Author Archives: weeklysift

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

Obama’s Positive Case

September 24, 2012 – 9:28 am

Like every two-person race, Romney vs. Obama has four major narratives: pro-Romney, anti-Romney, pro-Obama, and anti-Obama. So far both sides have focused mainly on the anti narratives: You shouldn’t vote for Romney because he’s out of touch with the middle class; his policies harm women, gays, immigrants, and the poor; he brazenly makes up his own facts; he has no defense or foreign-policy experience; his proposals have no details and their numbers don’t add up; his only firm conviction is that he should be president. And so on.

Conversely, you shouldn’t vote for Obama because he hasn’t gotten the economy on track; he isn’t sufficiently pro-Israel or anti-Iran; he “apologizes for America” and projects a weak image to both our allies and enemies; he has increased the national debt by trillions of dollars; he favors Big Government and wants to enlarge the class of government dependents; and there’s just something generally suspicious about him that you can’t quite put your finger on (but it can’t possibly have anything to do with him being black, because you’re not a racist).

All I can say is that it will be a sad day for America if we elect a president entirely on a negative narrative, because he wasn’t the other guy.

I suspect we will never hear a serious pro-Romney case; his campaign doesn’t seem to be laying the groundwork for one. (I may be wrong, but I suspect “Obama Isn’t Working” is the first example of a presidential campaign’s main slogan containing the opponent’s name rather than the candidate’s. Remember “All the Way with LBJ” and “Nixon’s the One”?) If Romney is elected, I’ll hang on every word of his inaugural address, because it will be the first real indication of what his administration intends to do.

However, I’ve been predicting for a while that (after spending the summer defining the otherwise vacuous Romney) the Obama campaign will end on a positive note. Republicans have been saying that Obama has gone negative because he can’t defend his record or provide a convincing plan for the future. But I think they’re wrong. We began to hear some of the pro-Obama narrative during the Democratic Convention, and I think we’ll hear more of it as Election Day approaches.

This is my version of Obama’s positive case:

The stimulus, auto bailout, and other emergency measures of 2009 ended the crash.

It’s amazing how quickly the panic that gripped the nation in January, 2009 has been forgotten. Bankruptcies were dominoing: Across the country, apparently healthy companies were discovering that their accounts receivable were worthless because their customers couldn’t pay. And so they were now bankrupt too and couldn’t pay the next company down the line.

Giant enterprises like General Motors and giant states like California couldn’t pay their bills. If those debts went bad, how many other employers would go down? Then how many local shops and restaurants would fail when their customers lost their jobs?

In the pre-Obama era, a stimulus was an uncontroversial response to a recession. President Bush passed a stimulus in 2002 and again in 2008, both times without significant protest from congressional Republicans. Liberal and conservative economists alike were calling for a stimulus in 2009. Republicans had their own 2009 stimulus proposal – a mere $713 billion and weighted more towards tax cuts, but nonetheless a stimulus.

Obama’s proposal was designed to be centrist: A third of the $800 billion total was tax cuts. Another big chunk was aid to the states (to prevent massive layoffs of teachers and construction workers). Another chunk extended unemployment benefits (which made sense given that there were no jobs for the unemployed to find). The remainder was also pretty well spent on a variety of infrastructure and social-investment projects. The definitive analysis is in The New New Deal by Michael Grunwald.

And it worked. Again, both liberal and conservative economists estimate that the stimulus saved a considerable number of jobs, as shown in the following chart (more up-to-date version here).

Obama’s critics have made a big deal of his administration’s projection (they incorrectly call it a “promise”) that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8%. The mistake here had nothing to do with the effect of the stimulus: In early 2009, everyone was still underestimating the number of jobs that had already been lost in the 4th quarter of 2008.

Obama focused on Al Qaeda (hasta la vista, Osama), ended the Iraq War, is winding down the Afghanistan War, and – best of all! – didn’t start any new wars.

In the 1950s, critics of President Eisenhower said he was a do-nothing president. In retrospect, some of Eisenhower’s not-doings look wise, like not sending troops to Vietnam after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. We can only wish Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had maintained Ike’s standards of military idleness.

By Bush standards, Obama has been a do-nothing president in the Muslim world. He hasn’t bombed Iran, he didn’t prop up the Egyptian dictator Mubarak, and he has kept our troops out of Libya and Syria. Let’s keep them out.

The Affordable Care Act is a major step towards health security for all Americans.
Universal health care has been a goal of every Democratic president since Truman, and Republicans like Nixon have also had ambitions in that direction. The Affordable Care Act did not get all the way there, but it gets us closer than we’ve ever been.

Currently, 48.6 million Americans are uninsured – most of them in red states like Texas. The ACA was projected to drop that number below 20 million, though now that a partisan Supreme Court has nixed the Medicaid expansion (and Republican governors like Texas’ Perry are threatening not to take the federal money to expand Medicaid), no one can estimate the exact number.

The ACA does not completely take effect until 2014, but you may already be benefitting if you are old (it closed the “donut hole” in Medicare drug coverage), young (parents’ insurance can cover their children up to age 26), or sick (you can’t be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition). It might even have gotten you a refund from your health insurance company.

Like the stimulus, the ACA is a centrist program that has been smeared as radical: It mimicks RomneyCare in Massachusetts, which was designed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The ideas behind it only became “socialist” and “unconstitutional” when Obama adopted them.

Obama’s Supreme Court appointments kept the corporatist and theocratic agendas at bay.

Obama got to replace two liberal justices with two slightly-less-liberal justices, so that Justice Kennedy remains the swing vote. (Though Roberts was the swing vote on the ACA decision.) If President McCain had instead appointed two justices resembling Alito or Thomas, the Court would have only two liberals, so even convincing Kennedy and Roberts wouldn’t be enough. The swing vote would be Scalia, believe it or not.

The main theme of the Roberts Court was summed up in 2010 by Al Franken:

What conservative legal activists are really interested in is this question: What individual rights are so basic and so important that they should be protected above a corporation’s right to profit?

And their preferred answer is: None of them. Zero.

That may sound like an exaggeration, but the rest of Franken’s speech backs it up.

Without Obama’s appointments, decisions would be even more pro-corporate, and you could add Christian supremacy to that agenda.

And of course Roe v. Wade would be toast.

He defended women’s right to equal pay, which the Roberts Court had gutted.

The first bill Obama signed was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. And what other women’s rights will be gutted if the Roberts Court gets conservative reinforcements?

He stopped deporting good kids who know no country other than this one.

Naively, Obama assumed that Republicans (like John McCain) who had publicly supported immigration reform in the past would continue to support it. Instead, Republicans have unified against their own previous proposals and blocked any progress on immigration, including the DREAM Act (which Orrin Hatch co-sponsored and then voted against) and even Mario Rubio’s watered-down version of the DREAM Act.

President Obama has gone about as far as he can without Congress’ cooperation: He has suspended deportations of undocumented teen-agers who were brought here as small children and are on their way to becoming Americans we can be proud of.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is history, and the country has turned the corner on gay rights.

President Obama hasn’t been a crusader for gay rights, but he did manage to tip-toe through the minefield of gays in the military.

It’s worth noting that the DADT repeal has caused virtually no problems. Remember how unit cohesion was going to collapse, recruitment would plummet, and chaplains would resign in droves once the Pentagon de-institutionalized bigotry against gays and lesbians? None of it happened. (But I’ll bet none of the false prophets in the pundit class lost their jobs for being wrong. They never do.)

Obama’s personal support for same-sex marriage has no direct impact, but it did seem to be a tipping point in public opinion. His refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court may help get rid of that unjust law (though not if President Romney gets to appoint some Supreme Court judges first).

This fall we may start seeing anti-gay referendums lose. Increasingly, gay rights has become a why-not issue rather than a why issue. Expect Obama to continue to ride the public-opinion wave rather than lead it or block it.

In short: Regardless of who the Other Guy is, Barack Obama has been a good president in tough times. He deserves re-election.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

September 24, 2012 – 7:58 am

Welcome to the new readers the Weekly Sift picked up from the popularity of The Distress of the Privileged. I hope you’ll appreciate this week’s Sift enough to bookmark the Sift and come back every Monday.

This week will have two main articles, which I’ll try to get out before noon. (I’m running a little late today because I’m still in the Central Time Zone*. Like the main character in Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE, I’m getting my Internet from a HyVee packed with retirees.) In the first, I’ll anticipate the Obama campaign finishing on a high note with Obama’s Positive Case. In the second, I give my answer to Waiting for Superman in Education Reform: I’m Still Not Convinced.

The weekly summary will be called Bedrock, after an insightful thing Chris Hayes said Saturday on Up. What everybody has been talking about this week, naturally, is the sad state of the Romney campaign.

* Dad is hanging on, but things don’t look good. Thanks for asking.

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No Sift This Week

September 17, 2012 – 9:38 am

As much as I would love to capitalize on all the new readers who found the blog last week*, it’s not going to happen.

I’ve spent most of this week hovering over the hospital bed of my 90-year-old father, trying to figure out whether or not this is his final health crisis.

The whole point of the Sift is that I scour the internet looking for the stories you ought to be reading, I check the facts and the framing of the stories the mainstream media is covering, and  I try to provide the kind of perspective and background that intelligent readers are looking for.

There’s no way any of that was going to happen this week. I could probably go through my files of half-written articles and throw some stuff together, but that would be no service to my regular readers and give new readers a poor introduction to what I’m trying to do here.

Maybe next week.

* Last week was the second-most-popular week in weeklysift.com history, with 38,000 views. Most of them were for The Distress of the Privileged.

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Probably Obama

September 10, 2012 – 2:05 pm

I’ve seen Romney, I’ve seen Bain.
I’ve seen Clinton speeches I thought would never end.
I’ve seen crazy guys talking to invisible men.
So I’ll prob’ly vote Obama, again.

— Jimmy  Fallon channeling James Taylor

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention

The best speech was definitely Bill Clinton’s, but Obama and Biden also did well. Among the punditry, Obama suffered from unreasonable standards. A typical comment sounded a little like: He used to leap taller buildings at a single bound.

After the Paul Ryan lie-fest, Factcheck.org whined a little about Bill Clinton’s speech: He gave them a lot of facts to check, but nothing much to write about.

The best single line of the convention was probably John Kerry’s: “Ask Osama bin Laden if he’s better off than he was four years ago.”

But let’s not forget the week’s really important moments, like Julian Castro’s 3-year-old daughter spotting herself on the jumbotron TV.

Or Jimmy Fallon doing his James Taylor impersonation. (Taylor really did perform at the convention, but this video comes from Fallon’s show Late Night.)

… and where the race stands now

In short: Obama got a bounce from his convention, but Romney didn’t. Statistically, the race is still close enough that Romney could come back. But doing so would require him to uncork some inner awesomeness that so far I see no sign of.

The longer version of that analysis is: Where the Presidential Race Stands.

… but I also wrote about something else

The Distress of the Privileged takes a sympathetic look at the experiences that lead to Tea-Party-style anger. When your privileges shrink, it can feel like persecution. I rely on a series of wonderful articles in the Owldolatrous blog, and tie them to a Pleasantville theme.

… and you might also be interested in this

You may have heard that your religious liberty is in danger. A minister provides a quick quiz to help you determine if it is. Typical question:

4. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to pray privately.
B) I am not allowed to force others to pray the prayers of my faith publicly.

Note to local TV reporters: Don’t try to question Ann Romney about the issues that might interest your viewers. Lady Ann will tell you what the issues are and what you should be asking about them.

Jon Stewart did a wonderful job of contrasting Fox News’ coverage of the two conventions.

Something I almost pulled into the “The Distress of the Privileged“: the contrast with the kind of anger you see in Melissa Harris-Perry’s rant on risk. She got tired of hearing about how the entrepreneur’s deserve to be rich because of all the risks they take. “What is riskier than living poor in America?” she demanded.

When the privileged get angry, you get the kind of coverage the Tea Party got: reflections on what Obama must have done to rile these people up. But black female anger comes pre-discounted. “What got into her?”

Something to remember when Republicans complain about Obama’s record on jobs:

Posted in Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Where the Presidential Race Stands

September 10, 2012 – 11:39 am

A month ago, the conventional wisdom was that Romney was slightly behind, but he still had three chances to catch up: his VP announcement, the conventions, and the debates.

Two down, one to go. Picking Ryan seemed to arrest Romney’s slow slide, and the tiny bounce he got from the Republican Convention pulled the race more-or-less even. But then the Democrats had a much more successful convention.

Nate Silver comments:

the polling movement that we have seen over the past three days represents the most substantial shift that we’ve seen in the race all year, with the polls moving toward Mr. Obama since his convention.

The Gallup tracking poll (consistently one of the more unfavorable to Obama) now shows him with a 49-44% lead. That margin has been growing daily as more and more of Gallup’s 7-day window is post-convention. A PPP poll out Sunday showed Obama leading by 5% in Ohio, the largest lead that poll has given him since May. Obama has even pulled ahead 49-48% in North Carolina, a state he could only carry in a 2008-style landslide.

A month ago, Silver’s predictive model gave Obama a 72% chance of re-election. Today it stands at 80%.

Silver just crunches numbers. Let’s see if we can attach some scenarios to them. Romney’s 20% chance depends on events running in his favor, his message starting to take hold, and he and Ryan significantly outperforming Obama and Biden in the four debates.

Message. Romney’s most visible slogan is “Obama isn’t working.” The message is fundamentally negative, and it typifies Romney’s strategy. As much as possible, he has tried to keep the focus away from himself and his policy proposals. Every issue page on Romney’s web site begins with “Obama’s failure” and only later gets around to “Mitt’s plan”.

Often that plan doesn’t amount to much beyond platitudes. His promise on Afghanistan is to

order a full interagency assessment of our military and assistance presence in Afghanistan to determine the level required to secure our gains and to train Afghan forces to the point where they can protect the sovereignty of Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban.

Withdraw troops faster? slower? not at all? The point seems to be to take advantage of an anti-Obama wave by leaving his own views as vague as possible, giving everyone reason to think he might do what they want. That might work if the general public hated Obama as much as the Republican primary electorate did, but that seems not to be true.

One recent Romney strategy is to sound more moderate on TV appearances, only to have his staff issue a statement later “clarifying” that the radical conservative position he took in the primaries is unchanged.

On abortion, for example, he told CBS:

My position has been clear throughout this campaign. I’m in favor of abortion being legal in the case of rape and incest, and the health and life of the mother.

But four days later an anti-abortion activist assured a conservative radio host that “health” was a mis-statement.

I have heard clarification from his spokesperson, restating what his position really is, which is rape, incest, life of the mother. That is his position.

So his position is clear, or maybe it isn’t. Or maybe there’s one position for a national audience an another for right-wing talk radio.

Sunday, David Gregory asked Romney about two popular parts of ObamaCare: Guaranteeing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and letting young adults be covered under their parents’ plans. Romney seemed to endorse both:

I’m not getting rid of all of healthcare reform.  Of course, there are a number of things that I like in healthcare reform that I’m going to put in place.  One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage.  Two is to assure that the marketplace allows for individuals to have policies that cover their– their family up to whatever age they might like.

Then his campaign backed off to a position where the magic of marketplace would provide everything:

in a competitive environment, the marketplace will make available plans that include coverage for what there is demand for. He was not proposing a federal mandate to require insurance plans to offer those particular features.

And then there was a third position, in which people with pre-existing conditions couldn’t be dropped if they had been insured continuously. This, as Wonkblog points out, leaves out about 89 million Americans.

But if you just watched Meet the Press, you know none of that. Romney has re-assured you that what you like about ObamaCare will stay put.

The closer we get to the election, the more this vagueness will wear on both the moderates and the conservatives. I’m not hearing a message that has a chance to take hold. Sometime between now and November, Romney has to come up with a clear reason voters should vote for him.

Debates. The debates are likely to bring out the worst in both Romney and Ryan. Romney does not think well on his feet, and is prone to clueless gestures, like trying to shut Governor Perry up by challenging him to a $10,000 bet.

Both Romney and Ryan talk in abstractions, and are unconvincing or uncomfortable when talking about real people.

Finally, the debates will force Romney and Ryan to choose one set of facts and policies and stick to them.

Events. The public isn’t expecting a sudden turn-around in the economy, so continued sluggishness isn’t going to give them an October surprise.

October surprises tend to come from overseas, and a ticket without any foreign-policy or defense experience would be unlikely to benefit from them.

So while it is certainly possible to overcome the small lead Obama has taken, it is hard to construct a scenario where it happens.

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The Distress of the Privileged

September 10, 2012 – 9:47 am

In a memorable scene from the 1998 film Pleasantville (in which two 1998 teen-agers are transported into the black-and-white world of a 1950s TV show), the father of the TV-perfect Parker family returns from work and says the magic words “Honey, I’m home!”, expecting them to conjure up a smiling wife, adorable children, and dinner on the table.

This time, though, it doesn’t work. No wife, no kids, no food. Confused, he repeats the invocation, as if he must have said it wrong. After searching the house, he wanders out into the rain and plaintively questions this strangely malfunctioning Universe: “Where’s my dinner?”

Privileged distress. I’m not bringing this up just to discuss old movies. As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change. The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.

If you are one of the newly-visible others, this all sounds whiny compared to the problems you face every day. It’s tempting to blast through such privileged resistance with anger and insult.

Tempting, but also, I think, a mistake. The privileged are still privileged enough to foment a counter-revolution, if their frustrated sense of entitlement hardens.

So I think it’s worthwhile to spend a minute or two looking at the world from George Parker’s point of view: He’s a good 1950s TV father. He never set out to be the bad guy. He never meant to stifle his wife’s humanity or enforce a dull conformity on his kids. Nobody ever asked him whether the world should be black-and-white; it just was.

George never demanded a privileged role, he just uncritically accepted the role society assigned him and played it to the best of his ability. And now suddenly that society isn’t working for the people he loves, and they’re blaming him.

It seems so unfair. He doesn’t want anybody to be unhappy. He just wants dinner.

Levels of distress. But even as we accept the reality of George’s privileged-white-male distress, we need to hold on to the understanding that the less privileged citizens of Pleasantville are distressed in an entirely different way. (Margaret Atwood is supposed to have summed up the gender power-differential like this: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”)

George deserves compassion, but his until-recently-ideal housewife Betty Parker (and the other characters assigned subservient roles) deserves justice. George and Betty’s claims are not equivalent, and if we treat them the same way, we do Betty an injustice.

Tolerating Dan Cathy. Now let’s look at a more recent case from real life.

One of the best things to come out of July’s Chick-fil-A brouhaha was a series of posts on the Owldolatrous blog, in which a gay man (Wayne Self) did his best to wrangle the distress of the privileged.

The privileged in this case are represented by Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy, who stirred up a hornet’s nest when he denounced the “prideful, arrogant attitude” of those who support same-sex marriage, saying that they “are inviting God’s judgment on our nation”.

His comments drew attention to the millions that Chick-fil-A’s founding family has contributed to anti-gay organizations, and led to calls for a boycott of their restaurants.

To which his defenders responded: Is tolerance a one-way street? Cathy was just expressing the genuine beliefs of his faith. As an American, he has freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Why can’t gays and their supporters respect that?

“Nothing mutual about it.” Self starts his post by acknowledging Cathy’s distress, but refusing to accept it as equivalent to his own. Cathy is suffering because people are saying bad things about him and refusing to buy his sandwiches. Meanwhile, 29 states (including Self’s home state of Louisiana) let employers fire gays for being gay. There are 75 countries Self and his partner can’t safely visit, because homosexuality is illegal and (in some of them) punishable by death.

The Cathy family has given $5 million to organizations that work to maintain this state of oppression. Self comments:

This isn’t about mutual tolerance because there’s nothing mutual about it. If we agree to disagree on this issue, you walk away a full member of this society and I don’t. There is no “live and let live” on this issue because Dan Cathy is spending millions to very specifically NOT let me live. I’m not trying to do that to him.

Christian push-back. That post got over a million page views and (at last count) 1595 comments, including some push-back from conservative Christians. Self’s follow-up responded to one commenter who wrote that he supported Chick-fil-A as

[a] company with a founder who speaks for what seems to be the minority these days.

In other words, I specifically feel BASHED by the general media and liberal establishment and gay activists for simply being a Bible-believing Christian. From TV shows, movies, mainstream news and music, so much is Intolerance of my conservative beliefs. I am labeled a HOMOPHOBIC and a HATER. … I neither fear nor hate homosexuals.

Self brings in a blog post by Bristol Palin, in which she scoffs at an interviewer’s implication that she might refuse to have a gay partner on “Dancing With the Stars”.

In their simplistic minds, the fact that I’m a Christian, that I believe in God’s plan for marriage, means that I must hate gays and must hate to even be in their presence.  Well, they were right about one thing: there was hate in that media room, but the hate was theirs, not mine.

… To the Left, “tolerance” means agreeing with them on, well, everything.  To me, tolerance means learning to live and work with each other when we don’t agree – and won’t ever agree.

Like Bristol Palin, Self’s commenter sees himself as the victim of bigotry. He isn’t aware of hating anybody. He just wants to preserve the world he grew up in, and can’t be bothered to picture how others suffer in that world.

He wants dinner.

Aesop II. Self answers with a story: a sequel to the Aesop fable of the mouse who saves a lion.

[A story is] the only way I know to address some of these things without resorting to words that hurt or offend, or shut down discussion.

Aesop’s tale ends with the mouse and the lion as friends, but Self notes that they are still not equal: The Lion is King of the Jungle and the Mouse … is a mouse.

In Self’s sequel, the Lion hosts the Kingdom Ball, to which mice are never invited, because they disgust many of the larger animals. Nothing personal, the Lion explains to his friend, it’s just the way things are.

At this point, Self breaks out of the story to explain why (in spite of the fact that his commenter feels “BASHED by the general media and liberal establishment”) he is casting conservative Christians as the Lion and gays as the Mouse: It is not illegal to be a Christian in any state. You can’t be fired for Christianity. Christians may feel bashed by criticism, but gays get literally bashed by hate crimes. Christians may feel like people are trying to silence them, but the Tennessee legislature debated a bill making it illegal to say the word gay in public schools. (The senate passed it.)

There is a vast difference between being told you’re superstitious or old-fashioned and being told you’re an abomination that doesn’t deserve to live. There’s a vast difference between being told you’re acting hateful and being told God hates you.

I’ve been gay and Christian all my life. Trust me: Christian is easier. It’s not even close.

Leonine distress. But does the Lion have reason to be annoyed with the Mouse? Of course. The Mouse is making trouble by asking to go where he’s not wanted. The Mouse is “prideful” for expecting the rules to change to suit him. However, Self admits that the Lion probably doesn’t hate or fear the Mouse.

I don’t think you hate me. I certainly don’t think you’re afraid of me. Neither is Bristol Palin. She probably even has LGBT people she calls friends. She just disagrees with them about whether they should be invited to the party (the party, in this case, being marriage).

But here’s the problem: the basis of that disagreement is her belief that her relationships are intrinsically better than ours. 

There’s a word for this type of statement: supremacist.

Ah, now we get to “words that hurt or offend”. Here’s what he means by it:

Supremacy is the habit of believing or acting as if your life, your love, your culture, your self has more intrinsic worth than those of people who differ from you.

Self sees a supremacist attitude in the commenter’s

sense of comfort with yourself as an appropriate judge of my choices, ideas, or behaviors, … unwillingness to appreciate the inherent inequality in a debate where I have to ask you for equality … [and] unwillingness to acknowledge the stake that you have have in your feeling of superiority rather than blame it on God.

[The third point is one that is not made often enough: A lot of interpretation and selective reading is required to find “God’s plan for marriage” in the Bible. Did that doctrine arise on its own merits, or because it rationalizes heterosexual supremacy? Elsewhere, I made a similar point about right-wing Protestants’ adoption of the bizarre Catholic ensoulment-at-conception doctrine: Anti-abortion politics came first, and theology changed to rationalize it.]

Now let’s finish the fable: Uninvited, the Mouse crashes the party. The shocked guests go silent, the Lion is furious, and the ensuing argument leads to violence: The Lion chucks the Mouse out the window, ending both the party and the friendship.

The lesson: Supremacy itself isn’t hate. You may even have affection for the person you feel superior to. But supremacy contains the seeds of hate.

Supremacy turns to hate when the feeling of innate superiority is openly challenged. … Supremacy is why you and Bristol Palin have more outrage at your own inconvenience than at the legitimate oppression of others.

We can talk about the subjugation of women later, honey. Where’s my dinner?

George Parker’s choices. All his life, George has tried to be a good guy by the lights of his society. But society has changed and he hasn’t, so he isn’t seen as a good guy any more. He feels terrible about that, but what can he do?

One possibility: Maybe he could learn to be a good guy by the lights of this new society. It would be hard. He’d have to give up some of his privileges. He’d have to examine his habits to see which ones embody assumptions of supremacy. He’d have to learn how to see the world through the eyes of others, rather than just assume that they will play their designated social roles. Early on, he would probably make a lot of mistakes and his former inferiors would correct him. It would be embarrassing.

But there is an alternative: counter-revolution. George could decide that his habits, his expectations, and the society they fit are RIGHT, and this new society is WRONG. If he joined with the other fathers (and right-thinking mothers like the one in the poster) of Pleasantville, maybe they could force everyone else back into their traditional roles.

Which choice he makes will depend largely on the other characters. If they aren’t firm in their convictions, the counter-revolution may seem easy. (“There, there, honey. I know you’re upset. But be reasonable.”) But if their resentment is implacable, becoming a good guy in the new world may seem impossible.

Only the middle path — firmness together with understanding — has a chance to tame George and bring him back into society on new terms.

Privileged distress today. Once you grasp the concept of privileged distress, you’ll see it everywhere: the rich feel “punished” by taxes; whites believe they are the real victims of racism; employers’ religious freedom is threatened when they can’t deny contraception to their employees; English-speakers resent bilingualism — it goes on and on.

And what is the Tea Party movement other than a counter-revolution? It comes cloaked in religion and fiscal responsibility, but scratch the surface and you’ll find privileged distress: Change has taken something from us and we want it back.

Confronting this distress is tricky, because neither acceptance nor rejection is quite right. The distress is usually very real, so rejecting it outright just marks you as closed-minded and unsympathetic. It never works to ask others for empathy without offering it back to them.

At the same time, my straight-white-male sunburn can’t be allowed to compete on equal terms with your heart attack. To me, it may seem fair to flip a coin for the first available ambulance, but it really isn’t. Don’t try to tell me my burn doesn’t hurt, but don’t consent to the coin-flip.

The Owldolatrous approach — acknowledging the distress while continuing to point out the difference in scale — is as good as I’ve seen. Ultimately, the privileged need to be won over. Their sense of justice needs to be engaged rather than beaten down. The ones who still want to be good people need to be offered hope that such an outcome is possible in this new world.

Update: I’ve written a number of other things about privilege since this post first appeared, some here, and some on my religious blog Free and Responsible Search.

  • “The Web of Privilege” is a talk I gave to a men’s group in Ann Arbor. It reviews some of the material presented above, and then tries to move beyond the privileged/oppressed dichotomy to deal with the notion that we are almost all privileged in some ways while oppressed in others. The “web” metaphor is intended to replace the metaphor of privilege as a wall.
  • “Recovery From Privilege” responds to the frequent response (typified by a comment on this post) that the whole point of talking about privilege is to make people feel guilty. Guilt actually isn’t the response I’m looking for, because it’s a dead-end state that does no one any good. Instead, I outline a recovery process.
  • “Privilege and the Bubble of Flattery” is my response to the Princeton freshman whose essay in Time says he’ll never apologize for his privilege, as if that’s what anyone wanted.
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The Monday Morning Teaser

September 10, 2012 – 6:47 am

This week the focus shifted to the Democratic Convention, where Bill Clinton came through big for President Obama, and Obama and Biden did well for themselves. (The pundit class, though, didn’t give Obama much credit, their commentary more-or-less amounting to: “The buildings he leaps at a single bound used to be taller.”)

This week’s Sift will review where the race stands, though I haven’t decided whether that will get its own article or happen in the weekly summary.

I’m trying not to get completely absorbed in the election, so this week’s longest article will step back and look at a larger-scale issue that I’m calling “The Genuine Distress of the Privileged”. What do you do with people who feel persecuted because they are losing their dominance? Whites, men, Christians, English-speakers, heterosexuals … it genuinely stings to be told that there’s something wrong with the attitude you were brought up to have. They don’t think of themselves as hate-filled bigots, so why do people keep calling them that?

The question is: How can we acknowledge their distress without de-railing efforts to deal with the far more serious problems of groups that really are persecuted?

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Check, Please!

September 3, 2012 – 11:40 am

We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.

— Neil Newhouse, pollster for the Romney campaign

This week everybody was talking about Clint Eastwood

Clint was at some big political rally in Florida (I didn’t catch the name of it) when he launched into a bizarre improv discussion with an invisible Barack Obama, represented by an empty chair.

To Jon Stewart, this scene explained everything:

I could never wrap my head around why the world and the president that Republicans describe bears so little resemblance to the world and the president that I experience. And now I know why: There is a President Obama that only Republicans can see.

Michael Moore elaborated:

Clint Eastwood was able to drive home to tens of millions of viewers the central message of this year’s Republican National Convention: We Are Delusional and Detached from Reality. Vote for Us!

As big stars sometimes do, Eastwood inadvertently created an internet phenomenon to rival Pepper Spraying Cop: Eastwooding

Inevitably, it led to this response from an earlier meme:

I intend to use it as a quick slang for telling Republicans to get real: “I think you’re talking to the chair again.”

… and the rest of the Republican National Convention

Back in the day, political conventions made news. Outcomes were uncertain and speeches captured a party’s internal policy differences. (To get a taste, rent the 1964 film The Best Man.)

These days, of course, conventions are infomercials that can’t be taken at face value. The only honest information is in the subtext, and illuminates questions that mainly interest political junkies: What image does the party want to project? Who is their target audience? What do they think their best/worst issues are?

Bill Maher pointed out one major subtext:

Republicans don’t have to accept evolution, economics, climatology, or human sexuality, but I just watched a week of their national convention, and I need them to admit the historical existence of George W. Bush.

References to Reagan popped up every now and then, but Bush has become an un-person. Bill Clinton is the headliner in Charlotte Wednesday night, but W and Dick Cheney weren’t even in Tampa. The convention needed Condi Rice for diversity, but not even that could get Alberto Gonzalez to the podium.

Don Rumsfeld? John Ashcroft? Never saw them. Karl Rove has moved on to be a major SuperPAC player, but they kept him off-stage.

Eight years down the memory hole. But don’t worry, George, you’ll be remembered this week in Charlotte.

Nate Silver thinks it’s still too soon to measure the size of Romney’s convention bounce, “but the information we have so far points toward its being a little underwhelming.” His model still gives Obama a 74.5% chance of re-election.

Similarly, Gallup pegs Romney’s convention speech as the least effective since Bob Dole.

My favorite convention wrap-up was on Saturday morning’s “Up With Chris Hayes”. “Up” is consistently the best political discussion on TV. It’s like you’re on a weekend retreat with the sharpest political observers around, and you all get up and chat while the coffee is brewing. Hayes himself is the smart-but-congenial host we all want to be.

… and how to cover lies

A second major piece of convention subtext concerned the press. A controversy has been brewing for a while about Mitt Romney’s relationship with the truth, which Grist’s David Roberts describes like this:

Political campaigns have always lied and stretched the truth, but when caught in a lie, would typically defend themselves (claim it was actually true), retract, or at the very least stop repeating the lie. Either way, the presumption was that truth-telling had some moral force; one ought to tell the truth, even if that commandment was often honored in the breach.

What’s creepy about the Romney crew is that they don’t do any of those things. They don’t deny, they don’t stop, they just don’t care at all.

For weeks now, journalist blogs have been buzzing about how to respond. Sure, you fact-check, but the Boston Phoenix’s David Bernstein tweeted this follow-up question:

Dear media critics: OK, entire news media called Romney’s welfare attack a lie. Campaign still pushing it. Now what?

Journalists either had to find a way to increase the pressure, or just admit that their whole profession doesn’t matter any more — we’re in a post-truth era, where the powerful can make up their own facts.

During the RNC, they increased the pressure like this: The consensus of fact-checkers has itself become a fact that an objective reporter can report in a news article, not on the opinion page. So the NYT headlined a news article “Facts take a beating in acceptance speeches“. And an L.A. Times news headline read: “Rick Santorum repeats inaccurate welfare attack on Obama“.

We’ll see if this makes any difference, or if Romney is right in his assessment that the press’ disapproval is a wristslap compared to the benefits of lying.

I hope the Obama campaign is paying attention. The press would love to “balance” their coverage of the RNC by finding inaccuracies at the DNC. Even trivial fact-fudging is going to come at a high price.

Minor victory: Paul Ryan had to back off the claim that he ran a sub-three-hour marathon. I wonder if he ever played golf with Kim Jong Il.

… but I wrote about Paul Ryan’s character in general

A lot of people have written about the influence of Ayn Rand on Paul Ryan. But I haven’t seen many confess their own teen-age Rand obsession and give an insider’s view. Since I already admitted most of it last year in Why I’m Not a Libertarian, I might as well explore the psychology of teen Randism in Ayn, Paul, and Me.

The interesting question is: Why didn’t Ryan grow out of it, as most of us do?

… and you might also find this stuff interesting

Ron Fournier almost took a job with John McCain four years ago, but he’s also not going easy on Romney: Why (and How) Romney is Playing the Race Card.

Mike Lofgren was a Republican congressional staffer for 16 years, but even he (writing in The American Conservative, of all places) has noticed that the rich aren’t really Americans any more:

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.

Dan Froomkin writes a depressingly realistic article about the jobs of the future:

As the super-rich get even richer … they will need maids, cooks, and gardeners.

So is that an issue in this election?

The fact is that there is no Democratic jobs plan, if Republicans are able to keep either their control of the House or their ability to paralyze the Senate, or both. And there is no Republican jobs plan at all.

Who is this rude giant?

This week’s most fun image:

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Ayn, Paul, and Me

September 3, 2012 – 10:34 am

A year ago, when I posted Why I’m Not a Libertarian, I thought I was done talking about my misspent Objectivist youth. Yes, I read Atlas Shrugged six times, and all of Ayn Rand’s other published works at least twice. Yes, I realize how much I could have learned by investing that effort more wisely. Let’s not dwell on it. What’s done is done.

So in April, when Paul Ryan’s love/hate relationship with the Catholic bishops led me to write Jesus Shrugged — Why Christianity and Ayn Rand Don’t Mix, I left my personal history out of it. Ryan’s policy proposals were the issue then, not his personality or character, so any insight I might gather from our common obsession was beside the point.

It’s not beside the point now. When you start talking about a person as a potential vice president — which necessarily makes him a potential president — character matters as much as policy, maybe more. Paul Ryan may end up leading our country through challenges and crises we cannot foresee. We need to know who he is.

It should go without saying that I can’t give you the final word on Ryan. I’ve never spoken to him. As far as I know, we’ve never been in the same room. But I can tell you what kind of young man is attracted to Rand’s philosophy, how it changes him, where you can see Rand’s influence on Ryan’s thinking today, and what it says that he carries those beliefs into middle age. Along the way, we may learn something about Rand’s influence on the conservative movement in general.

What Rand stood for: selfishness. In a nutshell, Rand’s philosophy is the anti-gospel. She’s explicit about this, as I have previously noted.

In the gospel worldview, people need to choose between selfishly piling up wealth for themselves and virtuously helping others. So Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and money” and advises the rich young man to sell everything he owns and give the proceeds to the poor.

Rand flips that value system upside-down. To her, selfishness is virtue. All good things, even social goods, come from individuals acting selfishly: Thomas Edison wants to be rich and famous, so he invents the light bulb that benefits all of us.

It follows that capitalism is the only moral economic system, because it best expresses selfish virtue. (If you’re having trouble grasping this, combine the theories of trickle-down economics, the invisible hand of the market, and homo economicus — then multiply by a thousand.)

The relationships between Rand’s heroic characters demonstrate how friendship and even love can be re-interpreted as selfish. Some people make the love-is-selfish point cynically, but not Rand: In her mind she’s redeeming friendship and love by attaching them to the selfishness that she believes is the prime virtue.

Tellingly, there are no hero-parents in Rand’s novels, and Rand had no children herself. Also, the relationship-value of her heroes never crashes, so we don’t know how Dominique Francon would react if Howard Roark developed Alzheimer’s.

What Rand stood for: elitism. In Rand’s telling of history, all human progress comes from a tiny creative elite (think Edison’s light bulb again) and they alone deserve the fruits of that progress. In the speech that epitomizes Atlas Shrugged, John Galt says:

If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

Rearden the inventor/industrialist not only owns his innovations, he and his fellow capitalists are the sole heirs of humanity’s technological legacy. Workers inherit nothing from the geniuses of the past, except through their employers’ generosity. (I’ve written about that aspect of Rand’s philosophy here.)

The non-creative masses attach to the Reardens like leeches or barnacles. Christianity, socialism, and other philosophies that make selfishness a vice are tricks by which the “parasites” make the producers feel guilty about claiming what is rightfully theirs. The Fountainhead‘s hero Howard Roark voices the eternal victimhood of the creative elite:

Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. … Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build.

The plot of Atlas Shrugged stands the labor movement upside-down: The job-creators go on strike, vanishing with their wealth (even their inherited wealth) and leaving the parasites to suck each other’s blood. “If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society,” strike-leader John Galt says, “it will be on our moral terms.” Naturally, the economy collapses, and the novel ends with the newly-appreciated strikers preparing to return and reinvigorate the impoverished world with their productive genius.

Why this appeals. Like polio, Randism typically strikes in adolescence — for good reasons.

One of the most frustrating things about adolescence is the way grown-ups use your lack of experience to discount your opinions. So teens are particularly attracted to theories that turn experience inside-out: Adults aren’t experienced, they’re indoctrinated. Our corrupt culture looks at everything backwards, so the longer you have lived in it uncritically, the further you are from reality.

The most attractive teen philosophies are bit-flips: The wrongness of the culture can be summed up in one idea, where the culture says true instead of false or yes instead of no. Once you reverse that single bad decision everything becomes clear, so a college student who has flipped that bit is infinitely wiser than any uncorrected greybeard professor.

Second, in the same way that my-real-parents-are-royal is the characteristic fantasy of childhood, my-unique-potential-is-unappreciated is the characteristic fantasy of adolescence. Tell a teen-age boy that there is a hidden aristocracy of talent, and he will start designing his coat-of-arms. The much higher probability that he was born to be a drudge never registers.

Finally, Rand’s ideas are particularly seductive to boys. I’ve never been clear on the exact socio-biological mechanisms, but boys in general have a harder time learning empathy than girls do. It’s not that we don’t care about others, it’s that seeing their point-of-view is work. It doesn’t come naturally. The boy who happily gobbles down the last donut may be honestly distressed to look up and realize that other people wanted it.

To become mature, men need to discipline themselves to imagine how other people’s legitimate interests might conflict with their own. Until you learn that habit — OK, until I learned that habit — I was constantly running afoul of rules that seemed arbitrary and restrictions that I imagined had been contrived purely to frustrate me.

So my elders told me that selfishness was a vice, but Rand flipped that bit and made it the essence of virtue. What a relief to know that my basic wiring was right all along, and that the only point-of-view I ought consider was my own! All those authority figures lecturing about respect for others were just trying to enmesh me in the culture’s fundamental corruption.

In addition to being male, I was white and healthy, and (though not as well-to-do as Ryan) I grew up with all the opportunities middle-class kids used to take for granted. Liberals might try to call me to account for my privileges — how did I justify them? what social responsibilities did they place on me? — but Rand set all that aside. Instead, I could identify with a victimized upper class of Roark-like geniuses.

Why it fades. Eventually, teens get the life experience their elders faulted them for not having. You meet people of many types, see how they approach life, and how (over time) it works out for them. As I did that, here’s what I noticed:

  • Self-interest is a really crappy model for love and friendship. I force-fit it for a while, but eventually I noticed that the people whose relationships I envied didn’t live that way.
  • Greed is ugly. When I look back on things I did out of greed, I’m rarely proud of myself.
  • Life is complicated. No One Big Idea explains what’s right or wrong with the world.
  • There is no aristocracy of talent — most people are good at something — and while the correlation between wealth and talent or hard work is positive, it’s not that high.

Most of all, as I got into life and began to have my own modest successes, the need to think of myself as special or tortured (like Rand’s mythical discoverer of fire) lost its power. The world will little note nor long remember what I do, but I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been important to me, so I’m content to let other people’s lives be important to them. I don’t need to see others as an undeserving mass trying to usurp the glory that is rightfully mine.

Rand and Ryan. Like me and so many others, Ryan found Rand as a teen-ager. He told the Atlas Society in 2005:

I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.

He tries to play his Randism down when he would rather appear Catholic, but it never really goes away. In 2009 he said:

It doesn’t surprise me that sales of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have surged lately with the Obama administration coming in. Because it’s that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel.

Ryan buys into Rand’s framing of the great fight between individualism and collectivism, and he admires her for laying out “the moral case for capitalism”. That moralism is what makes compromise impossible: Good cannot compromise with Evil. Any compromise between Purity and Corruption is a victory for Corruption.

Rand’s villains never have a legitimate point of view. Some are evil incarnate, while others refuse to understand the truth because of its inconvenience. But always, the truth is readily apparent to anyone who wants to know it.

I can see that mindset working in Ryan in more than just his pro-1% policies. In his Atlas Society talk, Ryan notes that unreformed government spending is projected to grow eventually to 26% of GDP and concludes “Autopilot will get them where they want to go.”

Them? The conspiring collectivists — Dick Gephardt, Nancy Pelosi, and Ted Kennedy. They’re not trying to solve any social problems, they’re just trying to make government bigger for its own sake. So if Medicare costs more, they win.

Similarly, in a 2010 anti-abortion article he says “we cannot go on forever feigning agnosticism” about the full human rights of fertilized eggs. Pro-choicers can’t really doubt the infinite moral value of zygotes or the government’s competence to make that judgment, we’re just “feigning”.

But most of all, Rand is the source of Ryan’s Makers vs. Takers worldview. Like many other Republicans, Ryan has connected two statistics: that about half the population doesn’t owe income tax and half live in a household getting some kind of government assistance to paint a false picture of two fixed and separate classes: those who work and those who mooch.

In reality, the two groups overlap and flow into each other: People who paid into Social Security while they had jobs are now retired and drawing out. The hard-working minimum-wage WalMart clerk needs food stamps to feed her children. In another household, one spouse works while the other collects unemployment, or both work while their college student gets a Pell grant or S-CHIP helps care for their sick toddler. Only in Randist mythology does society divide into Makers and Takers.

Why didn’t it fade for Ryan. This is where I can only speculate. But three explanations make sense to me.

First, even at age 42, Ryan hasn’t had much life experience. He went to Washington as a congressional intern at 21, and he has lived in the conservative echo chamber ever since. During that time, he hasn’t made a product or had a customer. Since 28, when he entered Congress, he hasn’t had a boss.

Second, the company he keeps. One of the most interesting chapters in The Audacity of Hope has senate-candidate Obama riding to a fund-raiser on a private jet. He contemplates how much time he spends raising money from the very wealthy. How much, he wonders, is this constant need to appeal to the rich changing the way he thinks?

I don’t believe Ryan has that level of introspective intelligence. As the Koch brothers’ favorite congressman, Ryan spends more time with richer people than Obama ever could have. Plutocrats love his high-school convictions, so why change?

And finally, in many ways Ryan is living his adolescent dream. He can put out a budget full of holes, with numbers that don’t add up, and read about how brave and brainy he is. He is the ideological leader of the Republican caucus, the true star of the 2012 convention. If he grew up wanting to be Howard Roark, lots of people are telling him he succeeded.

Ryan does remind me of some fictional characters, but not Roark or Galt. To me, Paul Ryan resembles David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel, the middle-aged rockers of Spinal Tap. Probably they were good boys once, but the rock-star life has robbed them of the experiences they needed to grow up. Proclaimed as geniuses at an early age, they enter their 40s believing that the puerile thoughts of their teens are still deep and weighty.

[This article completes my Ryan trilogy: I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To and Paul Ryan: Veteran of the War on Women are the other parts. I hope I can move on now.]

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The Monday Morning Teaser

September 3, 2012 – 9:00 am

Like last week, this week’s Sift will have only one main article. The rise of Paul Ryan is making me revisit my misspent Objectivist youth in “Ayn, Paul, and Me”.

In the weekly summary, everybody was talking about Clint Eastwood’s empty chair. They were also talking about where Eastwood debated the chair — apparently at some kind of Republican get-together in Tampa. I must have missed it.

Oh yeah — it was the Republican National Convention, where we found out that George W. Bush is an un-person. Eight years of recent American history disappeared down the memory hole. Maybe the Democrats will figure out how to dredge them up this week.

Also, the convention raised the stakes in a brewing conflict between the press and the Romney campaign. Politicians have never been known as truth-tellers, but Romney is lying in a no-apologies fact-check-this way that threatens the foundations of political journalism. Journalists are starting to strike back, but it might be too late.

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