Category: Demographics

Monday Wake Up Call – February 28, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Wiggly Bridge, York, ME – February 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Wrongo intended to write about domestic issues today. One domestic issue is how Republicans and the Right-wing media pivoted over the weekend from being pro-Putin and his War, to now saying Russia was wrong to invade Ukraine. Is that proof that the sanctions are working?

It’s hard to turn away today from Ukraine news, despite knowing that Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU) speech is tomorrow night. The Republican reply will be given by Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds. This happens at a time when there are big differences of opinion about the most important issues facing the nation by Democrats and Republicans.

According to a Pew Research Center survey, 71% of US adults rated strengthening the economy as a top policy priority, followed by reducing health care costs (61%), addressing the coronavirus (60%), improving education (58%) and securing Social Security (57%). The survey was conducted between Jan. 10-17, 2022 among 5,128 adults.

But as expected, the top issues were very different for those who identified as a Republican or as a Democrat. When asked which issues “should be a top priority for the president and Congress to address this year,” the top five regarded as most important by Democrats were:

Top 5 priorities, according to Democrats (percent saying issue should be a top priority)

  1. Dealing with the coronavirus outbreak (80%)
  2. Reducing health care costs (69%)
  3. Improving the educational system (66%)
  4. Dealing with global climate change (65%)
  5. Strengthening the nation’s economy (63%)

Here’s the Republicans’ top-five list:

Top 5 priorities, according to Republicans (percent saying issue should be a top priority)

  1. Strengthening the nation’s economy (82%)
  2. Dealing with the issue of immigration (67%)
  3. Defending the country from future terrorist attacks (65%)
  4. Reducing the budget deficit (63%)
  5. Reducing crime (60%)

Strengthening the nation’s economy is the only priority that both Democrats and Republicans rank among the most important. Two of the Democrats’ top priorities are among the five lowest-priority issues for Republicans. Only 11% of Republicans think global climate change should be a priority (vs. 65% of Democrats). Just 35% of Republicans think dealing with the coronavirus outbreak should be a priority (vs. 80% of Democrats).

Conversely, two of the Republicans’ top priorities are among the five lowest-priority issues for Democrats. Only 35% of Democrats think immigration should be a priority (vs. 67% of Republicans). Just 31% of Democrats say the budget deficit should be a priority (vs. 63% of Republicans).

All of this may be on display at the SOTU and the Republican reply on Tuesday.

Returning to Ukraine, it’s reported that Ukraine and Russia have agreed to have low-level delegations meet, hosted by Belarus, to discuss ending the war. It’s unclear what exactly might be achieved from these negotiations, given that Putin’s War appears to be aimed largely at removing Zelensky from power.

Finally, assuming that Russia wins either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table, that will almost certainly be followed by a Ukrainian insurgency supported by NATO. The US military knows a lot about how many troops it takes to hold ground when most of the locals want you dead.

Many military studies say that the number needed is 10 troops to one insurgent. From The Dupuy Institute (TDI): (Brackets by Wrongo)

“…TDI amassed data on 109 post-World War II insurgencies, interventions, and peacekeeping operations between 2004 and 2009. [TDI]…found that….While overwhelming numbers were not required to defeat an insurgency, force ratios above 10-to-1 nearly always produced a counterinsurgent victory. Conversely, lower force ratios did not preclude success, but conflicts with two or fewer counterinsurgents per insurgent greatly favored an insurgent victory.”

Remember in this case the insurgents would be Ukrainians, and counterinsurgents the Russians. More from TDI:

“When force ratios were assessed together with the nature of the motivation for the insurgency, TDI found that….when facing broadly popular insurgencies, counterinsurgents lost every time they possessed a force ratio advantage of 5-1 or less, failed half the time with odds between 6-1 and 10-1, but succeeded three-quarters of the time when outnumbering the insurgents by 10-1 or more.”

Ukraine’s pre-war population was 44 million. Let’s assume that 20% would support an insurgency, and that 2% would participate in an insurgency. That would be 176k Ukrainian insurgents. Following the 10-1 ratio would mean Russia would need to keep 1.76 million troops on the ground to win, an unsupportable number. Cutting the number of insurgents in half would mean Russia would need 880k troops to occupy Ukraine, still an unsupportable number.

This could mean that an insurgency in Ukraine could succeed as easily as it did in Afghanistan.

Time to wake up Putin! You might win before you lose in Ukraine. To help you wake up, watch the Saturday Night Live open, where the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York performed “Prayer for Ukraine”:

Kinda makes you tear up.

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Saturday Soother – Super Bowl Edition, February 12, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Owens River, east of Big Pine, CA – 2022 photo by Brian Joliffe

Tomorrow brings the Super Bowl, an American cultural icon that transcends football. Even people who don’t watch football watch the Super Bowl. Advertising executives know that it is the one time each year when most Americans are tuned into one show at the same time, across most forms of media.

It’s watched by roughly 100 million viewers. Given the fragmentation of our media, it’s a huge number of eyeballs to find in one place. That’s why Super Bowl commercials cost so much. NBC, broadcaster of this year’s game, sold out all of its Super Bowl ad space for $7 million per 30 second spot.

And though it may only last for a short time, this is the first time in 22 years that the Super Bowl will be played when the country is not officially at war.

On Sunday, the Super Bowl halftime show will be a celebration of hip hop, featuring Los Angeles rap heroes Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Kendrick Lamar. That places hip hop firmly at the center of the Super Bowl for the first time. The show will also star Eminem and Mary J. Blige.

Depending on who you ask, that’s either one of the greatest classic hip-hop lineups ever assembled, or way too much lineup for a show that only lasts for about 13 minutes, less than 3 minutes per artist.

This isn’t the first time the Super Bowl has included rap music. But it’s had a rocky path to headliner status. Headlining this year’s event comes at a time when the NFL is again confronting issues regarding its tin ear about race.

Since 2016, when the quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police killings of Black people, the league has faced questions about its commitment to diversity and social justice. Brian Flores, a Black NFL head coach who was fired last month, sued the league, claiming he and others had been discriminated against during various teams’ hiring processes.

This year, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg are taking the NFL in a different direction, and that may be the idea. The NYT quotes Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, who headlined the show in 2011:

“At one point, Dre was in a group that was banned by popular culture,”

Will.i.am is referring to Dr. Dre’s gangster rap group NWA, widely considered in the late 1980s to be one of the greatest and most influential groups in the history of hip hop music. Their music had explicit lyrics, and many viewed NWA as misogynistic. They also glorified drugs and crime.

Their work was banned from many mainstream American radio stations. In spite of this, the group has sold over 10 million albums in the US. Wrongo’s favorite NWA cut is “Fuck Tha Police” from their 1988 album “Straight Outta Compton”. You should take a listen, but don’t hate on Wrongo if you despise it.

That the NFL has now turned to these formerly controversial figures, makes it seem as if we’ve moved far from White America’s pearl-clutching days of Janet Jackson’s 2004 wardrobe malfunction. Or from M.I.A.’s middle finger in 2012, or Beyoncé’s nod to the Black Panthers in 2016.

Or maybe we haven’t moved on. But right now, the league needs to embrace Black music and culture to help shore up its badly damaged community bona fides.

And there’s the open secret: The NFL, a fabulously wealthy sports league whose least valuable team is worth more than $2 billion, doesn’t pay its Super Bowl performers. They consider their halftime show to be music’s ultimate for-exposure gig. But how much is that exposure worth when multiple performers are competing for just 13 minutes of attention?

On to our Saturday Soother. Weather is positively spring-like in Connecticut, so Wrongo will venture outside for some way-too-early spring cleanup. After that we have a family party followed by making turkey chili and queso con chorizo for Sunday’s extravaganza.

It’s time for you to forget about Trump’s missing call logs from Jan. 6, and grab a seat by a window. Now, plug in your Bluetooth headphones and listen to John Williams, who turned 90 this week. Here’s his “Cowboys Overture” from the 1972 film, “The Cowboys” starring John Wayne.

It’s played live in 2020 by the Film Symphony Orchestra, Spain’s first orchestra specializing in cinematic music:

While you listen, to this mythical view of the west, do you hear echoes of Aaron Copeland?

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Monday Wake Up Call – January 10, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Kohler-Andrae State Park, Sheboygan, WI – January 2022 photo by Nick Schroeter Photography

Wrongo rarely delves into religion, but since Pope Francis had comments on the slowing global population growth, Wrongo has thoughts. From the Guardian:

“In a move likely to raise the hackles of millions of cats, dogs and their human cohabitees, Pope Francis has suggested that couples who prefer pets to children are selfish.”

The Pope said that owning a pet instead of having kids meant that:

“…civilization grows old without humanity because we lose the richness of fatherhood and motherhood, and it is the country that suffers”.

Ouch. As someone who has had both children and dogs, Wrongo knows that taking care of a pet is far from selfish. As Bloomberg’s Lara Williams said:

“…the Pope could do better than to rhetorically kick puppies. There are solid economic reasons for the decline of birthrates across the world, and they need addressing.”

This isn’t a new trend. Despite optimistic predictions for a post-pandemic baby boom, last year, the US recorded the lowest rate of population growth since we began gathering data. In the year from July 2020 to July 2021, only 392,665 people were added to the US population. That’s about a tenth of one percent growth. It’s also the first time since 1937 that the population grew by fewer than 1 million people.

Here’s Bloomberg’s graph of our reproductive performance:

Meanwhile, pet ownership has been increasing, especially among younger generations. The American Pet Products Association’s annual survey revealed that millennials are now the biggest cohort of American pet owners. A 2021 AlphaWise survey revealed that 65% of 18-to-34 year-old Americans plan to acquire or add another pet in the next five years, driving a predicted 14% increase in US pet ownership by 2030.

But the falling birth rate is concerning. According to the US Census Bureau the proportion of married couple households with children fell from 40% in 1970 to 20% in 2012. While seven in 10 households included a pet.

So why are people delaying having children? A Morning Consult survey revealed that, no surprise, money is the top reason for millennials being childless, followed by the other key ingredient to starting a family: a willing and appropriate partner. The poll showed that 38% of millennials say that children are too expensive, while 33% of millennials said they hadn’t found a suitable partner.

Millennials face more economic hurdles than the older generations: high levels of student debt, stratospheric real estate prices and career instability all have been exacerbated by the pandemic. The recent rise in inflation also makes the cost of living, and thus the costs of raising a child, more expensive.

Here’s the comparison of the average cost of raising a child versus owning a dog. Pets are way cheaper:

This shows that pets aren’t cheap, but they’re far less expensive than having a child. The lifetime cost of a dog is just 15.6% of the cost of a baby. Cats are cheaper, but that isn’t necessarily a reason to choose to have one in your life.

The cost differential makes it clear why millennials might not feel financially secure enough to bring a child into the world, while the financial costs of adopting a pet is much more achievable. A few things to remember:

  • Pope Francis took the name of the patron saint of animals
  • Having children is a choice, it shouldn’t be an obligation
  • Catholic opposition to birth control and abortion rights hasn’t led to “loving families”

The Pope shouldn’t weigh in on the intensely personal decision about whether to have a child, any more than parents, or family friends should. And the Pope shouldn’t be condemning the childless pet owners of the world as selfish when people are simply struggling to make good life choices.

He, along with politicians, should be committed to doing more to tackle the underlying reasons why the people who might want children feel that they have to delay it.

Time to wake up, Pope Francis! How many times does the Roman Catholic Church need to hear that they should stay out of people’s bedrooms?

To help him wake up, let’s all listen to Billy Bragg perform “Ten Mysterious Photos That Can’t Be Explained‘ from his 2021 album, “The Million Things That Never Happened”. In the 1980’s, Bragg was described by Rolling Stone as “a contemporary, urban British folksinger”. Still true today:

Sample Lyric:

The conspiracy acts
The cyberchondriacs
Gripped by their fevered imagination
They switched the filters off
Too much is not enough
You know that you can overdose on information

But you know that you can’t overdose on The Wrongologist!

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Covid’s Junior Year Better Not Suck as Much as Its Sophomore Year

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Baker, viewed from Bellingham, WA after 66” of new snow – December 2021 photo by Randy Small photography

Wrongo tested positive for Covid on Christmas Day, despite being vaxxed and boosted. When he asked if it was Omicron or Delta, the hospital didn’t know, saying that the test might be selected randomly for further genetic testing. That means it’s highly doubtful any facility in Connecticut can separate Delta and Omicron patients. In fact, most places wouldn’t have the resources to do that, even if they wanted to.

So, while recovering here at the Mansion of Wrong, we’ve tried to take the required precautions, including cancelling family events, informing those who we had spent time with earlier that week, and masking indoors. One family friend who was with us last week, just texted to say that his 3.5 year old grandson whom he babysat for after seeing us, just tested positive. It’s rampant.

We are entering year three of Covid, and the pandemic isn’t over, even though most of us believed it would be over by now. Instead, for its junior year, Covid is looking like it may shift from a pandemic to an endemic disease, one we will have to live with, possibly forever.

We have effective vaccines, but a political effort is stoking anti-Vaxx feelings in order to keep the pandemic going. Republican leaders are opposing vaccinations, wearing masks, and social distancing (even though they know these things are very effective). And their followers are well — following, by refusing vaccinations, masks, and social distancing.

Despite Covid having a roughly 2% mortality rate, they seem to be more threatened by a vaccine that has a 0.0022% mortality rate. We can ask why GOP politicians are doing this. Most of them are vaccinated. They know that refusing these measures will make people sick and will likely kill quite a few of the unvaccinated, but they don’t seem to care.

They understand that a continuing pandemic could make Biden a one-term president. A continuing pandemic may help Republicans retake the House and Senate in 2022. Nobody likes a loser, and they think the majority of voters will blame Biden for the continuing pandemic.

The numbers are against Biden. America’s now at 821,000 dead. Unless we get very lucky, in another 100 days, we’ll be somewhere between 920,000 and 1,000,000, because since August, we have averaged more than 1,500 deaths/day. Unless the daily deaths change, we’re headed to a million dead by spring.

Republicans are going to use this fact to attack Biden, saying that he’s handled Covid worse than Trump did, because there are more deaths on his watch.

Republicans have done everything possible to prolong Covid and to slow or prevent the implementation of measures that would have lowered the death toll. It’s like an arsonist complaining about the fire department not putting out fires fast enough. The idea that Covid vaccinations should be treated as a matter of individual consumer preference is absolutely brain-dead Republican nihilism.

The NYT reports that where people are dying of Covid also has changed since vaccines became widely available: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Death rates fell in most counties across the country, and in about one in five counties, the death rate fell by more than half. But in about one in 10 counties, death rates have more than doubled.”

Now, ten percent of counties doesn’t equal ten percent of the population. Here’s the map provided by the Times:

Note the concentration in Kentucky and West Virginia. The latest data from the CDC, based on data from 25 states and cities, shows that the death rate for unvaccinated people is 14 times higher than that for vaccinated people. The article also includes a map where Covid deaths have decreased. You can view it here. In most ways, it fills in the blank areas on the map above with green cones instead of these red cones.

We’ve been at this for two long years. Now starting year three, maddeningly, the issues remain the same: The health care system is running out of resources. People can’t get tested. Some people refuse to help themselves and their neighbors. New variants can emerge in the wild faster than we can develop remedies, particularly when people won’t avail themselves of the remedies we already have.

There will be end of year reports on the good things that happened in 2021. There will be reports on both the good and bad things to come in 2022. One thing that doesn’t seem likely to be in any of those reports is a changed reaction to Covid by Americans.

Time to put 2021 in the dumpster.

Happy New Year! Thanks for riding with Wrongo for another year. Raise a glass, knowing that we will try our damnedest to make sense of it all again in 2022. Let’s close with “Auld Lang Syne” performed by The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin: (hat tip to Monty)

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Rehabilitating Our Democracy

The Daily Escape:

Christmas lights, New Milford Green, New Milford CT – December 2021 photo by Tom Allen. New Milford was founded in 1709.

James Fallows writes a column called “Breaking the News”. His most recent article looks at the growing mismatch between the formal structure of the US government (two Senators per state and the House ceiling of 435 members), and the astonishing population growth in the US since the Constitution was ratified in 1788.

Fallows says the main problem is that modern America is running on antique rules that are too hard to change and too easy to abuse. He sees a Constitutional shift from protecting minority rights, to enabling minority rule, which ultimately means a denial of democracy. A system that is not steered by its majority will not survive as a democracy.

Fallows outlines the changing nature of big vs. small in America. When the Constitution was being negotiated, two issues were big states vs. small states, and slaveholding states vs. non-slave states. At the time, the three most populous original states had around 10 times as many people as the three smallest. That was behind the agreement to the two-Senators-per-state deal. But today, the three most populous states—California, Texas, and Florida—have about 45 times the population of the three least populous, Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska.

Second, the ceiling on the size of the House of Representatives must change. Fallows observes that when the country was founded, there were 65 members of the House. For the next century-plus, the size of the House increased after the Census, following changes in the US population. Just before World War I, the number was capped at its current level of 435. Today, the US population is about 90 times larger than it was in 1788, but the House is just 7 times as large.

Today there’s a bias against the needs of urban and suburban populations. There’s also a distinct small-state bias in the Electoral College. Each state’s representation in the Electoral College votes equals it’s number of Senate and House representatives. As House membership expanded through the 1800s from 65 to 435, House seats became relatively more important in Electoral College totals, and Senate seats relatively less so. From Fallows:

“To spell it out, in the first presidential election, Electoral Votes based on Senate seats made up nearly 30% of the Electoral College total. By 1912, the first election after House size was frozen, they made up only 18%.”

If the House were expanded, then the Electoral College outcome would more closely track the national popular vote.

Jill Lepore writing in the New Yorker, says that the US Constitution was the first national constitution that provided for its own revision. Article V is the amendment clause. The founders knew that the Constitution was imperfect; Article V left a Constitutional means for making it “more perfect.” Without an amendment provision, the only way to change the rules is to overthrow the government.

But it’s extremely difficult to amend our Constitution. Lepore says:

“The US Constitution has been rewritten three times: in 1791, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments; after the Civil War, with the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments; and during the Progressive Era, with the ratification of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments.”

She points out that by contrast:

“…American state constitutions have been amended over 7,500 times, amounting on average to 150 amendments per state.”

While state governments freely change, the US Constitution doesn’t. America’s older, but not necessarily wiser.

We could approve the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes. The Electoral College has 535 votes, with 270 needed to win the presidency. In 2020, had 21,461 Biden voters actually switched to Trump, Trump would have won the Electoral College with 270 votes, despite Biden winning nationally by 7 million votes. Each of those 21,461 Biden votes (5,229 in Arizona, 5,890 in Georgia, and 10,342 in Wisconsin) were 329 times more important than the other 7 million votes.

The Compact would end the “winner-take-all” laws in the 48 of 50 states. If passed, the Compact would award their electoral votes in proportion to the votes the candidate receives. Article II gives the states exclusive control over the choice of method of awarding their electoral votes, so they can reform the system if they choose. The Compact would go into effect when enacted by states comprising at least 270 electoral votes.

Time to wake up America! Our current ineffective federal government must change. Otherwise, democracy is doomed.

To help you wake up, watch “Peace Train”, the 1971 anthem of hope and unity written by Yusuf/Cat Stevens, performed here by Playing for Change. This version features Keb’ Mo’ playing in CA, along with Yusuf playing in Istanbul, Rhiannon Giddens in Ireland, along with musicians from 12 countries:

This song is more relevant than ever.

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Young Americans Are Suffering

The Daily Escape:

View from Franconia Notch, NH – November 29, 2021 photo by Mel Elam. Looks cold.

There’s plenty of Covid news. We’re concerned about the new Omicron variant while we’re also seeing another surge of the Delta variant around the country. It’s important to remember that half of what you’re reading about Omicron now, and for the next several weeks, is going to be wrong or mistaken.

The problem is that we can’t be sure which half is wrong.

It’s troubling how prevalent Long Covid has become. The NIH reported on an Italian study that found 87% of people recovered and discharged from hospitals showed at least one symptom even 60 days after release. The commonly reported problems were fatigue (53.1%), worsened quality of life (44.1%), shortness of breath (43.4%), joint pain, (27.3%) and chest pain (21.7%).

One symptom of Long Covid that wasn’t reported is emotional distress. This is particularly evident in younger Americans. The just-released Fall 2021 Harvard Youth Poll, surveyed 2,109 Americans aged 18-29, between October 26 and November 8. In addition to their usual questions about politics, they also asked these young Americans about their mental health and Covid. They found that half of them say they’re a different person because of Covid. Here are the results:

Overall, 51% of 18-29-year-olds say that Covid has changed them. What’s particularly striking is that 61% of young women say they’re different now than they were before Covid. Contrast that with men in the survey, just 40% of whom said that they have changed.

While the survey can’t tell us exactly how they’ve changed, there’s some insight because 51% also say that Covid had a negative impact on their life. And there wasn’t a partisan divide: 51% of Democrats, 51% of Republicans, and 52% of independents said that Covid impacted them negatively.

There’s something worse going on though. These kids are a mess mentally. More than half (51%) report  that several times in the last two weeks they felt down, depressed, and hopeless, while 25% have had thoughts of self-harm.

In addition to the majority of youth who express depressive symptoms, and the 25% who express thoughts of self-harm, the study also found that a significant number show traits associated with generalized anxiety disorder:

  • 38% of young Americans report feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge in the last two weeks
  • 36% have been worrying too much about different things
  • 32% have been easily annoyed or irritable
  • 30% have had trouble relaxing
  • 22% report feeling afraid, as if something awful might happen
  • 20% have not been able to stop or control worrying
  • 16% have been so restless that it is hard to sit still

The causes of these emotional problems are diverse. The respondents listed the following as their top five reasons for worry: School or work (34%), personal relationships (29%), self-image (27%), economic concerns (25%), and Covid (24%).

But Covid can easily be seen as the primary driver behind all of these issues. The pandemic brought fear of losing one’s own life or that of an older loved one. The lockdowns impacted school and work, with people having to use technology as a work around for face to face interaction. People were cut off from friends and family. Dating died. Retail businesses that primarily hire the young closed, or sharply reduced their staffing, causing historic job losses and reduced paychecks.

The CDC reported in 2020, that from 2007 to 2018, the suicide rate among persons aged 10–24 had increased 57.4%. Let’s hope that isn’t what will happen to this cohort going forward.

Wrongo and Ms. Right have 12 grandchildren. Ten are between 18-29. A few graduated from high school, college, and grad school during the pandemic. And some of those graduates seem stuck in bad grooves, unable to land the jobs they wanted, or in some cases, a job at all.

They seem to swing between two poles, either feeling unqualified for the job they want, or being unwilling to settle for the jobs they are offered. A few grandchildren with college degrees say they are unqualified for even entry-level positions in their field of study.

These kids broadly represent what the kids in the Harvard study say about changes in their lives during Covid. Young Americans must really hate what we’ve done to them.

Their sense of despair is a common theme in other polling of American adults. But the deep unhappiness and pessimism displayed in the Harvard poll was a startling turn in an age group that might be expected to have more optimism, given that they are at such an early stage of their adult lives.

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Expanding The Dem’s Voter Base

The Daily Escape:

Artist’s Point, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, AZ-UT – October photo by Alan Seltzer

Ruy Teixeira explains the political (and messaging) dilemma facing Democrats in 2021:

“A recent Gallup release confirmed that Democrats now have about as many liberals in the party as moderates or conservatives. That liberalism has been mostly driven by increasing liberalism among white Democrats which has spiked upward 20 points since the early 2000s. White Democrats are now a solidly liberal constituency. Not so black and Hispanic Democrats who are overwhelmingly moderate or conservative.”

The contrast is particularly striking among Whites who are college graduates and working class (non-college) nonwhites. The Gallup data show that two-thirds of White college grads are liberal while 70% of Black working class and two-thirds of Hispanic working class Democrats are moderate or conservative.

This takes on additional relevance because in 2020, 63% of voters did not have college degrees, and 74% of voters came from households making less than $100,000 a year. This should make it painfully obvious that, if issues and rhetoric that appeal mostly to college-educated White liberals are promoted, Democrats could see serious attrition among Democrat working class nonwhites who dislike those issues and rhetoric.

It’s hard to build a majority if you’re focused on a minority of the electorate. The internal conflict between Democrats, displayed by the Gallup poll mentioned above by Teixeira, pits the Party’s progressives against its moderates, its college-educated against its working class.

Like the modern Democrats, the Whigs cobbled together their party in the late 1830s out of an assortment of constituencies, many of whom had little in common. The Whig Party was formed to counter President Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian Democrats. They were one of the two major political parties in the US from the late 1830s through the early 1850s and managed to elect two presidents: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor.

By the mid-1850s, the Whigs were divided by the issue of slavery, particularly as the country had to decide whether new states would be admitted as slave or non-slave states. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the Missouri Compromise and allowed each territory to decide for itself whether it would be a slave or free state. Anti-slavery Whigs then spun off to found the Republican Party in 1854.

Is the modern Democratic Party on the precipice of becoming the new Whigs? The Whigs were a coalition of bankers, lawyers, and the Eastern mercantile class. In the South, Whigs worked to put a moral face on slavery. This allowed the Whigs to cultivate political distance from what was becoming a party of southern Democrats happy to extend slavery in new states, and a northern base of what we call “blue collar” (white) workers.

The Whigs couldn’t continue bridging the ideological distance between the Northern industrial states section of the party and the Southern agribusiness/slavery Whigs. Faced with this dilemma, the party broke apart.

If the Democrats are to remain one Party, a new poll by Jacobin, YouGov, and the Center for Working-Class Politics offers a perspective on how to win among working-class voters. They found that:

  • Candidates who prioritized bread-and-butter issues (jobs, health care, the economy), and presented them in plainspoken, universalist rhetoric, performed significantly better than those who had other priorities or used other language. That preference was even more pronounced in rural and small-town areas, where Democrats have struggled in recent years.
  • Candidates who named elites as a major cause of America’s problems, invoked anger at the status quo, and celebrated the working class were well received among working-class voters.
  • Potential Democratic working-class voters did not shy away from candidates who strongly opposed racism. But candidates who framed that opposition in identity-focused language fared significantly worse than candidates who embraced either populist or mainstream language.

The survey proposed multiple sound bites spoken by potential candidates to survey respondents to rank. The most popular sound bite was the “progressive populist” one:

“This country belongs to all of us, not just the super-rich. But for years, politicians in Washington have turned their backs on people who work for a living. We need tough leaders who won’t give in to the millionaires and the lobbyists, but will fight for good jobs, good wages, and guaranteed health care for every single American.”

This has implications for the 2022 mid-terms. Keep Trump off the table unless, by some miracle, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attempted coup refers charges to the DOJ and the DOJ acts on it. Another key finding was that those surveyed felt Democrats run too far left on certain priorities:

This is also key for building Democrats’ messaging in 2022. You can read the full report here.

Democrats need to think about what it will take to do two things simultaneously: How to stay together as a Party, and how to retain majorities in the House and Senate.

It won’t be simple, but everything depends on it.

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Monday Wake Up Call – August 30, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Abandoned house, eastern plains of Colorado photo by Daniel Forster

On Sunday, Wrongo talked in passing about how religion may bring some people together, but that it divides many more. And that the lessons about being a good person are too often pushed aside in the service of doctrine.

A fine example of this comes from the Religion News Service, who reported that Daniel Darling, SVP of communications for the National Religious Broadcasters, was fired after making pro-vaccine statements on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.

Darling told Joe Scarborough:

“I believe in this vaccine because I don’t want to see anyone else die of COVID. Our family has lost too many close friends and relatives to COVID, including an uncle, a beloved church member and our piano teacher…”

Sounds innocuous, but them’s firing words to the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). According to its website, the NRB “works to protect the free speech rights of our members by advocating those rights in governmental, corporate, and media sectors.” Of course they do.

Darling shared his personal experience at a time when White evangelical Christians and Hispanic Protestants are among the faith groups most likely to be hesitant or refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccines, according to a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Although the study found vaccine hesitancy has dropped recently, 1 in 4 White evangelicals said they refuse to get a vaccine, while an additional 1 in 5 was hesitant.

So, here’s an Evangelical Christian trying to do the right thing. Urging others to get vaccinated is something that will help them and our society. But his religious organization, one apparently dedicated to “free speech”, fires him for expressing an opinion, something that’s an obvious good for humanity,  that is contrary to their policy.

Darling’s statement is clearly free speech. And his viewpoint doesn’t infringe on the rights of either those who are promoting the vaccine, or those who have decided not to get the vaccine. Wrongo has no stake in whether this is wrongful termination. That is a legalistic construction which has nothing to do with what our individual duty is to each other and to society.

Sadly, this is another example that some Christians haven’t developed a code of ethics to guide their lives. Instead, they rely on learned doctrine to justify their behavior, even when their actions fly in the face of good humanity.

Let’s also spend a minute thinking about the impact of Hurricane Ida on Louisiana. As Wrongo writes this, the eye is 10 miles in diameter, the storm is over land, and severe damage reports are starting to come in.

Remember that this is also the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in 2005 as a Category 3. Of course, back then, Pastor John Hagee said that Katrina was God’s vengeance on the gays. We’ll probably be hearing others offering similar revealed truths soon.

Remember too that Louisiana hospitals are just starting to reduce their census of Delta patients after a record surge of Covid infections. Now New Orleans is evacuating because of the Hurricane Ida storm surge, but hospitals have nowhere to send patients.

We should also remember that Ida went from a tropical storm to a Category 4 Hurricane in 48 hours. There are no rental cars, the highways are clogged. The airport in New Orleans is shut down.

Wake up America! Our 21st century horrors rare rarely subtle. And 2021’s horrors range from what we’re seeing in Afghanistan to Louisiana. Maybe that makes firing an Evangelical for speaking his mind about Covid a lesser problem, except for doctrine taking precedence over a good act.

To help you wake up today, let’s listen to “This is All I Want” by Corey Ledet, from his 2021 album, “Zydeco”. Ledet has incorporated Kouri-Vini, a regional Cajun dialect spoken by family members, into songs on his album. It’s a lot of fun and you should listen to it:

 

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Census Data Shows Big Changes Coming

The Daily Escape:

Big Balanced Rock, Chiricahua National Monument, AZ – photo by Arnaud BarrĂ©

From the WaPo:

“For the first time in the history of the country’s census-taking, the number of White people in the United States is widely expected to show a decline when the first racial breakdowns from the 2020 Census are reported this week.”

The headline news includes these facts: For the first time, the portion of White people could dip below 60%, and the under-18 population is likely to be majority non-White. In 26 states, the number of Whites has declined. Up to six states and DC could have majorities of people of color.

In case anyone was wondering what was motivating all the Republican voting restrictions, this is it.

The actual data will be released later today. So there’s at least some chance that the WaPo and Wrongo are well, wrong about the census results. That’s unlikely, since the numbers have been moving in this direction for years. More from the WaPo:

“Estimates from 2016 to 2020 show that all of the country’s population growth during that period came from increases in people of color. The largest and most steady gains were among Hispanics, who have doubled their population share over the past three decades to almost 20% and who are believed to account for half of the nation’s growth since 2010. They are expected to drive about half the growth in more than a dozen states, including Texas, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.”

The WaPo quotes William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The trend is projected to continue, with Whites falling below 50% nationally around 2045…[and] at that point, there will be no racial majority in the country. Between 2015 and 2060, the Hispanic and Asian populations are expected to approximately double in size, and the multiracial population could triple due to both immigration and births.”

America is heading into uncharted territory. Our older generations will be much Whiter than younger ones. Racial minorities will drive the growth in the US labor force as White Boomers retire. Frey calls what’s about to happen a “cultural generation gap”.

This could mean that both groups may compete for resources. For example, public spending on services for seniors versus spending on schools or job training.

The new data are also expected to reflect continuing ethnic diversification of the suburbs. Now, more minorities live in suburbs than live in cities. Frey says that the vast majority of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties and its more than 350 metropolitan areas became less White in the past decade.

All of this has tremendous implications for social cohesion. Cities and states that want to sustain economic growth will need strategies to attract minorities. That’s already happened in places such as Kansas, the Philadelphia metro area, Miami-Dade County, and Prince George’s County, MD.

How predominantly White boards of directors manage predominantly diverse management teams and workers could be a big challenge.

The data release comes amid concerns over its accuracy. The 2020 count had huge problems, including the Trump administration’s attempts to add a citizenship question and block undocumented immigrants from being counted. On top of that, the pandemic caused major delays for the survey.

This release also provides the first look at whether last year’s count missed significant numbers of minorities. Arizona, along with Texas and Florida, each fell short of expectations with smaller gains in Congressional seats than projected.

The big event is that release of the Census data kicks off this decade’s Congressional seat redistricting. The clock is now ticking for states to draw new Congressional maps. The fact that the data are already late creates a scramble among most states to finish their maps before primaries begin next year.

In addition to questions about data accuracy, get ready for a new round of “white replacement” tirades from the Right. Expect to see a revival of the debate over whether the undocumented should be counted in the Census. Expect a fresh wave of Right-Wing anger directed against America’s minority populations.

Our ugly politics will probably get uglier, at least for a while.

It’s ironic that Republicans are both completely resistant to more support for families, although they complain loudly about the declining share of the White population.

It isn’t only people of color who need better policies – like more parental leave; control of healthcare costs; housing affordability; and better and cheaper childcare. It’s also those Millennials and GenZ’ers who are of child-bearing age who can’t afford kids.

Protecting voting for all Americans is the most important priority for Congress. Particularly now, as it seems clear that Republicans are trying to bail on democracy.

Why? Because it’s hard to promote White supremacy to non-white people.

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Monday Wake Up Call – July 26, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Can Democrats move their agenda forward? Will we ever see an infrastructure bill, or a voting rights bill signed by Biden? How should Democrats deal with the voting restrictions that several states are putting in place to make it more difficult to win elections, and possibly cause the Dems to lose both Houses of Congress in 2022?

Even though most of the Party’s voters say that their representatives in DC should be willing to do whatever it takes to eliminate the filibuster, Democrats in Congress seem hamstrung by what some in Congress say is a need for bipartisanship on fundamental legislation, like the filibuster and voting rights.

This hamstringing is occurring throughout America. Consider New Jersey: Their Congressional redistricting process is technically bipartisan; but like in prior decades, it’s in a completely partisan place.

New Jersey has a bipartisan redistricting commission. Leaders from each Party appoint six members to the 13-member commission. Those 12 members then pick a 13th member who serves as a tiebreaker, and a safety valve to prevent partisanship. That sounds well, bipartisan. This is the fourth redistricting cycle where this process has been used for NJ’s Congressional redistricting.

The commission members picked an academic as the tiebreaker in 1991 and 2001, and a former state attorney general in 2011. Last time, the tiebreaking member sided with Republicans. Despite that, the resulting district maps worked out well for Democrats, as they currently hold a 10-2 edge in the NJ Congressional delegation.

New Jersey is a great example of how the Congressional map can change over a decade. The tiebreaker initially helped Republicans 10 years ago, but the demographics in those districts have changed, And Democrats now over-perform in their local Congressional races.

This time around, the 12 members of the commission were unable to agree on the 13th member of the commission. Both sides proposed a retired judge from their respective Parties. So now, according to law, it’s the state Supreme Court’s job to pick one or the other. The court has until Aug. 10 to decide on the tiebreaker.

From the New Jersey Globe:

“The State Constitution puts the burden of settling a tie-vote on the tiebreaker on the Supreme Court, who must now choose between the two candidates advanced by the commission: former Supreme Court Justice John E. Wallace, Jr., a Democrat, and former Superior Court Judge Marina Corodemus, a Republican….Make no mistake: this is an election. There are as many as seven voters.  The winner will either be a Democrat or a Republican. Election Day is August 10.”

All Supreme Court decisions are elections, elections with consequences. And some decisions are more consequential than others.

In NJ, Democrats and Republicans have never agreed on a map without employing a “bipartisan” tiebreaker. But since this the first time the two Parties couldn’t agree on a 13th member for Congressional redistricting, it’s the first time the Supreme Court option will be used.

If this isn’t unusual enough, the NJ Supreme Court will vote on the Congressional tiebreaker before the US Census Bureau transmits the census numbers to the state. This year, it’s delayed. It won’t happen until September 30, so the process of redistricting can’t begin until then.

Even though three of the Jersey Justices are Republicans and four were nominated by GOP governors, it’s unclear if the Supreme Court will vote in line with their Party’s choice. When state Republicans went to the Supreme Court to fight a Covid-related borrowing plan, the Court unanimously backed up a plan approved by Democratic Governor Murphy and the Democratic-controlled legislature.

This standoff is a reminder that even in states that don’t have an outwardly partisan redistricting process, bipartisan disputes are hard to avoid.

Time to wake up America! In these times when there is little to no trust between the Parties, there is no such thing as bipartisanship.

To help you (and President Biden, along with Sens. Manchin and Sinema) wake up, here is a band from Russia and Ukraine, Leonid & Friends, featuring the Rox Bros, doing a cover of Steely Dan’s “My Old School” from SD’s 1973 album “Countdown to Ecstasy”.

The song’s lyrics tell the story of a drug bust at Bard College (named “Annandale” in the lyrics) while both Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were students there, and how a female acquaintance had inadvertently betrayed them to “Daddy Gee” (G. Gordon Liddy, then a local prosecutor):

Steely Dan tunes demand absolute precision and attention to detail, and these guys nail it!

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