Uniform Hieroglyphic

Rats Scramble Off Ryan's Ship

Newt Gingrich's political triangulation notwithstanding, I thought most Republicans would wait for the outcome of tomorrow's special election in upstate New York before deciding to scramble off the sinking ship that is Paul Ryan's draconian budget cutting proposal.

If you haven't been following the race in New York’s 26th congressional district--to fill the seat vacated by Craigslist Congressman Chris Lee--in a solidly Republican district GOP State Assemblywoman Jane Corwin now trails Democractic challenger Kathy Hochul in some polls. And the issue that has scuttled Corwin's cakewalk has been Ryan's plan to slash Medicare.

Well, Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown--a Republican who will face re-election in a very blue state--didn't wait for the election, scrambling off the Ryan boat in a guest colum in Politico this morning.

Writes Brown:

While I applaud Ryan for getting the conversation started, I cannot support his specific plan — and therefore will vote “no” on his budget.

Why can’t I go along with the Ryan Medicare plan?

First, I fear that as health inflation rises, the cost of private plans will outgrow the government premium support— and the elderly will be forced to pay ever higher deductibles and co-pays. Protecting those who have been counting on the current system their entire adult lives should be the key principle of reform.

Second, Medicare has already taken significant cuts to help pay for Obama’s health care plan. The president and Congress cut a half trillion dollars to the private side of Medicare — meaning seniors are at risk of losing their Medicare Advantage coverage.

Another key principle is that seniors should not have to bear a disproportionate burden.

Brown's arguments are all reasonable. But they're also a rhetorical screen behind which lurks one simple political reality--seniors vote, and seniors don't want Medicare cut--and two complex political realities--first, that after years of conservative demagoging about the evils of government spending the electorate is profoundly confused about just what the government does; and second, that for all the political potency that demonizing government spending seems to posses, people don't actually like to see government spending cut if it's spending that benefits them.

For evidence of the confusion and ambiguity one needs to look no farther than the GOP sponsored town hall meetings in recent years at which angry voters continually and routinely tell GOP lawmakers to keep government out of their Medicare!

Even after the Ryan budget proposal goes down in flames, as it inevitably will, Republican candidates like Brown--who was for the Ryan plan before he was against it--will be on the defensive, and they will certainly be continually tested on the issue of entitlement cuts by every Democratic challenger. But for Dems, the brouhaha over Medicare ought to be something they use not just as a means of tarring their opponents but also as an opportunity to explain their principles: that government isn't inherently bad; that we form governments to do for one another collectively what we can't do so easily for ourselves as individuals; and that in fact there are many things on which government spends tax dollars--Medicare included--which, like that biggest of budget lines, the GOP spending sacred cow of defense, make us better and stronger as a people and as a nation

 

Polls and the People Who Love Them

It's a popular rhetorical move among conservative pols to twist polling on issues they are concerned with into broad assertions that they, and not their political opponents, are the voice of the American people.

The list of things "the American people don't want"--determined by polls which inevitably proceed from one side of a debate or another and are packed with polemically slanted questions--according to Republicans in last election were the Obama healthcare reform package (continually mis-characterized as a government takeover of health care--if anything it's a government subsidy for private industry), gay marriage, economic stimulus, deficit spending, and liberalism itself.

Well, here's another thing that, by the same criteria "the American people don't want": public workers unions stripped of their collective bargaining rights.

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll: "Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to 33 percent."

A Pew poll more specifically focused on the situation in Wisconsin found a a 41-32% split in favor of public workers (with a full 21 percent either not preferring one side or another don't know).

And among Wisconsin voters, a Public Policy Polling survey found that if November's election between Governor Scott Walker and Democratic opponent Tom Barrett were held today, Barrett would win big, 52 to 45%, mostly as a result of a shift among blue collar GOP voters.

It's actually Republicans, more so than Democrats or independents, whose shifting away from Walker would allow Barrett to win a rematch if there was one today. Only 3% of the Republicans we surveyed said they voted for Barrett last fall but now 10% say they would if they could do it over again. That's an instance of Republican union voters who might have voted for the GOP based on social issues or something else last fall trending back toward Democrats because they're putting pocketbook concerns back at the forefront and see their party as at odds with them on those because of what's happened in the last month.

Precisely the same kind of polemical polling--with the same sorts of leading questions, issues about the nature of those polled and the underlying agendas of the pollsters--produced the polls GOP candidates cited in November to claim they were the standard bearers for the will of the people.

But this morning, with exactly the same sorts of polls clearly showing the public favoring preserving the power of public unions, conservatives are up in arms about polling methods, cohorts, and the like--complaints the same folks never raise when equally colored polls return the results that they favor.

American politics and journalism have each become far too reliant on polls. Not only are polls themselves packed with inherent flaws--the inevitable biases, the small sampling sizes, the unreliability of respondents, the unwillingness of people to participate, the increasing difficulty reaching respondents through traditional means--but they see to serve, for journalists and politicians alike, as a new kind of ersatz class of facts, illuminating little.

Sure, polls can work fairly well in the context of simple yes or no questions, or even in elections between two candidates, where there are binary choices with none of the ambiguity, complexity, or subtlety presented when you try to reduce to a pollable question issues and attitudes that humans reflexively approach with nuance polls can't capture. If a respondent tries to answer a poll question with the real nuance and ambiguity most humans feel about more complex questions than Coke or Pepsi, all that happens is the response is invalidated.

But polls and surveys have come to govern our public lives. Politicans make all their decisions based on poll results. And increasingly new organizations use them as substitutes for substantive coverage. The New York Times off lead story today is the poll it conducted with CBS News, a glorified "man in the street" piece, a work of journalistic alchemy that has the impact of reducing complex social attitudes to simple opinions and then presenting those opinions as facts.

Look, I'm as fascinated with poll results as anyone. I write about them and use them to inform me about a range of topics. But I'm always aware of the limitation inherent in their methodology and would never be so bold as to proclaim that on the basis of the poll "the American people" can be said to want one thing or another. 

As a side note, last night I happened to catch Jamila Wignot's documentary about the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire on WGBH's American Experience series. The film is terrific, replete with period photography from the tragedy that I had never seen before. The famous fire--in which 146 mostly teenage girls perished in a sweatshop a year after a strike led to concession like a 52 hour work week and 4 paid holidays but left the workers unable to unionize--was a galvanizing moment in the history of American labor. That 100 year old event is instructive in the history of the current disputes in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Sure, public employees today don't work in dangerous sweatshops. But America is at an historic crossroads and needs to decide how it is going to support it's aging population as it leaves or is pushed out of the workforce and left to live on precisely those meagre income streams that are continually under GOP attack--social security and negotiated pension benefits. Let's hope we don't need the spectacle of starving homeless retirees freezing to death in tent cities in the upper midwest to realize the workers have a point.

BTW, you can watch the documentary here. Highly recommended.

Wisconsin Workers: The Last Line of Defense for American Labor

American labor has been taking on the chin for 30 years.

Broad economic changes--from globalization and outsourcing, to technological changes in manufacturing, shipping, delivery--have forced both public and private unions into a generation of givebacks which not only have worsened financial conditions of members but also have undermined union strength. Sometimes is has seemed that the only job of union leaders has been to negotiate the size of layoffs and pay and benefits cuts for member every few years.

It started of course with the union-busting Ronald Regan's wholesale firing of the nation's air traffic controllers in 1981 because the had gone on strike. It was a moment that changed labor relations in America forever--making replacing striking workers no longer anathema but standard operating practice and neutering the strike, organize labor's most powerful weapon, as leverage.

From that day to this, it has been one roll back after another for union workers. The ensuing years have led to shrinking wages, shrinking workforces, and shrinking pensions for blue collar union workers--who once could count on working class jobs that paid enough and provided enough stability to allow them to buy a home,  to pay for the next generation to become college educated and to retire, opening up jobs for new workers.

But lo these 30 years, as union power has waned under an organized, post-Regan assault, blue collar non-service jobs have disappeared from these shores, and the American dream of class mobility has eroded, it has been the enduring and passionately-cherished dream of conservatives generally and the Republican party in particular to eliminate unions in the United States altogether.

And the battle raging in Wisconsin between Republican lawmakers and state workers may be a decisive one in determining whether or not conservatives achieve their dream.

Make no mistake about it, destroying the ability of the state's public workers to unionize and negotiate from the position of strength in numbers--and by extension beginning the process of dismantling public workers unions across the country--is the dark heart of the proposed law that has driven thousands of workers into the streets and led Democratic lawmakers to flee the state to prevent the state's senate from achieving a quorum.

Need proof? Listen to this interview from last night's Hardball broadcast that Chris Matthews conducted with Wisconsin State Sen. Glenn Grothman:

MATTHEWS: Would you like to get rid of the public employee unions altogether, just get rid of them?

GROTHMAN :...Personally I would yes.

MATTHEWS: So you don't believe in collective bargaining for public employees period?

GROTHMAN: No I don't think public employees need collective bargaining, that's correct.

Here is the crux of the issue that his driven state workers into the streets and Democratic lawmakers across state lines. It's not the givebacks proposed in the bill--an increase in the amount of money workers contribute to their pension fund and health care coverage--which Democratic lawmakers say they are open to negotiating. It is the sweeping language that will strip state workers of the power to collectively bargain on any issue but wages--not work rules, not workplace safety, not pensions, that have people up in arms.

Stripping unions of the power to negotiate on behalf of members has nothing to do with closing Wisconsin's budget gap, but everything to do with wiping out the power of unions, and it serves only two interests--anti-union politicians who suffer at the hands of organized groups of voters who oppose them; and corporate interests who--as they did following Reagan's firing of the Patco workers--will use the political cover of the public measure to work to achieve the same kind of spaying of union power in the private sector.

The images of 15,000 workers in the streets, many occupying the Wisconsin state house, warms my heart. But it should also give lie to the grand, ludicrous fantasy of conservative populism--that the GOP is for the little guy and is doing what is can and should to give working stiffs a chance to better their economic circumstances.

It should go without saying that unionization and collective bargaining have done more to improve working conditions, salaries, job security, and the standard of living for working Americans than 30 years of upper income tax cuts, capital gains tax cuts, government spending cuts, and corporate deregulation--all those cherished measures that conservatives continually claim, falsely, are designed to improve economic conditions for average Americans.

It should go without saying, but in fact it needs to be said because too many Americans--including many whose own economic interests are much more closely aligned with those of the Wisconsin state workers than with those who do benefit from Republican economic policies--fall for the fraudulent rhetoric of GOP leaders like House Speaker John Boehner who had this to say about the situation in Wisconsin:

Republicans in Congress - and reform-minded GOP governors like Scott Walker, John Kasich  and Chris Christie - are daring to speak the truth about the dire fiscal challenges Americans face at all levels of government, and daring to commit themselves to solutions that will liberate our economy and help put our citizens on a path to prosperity.

Stripping unions of their right to bargain will do exactly the opposite of putting our citizen on a path to prosperity, it will hasten the continuing erosion of decent paying working class jobs, decrease workplace safety, and expand the widening gap between rich asset owners in America and the working poor and middle classes. Don't believe the hype.

Birthers Now GOP Majority, Truth Optional

Americans are living in a new dark ages in which science bends before faith, in which fanatical delusions are discussed as if they were rational ideas, in which the very facts before our faces are perpetually under assault.

From Glenn Beck's surreal and paranoiac theory of a cabal of atheistic communists conspiring with fanatical Islamists in the Middle East, to the routine assaults on peer reviewed science by groups of organized skeptics--doubters on global warming, on autism and childhood vaccines, to the ideological, Soviet-style rewriting of history textbooks by panels of bureaucrats in states like Texas; we now live in a culture where there's no shared truth left to bind us.

How we got to this point will be a matter for sociologists and historians to puzzle out in decades to come. Living in the middle of our descent into madness it's hard for us to have the necessary perspective.

Did the steady erosion of faith in government's honesty, beginning with the revelations of The Pentagon Papers and Watergate, play a role? The flagging quality of public education that has left us with a nation in which one quarter of us don't know who we fought the Revolutionary War against certainly must shoulder a portion of the blame. So too the twisted cult of "balance" in journalism, requiring, as it does, that reporters treat every bit of information as if it were opinion, placing one attributed "fact" next to an equal and opposite one regardless of the independently verifiable truth or falsity of the attributed information.

Conservatives would argue that the growth of widespread relativism in society at large, which proceeds from the notion that there's more than one truth, is to blame for our inability to discern truth from falsity. Maybe. But widespread faith in the truth as arbitrated by a single authority that demands fealty--a church, a government, a political movement--while inspiring unanimity of mind, rarely leads adherents closer to facts, those nettlesome empirical things that we now routinely contest. Maybe it's the sheer cognitive dissonance of living with all these competing notions that has driven us off the deep end.

Nevertheless here we find ourselves, in a pernicious and fundamental contest for reality itself. The latest evidence of the malleability of truth in American life comes from Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling who reports on a new poll finding that 51% of likely Republican presidential primary voters believe the President Obama was not born in the United States. Jensen writes:

Birthers make a majority among those voters who say they're likely to participate in a Republican primary next year. 51% say they don't think Barack Obama was born in the United States to just 28% who firmly believe that he was and 21% who are unsure. The GOP birther majority is a new development. The last time PPP tested this question nationally, in August of 2009, only 44% of Republicans said they thought Obama was born outside the country while 36% said that he definitely was born in the United States. If anything birtherism is on the rise.

Or as PPP commentor Marvin Marks : "This means that only 28% of GOP primary voters are sane."

Writes Steve Benen at Washington Monthly: "In other words, the Republican fringe is no longer the fringe."

In the spirit of trying, for as long as possible, to cling to our shared sanity, I present a link to Jonathan Strong's recap of those facts that we do know about President Obama's birth . Why the President will not release the long form birth certificate does remain an open question and one can only suspectit is because the document possesses some embarrassing personal detail. But the State of Hawaii's Certification of Live Birth and contemporaneous birth announcements leave no supportable doubt about the location of the president's birth.

Nevertheless nearly three quarters of prime Republican voters cling to an unsupported truth of their own.

There are those, like Dave Weigel of Slate who see the poll results as a mere political proxy in highly partisan times :

Does that mean that 72 percent of Republicans think Obama should be disqualified from the presidency? No. It suggests that birtherism has become another screen for extreme partisanship.

But I agree with Steve M at No More Mr. Nice Blog :

I don't see any reason why we shouldn't believe the vast majority of birthers mean exactly what they're saying and absolutely believe that Obama has become president through deliberate deceit.

You have to remember that these people feel they're at war with Obama, Democrats, liberalism, socialism, and so on (up to and including a Kenyan anti-colonialist Piven/Cloward-meets-sharia vast conspiracy).

Believers are unconvinceable. Reason holds no sway in the kingdom of faith. So is there any hope left for America?

In the 1330s, when first advancing the notion of the Dark Ages, Petrach wrote:

My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.

You see even he was a believer. I'm not quite so sanguine.

Murdering Abortion Providers Could Become Legal in South Dakota

In a grotesque and barbaric escalation of the culture war declared in the 1990s by the American political right, the House of Representatives in South Dakota--which is already considering a bill to require household gun ownership in that state--is considering a measure that will make it legal to kill an abortion provider.

To be sure the measure--in the form of two amendments to the state's definition of justifiable homicide-- construed narrowly, wouldn't permit the kind of murder and political terror that has led to the assassination of eight doctors in America since 1993. Reading the language of the statute it's hard to imagine it sheltering a third party killer of a doctor. But it would provide an air tight defense for, say, the husband of a woman about to undergo an abortion who walks into a clinic and guns down the medical professionals attempting the provide the procedure.

"The bill in South Dakota is an invitation to murder abortion providers," Vicki Saporta, the president of the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers, told Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones.

The measure was supported according to Sheppard by "a parade of right-wing groups—the Family Heritage Alliance, Concerned Women for America, the South Dakota branch of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, and a political action committee called Family Matters in South Dakota..." who testified in favor of measure before a South Dakota House Committee earlier this month.

In one way it can be seen as part of the creeping effort by conservative activists to extend the full legal rights and protections of people to fetuses. In another way it can be seen as a bold expansion of the use of state power to coddle those who commit violence in the name of ideology.

It's easy to dismiss the practical effects of the measure were it to be signed into law. For one thing, the only abortion provider in South Dakota is one flown in weekly by Planned Parenthood according to Firedoglake. For another thing, the measure is might well be unconstitutional given the federal constitutional protection that abortion rights possess.

But the very fact of the legislative effort to move the measure forward--and it passed the state's House Judiciary committee by a 9-3 party line vote--indicated a profound change in the tactics of culture warriors from legislating prohibitions or controlling government spending as a means of advancing their social agenda to providing a legal shield for homicidal, moral vigilantism.

The very notion of a culture war should be anathema to a free society. Going back to Bismark's Kulturkampf targeting German Catholics in which Catholic clerics were jailed, efforts by governments to declare war on moral or ideological opponents have been hallmarks of authoritarian regimes.

In the climate of political violence and intimidation that has marked American conservatism during the Obama administration, the South Dakota measure, while exceptional, is, unfortunately, not entirely shocking.

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, & the American Dream

This week the Obama Administration plans to present a report to Congress to address Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the mortgage finance and guarantor companies the government seized two and a half years ago in an effort to stabilize the US housing market and save the nation's banking system. By all accounts--leaked widely in the press this morning--the crux of the report will be a variety proposals from spinning the entities back into the private sector to eliminating them altogether.

Perhaps nothing the administration does--from appointing Supreme Court justices to starting or ending US military commitments in the Middle East and elsewhere--will have a more important and lasting impact on American life, presuming that a end to government home mortgage support is even possible, fiscally or politically. For better and worse Fannie and Freddie--like a foreign object in the human body around which years of tissue have grown--are so intertwined with the American economy that surgically removing them without killing the patient will be a nearly impossible operation.

For one thing, it's almost impossible to understate the importance of mortgage lending to the US economy. We're talking about a $10.6 trillion chunk of cash, so even seemingly marginal changes, say, to the value of loans the entities guarantee to the amount of mortgage backed securities they own will send shockwaves through the economy as a whole. For another thing, since the economic meltdown, the two government sponsored enterprises have become even more crucial to the barely-breathing US housing market than before--today backing 90 percent of all new mortgage loans. As weak as the vital signs are for the US housing market, they are almost entirely dependent on Fannie and Freddie like a coma patient is dependent on a ventilator. Finally, and I know conservatives don't want to hear it, but Fannie and Freddie historically have actually done a better job managing risk and preventing the kind of bubble and crash we witnessed in recent years than private sector lenders and investors.

That last statement flies in the face of ideological and lobbyist-financed arguments Republicans on the Hill are likely to raise when they get their hands on the President's report this week. For the GOP it's an article of faith that government intervention in the housing market was the primary cause of the housing bubble of the 2000s. I'm not saying that government played no role. Far from it--undoubtedly though the government helped fuel the housing bubble through tax incentives and credits of the sort that created financial benefits for consumers to borrow money; it's also certainly true that the market presence of a government or quasi-government buyer of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities bends markets the government's way. But more than anything it was the boom in the securitization of mortgage debt, and the leveraged-lending feeding frenzy it touched off on Wall Street, as well and the privatized Fannie and Freddy's need to compete in that market, that played the biggest role in flooding the market with credit regardless of a borrower's risk.

Look at this chart published today by the Wall Street Journal:

 

It's far from coincidental that the real estate bubble years correspond to a flood of private cash--much of it borrowed--into mortgage backed securities. During the boom years, stable credit spreads attracted investors from hedge funds to ibanks into a mostly unregulated market in MBS's and derivative investments on top of them. Sustaining this paper churning, money making machinery required constantly feeding the furnace with new loans, preferably higher interest loans like those made to subprime borrowers.

The result was a sand castle housing market destined to crumble as uncreditworthy borrowers defaulted on mortgages, real estate values declined, and leveraged investors as well as consumer banks (who had been freed from preserving cash thanks to the "innovation" of off balance sheet accounting) found they had nowhere near the cash reserves they needed to cover their losses.

Two an a half years after the federal government first started to triage the wounded lenders and borrowers, the housing disaster is no better and trauma cases abound.

Writing last September in US News and World Report, Mort Zuckerman offered a tidier description than I can of the landscape then:

The economics of home ownership could hardly be more disastrously opposite to the expectations of generation after generation. Millions of homes have been foreclosed upon. About 11 million residential properties, or about 23 percent of such properties with mortgages, have mortgage balances that exceed the home's value. Given the total inventory, and the shadow inventory of empty homes, many experts expect prices to fall another 5 to 10 percent. That would bring the decline to 40 percent from peak-to-trough and expose an estimated 40 percent of homeowners to mortgages in excess of the value of their homes.

The growing risk of disappearing equity invites more strategic defaults on mortgages. Homeowners with negative equity are tempted simply to mail in their keys to their friendly lender even if they can afford the mortgage payment. Banks don't want to take the deflated properties onto their books because they will then have to declare a financial loss and still have to worry about maintaining the properties.

Little wonder foreclosure has not been enforced on a quarter of the people who haven't made a single mortgage payment in the last two years. A staggering 8 million home loans are in some state of delinquency, default, or foreclosure. Another 8 million homeowners are estimated to have mortgages representing 95 percent or more of the value of their homes, leaving them with 5 percent or less equity in their homes and thus vulnerable to further price declines. A huge percentage will never be able to catch up on their payment deficits.

The pace of foreclosures was briefly slowed by loan modifications brought on by government programs. Alas, the programs have not been working as hoped. Half of the borrowers have been redefaulting within 12 months, even after monthly payments were cut by as much as 50 percent. The foreclosure pipeline remains completely clogged. As it unclogs, a new wave of homes will come on the market and precipitate additional downward pressure on prices. The number of foreclosed homes put on the market by banks will be a more powerful influence on the further decline of home prices than either consumer demand or interest rates.

A well-balanced housing market has a supply of about five to six months. These days the supply is more than double that, as inventory backlog has surged to about a 12½ months'....

Things have only gotten worse since last fall with prices continuing to drop and foreclosures and delinquencies continuing to occur.

The economic price of this disaster is clear in the millions of foreclosed houses clogging the market, in the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent to bailout collapsed banking institution, in wipeout of asset values of American families. But the impact on the national psyche is more subtle. When you ask people do define "the American dream" many will evoke images of the home in the suburbs with two cars in the garage, three kids playing in a picket fenced yard. That's not what writer James Truslow Adams meant exactly when he coined the phrase in his 1931 book The Epic of America. Here's what Adams wrote:

...that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Class mobility, that's the American dream. And while its erosion has more to do with things like the loss of high-paying working class jobs, the decline of American primary education, and the crippling costs of college and graduate schools, it remains intimately tied to hearth and home as  both  asset--since purchasing a home will always be the most substantial investment most American families will ever make and therefore will always be crucial to class mobility--and as symbol--since our homes not only provide the roofs over our heads but also stand as a metaphor for our sense of community.

While many Americans' eyes may glaze over as talk begins in Washington of mortgage backed securities and long term mortgage rates, make no mistake, as much as anything lawmakers will be talking about the aspirations that bind us as a people. Pay attention.

Who Loves the Gun?

As an interesting follow up to my piece earlier this week on Americans' enduring embrace of the gun as weapon and symbol have a look at the demographic breakdown of a survey by the Pew Center for the People & the Press on the subject of which is more important, preserving gun ownership right or controlling gun access.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that men, older folks, whites, and those who abide in rural areas are more likely to lean towards gun rights while women, younger folks, blacks and hispanics, and those who live in urban and suburban areas are more likely to favor gun control.

But most interesting are the regional demographics. While Easterners are predictably more concerned with gun control than gun rights (60-36% margin), Southerner's concern is almost equality divided (49-48%).

The big split in the South breaks down between the South Atlantic states (including Washington DC, DE, FL, GA, NC, SC, VA and WV)--whose residents lean towards gun control by a 54-43% margin--and the East South Central (AL, KY, MS, TN) and West South Central (AR, LA, OK, TX) regions.

In Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas respondents were more concerned with preserving gun rights by a 53-43 margin, while in Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee, respondents were more concerned with preserving gun rights by a 61-36 margin, almost exactly the inverse of the attitude in the Eastern states.

One other interesting finding, among the Christian religious sects whose responded Pew parsed, all Protestants leaned towards gun rights by a 62-34 margin, but Catholics favored gun control by a 62-36 margin.

Eyes on the Prize

February is of course "Black History Month." Inevitably, like all things dealing with race in America, Black History Month functions as a blank slate onto which people project their own attitudes, often giving rise to politically charged questions like "Is Black History Month Necessary?" or  "Can Whites Write Black History?"

But for me, having seen the nation move from de jure segregation to the election of an African American president in my lifetime, and seeing among some younger folks today possessing an almost blase attitude towards the enormity of that social change (and the cost in sweat and blood that achieving that change required), Black History Month offers an important opportunity to inform younger Americans, and to remind ourselves, that our national ideal of the equality of man is only as good and as strong as we are in our determination to put it into practice.

Thats what I think of when I see this video of civil right movement era movie footage accompanied by Mavis Staples with Ry Cooder singing "Eyes on the Prize" from her 2007 album We'll Never Turn Back.  If you're old enough to remember Jim Crow America, do the nation a favor this month and tell someone too young to have that memory what it was like and that yes, it can happen here and did, but also that with persistence and determination change was possible.

 

Guns, and We Americans Who Love Them

In American life there's no more enduring tribal totem of national identity than the gun.

Not the bald eagle. Not the great seal. Not the mighty Mississippi nor the majestic Hudson. Not the Rocky Mountains nor the Great Plains. Not the automobile. Not the skyscraper. Not the buffalo. Not the hamburger. Not Whitman's leaves of grass (his uniform hieroglyphic) nor Melville's white whale. Not denim. Not baseball. Not apple pie. Not rock and roll. Not even the highway nor the open road, although these latter two are the only things I can think of that approach the gun for the freight of symbolism it carries--of freedom and self-determination, of power and will, of individual strength and national might.

From Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun to Cypress Hill's Hand on the Glock the gun has served Americans as a remarkably malleable symbol of disparate ideals--in those two works alone the gun serves as a symbol of gender equality and alpha male dominance, of frontier life and urban life, of self-determination and of the imposition of one's will.

The gun's image in American life was informed first by the militia culture of the colonial era in "defense" against Native Americans and the British--when the gun stood as a symbol of national unity and collective action; later the image of the gun was formed by the frontier culture of the Western expansion--when the gun stood as a symbol of survival and of the ability of the individual to tame the wilderness.

But in the early days of America actually gun ownership was not as widespread as today, dominated by Eastern and Southern elites, in romantic emulation of English hunting culture.

It was Samuel Colt, more than anyone else, who fixed the image of the gun in the American mind--as a product of American ingenuity and industry and a tool of American manhood and domestic tranquility--advertising his revolvers by evoking images of would-be stagecoach robbers held off by Colt-wielding citizens, and of Colt himself, riding the range, firing at buffalo. And it was Colt who put gun ownership within the reach of every American, mass producing weapons that could sell for $20 a piece.

But it was the political assassinations of the 1960s, and the resulting push for gun control laws in the late 1960s and early 1970s that turned the gun into the symbol it is in American life today: a dividing line between left and right, a them against us front in a "culture war" freighting the gun with even more symbolic baggage, a new rhetorical totem that divides rather than unifies, which is what makes an effort by five South Dakota legislators to require gun ownership in that state a political gesture that is brilliant, nefarious, potent, and reckless.

Here's the story from yesterday's Sioux Falls Argus Leader:

Five South Dakota lawmakers have introduced legislation that would require any adult 21 or older to buy a firearm “sufficient to provide for their ordinary self-defense.”

 The bill, which would take effect Jan. 1, 2012, would give people six months to acquire a firearm after turning 21. The provision does not apply to people who are barred from owning a firearm. Nor does the measure specify what type of firearm. Instead, residents would pick one “suitable to their temperament, physical capacity, and preference.”

The measure is known as an act “to provide for an individual mandate to adult citizens to provide for the self defense of themselves and others.”

The bill is not designed to be passed or even to be seriously considered. Instead it's a pure bit of political theater created by its sponsors in the context of the legislative and judicial battle over health care reform's individual mandate to purchase health insurance:

Do I or the other cosponsors believe that the State of South Dakota can require citizens to buy firearms?," Rep. Hal Wick, R-Sioux Falls told the Argus Leader. "Of course not. But at the same time, we do not believe the federal government can order every citizen to buy health insurance."

Apparently the measure is not unique. Last month columnist Earl Morgan reported in the Jersey Journal  on a 30-year old ordinance in Kennesaw, Ga. requiring heads of households to own and maintain a gun and ammunition. And today No More Mister Nice Blog calls attention to a 2003 law in Geuda Springs, Kansas with a similar mandate, violation of which is punishable by a fine.

No, apparently the South Dakota proposal is not unique, but it does represent a new chapter in the American life of gun as symbol, one that obfuscates the constitutional issues it intends to clarify.

From Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:

I don’t think this bill makes the constitutional point its sponsor intends — state governments, unlike the federal government, are not limited to enumerated powers. But even the federal government could require citizens to own guns under its militia power, as opposed to the commerce power. In fact, it did just that in the Militia Act of 1792, but I rather doubt that this power would extend to requiring ObamaCare under that clause, which empowers Congress “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress."

Still the proposal does illumate the continuing power of the gun's symbolic power in American life, and how profoundly dangerous a weapon, even a symbolic one, can be in the wrong hands.

Bachmann, Palin & the End of History

The meaning of historical events are always open to interpretation. Sometimes even the facts are in dispute.

But what are we to make of the latest Tea Party twisting of both historical interpretation and historical fact?

I'm speaking, of course about Congresswoman Michelle Bachman's stunning revision of America's history of race slavery last weekend , and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's bizarre revision of the history of of the US/USSR space race during a FOX News interview this week .

In case you missed it, here's what Bachmann told Iowans For Tax Relief, speaking of The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution Bachmann said:

...we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.

The line was part of an extended riff aggrandizing our justifiably cherished ideal that "all men are created equal," which also included the following assertion, in all its twisted syntax:  How unique in all of the world, that one nation that was the resting point from people groups all across the world. It didn't matter the color of their skin, it didn't matter their language, it didn't matter their economic status...Once you got here, we were all the same.

Of course Bachmann's rap ignored the slave ownership of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and most if not all the Southern landed founding father; it ignored 70 years of weak-kneed political compromise designed to protect slavery and even expand it, followed by 5 years of bloody civil war, and another 100 years of failed reconstruction, political assassination, racial terrorism, and civil disobedience.

Meanwhile, in a post-SOTU interview on FOX News, Palin seized on President Obama's reference to the US response to the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite. Obama's point was that the US response to the Soviets beating the US into space led to a massive national response ending with US manned moon landings. That's the historical fact. But here's Palin's version:

...he needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory in that race to space, yes, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.

Wha? Somehow Palin managed to misrepresent the fact of the space race, then conflate the events of the 1960s with the events of the 1980s. Or, as The Washington Post's Stephen Stromberg writes  :

The Soviets didn't have an empire-draining debt problem until some 30 years after Sputnik passed over America. And when they did, it was in large part a result of massive overinvestment in heavy industry, which supported Soviet military pretensions. None of this is to argue that the Soviet economy is anything we should emulate. But let's at least get the basic facts right when we criticize it.

It's a fair guess that Palin thought she was borrowing her "insight" from the mythology of Ronald Reagan, who massively increased America's spending to spur the sort of competitive expenditure that contributed to the ballooning of Soviet debt in the 1980s. According to many conservatives, this was a -- if not the -- crucial factor that catalyzed the Soviet collapse.

But in claiming that the Soviets incurred their consequential debts long before Reagan was president, Palin ends up arguing that the Gipper wasn't nearly that responsible for the USSR spending itself to death. If a reverence for Reagan's anti-Soviet spending inspired her narrative in the first place, then this is incoherent. If she's just making this all up, then she's really also claiming that the Reagan-brought-down-the-USSR narrative is overstated.

Palin appears to be lazily checking a lot of Fox News boxes. She wants to criticize Obama's State of the Union address, so she grabs hold of the Sputnik line. She wants to make a point about debt, so she invents a history in which the USSR had a debt crisis decades before this inference could have made much sense. Even better -- her argument sounds like an implicit vindication of Reagan, but that really just makes it either self-contradictory or hostile to Reagan's legacy.

Perhaps Palin's confusion is to be expected if what reporter John Heilemann told 60 Minutes is true, speaking of Palin's VP Debate prep:

Her foreign policy tutors are literally taking her through, 'This is World War I, this is World War II, this is the Korean War. This is the how the Cold War worked.' Steve Schmidt had gone to them and said, 'She knows nothing,'" Heilemann told Cooper. "A week later, after the convention was over, she still didn't really understand why there was a North Korea and a South Korea.

Certainly ignorance is at the core of what's going on here. The national level of historical ignorance is astounding, witness the Marist Poll finding last summer that a full 26% of Americans could not identify that nation againstwhich the United States fought its war of independance!

But one can't help but wonder how much of this use of false history is a result of the ignorance of these lawmakers and their handlers and how much is a cynical and deliberate exploitation of the ignorance of the electorate. The Marist poll found the highest degree of ignorance about the Revolutionary War among the young, the female, and the Southern--fertile electoral hunting ground for female Tea Party spokespeople like Bachmann and Palin.