelphia or the mountains of Appalachia, both riddled with drug use and violence. There are even wider areas that have quietly lost hope. While it’s hard to prove, it seems to me that there are far more people now than fifty years ago who feel they will never make it, that the paths to financial comfort and self-respect are closed to them. Whatever we’ve been doing hasn’t worked.

The liberals would say: that’s because Republicans have been undermining our programs since the start; if we could really do what Denmark and Sweden have done, we wouldn’t have those problems. But Denmark and Sweden and Europe in general do have those problems, and they don’t know how to deal with them either.

In general, poverty and inequality are lower in Europe than in the US (though there are intense debates about how to measure these, the US comes off badly in most approaches.) But the trends are similar to ours: both poverty and inequality are rising everywhere. Europeans are concerned about ethnic and immigrant ghettos and pockets of severe poverty. So in 2010 the EU adopted the “Europe 2020” strategy, aiming lift 20 million people out of the risk of poverty and social exclusion within ten years. But it hasn’t worked: since 2010 poverty in the EU has increased.

While the New Deal model has lost ground here, the European welfare model has lost ground throughout Europe. Whatever is causing the rise in poverty, they haven’t got the answer.

Of course, there is no good evidence that the conservative answer works, either. Conservatives, in my experience, are often more active in local food banks and church charities than liberals: in that way they may do more visible good. But that doesn’t dent the larger problem. Relying on local communities and family networks, or on personal morality, can work occasionally, when the stars are aligned, but I have not seen a conservative model that shows it works for systemic change.

Liberals believe we have a moral obligation to reduce poverty. We feel morally superior when we embrace programs that we believe will work on a large scale. But we should be a little more humble. Actually, we should be a lot more humble. We do not know what works. The method that worked pretty well in the postwar period seems not to be working effectively now. We should be trying to figure that out.

Conservatives may have some good ideas for that. It seems very likely that building community will have to be part of the solution. Indeed, most liberals would agree: we have supported programs of community engagement and participation. It seems probable that the government-centered approach is too clumsy and bureaucratic for the complexity of current societies: there are just too many examples of programs that wrap people in red tape rather than helping them. As an administrator of an Obama-era program to help teachers in poor districts admits, “"We get focused on, you know, budgets and legislative requirements and things like this, and frankly, I think sometimes we forget who we ultimately work for."

So as a matter of fact, there is a great deal of overlap and agreement across the political spectrum. Everyone wants to develop local communities. No one wants to give all the power to a a central government bureaucracy. Everyone believes the goal should be to help people achieve independence and self-respect, not dependence on a dole. So the intense battles around this issue represent another case where ideological framings have unnecessarily blocked the search for solutions.

The return of the repressed: how liberals helped create the Trump movement

I'm reviving here a post I wrote in early 2012 - to suggest that the roots of the Trump phenomenon are deep, that liberals profoundly misunderstood them -- and that still misunderstand them. We're not going to fix this without dealing with these feelings.

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Liberals do themselves and the nation a grave disservice by dismissing the views of the Tea Party.

Speaking as a mostly-proud liberal myself – sympathetic to unions, redistribution, and other conservative bugbears – I am horrified by many aspects of the Tea Party ideology. They frequently seem, from my perspective, to avoid rational, evidence-based thought, as when denying that failure to lift the debt ceiling would be harmful, or (in many cases) denying the dangers of climate change. I am also convinced that some aspects of Tea Party activity are not genuine, that they sometimes supported and influenced by wealthy “special interests” who hide their activities or disingenuously cloak self-serving proposals in public-spirited rhetoric.

However: It is quite clear that there are a great many self-identified Tea Party supporters who are entirely genuine and public-spirited. Some of them may be uninformed, but many are clearly not: in fact an important characteristic of the Tea Party is that it is built on many local self-study groups that carefully read the Constitution and various difficult theoretical works by Hayek and others, and apply them to current events. Conservatism in general has arguably a more consistent intellectual framework than liberalism. Most polls indicate that Tea Party supporters are, if anything, somewhat better educated than average.

So when my liberal colleagues dismiss Tea Party conservatives as stupid and ignorant, it makes my blood boil. One of the very few core principles of progressive liberalism, in my view, is that one should always strive to understand those with whom one disagrees. That does not mean one must come to consensus with them, or to compromise, or even in all cases to tolerate them; but arrogant dismissal violates everything we stand for. Conservatism, as its name implies, seeks to protect existing goods, so it can afford to draw up defenses around its ideas; liberalism at its core seeks improvement and development, so must always make the effort to seek understanding. This is the act that opens the mind and makes possible new ideas and new relations.

When I consider individual ideas associated with the Tea Party (recognizing, of course, that it has no single dogma), I am often baffled – I can’t make sense of them. How can they blame Obama for a Federal debt that was created mostly by Bush, and where were they in the Bush years? How can they oppose closing tax loopholes for the rich, while simultaneously expressing strong antipathy for Wall Street and the banks? And so on.

But like an Impressionist painting, it makes better sense if one takes a few steps backward. The core animating feeling of the Tea Party, rather clearly, is that things have gone wrong and are getting worse. The reasonable conclusion is that the people in charge can no longer be trusted. That means first of all government: it has failed to spur economic growth or improve the lot of most people, while running up mind-boggling levels of debt. Even most liberals would agree with the basic sense that government has lost its grip on the situation.

It gets worse. The government has been for the last fifty years a hectoring moralist telling most people, especially most conservatives, that they are bad because they hold traditional views of relationships. Powerful leaders, mostly holding political offices, have told them that their “old” ways of doing things are not only impractical but unjust. It has told them that they must change deeply ingrained relations and ways of thinking, must accept all kinds of unfamiliar people into their daily lives, must accept an upset of traditional patterns of family and neighborhood in the interests of an abstract sense of justice.

There are few things that make human beings madder than being blamed. If I bump into someone on the sidewalk and they say “excuse me,” I am not angry; I reciprocate and move on, no matter whose fault it was. But if they say, “Why don’t you look where you’re going?”, I instantly become less reasonable – I get my back up, even if it was my fault; I nurse the grievance. On a big and long scale, this is what much of the country, indeed much of the world, has been feeling for at least a half century: they have been told they are to blame for long-standing injustices and that they must apologize and make amends. It’s enough to make anyone furious.

Most Americans are ambivalent. They accept the good that has come of the push for human rights and diversity – as a nation we are on the whole far more accepting of Blacks and of women’s rights than we were fifty years ago; but that doesn’t mean that they don’t resent being pushed into it. And many are not at all convinced that they want further broadening of the community to include Muslims or homosexuals or other “outside” groups. Liberals see such attitudes as stupid and racist. And that contributes mightily to our national polarization.

Lessons from conversations with Trump supporters

I have been talking to Trump supporters whenever I could. It isn’t easy, since people generally shy away from talking about politics; also, polarization is so bad now that there there are no admitted Trumpists in my usual friend networks. So I’ve had to actively seek them out. Here are a few things I’ve learned.

The first thing is the very strong temptation to stereotype. Maybe that’s obvious, but I hadn’t felt it so strongly. Trumpists have an image of liberals  as self-centered, spendthrift, disloyal, heedlessly amoral; some of them also think we are power-mad and dangerously manipulative. After a bit of conversation they may become convinced that I personally am not like that, but that doesn’t stop them from continuing to use the stereotype. And I, meanwhile, have to fight my urge to assume that conservatives are narrow, intolerant, and ill-informed – despite the fact that the ones I am talking to usually don’t fit. Part of every conversation skates along the edge of this strange shadow world, where everything makes sense but nothing reflects what is going on in the real interaction.

Yet for all that, in my conversations I have found something that felt very strange and positive to me: there is a great deal of common ground around particular solutions, even when the ideological framework is highly polarized. When you focus on broad, ideologically charged issues like climate change and health care, you get stuck in well-worn grooves. I have often been drawn into trying to fight about facts, but when I do that the response is just to throw in another fact from another right-wing source. There’s no engagement.  

But when we start poking at actual solutions to actual problems, surprisingly often we find significant areas of agreement. On health care, for example, the conversation may start out about with attacks on Obamacare and inefficiency and crony capitalism vs letting people die and the suffering of those without insurance. But in one conversation someone suggested the Singapore healthcare system as a model; and by God, there seem to be some things there that we might all like. As we dig into the actual combination of structures and incentives, there is clearly a path for constructive discussion. Yet this doesn’t mean that the hurling of insults and grenade-facts stops; the two type of discussion continue at the same time.

Or on climate: you can go down endless rabbit-holes trying to knock down every denial theory. A Trumpist may raise “Climategate” – a set of emails by one set of researchers that appear to be  trying to shape the findings to alarmist ends. If you reply with a careful analysis of why the emails don’t actually say that, the conversation just veers off in a different direction to a different  claim of malicious science. But when you shift your focus to solutions, the idea of renewable energy draws a lot of support across the spectrum: it’s economically sensible, and it has a local rather than “big” feel. Here, too, we can find a path for a different and better kind of discussion.

On gun control, my conversations and polls indicate that there are several important issues on which there is wide agreement – including background checks at gun shows and banning “assault-style weapons.” Similarly, there are many points of broad consensus on immigration. For inequality, a Universal Basic Income has drawn interest from Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek as well as many on the Left.

Most people, aside from small batches of professional ideologues, have mixed views on issues. So there is surprising room for shared exploration; and that exploration can itself build a sense of trust that enables further progress.

Another point is that this has not been one-way: I have learned a good deal about the issues in these discussions. I knew almost nothing about guns, which is why gun owners don’t trust people like me; now I know at least a little more about the difficulties of defining assault rifles, the deep commitment of most gun owners to safety as well as to nature, and some techniques to reduce the danger of unwanted use. I learned about the Singapore health system, which was news to me even though health care a field I have studied. I have learned that the problem of “political correctness” is actually more serious than I had thought: there is now quite a lot of student support for restricting “undesirable” speech on campus, and a very strong feeling by rightists that they can’t speak their minds.

It’s possible to talk while ignoring the conspiracy theories and insults, resisting the temptation to answer in kind. If you do, it turns out there may be paths that can be walked together. So far the battle is still raging around us, and we’re just catching glimpses of those paths through the smoke. I don’t know whether we could in time just walk away from the trench warfare and the grenades, towards a future that can include the vast majority of Americans.

Inequality

Here's a little factoid for us progressives to ponder: Income inequality appears to be generally worse in Blue States than Red ones:

What does that signify? There may be many explanations, but whatever they are, we Blues haven't done much to reduce inequality. We know that on a national level, but we can blame that on Republican resistance. But Massachusetts? New York? California? 

(Where the right is not wrong, part 3): White males are suffering

The Progressive Left among which I count myself, has shone a spotlight on the evils of racism, especially against African-Americans. Very few people now deny the long historical record of brutality, and a large majority even recognize the continuing injustices in the present day. But that focus has blinded us to the real suffering of whites and males. 

This burst into our consciousness – or should have burst – two years ago when Deaton and Case found that between 1999 and 2014, the death rate among white adults with a high school education rose by twenty-two percent. They trace the causes mostly to suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” Deaton commented.  If those words aren’t enough, here’s a picture:

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The liberal response has been largely unsympathetic. We haven't paid much attention to this study or this group. Hillary Clinton largely ignored them in 2016. We often dismiss them as ignorant and uneducated. We would never say that about any other group – immigrants or blacks or muslims – because that would be victim-blaming. But we generally don’t see undereducated white males as victims: we see them as the beneficiaries of centuries of racism. Yet they apparently don’t feel like beneficiaries of anything, and they’re dying.

We do offer them money – we say our welfare-state programs will protect them from poverty. Then we are baffled when they don’t embrace us. Like Robert Frank in his popular book, we cannot figure out “What’s the matter with Kansas?” But we should know: money without respect is no balm. We do know that abstractly: the watchword of liberalism is respect. But we have this hole in our sight.

Conservatives don’t seem to have the answer either. Most of the hot spots of white mortality are in conservative, Republican areas – West Virginia, Kentucky, Kansas indeed, much of the West.

William Julius Wilson, perhaps the most important sociologist of black poverty of the past half century, made this point long ago: whatever the answer is, it has to include everyone. Solutions targeted at blacks will never work, because they divide the society, creating resentments that lead to exclusion rather than inclusion.  Whites need to be included in the solutions.

Winning is not enough

As a liberal, I am deeply upset by the direction of the country. But I don't think beating Trump will save us. I believe deeply that we have to do something harder: to build understanding across the political divide.

But I’m not getting much traction. Almost everyone on both sides believes it’s more important to win. They all think their view of the world is right, and that the future depends on their triumph.

I’m saying that victory, by itself, won’t do it. We need to demand more of ourselves.

I am personally offended by Trump actions almost every day, and I feel he is extremely dangerous for our future. I think he has to be stopped; it’s an emergency. He is destroying the foundations of our democracy, and indeed of the international world order that has slowly increased prosperity and safety for everyone for decades.

And yet, if all we do is to stop him, 40% of the country will be enraged and will battle back with every weapon they can find. In this kind of polarized environment, the rules of civilization no longer restrain people. Though I feel that the situation is so bad that we have to stop Trump almost no matter what it takes, the other side -- the solid 40% of Trump supporters -- feels just as passionate. This is how conflict spirals out of control.

Western democracies, after a long period of general accord on the principles of Keynesianism and the welfare state, have profoundly split. The populist wave, which has gained significant strength across the board, rejects the advances of the postwar period, is hostile to multiculturalism and globalization, and has little faith in existing governments. Populists feel they have ignored and marginalized for too long, and they are full of passionate intensity in their search for power.

Since these nations are, after all, democracies, we cannot ignore this backlash; nor should we. We liberals have not done the work of understanding the sources of the discontent. We are too quick to accept facile explanations that demean the populists and deny their legitimacy as citizens: we call them ignorant, racist, “deplorable.” They feel, with much justification, that if they lose this battle we will simply sweep them aside. They will fight with fury to prevent that, and they will continue the war even if they lose a battle.

It’s worth looking at history for lessons. Here’s one instructive contrast: After World War I the victorious Allies punished Germany and treated it with contempt; it rose rapidly from a crushing defeat to launch another wave of destruction. After World War II, by contrast, we helped Germany to rebuild, and major efforts were made to bring it back into the large European community; it soon became a major force for progress and liberalism.

Or we can look at our own Civil War: when the Union won, Abraham Lincoln pleaded for reconciliation in his Second Inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” His assassination, however, unleashed a vengeful torrent of victors against victim – with the result that much of the South remains to this day alienated, hostile to the dominant liberal order.

We have to win, but we have to win in a way that promotes reconciliation. We have to call, as Lincoln did, on “the better angels of our nature” even in the midst of a battle that may determine the fate of the earth. We need to listen to our enemies, to understand their grievances, and to include them in building our common future. It demands hard work instead of facile triumph. But if that’s asking too much from us, we may not get a chance to build at all.