The US Senate: Where Democracy Goes to Die
by Corey Robin
Every once in a while I teach constitutional law, and when I do, I pose to my students the following question: What if the Senate apportioned votes not on the basis of states but on the basis of race? That is, rather than each state getting two votes in the Senate, what if each racial or ethnic group listed in the US Census got two votes instead?
Regardless of race, almost all of the students freak out at the suggestion. It's undemocratic, they cry! When I point out that the Senate is already undemocratic—the vote of any Wyomian is worth vastly more than the vote of each New Yorker—they say, yeah, but that's different: small states need protection from large states. And what about historically subjugated or oppressed minorities, I ask? Or what about the fact that one of the major intellectual moves, if not completely successful coups, of Madison and some of the Framers was to disaggregate or disassemble the interests of a state into the interests of its individual citizens. As Ben Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention, "The Interest of a State is made up of the interests of its individual members. If they are not injured, the State is not injured." The students are seldom moved.
Then I point out that the very opposition they're drawing—between representation on the basis of race versus representation on the basis of states—is itself confounded by the history of the ratification debate over the Constitution and the development of slavery and white supremacy in this country.
As Jack Rakove argued in Original Meanings, one of the reasons some delegates from large states ultimately came around to the idea of protecting the interests of small states was that they realized that an equal, if not more powerful, interest than mere population size bound delegate to delegate, state to state: slavery. Virginia had far more in common with South Carolina than it did with Massachussets, a fact that later events would go onto confirm. In Rakove's words:
The more the delegates examined the apportionment of the lower house [which resulted in the infamous 3/5 clause], the more weight they gave to considerations of regional security. Rather than treat sectional differences as an alternative and superior description of the real interests at play in American politics, the delegates saw them instead as an additional conflict that had to be accommodated in order for the Union to endure. The apportionment issue confirmed the claims that the small states had made all along. It called attention not to the way in which an extended republic could protect all interests but to the need to safeguard the conspicuous interest of North and South. This defensive orientation in turn enabled even some large-state delegates to find merit in an equal-state vote.
As Madison, a firm opponent of representation by states, would argue at the Convention:
It seemed now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lay, not between large and small but between the Northern and Southern States. The institution of slavery and its consequences formed the line of discrimination."
True, Madison made this claim in the service of his argument against representation by states, but for others, his claim pushed in the opposite direction: a pluralism of interests in an extensive republic was not, as Madison claimed in Federalist 10, enough to protect the interests of a wealthy propertied minority. Something more—the protection of group interests in the Senate—was required. (Which is why, incidentally, I'm always amused by conservatives' horror at the notion of group rights: what do they think the Senate is all about if not the protection of group rights? This is not to say that there aren't principled reasons to oppose group rights; I'm commenting merely on the scandalized tone of the opposition.)
And when one considers how critical the Senate has been to the protection of both slavery and Jim Crow—measures against both institutions repeatedly passed the House, only to be stymied in the Senate, where the interests of certain types of minorities are more protected than others—the distinction between race and state size becomes even harder to sustain. Though the Senate often gets held up as the institution for the protection of minority rights against majoritarian tyranny, the minorities it protects are often not the powerless or the dissenters of yore and lore.
Indeed, for all the justified disgust with Emory University President James Wagner's recent celebration of the 3/5 Clause, virtually no one ever criticizes the Senate, even though its contribution to the maintenance of white supremacy, over the long course of American history, has been far greater than the 3/5 Clause, which was nullified by the 14th Amendment.
This is all by way of a long introduction to a terrific article in the New York Times by Adam Liptak on just this issue of the undemocratic nature of the Senate, and some of the racial dimensions of that un-democracy. Just a few excerpts:
Vermont’s 625,000 residents have two United States senators, and so do New York’s 19 million. That means that a Vermonter has 30 times the voting power in the Senate of a New Yorker just over the state line — the biggest inequality between two adjacent states. The nation’s largest gap, between Wyoming and California, is more than double that.
The difference in the fortunes of Rutland and Washington Counties reflects the growing disparity in their citizens’ voting power, and it is not an anomaly. The Constitution has always given residents of states with small populations a lift, but the size and importance of the gap has grown markedly in recent decades, in ways the framers probably never anticipated. It affects the political dynamic of issues as varied as gun control, immigration and campaign finance.
In response, lawmakers, lawyers and watchdog groups have begun pushing for change. A lawsuit to curb the small-state advantage in the Senate’s rules is moving through the courts. The Senate has already made modest changes to rules concerning the filibuster, which has particularly benefited senators from small states. And eight states and the District of Columbia have endorsed a proposal to reduce the chances that the small-state advantage in the Electoral College will allow a loser of the popular vote to win the presidency.
...
What is certain is that the power of the smaller states is large and growing. Political scientists call it a striking exception to the democratic principle of “one person, one vote.” Indeed, they say, the Senate may be the least democratic legislative chamber in any developed nation.
...
Behind the growth of the advantage is an increase in population gap between large and small states, with large states adding many more people than small ones in the last half-century. There is a widening demographic split, too, with the larger states becoming more urban and liberal, and the smaller ones remaining rural and conservative, which lends a new significance to the disparity in their political power.
The threat of the filibuster in the Senate, which has become far more common than in past decades, plays a role, too. Research by two political scientists, Lauren C. Bell and L. Marvin Overby, has found that small-state senators, often in leadership positions, have amplified their power by using the filibuster more often than their large-state counterparts.
Beyond influencing government spending, these shifts generally benefit conservative causes and hurt liberal ones. When small states block or shape legislation backed by senators representing a majority of Americans, most of the senators on the winning side tend to be Republicans, because Republicans disproportionately live in small states and Democrats, especially African-Americans and Latinos, are more likely to live in large states like California, New York, Florida and Illinois. Among the nation’s five smallest states, only Vermont tilts liberal, while Alaska, Wyoming and the Dakotas have each voted Republican in every presidential election since 1968.
The article is long, but it's worth the entire read. A model of how good journalism can incorporate the insights of historical and institutionalist political science (and not just the number-crunching kind).
Corey Robin
March 12, 2013 at 11:26 am
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Sunday, March 10, 2013
At Panera Bread
Every time I visit Panera Bread in Hoover I am conscious of being in a restaurant full of people all of whom who are likely much younger than me. I was wearing my hair visor today, but it didn't stop me from being age self-conscious again. All of these Yuppies and young couples with young kids and their hand-held electronic devices! This time I had enough. I got myself centralized, raised my a...rms, and said loudly, "EXCUSE ME! Can I have everyone's attention PLEASE!" It took a minute with a store manager glaring at me. "Is anyone here over 60?" People are looking at each other. Who is this crazy dude? No one raised their hand. "Just as I thought. Thank you!". Assumption confirmed. I am OLD for Panera Bread. You think they were glad to see me leave with my carry out? You bet.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Fear Deal
‘Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time’ by Ira Katznelson
By Robert G. Kaiser, Mar 01, 2013 10:33 PM EST
The Washington Post Published: March 1
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, World War II and Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal that followed saved both capitalism and representative democracy — a historic triumph. But as historian Ira Katznelson argues persuasively in this engrossing book, “the triumph . . . cannot be severed from the sorrow.”
At home, Katznelson writes, “liberal democracy prospered because of an accommodation with racial humiliation” — the flagrant racism of the Jim Crow South. Abroad, victory in World War II depended on an alliance with Joseph Stalin, a tyrant in the class of Adolf Hitler. Then to cope with Stalin’s Soviet Union early in the Cold War, we relied on Hitler’s Nazi scientists and engineers to build our rockets.
.Such contradictory combinations of good and evil recur throughout Katznelson’s story, revealing basic truths about the complexities of human history.
It is an exhilarating pleasure to lose yourself in this old-fashioned example of original historical scholarship. “Fear Itself” is a sprawling, ambitious book that offers illuminating insights on nearly every page. Among Katznelson’s gifts is the one most valuable to readers and most in danger of extinction in the American academy: He writes clear, energetic prose without a whiff of academic jargon or pretension.
Katznelson, the Ruggles professor of history and political science at Columbia University, demonstrates that Congress’s approval of Roosevelt’s New Deal depended on the support of racist Southern Democrats, who were happy to support FDR’s liberal and occasionally radical economic ideas, provided they did not disrupt the Jim Crow culture of the South. FDR willingly accepted this bargain. So poor black Southerners were deliberately excluded from many New Deal programs, beginning with Social Security, which initially did not cover agricultural and domestic workers, the principal occupations of Southern blacks. Again and again, Katznelson shows, Southern members of Congress made sure that African Americans were shortchanged, even by the G.I. Bill of Rights and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which actively discriminated in its employment policies and favored white institutions over black ones.
The book is being published on the 80th anniversary of FDR’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1933. Its most famous line provided Katznelson’s title: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Katznelson considers “fear itself” more than a rhetorical flourish. He argues, again persuasively, that historians beguiled by Roosevelt’s successes have failed to appreciate the degree to which fear had unhinged the nation in 1933, or how that fear persisted for more than 20 years, coloring our history at every turn and influencing it still. Those two decades are Katznelson’s subject, despite his subtitle’s reference to the New Deal; his rich narrative takes us from 1933 to the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953.
Text Size PrintE-mailReprintsRoosevelt restored America’s spirits, saved liberal democracy and led the Allies to victory over Hitler and the Japanese, but he never dispelled the fear. Sometimes he aggravated it — for example, by interning Japanese Americans as if they deserved to be feared. And under Roosevelt’s successor, Truman, the arrival of the atomic bomb and the Cold War sharply raised the level of national anxiety. It was an age of fear.
The role of Southern white members of Congress in the New Deal and Fair Deal eras is not a new subject for Katznelson, but he dissects it here compellingly, reminding us painfully how crudely racist American society was just one human lifetime ago. FDR was caught in “a Southern cage,” he writes, and he provides lively descriptions of its occupants and their hair-raising prejudices. Perhaps the most vivid character sketch is of Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, a Neanderthal whose name was easy to laugh at but whose rhetoric was anything but laughable in its use of racial epithets for African Americans and its disparagement of Catholics and Jews.
.Yet Bilbo, a staunch New Dealer, and his fellow Mississippians in Congress were crucial allies of FDR’s. So when Northern Democrats tried to pass anti-lynching legislation in 1934, FDR refused to help. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill,” the president told Walter White of the NAACP, Southern members “will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”
Again and again the Southerners provided crucial votes, not just for New Deal legislation in the early 1930s, but also on measures to prepare for World War II. In August 1941, for example, Roosevelt won a House vote to strengthen the military draft in obvious preparation for war by a single vote, 203 to 202. Southern members voted 123 to 8 in favor. The pattern recurred after the war, when Southern members gave strong support to Truman’s forceful Cold War policies.
Katznelson takes his readers on an entertaining and enlightening journey through the ’30s and ’40s, reminding us of how far we have come in the subsequent six decades. He recounts obscure events that illuminate those years — for example, the long-forgotten 1933 tour of Europe and the United States by 25 Italian seaplanes commanded by Fascist Italy’s aviation minister, Italo Balbo. At the time Balbo was widely compared to Charles Lindbergh and welcomed in America as a hero, warmly received by Time magazine (which put him on its cover) and numerous public figures. Benito Mussolini was a sympathetic figure in the early ’30s, Katznelson reminds us — an example of the ambivalent attitudes Americans brought to the European crisis that worsened steadily through that decade.
Katznelson seems to have read everything written about these two decades. His detailed footnotes — worth reading with care — fill 172 pages at the back of this thick volume. He makes wonderful use of quotations from the principal actors in his story and from scores of scholars who have written on his subjects. He has also done extensive research on voting in Congress in these years to demonstrate the critical role played by Southern Democrats. This work produced some dense, overly detailed passages, the only unwelcoming sections of the book. He could have shared fewer numbers.
The author can appear romantically unrealistic about some of his own liberal inclinations. For example, he suggests that the United States would have developed a strong national labor movement deeply involved in politics — the sort of trade union movement seen later in the 20th century in Western European countries — had it not been for the Taft-Hartley Act. This law, enacted over Truman’s veto in 1947 by the same Southern Democrats who were so important to passing the New Deal, certainly did impede American unions, which represented about a quarter of all workers at the end of World War II. But there were many other influences that discouraged the evolution of a labor party in this country.
There is more to quarrel with here but insufficient space in this review to conduct a debate with the author. And the quarrelsome material only adds to the fun of reading this book. More important, there is no quarreling with Katznelson’s largest conclusions: These 20 years “dramatically altered the context within which American politics operated. . . . [They] successfully initiated a durable shift in governing authority that brought a new national state into being.” This is a state with a much-enlarged role managing the affairs of the country at home, and “an assertive state that crusaded almost without limits [abroad] for American power and values.” The New Deal (and the Truman years that followed) “proved to be a rejuvenating triumph,” albeit one that “flourished with ethical compromise” with racists at home and dictators abroad. History truly is complicated.
kaiserr@washpost.com
Robert G. Kaiser is an associate editor of The Washington Post. His latest book, “Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t,” will be published in May.
By Robert G. Kaiser, Mar 01, 2013 10:33 PM EST
The Washington Post Published: March 1
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, World War II and Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal that followed saved both capitalism and representative democracy — a historic triumph. But as historian Ira Katznelson argues persuasively in this engrossing book, “the triumph . . . cannot be severed from the sorrow.”
At home, Katznelson writes, “liberal democracy prospered because of an accommodation with racial humiliation” — the flagrant racism of the Jim Crow South. Abroad, victory in World War II depended on an alliance with Joseph Stalin, a tyrant in the class of Adolf Hitler. Then to cope with Stalin’s Soviet Union early in the Cold War, we relied on Hitler’s Nazi scientists and engineers to build our rockets.
.Such contradictory combinations of good and evil recur throughout Katznelson’s story, revealing basic truths about the complexities of human history.
It is an exhilarating pleasure to lose yourself in this old-fashioned example of original historical scholarship. “Fear Itself” is a sprawling, ambitious book that offers illuminating insights on nearly every page. Among Katznelson’s gifts is the one most valuable to readers and most in danger of extinction in the American academy: He writes clear, energetic prose without a whiff of academic jargon or pretension.
Katznelson, the Ruggles professor of history and political science at Columbia University, demonstrates that Congress’s approval of Roosevelt’s New Deal depended on the support of racist Southern Democrats, who were happy to support FDR’s liberal and occasionally radical economic ideas, provided they did not disrupt the Jim Crow culture of the South. FDR willingly accepted this bargain. So poor black Southerners were deliberately excluded from many New Deal programs, beginning with Social Security, which initially did not cover agricultural and domestic workers, the principal occupations of Southern blacks. Again and again, Katznelson shows, Southern members of Congress made sure that African Americans were shortchanged, even by the G.I. Bill of Rights and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which actively discriminated in its employment policies and favored white institutions over black ones.
The book is being published on the 80th anniversary of FDR’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1933. Its most famous line provided Katznelson’s title: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Katznelson considers “fear itself” more than a rhetorical flourish. He argues, again persuasively, that historians beguiled by Roosevelt’s successes have failed to appreciate the degree to which fear had unhinged the nation in 1933, or how that fear persisted for more than 20 years, coloring our history at every turn and influencing it still. Those two decades are Katznelson’s subject, despite his subtitle’s reference to the New Deal; his rich narrative takes us from 1933 to the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953.
Text Size PrintE-mailReprintsRoosevelt restored America’s spirits, saved liberal democracy and led the Allies to victory over Hitler and the Japanese, but he never dispelled the fear. Sometimes he aggravated it — for example, by interning Japanese Americans as if they deserved to be feared. And under Roosevelt’s successor, Truman, the arrival of the atomic bomb and the Cold War sharply raised the level of national anxiety. It was an age of fear.
The role of Southern white members of Congress in the New Deal and Fair Deal eras is not a new subject for Katznelson, but he dissects it here compellingly, reminding us painfully how crudely racist American society was just one human lifetime ago. FDR was caught in “a Southern cage,” he writes, and he provides lively descriptions of its occupants and their hair-raising prejudices. Perhaps the most vivid character sketch is of Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, a Neanderthal whose name was easy to laugh at but whose rhetoric was anything but laughable in its use of racial epithets for African Americans and its disparagement of Catholics and Jews.
.Yet Bilbo, a staunch New Dealer, and his fellow Mississippians in Congress were crucial allies of FDR’s. So when Northern Democrats tried to pass anti-lynching legislation in 1934, FDR refused to help. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill,” the president told Walter White of the NAACP, Southern members “will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”
Again and again the Southerners provided crucial votes, not just for New Deal legislation in the early 1930s, but also on measures to prepare for World War II. In August 1941, for example, Roosevelt won a House vote to strengthen the military draft in obvious preparation for war by a single vote, 203 to 202. Southern members voted 123 to 8 in favor. The pattern recurred after the war, when Southern members gave strong support to Truman’s forceful Cold War policies.
Katznelson takes his readers on an entertaining and enlightening journey through the ’30s and ’40s, reminding us of how far we have come in the subsequent six decades. He recounts obscure events that illuminate those years — for example, the long-forgotten 1933 tour of Europe and the United States by 25 Italian seaplanes commanded by Fascist Italy’s aviation minister, Italo Balbo. At the time Balbo was widely compared to Charles Lindbergh and welcomed in America as a hero, warmly received by Time magazine (which put him on its cover) and numerous public figures. Benito Mussolini was a sympathetic figure in the early ’30s, Katznelson reminds us — an example of the ambivalent attitudes Americans brought to the European crisis that worsened steadily through that decade.
Katznelson seems to have read everything written about these two decades. His detailed footnotes — worth reading with care — fill 172 pages at the back of this thick volume. He makes wonderful use of quotations from the principal actors in his story and from scores of scholars who have written on his subjects. He has also done extensive research on voting in Congress in these years to demonstrate the critical role played by Southern Democrats. This work produced some dense, overly detailed passages, the only unwelcoming sections of the book. He could have shared fewer numbers.
The author can appear romantically unrealistic about some of his own liberal inclinations. For example, he suggests that the United States would have developed a strong national labor movement deeply involved in politics — the sort of trade union movement seen later in the 20th century in Western European countries — had it not been for the Taft-Hartley Act. This law, enacted over Truman’s veto in 1947 by the same Southern Democrats who were so important to passing the New Deal, certainly did impede American unions, which represented about a quarter of all workers at the end of World War II. But there were many other influences that discouraged the evolution of a labor party in this country.
There is more to quarrel with here but insufficient space in this review to conduct a debate with the author. And the quarrelsome material only adds to the fun of reading this book. More important, there is no quarreling with Katznelson’s largest conclusions: These 20 years “dramatically altered the context within which American politics operated. . . . [They] successfully initiated a durable shift in governing authority that brought a new national state into being.” This is a state with a much-enlarged role managing the affairs of the country at home, and “an assertive state that crusaded almost without limits [abroad] for American power and values.” The New Deal (and the Truman years that followed) “proved to be a rejuvenating triumph,” albeit one that “flourished with ethical compromise” with racists at home and dictators abroad. History truly is complicated.
kaiserr@washpost.com
Robert G. Kaiser is an associate editor of The Washington Post. His latest book, “Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t,” will be published in May.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Is Being Liberal a Choice?
Tuesday, Mar 5, 2013 07:00 PM CST
Is being liberal a choice?
From Jefferson to modern scientists, ideology has been linked to neuroscience. That way of thinking could be fatal
By Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
It’s become something of a fad of late to apply neuroscience to partisan behaviors. A recent brain scan study distinguished the Republican from Democratic amygdala: The first is more driven by fear and reward, the latter by more generous-spirited emotional connectivity. In several books, the well-established linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff argues the basis for Republicans’ attachment to a rigid concept of paternalistic discipline and enforced obedience to an idealized authority.
Then there are last year’s two similarly inspired treatments: journalist Chris Mooney’s “The Republican Brain” and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind.” Despite their different training, both authors approach modern tribalism from a similar angle. Mooney wears his partisanship as a proud badge, making much out of the wider-ranging libraries of liberals and the inability of conservatives to accept science as an agent of positive change. Haidt, if liberal-leaning, steers a middle course, advising Democrats to “stop dismissing conservatism as a pathology and start thinking of morality beyond care and fairness.” In other words, you don’t have to endorse fear and loathing when you show compassion for the conservatives who reserve their compassion for the group of like-minded folks with whom they identify. There is, potentially, he says, a way to find common ground – and not just as there was when liberals joined with conservatives in the climate of fear after 9/11.
Welcome to the age of neuro-politics. More and more evidence suggests that genes, or brain chemistry, significantly influences one’s political perspective. So, conservatives sense danger sooner and more acutely than liberals – far more white Republicans own guns than do white liberals and blacks. But does the same ingredient in their makeup that makes them feel easily threatened really set them up to buy into conspiracy theories like, “The black president isn’t really American”?
Hmm. How far back can we take this? Pretty far back, as it turns out. The theories privately put forward by Thomas Jefferson in attempting to make sense of his adversaries’ compulsion to resist what was then regarded as “democracy” (sympathy for the needs of the many) sound remarkably like an 18t-century version of George Lakoff and his disciples.
In 1795, Jefferson sought to intellectualize the immutable differences he perceived between those of his political party – keepers of the indomitable, forward-looking spirit of 1776 – and the conservative forces to whom George Washington had recently surrendered himself. For Jefferson, the Federalists’ resurfaced attachment to England demonstrated a preference for an unchallenged obedience to dying ideas. He called these people “Anti-republicans.” They included “speculators,” “office-hunters” and “merchants trading on British capital,” those who worshipped money power. On his side of the political spectrum stood optimistic small landholders and “the body of labourers” who understood freedom as a marketplace to which they had fair access.
Jefferson damned greedy conservatives as absolutists, “hoping monarchy might be a remedy if a state of complete anarchy could be brought on” first. What makes Jefferson a neuro-politician, though, is his conviction that the hardened Federalists he opposed were suffering from damaged brains, diseased minds, which rendered them incapable of supporting healthy social growth. Those who could only identify with money power were “nervous persons, whose languid [nerve] fibres have more analogy with a passive than active state of things.” He had not observed any amygdala under his microscope, but nonetheless concluded that the conservatives who feared a politics of openness tended to accept arbitrary power easily.
Federalists needed (and vocally demanded) order. Jefferson mocked their “timidity” and “delusion” in the face of the moderate democratization he proposed. He was convinced that the same weakness was reflected in their use of religious dogma as a crutch.Vocal ministers who labeled Jefferson an atheist intentionally mistranslated his statement that there was no harm done if Christianity-deniers claimed there were “twenty gods or no god.” His refusal to fear unorthodox belief caused shameless conservatives to insist that he would burn Bibles and superintend a complete breakdown of public morals if elected president.
To say there is such a thing as a “culture of the closed mind” may sound like an oxymoron, but is it? In historical relief, it is easy now to see Jefferson, despite his democracy, as closed-minded and self-protective in his pseudo-scientific assertions about African-American intellect. He felt certain his racial prejudice was objective, measurable and empirically derived. More open-minded others urged him to see what they saw, to no avail. And when it came to that monarchical persuasion he perceived among Federalists, he was so consumed by fear that even at the end of his life, long after the Federalist Party had died of its own accord, he warned of a “monocrat” resurgence in America.
Conservative tyranny. Liberal tyranny. Both have a long history in the political mind. At the Constitutional Convention, small states complained about large state tyranny. The states could not have come together as one were it not for the shared fear that dominated when they were militarily and economically weak. They had to surrender their competing claims to frontier lands to the federal government before any meaningful union could be arrived at.
As Lakoff has explained, the underlying battle is (as it has always been) rival understandings of the meaning of freedom. Is the common good best secured through the wider dissemination of opportunity and active pursuit of social justice (the liberal persuasion); or by the stronger enforcement of public safety through a locally derived, family-centered moral consensus (the conservative persuasion)?
But freedom from fear? Will stubborn, snobbish, clannish conservatives ever have the perfect world they crave? Aren’t bleeding heart liberals equally hopeless as they go out in search of others who feel what they feel? Politics exist because neither side’s definition of unsullied freedom will ever come to pass, and because compromise only succeeds when emotions align. We’ve divided ourselves into two national political parties, two simple ways of defining moral community. Reason is clearly not a competent opponent in its contest with the irrational.
That is why we have to have a federal government. Private enterprise and corporate culture do not exist to maximize the collective pursuit of happiness. They are meant to enrich some, and some only. Government was designed to promote balance among competing forces by applying laws equitably; to establish a common identity in spite of our cultural heterogeneity.
The states’ rights argument has proven narrow and limited. We see, for instance, how a state or locality will do nothing about inequality in educational opportunity, because the ruling group is content with the existing power and tax structure; or the education its core constituency receives allows for foot-dragging. Self-selected community makes it only natural to ignore the prospects of unseen, unknown, outlying poor communities. Someone has to think bigger, or we are not a nation. A fair-minded federal arbiter is needed to make adjustments. We see good effects emanating from the top, where government funds necessary research in science, health, and other critical fields.
Yet conservative Republicans decry big government largess and want Washington to stop spending, except on weapons systems. Typically ignoring what they themselves have received from big government, they translate liberal-minded fairness as a “giveaway” to those who aren’t doing enough for themselves. This is why liberals don’t get the “middle ground” approach. How do you negotiate with ideologues who refuse to see magnanimous government as a good thing? If you claim you’re pro-life, why aren’t you as demonstrably in favor of cleaning up the environment, ensuring public health, and everything else we want government to be proactive about?
Which brings us back to where this all began: what to say about the the fear of destabilizing change, extravagant openness, and surplus compassion, which liberalism represents to the conservative brain. Whether or not the divide between authoritarian moralism and magnanimous moralism is any more accurately understood today, with our advanced tools of neuroscience, than it was in Jefferson’s time, we must acknowledge that a simple, dualistic taxonomy of “liberal versus conservative” persists in our thinking about Americans’ political choices. Americans can’t pretend that class conditions have nothing to do with partisan identity; but often they do, and neuro-politics is another example of the phenomenon. Jefferson denied the slave-owning planter interest in the composition of his political party. There is much that we choose not to talk about; we find it easier to dismiss an “other” as fatally flawed.
Is tolerance the equivalent of naiveté, as a conservative thinks? Is intolerance intentional cruelty, as a liberal thinks? And do individuals belong only to one or the other persuasion? It would appear that we cannot become a free society if we are chained to a cognitive science that declares partisanship to be largely unconscious.
Is being liberal a choice?
From Jefferson to modern scientists, ideology has been linked to neuroscience. That way of thinking could be fatal
By Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
It’s become something of a fad of late to apply neuroscience to partisan behaviors. A recent brain scan study distinguished the Republican from Democratic amygdala: The first is more driven by fear and reward, the latter by more generous-spirited emotional connectivity. In several books, the well-established linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff argues the basis for Republicans’ attachment to a rigid concept of paternalistic discipline and enforced obedience to an idealized authority.
Then there are last year’s two similarly inspired treatments: journalist Chris Mooney’s “The Republican Brain” and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind.” Despite their different training, both authors approach modern tribalism from a similar angle. Mooney wears his partisanship as a proud badge, making much out of the wider-ranging libraries of liberals and the inability of conservatives to accept science as an agent of positive change. Haidt, if liberal-leaning, steers a middle course, advising Democrats to “stop dismissing conservatism as a pathology and start thinking of morality beyond care and fairness.” In other words, you don’t have to endorse fear and loathing when you show compassion for the conservatives who reserve their compassion for the group of like-minded folks with whom they identify. There is, potentially, he says, a way to find common ground – and not just as there was when liberals joined with conservatives in the climate of fear after 9/11.
Welcome to the age of neuro-politics. More and more evidence suggests that genes, or brain chemistry, significantly influences one’s political perspective. So, conservatives sense danger sooner and more acutely than liberals – far more white Republicans own guns than do white liberals and blacks. But does the same ingredient in their makeup that makes them feel easily threatened really set them up to buy into conspiracy theories like, “The black president isn’t really American”?
Hmm. How far back can we take this? Pretty far back, as it turns out. The theories privately put forward by Thomas Jefferson in attempting to make sense of his adversaries’ compulsion to resist what was then regarded as “democracy” (sympathy for the needs of the many) sound remarkably like an 18t-century version of George Lakoff and his disciples.
In 1795, Jefferson sought to intellectualize the immutable differences he perceived between those of his political party – keepers of the indomitable, forward-looking spirit of 1776 – and the conservative forces to whom George Washington had recently surrendered himself. For Jefferson, the Federalists’ resurfaced attachment to England demonstrated a preference for an unchallenged obedience to dying ideas. He called these people “Anti-republicans.” They included “speculators,” “office-hunters” and “merchants trading on British capital,” those who worshipped money power. On his side of the political spectrum stood optimistic small landholders and “the body of labourers” who understood freedom as a marketplace to which they had fair access.
Jefferson damned greedy conservatives as absolutists, “hoping monarchy might be a remedy if a state of complete anarchy could be brought on” first. What makes Jefferson a neuro-politician, though, is his conviction that the hardened Federalists he opposed were suffering from damaged brains, diseased minds, which rendered them incapable of supporting healthy social growth. Those who could only identify with money power were “nervous persons, whose languid [nerve] fibres have more analogy with a passive than active state of things.” He had not observed any amygdala under his microscope, but nonetheless concluded that the conservatives who feared a politics of openness tended to accept arbitrary power easily.
Federalists needed (and vocally demanded) order. Jefferson mocked their “timidity” and “delusion” in the face of the moderate democratization he proposed. He was convinced that the same weakness was reflected in their use of religious dogma as a crutch.Vocal ministers who labeled Jefferson an atheist intentionally mistranslated his statement that there was no harm done if Christianity-deniers claimed there were “twenty gods or no god.” His refusal to fear unorthodox belief caused shameless conservatives to insist that he would burn Bibles and superintend a complete breakdown of public morals if elected president.
To say there is such a thing as a “culture of the closed mind” may sound like an oxymoron, but is it? In historical relief, it is easy now to see Jefferson, despite his democracy, as closed-minded and self-protective in his pseudo-scientific assertions about African-American intellect. He felt certain his racial prejudice was objective, measurable and empirically derived. More open-minded others urged him to see what they saw, to no avail. And when it came to that monarchical persuasion he perceived among Federalists, he was so consumed by fear that even at the end of his life, long after the Federalist Party had died of its own accord, he warned of a “monocrat” resurgence in America.
Conservative tyranny. Liberal tyranny. Both have a long history in the political mind. At the Constitutional Convention, small states complained about large state tyranny. The states could not have come together as one were it not for the shared fear that dominated when they were militarily and economically weak. They had to surrender their competing claims to frontier lands to the federal government before any meaningful union could be arrived at.
As Lakoff has explained, the underlying battle is (as it has always been) rival understandings of the meaning of freedom. Is the common good best secured through the wider dissemination of opportunity and active pursuit of social justice (the liberal persuasion); or by the stronger enforcement of public safety through a locally derived, family-centered moral consensus (the conservative persuasion)?
But freedom from fear? Will stubborn, snobbish, clannish conservatives ever have the perfect world they crave? Aren’t bleeding heart liberals equally hopeless as they go out in search of others who feel what they feel? Politics exist because neither side’s definition of unsullied freedom will ever come to pass, and because compromise only succeeds when emotions align. We’ve divided ourselves into two national political parties, two simple ways of defining moral community. Reason is clearly not a competent opponent in its contest with the irrational.
That is why we have to have a federal government. Private enterprise and corporate culture do not exist to maximize the collective pursuit of happiness. They are meant to enrich some, and some only. Government was designed to promote balance among competing forces by applying laws equitably; to establish a common identity in spite of our cultural heterogeneity.
The states’ rights argument has proven narrow and limited. We see, for instance, how a state or locality will do nothing about inequality in educational opportunity, because the ruling group is content with the existing power and tax structure; or the education its core constituency receives allows for foot-dragging. Self-selected community makes it only natural to ignore the prospects of unseen, unknown, outlying poor communities. Someone has to think bigger, or we are not a nation. A fair-minded federal arbiter is needed to make adjustments. We see good effects emanating from the top, where government funds necessary research in science, health, and other critical fields.
Yet conservative Republicans decry big government largess and want Washington to stop spending, except on weapons systems. Typically ignoring what they themselves have received from big government, they translate liberal-minded fairness as a “giveaway” to those who aren’t doing enough for themselves. This is why liberals don’t get the “middle ground” approach. How do you negotiate with ideologues who refuse to see magnanimous government as a good thing? If you claim you’re pro-life, why aren’t you as demonstrably in favor of cleaning up the environment, ensuring public health, and everything else we want government to be proactive about?
Which brings us back to where this all began: what to say about the the fear of destabilizing change, extravagant openness, and surplus compassion, which liberalism represents to the conservative brain. Whether or not the divide between authoritarian moralism and magnanimous moralism is any more accurately understood today, with our advanced tools of neuroscience, than it was in Jefferson’s time, we must acknowledge that a simple, dualistic taxonomy of “liberal versus conservative” persists in our thinking about Americans’ political choices. Americans can’t pretend that class conditions have nothing to do with partisan identity; but often they do, and neuro-politics is another example of the phenomenon. Jefferson denied the slave-owning planter interest in the composition of his political party. There is much that we choose not to talk about; we find it easier to dismiss an “other” as fatally flawed.
Is tolerance the equivalent of naiveté, as a conservative thinks? Is intolerance intentional cruelty, as a liberal thinks? And do individuals belong only to one or the other persuasion? It would appear that we cannot become a free society if we are chained to a cognitive science that declares partisanship to be largely unconscious.
The Whole Ying-Yang
As a well-adjusted man in his 60's, I am well attuned to the ebb and flow of life, the ying and the yang. It's just that some days the ebb overwhelms the flow, and the ying smothers the yang and it's too much to handle even for a well-adjusted man in his 60's. Or maybe it's just that wonton soup I had for lunch
Monday, March 4, 2013
The Sequester
I am following developments on the indiscriminate sequester which has cut 85 billion dollars from the federal budget. I keep hoping that some issue will bust the Republican Party. I doubt this it it, but I can keep hoping.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Marathon Man
Freddy Hudson II reports that he has finished his first Marathon in Little Rock! He did it in 6 hrs. 16 minutes---an amazing accomplishment. We are so proud of him! He started at 6 a.m. in 20 something degree weather in downtown Little Rock. The route took the runners along the river, past the state Capitol, and past the legendary Central High School. I think it's safe to say that Freddy is the first of our Hudsons to run a marathon! Hooray! I am going to have a good dinner tonight to celebrate his accomplishment. :)
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