A Silly Argument And A Smart One

Mark Thoma at The Fiscal Times argues that "balanced budget rules can cause rushed decisions if the statutory deadlines for achieving balance leave little time for careful deliberation" in the course of arguing that Congress is disfunctional. This is silly.

How many times in my lifetime have state or federal legislatures gotten fiscal matters done in advance in a carefully deliberated manner, rather than right at a deadline? I can't remember a year that Congress didn't have a continuing resolution or passed all of the dozen different appropriations bills separately before the deadline came and an omnibus bill had to be pushed through, even in years when we haven't had divided government.

Colorado's joint budget committee is better, but still highly deadline driven. And, one of the key's to Colorado's deadlines - a joint set of legislative rules made necessary by a short session, amateur legislature and strong legislative services division are almost impossibly to constitutionally impose on Congress.

But, Thoma also has a worthwhile point to make:

[A]nother explanation that is often put forth to explain the change in congressional behavior is that legislators today are less patriotic than they once were. That is, nation used to come before party, but those days are long gone.

But patriotism is not the problem. What has changed is that we have become, in many respects, two separate nations living within a common border. Patriotism is as strong as ever within each nation, but there is very little recognition that the needs of the other group are legitimate or have any standing at all in policy decisions.

Thus, we are no longer indivisible. Justice for my group rather than justice for all dominates the political landscape and pollutes the policy environment. Until that is fixed–if it can be fixed–no amount of rules, triggers, ticking bombs, or other devices will set it right again.

The two nations thing isn't entirely Mark Thoma's invented rhetoric. For example, Texas Governor Perry, who has campaigned for the GOP Presidential nomination in Colorado recently, has publicly said positive things about the possibility of Texas leaving the United States of American again. The partisan divide between U.S. regions is as strong as it has been in recent memory and social class divides are also more intense in the U.S. than they have been in a very long time.

It isn't just the politicans. I frequently finding myself asking what the heck Republicans are thinking, because when I ask myself what someone who hates American would do and then compare it to what they are trying to accomplish, it very frequently seems to be the same thing. My civility instincts tell me that this is a horribly bad attitude that I should try to fight, but it is what comes to the surface emotionally whenever their latest idea comes up. Whatever agenda they are advancing, it is so profoundly distant from my reality that it makes no sense at all to me, much of the time, or violates deeply held values about the political process and policy substance of what makes our country special and uniquely American. Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be better off if Governor Perry got his wish and rid us of the influence that he and his have on our politics.

Then again, Thoma makes one more argument that is neither here nor there. He says that the press doesn't do a good enough job of holding politicians accountable. There is merit to that. Politicans are held accountable for very little of their destructive bad behavior and mischief.

But, I'm not convinced that the press is the most guilty party. It is hard to educate the large share of the voting public that isn't interested in paying attention, and the fact that the nation feels that it can get away with indifference is mostly a testament to a fairly healthy political culture in the formative period of the average voter, rather than being a purely negative indicator. Many of us managed to earn the privilege of not paying much attention because politics has tended to be incrementalist for the last few decades in the United States. Only when elected leaders really screw up in a way that forces a radical change that is contrary to the agreed rules of the political game, as we saw this year in Wisconsin and Minnesota, does the sleeping giant that is the American public wake up and start paying attention. We can be outraged about the process because we have been taught to expect better.

If the U.S. had defaulted on its debt and there had been dire consequences, the American public probably would have woken up and been determined to do something about it in 2012. But, a deal to complex and arcane and unlikely to be adhered to in the long term to make it interesting to the general public was reached, constitutional crisis was avoided, and the public will return to its slumber for a while.

I don't like the way that we are making our sausage and would like to reform it. The Republican balanced budget amendment proposal is a DOA way of addressing the problem. But, there is room for process reform and better ways of holding politicians accountable as well.

READ MORE - A Silly Argument And A Smart One

The More Things Change . . .

Once upon a time, before I was born, the regressive wing of American politics was the province of Southern Democrats called Dixiecrats. Now, realignment is complete and the radical right Tea Party delegation in the U.S. Congress, a faction in the Republican, comes about two-thirds from the American South that accounts for about a quarter of the U.S. population (and the Tea Party is not getting any significant share of the black vote despite the fact that the South has a larger black population than any other region in the U.S. by a large margin), while only one hails from the Northeast. It is dominated by the same demographics that used to elect Dixiecrats. They are just as pernicious as they were before they rebranded and changed parties.

READ MORE - The More Things Change . . .

Evangelical Christianity's Ugly Side Is Inseparable From Its Virtues

Nicholas Kristoff, in a column this past Saturday, summed up what liberals don't like about Evangelical Christianity, in the course of arguing that the negative stereotype isn't universal since there are nice evangelical Christians out there (like the late Reverend John Stott of Britain, and liberal evangelicals like Jim Wallis of Sojourners fame and Richard Cizik) who don't make headlines the way that the hellfire and brimstone, or prosperity gospel TV evangelists do.

This may be true, but his spot on summary of liberal distaste of the Evangelical Christian movement deserves restating for future reference:

In these polarized times, few words conjure as much distaste in liberal circles as “evangelical Christian.”

That’s partly because evangelicals came to be associated over the last 25 years with blowhard scolds. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson discussed on television whether the 9/11 attacks were God’s punishment on feminists, gays and secularists, God should have sued them for defamation.

Earlier, Mr. Falwell opined that AIDS was “God’s judgment on promiscuity.” That kind of religious smugness allowed the AIDS virus to spread and constituted a greater immorality than anything that occurred in gay bathhouses.

Partly because of such self-righteousness, the entire evangelical movement often has been pilloried among progressives as reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual and, if anything, immoral. . . .

Centuries ago, serious religious study was extraordinarily demanding and rigorous; in contrast, anyone could declare himself a scientist and go in the business of, say, alchemy. These days, it’s the reverse. A Ph.D. in chemistry is a rigorous degree, while a preacher can explain the Bible on television without mastering Hebrew or Greek — or even showing interest in the nuances of the original texts.

Those self-appointed evangelical leaders come across as hypocrites, monetizing Jesus rather than emulating him. Some seem homophobic, and many who claim to be “pro-life” seem little concerned with human life post-uterus. Those are the preachers who won headlines and disdain.

While I am more than willing to acknowledge that there are social gospel preaching intellectuals like Stott, a British theological writer, who are simultaneously humanistic and Christian, it is inaccurate to call him an "evangelical Christian" in the sense of the term that describes the movement within American Christianity that took off in the American South during the Second Great Awakening, with its "distinctives" having only remote and cryptic connections to earlier movements in Christianity that has spread and mutated from there, as opposed to its generic meaning of someone who is a Christian and actively engages in the business of trying to convert others to the faith.

There is a case to be made that this narrow sense of Evangelical Christianity makes positive contributions to society and doesn't deserve the wholehearted distaste which Kristoff explains that the movement has worked hard to earn. But, attacking it from the point of figures like Stott, Wallis and Cizik, who are either not a part of that movement at all, even if religious people in that movement do read what they have to say at times, or who are on its fringes trying to reform it from its flaws from a position of underdog movement insurgents, is not a credible way to redeem this movement.

If one is to redeem (or at least understand the moral basis of) narrow sense Evangelical Christianity, one needs to look at the positive or at least culturally important contributions of core followers of the very same people, at that core of that movement, who generate such liberal outrage, not the critics at its fringe.

Evangelical Christianity does have upsides: their willingness to engage in prison ministries, their willingness to acknowledge that their communities are broken and need fixing, their willingness to include the poor and working class as a part of their community rather than objectifying them as outsiders, their commitment to trying to reform people, their ability to unify a Southern ethnic identity that doesn't show up on census forms in the face of a dominant Northern national elite culture, their ability to devote private sector charitable effort to addressing the problems of the Third World, and their commitment to the possibility of a hopeful future even in moments when individuals think that their lives have reached dead ends.

This movement is fundamentally reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual and immoral. For this movement these are features, not flaws. This movement is also inherently and centrally willing to include and support those who are down on their luck if those people submit to their broader cultural agenda. The two sides of the movement's agenda are mutually reinforcing and inseparable parts of what it means to be an Evangelical Christian in the narrow sense of that term.

Their stubborn, fact-blind righteousness is part and parcel of their unwavering attitude of hopefulness and acceptance of the inevitability of divine providence. Their anti-intellectual orientation is part of what puts this religious movement in a comfort zone for those who are themselves ill educated. One can't unify a cohort of people who as a matter of core ethnic identity refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the North's victory in the Civil War if you are aren't reactionary.

Evangelical Christianity offers a port in the storm for losers of many shades and stripes that more mainstream Christianity does not. Mainstream Christianity is more open to letting a depressing (for the core constituency of Evangelical Christianity) reality in, mainstream Christianity accepts the authority of intellectuals who necessarily have profound cultural distance from working class flocks as their leaders, and mainstream Christianity is more insistent upon the importance of not sinning in the first place relativite to the importance of never ending forgiveness without regard to culpability than the average self-identified Evangelical Christian knows how to manage. In a world of ugly people, a taboo against mirrors can seem attractive; Evangelical Christianity offers such a world.

If liberals want to make inroads into the people who make up the core of the Evangelical Christian movement, which is closely identified with, although not 100% identical to, the core of the American political conservative movement exemplified in the Tea Party movement and core of the Republican party, it will not suffice to embrace and encourage people who self-identify as Evangelical Christians but operate from outside or at the fringes of that movement.

Instead, liberals have to offer an alternative that can provide an authentic core identity and belief system that works for people who are uneducated and regularly down on their luck who need abundant forgiveness for their psychological well being because they can't figure out how to keep from sinning on a regular basis. They need an alternative that can maintain an unrelenting campaign of calling attention to the failures in their community that need fixing without raising the hackles that outside criticism does, who keep trying even though there is no source of relief in sight. They need to provide people with a worldview that can give them hope in the face of a lack of possibility. They need to offer some filter that can allow these people to make sense of a world that confuses them because they have their feet planted firmly in the past. These people have deep spiritual needs and neither mainstream Christianity nor secular philosophy are doing a good job of serving their needs.

If liberals can solve that riddle to meet those needs, or can change the world in a way so that a critical mass of people no longer need these things, Evangelical Christianity will wither away. Until then, liberals are fighting fire with paper. Every now and then it can smoother a hot spot that is getting out of control, but their own efforts to fight it also fuel the fire.

I suspect that if an alternative is found, it is as likely as not to be something other than mainstream Christianity. For example, Americanized Islam came close to leaping into that role under the leadership of Malcolm X for African-Americans. Mormons, while in many respects a part of the Evangelical Christian movement, similarly offer a different enough community and theological model to offer a genuine alternative to the traditional Evangelical Christian model, even though they do not completely break from that mold. It would likewise be unsurprising to seem some sort of innovation along these lines emerge from the non-denominational megachurch movement. Or, it could be something entirely different. But, until an alternative comes along, Evangelical Christianity, as pernicious as it is, will have staying power because it addresses needs that other movements do not for tens of millions of Americans.

READ MORE - Evangelical Christianity's Ugly Side Is Inseparable From Its Virtues

GOP Getting More White, Democratic Party, Less So

Race has come to be a bigger factor in party identification from 2008 to 2011.

Whites have become more likely to ID as Republican. A majority of whites in every adult age group, and every income group of $30,000 per year+ is majority Republican. Low incomer income whites are still more likely to identify as Republican than Democratic, and have seen GOP party ID leap by ten percentage points in three years. GOP identification has also risen by ten percentage points among whites aged 18-29. Overall 52% of whites are Republicans and 39% are Democrats now. GOP identification rates are increasingly similar across all ages and income groups for whites.

There was a small increase in black GOP identification (from 6% to 8%), but that may be simply a statistical blip that is a produce of modest sample sizes; 86% of blacks identify politically as Democrats. Also, the two percentage point gain in blacks is still smaller in percentage point terms than the four percentage point gain for the overall population for Republicans: voters overall are 43% Republican and 47% Democratic in their political identity.

Republican identification among Hispanics has dropped six percentage points to 22% Republican and 64% Democratic. (The numbers don't total to 100% because one can be independent or affiliate with a third party.) The situation with Hispanics is really more complicated than it appears because on important Hispanic subgroup, Cuban-Americans, which is significant mostly in Florida, accounts for a disproportionate share of Hispanic Republicans.

This source doesn't have a regional breakdown. My suspicion is that Southern whites are Republicans at much higher rates than other whites. It may be the by far dominant party for Southern whites who are also more likely to vote the party line, while whites outside the South may be fairly evenly split between the political parties and less reliable in voting for their political party.

The apparent shift in party ID may mostly be a product of conservative white Democrats in the South (Dixiecrats) either dying, becoming Republicans (perhaps in response to President Obama's Presidency) or aging out of younger age brackets, while their children and grandchildren identify as Republicans from the start. In other words, it may be just one more manifestation of the continuing process of "realignment" in which the Democratic party becomes more purely politically liberal, and the Republican party becomes more purely politically conservative, rather than a shift in political opinion by race.

In terms of brand identification, realignment is great. It is easier than every to know what each party stands for and inform one's vote accordingly. But, since elected officials run on major party tickets, it may be harder than it used to be for a political moderate to get elected on either major party ticket. And, an absence of political moderates can produce the political deadlocks we see today.

READ MORE - GOP Getting More White, Democratic Party, Less So

Congressional Partisanship At Record High

The partisan divide between the Democrats and Republicans in the United States Congress is currently at an all time high. Partisan divides were lowest in the mid-20th century, but are higher now than they were in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Posed less negatively, the Democratic and Republican party are more distinct than every before rather than being blurred by politicians who don't fit either party's mold, in part, due to "realignment" with one time Northeastern moderate Republicans now identifying as Democrats, and one time conservative Southern Democrats now identifying as Republicans in federal elections.

Deadlock isn't always a bad thing when the country is divided. A deadlocked nation may be one that shouldn't be making major changes from the status quo in the law. But, deep partisan divisions and divided government may make action entirely unachievable even on issues that necessarily call for some action to keep the institution of the federal government functioning, like the debt ceiling, appointments to bureaucratic posts, or approval of a federal budget.

READ MORE - Congressional Partisanship At Record High

White Minority Culture and Xenophobia

One fruitful way to look at the politics of immigration, is from the perspective of a minority (or at least socio-economically subordinate), ethnically white culture in the United States that is trying to avoid dilution. This culture, which I call "Country-Western", is one that even people from this culture who make it into the ranks of the American economic elite often work hard to suppress.

Why do the people of immigrant filled New York City or Los Angeles not fear immigration, while excluding immigrants is highly salient in Alabama, where immigrant populations are scarce?

Perhaps, the answer is rooted in the inferrence that immigrants will assimilate into the dominant culture of the United States. If you are a native born member of the white middle class in New York City or Los Angeles, you can be relatively confident that immigrants are eager to assimilate into your culture. If you are a native born member of the white middle class in Alabama, you can be relatively confident that immigrants are not particularly eager to assimilate into your culture.

The drama of gay rights can been seen through the same prism. Because, "country-western" culture in the United States does not have much of a niche in which one can come out as gay, and because churches which are welcoming to people who are gay tend to have ties to the dominant rather than the "country-western" culture, acceptance of gay rights fuels a trickle of native born members of this white minority culture out of it and into the dominant American culture. It is no coincidence that states that allow gay marriage and/or civil unions are overwhelmingly Yankee or urban, and that states that take the half-step of domestic partnerships are overwhelming the Pacific States which have only a weak "country-western" cultural component, while those states where this cultural component is large tend to have state constitutional amendments prohibiting gay marriage.

This notion may even explain much of the anti-intellectualism that is rife in conservative white protestant political circles.

Thus, fear of immigration and gay rights and science may have much the same motive as the fear that Jewish parents have of intermarriage. The driving motivator may be a loss of cultural market share if immigration and gay rights are embraced. This impact, unlike the questionable economic impacts sometimes claimed in polite political debate, may help explain the persistance of these issues as high saliance issues despite an absence of tangible economic or liberty impact on people. The fear is dilution and marginalization of a white ethnic culture that is unable to absorb either.

A trickier issues is parsing what is going on in the Midwest, which is neither entirely Yankee or entirely Country-Western. Outside the highly urbanized Illinois and its neighbor Iowa, they have taken the Country-Western line on gay rights, but until recently haven't been particularly hostile to immigration. But, these states also seem to be swing states that are potentially on the brink of changing sides in the two party battle for the United States as they are depopulated or stagnant in population and the people with the strongest ties to the dominant American culture leave, while those with the strongest ties to Country-Western culture remain.

In contrast, as urban areas in the American Mountain West grow, the influence of rural areas and rural support oriented cities is declining and their political fates are increasingly aligning themselves with the compositions of the waves of migrants into their cities.

READ MORE - White Minority Culture and Xenophobia

Religion and Politics Drives Spouse Selection

It may not be polite to discuss religion and politics with mere acquaintances, but these matters go to the core of our revealed preferences in our choice of a spouse.

On a scale of 0 to 1, where 1 means perfectly matched, physical traits (body shape, weight and height) only score between 0.1 and 0.2 among spouse pairs. Personality traits, such as extroversion or impulsivity, are also weak and fall within the 0 to 0.2 range. By comparison, the score for political ideology is more than 0.6, higher than any of the other measured traits except frequency of church attendance, which was just over 0.7. . . .
An important point of the paper apparently is that this correlation does not emerge through convergence over the term of a relationship. Rather, partners are strongly similar at the beginning of relationships.  

From here, via Gene Expression, both relying on Alford, Hibbing and Peter K. Hatemi, "The Politics of Mate Choice," Journal of Politics, April 2011. The sample size was 5000 married couples.

READ MORE - Religion and Politics Drives Spouse Selection

Pew Offers Up New Political Typology

For the fifth time in 24 years, the Pew Research Center has done cluster analysis of survey data (broken down on nine ideological dimensions) to break the U.S. political spectrum into subtypes that capture some of the main intrapolitical party factions in political ideology and identity. The analysis differs substantial from their previous breakdown in 2005.

Both studies classify about 10% of the population as "bystanders" who are politically apathetic, identify three Democratic leaning clusters, three Republican leaning clusters, and two other moderate clusters.

In 2005, the Democrats were divided into Liberals (secular and anti-war), Disadvantaged Democrats (social welfare loyalists), and Conservative Democrats (latter day New Dealers). The Republicans were broken into Enterprisers (Staunch conservatives), Social Conservative (religious, critical of business), and Pro-Government Conservatives (struggling social conservatives). The politically involved moderates were classified as Upbeats (positive outlook and moderate) and Disaffected (working class and discouraged).

In 2011, Pew finds two Republican clusters: Staunch Conservatives (highly engaged tea party supporters), and Main Street Republicans (conservative on most issues); three Democratic clusters: Solid Liberals (across the board liberal positions), Hard Pressed Democrats (religious, financially struggling), New Coalition Democrats (upbeat, majority-minority); and three politically active moderate clusters: Libertarians (free market, small gov't seculars), Disaffected (downscale, cynical), and post-moderns (moderate, but liberal on social issues). But, as it discusses in its analysis, the two Republican clusters are very similar to each other, and two of the three political active moderate clusters have weak but clear partisan leanings.

The realignment partially reflects a Republican loss of seven percentage points of population share in favor mostly of moderates, presumably into the Libertarian and Disaffected categories.

According to Pew:

[A] growing number of Americans are choosing not to identify with either political party, and the center of the political spectrum is increasingly diverse. Rather than being moderate, many of these independents hold extremely strong ideological positions on issues such as the role of government, immigration, the environment and social issues. But they combine these views in ways that defy liberal or conservative orthodoxy. . . .

The most visible shift in the political landscape since Pew Research’s previous political typology in early 2005 is the emergence of a single bloc of across-the-board conservatives. The long-standing divide between economic, pro-business conservatives and social conservatives has blurred. . . .

On the left, Solid Liberals express diametrically opposing views from the Staunch Conservatives on virtually every issue. While Solid Liberals are predominantly white, minorities make up greater shares of New Coalition Democrats – who include nearly equal numbers of whites, African Americans and Hispanics – and Hard-Pressed Democrats, who are about a third African American. Unlike Solid Liberals, both of these last two groups are highly religious and socially conservative. New Coalition Democrats are distinguished by their upbeat attitudes in the face of economic struggles. . . .

Libertarians and Post-Moderns are largely white, well-educated and affluent. They also share a relatively secular outlook on some social issues, including homosexuality and abortion. But Republican-oriented Libertarians are far more critical of government, less supportive of environmental regulations, and more supportive of business than are Post-Moderns, most of whom lean Democratic.

Disaffecteds, the other main group of independents, are financially stressed and cynical about politics. Most lean to the Republican Party, though they differ from the core Republican groups in their support for increased government aid to the poor. . . .

[T]he nature of the partisan divide has changed substantially over time.
More than in the recent past, attitudes about government separate Democrats from Republicans . . . In 2005, at the height of the Iraq war and shortly after an election in which national security was a dominant issue, opinions about assertiveness in foreign affairs almost completely distinguished Democrats from Republicans. Partisan divisions over national security remain, but in an era when the public’s focus is more inward-looking, they are less pronounced. . . .

• More Staunch Conservatives regularly watch Fox News than regularly watch CNN, MSNBC and the nightly network news broadcasts combined.
• There are few points on which all the typology groups can agree, but cynicism about politicians is one. Majorities across all eight groups, as well as Bystanders, say elected officials lose touch with the people pretty quickly.

Two of the main issues dividing the Republican clusters are the feeling that businesses make too much in profits and support for environmental regulation, also common in Main Street Republican, both common in Main Street Republicans but not Staunch Conservatives, while they are united on religion, immigration and the view that the social welfare net is too expensive. The Democratic party has more ideological diversity between its clusters.

Particularly notable is the disappearance of the once prominent "pro-government conservative" faction from the Republican clusters. Indeed, both of the Republican clusters and two of the three political active moderate clusters, and at least one of the Democratic clusters are pretty down beat on government in general.

The desirability of environmental regulation has become an intraparty divide for both major American political parties (and amongst different moderate clusters), rather than an interparty divide.

READ MORE - Pew Offers Up New Political Typology

Planet GOP

What motivates people like 11 Colorado State Senators (almost the entire GOP caucus in the State Senate): Kent Lambert, Bill Cadman, Scott Renfroe, Mark Scheffel, Keith and Steve King, Nancy Spence, Kevin Grantham, Ted Harvey, Mike Kopp, and Kevin Lundberg, to sponsor "Birther" legislation? (In fairness, the legislation proposed, which is prospective, does not itself on its face question the legitimacy of President Obama's current tenure in office.)

What makes Republicans like Scott Gessler, our Secretary of State, convinced that there are massive numbers of illegal immigrants voting our elections, in the absence of evidence that this is happening (or does he really believe it)?

What drives Republicans like Retired General William Boykin to forward an agenda arguing that Islam is Satanic and shouldn't be included in the freedom of religion?

Why do so many Republicans support succession? Why do so many think contrary to the historical fact, that the Founders were evangelical Christians trying to create a Christian nation?

Why do so many Republicans think it is O.K. to pass laws that are clearly unconstitutional either because they violate the Supremacy clause and assert a state right to disregard binding federal law, or because they violate well established precedents like Roe v. Wade?

Why do so many Republicans claim that President Obama is a Muslim? If one wanted to sully the President's religious credentials, surely the claim that he was a closet atheist, given his adult conversion to Christianity after a secular youth would have been more plausible and atheists are almost as despised by Americans as Muslims in public opinion polls.

How did the Republican party manage to secure a lock on the crazy absurd positions and ideas so fervantly opposed to our constitutional traditions, while claiming a banner of greater patriotism?

Really, factually incredible claims simply don't have the same political currency in the Democratic party that some factually incredible claims do in Republican circles. Really, the Democratic party is far more comfortable with the framework established by mainstream constitutional law than Republicans. Even when Democrats disagree with authoritative interpretations of the constitution in areas such as corporate free speech rights in political debates, they generally don't argue that their view is the absolute law which other parts of the political system are free to ignore. Republicans, in contrast, seem to delight in proclaiming a fantasy constitution to be the real one.

Democrats live with a world view that is bounded by a sense of legal and factual reality; an important subset of Republicans seem entirely divorced from both.

It is hard to hope for politics based on a reasoned search for the truth when a significant share seem to be delusional in many cases. How does one build common political ground with people who don't seem to be playing by the same rules?

Not all Republicans, especially among the rank and file in professional and managerial ranks in America fit this stereotype. But, a surprisingly large number do seem to be a fit for it.

What is going on? Is this really a stable ideology, or a case where a small, tightly disciplined cadre of of extremists have taken hold? For how many are these beliefs sincere and heartfelt, and for how many is this calculated hypocricy and stagemanship?

I know some of the outlines of where some of these ideas have roots in intellectual history, their political roots, and the origins of the political identity of people who now identify as the conservative Republican right wing. But, that doesn't make it seem any less bizzare when I encounter it. How did ideas from Glen Beck recycled from a John Bircher political philosopher gain such much currency with so many people? Why was the intellectual environment so fertile for these ideas? How did right wing media and mainstream media (there scarcely is any truly left wing media) become so disconnected from each other? Why has the outcome of the Civil War been so hard for so many to accept a century and a half later?

Europeans aren't rushing to talk radio stations proclaiming that the monarchies deposed in the 1870s are still the legitimate governments of their countries today and winning majority support in polls of members of major political parties. Why are an important subset of Americans engaged in the same exercise?

Why are Tea Party members so angry at government's existence and operations? Does it make any sense for what is at its roots, as the name suggests, an anti-tax party, to be thriving at a point when taxes are already at sixty year lows?

Why is the public so succeptible to mass political hysteria? Is there something in the political process that is encouraging this kind of sentiment? Or, is this kind of sentiment inextricably intertwined with democracy itself? What does it take to make the masses see crazy talk for what it is?

READ MORE - Planet GOP

Policy Beliefs Can Change

When you get immersed in the toil of electoral politics, it is easy to get into the rut of assuming that politics is all about getting people who agree with you to the polls at a higher rate that the people who don't agree with you, and that people's opinions, to the extent that they are based on more than trivial amounts of information, almost never change.

But, in the longer run, that isn't true. While an individual, and even a whole geographic community's place on the political spectrum is very stable over time, in the case of communities, even over more than a century, the location of specific policy stances on that political spectrum can shift dramatically in a couple of a decades or less.

A poll from CNN this week is the latest to show a majority of Americans in favor of same-sex marriage, with 51 percent saying that marriages between gay and lesbian couples “should be recognized by the law as valid” and 47 percent opposed.

This is the fourth credible poll in the past eight months to show an outright majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage. . . Prior to last year, there had been just one survey — a Washington Post poll conducted in April 2009 — to show support for gay marriage as the plurality position, and none had shown it with a majority. . . . opponents of gay marriage almost certainly no longer constitute a majority; just one of the last nine polls has shown opposition to gay marriage above 50 percent.

From here.

In New York State, likely voters polled earlier this year supported gay marriage by a 56-37 margin. In New York City suburbs support for legalizing gay marriage is 61-33. Roman Catholics are more likely to support gay marriage than members of the population at large, notwithstanding church doctrine to the contrary.

If you told me when I started high school in small town Ohio in the mid-1980s that a majority of Americans would support gay marriage two and a half decades later, I would have thought that you were crazy. When I graduated from high school, only about 11% of those polled thought gay marriage should be legal, while about 72% oppose it. Frankly, I'm surprised that support for gay marriage back then was that high, I would have guessed that it was in the single digits, and maybe in small town Ohio it was. It is also possibly that the single pre-1994 poll's number was high and was made public at all only because it was a statistical outlier on the high end.

The AIDS epidemic had started to make most people aware that there were actually people who had intimate relationships with members of the same sex voluntarily, but even the notion that someone could actually identify as "gay" or "lesbian" in real life, as opposed to merely as an insulting and inaccurate description of someone, wasn't real clear to me at the time. I had never met anyone who had come out. I hadn't even seen or heard of anyone who had come out on TV, in a movie, on the radio, or in anything that I'd read in print. There were no organizations for gays, lesbians, transgender individuals that I was aware of in my town, and the only one that I was aware of nationally was ACT-UP. I was aware of a couple of same sex adult couples who lived together as a household, one of which involved an extended family member, but it had never occurred to me that a household like that would be anything other than platonic, and nobody in those households ever said a thing that suggested that more legal rights were necessary for them.

Since then, the trendline has been more or less steady and shows no sign of reversing. Nate Silver notes in the linked article that "If support for gay marriage were to continue accelerating as fast as it has in the past two years, supporters would outnumber opponents roughly 56-40 in the general population by November 2012." Even if the growth in support reverts to the overall trend line, there will be a pretty safe majority that favors legalizing gay marriage by then, and some states will be ahead of that trend while others will be behind it.

Popular understanding of sexual orientation and gender identification has expanded dramatically in a quarter of a century. By the time I finished high school, I learned that there were at least a few people in my community who self-identified as gay or lesbian (I would not meet anyone who had a transgender identity until after I finished college). Oberlin, where I went to college, was a mecca for gay and lesbian students, who were often active in campus politics, were deeply involved in running one of the major social events of the year on campus (the drag ball), and made it a point to be out of the closet in daily life in class and around campus. A large share of our student body came from New York City and some students personally knew people who had participated in the Stonewall Riots.

But, while college changed my views, this took much longer for the rest of the nation. More than one book has recounted what happened in the years that followed, but my point is not to illustrate how this happened. My point is to note that it did.

Even a decade ago, even among liberal minded people and many people in the gay and lesbian community, some form of civil unions seemed possible and desirable, but gay marriage seemed like a remote possibility that might never happen anywhere in anything but the distant future (where author Kate Elliott, who I whose science fiction Jaran novels I was reading in the late 1990s had put a society that had gay marriage). It was a little hard to determine at that point what gay marriage would even mean at a practical level, because not a lot of attention had been given to the question by people in a position to know the answers.

Now, there are thousands of same sex legally marriage couples in the United States and more in Europe. Colorado doesn't legally recognize same sex marriage and doesn't even have a civil unions law (one was narrowly defeated in this year's session of the Colorado General Assembly). But, it does have a lot of same sex couples who view each other as spouses, who hold themselves out to the public as spouses, who live as a household and who raise children together. They are parents of children who go to school with my children. They are teachers. They are nurses. Their families are my neighbors. Those couples are my clients in large numbers.

It has become obvious to a large share of the population through countless examples that someone can be gay or lesbian as a matter of personal identity, and that a person's sexual orientation is a stable part of who someone is as a person that someone is generally aware of to some extent, even if they may not fully understand their feelings in some social contexts or may be confused at times, for most, if not all, of their lives. (And, who doesn't, at some point in life, find their potential romantic relationships to be confusing?)

It has become clear as well that gay marriage doesn't have negative externalities. It doesn't weaken the institution of marriage for opposite sex couples. It helps many children and harms none. It imparts dignity without taking it away from anyone.

There are still plenty of people in the world who still insist that same sex loves are sinful based on epistles written by John the Gospel writer a couple of thousand years ago, and stories and laws written by Jewish priests centuries before then. But, those scripturally motivated views don't last long in the face of encounters with real life friends, neighbors and colleagues. They don't have much credibility with young people, even those who are evangelical Christians who have grown up in a world that has allowed them to see gays and lesbians and transgender individuals living ordinary (and extraordinary) lives like anyone else.

Decisions from courts and politicians, like the recent Congressional repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in the military and the President's decision not to defend in court the part of the Defense of Marriage Act applicable to the federal government have provided the leadership that has changed the views of the majority, and willingness to hire a gay man as the White House social secretary. Once you abandon the sin theory of sexual orientation the rest flows pretty naturally, and the leadership that our nation's leaders have shown has pretty well discredited that understanding of sexual orientation.

The sin theory of sexual orientation is rapidly going the way of the equally scripturally supported and equally empirically inaccurate demon possession theory of mental illness. Despite the fact that the words in the Bible haven't changed, very few people walking the streets believe in an internalized way that mental illness is caused by demon possession, and likewise, the Biblically based defenses for the institutions of slavery are also now heart felt for only a tiny minority of American Christians.

Lots of people believe that faith healing (which the Gospels devote a great deal of time to) is possible, or at least once was possible, but very few people resort to a clergyman laying on hands as their sole means or even primary means for dealing with poor physical health.

The Pope's official position, reduced to writing ever since 1968 in "Humanae Vitae," is that using contraceptives is a sin. But:

A survey just one year later . . . found that 44% of Catholic women (who were regular churchgoers) were currently using artificial contraception. In 1974, 83% of Catholics said they disagreed with the Pope’s stance on birth control. By 1999, nearly 80 percent of Catholics believed that a person could be a good Catholic without obeying the church hierarchy’s teaching on birth control. A 2005 nationwide poll by Harris Interactive showed that 90% of Catholics supported the use of birth control. The Center of Disease Control and Prevention 2002 National Survey of Family Growth revealed that 97% of American Catholic women over age 18 have used a banned form of contraception, which is the same percentage as the general population.

The sea change in public opinion on gay rights isn't the only recent example.

While he was living, Martin Luther King, Jr., our nation's pre-eminent hero was the civil rights movement, was wary of pressing to strike down miscegenation laws and emphasized civil rights in the public sphere of work and commerce instead. Yet, in the wake of Loving v. Virginia, even prominent segregationist politicians like Strom Thurmond eventually came around to the view (and I genuinely believe that at least that far it was sincere) that miscegenation laws were wrong and that there was nothing wrong with interracial marriage. Large percentages of white, usual Republican primary voters in Mississippi still haven't come around, and we are not a nation of color blind people. But, Jim Crow era laws to enforce segregation and discriminate on the basis of race have been utterly morally discredited for the vast majority of Americans today.

We haven't reached a comfortable answer that tells us how to balance work and family in a world where both men and women are part of almost all parts of the workforce. But, almost nobody wants to return to the status quo that was in place when I was born when the percentage of women in law school student bodies was in the single digits, and there were only a handful of jobs that were open to women, especially to married women. Likewise, almost nobody advocates a return to a legal regime in which women cannot own property, bring lawsuits or enter into contracts in their own name, as was the case when the Founders wrote the United States Constitution.

Similarly, nobody is advocating that the franchise be limited to white male property owners over the age of twenty-one as it was when the Founders wrote the United States constitution. Indeed, while non-whites can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on race, women can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on gender, and eighteen to twenty year olds can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on age, laws restricting the franchise to property owners would quite possibly not violate the federal constitution, although such laws would be politically impossible to pass at the moment.

Abortion remains controversial, but popular opinion today would never support the laws struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 that made it illegal to use "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception."

Support for legalizing marijuana is at about the same point that support for legalizing gay marriage was two years ago. The year that I graduated from high school, about 74% opposed that and 24% supported it. Now, about 50% oppose legalizing it, while 46% support legalizing it, and support for legalization has grown more or less steadily for the last fifteen years. According to the executive director of NORML:

Thirteen states have decriminalized marijuana, and that covers 130 million Americans. We now have fifteen states and the District of Columbia that have legal protections for qualified medical-marijuana patients, and that covers 90 to 95 million Americans.

The President has taken the position of not using federal law to punish people who use marijuana in compliance with state medical marijuana laws, and has paid essentially no price (and perhaps gains support) for taking this position.

In aspects of life where people have real experience and are affected in their daily lives, religious texts and doctrines and even community traditions are all but irrelevant to people's opinions. The previous generation's unthinkable possibilities can become the current generation's moral norms.

READ MORE - Policy Beliefs Can Change

Mississippi Republicans Still Racist

Public Policy Polling surveyed 400 usual Mississippi Republican primary voters from March 24th to 27th [2011]. The survey’s margin of error is +/-4.9%. Other factors, such as refusal to be interviewed and weighting, may introduce additional error that is more difficult to quantify.

[They asked and were told:]

Do you think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal?

Legal............................................................... 40%

Illegal .............................................................. 46%

Not sure .......................................................... 14%

From here.

Keep in mind that this is not some highly technical question about which ordinary, well socialized, non-racist people would have to contemplate a "not sure" answer.  Also, keep in mind that this sample excludes not only Democrats and people with no political affiliation, but also Republicans who are not "usual primary voters."  Primary voters typically make up something on the order of half of all voters and tend to be more extreme in their political beliefs than general election voters or politically affiliated non-voters.

As Razib notes, this is not implausible.  I agree with Razib that the poll is not as far from expectations as one might think.

Nationally, according to the General Social Survey, about 37% of people favored banning interracial marriage in 1972, a few years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this was not constitutional in Loving v. Virginia. By 2002 the percentage favoring a ban on interracial marriage nationally had dropped to 10%. But, Republicans from the region that includes Mississippi were the strongest supporters of prohibiting interracial marriage.

Presumably, the Republicans who want to ban interracial marriage are also the ones who are birthers, favor secession, think President Obama is a Muslim, are young earth creationists, and generally have beliefs that embarrass everyone else in the country, even serious mainstream Republicans.

Clearly, some subcultures manage to very completely insulate themselves from the overall social and intellectual trends of the nation. The hard questions are how one can break through that bubble, and failing that, how one can reduce their disproportionate political influence.

READ MORE - Mississippi Republicans Still Racist

Who Supports School Vouchers?

Education vouchers are generally disliked by poor whites and are liked by rich whites (if they happen to be Catholic or evangelical Protestant), poor Hispanics, and poor blacks in the Northeast.

From

The Monkey Cage, reacting to inaccurate op-ed statements in the Wall Street Journal with actual facts.

As someone who believes that good data analysis is the only hope we have of saving the world, I also add this from the Monkey Cage post:

P.S. Why does this irritate me so much? I analyze survey data for a living. If I were to go around making up numbers about the atomic weight of potassium or international trade, people would rightly ask what I know about chemistry or economics. But when people start spreading false statements about public opinion, they're believed without question--even by a science writer who prides himself on defying conventional wisdom--and used as part of a pseudo-populist argument about that despicable group, "rich whites," It all just makes me want to barf. If you want to attack rich whites, fine. But use a more plausible argument, please!

READ MORE - Who Supports School Vouchers?

Interesting Studies

* A new study predicts the extinction of religion in nine countries using models similar to those to predict language extinction. (See also here on language extinction: 6% of the world's languages are spoken by 94% of the world's population. The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population. 133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people.) "The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland." The key constant in their model in all of the studied countries was a best fit to a value that would lead to completely secular beliefs in the long run.

Daniel M. Abrams, Haley A. Yaple, Richard J. Wiener, "A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation."

The model looks at the proportion of people who are religious, the proportion of people who are non-religious, and assumes that conversion rates in each direction are a function of the proportion of the population that belongs to that group and a constant called "u" for the perceived utility of membership in that group. This probability they put in the form: "c(x^a)(u), where c and a are constants that scale time and determine the relative importance of x and u in attracting converts, respectively." Using 85 sets of long term census data they found that the best fit to "a" was 1, that c is also succeptible to global fits, and that u varies from place to place. When they solve the equations on this basis they find:

The behavior of the model can be understood analytically for a = 1, in which case we have dx/dt=cx(1-x)(2u-1): logistic growth. An analysis of the fixed points of this equation tells us that religion will disappear if its perceived utility is less than that of non-affiliation [i.e. u is greater than 0.5], regardless of how large a fraction initially adheres to a religion. However, if a is less than but close to one, a small social group can indefinitely coexist with a large social group.

The study estimated the constant "u" from census of religion data for "(a) the autonomous Aland islands region of Finland, (b) Schwyz Canton in Switzerland, (c) Vienna Province in Austria, (d) the Netherlands. . . . Relative utilities for the religiously unaffiliated populations as determined by model . . . were u = 0:63; 0:70; 0:58; 0:56."

No estimate of the key constant was made for the United States, which is far less secular than the countries studied, but has a growing non-religious population. There is also good reason to wonder if the either or model used in the study (in which religious or non-religious were the only categories) makes sense in a nation without a tradition of an established or locally dominant religion as found in most of the studied areas.

The general empirical trend in the study of American religious affiliation has been a candle burning at both ends result, with both more demanding religious faiths and secular beliefs growing at the expensive of mainline moderate religious belief. Similarly, in Latin America, the trend has been to see a growth in both Pentacostal faiths and secularism at the expensive the Roman Catholicism which is the dominant established church. In sub-Saharan Africa, the trend has been for conversion from animism to Christianity, with a minor growth factor (partially demic and partially from conversion) for Islam, while secular views have not been particularly notable as a share of the population.

Put another way, there is a lot to be said for a logistic model to explain trendlines in religious affiliation, but the model does nothing to explain what drives changes in the key constant "u" that drives these trends. By analogy, is is compable to looking at politics at an electoral level without really examining the movement politics that cause political views to change in the general population over time.

This model is a good antidote, however, to purely population genetic models that start from the assumption that children will share the faith of their parents, rather than attempting to quantify propensities to convert from one faith to another in a meaningful fashion. To some extent, by deriving empirical constants in the model from data, it glosses over these theoretical objections in a robust way. The constant "u" effectively subsumes both conversion propensities and reproduction rates. But, near the extremes, it becomes more and more important to recognize the relevance of subgroup membership, subgroup coherence, and reproduction rates, although its constant "a" can help mediate that result.

For example, in the sample "a" equals 1 model, it can't explain the persistence, and even growth, of faiths that Judaism and the Amish, in the face over overwhelming minority status for thousands of years and hundreds of years respectively. More generally, a more realistic model would assume a hetrogeneous propensity to convert which might very well have a hereditary component (due to psychological tendencies to take certain approaches to tradition and authority selected for heavily through religious endogamy when a religion is in the minority).

In more complex models, some religious populations and some personality types might be slow to convert, while others might convert more rapidly, and if the populations slow to convert also have more children and have children younger, you might end up with a bimodal outcome with a stable, fertile religious segment and a stable less fertile non-religious segment. It isn't hard to imagine the United States and Latin America evolving into this kind of equalibrium. And, while Turkey is nominally 99% Muslim, its division into different varieties of Islam arguably reflects this kind of balance.

* In a decidely participant-ethnographic investigation, New York City dezinens have discovered that godless people who get together in clubs are happier.

* A parasitic factor in mental illness may have been located:

Toxoplasma gondii infects approximately 25 percent of the human population. The protozoan parasite is noted for altering the behavior of infected hosts. . . .

"It is noteworthy that we found vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor 2 (VIPR2) was upregulated by all three Toxoplasma strains," says Xiao. VIPR2 "is linked to schizophrenia in some recent publications. Since the tropism of Toxoplasma for brain has been linked with specific behavioral changes and psychosis in humans, this finding will have some fundamental significance for understanding the correlation between Toxoplasma and psychosis."

The report based on the study by J. Xiao, L. Jones-Brando, C. C. Talbot, R. H. Yolken. "Differential Effects of Three Canonical Toxoplasma Strains on Gene Expression in Human Neuroepithelial Cells." Infection and Immunity, 2010; 79 (3): 1363 DOI: 10.1128/IAI.00947-10 suggests from a mouse model that there may be an important subclass of mental health conditions with a parasitic infectious agent as a cause or trigger.

* There may be a quick and easy vaccine cure for a complication of dust mite allergies:

Monash University researchers are working on a vaccine that could completely cure asthma brought on by house dust mite allergies. If successful, the vaccine would have the potential to cure sufferers in two to three doses. . . . Professor O'Hehir has also made significant gains in developing a vaccine for people with peanut allergies. Currently there is no specific treatment for peanut allergy with avoidance and emergency treatment of anaphylaxis with adrenaline as the only options. Allergen immunotherapy is available for selected patients with house dust mite allergy but typically injections need to be given regularly for three to five years.

I've never been diagnosed with asthma, but do have a dust mite allergy and have had subclinical asthma-like symptoms, so this is naturally of great interest to me.

* Native Americans had big influences on the environment of the Americas beyond a megafauna extinction, in the Everglades:

Tree islands are patches of relatively high and dry ground that dot the marshes of the Everglades. Typically a meter (3.3 feet) or so high, many of them are elevated enough to allow trees to grow. They provide a nesting site for alligators and a refuge for birds, panthers, and other wildlife.

Scientists have thought for many years that the so-called fixed tree islands (a larger type of tree island frequently found in the Everglades' main channel, Shark River Slough) developed on protrusions from the rocky layer of a mineral called carbonate that sits beneath the marsh. Now, new research indicates that the real trigger for island development might have been middens, or trash piles left behind from human settlements that date to about 5,000 years ago.

These middens, a mixture of bones, food discards, charcoal, and human artifacts (such as clay pots and shell tools), would have provided an elevated area, drier than the surrounding marsh, allowing trees and other vegetation to grow. Bones also leaked phosphorus, a nutrient for plants that is otherwise scarce in the Everglades.

And, in the Eastern United States where "prehistoric people decreased forest cover to reorient their settlements and intensify corn production. They also contributed to increased sedimentation in valley bottoms about 700 to 1,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. The findings suggest that prehistoric land use was the initial cause of increased sedimentation in the valley bottoms, and sedimentation was later amplified by wetter and stormier conditions."

* Unimpressive social science discovery of the week: Subjects in psychology experiments distinguish between real human beings and mere video recordings of human beings.

* Traits that cause organisms to disperse rapidly in space lead to selective evolution without regard to other measures of biological fitness.

* We know more about the apes of Europe and Asia tens of millions of years ago than we used to know:

Extant apes (Primates: Hominoidea) are the relics of a group that was much more diverse in the past. They originated in Africa around the Oligocene/Miocene boundary, but by the beginning of the Middle Miocene they expanded their range into Eurasia, where they experienced a far-reaching evolutionary radiation. . . Here we provide an updated chronology that incorporates recently discovered Iberian taxa and further reevaluates the age of many previously known sites on the basis of local biostratigraphic scales and magnetostratigraphic data. Our results show that identifiable Eurasian kenyapithecins (Griphopithecus and Kenyapithecus) are much younger than previously thought (ca. 14 Ma instead of 16 Ma), which casts serious doubts on the attribution of the hominoid tooth from Engelswies (16.3–16.5 Ma) to cf. Griphopithecus.

READ MORE - Interesting Studies

Did Unions Create The Middle Class?

Many people . . . believe there would be no middle class in America if unions did not organize a third of the workforce after World War II. That post-war era, the sixties, still represents one of the most prosperous eras in the nation's history. But that lesson has been lost on most people who oppose unions.

From here.

Krugman agrees.

I don't oppose unions. But, I am also deeply skeptical of the claim by union supporters, and of liberal economists like Krugman, that they were as important an ingredient in creating the American middle class as claimed.

The Comparative View

Consider, for example, Japan and Western Europe. Both societies are far more economically egalitarian than the United States. They pay their executives less, and have a far more even distribution of wealth. But, they do it in two radically different ways.

Japan's big businesses are formally unionized, but their unions are company sponsored affairs that are actually forbidden by law in the United States on the grounds that they would be too management controlled. Japan also has a fairly small public sector, a very paternalistic government, a fairly weak public sector welfare state, and role for married women that is anything but equal even though unmarried women have substantial economic equality with their married peers.

Western Europe is heavily unionized (compared to the United States) with unions that are much more vigorous in asserting their rights than American unions, and those nations also uniformly have a much more comprehensive public sector social welfare state than either the United States or Japan. Germany gives workers at public corporations seats on the Board of Directors of their companies. France tolerates the kidnapping of executives in the course of union-management negotiations and gives public sector workers a frequently exercised right to strike. Sweden has very high taxes that finance a public sector welfare state that makes marriage an economically unnecessary part of being a parent.

The United States has a union movement that was almost as powerful as that of Europe through the 1960s, but that has declined in the four decades since then. It has a public sector welfare state, but it is anemic. We work more hours per year than workers in any other country in the world, and have the most unequal distribution of wealth in the developed world, together with low taxes by developed world standards overall, as measured by tax revenues collected relative to GDP. We have arguably the weakest private sector union movement in the developed world, but have a large, but timid public sector union movement.

The Weak Chain of Cause and Effect

The weakening of private sector unions has not had some of the results that you would expect. Workplace safety is profoundly improved from the standards that prevailed four decades ago when unions were much stronger. The workers whose wages have stagnated have been in industries where unions were strong, not in industries where unions have never had much of a foothold, although, in those industries, union workers tend to be paid more than non-union workers. Disgruntled workers in an American workplace are more likely to call a trial lawyer than a union organizer. American workers have less job security than their peers in either Japan or Europe, although in Japan this is mostly due to a private sector understanding of fairness, while in Europe it is mandated by law.

Income inequality in the United States has risen more or less steadily since 1947. Changing rates of unionization have done very little to alter the trend line, which has arguably flattened a little for families in the bottom 95% of the income distribution in the last decade. Earned income inequality is risen in Europe as well, but has been mitigated by their tax codes and social welfare state, rather than fundamental differences in the structure of economic relationships between people within businesses.

Public sector workers in the United States got job security and good benefits first, and unionized second, many decades after the prevailing accommodation on the shape of public sector employment terms, conditions and compensation were well established.

Did Ethnic Diversity Play A Role?

Some people would argue that American tolerance for inequality has roots in a lack of shared ethnic identity found in both Europe and Japan. I can't rule that out. There is circumstantial evidence that heavy immigration in the late twentieth century has frayed the European consensus on the social safety net and management-labor relations.

Then again, the union movement in the United States has historically been strongest in places where massive immigration has been attracted by job creation, not economically stable places, or places with homogeneous populations. The only place in the agriculture sector that there has ever been any meaningful effort at unionization, for example, has been among immigrant farm laborers. To my knowledge, there are not now, and never have been any unionized plantations. Rural America has produced a great many co-operatives but very few unions.

The deepest economic inequalities in the United States are not in the South where there is the greatest ideological and historical tolerance of inequality in the form of slavery and then, in post-slavery racism, and where opposition to unions has historically been strongest. The plutocrats who have captured such an immense share of the national wealth tend to be based in places like San Francisco and New York City where the financial sectors are strongest, despite the high and progressive taxes that they face there and the strongly liberal local politics. The strongly anti-union Deep South is the home not just of pervasive black rural poverty, but of pervasive white rural poverty.

Southern anti-unionism at the grassroots level may be a product of discontent, in the context of Southern efforts to a great extent successful, to create the "New Rust Belt" in the American South, with existing union efforts to keep new manufacturing investment in the "Old Rust Belt" where their members held jobs in manufacturing companies. From their perspective, Northern manufacturing unions most important position was their opposition to relocating jobs to the South where they lived, rather than any deep felt concern about what it was like to work in a union shop, something few Southerners have experienced.

The current hotbed of union busting sentiment, Midwest states like Wisconsin and Ohio, have historically been relatively homogeneous and inclined to have politics that focused on the collective good. Wisconsin was the epicenter of Garrison Keillor's somewhat idealized middle class heartland where petty village quibbles and small town values prevailed over deep ethnic strife. Where Swedish Lutherans and German Lutherans considered their unions to be mixed marriages. Ohio was one of the first states to proudly embrace a land grant funded system of public education.

Working Class v. Middle Class

Another part of the conundrum of identifying the union movement with the middle class, is that until the relatively recent rise of public sector unionization, unions have been largely the province of the blue collar working class (aka lower middle class). The history of the American union movement is full a smudge faced miners, rank and file factory workers, postal workers trudging through rain, sleet and snow, firemen stinking of smoke, truck drivers and skilled tradesmen.

Today's union movement is more middle class than it used to be because the working class jobs that used to be its core constituency are gone or no longer unionized, while the relatively few middle class unionized jobs have survived and grown relatively more important to the movement as a whole.

The minimum wage and hour laws that unions worked to enact were all but irrelevant to middle class workers who were paid salaries and often exempted from their application. The workplace safety protections and worker's compensation regimes that unions pushed to enact didn't mean much to people who sat behind desks and cash registers all day. The fact that employers started to offer health insurance was as much a product of World War II era wage controls as it was a product of a healthy union movement and benefited non-union workers in factory offices as much as it did union workers on the factory floor.

The entire social class that was at the heart of the union movement has contracted, and the middle class that it now claims used to identify itself with management. Bank tellers have a great deal in common with factory floor workers. They aren't paid much. They are micromanaged. They are rank and file employees of large enterprises that thrive on coordinated mass production. But, factory workers who identified as working class unionized, while bank tellers who identified as middle class, didn't.

A college education and a union card used to be considered contradictions in terms; alternative directions in life. Union leadership is how smart young working class men who couldn't dream of securing a college education or the management jobs that came with it found a way to exercise power in the large institutions where they worked, just as they did as non-commissioned officers did in the military. Yet, a college education is now often considered the defining element of the middle class.

How did access to the college educations that were the thresholds to membership in the middle class open? Mostly through the GI Bill, and after that through the shift of selective institutions of higher education to merit based admissions in the 1960s and the parallel expansion of of state institutions of higher education to accommodate the needs of former soldiers entitled to it as a result of the GI Bill. The political resistance of the civil service that was created to meet this need to being downsized (at a time when higher education employees largely weren't unionized) and student radicalism, rather than labor union efforts, does more to explain why the gates to higher education remained open.

Conclusion

Does all of this mean that unions can't play an important role in strengthening the American middle class? No. They are eager to step up to the challenge and remake themselves as a movement, and it is a task worth taking on.

But, as a matter of history, it is not at all clear that unions played an important part in creating the middle class, which was instead apparently driven by the widening availability of higher education. Instead, unions actually worked hard to secure justice for the American working class and seemed to be making good headway in doing so until sometime around 1970, when that social class in American life entered a period of seemingly permanent economic stagnation.

READ MORE - Did Unions Create The Middle Class?

Life Imitates Art

Fiction is full of children who discover one day that they aren't the people they thought because their parents weren't who they thought that they were. Fairy tales are full of royals raised as peasants, changlings, and more. The impulse hasn't run its course yet. For example, Nicole Peeler's debut novel of 2009, "Tempest Rising," features a young woman who discovers that her mother was a Selkie and that she is half supernatural.

This kind of surprise, of course, isn't nearly so common in real life. But, surprise revelations about who your parents happen to be do happen, and one such event was recently recounted in "The Australian":

In the 1950s, ten Iraqi Jewish Mossad agents were sent undercover to spy on Israeli Arab communities, each married a local woman while pretending to be an Arab Muslim, and they each had children. The operation was shut down in 1964. The reveal happened and the consequences weren't very good for the children.

[T]he wives were invited to France, where they were met by the Mossad station chief. He told them they could either join their husbands in a Jewish community, where the children would be raised as Jews, or arrangements could be made for them to be resettled in an Arab country of their choice. . . . The women chose to remain with their husbands. Israeli army chaplains brought to Paris converted them to Judaism and by special dispensation their young children were also recognised as Jews without undergoing separate conversion.

The ensuing identity crisis required psychological intervention. "We tried to rehabilitate the people involved, but weren't really successful . . . . The kids experienced serious trauma. They tried to forget their past, where they came from, but they couldn't. A few succeeded in life, but most still suffer from problems."

READ MORE - Life Imitates Art

Jefferson Davis On The Cause of The Civil War

Jefferson Davis unequivocally stated in 1861 that the cause of his state’s secession was that “she had heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races.” Other Confederate leaders also emphasized that slavery was the reason for secession.

From here, with links to multiple sources.

Jefferson Davis's inauguration as President of the Confederate State of America was re-enacted on its 150th anniversary on February 19th in Alabama in an event organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group of men, mostly in the American South, who have wide political support, who are proud that their ancestors were traitors who fought to defend slavery.

Ironically, most of them now favor the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln.

READ MORE - Jefferson Davis On The Cause of The Civil War

Wisconsin and 2012

Democratic partisans are fond of saying that anti-immigrant measures advanced by Republicans are good for Democrats because they alienate a large Latino population that would otherwise be inclined to vote Republican (see e.g. "Even More Opportunities for GOP Latino Alienation").

The Republican anti-union showdown with public employees unions playing out at the moment in Wisconsin (and the Denver Post's AP story advises me in other states across the country like Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, Nevada and Florida) may have a similar effect.

One of the crucial sources of the big Tea Party wins in 2010 was union member ambivalence about voting for Democrats. While Democrats have near unanimous support from the leadership of organized labor, union members themselves barely favored Democrats more often than Republicans in 2010 election in many key races.

But, the current multi-state Republican jihad against labor unions, whether or not it is successful, may change that in 2012. By reminding the public that the Republican brand hates unions and favors making deep spending budget cuts substantially on the back of union member compensation, the Tea Party union members of 2010 may return to the Democratic fold in 2012.

Half of union members in the United States are public employees who are directly affected by the stance Republicans have taken in Wisconsin, and the other half don't have to be particularly prescient to see Republican attacks on public sector unions translating into attacks on their economic interests should Republicans gain control of the federal government as well.

READ MORE - Wisconsin and 2012

Ethnicity, Language and Religion In Modern Egypt

A nice analysis of the ethnic and linguistic make up of the eighty million people Egypt is found here, and its religious diversity is analyzed here.

Linguistically, most Egyptians speak one of two dialects of Arabic which are described as being roughly as similar a Spanish and Portuguese, one of which (Sa'idi) is spoken in Upper Egypt (the Southern part of the Nile Valley) and the other of which (Egyptian Arabic) is spoken in Lower Egypt (the Northern part of the Nile Valley). A Libyan dialect of Arabic is spoken on the Mediterranean coast beyond the Nile Delta region. And, Bedouin dialect of Arabic is spoken in the Sinai.

There is also a pocket of the Nile Delta where Greek is spoken, a small community on the Southern Red Sea Coast that speaks the Cushitic Beja language, and an oasis community in the Western Desert that speaks the Berber Siwi language. In the far South of the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt two Nubian (Nilo-Saharan) languages are spoken.

In addition to these linguistic minorities there are communities of Abazas, Turks, and Dom (Gypsies). "The Abazas . . . are a Circassian/Abkhazian people whose ancestors fled Russian assaults in the Caucasus in the 19th century; although they have long maintained a distinct identity in Egypt[.]" Estimates of the Dom population range from tens of thousands to a million, an estimate complicated by the apparently common practice of Dom publicly identifying as Palestinian to avoid discrimination. Egyptians who are not part of one of these minorities speaking one of the two main Egyptian Arabic dialects make up about 91% of the Egyptian population.

There are significant Christian minorities in Egypt, perhaps ten percent of the total in many Nile Valley and Northern Red Sea coastal areas, mostly Coptic Christian (perhaps seven or eight million in all), but perhaps a quarter million of whom are many other types of Christians (they seem to be concentrated around the Nile Delta), and there is apparently a Shi'ite minority in parts of the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt whose numbers are a matter of great dispute but may make up as many as a million people. Most Egyptians, of course, are Sunni Muslims and are generally not a part of the Wahhabi sect that dominates in Saudi Arabia and is evangelized by the Taliban.

In an international context, Egyptian Sunni Muslims are on the conservative/traditionalist end of the the scale on "social issues," although not necesarily as extreme as Wahhabi sect Muslims. Gender segregation in the workplace is favored by a narrow majority and most Egyptians favor the use of harsh Islamic law punishments for offenses like adultery and theft.

Still, despite pockets of diversity, the overall picture is of a relatively homogeneous core Egyptian population in the Nile Valley split mostly between Upper and Lower Egypt, with small, mostly geographically combat minority populations on its periphery. Upper Egyptians and Lower Egyptians, Sunni Muslims, Shi'ite Muslims and Coptic Christian alike, all have a strong Egyptian national identity, muted somewhat by a sense of also belonging to larger Muslim and Pan-Arab communities.

Any reasonably democratic process will produce a parliament in Egypt dominated by Sunni Muslims who speak one of the two main Arabic dialects of Egypt, with the more urban Lower Egyptian Sunni Muslims probably making up a majority or close to a majority.

READ MORE - Ethnicity, Language and Religion In Modern Egypt

Population Density And Political Identity

The median Republican Congressional district now has a population density 11 times smaller than the median Democratic district[.]

From here.



Chart from here, which goes on to explain:

As shown in the chart above (in Log scale), there was a relatively strong positive correlation between density of congressional districts and the vote share of the Democratic candidate in the 2010 elections. Of densest quartile of districts with a race between a Democrat and a Republican — 105 of them, with a density of 1,935 people per square miles or more — the Democratic candidate won 89. Of the quartile of districts with the lowest densities — 98 people per square mile and below — Democratic candidates only won 23 races.

This is a pretty intense urban-rural divide. Shifts like those in Colorado which transferred rural Congressional Districts 3 and 4 from Blue Dog Democrats to Republicans no doubt made it more intense.

If you wanted to be more fine grained in your analysis, I also have no doubt that intraparty liberal-conservative divides would also show a meaningful connection to population density: moderate Republicans probably tend to be from more urban districts, while conservative Democrats probably tend to be from more rural districts.

I also suspect that further analysis would show that if you were took take more fine grained data, for example, census tracts, that average population density in a district would match the partisan split even more strongly. In other words, it is possible to have a large Congressional district in which most of the voters live in a densely populated central city or two, and a minority of voters live in outlying areas around the cities that house most of the people in the district. My expectation is that geographically large Congressional Districts in which most voters are crammed into central cities but there are large, barely populated outlying areas are more liberal than geographically large Congressional Districts with a steady low level of population densities (e.g. districts that have only small towns, rural areas and exurbs).

There is a credible argument that population density is indeed one of the prime drivers of partisan identity - that living in an urban area causes Democratic policies to make more sense, while living in a rural area causes Republican policies to make more sense.

One way to test that would be to look at changes in political ideology upon moving from an area that has high population density to one that has low population density and visa versa. If an individual's politics get more conservative when he or she moves to the country, and more liberal when he or she moves to the city, then the case for population density causing political identity would be supported (although one could also argue for neighborhood effects that are independent of population density in that scenario).

It is possible to argue for causes other than population density for this divide. For example, one could argue that it is farming, rather than population density that drives it. But, this would fail to explain why exurbanites are more conservative than outer ring suburbanites who in turn are more conservative than inner ring suburbanites who are in turn more conservative than central city residents, none of whom are involved in the farm economy. A population density explanation can also explain why cities like Columbus, Ohio, which have a large land area for their population, are more conservative politically than more densely populated cities like Denver.

One important caveat is that I am not at all sure that this relationship holds in all U.S. regions. In the South, partisan divides based on race and religion may swamp most population density effects, while in the North, I suspect that racial and religious divides merely reinforce the population density effects. There are many rural blacks in the South and few in the North.

READ MORE - Population Density And Political Identity

South Sudan Holds Independence Vote

A vote is being held today to create a new country of South Sudan, a predominantly Christian/animist part of the the predominantly Arab Muslim nation of Sudan, that has endured a long insurgency that has killed two million people. About four million people are expected to vote and the outcome is almost certain to be a vote for independence, assuming the orderly voting allows the quorum for the election to be secured. I share the view of almost everyone in the West that this is a positive development compared to what came before it.

The new nation would be oil rich, but short of the educated people needed to give a nation real hope. I've read that 80% of its people are illiterate and that only 2% complete elementary school. I have little doubt that among women, the percentages are even lower. The new people share a larger "macro-culture" but are divided by local languages and tribal affiliations. All of the usual horrors of sub-Saharan Africa are present there enhanced by the additional burden of a long period of war. Mostly locals hope that a sovereign government's military and security resources may better protect them than the Sudanese government has in the past.

The ethnic divide between Muslims predominantly in the North, and Christian/animists predominantly in the South, is found across Africa at roughly the same latitude. This shouldn't be construed to mean that the Christians are the good guys and the Muslims are the bad guys, however. Uganda, adjacent to the new landlocked country and its principal connection to the outside world, for example, if famous for its virulent Christianity based anti-gay fervor and Christian based violent political movements. Rwanda and Burundi which are part of the same larger Christian/animist layer of sub-Saharan Africa are famous mostly for their repeated waves of genocidal slaughter in Hutu-Tutsi clashes. Over in Nigeria, religious compatriots still burn witches.

The area seeking independence does not include Darfur in West Central Sudan where genocidal killings have taken place with the approval of the government, although not always with its direct involvement. Indeed, to some extent, the removal of Darfur allies with South Sudan's independence from the political scene may undermine Darfur politically, although it may also provide a place of refuge for those fleeing the Darfur region.

Together with the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt by violent Muslim extremists, and the wholesale exile of a large share of the Iraqi Christian population in the Iraq War and subsequent political and religious violence, it also marks of trend in which there are fewer Christian presences and those that remain are threatened, in predominantly Muslim nations.

READ MORE - South Sudan Holds Independence Vote