Category: Constitutional Issues

The Two-Edged Sword Of Federalism

The Daily Escape:

Mount Evans Road, 14,100′, Idaho Springs, CO – May 26, 2023 photo by Reid Neureiter

Here at the Wrongologist, we often talk about Constitutional rights, but we rarely talk about Federalism. So today, let’s lean into federal vs. states’ rights. We’ll start with the recent Supreme Court decision in Sackett vs. EPA, which concerned the power of the EPA to regulate wetlands. Last week, the Supreme Court concluded that the Clean Water Act only applies to wetlands with “a continuous surface connection” to bodies of water.

This defined what waterbodies are considered waters of the United States (WOTUS), an issue that has been in the courts for years. The ruling narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act, and severely limits the federal government’s ability to regulate wetlands.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion affirmed the principle that bureaucrats cannot broadly define statutory language. Alito’s opinion struck a blow for federalism. Federalism is a system of government in which the same territory is controlled by two levels of government. The US Constitution originally divided the exercise of political power between one national and many state governments. The national government is given control over matters affecting the whole nation. All other issues were reserved to the states.

  • Article VI of the Constitution contains the Supremacy Clause, which says that when the laws of the federal government are in conflict with the laws of a state’s government, the federal law supersedes the state law.
  • Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution describes specific powers which belong to the federal government. These powers are referred to as enumerated powers.
  • The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states those powers that are not delegated to the federal government.

The Sackett vs. EPA decision is another step in the Right-wing program to move as much federal government rule-making authority as possible to the states. This is the continuation of Nixon’s efforts to shrink the federal government’s power by devolving decisions to state and local governments. The best recent example of this is the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on abortion that wiped out the precedent set in Roe v. Wade that guaranteed a national right to abortion and passed that responsibility back to the states.

At the same time, the Right is moving to nationalize policy on social issues, from what books to allow on library shelves to limits on transgender rights, a rollback of state environmental actions, and an attack on anything that can be labeled as “woke.”

So we’ve got Red states pushing to centralize decisions about social and cultural issues in Washington, while the Right-wing Supreme Court pushes devolution of voting rights, abortion rights, and indeed national agency rule-making (EPA) to the states.

This 2023 brand of two-way Republican federalism is upending the delicate balance of power between the federal government and state governments. It raises questions about the allocation of authority, cooperation, and the ability of the national government even to define what is a pressing national issue.

Today’s Washington gridlock makes policymaking nearly impossible. That has shifted much of today’s policymaking to the states, where the Parties often have comfortable majorities. Many states (39) have government trifectas, with one Party controlling the governorship while holding majorities in the legislature, making policymaking simpler than in a divided and polarized US Congress.

Interest group activists have followed this trend and focused their efforts on these 39 states. Much of a state’s policies – abortion, voting rights, gun control, immigration, LGBT rights, healthcare, or taxation – are on widely divergent paths. For example:

  • In Democratic states it is easy to vote; in Republican states there are many barriers to voting.
  • In Democratic states fewer people are medically uninsured; in Republican states there are more uninsured people.
  • In Democratic states access to abortion is easier; in Republican states it is harder, if not criminalized.

Although federalism (for now) seems to protect the country from presidents amassing power in dictatorial ways, anti-democratic figures (think DeSantis and Abbott) are able, because of the resurgence of state-level policymaking, to transform Republican states into laboratories against democracy.

The Covid pandemic also put federalism to the test. The response to the pandemic highlighted the tension between national coordination and state autonomy. While the federal government provided guidance and resources, the implementation of measures like lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination campaigns, was largely left to individual states. This decentralized approach led to significant variations in pandemic response across the country, creating challenges in coordinating efforts and potentially exacerbating the spread of the virus.

Federalism properly implemented, brings government closer to the people and holds it accountable. But when badly implemented, you get the USA in 2023: A country trending toward autocracy.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 21, 2023

Top negotiators for Biden and Speaker McCarthy resumed talks Friday evening after the Republicans said the negotiations had to go on a “pause”. Roll Call reports that:

“After a nearly daylong setback, White House Counselor Steve Ricchetti, White House budget director Shalanda Young, Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., and House Financial Services Chairman Patrick T. McHenry, R-N.C., resumed talks at the Capitol shortly after 6 p.m.”

Time is running out for Congress to raise the debt ceiling. If not, the consequences are stark. Keeping the lines of communication open and giving away the store are two different things entirely. On to cartoons.

McCarthy’s toll booth:

The North Carolina legislature overrode Governor Roy Cooper’s veto  of a bill imposing a ten-week abortion ban. Will this ensure Democratic victory in North Carolina in 2024?

Texas has sued the Biden administration 29 times in a Texas Federal District Court. Now after banning mifepristone, Texas judges have new careers:

Durham’s report:

Disney’s Bob Iger asks DeSantis: “Does Florida want our jobs and taxes or not?” This is a severe kick in the balls:

Wrongo’s old enough to have seen Jim Brown play in Yankee Stadium against the NY Giants:

Trump’s one note:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 30, 2023

This month, Texas Senate Republicans passed three bills allowing religion into public schools. From Vox:

“The first, SB 1515, would require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous place” in classrooms. The other bill, SB 1396, would permit public schools to set aside time for students and staff members to pray or read the Bible and other religious texts. The third, SB 1556, would give employees the right to pray or “engage in religious speech” while on the job.”

Some of this sounds unconstitutional. You can be certain that plenty of Texans will be happy to comply as maliciously as possible next fall.

The three bills now go to the Texas House for approval. They follow Texas’s SB 797, which took effect in 2021 and requires schools to display “In God We Trust” signs.

When the Texas Right say they want to bring religion back into public schools, they mean they want to make public schools more Christian. This flies in the face of America becoming noticeably less religious over the past 20 years:  Weekly service attendance and religious self-identification are both down 20% overall, which translates to about 50 million fewer Americans than two decades ago.

This is ironic: If religious identification is to increase, it will have to come from “importing” traditional believers from the global south. But few of them are white. So that’s a problem for Trumpism and the reactionary Right. On to cartoons.

State-sponsored religion is hard to swallow:

Biden announces he’s running:

How do young voters fit in the race between these geriatrics?

A certain debate this time:

House Republicans pass a debt ceiling bill:

McCarthy wonders why Biden won’t talk:

Daylight come and he got to go home:

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Monday Wake Up Call- April 17, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Woodenshoe Tulip Festival with Mt. Hood in background, WA – April 2023 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

If you drink beer, you know that Bud Lite is terrible. Wrongo shares this opinion with the GOP, but for different reasons.

Wrongo hates the taste. Conservatives hate Bud Light because of a recent Bud Light promotion featuring influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman. Mulvaney posted a sponsored video on her Instagram account announcing that Bud Light had sent her a customized beer can with her face on it.

Bud sent the can to Mulvaney in celebration of the first anniversary of her transition.

Some on the Right are calling the brew a “Woke Mind Virus”. But shouldn’t the real focus be on the MAGA Mind Virus? The Right has created a kind of Bud-lash fever: Some have machine gunned or crushed cases of the beer with heavy equipment. Then a person or persons moved on to making bomb treats at a Bud plant in Van Nuys, CA. Several Budweiser facilities across the nation have also been targeted with bomb threats.

Many on the Right call for a boycott of the bestselling beer in the country. If that sounds ludicrous, it’s because it is. It’s also indicative of where we are in America today.

Trans issues are front and center in the GOP-inspired culture war. Anti-trans sentiment is on display by many on the right, targeting children’s health, sports, drag shows, and health care. It’s seen throughout Conservative media. Anti-trans legislation is growing. And it’s even entering the mainstream. From Vox:

“Mainstream publications like the NY Times increasingly follow the lead of anti-trans agitators, treating what should be understood as a fundamental human rights battle more like a semantic “debate,” fixating on terminology and labels and medical minutiae, instead of humanizing trans and nonbinary people and their experiences.”

Vox reports that this has created a contentious situation at the Times. In February, contributors and members of the Times’s staff posted an open letter protesting the paper’s escalating bias toward anti-trans talking points.

But the Bud-lash fever may be breaking. The Daily Beast reported that on Saturday, the Twitter account for the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) removed a fundraising post that trashed Bud Lite. Apparently, they realized that Anheuser-Busch isn’t some progressive company. In 2022, they gave the NRCC $464,505. The NRCC has decided that they like political donations more than they hate trans people.

Bud’s partnership with Mulvaney also triggered a nearly $5 billion drop in the Anheuser-Busch stock value as of last Wednesday.

On Friday, Anheuser-Busch released a tepid statement from its CEO, Brendan Whitworth, saying he is “responsible for ensuring every consumer feels proud of the beer we brew”:

“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”

The company cancelled an event in Missouri last week, citing safety concerns for its employees. Wrongo is against banning TikTok. Here’s a TikTok video of Bud Lite cans being crushed by a steam roller. Where else would we see news like this?

Boycotts are a tradition in America, so like all the others, this one will fade away. The difference with this one is how wound up Conservatives get about something as trivial as a one minute video that pitches Bud Lite.

Time to wake up America! These clowns will try to take you down in a hail of gun fire, saying it’s for God and Freedom, (loosely defined). They just can’t abide sharing the country (or political power) with people who aren’t just like them.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to “All I Ask of You” from the musical “Phantom of the Opera” which had its last Broadway performance yesterday. It opened on Broadway in January of 1988. Since then, Phantom has played almost 14,000 performances (the most in history) to more than 20 million people, grossing over $1.3 billion. An estimated 6,500 people have been employed by the production – including over 400 actors.

Here the song is performed by Michael Ball and Sarah Brightman (the original Christine) at London’s Royal Albert Hall Celebration for Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the play:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 16, 2023

America is in a literal death spiral. The more mass shootings take place, the more innocent people die. And then more of America’s Republican politicians tell us that only more guns will solve the problem.

Republicans say that school shootings would be minimized if we would just hire a security guard to cover the door of every school. But with school budgets under pressure, where will the money come from to hire them? And how would the GOP’s plan for out-gunning the next mass shooter turn out?

We need to see mass shooting as a form of domestic terrorism. We’ve moved from having ten Constitutional Amendments that most of us cared deeply about to a place where the Right only really cares about the Second Amendment. Maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised that there are so many Americans who care more about guns than they care about people.

For a certain group, that seems to be what America is all about. If they cared about freedom, nothing would be more of a priority than defending every person’s right to go about their daily lives without the threat of violence. If we really cared about the sanctity of human life, we would prioritize people over guns. On to cartoons.

The unholy trio who prioritize guns over people:

The GOP’s platform is turning into a cliff:

When your anti-human policy list is this long, you must be a Republican:

It isn’t a game:

Clarence is tracking mud into the Court:

Rep. Jim Jordan plans to investigate AG Bragg in NYC:

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Can America Come Back From Our Divide?

The Daily Escape:

Easter Sunday, Great Smokey Mountains NP – April 2023 photo by Melissa Russell

We’re back from our roughly 2,200 mile journey to Gettysburg PA, St. Augustine FL, and Charleston SC. The focus of our trip was visiting with family, and it didn’t disappoint. We saw about 40 family members in the three locations. Most are healthy and thriving, and there was lots of laughter.

But we also saw slices of different cultures than what we’re used to here in Connecticut. Wrongo wonders if the US has ever been as divided as it is now?

Yes we’ve been divided in the past, most notably before and during the Civil War. American schools still teach the Civil War to our kids, although like everything else, views on what it was fought about differ largely by geography and political leaning.

Between 1861-1865, we killed our fellow Americans at a prodigious rate, with about 620,000 dying. In fact, Americans killed more other Americans in that war than all of our adversaries did in eight of our wars combined: the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Gulf Wars. The Civil War stands alone when it comes to America being divided deeply enough that we killed each other in astonishing numbers.

The Civil War was about one issue: Slavery.

In today’s America, we’re fighting about everything: Gun control, abortion, climate change, fossil fuels, drilling, the environment, immigration, refugees, diversity, voting rights, elections, women’s rights, policing, who gets tax cuts, health care, LGBTQ+ rights, health care for transgender kids, bathrooms, books, what’s taught in classrooms, COVID-19, vaccines, poverty, welfare, unions, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, student debt, Trump, the Jan. 6 insurrection, and education.

These modern divisions exist without exception in every state. They are fought over with words, and occasionally, with weapons. They are fought about in our courts. Some on the political Right call for secession. In 2021, the University of Virginia Center for Politics released the results of a poll that found the majority of the individuals who voted to reelect Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential elections hoped that their state could secede from the Union.

“Hoping” isn’t doing something to make secession happen, although it’s a first step.

What’s worrisome is that like before the Civil War, there doesn’t seem to be a pathway forward to a common cause. Wrongo has written about “The Cause, The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783” by Joseph Ellis. It says that the founders had to create a blurry vision of the revolution because colonists were suspicious of the motives of other colonies. So the founders described their fight for independence as “The Cause”, an ambiguous term that covered diverse ideas and multiple viewpoints.

It succeeded in unifying us against the British.

Maybe America’s now reached a point where it’s possible that nothing will ever unite us again. Instead, we yell at each other across a chasm of ideological and political partisanship.

Our global reputation has sunk: We’re seen as an undereducated, and unhealthy nation. Many of us want our political opponents dead, while admiring the world’s autocrats. We’re tolerant of the gun slaughter of our children, and callous about the plight of our neighbors, especially if they are poor, sick, or different.

The annual World Happiness Report, based on data from Gallup’s World Poll of 24 developed nations, shows that Americans, when asked to evaluate their current life as a whole, are less content than the citizens of 14 other wealthy countries.

It’s worth noting that most of the countries whose citizens are happier than ours have governments that provide their residents with a sense of safety and security, a foundation on which their people can build a fulfilling life and an optimistic future. They can get treated for medical problems. They can afford life-saving medicine. They don’t fall into medical bankruptcy.

Their life expectancies are longer than ours and rising; America’s is falling.

They value higher education enough to provide it for free. They value families enough that their maternal care, both before and after birth, is outstanding. The US should be ashamed of our maternal mortality rate, which is higher than almost any other country, developed or not, in the world.

We desperately need to find a new “Cause” to bind us together.

Benjamin Franklin famously remarked at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that we had formed a republic if we could keep it.

We must get prepared both mentally and in our guts, to fight to keep this country together – AND to keep it a representative democracy.

The alternative looks horrendous.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – March 26, 2023

TikTok’s CEO testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week. He wasn’t well received. The main focus of your Congress critters was how TikTok could be weaponized against Americans through data surveillance and/or algorithm manipulation.

TikTok is used by about 150 million Americans. It may (or may not) be owned or controlled by the Chinese government. Given what we know about how American Big Tech abuses your data, and how China embraces surveillance as a tool of social control, it’s common sense to ask questions about how best to guard against TikTok’s misuse.

TikTok could be used to collect information on American citizens. But if TikTok was banned, that wouldn’t protect the privacy of American citizens. Many other companies are already collecting that information and are willing to sell it to any buyer.

The only thing that could protect the privacy of American citizens is a law preventing anyone from collecting that information: A law that would restrict all companies’ capacity to collect data on Americans, not simply TikTok’s.

A final argument made in Congress is that TikTok could be used to promote Chinese propaganda. It could; but is our government in the business of protecting us from a free flow of ideas? If America is still a democracy, people should be free to promote or listen to any kind of speech. That is the very essence of free speech. On to cartoons.

Why hammer only the Chinese?

The hypocrisy by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs after the bank failure was breathtaking:

Tranny vs. tyranny. GOP knows what it hates:

Stormy weather ahead:

More hypocrisy by Republicans:

Woke or witch, it’s all the same:

Vlady isn’t into upsets:

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Saturday Soother – March 11, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend NP, TX – March 2023 photo by Rick A. Ludwig. Cliff on left is in Mexico, the one on the right is in US. The Rio Grande is in the middle.

Signs that we’re starting to think about the 2024 election are everywhere. Wrongo wants to connect a few dots regarding Biden’s recent efforts to move the Democratic Party more to the middle on crime and immigration while staying left on financing the country’s social and military needs.

Biden proposed a budget to reduce the deficit, protect Medicare and Social Security, and raise taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. From the NYT:

“In a speech in Philadelphia on Thursday, Mr. Biden said that his budget was designed to ‘lift the burden on hard working Americans’ and drew sharp contrasts with the proposals that Republicans have offered, which the president argued would threaten the nation’s social safety net programs and benefit the rich.”

This contrasts with Biden’s right-leaning position on the recent DC crime bill. Since DC is controlled by the Congress, it’s legislation can be vetoed by the US Senate. Also from the NYT:

“The Senate…voted overwhelmingly to block a new District of Columbia criminal code that reduces mandatory minimum sentences for some violent offenses, with Democrats bowing to Republican pressure to take a hard line on crime in a move that underscored the rising political potency of the issue ahead of the 2024 elections.”

By an 81-to-14 vote, with 31 Democrats voting with the Republicans, the Senate passed the Republican-written measure to undo the District’s law. It now goes to Biden, who after initially opposing it abruptly changed course and said he would sign it.

So, Biden’s tacking left on spending but to the center-right on crime. He’s making a series of calculated moves to position his Party to compete successfully in 2024. Still, it’s disappointing that Biden and 31 Democrats joined with the Right to deny DC residents the right to govern their own city.

But this shouldn’t be surprising. Last year, Biden and the Democrats turned their backs on labor during their contract battle with the railroads.

Here’s Nick Catoggio in the Dispatch: (Brackets by Wrongo)

“[Biden has]…begun to tiptoe toward the center lately on another major Democratic liability, immigration…..Centrist analysts…have warned Biden and his Party that their political viability depends on escaping the…“cultural bubble” in which an unsecured border is treated as a civic good.”

And last week Biden changed his immigration policy. He’s requiring asylum seekers to seek refuge in nations they pass through rather than waiting to do so in the US.

These new policies bring Biden closer to public opinion. Among Democrats, a plurality want to see the number of asylum applicants increased rather than reduced. Among the overall public, it’s the opposite. Biden is tilting toward the latter.

Biden wants to be seen as strong on crime. Democrats walk a fine line of being against crime but not wanting to wholly support the police. Doing that would risk looking anti-Black in cities that are so important to their political success. Dems support compassionate justice and not retributive justice, so they get tied up in knots when violent crime increases, which is rising in America. The problem of course is that the descriptor “violent” isn’t consistently applied.

Biden’s idea is to try to win more votes from people who are not fanatic MAGA types. That means picking off White suburban voters, Asian voters and Hispanic and Black voters, all of whom are concerned about crime.

Tom Sullivan points out that while the moderate-to-conservative White population is in slow decline, their votes remain significant, and that Democrats shouldn’t ignore them over the next two years:

“Sadly, Democrats often do. Campaigning in concentrated urban areas that tend to vote your way is simply easier and more cost-effective. What it means for largely rural states like North Carolina is that while it remains possible to elect a Democrat like Roy Cooper as governor, Democrats’ urban focus bequeaths him a Republican-dominated legislature…”

Sullivan says the Democrats need to start acting like the big-tent party that they used to be.

And that’s what Biden is attempting to do.

Time to say “enough” to war-gaming the 2024 election. It’s time for our Saturday Soother. The daffodils have sprung through the snow, a sure sign of spring. We turn back the clocks tomorrow night, another win for those who hate dark days.

So, it’s time to take a few minutes to center yourself. Start by sitting in a comfy chair and watch and listen to Lili Boulanger’s “D’un matin de Printemps” (On a spring morning). She wrote this piece in 1917 when she was 23. Boulanger battled bronchial pneumonia throughout her short life, dying a year later at age 24. Here, it is played by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Cristian Măcelaru.

Listen and think about her writing this during the darkest days of her life:

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Saturday Soother – March 4, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Superstition Mountain area, AZ – March 2, 2023 photo by Teresa Arbisi

What does freedom mean to you? Lexington, a columnist who writes about America in the Economist, says that American politicians on the right and left are groping for a new definition of what it means:

“Democrats and Republicans are competing over which party is the true defender of freedom in American life, but the claims of both have become muddy. What the debate really illuminates is how far the parties have drifted from decades of consensus about liberty in American economic and social life, without yet articulating where they are headed, if they know.”

Lexington says that as evidence of the Republicans’ commitment to freedom, they are for gun rights. The Democrats usually point to abortion rights or voting rights. But the crux of today’s battles are about how history should be taught, what pronouns people should use, and whether governments should coax investment managers to include corporate behaviors in their analysis of investments.

We see that there’s a new willingness on the part of Republicans to inject the state into what freedom means.

Lexington says that Harvard’s Michael Sandel, in his 1996 book “Democracy’s Discontent”, traced in the wake of the New Deal how Americans made peace with centralized governmental power by embracing a concept of liberty that maximized the individual citizens’ freedom to pursue their own ends, with an economy that encouraged consumption. The implicit agreement was that:

“The government would deliver economic growth and Americans would debate how to distribute it, but politicians would stay out of questions about individuals’ values or notions of the good life. In one sign of this shift the Supreme Court in 1943 blocked local governments from compelling schoolchildren to salute the flag.”

This idea of government staying out of the way of individual freedom used to be a core assumption of American politics, but not so much today. Two examples: Florida’s governor DeSantis has trouble squaring his agenda that includes enhancing the state’s control over local schools and substituting its judgment for that of corporations over how to serve their customers.

DeSantis signed a law tightening restrictions on what materials teachers can use, prevented cruise-ship companies from requiring passengers to be vaccinated and sought new government control over Disney because he disapproved of its exercise of speech.

This week, a Florida state senator introduced a bill that would make bloggers who write about DeSantis, and other members of the Florida executive cabinet or legislature register with the state or face fines.

Whatever you make of these policies, what’s happening in Florida is miles away from any definition of freedom.

Second, Lexington points to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas. In her rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union speech, she said she was a defender of free speech, while boasting she had banned the “derogatory term LatinX in our government”. Wrongo never uses the term either, but did Huckabee Sanders understand the contradiction between her actions and what freedom of speech means?

The Republicans are saying words about freedom that no longer square with the concept, while groping for definitions that they can’t articulate without losing much of America. Take for example, this quote from DeSantis’s new book, “The Courage to Be Free”:

“At the end of the day, the re-mooring of the constitutional ship of state will provide the needed foundation for the reinvigoration of a society rooted in freedom, justice, and the rule of law.”

What exactly does THAT mean?

This is a great time to introduce you to Anat Shenker-Osorio. She’s the founder of ASO Communications, and an expert on political messaging. Shenker-Osorio says we need to be thinking about freedom as freedoms, plural. And to see it as a concept that the Left needs to reclaim from the Right, who use it as a tribal signifier.

She says the Left focuses too much on what they are against. Thus, what the Left stands for gets lost in the noise. She thinks that freedom must be a contested value between the Parties.

If you think about it, the Right have fought against every major effort to extend freedom to more people. Isn’t it funny how deeply anti-communist Florida along with the deeply anti-communist Republican Party keep doing things to constrain freedom? Aren’t these the hallmarks of state socialist regimes?

On to the weekend and our Saturday Soother. It’s our time to forget about ideas that make our heads hurt; like what freedom means. Let’s try to center ourselves after another week of terrible news. Here on the Fields of Wrong, the first robins have arrived. They’re searching among the patches of snow for those early bugs that will soon be everywhere. We’re also getting our latest late winter snowfall, so good luck finding bugs for the next day or so.

Let’s start off by grabbing a chair by a south-facing window. Now watch and listen to Yo Yo Ma perform “Song of the Birds“. It’s a traditional Catalan tune and was a favorite of Pablo Casals, but the composer is unknown. Ma plays this piece often.

Casals often played it to protest war and oppression, particularly after he fled Franco’s Spain. He played it in 1961 at the White House for John F. Kennedy. Here Ma performs it live at KCRW in Los Angeles:

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Monday Wake Up Call – February 20, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Oatman, AZ on Route 66 – February 2023 photo by Laurel Anne Lindsay

Some of you may have heard about a study called “The Hidden Tribes of America” by the group More in Common. It’s trying to understand the forces driving political polarization in America today. They classify the American electorate into seven distinct groups, they call “Tribes”.

But their key conclusion is that most people don’t belong on the far left or far right: (brackets by Wrongo)

“
the largest group that we uncovered in our research has so far been largely overlooked. It is a group of Americans we call the Exhausted Majority…representing a two-thirds majority of Americans, who aren’t part of the Wings….most members of the Exhausted Majority aren’t [simply] political centrists or moderates. On specific issues, their views range across the spectrum.”

More:

“But while they hold a variety of views, the members of the Exhausted Majority are also united in important ways: They are fed up with the polarization plaguing American government and society
.. [they] are so frustrated with the bitter polarization of our politics that many have checked out completely
.. they aren’t ideologues who dismiss as evil or ignorant the people who don’t share their exact political views. They want to talk and to find a path forward.

This chart from the study graphically illustrates the seven tribal groups of the American populace. As you can see, there is a left-wing group that is about 8% of the US population. And there are two right-wing groups that equal about 25% of Americans. That leaves four groups in what the authors call the “Exhausted Majority”. They are 67% of the American populace.

Here are some demographic characteristics of the seven groups:

  • Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.
  • Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious.
  • Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.
  • Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic,
  • Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.
  • Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.
  • Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising,

Wrongo identifies as one of the Traditional Liberals, their description rings true.

The authors say that in their research, this tribal membership predicted differences in Americans’ views on various political issues better than demographic, ideological, and partisan groupings. You can read or download the whole study here.

An “Exhausted Majority” may be a positive political development. Wrongo spends nearly every day thinking that there are just two opposing camps. And that they each view each other with fear and loathing, refusing to listen to anything that doesn’t fit their existing narrative. As we’re entering the next presidential campaign, it’s good to know that Wrongo’s view of our polarization might be well, wrong.

Is the “Exhausted Majority” merely a new response to our dysfunctional politics? Wrongo isn’t alone in thinking that what’s wrong with our country will take decades to overcome. Faced with that, people start to look for quick fixes, or a way to stop listening to the wrangling. And you don’t have to be unaligned with either Party to share this sense of exasperation.

The people described in the “Exhausted Majority” are similar. It’s also true that for most people, politics isn’t the be-all-end-all of their lives. They’d prefer that the business of government didn’t require their involvement. They’re trying to get their kids educated, and to keep them safe. They prefer to see political compromise happen without needing to be involved.

But if you can walk away from politics when it frustrates you, then you’re in the lucky minority:

  • There are large numbers of parents who have discovered that their child is addicted to opioids.
  • There are many people who had lost their health insurance when they were laid off.
  • Many sent their daughter to college in the South only to learn that she no longer has any reproductive rights.
  • Many are worried that books are being taken from public school libraries.
  • Some fear that they may lose the right to vote.

These people can’t simply throw up their hands and walk away. Only political action will help them. We all know that the political radicals are irredeemable. We also know they make the most noise, but they’re a minority.

The fed-up people on both sides and in the middle have to find a way to take the country back from the radicals, instead of allowing ourselves to be herded into existing opposing camps.

Time to wake up America! We can’t simply drop out. There’s too much at stake. Democrats need to find candidates and a message that can motivate an additional 5%-15% of the “Exhausted Majority” to vote with them. To help you wake up, watch, and listen to the RedMolly band play a very nice cover of Richard Thompson’s “Vincent Black Lightning 1952”. It’s a surprise how beautifully it adapts to a bluegrass idiom, and the dobro work makes it:

“Vincent Black Lightning” is one of the most perfect songs ever written. We saw Thompson perform it live at Tanglewood last summer.

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