Education in America – Page 9

Old Candidates, Young Voters

While the decision makers at news organizations…scramble to appeal to younger viewers, [the] Republican and Democratic voters in Iowa and nationally have embraced a remarkably “mature” handful of top tier candidates.

How mature?

• Donald Trump will turn 70 next year
• Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will be 75
• Hillary Clinton will turn 69 a couple of weeks before the 2016 elections

There are younger Republican candidates: Ted Cruz is 45, and Marco Rubio is 44. The Democrat former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is 53.

According to a January 18-24 Quinnipiac University poll of likely Democratic voters, Sanders held a 78% to 21% lead among voters age 18 to 44 over Clinton. The younger O’Malley polls at just 2%.

On the GOP side, Trump and Cruz tied with voters age 18 to 44, each drawing 29%.

So, the networks are trying to attract the young voter demographic, while young voters overwhelmingly like a few of the older candidates. But, will younger voters actually vote? Their recent record isn’t reliable: Young voters turned out in big numbers in 2008 and then stayed home in record numbers in 2014. Did young Dems take a short nap in 2014 or have they turned their backs on democracy?

We don’t know for sure, but there is some bad news: Research by Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk shows growing disillusionment with democracy – not just with politics or campaigns, but with democracy itself: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

This growth is worldwide, but it is especially strong among young Americans. Fewer than 30% of Americans born since 1980 say that living in a democracy is essential. For those born since 1970, more than one in five describe our democratic system as “bad or very bad.” That’s almost twice the rate for people born between 1950 and 1970.

Foa and Mounk wrote in the NYT that political scientists are well aware that poll after poll shows citizens to be more dissatisfied than in the past. Yet they resist the most straightforward conclusion: that people may be less supportive of democracy than they once were. This raises a strange question: Could the political system in our seemingly stable democracy be heading for a fall?

Think about it. People say they like democracy less than they used to. While most Americans still have a deep emotional attachment to the Constitution, respect for the rules of our democracy are also eroding. The rise of politicians who are critical of key aspects of liberal democracy, like freedom of the press, or universal voting, or the rights of minorities, is even more disconcerting.

Citizens are aware of this disconnect. When asked by the World Values Survey to rate how democratically their country is being governed on a 10-point scale, a third of Americans now say: “not at all democratic.”

Let’s hope that this is a transient phenomenon. What explains the down-tick? It’s probably related to:

• Lack of optimism caused by stagnating incomes. This disproportionately effects the young.
• Rising income inequality, which effects all citizens.
• Attempts by the rich to game the political system, often through Super PAC donations.

In fact, the rich are now more likely to be critical of democracy than the poor. According to the World Values Survey, in 1995, less than 20% of wealthy Americans (those in the top income quintile) approved of having a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections”. Today, more than 40% support that view.

It’s not clear what young voters think is a better alternative to representative government, but who can blame them for not being enamored with their current political representation?

According to the US Census Bureau analysis of the voting population from 1964-2012 indicates a decrease in voting in all age groups, except for the 65 years and over group, who voted at nearly a 70% rate, while the 18-24 voted at 36% . But in 2008, 18-24 year olds did increase their numbers–the Obama factor.

Bottom line: If you want to make democracy work, you must get not only young people, but all the people who have given up on democracy involved again. But we cannot simply rely on charismatic individuals to help young voters awaken their political selves. We must restore their faith in democratic politics.

This is the very best argument for a Bernie-style political revolution.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 17, 2016

Another jam-packed news week: David Bowie stepped through the door, the Dow fell through the floor, the SOTU had the lowest ratings ever, the Republicans debated, and you didn’t win Powerball.

So, something to cheer you up at the start your week:

COW Foxes

Gonna miss ol’ Ziggy:

COW Bowie2

Wall Street longs for yesterday:

COW Lost Pet

The GOP debate followed the usual script:

COW Big Tent

Republicans are beginning to rationalize about the probable primary winner:

COW Satan for Prez

In this primary season it has become clear that facts don’t matter. How you feel matters. Other people don’t matter. How you relate to your tribe matters. Irresponsible tax policies, silly monetary policies (gold!), destructive foreign policy, no climate policy, no healthcare policy, no infrastructure policy, charter schools as an education policy, these all matter. Except for militarism, do they have any public policy positions?

The Clintons begin to understand the threat:

COW First Word

Angry Men Now a Political Force

The spin after the SOTU was about how angry voters are, and the political opening that creates, despite the genuine good news on the economy. Here is Mr. Obama from the SOTU:

Most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some narrow interest.

We can’t change the fact that some people are angry, but this article from the Washington Monthly by Andrew Yarrow points to some stunning facts about how men in particular have been left by the wayside of American life:

At least 20% of the nation’s 90 million white men have been pushed to the sidelines, either retreating or storming out of the mainstream of American life. They are not the men you see at work, who play with their children, go out with their wives or partners, are involved in their communities, and earn a living to save for their children’s education and their own retirement. What they do doesn’t register in…the gross domestic product…

Yarrow continues:

We know that they are out there. But they don’t fit old stereotypes of failure, so we’ve had trouble coming to grips with who they are or naming the problem. Parts of their stories have garnered significant attention, but we don’t see that what have been treated as separate problems are closely related.

Here are a few statistics from the article that merit your attention:

• Today, fewer than seven out of ten American men work; in the 1950s, nine out of ten worked.
• Since the 1970s, inflation-adjusted incomes for the bottom 80% of men have fallen, with the most dramatic declines occurring among the bottom 40%, most of whom do not have a college education.
• Today, just half of men are husbands; in 1960, three-fourths of men were married.
• As Barack Obama leaves office, only two out of three children live with their fathers; when John Kennedy was elected President, nine out of ten children lived with their fathers.
• Today, 43% of 18-to-34-year-old American men live with their parents (compared to 36% of millennial women); in 1960, about 28% lived at home.
• There are 36% more women in college than men, whereas in 1970, there were about 35% more men than women in college.
• Men are 50% less likely to trust government than women.
• In recent years, there has been a roughly 20-point gender voting gap, with white men being much more likely not only to vote for Republicans but to express disillusionment and anger toward government; until about 1980, men and women voted roughly evenly for Democrats and Republicans.

The point is that a lot has gone wrong for many white men, a demographic that once was the epitome of privilege and high expectations. And while politicians discuss stagnant wages, broken families and inequality, few notice, much less talk about the probable linkages between these issues and the impact of angry males on our politics.

Some may be thinking that this is a manufactured issue. After all, men still out-earn women, and they still hold most of the CEO and board–level jobs. And none of this white male angst should obscure the continuing struggles of women and people of color, including men of color. African-American and Latino men have had it worse than white men for a very long time.

But we ignore any group’s anger at our peril. The Bundy Brigade’s antics in Utah and Oregon is just one recent example. Many men are mad as hell, and their anger is often turned on scapegoats: Government in the case of the Bundys; Muslims, immigrants, African Americans, and Latinos in the case of others.

In 2016 we are seeing several presidential candidates feeding from the trough of this anger. Playing to the inchoate anger of a sizable minority of white men who have been benched economically, or who simply left the field, is a dangerous demagoguery, one that only benefits the demagogues.

Misinformed vs. Uninformed (Cont.)

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Mark Twain)

Yesterday, we linked to an article describing the difference between being misinformed and being uninformed. Uninformed people have no information about a subject, while those who are misinformed have information that conflicts with the best evidence and expert opinion.

How are so many people getting misinformed, and staying that way? Why does it work?

You probably have never heard of Robert Proctor, from Stanford, who wrote a book about ignorance, in which he tries to answer the question: What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? He calls this “Agnotology” (the study of ignorance). Proctor’s point is that ignorance has a political geography, and there are things people will work hard to keep you from knowing.

Apparently, his work started with the tobacco industry, who at some point used the slogan: “Doubt is our product“.

Proctor explains that ignorance can be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. For example, the common media approach that there are two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion to readers or viewers. This was how tobacco firms used science to make their products look harmless. It is still used today by climate change deniers to argue against the scientific evidence.

Procter, from the BBC:

This ‘balance routine’ has allowed the cigarette men, or climate deniers today, to claim that there are two sides to every story, that ‘experts disagree’ – creating a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance…We live in a world of radical ignorance, and the marvel is that any kind of truth cuts through the noise…Even though knowledge is ‘accessible’, it does not mean it is accessed.

Sound familiar?

In a December focus group with Trump supporters, David Frum, long-time Republican pollster, found that when negative information about Trump was presented, it strengthened the group’s support for him. Participants in the group held on more confidently to their misinformation as the session progressed.

We know that this is a symptom of the culture of American anti-intellectualism. Conspiracy theories have the same clout as legitimate science; the opinions of non-experts are just as credible as those of the experts; and ideology takes precedence over the cold hard facts. In this world, Trump is merely a symptom of that ethos and an industry dedicated to propagating doubt.

We all remember Stephen Colbert saying: “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

And consider a 2012 study that found when people are prompted to use their critical faculties, they become less likely to affirm religious statements. They found that there’s a causal link between “analytical thinking” and religious disbelief.

Perhaps the worst (best?) example was the Republican Party of Texas rejecting critical thinking in its 2012 platform:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs [that] have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs.

Hmmm. Teaching HOTS can give you the HOTS? Doubtful.

Perhaps it’s a better thing to not know the facts, instead of knowing a few pretend facts. At least, the uninformed person is persuadable by evidence.

The right-wing noise machine has fed hatred, bigotry, fear and loathing to its base supporters for decades, and Trump is the logical outcome. Most people aren’t all that logical when it comes to politics or political issues, since most of us tend to be ruled more by emotions. But the right-wing propaganda juggernaut has brainwashed some of its followers to the point that they are completely impervious to facts.

The Republicans are not going to laugh the Donald off their stage. They are not going to dissuade his core supporters, the only question is will his supporters vote in the Republican primaries.

If they do turn out, it will be The Donald vs. The Hill in 2016.

News You Can’t Use – December 28, 2015

A view of Santa’s rowing down the Grand Canal in Venice:

COW Venice Santas

News you can’t use:

Fortune reports that Americans born after 1980 lag behind their overseas peers in literacy, numeracy and problem-solving in technology-rich environments. Researchers at the Princeton-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) conducted the study, which was a test called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), to measure the job skills of adults in 23 countries. Our kids didn’t fare so well:

Top 5 countries in literacy:
1) Japan
2) Finland
3) Netherlands
4) Australia
5) Sweden
(The US placed at #17 out of 23)

Top 5 in numeracy:
1) Japan
2) Finland
3) Belgium
4) Netherlands
5) Sweden
(The US placed at #21 out of 23)

Top 5 in Problem Solving in Technology Rich Environments:
1) Japan
2) Finland
3) Australia
4) Sweden
5) Norway
(The US placed at #18)

The results were shocking to researchers, since American millennials are supposedly the most educated generation ever, according to the study. Madeline Goodman, an ETS researcher told Fortune:

We really thought [US] Millennials would do better than the general adult population, either compared to older coworkers in the US or to the same age group in other countries…But they didn’t. In fact, their scores were abysmal.

Millennials with college credentials did score higher on the PIAAC than Americans with only a high school diploma (yet less well than college grads in most other countries). The study concluded that a more expensive and expansive education “may not hold all the answers.” At least not to questions that are not about the Kardashians.

The Worst People of 2015. (GQ) Making the top 5: Kim Davis, Cameron Crowe, David Cameron, Sepp Blatter, and Hillary Clinton. Several could have been rated higher, like Martin Shkreli @ #28, or Jared Fogle @ #8, just behind Bill Cosby. Why should Hillary be ranked ahead of Shkreli or Fogle?

Never a Dull Moment: A Look Back at 2015. (WSJ) Joe Queenan takes a funny look at 2015. Sample of the writing:

…shockers came right out of nowhere. First, the new, less weepy Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, grew a beard, something no one holding that lofty position had done since 1925. That man’s name was Gillett.

Political Dark Money Just Got Darker. (Editorial Board, NYT):

For two years, President Obama has dithered and withheld the one blow he could easily strike for greater political transparency: the signing of an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose their campaign spending.

Wow. It’s almost like Democrats aren’t fully committed to campaign finance reform.

Oligarchs Seek Indentured Servants

Just when you thought that there couldn’t be another scheme to further mess with college students as they embark on their post-college journey, along come Income Share Agreements (ISAs).

The ISA is a contract whereby an individual investor (or a fund) would agree to provide a student with a lump-sum payment to be used for education costs, in exchange for receiving a share of the student’s income for a fixed period (5-10? years). The repayment would most likely be structured as a dividend on a security, thereby allowing the investor to pay a lower tax rate than on interest income.

Individual ISA contracts would be pooled and sold to investors. These are the kind of contracts that could only flourish in our growing oligarchy.

We have a student debt bubble. Student debt has tripled in 10 years, now totaling more than $1.3 trillion, or more than the country’s total debt for credit cards, auto loans and any other category except for home mortgages. Student debt default rates are equal to those of the 2008 subprime housing loan crisis, and the debt continues to grow, up this year by an estimated 8% with an estimated average debt of $35k each. About 70% percent of students have graduated with debt this year.

And now, ISAs are the new idea to siphon off student debt into the private sector. WaPo reported on Friday that Purdue University signed an agreement with Vemo Education a Virginia financial services firm, to look into the use of ISAs to help Purdue students pay for their educations. In an earlier WaPo op-ed, Mitch Daniels, former Republican governor of Indiana and President of Purdue, said:

From the student’s standpoint, ISAs assure a manageable payback amount, never more than the agreed portion of their incomes…Best of all, they shift the risk of career shortcomings from student to investor: If the graduate earns less than expected, it is the investors who are disappointed; if the student decides to go off to find himself in Nepal instead of working, the loss is entirely on the funding providers, who will presumably price that risk accordingly when offering their terms. This is true “debt-free” college.

What a nice way to say “indentured servitude.” And universities get to keep raising tuition faster than inflation. Sounds like a real winner for Mitch and other Republicans.

The argument by the free-market types is that ISAs shift risk from the backs of students to the investors. If the student has not earned enough over the period of the agreement to return the original capital to the investor, the student would have no further money obligation.

Sounds good. But, why would the investors agree to fund any low-paying degrees? It is logical that they would look to fund only those who represented a low risk of achieving significant earnings in the initial 10 years of working. So they would want to finance medical and engineering degrees while leaving the social workers and teachers to public sector finance. If private sources (investment funds) are providing the money and setting the terms, then loans will only go to those who are most likely to be successful.

And, Mr. Market will tell us which degrees and careers are worthy.

The investment fund will have access to voluminous private data that will allow it to make a precise (nearly riskless?) ISA negotiation with the student, while students are likely to only have access to their University’s aggregate data on expected salaries by type of degree.

If there was any doubt that this is a neo-con approved idea, consider that Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Tom Petri, (R-WI) proposed ISA legislation with a maximum contract length of 30 years and the share of income capped at 15%. This is touted by Sen. Rubio’s supporters as evidence of his “innovative ideas.”

Sadly this idea has been around since the 1950s, when it was first floated by conservative economist Milton Friedman.

One of the most significant factors in our uneven economic recovery since 2008 is how we’ve become beholden to the oligarchs. The gig economy has replaced permanent jobs. Wages have stagnated, and companies are motivated solely by returning money to shareholders, often through share repurchases.

Now, college students are supposed to provide another class of equity return for the investors. They are to syndicate themselves to “shareholders”?

It’s a sick idea, one that only the greediest among us would support.

They Call It “Class Warfare” For a Reason

Many pundits have commented on research by Angus Deaton and Anne Case of Princeton (h/t: Naked Capitalism for an ungated copy of the report) showing that mortality rates for middle-aged white Americans have risen since 1999, in contrast to the patterns for every other racial group and for residents of virtually every other affluent country. Here is a comparison of mortality rates among developed countries, with the US middle-aged white population:

“USW” above stands for US non-Hispanic Whites, while “USH” is US Hispanics, both are census descriptions. Deaton and Case found that rising substance abuse, including alcohol-related disease and painkiller overdose, was the main cause of the disturbing trend:

“Poisonings” refers to drugs and opioids. White Americans are killing themselves directly or indirectly, in increasing numbers. Suicide is up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking causes. This has happened before, in Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it in America.

Why this has happened with few noticing until now, is a great question. There have been warning signs of distress, such as the fact that US life expectancy has stopped rising, and that death rates among white women had risen (and over the same time period examined in the Deaton-Case study). USA Today reported in 2008 that the problem highlighted by Deaton and Case already was already flowering in the Deep South and Appalachia. Citing a study by the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Washington, they found that:

4% of the male population and 19% of the female population experienced either declines or stagnation in their life expectancy in the ’80s and ’90s.

Krugman in Monday’s NYT called it “Despair, American Style“, but like others, did not offer a complte explanation of the phenomena. Deeper analysis is necessary. It would be helpful to see the data mapped. An educated guess is that it is correlated with states that made up the old Confederacy and the American rust belt, as the 2008 Harvard study found.

For example, a 2013 report by the Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) identified West Virginia as leading the nation in drug overdose deaths, with a rate of 28.9 per 100,000 residents. The state’s fatal overdose rate increased by 605% between 1999 and 2010, and has jumped 1,056% since 1979. The majority of these deaths are attributable to the abuse of addictive prescription painkillers.

Assuming that Krugman is correct and it is related to despair, maybe we should look at whether this cohort possesses the things necessary to make life worthwhile, including food security, and a decent place to live, a way to be a part of a larger community, a sense of self-worth. If you’ve lived long enough to see people break, and then try to figure out why they did, while others did not, a lot of it is whether they were part of a supportive community, or an indifferent/cruel environment.

Job and income insecurity causes stress, and stress is a killer. Over an extended period of time, the physical effects of stress can result in long term adverse effects to health, including contributing to chronic pain and depression. Some manage to find relief by opting to buy weed online, but others struggle to get a hold of these products due to local legislation and turn to their doctors for other methods. Some may even find themselves using cambodian mushrooms to help manage their anxiety and stress before turning to any doctor’s orders.

But our physicians are also at fault. Here is a CDC article that says that the amount of pain Americans report has not increased, while the prescribing of pain meds has quadrupled since 1999. Deaton and Case also point out that opioids are prescribed far more often here to treat maladies that include pain than in other countries.

This didn’t happen yesterday, and it won’t be cured by exhortations to “eat healthy,” or “do yoga,” or to follow the great American mantra: “study hard”. To end despair in the working class, we need a better program:

(a) Supportive communities that end stigmatizing of low income earners
(b) Universal health care
(c) A jobs guarantee, with a living minimum wage, so people have better options than the Dollar Store or fast food
(d) Free college, so parents believe that their kids have a shot at a better life

Job and income insecurity are insidious. When you spend a few years out of work, despair creeps in. Despair will push you to the fringes of society, and then, society will blame you for being there.

A redesign of our capitalism is the answer.

Does any presidential candidate support this?

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 18, 2015

Happy Sunday! From The Hill:

With the House still clueless about who its next Speaker will be, Congress has just 10 legislative days to tackle a topic at the center of some of the most pitched fiscal battles of the last several years. The deadline was moved up Thursday by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who told Congress it has only until Nov. 3 to raise the government’s $18.1 trillion borrowing cap.

Paul Ryan is still avoiding the opening for Speaker:

Mr. Obama decided to keep troops in Afghanistan until at least the end of 2017. He says that combat operations in Afghanistan are over. He says the job of “train, advise, assist” won’t change. Mr. Obama says our troops just need to stick around until the training begins to take hold:

Bernie gives Hillary a hand at the Democratic debate:

And the Benghazi hearings are about to start:

Here is the NRA/GOP vision of school safety:

Learned Ignorance in Texas

Why does conservative America try to intentionally withhold historical information?

Consider the latest effort to whitewash American history textbooks. Here is this interpretation of slavery as immigrant labor in the “Patterns of Immigration” section of McGraw-Hill’s textbook, “World Geography”:

The photo above was texted by 15 year-old Coby Dean-Burren to his mother, Roni. The WaPo quoted Roni Dean-Burren:

This is erasure…This is revisionist history — retelling the story however the winners would like it told. In calling slaves ‘workers’ and their move to the United States ‘immigration’

As she noted in Facebook posts last Wednesday and Thursday, the textbook suggests not only that her African American ancestors arrived on the continent willingly, but also that they were compensated for their labor.

This is another skirmish in a broader effort to promote theocracy and remove references to major social justice issues in American textbooks. The NYT 2010 story that is linked above reported on the Texas Board of Education approving a social studies curriculum that put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. For example, the board:

Cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

Anyway, McGraw-Hill Education sought to address the issue with a statement saying that while their geography program:

Meets the learning objectives of the course…our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves. To communicate these facts more clearly, we will update this caption to describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor.

Apparently the changes will be made in the textbook’s digital version and included in its next run. WaPo reports that Dean-Burren has mixed feelings about the outcome:

On a surface level, ‘yay’…I understand that McGraw-Hill is a textbook giant, so thumbs up for listening.

On the other hand, she indicated that few students use the digital version, and since her son’s textbook is brand new (copyright year 2016), another print version is unlikely to come out for ten years.

According to WaPo, as recently as last year, scholars reviewing textbooks based on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills guidelines found a number of historical misrepresentations, among them several in McGraw-Hill’s proposed textbooks. The issues included:

• Declaring that a Muslim garb hinders women’s rights
• Mitigating the inequalities African Americans faced under Jim Crow
• Representing slavery as only a secondary cause of the Civil War

After all, if they can keep kids from learning about the reality of our history, they’ll be less likely to be sensitive to solutions that address long-term inequality, or that promote religious and cultural diversity.

Conservatives give us lots of information, it just isn’t usually completely true. There is a large group of pundits who are well paid to spread disinformation in comment pieces each week, and it’s hard to recall any of them ever suffering any discomfort for lying.

Think about how conservatives attempt to block progress–whether it is our history, climate change, or civil rights. They use three basic arguments: 1) it didn’t (isn’t) happening; 2) its too late to do anything anyway; 3) it will cost too much. They emphasize whichever argument the circumstances require.

The modern conservative game plan includes learned ignorance. They know they’re wrong on many of the issues, so they hope to limit access to data and truth.

Anger is an Energy

We are witnessing the convergence of several trends, which may take politics as we know it and turn it on its head. First, a political trend in which both angry Republicans and angry Democrats now believe that there is zero chance that the government will do anything to improve their lives.

Second, the American Exceptionalism movement is morphing into something that says we must win, and win now. Never mind trying to figure out exactly what “winning” means. We’ve now spawned two generations of Trump wanna-be’s who have no time for losing. They must win, win, win, and they will say or do whatever it takes to win.

Third, people have sorted themselves into groups that are impervious to fact. Presenting people with the best available information doesn’t change many minds. Like a psychic immune response, they reject ideas that they consider harmful. Regardless of whether the subject is climate, vaccines or politics, they prefer and are much more susceptible to, appeals to emotion.

So we live in a time of angry rage. We can’t change most of what we see, but we sure can be pissed about it. The angry voter has been blamed for the insurgent candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, and the possible emergence of a third-party presidential run in 2016.

In the midst of this shit storm, political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster of Emory University last week posted an intriguing analysis at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball Blog on the role of anger in the 2012 presidential election. They conclude that voters are indeed angry. But their anger is directed mainly at the opposing party, and this anger is increasingly correlated with ideology. In other words, the most liberal and most conservative voters are also the most likely to be angry. Looking forward to 2016, they conclude: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The most important influence on the 2016 presidential election as well as the House and Senate elections will be the division of the American electorate into two warring partisan camps. In the seven decades since the end of World War II, Democrats and Republicans have never been as divided as they are today.

Earlier this year, Abramowitz and Webster released a paper cataloging the sharp increase in party-line voting in recent decades. Once upon a time, it was not uncommon for Republicans to vote Democratic and vice versa. In 2012, the authors tell us, the US saw:

The highest levels of party loyalty and straight-ticket voting since the American National Election Studies first began measuring party identification in 1952.

What’s the reason for the polarization? Abramowitz and Webster call it “negative partisanship”, the tendency of voters to think of their ballots not as a way to help their party but as a way to hurt the opposition. In other words, it’s not that our side is so great; it’s that the other side is so awful.

How do we know the other side is awful?’

Abramowitz and Webster say that a crucial element in negative partisanship is the assignment of negative characteristics to the other party. From 1972 to 2012, the proportion of voters who believed there are significant differences between the parties rose from 55% percent to well over 80%. We can argue over why, but, as the authors point out, these changes in perception are rational, since the parties themselves have become more ideologically rigid.

A thought experiment: Is there a party where the voter who is for abortion rights, but against same-sex marriage is comfortable? How about the voter who supports the Affordable Care Act, but is a skeptic on climate change? And if you don’t believe such complex voters exist, you are part of the evidence for the authors’ thesis about party rigidity.

All of us have met political partisans who believe that those on the other side are irredeemably stupid or evil. Yet we know that view of superiority is ultimately enforceable only at the point of a gun — just the opposite of what we expect of our democracy.

So, is anger good for our democracy? In a world of twitter and other social media, there are just way more outlets for anonymous anger. And that anger reproduces itself with every re-tweet.

And if there’s one thing anger loves, its attention.

Maybe we can learn something from what Johnny Rotten said in his book, “Anger is an Energy”, (which is a line from his song “Rise”): (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

When I was writing the Public Image Ltd song ‘Rise’, I didn’t quite realize the emotional impact that it would have on me, or anyone who’s ever heard it since. ‘Anger is an energy’ was an open statement, saying, ‘Don’t view anger negatively, don’t deny it – use it to be creative...’

Anger doesn’t necessarily equate directly to violence. Violence very rarely resolves anything. In South Africa, they eventually found a relatively peaceful way out. Using that supposedly negative energy called anger, it can take just one positive move to change things for the better.

Maybe, a third party presidential run in 2016?

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Education in America