Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

The Monday Morning Teaser

December 10, 2012 – 7:04 am

The Sift will come out slowly today. I spent a bunch of this week turning the themes of “The Distress of the Privileged” into a sermon for the First Unitarian Church of Athol, Massachusetts, which I presented yesterday.  (The text will eventually show up on my religious blog Free and Responsible Search.) So I arrive at Monday morning with a lot less of the Sift done than I usually have.

Speaking of “Distress of the Privileged”, it was discovered by a new group of people this week and picked another 20,000 hits, running its total over 160K. (For comparison, “A Short History of Racism in the Two-Party System” did well by ordinary Weekly Sift standards, getting just under 1,500 hits in its first week.) I have fallen way behind in responding to comments on “Distress”, and I apologize.

Today’s main article (I’m still fiddling with the title) will be called something like “Repainting the Bubble”. This week I saw a lot of talk from the conservative pundit class about how the Republican Party is reforming itself and putting forward new faces and new ideas. Meanwhile, in the real world, a campaign to rally grass-roots paranoia stampeded 38 Republican senators into blocking ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. The arguments against the CRPD treaty were entirely of the death-panels variety, so it’s clear that the inmates are still running the asylum in the GOP.

What was everybody talking about this week? The fiscal cliff, as always, but since any real action in the negotiations is secret, pundits are stretching for anything worthwhile to say about it. And Jim DeMint leaving the Senate with four years on his term, for none of the usual reasons. Plus, you can expect a better-than-normal collection of short notes, with some book recommendations.

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Where the Votes Are

December 3, 2012 – 12:34 pm

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.

— Kevin Phillips, Republican strategist (1970)

This week everybody was still talking about the fiscal cliff

President Obama apparently shocked Republicans: His opening proposal in the fiscal-cliff negoations is more-or-less the plan he ran on, which the voters endorsed by re-electing him last month.

I’m beginning to see what the lines-in-the-sand are: Democrats don’t want to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits (though they are willing to consider other spending cuts, including Medicare cost reductions that don’t affect benefits). Republicans don’t want to raise tax rates on the rich (though they are willing to consider other unspecified revenue increases).

Here’s the difference: The Democrats’ line is popular and the Republicans’ isn’t. Democrats will happily go to the mat defending Medicare. But if Republicans have to go to the mat defending low taxes for millionaires, they’re in trouble. That’s why Obama can make a proposal and Boehner can’t. No way Boehner can look into a TV camera and say, “These are the Medicare cuts I want.”

Still, Boehner won’t move forward without a majority of his caucus, even if there is a plan that a bipartisan majority could support. A majority of the Republican House caucus lives inside the Fox News bubble, so we’re probably going over the cliff, at least for a little while.

… and filibuster reform

OK, I’m lying. Geeky poly-sci types were talking about filibuster reform while everybody else either ignored us or rolled their eyes. But it’s an important topic. Fortunately, just about everything I want to say about it came up on Saturday’s Up with Chris Hayes.

Main points:

  • The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution, which just says: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”
  • Traditionally, though, the Senate has been a clubby place that gave its members a lot of rope, but kept them in line with social norms rather than rules. (That was easier back when there were just 26 senators.)
  • Filibusters were rare until recent decades. (In the Hayes clip, they discuss how President Johnson’s people didn’t even consider the possibility that Medicare would be filibustered.)
  • The rule changes on the agenda for new Senate in January are pretty tame: You’d have one point in the process where you could filibuster a bill rather than several, and you’d actually have to stand up in public and talk, rather than put an anonymous hold on a bill as can happen now.
  • But the parliamentarians on Up are still worried about the precedent: If 51 votes are enough to change the filibuster rules, then the way is paved for a later 51-vote majority to regiment the Senate in a way similar to the House.

… but I wrote about the history of racial politics in America

When the first two people I talked to about the Lincoln movie both commented on how jarring it was to see the Republicans as the party of racial justice, I knew I had a research project to do. The result is “A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System“. Even shorter version: After Reconstruction, only whites could vote in the South, and they were Democrats. The national Democratic Party started moving away from the Southern Democrats in 1948, and broke with them decisively in 1964-65. Republicans had a decade-long debate about whether to soft-pedal civil rights to appeal to Southern whites, which by 1980 they had decided to do.

… and you might find this interesting

For a view of life inside the conservative bubble, you can’t beat the election night liveblog that Kevin DuJan did on Hillbuzz. He’s watching the election on MSNBC because he can’t wait to see the liberal meltdown when Obama loses. All evening, he’s finding signs of panic in the demeanor of the liberal hosts and the Democrats they interview. He’s explaining away anything that smacks of reality, even if it comes from the Right — Drudge’s leak of the pro-Obama exit polls is “fear porn” meant to drive up his site traffic. Fox News is only saying Virginia and Ohio are close because they’re trying to increase the drama.

It isn’t until the networks call Wisconsin for Obama at 8:30 CST that the illusion starts to crack. Over the next two hours DuJan and his commenters struggle to keep their fantasy world together, until at 10:14 CST DuJan folds:

Barack Obama has won Ohio, and with it reelection.

This is stunning.  Absolutely stunning.

Yes, delusional people are often stunned when everything goes the way rational people said it would.

DuJan’s liveblog ends there, but his devoted commenters continue far into the night and the next morning, hanging on to the hope that the Ohio call is wrong, that Obama can be impeached over Benghazi, that Democratic vote fraud will be exposed (“Is it possible that Obama’s team is cheating again at this magnitude??”), or that finally Congress will look into Obama’s birth certificate and declare him ineligible to be president.

Then comes an eruption of anger at the country and the voters: “America is over as we know it.” “My country is finished.” “65% of this country feeds off the remaining 35% … it’s us against them” “There’s nothing worth saving. Nothing. I’m going to join the lefties and take as much as I can while it’s still there for the taking.” “Look, the bottom line is that this country is a piece of shit. I’ve spent 24 months in Iraq defending what I thought was the country of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. But that country is gone. We gave it away because of white guilt.” And much more like it.

One of the week’s more remarkable pieces was the WaPo op-ed by Romney strategist Stuart Stevens, who demonstrated the kind of thinking that gets you beat by 4 1/2 million votes:

Romney carried the majority of every economic group except those with less than $50,000 a year in household income. That means he carried the majority of middle-class voters. While John McCain lost white voters younger than 30 by 10 points, Romney won those voters by seven points, a 17-point shift. … Yes, the Republican Party has problems, but as we go forward, let’s remember that any party that captures the majority of the middle class must be doing something right.

In other words: Everybody voted for us except the people who didn’t — mostly young non-whites and people who can’t even make $50K a year. And who cares about them? Why should their votes even count?

Good luck with that strategy. Don’t change a thing.

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg compares how the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page characterized President Obama’s re-election (65 million votes at last count, 51.8%, 4 1/2 million vote margin, 332 electoral votes) to President Bush’s re-election in 2004 (62 million votes, 50.7%, 3 million vote margin, 286 electoral votes).

In 2004, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, conservatism’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, congratulated President Bush for “what by any measure is a decisive mandate for a second term” and exulted, “Mr. Bush has been given the kind of mandate that few politicians are ever fortunate enough to receive.” This year, examining similar numbers with different labels, the Journal came up with a sterner interpretation. “President Obama won one of the narrower re-elections in modern times,” its editorial announced.

The world needs a cardboard bicycle.

It’s time for your annual ego deflation: The NYT’s 100 Notable Books of 2012 is out. I thought this year might be different when the first book on the list (Alif the Unseen) was one I had actually read and enjoyed. But no. You are illiterate. We are all illiterate.

Rugged individualism:
https://i0.wp.com/sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/561741_553381734675532_1109226987_n.png

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A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System

December 3, 2012 – 10:31 am

If you’ve seen the Lincoln movie, maybe you’re still walking around with this bit of cognitive dissonance: In 1864, the Democrats are the party of slavery and the Republicans the party of emancipation and racial justice. What’s up with that? How did we get from there to here?

The story is doubly worth telling because Republicans like Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg have been misrepresenting it so grossly.

A good place to start is the presidential election of 1860, which brings Lincoln to power and convinces Southern whites (the only people who can vote in the South in 1860) that secession is their best chance to maintain slavery*.

Lincoln gets only 40% of the vote, but in a four-way race (the Democratic Convention split over whether the platform should endorse the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision) that’s enough to win. In terms of the popular vote, his closest competition is Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas (30%), but in electoral votes another Democrat, sitting Vice President John Breckenridge of Kentucky, finishes second with 72 EVs to Lincoln’s 180.

Douglas fails because he is a national candidate representing continued compromise over slavery, while Breckenridge and Lincoln are sectional candidates with clear pro- and anti-slavery positions. So Douglas gets 15% in Alabama (to Lincoln’s 0%) and 43% in Wisconsin (to Breckenridge’s 0.5%), but only manages to carry Missouri and New Jersey, giving him 12 EVs and fourth place behind John Bell’s 39.

During Reconstruction, Southern whites still blame Lincoln’s party for their humiliation in “the War of Northern Aggression“, but the new black vote makes Southern Republicans competitive — particularly in South Carolina, where blacks have long outnumbered whites. So the 1876 map looks like this:

1876 electoral map

But by 1896 the Jim Crow laws have disenfranchised Southern blacks, and Southern whites still remember how Lincoln destroyed their society, so Southern Republicans go extinct. Mississippi, for example, gives Democrat William Jennings Bryan a 91% majority. The 1896 map is almost a negative of the 2012 map — Democratic in the South and Mountain West, Republican in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West.

1896 electoral map

1896 electoral map

2012 electoral map

2012 electoral map

The “solid South” stays Democratic through 1944, when FDR carries Mississippi with 94% of the vote.

1944 electoral map

So until 1944, there is no doubt that the Democrats are the party of Jim Crow. National figures like FDR may not be actively racist — and blacks benefit from the general anti-poverty provisions of the New Deal — but Democrats are not going to rock the boat of Southern white supremacy. Republicans, on the other hand, have nothing to defend in the old Confederacy, so it costs them nothing to champion civil rights. Their 1944 platform does them credit:

Racial and Religious Intolerance

We unreservedly condemn the injection into American life of appeals to racial or religious prejudice.

We pledge an immediate Congressional inquiry to ascertain the extent to which mistreatment, segregation and discrimination against Negroes who are in our armed forces are impairing morale and efficiency, and the adoption of corrective legislation.

We pledge the establishment by Federal legislation of a permanent Fair Employment Practice Commission.

 Anti-Poll Tax

The payment of any poll tax should not be a condition of voting in Federal elections and we favor immediate submission of a Constitutional amendment for its abolition.

Anti-Lynching

We favor legislation against lynching and pledge our sincere efforts in behalf of its early enactment.

But outside the South, Democrats are also changing. In 1941 Roosevelt bans racial discrimination in defense industries.

At the 1948 Democratic Convention, a young Hubert Humphrey leads a Northern liberal bloc that adds this Civil Rights plank to the platform:

We again state our belief that racial and religious minorities must have the right to live, the right to work, the right to vote, the full and equal protection of the laws, on a basis of equality with all citizens as guaranteed by the Constitution.

We highly commend President Harry S. Truman for his courageous stand on the issue of civil rights.

We call upon the Congress to support our President in guaranteeing these basic and fundamental American Principles:

(1) the right of full and equal political participation;
(2) the right to equal opportunity of employment;
(3) the right of security of person;
(4) and the right of equal treatment in the service and defense of our nation.

Southern delegates respond by walking out of the convention and establishing the States’ Rights Democratic Party, a.k.a. the Dixiecrats, who nominate South Carolina’s Democratic Governor Strom Thurmond for president and endorse “the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race”. In spite of later efforts to sugarcoat his memory, Thurmond is a racist running an openly racist campaign. He tells one rally:

There’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger** race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

After the Dixiecrat walkout, President Truman decides the die is cast and desegregates the military.

The 1948 electoral map looks like this:

1948 electoral map

So Democrats and Dixiecrats split the South, with still no Southern Republicans worth mentioning. Tom Dewey gets only 3% of the vote in Mississippi and 4% in South Carolina.

1948-1980 is a transitional period. On the state level, the South is still solidly Democratic. Republicans often don’t even bother to field candidates, as in Alabama in 1962, where George Wallace wins the governor’s race with 96% of the vote. (Wallace previously ran in 1958 with the endorsement of the NAACP and without support from the KKK. After losing the Democratic primary to a more openly racist candidate, he said, “I was out-niggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be out-niggered again.”)

The great civil rights face-offs of the 50s and 60s are between Southern Democratic governors and presidents of either party. In 1957, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sends troops to Little Rock when Democratic Governor Orval Faubus refuses to integrate Central High School. But Democratic President John Kennedy does exactly the same thing in 1962 when Democratic Governor Ross Barnett refuses to integrate the University of Mississippi, and in 1963 when Governor Wallace refuses to integrate the University of Alabama.

With Eisenhower’s invasion of Little Rock still rankling, 1960 is the second-to-last hurrah of the Democratic South. Putting Texan Lyndon Johnson on the ticket holds most of the South for Kennedy, but the Democrats’ hold is slipping: 15 Southern electoral votes go to Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, and Nixon is competitive in places Republicans never were before; he gets 49% in South Carolina, far more than Dewey’s 4% just three elections ago.

1960 electoral map

After JFK’s assassination, Johnson pushes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress with bipartisan support. 18 Southern Democrats and one Republican filibuster in the Senate — a rare occurrence in those days — but the bill ultimately passes with 46 Democratic votes and 27 Republicans. As he signs the bill, Johnson comments, “We have lost the South for a generation.”

But will the Republicans pick the South up, or will spurned Dixiecrats be a regional party whose support no one wants? Through the 60s, moderate Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney push to uphold the Lincoln-Dewey-Eisenhower civil-rights tradition and compete for black votes. But they lose. The 1964 Republican nominee against Johnson is Barry Goldwater, one of the few non-Southern senators who voted against the Civil Right Act.

Goldwater marks the beginning of I’m-not-a-racist-but Republicanism. His stated reasons for opposing the Civil Right bill have nothing to do with race. (He thought it was unconstitutional.) And the 1964 Republican platform stands by the Party’s pro-civil-rights record:

[W]e pledge: …

—full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen;

—improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times;

—such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote;

—immigration legislation seeking to re-unite families and continuation of the “Fair Share” Refugee Program;

—continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.

But it also gives white racists reason to hope.

[The Johnson] Administration has failed to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens. It has preferred, instead, divisive political proposals.

i.e. the Civil Rights Act and what becomes the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The platform also denounces “inverse discrimination” and “the abandonment of neighborhood schools, for reasons of race”. So Goldwater is against a public school saying “no niggers”, but if a neighborhood (just by pure chance, of course) happens to be all-white, its all-white school is just fine. His party also pledges

to open avenues of peaceful progress in solving racial controversies while discouraging lawlessness and violence.

Note the change: Dewey was worried about lynchings — white-on-black violence. In 1964 lynching are still happening, the Watts riots are still in the future, and Martin Luther King’s campaign of non-violent civil disobedience is being met with murders like the infamous Mississippi Burning case. But Goldwater’s platform lumps civil disobedience (“lawlessness”) together with “violence”, and pledges to “discourage” it.

So if you’re a Southern white supremacist who worries about civil rights agitators stirring up trouble in your town, Goldwater is your guy, just like he’s Strom Thurmond’s guy. Goldwater carries the South (and his home state of Arizona) as the rest of the country soundly rejects him.

1964 electoral map

Re-elected, LBJ passes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, also with bipartisan support. LBJ addresses a joint session of Congress, in a speech that still makes me misty-eyed:

It is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Thurmond the Dixiecrat-turned-Republican is the only Republican senator who votes No. Republicans field a candidate for governor in South Carolina in 1966 for the first time since Reconstruction. He loses 58%-42%, but erosion of support for the national Democratic Party is reaching the state level.

Goldwater’s landslide loss hardly establishes a new normal for Republicans, who still flirt with Rockefeller and Romney before settling on Nixon, whose civil-rights position is fuzzy. While few Dixiecrats are ready to follow Thurmond into the new tribe of Southern Republicans, they also can’t vote for the hated Hubert Humphrey. So in 1968 they give the regional-party thing another try with George Wallace.

1968 electoral map

But Nixon understands that Republicans have to pick up what the Democrats have dropped. His “Southern Strategy” (with Thurmond’s endorsement) captures the upper South in 1968, which is his victory margin in a close election. His long-term vision is for Republicans to absorb the Wallace vote into an unbeatable conservative coalition that Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips calls The Emerging Republican Majority.

https://i0.wp.com/ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51N4bKDcioL._SL500_AA300_.jpgPhillips writes:

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

The Nixon re-election landslide of 1972 sweeps the South, but it’s hard to read much into that, since he takes every state but Massachusetts, and Georgia’s Jimmy Carter manages to pull the Democratic South together one last time in 1976.

But 1980 is the re-alignment election that has been brewing since 1964.

Ronald Reagan’s first speech as the Republican nominee is in the symbolic location of Neshoba County, Mississippi, site of the Mississippi Burning murders of 1964. So: symbolic time, symbolic place — what’s he say? Nothing about race at all. Just this:

I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

States rights, local control — just what Orval Faubus and Ross Barnett and George Wallace wanted when they refused to enforce federal court orders to integrate their schools. Just what Eisenhower and Kennedy didn’t allow when they sent federal troops.

It’s the beginning of the dog-whistle era. After the election, Reagan strategist Lee Atwater lays it out:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, “forced busing”, “states’ rights”, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

So Reagan isn’t trying to “out-nigger” anybody, because people up North will hear him and think he’s evil. He’ll just say “states rights” — like Strom Thurmond and Jefferson Davis before him — and hope “Negrophobe whites” get the message that they are welcome in his coalition.

They get the message.

1980 electoral map

They get it not just nationally, but on the state level. Alabama and Georgia elect Republican senators for the first time since Reconstruction.

In case anybody has forgotten that message by 1988, George H. W. Bush reminds them: If you vote for Democrats, Willie Horton will rape your wife.

Locally, the transition from the “old comfortable arrangement” is gradual. Most Dixiecrat/Democrat politicians don’t follow Strom Thurmond’s path to the Republican Party, though during the 70s and 80s they often combine with Republicans in Congress to form the conservative majority Phillips predicted. But as they retire, they are replaced by Republicans like Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich. (Lott, interestingly, was endorsed for Congress by his retiring Democratic predecessor.)

The chart on the right shows a generational turnover, not a walk-out. Southern Democrats in Congress today tend to be blacks representing majority-black districts, like South Carolina’s Jim Clyburn.

Today, the old white Confederacy is solidly Republican. Nationally, Romney had a clear majority of white voters: 59%. But in Mississippi, a whopping 89% of whites voted for Romney.

How did he lock up the Mississippi white vote? Not by saying “nigger, nigger”. Republicans never did that, because they didn’t exist in Mississippi when that was a winning strategy. Instead, they are the party of traditional values in a state where “tradition” means the stars-and-bars and Colonel Reb. They are the party of property rights and business in a state where property and business overwhelmingly belong to whites. They are the party of small government in a state where only massive federal intervention gave blacks the right to vote or to attend the state university.

Republicans don’t have to say “nigger, nigger”. Everybody gets it. They aren’t the Racist Party, but they are the party where white racists are welcome, where “Barack the Magic Negro” is funny, and people email each other photos of Obama with a bone through his nose or put his image on fantasy food stamps with ribs and watermelon. Just as Republicans aren’t anti-Hispanic, they just think police should stop people who look like they might be illegal immigrants. They aren’t even anti-Muslim, they just don’t think freedom of religion includes the right to build a mosque.

That’s the Party of Lincoln today. And now you know how they got here.

*A longstanding argument claims that secession was about “state’s rights” and not about slavery. Mostly you’ll hear this from people who have affection for the Confederacy but find slavery embarrassing. Actual Confederates did not suffer this embarrassment, and were very open about why they were seceding. South Carolina’s declaration of secession is clear:

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. … On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved.

** When this recording came up in a different context a few months ago, I gave Thurmond the benefit of the doubt, that he might have said “negro” very fast and slurred. You can listen and judge for yourself.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 3, 2012 – 7:04 am

Everybody I know is coming out of the great new movie Lincoln with cognitive dissonance: In 1864 the Democrats are the party of slavery and the Republicans the party of emancipation and racial justice. So how do we get from there to the parties we know today?

The answer will be in today’s article “A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System”. Short version: Like any evolution, it takes a long time, with a period of punctuated equilibrium from LBJ to Reagan.

What was everybody talking about this week? Mostly the same stuff as last week: fiscal cliff, aftermath of the election, and Republicans trying to manufacture a scandal out of Benghazi. Also: a conservative live-blog of election night produces a fascinating record of life inside the bubble, and maybe we’ll even manage to reform the filibuster a little.

“Short History” is the kind of article I can futz with endlessly before pushing the button, so it’s hard to predict exactly when it will appear. Today. Definitely today.

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Absence of War

November 26, 2012 – 11:01 am

Of a commonwealth whose subjects are but hindered by terror from taking up arms, it should be said that it is free from war, rather than that it has peace. For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character.

— Baruch Spinoza, Political Treatise (1676)

This week everybody was talking about Gaza

But an unusual number of commentators couldn’t figure out what to say about it, including me. Since I was making Thanksgiving plans while the latest round of conflict was playing out, I was reminded of those old family arguments that come up year after year. The first year or two, you might be tempted to figure out who’s right and take a side. Then for several years you try to work out a middle position and get the combatants to compromise. And then, finally, everybody just shouts down whichever uncle tries to bring the old conflict up again.

Having passed into that third phase, Hullaballoo’s David Atkins explains why Gaza got so little coverage on progressive blogs:

The fact is that it’s impossible to say anything substantive about the Israel-Palestine conflict without being called a hateful anti-Semite, or a hateful bloodthirsty imperialist … often for the same post.

… There are no good guys here. Bibi Netanyahu is a horrible person, and Likud is filled with horrible people. They’re basically the Israeli version of Dick Cheney and John Bolton, but with a religious belief in their right to steal land that belongs to others.

Hamas, meanwhile, is a murderous organization of cutthroats who refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist and want to drive every Jew out of the land they believe their God owes them.

I used to run into a lot of people who put forward a partisan timeline: Everything was fine until Deir Yassin Massacre in 1948 or the Hebron Massacre in 1929. Since then, the victimized side (whichever one you think that is) has done a series of perfectly reasonable things to try to defend itself from the greedy or bloodthirsty lunatics on the other side.

People are still making those arguments, but nobody I hang around with or read regularly. I’m also not hearing the legalistic arguments I used to hear all the time: The Balfour Declaration of 1917 or the U.N. partition of 1947 justifies Israel’s claims, or U.N. resolution 242 justifies Palestinian resistance by whatever means necessary. Or the argument that there are already so many Arab countries; why does the world need another one? Why can’t Israel have it’s little strip of land and the Palestinians go to some other Arab country?

Instead, I’m seeing much more of a willingness to look at the lives of individuals on both sides and say, “Life shouldn’t be this way.” Slate’s legal writer Dahlia Lithwick is in Jerusalem to visit her parents and finish a book that isn’t about Israel or Palestine:

You want to hear about what it’s like here? It’s fucking sad. Everyone I know is sad. My kids don’t care who started it and the little boys in Issawiya, the Arab village I see out my window, don’t care much either. I haven’t met a single Israeli who is happy about this. They know this fixes nothing.

Her advice is to stop justifying your side, stop writing those ten-point-plans-to-solve-everything, and just listen.

Counting and photographing and tweeting injured children on each side isn’t dialogue. Scoring your own side’s suffering is a powerful way to avoid fixing the real problems, and trust me when I tell you that everyone—absolutely everyone—is suffering and sad and yet being sad is not fixing the problems either.

One good lesson I am learning this week is to shut up and listen. Because the only way to cut through the mutual agony here is to find people who have solutions and to hear what they have to say. Bombing the other side into oblivion is no more a solution than counting your dead children in public. The best thing about shutting up and listening? You eventually lose the impulse to speak.

Please don’t judge. Work toward solutions. Because everyone on every side of this is desperate. This isn’t a way to live and we all know it.

I know that the-people-I-hang-out-with doesn’t constitute any kind of random sample or significant power bloc. But the shift in attitude seems significant to me, because it’s the only way these things ever eventually resolve: The old wrongs don’t get righted and the old wounds don’t get avenged, but eventually people get tired of hearing about them. The significant question stops being “What were we promised?” or “What do we deserve?” or “What was taken from us?” and instead becomes “What do we need to do to make the present tolerable and the future a place where we will want to live?”

And once you arrive in that tolerable present, with turkey on the table and pies cooling on the counter, you need a consensus that tells the bitter old uncles to shut up. Don’t start that again. Nobody wants to hear it.

… and the fiscal cliff

Back in the 19th century, a trader compared watching the fluctuations of the wheat market to watching a wrestling match that is happening under a blanket — you can see that something is going on, but you can’t tell what.

The fiscal cliff negotiation is like that. I haven’t said anything substantive about it because none of the publicly available information means anything. One day John Boehner sounds conciliatory; a few days later he takes a hard line. Ditto for President Obama.

It’s all posturing. Right now, polls say the public will blame the Republicans if no deal gets reached, and that makes President Obama’s negotiating position stronger. If the Republicans can defuse that by making reasonable noises in public while Obama sounds inflexible, then their position improves. That’s all that’s going on.

So far there’s been only one public concession: Republican have backed off the utterly ridiculous position they took in 2011 that tax reform should be revenue-neutral. (In other words: Any money generated by closing loopholes and eliminating deductions should go back to the tax-payers as rate cuts.) They’ve allowed that a fiscal-cliff deal might generate new revenue somehow. How much revenue? From where? Nobody’s saying.

All along, President Obama has allowed that a deal would include some spending cuts. But again, the specifics are a little sketchy. Is Social Security on the table? Medicare?

As soon as there’s something real to report, I’ll be all over it. But I’m not going to get excited about the posturing on either side. All I see is the blanket moving around. Something is happening, but saying any more than that is just speculation.

… and you might find this interesting

Compare two issues: the federal debt and global warming. Both involve predictions of a future apocalypse if we don’t change our ways. In the Debt Apocalypse, trust in the United States’ economy fails, people stop buying our government bonds, interest rates soar, inflation rages, and so on. In the Climate Apocalypse, storms get more violent and more frequent, droughts and heat waves ravage crops, more wildfires break out, glaciers and polar ice caps melt, rising seas inundate coastal cities, and so on.

Here’s the difference: The Climate Apocalypse stuff is starting to happen. The Debt Apocalypse stuff isn’t: Demand for government bonds is high, interest rates and inflation are low. And Paul Krugman points out that a Debt Apocalypse has never happened to a country like the U.S.:

Still, haven’t crises like the one envisioned by deficit scolds happened in the past? Actually, no. As far as I can tell, every example supposedly illustrating the dangers of debt involves either a country that, like Greece today, lacked its own currency, or a country that, like Asian economies in the 1990s, had large debts in foreign currencies.

So which problem is getting front-page coverage and eliciting daily comments from our leaders? The debt. There isn’t even a proposal on the table — from either Party — to do something about the climate.

One problem is that scientists hate to sound like Old Testament prophets, so they let themselves get diverted into detailed explanations and fail to sum up. So David Roberts sums up for them: “Our present course leads to certain catastrophe.”

Occasionally you hear about a “skills gap”. (President Obama has even talked about it.) The idea is that there are actually lots of unfilled jobs in America, but our workers don’t have the skills to fill them.

Adam Davidson looked at this in the NYT Magazine, and wasn’t impressed. Employers say they “can’t fill” jobs, when actually they just aren’t willing to pay the market wage.

The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. … In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.”

It’s like the “jobs Americans won’t do” that supposedly make it necessary to bring in workers from low-wage countries like Mexico. There are jobs Americans won’t do for a Mexican wage.

It’s exactly analogous to the importing-prescription-drugs-from-Canada phenomenon. Nobody says that there are “drugs American companies won’t sell”. Of course they’ll sell them; they just want a higher price.

Interesting bit of data: Even though Android smartphones and tablets have been outselling Apple products by a fairly wide margin for the last two years, Apple-users seem to do a lot more online. Many more Black Friday online purchases came over Apple’s iOS operating system than over Android. And it’s not just purchases: TPM notes that it gets almost four times as much iOS traffic as any other kind of smartphone or tablet traffic. Nobody has offered a compelling explanation yet, but you have to wonder if a bunch of Android devices are sitting in a drawer.

Nicholas Kristof observes that post-Sandy, back-up generators are the newest must-have device for the East Coast elite. And then he makes a very important point:

It would make more sense to invest those resources in the electrical grid so that it wouldn’t fail in the first place.

Public consumption is way more efficient than private consumption. A few rich people can have big yards, or the community can have a park. Everybody can buy their own books, or we can have a public library. A few kids can learn in expensive private schools, or we can fix the public schools for all kids. We can buy bottled water, or we can make the public water system clean and safe. What makes more sense?

But increasingly, we’re opting for private consumption.

Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds. … I’m used to seeing this mind-set in developing countries like Chad or Pakistan, where the feudal rich make do behind high walls topped with shards of glass; increasingly, I see it in our country.

Republicans who don’t want their party to change have been arguing that they just need to turn out the base better. FreedomWorks’ Matt Kibbe wrote this in the NYT:

Possibly the most stunning number coming from the 2012 presidential election is the fact that Mitt Romney actually drew 3,488,911 less votes than John McCain in 2008, and a staggering 5,579,198 less than George W. Bush in 2004. Obviously fiscal conservative voters were not inspired to turn out on Election Day.

You can get stunning numbers when you compare one election’s partial returns to the final returns of the previous election. But as we get closer to having all the votes counted, that talking point dissolves. Romney has at least 350,000 more votes than McCain got. But he still lost to Obama by about 4.2 million votes.

That, BTW, is significantly bigger than President Bush’s 3 million vote margin in his 2004 re-election bid, the one that led him to say: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”

The guy whose “un-skewed polls” predicted a 3% Romney victory has found a new way to avoid reality: Obama won Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia by fraud. His evidence? Inner-city precincts in Cleveland and Philadelphia where Romney got zero votes. So it should be easy to go there, find some Romney voters, and get them to testify that they voted for Mitt, right? So why hasn’t anybody done that?

And I just can’t give President Obama a pass on this: Defending Israel’s bombing of Gaza, he said: “There’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.”

As if he weren’t launching drone attacks on Pakistan or Yemen. Of all the meanings of “American exceptionalism” that I explored back in 2011, this is the one I deplore: We’re morally exceptional. Things that would be evil for other nations to do are OK for us.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

November 26, 2012 – 8:09 am

This week I took some of the time off that I’ve been promising myself since the election campaign. So while there will be a Weekly Summary, all the articles it links to will be written by other people. Topics: a surprising number of the people I read reacted to the recent Gaza hostilities with disgust or sadness, rather than taking a side; for all the articles being written about the fiscal cliff and all the speculation about how a deal might look, we’re getting almost no useful information; and while we’re all focused on the mostly imaginary dangers of the U.S. debt, the march towards a global-warming catastrophe continues.

Since I don’t have any articles to finish writing, the Weekly Summary should come out by 10 or so.

BTW, I have to crow a little: In Foreign Policy magazine’s list of “100 Top Global Thinkers“, Thinker #91 (dana boyd) mentions me and says that “The Distress of the Privileged” gave her an “aha moment”.

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Thoughts and Actions

November 19, 2012 – 11:23 am

It is human nature to think wisely, and to act in an absurd fashion.

— Anatole France

This week everybody was still talking about the election aftermath

Republicans spent this week ignoring the good advice I gave them.

Mitt Romney is working hard to insure that his political career is over. In a conference call to donors, he explained away his defeat like this:

The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people.

“Gifts” like: a cut in student loan interest rates, an executive order doing much of what the DREAM Act would have done if Republicans hadn’t blocked it, making contraceptive coverage part of ObamaCare, changing the rules so that 20-somethings could stay on their parents health insurance, and — worst of all — offering the working poor the prospect of health insurance once ObamaCare fully takes effect. CNN’s Paul Waldman translated:

During his first term, Obama craftily carried out policies that helped improve Americans’ lives, thereby tricking them into voting to re-elect him. Diabolical!

Some foolish people say this is the “real” Romney resurfacing after shaking the Etch-a-Sketch in October. But like Barbie, Mitt Romney is a creation of his audience. Speaking to big donors brought back 47% Romney. If he runs in Massachusetts again, Pro-Choice Romney will reappear. When no one is looking, Mitt Romney does not exist.

I heard this joke: Post-election, a conservative talk-radio show was envisioning the next Republican nominee as the 180-degree opposite of Mitt Romney. Romney called in to say: “I think I can be that candidate.”

Joking aside, Mike Huckabee really said: “I regret the Republican Party’s complete abandonment of Todd Akin.” Me too, Mike. I wish all Republican candidates had loudly defended Legitimate-Rape Akin. I wish Romney had flown down to Missouri and stood arm-in-arm with him for a photo op. The Obama campaign would have paid Mitt’s air fare and provided a film crew.

And also not joking (“You think I’m joking? Think again.”), the LA Times Charlotte Allen proposes Sarah Palin as the cure for what ails Republicans. She’ll win back those blue-collar whites in Ohio, and women will vote for her because she’s a woman. I guess Bobby Jindal’s plea to “stop being the stupid party” is too idealistic.

I spoke too soon about Party officials not embracing the Obama-won-by-vote-fraud lie. The chair of Maine’s Republican Party is investigating reports that “dozens of black people” voted in rural Maine communities where “nobody in town knew them” — because it’s always suspicious when black people vote. Obama won Maine by over 100,000 votes.

Romney’s Wisconsin co-chair claims that it “absolutely” would have made a difference in the election if Wisconsin’s voter-ID law hadn’t been blocked by the courts. Obama won Wisconsin by 200,000 votes.

Sean Hannity concludes that fraud is the only possible explanation for urban precincts where Romney got zero votes. In August, an NBC/WSJ poll — whose African-American sample was probably about the same size as an urban precinct — showed Romney had 0% support among blacks.

Ohio Republicans are resuming the War on Women. In a post-election session of the legislature, they’re pushing a defund-Planned-Parenthood bill and a “heartbeat” bill that would outlaw abortion at about the six-week mark.

An election-eve poll by Latino Decisions shows Republicans have bigger problems with Hispanics than Marco Rubio or a comprehensive immigration bill can solve. 66% say government should “play a role to ensure that all people have access to health insurance”. Only 12% want the deficit solved by “spending cuts alone”, and respondents oppose repealing ObamaCare 61%-25%.

I think I know what’s going on here, and it has little to do with race. Have you ever met one of those Soviet-bloc immigrants who is a diehard conservative because he’s seen what happens when government runs everything? Well, many Hispanics come from places where five families own everything and nobody else has a chance to succeed unless the government forces the rich to give them one. They look at Republican policies and say, “I know where that road goes.”

… and General Petraeus

I can’t convince myself that Petraeus’ sex life has any news value at all. But the way the story is shaking out is illuminating several interesting side issues (like how invasive the FBI can be or the bankruptcy of the Pentagon’s “spiritual fitness” program) which I explore in Shadows Cast By the Petraeus Scandal.

… but I decided to write about gerrymandering and sports

But not in the same article. I mentioned last week that Democratic candidates for Congress got more votes than Republican candidates, even as the Republicans retained control of the House by a wide margin. My one-word explanation was gerrymandering. This week I flesh out How Gerrymandering Painted the House Red by looking at specific states — like Pennsylvania, where Democrats got more votes than Republicans, but Republicans control the House delegation 13-5.

If you missed ESPN’s “Ghosts of Ole Miss”, you can still catch it on NetFlix. It inspired me to write Race, Sports, and a Doomed Civilization.

… and you might find this interesting

Just anecdotal evidence, but there sure seemed to be a lot of people out shopping Saturday.

Privatization in action: If you’re a private prison company looking for a way to cut costs, why not subcontract to a gang?

Washington Monthly’s Kathleen Geier goes off on John McCain’s charge that potential-Secretary-of-State Susan Rice is “not very bright”:

I so love that they went there. It’s maddening that this country is more or less run by old, white, out of touch, sexist, racist men like McCain and Mitt Romney, whose accomplishments, intellectual and otherwise, are dubious, and who reaped enormous unearned benefits from the wealth and connections they were born into. And yet these same people, rather than being humble about their own modest abilities and respectful of others who have accomplished so much in the world despite facing far more formidable obstacles, have the unmitigated gall to question their credentials.

The right does this time and again. Women and nonwhites in the public eye constantly have their qualifications and competencies questioned in ways that those of white men never are. No matter how glittering a person’s resume is, how dazzling their accomplishments are, if a prominent person is nonwhite and/or female, he or she is treated as an unqualified usurper.

A music video reminds us not to forget the true victims of the Class War.

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Shadows Cast By the Petraeus Scandal

November 19, 2012 – 10:35 am

I feel the same way about David Petraeus’ infidelities as I felt about President Clinton’s: Unless hypocrisy is involved (as when Speaker Gingrich pushed to impeach Clinton while carrying on an affair himself), I’m content to let public figures have messy private lives. As much as I love gossip, let’s not pretend it’s news.

But if the media spotlight trained on General Petraeus’ bed isn’t illuminating anything I consider important, it has cast a few interesting shadows. The Onion called attention to one: Nation Horrified To Learn About War In Afghanistan While Reading Up On Petraeus Sex Scandal. Let’s look at a few others.

The surveillance state is eating its own. In the post-privacy era of the Internet and the Patriot Act, the FBI has become the Eye of Sauron: Once its attention has been drawn to you, it will soon know your secrets and the secrets of all your associates, whether or not anyone has committed a crime.

Glenn Greenwald lays out just how much investigation resulted from just how little probable cause: A friend of an FBI agent gets some mildly disturbing anonymous emails, and before you know it (and apparently without needing any warrants), the FBI is reading personal messages of the head of the CIA and his successor four-star general in Afghanistan. And when the agent decides that his superiors aren’t doing enough with the dirt they’re turning up, he takes it to the administration’s enemies in Congress. Greenwald sums up:

Based on what is known, what is most disturbing about the whole Petraeus scandal is not the sexual activities that it revealed, but the wildly out-of-control government surveillance powers which enabled these revelations. What requires investigation here is not Petraeus and [General John] Allen and their various sexual partners but the FBI and the whole sprawling, unaccountable surveillance system that has been built.

Rachel Maddow wonders what J. Edgar Hoover could have done with this kind of power, and raises a worthy question: Once politically embarrassing dirt has been dug up, who decides who gets to see it? Congress is complaining about being uninformed, but should it have been informed?

Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer details just how unprotected anyone’s online privacy is: Whatever you store “in the cloud” — emails, drafts of documents, pictures — is available to the government with the permission of Google or Yahoo or whoever the cloud-tender happens to be.

The Constitution protects you from unreasonable search and seizure by the government. It doesn’t stop third parties from sharing personal information you willingly give them. … If you had a bunch of old letters in a worn shoebox under your bed, the FBI would need a warrant to get them. But if those same letters are online, in your password-protected email account, and they’re more than six months old, the FBI doesn’t need a warrant to take a peek.

(If you really want to get nerdy about the legal side of this, read the EFF’s email privacy primer.)

Serwer thinks the Petraeus scandal is our best chance to restore some meaningful restraints:

Being the head of the CIA or a decorated war veteran didn’t entitle Petraeus to any more privacy than the average American. But if the ruin of someone as high-ranking and well-regarded as Petraeus can’t get Congress thinking about reining in the surveillance state, it may never happen.

And Greenwald agrees:

there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America’s national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside. As Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this morning: “Who knew the key to stopping the Surveillance State was to just wait until it got so big that it ate itself?”

It is usually the case that abuses of state power become a source for concern and opposition only when they begin to subsume the elites who are responsible for those abuses.

The public usually accepts abusable power as long as most people can draw a bright line between themselves and the victims. As long as the abused are just Muslims or “extremists” or other stigmatized minorities, the rest of us can pretend there’s no real problem. But if David Petraeus can go down, who is safe?

Why does “morality” always mean “sex”? Americans ought to be having lots of debates over the morality of our foreign policy and the leaders who carry it out. Who they are sleeping with should be far down that list.

Esquire’s Tom Junod says that “the real Petraeus scandal” is about “transform[ing] the CIA into a paramilitary organization distinctive for its lethality and lack of accountability”.

Petraeus was the primary driver of a policy that has established killing as the option of first resort in the war against Al-Qaeda and its proxies. He did not institute the data-driven “signature strikes” that have become the CIA’s specialty, but he clashed with the State Department over them, and he was relentless in his efforts to make sure that the inherently expansive Lethal Presidency kept expanding. The revelation that President Obama managed a “kill list” from the Oval Office rightly drew a great deal of attention; but just as remarkable were the killings in which the President had no direct hand.

Atlantic’s Robert Wright raises similar questions:

What if other nations behaved as we do? What if they started firing drones into countries that house people they’d rather were dead? Couldn’t this get kind of out of control? Shouldn’t the U.S. be at least thinking about trying to establish a global norm against this sort of thing (except, conceivably, under well-defined circumstances that have a clear basis in international law)?

Yeah, I know Holly Petraeus is “furious“, as she has every right to be. But what about the Pakistani mothers whose innocent children have died in CIA drone attacks that Petraeus ordered? They’re probably pretty pissed too.

The Petraeus fog machine. Why did we have such a superhuman view of Petraeus to begin with? The Week asks: “Did the Media Fall for General Petraeus’ Hype?” and strongly implies the answer is yes. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman confessed: “How I Was Drawn Into the Cult of David Petraeus“.

Petraeus is just about the only commander who improved his image in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither war is an American success story, so any credit given to one general comes at the expense of the others, who are left holding the bag for the overall disappointment.

How did he manage that? Maybe it’s time to take another look at the rare Petraeus-criticizing articles, like Michael Hastings’ “The Legend of David Petraeus” in last January’s Rolling Stone. (“The genius of David Petraeus has always been his masterful manipulation of the media.”) Or read Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s account of a 2007 trip to Iraq where congressmen were propagandized to support the Surge.

And there is a hypocrisy angle. Petraeus was a proponent of the Pentagon’s “spiritual fitness” push, which (while carefully framed as non-religious or non-sectarian in theory) in practice means Christian evangelism in the military. (Non-Christian or insufficiently Christian soldiers are suspect, preaches one high-ranking Army chaplain, because “the unsaved have no realization of their unfortunate alliance with evil.”)

Petraeus wrote a prominent blurb for the book Under Orders: a spiritual handbook for military personnel by Army chaplain Lt. Col. William McCoy. (Order 3: “Believe in God.”) The Army’s spiritual fitness test and Under Orders both strongly imply that the non-religious can’t be a good soldiers or reliable team members of any sort.

Chris Rodda may be a bit too gleeful in Petraeus’ downfall, but expresses a sentiment that I (as a fellow unfortunate ally of evil) can’t help but share: “Hey, General Petraeus, how’s that spiritual fitness stuff working out for you?”

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How Gerrymandering Painted the House Red

November 19, 2012 – 9:19 am

The same electorate that re-elected President Obama by more than 3 million votes and chose Democrats or Democratic-leaning Independents in 25 out of 33 Senate races also re-affirmed the Republican majority in the House 234-201. That’s not much different from the 242-193 advantage the Republicans got in 2010, which was considered a Republican wave election.

So how did that happen? Do voters “prefer divided government”, as Wisconsin columnist Tom Still concludes? Did they send a mixed message that gives a mandate to neither party’s agenda, as Paul Ryan claims? Or was a Democratic-leaning electorate thwarted in its will to have a Democratic Congress?

Consider this: More people voted for Democratic congressional candidates than Republican ones. As of November 9, the WaPo’s Dan Keating calculated the Democratic advantage at 48.8%-48.47%, or 49.55%-48.54% in races where both parties ran a candidate.

So how did the People vote (narrowly) for a Democratic Congress but get a Republican one instead? That’s certainly not what the Founders intended: The reason there are more House districts than Senate seats and all congressmen have to go back to the voters every two years is that the House is supposed to closely reflect the will of the People.

Why didn’t that work? Why didn’t the House come out with a slight edge for the Democrats, or something closer to a 50-50 split reflecting a close popular vote?

Gerry’s salamander, currently the I-95 and I-495 corridors near Boston

Gerrymandering.

Every ten years (after the census), the states redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts. 2010 was a census year, but it also was a year when Republicans swept the legislatures of several big swing states like Ohio and Florida, and even states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that ordinarily lean blue. So Republicans got to redraw the districts in those states to favor their own candidates.

There’s nothing illegal about that. It’s been going on forever. (The name comes from this 1812 cartoon, in which an oddly-shaped district is portrayed as Gov. Gerry’s salamander.) And both parties do it. (Though in recent years Republicans have been more aggressive about it, as when Texas redrew its districts without a new census in 2003.)

But it’s one thing to wave your hands and say “gerrymandering” and another to see how it actually works. The basic idea is simple: You load up a few districts with as many of your opponent’s voters as possible, leaving yourself smaller (but still comfortable) advantages in the other districts.

For example, suppose your state got 3 House seats and had 300,000 voters split equally between the Purple party and the Yellow party. If the Yellows control the state legislature, they can lock in a 2-1 House majority by drawing district boundaries that divide the voters like this:

District Yellow Purple
1 0 100,000
2 75,000 25,000
3 75,000 25,000
Total 150,000 150,000

That’s the ideal case, but now look at Wisconsin. Tom Still reports:

State voters sent a Democrat back to the White House, but maintained the Republican Party’s 5-3 edge in Wisconsin’s House delegation, very much in line with the national decision to keep the House in Republican hands, which will make Obama’s second term even tougher.

Look at the vote totals in those 8 districts. (Numbers retrieved from CNN on November 14.)

District Democrat Republican margin
1 157,721 199,715 41,994 R
2 264,790 124,465 140,325 D
3 217,328 121,536 95,792 D
4 234,823 80,637 154,186 D
5 117,972 249,267 131,295 R
6 136,146 223,514 87,368 R
7 157,340 201,318 43,978 R
8 156,371 198,464 42,093 R
Total 1,442,491 1,398,916 43,575 D

So a Democratic advantage of over 40,000 votes, or 50.8%-49.2%, turns into a 5-3 Republican majority. It happens just like in the ideal Purple/Yellow example: All three Democratic wins are by at least 95,000 votes, but only one Republican victory is that big. Districts 1, 7, and 8 all provide comfortable 40,000-vote margins for the Republicans, but put together those margins don’t add up to the 140,000+ Democratic landslides in either District 2 or District 4. (BTW, District 1 is Paul Ryan’s seat.)

The bigger the state, the more room for this kind of mischief. A chart listing the 18 congressional districts of Pennsylvania would be too big to be instructive, but I’ve added up the numbers: Democrats got 2.72 million total votes compared to 2.65 million for the Republicans — yielding a 13-5 Republican advantage in House seats.

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Race, Sports, and a Doomed Civilization

November 19, 2012 – 8:11 am

I just watched ESPN’s Ghosts of Ole Miss about the University of Mississippi in 1962, a year when they had a great football team and the campus rioted in an unsuccessful attempt to stop integration.

“Mississippi in the fall of 1962,” the narrator says, “is a doomed civilization at its peak.”

If such rhetoric sounds overblown, look at this Sports Illustrated cover. What country is that?

The narrator is ESPN’s Wright Thompson, a Mississippi native too young to remember 1962, but embedded in the white culture that has tried to forget it, minimize it, or whitewash it. His article in ESPN: the Magazine inspired the film, which beautifully walks the line between shame and nostalgia. He never loses sight of the ugliness of racism, but also does his best to make comprehensible the white-supremacist Ole Miss of 1962.

One hundred and one years earlier, all but four students at Ole Miss dropped out of school to form Company A of the 11th Mississippi Infantry. The University Greys. On July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg, the unit rose from safety and made a futile rush from Seminary Ridge. Everyone was killed or injured, and history named their suicide mission Pickett’s Charge. The school’s sports teams would be called Rebels to honor their sacrifice. The young men and women in the stands today are just three generations removed from those soldiers.

When the governor won’t negotiate James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, President Kennedy sends U.S. marshals to take over the Lyceum, the building at the center of campus where students are registered. The students riot, rowdies join in from far and wide, people are killed, and the marshals can’t contain it. So the 82nd Airborne (“Union troops”) has to finish what Thompson describes as the last battle of the Civil War. (The riot was covered, coincidentally, by a very young Dan Rather.)

Meanwhile, there’s a football team having the only undefeated season in Ole Miss history. When Meredith wants to be an ordinary student and go to a game, the decision goes all the way up to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy: No. The federal government isn’t willing to commit enough resources to keep him safe there.

Thompson pulls a timeless, universal theme out of his subject: If you can’t deal with the bad things in the past, the good things — like the 1962 Rebels — get lost too. And he makes personal the process of sorting the past’s relics, culling what is too ugly to be preserved from what is too beautiful to lose. The stars-and-bars, he concludes, has to go — both at Ole Miss and as the state flag. Colonel Reb as mascot — he’s out too. But what about the Rebel name and Pickett’s Charge?

And “Dixie”, which can still make Thompson cry when they play it slow. Can he keep “Dixie”?

GoOM reminded me of several other articles and books that examine the intersection of race and sports.

Blindsided By History — A 2007 Sports Illustrated article on the 50th anniversary of another undefeated football team whose achievement was overshadowed by a shameful racial controversy: the 1957 Central High Tigers of Little Rock, Arkansas. They didn’t repeat in 1958 because Governor Faubus closed the school to prevent a second year of integration.

Thornridge: the perfect season in black and white by Scott Lynn. This is the other side of the race/sports coin: How one of the greatest basketball teams in Illinois high school history helped a white suburb accept integration. (This was Quinn Buckner’s team. I was there when they beat my high school in the state finals.)

If Only You Were White: the life of Leroy Satchell Paige by Donald Spivey. Paige was the greatest player of the late Negro Leagues, and stayed good long enough to follow Jackie Robinson into the majors in his 40s. Spivey not only makes Jim Crow real for a generation that didn’t live through it, but captures the compromises successful blacks had to make. Paige could be proud and “uppity”, but he could also play to the clown/minstrel stereotype when he needed white acceptance.

Some of the issues around integrating the majors (which killed the Negro Leagues) have been forgotten. For example, the Negro Leagues provided jobs for hundreds of black athletes and opportunities for black promoters. The majors accepted a comparative handful of black players, and no owners, managers, or executives for a long, long time. Paige wanted something more like a merger, in which two or three of the best Negro League teams would be admitted to the majors intact. But that was too much to ask for in 1947.

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