Democrats and Republicans all think the other party is composed of extremists.
Accuracy is often as easy as opening your eyes. Herewith, a quick study at where we are, and where we’re headed. I’ve bolded some key passages. Btw, I like both donkeys and elephants. 😉
Via New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore, 10/21/19
That the American political system has recently been characterized by intense partisan polarization is hardly breaking news. It’s not entirely news, either, since it has been underway since the two parties began realigning ideologically in the 1960s, mostly because of the civil-rights revolution. The fact that we are in an era of (mostly) close partisan parity matters too; that raises the stakes of elections and drives sharp partisan differentiation.
Still, there’s “partisan polarization,” and then there’s the kind of bitter division normally associated with things like the Spanish Civil War. The latest edition of the American Values Survey from the Public Religion Research Institute shows pretty clearly that partisans subscribe to extremist characterizations of what makes the other side tick. Putting aside whether these are true (we’ll return to that topic later), it’s amazing how little Democrats have in common with Republicans, and vice versa, in how they view the other party.
The survey asks whether the Democratic Party is “trying to make capitalism work for the average American” or “has been taken over by socialists.” Self-identified Democrats agree with the former description over the latter by an 83-15 margin, but self-identified Republicans agree with the latter over the former by an 82-17 margin. This probably isn’t just a vestige of the era of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by the way; you may recall there was a serious effort ten years ago to get the Republican National Committee to constantly refer to the Donkey Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party” shortly after the centrist Barack Obama took office.
Meanwhile, the PRRI survey asked if the GOP is “trying to protect the American way of life against outside threats” or “had been taken over by racists.” Republicans chose the former characterization by a 94-5 margin, while Democrats chose the latter by an 80-17 margin.
Some may object that to some extent these findings simply reflect the tendency of partisans to choose less-disreputable labels for themselves and more-disreputable labels for the Other Team. But still: The extreme disconnect in perceptions has to mean something.
And that leads one back to objective reality and the need to resist the temptation to see partisan polarization through the lens of false equivalence. Have Democrats really been “taken over by socialists?” Well, all I know is that the currently preeminent lefty candidate for president embraces the capitalist label regularly and enthusiastically — as do all but one of her nomination-contest rivals, not to mention the vast majority of Democrats in Congress and in statehouses around the country. Even the nation’s most prominent self-identified “democratic socialist,” Bernie Sanders, stands for an ideological tradition borrowed mostly from FDR, not from some alien anti-capitalist tradition.
Now it’s true that most Republicans strongly resist the racist label too. But it’s also true that the maximum leader they adore has embraced racist expressions for most of his career. And the same PRRI survey that documents partisan polarization also shows that 69 percent of self-identified Republicans agree that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” You probably need to be at least a wee bit racist to believe that howler.
False equivalence aside, these findings add to our understanding that the 2020 elections are going to represent an apocalyptic clash of cultures and perceptions. Taking perceptions of the opposition as they exist and ratcheting them up into the insane level they are likely to achieve when the deal goes down is going to make this feel like a fight between the Klan and Commies. And unlike some political systems, ours has no mechanism to create a coalition government. It will be all or nothing for both sides, at least when it comes to the executive branch and the judicial branch the president’s party will dominate via appointments — and perhaps the legislative branch shaped by straight-ticket voting. Gird up your loins.
The real question in the room. Will enough of the same people who voted him into office, vote him back in anyway?
Some surely will not. There actually are people who admit they made a mistake in 2016, and may sit out 2020. But, given the broken electoral college system, and the in-your-face rigging of it by political gerrymandering, it is quite conceivable this man will gain enough votes again.
Of course, there’s more to the odds than just that. There’s the strength and electability of the opposition candidate, and there’s Russian interference, to name two major factors.
Right now, just a year away from the election, without a sea change in support from his base, a strong, scandal free, broadly accepted front runner emerging as a challenger, and quite likely, legislation banning him from running again, if he even is impeached, which is already unlikely to happen, Trump is President again in 2020.
Well-kept parks, clean air and water, safe and friendly neighborhoods: these and many other factors outside our control contribute to health. | WIN-Initiative/Getty Images/WIN-Initiative RM
Book Reviews
Well: What We Need To Talk About When We Talk About Health
Via NPR, Stephanie O’Neill
The typical American conversation about health focuses on personal choice as a key driver — the foods we choose to eat, the number of steps we log each day, the doctors we visit and the medicines we take. But epidemiologist Sandro Galea says that way of thinking is the wrong way.
In his new book, Well: What We Need To Talk About When We Talk About Health, the dean of Boston University School of Public Health says not only does the belief in the power of personal choice fail to fix America’s health crisis, it also diverts us from real issues underlying our nation’s poor health.
“We can choose the food we eat, but our options are limited by what we can afford and by what kinds of food are available for purchase near our home,” he writes. “These factors, in turn, depend on the quality of our neighborhood and the size of our income, which depends on larger social economic forces over which we have little control.”
The notion that one creates good health just by choosing to do so makes it easy to stigmatize obesity, addiction and other chronic conditions as byproducts of laziness or moral weakness, further obscuring their actual causes, he warns.
“Telling you that you should exercise more when you’re worried about getting out of your house and getting shot; when there is no park around you which has a nice place for you to walk; when you’re working two minimum-wage jobs and you can’t afford gym membership is simply absurd,” he tells NPR.
Galea says understanding that our health is a product of the world around us serves to remove “our reflexive stigmatization.”
And that’s important, he says, because stigma itself is known to erode self-esteem and confidence, which in turn causes social isolation that can further trigger other health problems.
Galea says his book, represents a culmination of 20 years of studying and working in public health. He was motivated to write it by the the huge gap between what the U.S. spends on health care and the relatively low return on that investment.
“Part of my job is to make sure that the world understands what it really takes to generate health,” Galea says.
As he discusses early in the book, the United States spends a whopping $3.3 trillion on health care, according to federal figures from 2016. Yet U.S. life expectancy — which is the lowest among all comparable nations — has actually fallen in recent years. He points out that the lifespan of a baby born in the U.S. today is now five years shorter, on average, than it would be if that baby were born in Japan, a nation that spends half of what we do on health, per person.
“There’s no other sector where we outspend all our peers and we get less for it,” Galea says. “Would you buy a smartphone if it cost you 40% more than the next closest competitor and your phone functioned 40% worse? The answer is no, you wouldn’t.”
To improve the nation’s overall physical and mental health, Galea says we need to understand that a slew of factors that may seem to have little connection to health are actually the drivers of it.
“The lens that we adopt makes a big difference in how we invest our resources and how we tackle this problem,” Galea says.
He says we need to start talking more about some neglected factors that shape health. These include some themes familiar to students of public health — poverty, environment and policies — and some more surprising ones, including fundamental human values that Galea believes deserve more attention. Key drivers of health to pay attention to include:
Acknowledging the past
To fix the flaws in the systems and policies we’ve created, we have to recognize powerful influences from the past, Galea writes. On an individual level, a person’s past plays a role in shaping their present-day health, he says. And nationwide, it means understanding how history affects us today. For example, Galea says, we can trace back to slavery some roots of the discrepancies in health and average lifespan of black Americans today, as compared to white Americans. “These health gaps are neither random nor inevitable,” Galea writes. “They are a consequence of history.”
Seeing the power in a place
It’s not hard to fathom that neighborhoods and environment — air quality, water quality, housing, sanitation and infrastructure — affect our health and well-being. But Galea says the influence of place is about more than physical environment. A community is formed of “cultural, economic and political factors” which can have a real impact on health, he says, including “the economic opportunities we have … the extent to which we invest in reducing domestic violence; the extent to which we invest in having equitable opportunities for people of all genders.”
Understanding no one’s an island
Galea writes about the importance of social interactions to combat loneliness and isolation — conditions that increase the risk of depression, addiction and suicide. He says that’s especially true for older and sicker Americans, as age and disability contribute to social isolation. As the world’s population ages, “it will become ever more critical that we create opportunities for social engagement across generations,” he says.
Cultivating humility
Recognizing what we don’t know about health and medicine is just as important as what we do know. Humility, Galea says, reminds us that health doesn’t happen in a vacuum and that improving the conditions of people around us could be just as important to improving health as the next scientific breakthrough. “We need to have the humility to accept that there is not just one thing we should do, there are many things we should do,” he says.
Deepening compassion
Galea wants to replace short-term acts of empathy with compassion that acts on the root causes of suffering — which “envisions and aspires to a better world.” Empathy might inspire us to help cover someone’s medical costs or donate to victims of a hurricane, but we still “leave in place the structures that create disease,” he writes. He advocates viewing collective-well-being as a responsibility we all should share. “It’s centered around the Martin Luther King version of compassion,” Galea says, “which is you don’t just fling a coin to a beggar but you ask why he’s a beggar to begin with.”
Shifting perspective on death
A shift in our attitude toward death could help us live better, according to Galea. We need to embrace death’s inevitability and then strive to “die healthy,” he says. “Because once you and I say we value living healthy for as long as possible, then we’ve got to stop investing enormous amounts of money into end-stage (treatments) that do nothing to prolong quality of life, let alone longevity.”
Galea predicts a shift in the American health conversation will require a grassroots approach that starts with each of us changing how we talk about health with friends and family; with electing local, state and national leaders who better understand what’s necessary for health in the U.S.; and with supporting a private sector that’s responsible not just to shareholders but to “common good in the world …. to generate health both for its employees and for the world around it.”
“I think if we all did that,” Galea says, “transformation of how we talk about health will happen sooner than we think.”
If you watch one sociopolitical satire and commentary this year, make it this one, and just stop there. It is very very funny, and it is pitch perfect. Watch it. Pay for it. Subscribe to it. Whatever you need to do. Just watch this. >MB
Political prudence isn’t in vogue, but it should be.
Via NYTimes, By Greg Weiner
A quarter-century later, as Lincoln prepared a bold stroke that helped define his own legacy — the Emancipation Proclamation — his annual message to Congress spoke of historical circumstances more grandly: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
Those poles of Lincoln’s politics — modesty in ordinary times and boldness when required — illustrate the essence of prudence. The gateway to prudence is accurately gauging the character of one’s moment in history. That should be a topic of debate in 2020. Both sides can agree that Mr. Trump is a political anomaly; the question that can distinguish Democrats and Republicans is whether the nation’s situation requires anomalous measures. To justify his leadership style, Mr. Trump’s partisans must establish that his actions are prudent because a pivotal period in history demands them. The sharpest contrast to that view would be a call for normalcy fitted to normal times.
Yet for all the polarization in our politics, Mr. Trump and many of his Democratic challengers agree on the core claim that we live in the throes of a historical crisis. They concur that economic dislocation has ravaged the middle class: many of them might have uttered Mr. Trump’s inaugural proclamation of “American carnage.” All speak of constitutional crises — Mr. Trump of the excesses of the administrative state, Democrats of his violations of longstanding norms.
But the erosion of the middle class is not an acute ailment: It is a gradual, nearly half-century phenomenon that is susceptible only to gradual solutions as well. As for the supposed collapse of American government promulgated by the bureaucracy, the truth is much less dramatic: The administrative state is the product of an eight-decade consensus dating to the New Deal, not an emergent calamity. It can be unwound, but 80 years of practice will not yield to sudden solutions.
The quadrennial inflation of political problems to catastrophic status is a form of historical narcissism, according to which the era in which we live is always grave, earth-shattering, consequential. This raises Lincoln’s question: Who benefits from the claim that these are end times for the republic? The answer is messianic politicians, especially presidents, to whom we give additional power to rescue us. It is therefore no surprise that those who seek the office tend to speak in grandiose terms.
Barack Obama, accepting the Democratic nomination in 2008, proclaimed “one of those defining moments” requiring “a new politics for a new time.” Four years later, Mitt Romney said the 2012 election would “shape great things, historic things, and those things will determine the most intimate and important aspects of every American life and every American family.”
In 2016, Mr. Trump’s supporters said his outsized style was necessary to “drain the swamp” and reorder American politics. On the substance, there has been less reordering or disaster than either his defenders or critics are willing to concede. Wage growth at the bottom half of the economy is climbing, as it has been since roughly Mr. Obama’s second term. The number of troops deployed overseas, an index of conflict, has been declining since 2010.
Voters might reasonably credit Mr. Trump with accelerating those trends, just as they might reasonably dislike his approaches to doing so. But the inflated, world-historical narrative that surrounds both his adversaries and him obscures what might be clarifying differences in the 2020 campaign. If the contest is about who can most shrilly characterize the nation’s condition as opposed to whose politics are best suited to the actual needs of the moment, the candidates will be difficult to distinguish. The sole question will be which extravagant leader we need.
Because it can draw sharp distinctions between candidates, prudence can be a political asset. Yet American politics has comprehensively rejected prudence. Historical rankings of presidents routinely lionize leaders who presided over emergencies, a dynamic that, as Lincoln predicted in 1838, generates a constant demand for and corresponding supply of emergencies. These rankings inevitably consign to oblivion presidents who simply governed according to the circumstances of their times.
Similarly, cable news stations attract more viewers with the breathless chyron “breaking news” than they would with one reading “keep this in perspective.” For their part, voters have an endless appetite for transformative change that leaders, obsessed with their legacies, are eager to sate. The White House hopeful who promises simply to govern is doomed. Instead, the formula for presidential success is change divided by time: The president who alters the nation’s politics the most in the shortest period ranks the highest.
Prudence would question whether a given moment requires transformation or mere governance — whether we are actually hurtling toward the abyss or whether these are more commonplace times. As that inquiry, and Lincoln’s career, demonstrate, prudence does not demand Pollyannas. In genuine emergencies, boldness is prudent. But most political problems, including serious ones, fall short of tragic dimensions. In these situations, prudence counsels moderation.
Before claiming instead that every election revolves around a crisis, political leaders should embrace what Edmund Burke called “a moral rather than a complexional timidity.” Voters ought to share Lincoln’s skepticism of the rhetoric of catastrophe. That would be a prudent response to our grandiose politics and the grandiose politicians who peddle it.
Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump’s characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren’t all criminals, he said. “What about those who have come here for reasons of need?”
Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of “the fathers, the mothers, the children” who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.
In an earlier era, Bundy’s appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone’s-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.
When I was growing up in the ’70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other’s eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.
And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an “empathy pill” so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.
Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: “It’s not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help” or “Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place.”
Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it’s not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else’s perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!
It’s strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that’s what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.
Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.
So, for example, when the wife of white nationalist Richard Spencer recently told BuzzFeed he had abused her, the question debated on the lefty Internet was: Why should we care that some woman who chose to ally herself with a nasty racist got herself hurt? Why waste empathy on that? (Spencer, in a court filing, denies all her allegations.)
The new rule for empathy seems to be: reserve it, not for your “enemies,” but for the people you believe are hurt, or you have decided need it the most. Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That’s practically a taboo.
And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force.
In the past 20 years, psychologists and neurologists have started to look at how empathy actually works, in our brains and our hearts, when we’re not thinking about it. And one thing they’ve found is that “one of the strongest triggers for human empathy is observing some kind of conflict between two other parties,” says Fritz Breithaupt, a professor at Indiana University who studies empathy. “Once they take the side, they’re drawn into that perspective. And that can lead to very strong empathy and too strong polarization with something you only see this one side and not the other side any longer.”
A classic example is the Super Bowl, or any Auburn, Alabama game.
But these days in the news, examples come up every day: the Kavanaugh hearings, emergency funding for a wall, Spike Lee walking out of the Oscars, the Barr report, Kirstjen Nielsen, every third thing on Twitter.
Researchers who study empathy have noticed that it’s actually really hard to do what we were striving for in my generation: empathize with people who are different than you are, much less people you don’t like. But if researchers set up a conflict, people get into automatic empathy overdrive, with their own team. This new research has scrambled notions of how empathy works as a force in the world. For example, we often think of terrorists as shockingly blind to the suffering of innocents. But Breithaupt and other researchers think of them as classic examples of people afflicted with an “excess of empathy. They feel the suffering of their people.”
Breithaupt called his new book The Dark Sides of Empathy, because there’s a point at which empathy doesn’t even look like the kind of universal empathy I was taught in school. There is a natural way that empathy gets triggered in the brain — your pain centers light up when you see another person suffering. But out in the world it starts to look more like tribalism, a way to keep reinforcing your own point of view and blocking out any others.
Breithaupt is alarmed at the apparent new virus of selective empathy and how it’s deepening divisions. If we embrace it, he says, then “basically you give up on civil society at that point. You give up on democracy. Because if you feed into this division more and you let it happen, it will become so strong that it becomes dangerous.”
We can’t return to my generation’s era of empathy innocence, because we now know too much about how the force actually works. But we can’t give up on empathy either, because empathy is “90 percent what our life is all about,” Breithaupt says. “Without it, we would be just alone.”
In his book Breithaupt proposes an ingenious solution: give up on the idea that when we are “empathizing” we are being altruistic, or helping the less fortunate, or in any way doing good. What we can do when we do empathy, proposes Fritz, is help ourselves. We can learn to see the world through the eyes of a migrant child and a militia leader and a Russian pen pal purely so we can expand our own imaginations, and make our own minds richer. It’s selfish empathy. Not saintly, but better than being alone.
