Oh Those Wacky Voters

This election night tweet from Ben Casselman of 538 dot com is already famous:

So voters want a higher minimum wage, legal pot, abortion access and GOP representation. Ok then.

This sentiment is poignant and succinct. It gets to the heart of a conundrum about American politics that researchers have been asking for decades. "Why are American attitudes center-left, even social democratic, but they keep electing so-called conservatives?" Or why do the majority of Americans favor liberal policies but keep electing Republicans who do not? We could take one example, hunger, to illustrate the point on an issue that should not be partisan. The Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) published a poll on attitudes towards hunger as a social problem in America.

The belief that the government needs to display leadership in the fight against hunger is very strong. More than 80 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Independents look to the federal and local government to lead, and 50 percent of Republicans believe that the federal government has responsibility.

61 percent agree that “we should support and improve government-sponsored food assistance programs so that more people who are struggling can get the help they need.” Eighty-one percent of Democrats, 60 percent of Independents, and 39 percent of Republicans agree with this statement.

People believe that the child nutrition programs – especially school meals and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program – are leading to better outcomes for children by helping them learn and improving their overall health and well-being. By more than three to one, Americans believe that spending on such programs should increase (50 percent) rather than decrease (15 percent). (emphasis mine)

So a strong majority of Americans believe you should not be on your own in this most basic aspect of life, but nearly 100% of the Republicans sent to congress campaign and win on cutting these very programs with so much support. Ok then.

Sometimes the question is posed as such; why are Democrats so good at governing and so lousy at campaigning, while Republicans are so good at campaigning and lousy at governing? Before attempting to answer we should try to figure out what the two parties stand for and who supports them.

According to Drew Westen in his book The Political Brain, Republicans have a simple storyline about America that is constantly told and retold to the point where we all know it by heart. Government is the problem, free markets are the solution, religion in public life will prevent crime and maintain the traditional family, etc. What story do Democrats tell?

They don't have one. So each election season, Democrats come out of hibernation with consultants in tow to try and figure out what people want and how they should message what they plan to do about it. There is next to no storyline to transmit from one election to another, and the platform to tell that story is practically non-existent. Republicans have the (very profitable) fox news network to keep their story of hate and fear going, along with right-wing radio and publications that keep their "brand" in constant view. A big difference is who each party speaks to and how it is influenced by their governing style.

Republicans govern only those who vote for them, therefore they have a wide range of villains to attack on their way to power. Yoda understands how fear leads to anger and hate on to the dark side, it turns out this path activates authoritarianism as well. So create an enemy, promise to punish that enemy, scare the hell out of people, and present yourself as the only one strong enough to protect the fearful. Why are Republicans so bad at governing or even addressing the problems they manufacture? Because they don't give a shit about governing really, the state is just a giant pile of money to crack open and give to their financial backers. Ok then.

Democrats believe they actually have to govern, and govern the whole nation not only those who agree with or vote for them. Therefore Democrats also campaign in order to represent everyone. Consequently, they regularly throw their liberal base under the bus and cannot have villains in whatever story they come up with to tell voters, nothing is ever their fault the little dears. So if you cannot have bad guys in the story because it would alienate people (the ones who hate you and would never vote for you anyway) and you can't "pander" to the base because it might look like you are doing favors for special interests, what story can you tell? Something vague and pointless about being united, and what ever those expensive consultants can poll-test without alienating anyone. Ok then.

Is it any wonder why voters are schizophrenic?

Let The Blaming Commence.

Which is worse after an election like this, the gloating from tea bag trolls, or the hand-wringing and incestuous scalp-hunting from the left? The president is going to be impeached over [reasons], millions will lose health insurance, hundreds will probably die of preventable diseases, and if you liked the disenfranchisement this time around wait until the new authoritarian governors have two more years to wreck democratic process. But right now the important thing is to wag your finger at all those incompetent boobs who failed to stop the wrecking crew onslaught. It's the media, it's the voters, it's the candidates, consultants, party bosses, anything to put the blame somewhere.

One status I saw this morning:

 Four years ago we had complete control and now we have lost seats every election but the recall(which they were not on board with). Leadership trio of the Democratic party has to go. That Mike Tate has not resigned yet leaves me speechless. ...

DO not say join the party and take it over, thats bs and I have zero interest in that. Why join the party so they can use our money to pay worthless consultants? How can Joel Gratz and Beau stafford still be receiving money from the party? I hope someday when Mary Burke gives an honest interview she can admit hiring a republican lobbyist was probably not the best idea to start a campaign(who knew). THese people need to resign in disgrace and find a new line of work. NOW

This individual is far more inside baseball than your humble narrator but seriously, it was Scott Walker vs. Not-Scott Walker the choice was pretty clear. A commenter jumped on the bandwagon almost to the point of conspiracy theorizing:

There was no loser last night. Big money won. We have no parties. As long as we live the "delusion" that there are parties representing people we will always lose. If Democrats want to be the party of the people, the people need to force the party to swallow a laxative followed by a 10 gallon enema. Only a total cleanse will save Democrats!

Or we can blame the president:

Progressives need to face facts. We have a weak, ineffectual president who has been irrelevant since Nov 2012. Pretty hard to win with that spectre looming overhead.

And poor Freebird, her first time voting, to see this train wreck.

I am more pissed at democrats than anyone else right now....this campaign proved to me that as a whole, we really are a lazy bunch. I hate feeling this way- but it''s true. People who don't vote are being ridiculously stupid. I don't feel bad for anyone who will be negatively impacted by Scott Walker once again, but was too lazy to go vote. Actions have consequences.

 I hope she does not give up on politics, her energy and enthusiasm are infectious.

Bob Cesca has to take the cake when it comes to finger-wagging though.

Turnout among voters under 30? 13 percent. Congratulations, kids. This is what happens when you confuse social media masturbation for actual participation

Doesn't that just make you want to jump up and get involved? Me too.

 

Dubya's Revenge

Setting aside the sense of outrage that comes from voter suppression, cynicism, dirty tricks, tampering with voting machines, endless robo-calls, long lines, deliberate sabotage, and all the rest; last night was utterly disgusting. People actually went out to vote for the very party, ideology, and in many cases the same politicians who caused the financial collapse, then obstructed and sabotaged the admittedly feeble attempts to fix their mess. Apparently this really is the human condition, deep down most people need to be exploited, need a boot on their neck. The mass of humanity really was born with saddles on their backs with a privileged minority born booted and spurred, ready to ride them. Our experiment is over, the moneyed elite killed the idea that people could actually govern themselves and now we suffer the consequences for daring to believe that "all men are created equal."

In so far as the direct line of causation goes, a century from now historians will identify George W. Bush as the man most responsible for the destruction of the US. Sure, the list of despicable operatives in the assassination of representative government is very long but they all intersect at dubya. Sure, a country called The United States of America will continue to exist. That dismal place may even have a big entertainment extravaganza every couple years and call it an election, there may even be corporate-approved opposition candidates to play scapegoat. But this country will be a land of opportunity only for con men, grifters, gangsters, and thugs. The rest of us will simply wait our turn to be victimized.

I can't even detail all the ways dubya's tax cuts, wasteful spending, wars, bailouts, and deregulation or simple non-enforcement of laws irrevocably tipped the balance forever into the hands of plutocrats and their henchmen.

Get used to it.

Follow Up on Agendas: Marijuana Legalization

A friend of mine recently posted that the Democratic Nominee for Governor of Wisconsin, Mary Burke, is receptive to proposals to legalize medical marijuana. I support her on this issue, I would go further and follow the Colorado model on pot. Of course it will not happen, uptight dairy state denizens would pillory a major party candidate campaigning for that. But legalized marijuana would go a long way toward rebuilding schools and social services in the state.

Enter Libertarian Robert Burke (I can't believe that is actually his name, two Burkes for the same office?) who is also running for Governor. He does support legalization, but would do it the Libertarian way so I can't get behind his platform. Libertarians are the "too cool for you" hipster party and one day I will detail all the ways that I can't stand them. But for now it is important to note that there is an uncool group that also supports libertarianism; billionaires like the Koch brothers. 

The columnist John Nichols wrote today about the difficult relationship between stuffy, rich, old white men; their henchmen; and insufferable young hipsters. What these groups have in common is a narcissistic, smug, sense of superiority, and a complete lack of humor or self-awareness. There are only a handful of these guys running around and they are definitely not an electoral coalition (Robert's campaign Facebook page has 1,279 "likes") but they infect everyone around them by force of will.

It is these wannabes who are the target of new ads designed to siphon off a few votes from Mary Burke. From the article:

American Future Fund is an enthusiastically conservative organization that each election season fills the airwaves with ads hailing right-wing causes and socially conservative Republican candidates while ripping Democratic officials and contenders.
But, this fall, the group is also jumping into battleground states with social-media campaigns hailing third-party candidates, legalization of marijuana and "our progressive values."
Confused? Don't be. In close races, those third-party candidates might just pull a few votes away from Democratic contenders, who are specifically attacked in the ads. Yes, that's playing the margins. But when money is no object, every strategy gets tried.
Welcome to the brave new world of hyper-cynical, win-at-any-cost big-money politics. (emphasis mine)

Robert Burke also shared Nichols' article and the one comment just summed up everything I hate about libertarians:

I just watched all of these commercials for the first time. I don't know what the Democrats are afraid of. It's obvious these commercials were done by old, white people who think they know what cool is and what attracts the college crowd. The actors are poor and have dumb expressions. They remind me of the losers in college who always got so drunk, they woke up the next morning with a shaved head. I was usually the jerk who gave shaves to passed out drunks on my dorm floor. It pretty much insults the intelligence of the college crowd and underestimates their ability to see through this. Anybody dumb enough to believe these ads are most likely not going to vote at all. Too much effort to get off the couch. Why is this getting press and not the debate exclusions?

You see, it is a pretty exclusive club. They are both bullies and victims... man.

American Future Fund is targeting these "losers" who desperately want to sit at the cool kids table but might "get off the couch" and vote for Mary Burke. It is quite difficult to simultaneously be a libertarian and care about anyone but yourself. This "serious and sincere Libertarian" may describe the people behind this cynical ploy as "morons" but he also attracts some serious jerks to his crusade. That agenda is to completely atomize society, leaving us entirely at the mercy of our corporate masters. It is an agenda shared by both groups of libertarians, but at least we will all be able to "get blazed" man.

Follow-Up On Bad Media Narratives

Run for your lives! The President is unpopular!

Take everything I wrote in the last two posts about the big picture and apply them to this story.

The Big Lie The Media’s Telling You About Obama’s Approval Rating

Happy cognitive empowerment :)

Another look at the Big Picture

In almost a perfect follow-up to my recent post on creating and examining the Big Picture, The Atlantic published this story by Norm Ornstein on the media narrative in this election season. When Conspiracy Theories Don't Fit the Media Narrative examines the maddening tendency of not just cable news, but our premier newspapers of record to report stories that conform to whatever theme for the election that surfaced arbitrarily along the way. This time around, The Washington Post and New York Times collectively determined that this season they would push the narrative that Republican establishment types have reclaimed the party for conventional nominees as opposed to wacko tea partiers. So things are just humming along nice and smoothly as the nomination process is back in the hands of campaign managers and national leaders, democracy be damned.

The subtle underpinnings that this whole concept is anti-democratic seems to be lost in the shuffle. As though the RNC and lavishly funded right wing operatives are saying "dear God, we can't let these people pick our nominees, they're friggin' crazy!" If we put aside for the moment that yes, they are, and so is your entire ideology it says to the objective observer that Republicans really do need to hide their real intentions in order to win office. Ornstein points out that the major newspapers, whose reporting and facts we are supposed to accept as honest, even true, are in fact dependent on someone else's preconceived narrative. Facts, like belief in conspiracy theories by these supposed establishment, civilized Republicans, that do not fit the frame are ignored. But boy do we here about the trivial gaffes from Democratic nominees.

So, does this critique undermine my recent support of big picture thinking? Am I hopelessly biased in favor of independent and occasionally dissident analysts like Thomas Frank or AlterNet? Maybe, but there is a crucial element missing in the narrative examined by Ornstein, empiricism. Generalizations that lead to narratives must first be drawn from actually existing evidence. Examining the primary sources, which unfortunately often includes newspaper articles that may or may not be suffering from the very cart-before-the horse thinking presented by Ornstein, is the first step in an historian's trade. Some evidence may support your hypothesis about the past, other evidence may not but it is the evidence that drives the narrative not the other way around.

Empiricism should be a self-evident basis for trying to understand who we are and where we come from but those two things are also based on the fact that we are human. And humans are erratic, unpredictable, and sometimes downright irrational. It takes years of training and experience to overcome these tendencies, and often more to locate the in others. Then there are problems of identifying agendas, which can be as benign as meeting a deadline or as insidious as deliberate deception of your audience to further some other goal. In the case Ornstein examines it is the former, time constraints or even simple laziness can lead a reporter to depend on what was written yesterday to inform his or her findings.

We hope that Ornstein is correct when he concludes:

Of course, this does not mean that the press has a Republican bias, any more than it had an inherent Democratic bias in 2012 when Akin, Angle, and Mourdock led the coverage. What it suggests is how deeply the eagerness to pick a narrative and stick with it, and to resist stories that contradict the narrative, is embedded in the culture of campaign journalism. The alternative theory, that the Republican establishment won by surrendering its ground to its more ideologically extreme faction, picking candidates who are folksy and have great resumes but whose issue stances are much the same as their radical Tea Party rivals, goes mostly ignored. Meanwhile, there was plenty of coverage of the admittedly bonehead refusal by Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan [sic] Grimes to say she had voted for Obama—dozens of press references to NBC’s Chuck Todd saying it was “disqualifying”—but no stories saying that references to Agenda 21 or talking about terrorists and drug lords out to kill Arkansans were disqualifying.

 If you would like to read more about the latter effect of deliberate deception on our polarized political system, I would suggest Ornstein's book co-authored with Thomas Mann. It is a fairly objective look at how dysfunctional a government based on compromise and pragmatism becomes when extremism is the norm.

"The GOP Mantra"

Interesting discussion in class. One student asserted that women should earn less than men. "What about equal pay for equal work?" "Well, if they *did* equal work, sure."
Same student did not like an increase in the minimum wage. "I'm working now at Walgreen's, busting my butt for minimum wage. But, I know that in the future I will be making a lot more."
All of this stemmed from a review of Hamilton's economic and political philosophy. Good opportunity to learn from student...s and encourage participation.

Then I had them look up the line from 1776 (on their magic telephones). "Don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor."

-Lincoln Log