Some reasons why the return of a reasonable GOP will be so difficult

In some sense, this post is a response to a recent column by Nicholas Kristof, Desperately Seeking Principled Republicans.  Kristof cites several prominent conservatives who have said, in so many words, that the Republicans have gone off the rails. It is time to vote for Democrats, just to restore some sanity.  Kristof's piece makes it seem that the failure is primarily a matter of character in those Republicans who currently hold office.  I certainly don't want to rule out the importance of character, but I think it necessary to consider the political environment as well.  Thinking about the political environment gets you to consider changes in it, some which are not that recent, that surely have had an impact on the behavior of our elected officials, and on the electorate as well.  It also gets you to consider the long term impact of those changes (by looking back historically at them) and separate that from the more immediate intended effects.  Doing this, at least for me, makes the current situation seem less likely a consequence of some grand conspiracy and more likely the result of insufficient prescience in making those past decisions, so a gradual withering away at institutions that, while not perfect, were at one time reasonably functional.

I should also note here, for the reader who otherwise is unfamiliar with me, that I'm not a political scientist.  I am a retired, but once well trained, economist.   I don't believe the social science is all that different, regardless of the perspective.  So, with that, I will offer up an annotated list of factors that seem important to me and that are not focused on the very recent past. There's been enough written about those more recent factors that I don't need to include them here.

The End of the Fairness Doctrine/The Old Oligopoly of Network News

The Wikipedia entry is interesting in that it explains the fairness doctrine as a rule imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on broadcasters (radio and TV, but apparently not on newspapers, which were outside the FCC's jurisdiction) to present controversial issues in a fair and balanced manner.    We did once have that in our country.  Whether watching Walter Cronkite (CBS), Huntley and Brinkley (NBC), or Howard K. Smith (ABC) for the nightly news, the essence of the content was pretty much the same.  It seems clear that we no longer have anything close to that.

The doctrine was ended in 1987 and the argument at the time was that with the advent of cable television, the oligopoly of news provision would be broken.  New providers would emerge.  With greater competition, the fairness doctrine was no longer necessary.

Now I want to consider newspapers a bit, even though they were outside the scope of this regulation.  Newspapers have a separate section for opinions/editorials/and other columns that are not subject to the requirement of being balanced in the way the fairness doctrine required. But the news was supposed to be the news, the reporting of factual information of importance and current interest.  This means that while the editorial pages of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal could be wildly different, their front page news should have been pretty much the same.  I'm unaware of anyone who has done a serious study to test whether that was ever actually true, or if instead the front pages themselves were slanted, even back in the early years of Reagan.  I do recall ongoing complaints from conservatives about liberal bias in the news.   I always thought that was sour grapes, as they weren't seeing the coverage they wanted to get, perhaps with a strategic element thrown in to try to influence future such coverage.

With television and radio news, the separation of news from editorial isn't as clean, at least conceptually (way back when 60 Minutes had Andy Rooney giving opinion near the end of the show, but that was not true of nightly news) so there is reason to believe that some editorial content gets inserted into news pieces.  Purely as a social scientist, this idea of complete objectivity and that the news is just facts, I believe to be an illusion.  There is an important selection issue, which facts to emphasize and which to push to the background.  This requires a point of view to decide.  The point of view is fused then with the reporting of news. Nevertheless, one might expect the variation in how the news is reported to not be too great, so a regular reader of the New York Times could have a discussion with a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal about the news and find areas of what they agree to be true, as well as points of disagreement.  We are not close to this now with TV news.

There has been Yellow journalism long before the current morass.  (We learned about it in grade school history class regarding the Spanish-American War.  It was the precursor to fake news.)   What may not be well understood is that there is a kind of market failure in news that is ad-funded or funded by subscription.  In the competition for eyeballs, sensationalism that produces "addicted" viewers is a winning business strategy, even as it tarnishes the news itself.  With a limited number of possible entrants, the fairness doctrine can then be seen as a counter to this market failure.

There is the question of whether we can return to something like the fairness doctrine now, with the advent of the Internet strongly suggesting otherwise.  I will point out that if TV is regulated but the Internet is not, that will simply expedite the movement of programming to the unregulated environment.   So one might ask, is is possible to impose the fairness doctrine on Internet news as well as on TV news.  From my vantage, that would be desirable, but I don't see how it might happen.

As a social experiment, possibly one that might be done if we have a Democrat in the White House, I would like to see Fox News, and for fairness MSNBC as well, off the air for an extended period of time, say four to six months.  I'm interested, in particular, in whether regular Fox viewers might willingly turn to other news programming that is "more balanced."  If the answer to that is no, then one might reasonably conclude that audience is captured by those politicians who make appeal to them.  This captured audience is one reason for the tribalism that has been so heavily reported.

The Hastert Rule/The End of Bipartisan Compromise in the House

The Wikipedia entry makes clear that the rule was actually first imposed by Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert's predecessor as Speaker.  But the entry fails to point out that the rule served quite different purposes for the two.  Gingrich was much more of an ideologue and a firebrand.  For Gingrich, the rule was a tool for wielding power.  Hastert, who is now probably remembered more for his sexual indiscretions while in office than for his politics, was much more of a conciliator, as was his successor John Boehner.  Indeed, Paul Ryan might also fit in the conciliator category.

The purpose of the rule for the conciliator as Speaker, is to preserve job security and not face the threat of a challenge from the right flank.  More generally, one might argue that the scarcity of principled Republicans, broadly considered, is because they have had to defend themselves against the right flank rather than take as their opponents those from across the aisle.  Let's consider this specifically as it applies in the House.

In an ideal word scripted by Anthony Downs, legislation from the House should reflect the median voter in the House, aggregating across all representatives: Democrats, Republicans, and others.  Next, we modify that ideal by noting that the Speaker is a politician with the power of setting the agenda, as described by Duncan Black.  So the Speaker's preference matters in determining the legislation and one should then predict the legislative outcome to be somewhere between the true median of the entire House and the Speaker's preferred point, with the location depending in part on the size of the majority that will vote in favor of the legislation.   If the Speaker is wary of threats to his leadership from his own caucus, that can influence the Speaker's preference, but it does not preclude having legislation emerge that has bipartisan support.

Seen in this framework, the effect the Hastert rule, when Republicans have a majority in the House, is to move proposed legislation to the median of the Republican Caucus rather than to the median of the House as a whole, and to block legislation that would require bipartisan support to pass.

One might envision a more important dynamic consequence.  Compromise, with the Democratic caucus, gets cast as disloyalty among Republicans, rather than the necessary "sausage making" part of politics.  This is another factor contributing to tribalism, as practiced by our elected representatives.

I think it worthwhile to consider what being principled means, from the perspective of this analysis.  Is the Speaker who sticks to the party line principled or is it the Speaker who compromises with the other party the principled one?  There are many different ways to answer the question.  I will answer that with the following question.  Which mode would be better for us all, as a long term proposition?  So I'd like to entertain the following counterfactual.  Suppose that Hastert or Boehner abandoned the rule entirely, which was then followed by a challenge to their own leadership from the right wing.  Suppose that challenge was effective enough to remove the then current speaker.  What would happen after that?  Would the Republicans in the House then find themselves in disarray and as a consequence lose their majority in the next election?

If so, maybe the experience would actually be liberating for future Speakers.  The threat from the right wing, like the threats of many bullies, would be seen as not decisive.  Those future Speakers would have more freedom to negotiate, because the entire Republican caucus would fear another bout of disarray.  Alas, we haven't yet had this experience.   I'm afraid that with a conciliator as Speaker, we never will, and with a hardliner as Speaker, then of course it won't happen.

The Undemocratic Effects of the Primary System Coupled with Low Voter Turnout

If the Median Voter Model held full sway and voters voted their preference rather than voted strategically (e.g., opt for their second choice if they felt their first choice had no chance of winning in the general election) then the winning Republican candidate in a Congressional district primary would look like the median Republican voter in that district, and likewise on the Democratic side of the equation.  Then this observation needs to be coupled with the Paradox of Voting.  If voting is costly (from the point of view of opportunity cost of time) and an individual voter's vote will likely not sway the outcome, then voting becomes irrational.   Given this, the candidate who wins the primary should reflect the median only of those voters who do vote.  Such voters overcome the seeming irrationality suggested in the Paradox of Voting.

It is known that voter participation rates in the primary are lower than voter participation rates in the general election.  Moreover, Republican voters further to the right are more inclined to participate (as are Democratic voters further to the left).    The primary system itself is polarizing.  Adding the voter participation issue to the primary system increases the polarization.

This issue does have some obvious remedies.  Enabling crossover voting in the primaries, especially for those of the other party who have an eye on the general election, would help keep extreme candidates from winning.   And making voting mandatory would counter the Paradox of Voting.  How to get those remedies as outcomes, however, is far from obvious.

The Decline of Private Sector Unions

Let me begin this section by engaging in a stereotype from 1970s TV, Archie Bunker.  He worked on the loading dock, was a union member, and voted for Nixon.  (This last one is best explained because Archie Bunker was a proud American, believed that America is always right, and thus was for the War in Vietnam.)   More generally, Archie Bunker is emblematic of the hard-hat type.   I don't know whether that type is representative of current Trump supporters in many respects, but among urban, males who voted for Trump, I think it a useful stereotype to keep in mind.

It's the union membership aspect that I want to focus on here.  While union members are now quite often depicted as lefties, that never was fully true, even when unions wielded power and the majority of union members voted Democratic while the unions themselves contributed more to the campaigns of Democratic candidates.   Unions should be considered in a quite different light. They were a normalizing force with respect to social attitudes, particularly about minorities, even if not a perfect one.  Because union power was related to the size of union membership, there was incentive to include minorities in the union.  Unions were also also guilds and helped members - skill-wise by encouraging senior members and junior members to have a master-apprentice relationship, and socializing-wise by providing members with a ready peer group for after work-hours fun.  This put unions in a paternalistic role with respect to their members.  The politicians understood this.  Republican politicians might garner some union votes, as long as their politics wasn't explicitly anti-union.

I don't want to sugarcoat what it is that unions did.  There were, of course, serious issues about connections with the Mafia and corruption among union leadership.  But, and this is the important point for what is being argued here, unions served as a force from outside the political arena that the politicians needed to confront (and perhaps be fearful of).  In that way strong private sector unions steered Republican politicians towards the center. This force is absent from our current politics.

The Rise of Hostage Taking as a Strategy by Organized Special Interest Groups

Lobbying has been around at least since U.S. Grant was President.  That special interests would shower gratuities and attention on politicians situated on the right committees, so that when legislation the special interests cared about was being considered, they could influence the writing of that legislation in a way favorable to themselves.   While I find the practice unsavory, as I'm sure many others do as well, it has been with us for such a long time that you might think it part of the process.  In particular, I would be hard pressed to consider the shift in the Republicans that Nicholas Kristof wrote about and attribute it to lobbying. We need to focus on something else.

I've called the something else strategic hostage taking.  An exemplar is Grover Norquist and his organization Americans for Tax Reform.  He offers a candidate to take their "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," which in game-theoretic terms can be called a credible commitment device.  The pledge says the candidate will oppose any and all measures to raise taxes.  Having taken the pledge that gets publicized, so people who monitor the list of candidates who have taken the pledge and who want to support them in their campaigns can do so.  Americans for Tax Reform might also contribute directly to the campaign, but the real leverage is in making other high rollers who don't want their taxes raised aware of which candidates are on the list.  The hostage taking part comes later.  Suppose that later there is a dire situation - a war has been declared, an enormous natural disaster has taken place, or something else in this category and that necessitates substantial additional government spending.  The rational response then would be to have a temporary tax surcharge to pay for that spending.  But legislators who took the pledge and who want to run for reelection can't vote for such a temporary surcharge, because that would mean they've broken the pledge, and they'll be punished accordingly.  That is the hostage taking.

The National Rifle Association operates in much the same way and has completely blocked any sensible reform regarding gun control in recent times.  Let's note that the Brady Bill did pass 25 years ago, in spite of the NRA, though at the time the Democrats were in control of Congress and the White House.  But since then, nada on the gun control front, yet there have been so many publicly known violent gun death tragedies to galvanize voters on the issue.

Let's observe that when politicians find they are hostages to a variety of different special interests, the normal path for them to break the arrangement is to not seek reelection.  That may be a principled decision or it may simply represent fatigue from playing the role of a puppet.  Surely, it is not principled to promise to surrender one's discretion once in office by abiding by the wishes of the special interests, for the sake of getting their support to assist them in being elected.  We might call that by many other names, but principled wouldn't be one of them.

Conclusion

Except for the last section of this essay, I tried to make the argument in as abstract form as I possibly could.  The point is that the environment that GOP politicians operate in has gotten more hostile over time, especially to politicians who try to conduct themselves in a principled manner.  The reason to present this in an abstract way is to get the reader to focus on that main point, and not get hung up on the issues, which they might otherwise be inclined to do.  The reason why I deviated from that script in the last section is that I didn't know a way to tell the story purely in the abstract, yet keep it readily understandable.  In this case the examples convey the ideas better than a purely theoretical discussion does.  Otherwise, I don't want to elevate the examples, at least not for this post.

I also want to repeat a caveat I gave at the beginning of this essay. I'm looking at changes from a while ago and totally ignoring more recent changes. This is deliberate to make the point that it has been going on for quite a while.  It's not that everything was hunky-dory until the election of 2016 and then we went over a cliff.  Asserting that would be a bad misreading of this history.

Assuming that I am right that the environment for governing has become more hostile for Republicans, one should ask what would Democrats taking control do?  Would it reverse any of the hostility in the environment or merely delay the process till Republicans again take over?   One might also ask whether Republicans, as the out party, might do anything themselves to reverse the hostility in the environment.   That didn't happen in the past, but in the past prominent conservatives weren't ashamed of the Republican party.  Now they are.

Let me conclude by saying we sometimes focus on the wrong period in our history.  Recently, the 1920s have been considered because it was the last time where there were such great disparities in the income distribution.  And the 1930s have also been considered, both because of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism.  Yet I think we should look at an earlier time, to the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.  TR was a Republican, but he also was a reformer.  The problem then was the power of the trusts.  TR came to be known as the trust buster.   Power is distributed differently now and while Antitrust Law, still on the books, may be one tool to combat concentrated power, I suggest we need 21st century tools that take on the political analog. Here I don't want to speculate about what those tools might look like.  My hope with this essay is to get some readers to do that and push the discussion along that way.

The Nerd Man of Razzmatazz

Yesterday I had a look at a brief survey the ELI is doing about current issues with teaching and learning.  While in Malcolm Brown's solicitation for completing the survey he welcomed a very broad audience, a good thing to do, I found that going through the topics there wasn't really anything for me.  I should say here that nowadays I think of myself purely as the college instructor who uses technology as he sees fit, and no longer as the learning technology administrator who cares about where the profession as a whole is headed in driving the technology that is employed in instruction.  So in writing my response to the survey I chose the last entry, Others, and then wrote in something like - Getting students to believe that their instructors care about them.

In my class, that is a big deal.  My impression from the students is that in the other classes they take nobody actually does care about them.  My course, then, comes as a surprise, though I wish it weren't.  Then I started to noodle more on surprise.  I seemed to recall Ken Bain making the argument in What the Best College Teachers Do, that students learn the most when they are genuinely surprised.  Let's say that's true.  As a teacher interested in promoting student learning, it becomes natural to ask, how can I promote surprise in the students by how I teach?

Even though my current memory is for the birds, my long term memory still seems to be functional.  In looking for an answer to that question I recalled the Last Lecture of Randy Pausch, which if you haven't already seen it is worth viewing. He is the person I'm referring to in my title.  Near the end of the lecture he explains that his approach to teaching involves misdirection.  Students think the lecture is about something.  But it really is about something else, although that something else is not revealed ahead of time.  The students eventually discover the true purpose, after the misdirection has been played.  This is what produces the surprise.

People who are not in the education biz might find nothing startling about this revelation, for it sounds just like good showmanship. The professor is like a magician who pulls a metaphorical rabbit out of his hat, near the climax of the lecture.  But if you are in the ed biz, then the Randy Pausch approach might challenge your core beliefs.   I wrote about those beliefs some years ago in a post called, Is "No Brainer" A Double Entendre?  At issue is the following assertion from instructional design.

A well designed course should have clear goals.

In my post, I deconstructed this assertion some.   I'll leave the reader to have at it, other than to note that if the real lesson is a surprise, then it couldn't have been a clear goal to the student at the outset.  So something is fishy here, or needs further untangling, or a different way to view things so that they come back in focus and then make sense.

I want to do something else here, create my own surprise. I actually lied above (something I rarely if ever do so with intention in these posts).  While it is true that I did the ELI survey before starting to draft this post, I did not noodle on how to create surprise in learning to come up with my title.  It was actually quite the opposite.  I came up with the title (I'll explain how that happened in a bit) and then tried to find subject matter to fit it.

The title itself is actually a rhyme for a pretty well known movie starring Burt Lancaster that came out when I was a kid.  I'm guessing that just about anyone my age would know the name of that movie, as it was quite popular at the time.  Coming up with rhymes is something I do now, much of the time, as anyone who has seen my Twitter feed will be able to attest.

What may be less obvious, is how those rhymes appear to me in gestation.  It is never the whole thing in one gestalt.   But with some frequency the first line seemingly appears in my head from nowhere, especially if I'm not writing a rhyme as commentary on something I've just read.  I've come to appreciate this form of "discovery" as the product of my subconscious at work, solving a problem I didn't know I had.

With the first line almost there, I then had to do a Google search because I thought the last word was Razamatazz (sometimes I remember things incorrectly or never heard them the right way when I first learned them).  The Google search not only revealed the right spelling, but also the meaning, razzle-dazzle.   So I had my line about a nerd who did razzle-dazzle.

The next step is the heart of the matter for me.  It's not the initial spark, but what follows it.  I'm guessing that most people who "discovered" the line for themselves would simply drop it.  There's not much to make from it, so better to move onto something more important.  I operate differently.  I've learned to respect these bits of serendipity as gateways into something interesting. So I started to look for how I can explain the line with something we all know already.  It was probably less than a minute later that I came up with Randy Pausch's last lecture.  He clearly was a nerd.  Misdirection and razzle-dazzle aren't necessarily the same thing, but they are pretty darn close. To me, I had found the connection I was looking for, enough to make a post out of it.

Now a different surprise, one that tries to tie things back to ELI.  Can technology help in teaching with misdirection?   I'll reframe the question, which I think is really more the issue.  Can technology help the learner find serendipity in the process of learning?

I think that's a big question, one worth a lot more investigation, and I want to wrap up this piece, so I'm only going to comment a little on it.  My piece has hyperlinks in it.  What do we know about student reading of online material.  Do they read the hyperlinked content?  (I'm guessing many students do not.)  What might get students to change their approach and follow the hyperlinks?  If they did that would they start seeing connections between things that heretofore appeared disconnected? These questions aren't on the list of questions in the ELI survey.  Maybe they should be there.

Why are we so screwed up about sex and authority?

My social science nose tells me that all we've been reading and viewing about recent events, which has been overwhelming no matter your point of view, is mainly if not exclusively about symptoms.  We have to get behind that, or under it, or segue to something earlier, to get at causes.  I'm going to try to do that here.  The main causal explanation advanced in the media is that this is a consequence of patriarchy, men abusing women is part and parcel of the system.  I don't want to deny that is a possible cause.  But I want to entertain other explanations, because in many cases the patriarchy explanation serves more to mask things than to enlighten on these matters. 

I want to claim no expertise on this subject.  What I have to go on is my own experience when I was younger, with the Bob Seeger line - awkward teenage blues - a huge understatement in my case.  And then I have my recent experiences teaching, where I try hard both to do Socratic dialog in class and to get widespread class participation. Yet in the last few years I have failed in this endeavor, with the majority of the class and sometimes all students present opting out of responding, instead waiting for one of their classmates to make the heroic leap and then raise their hand.   With this, I hope to cobble together a plausible explanation for what is going on.

Let me begin with a few awkward personal experiences - failures, at least they seemed that way from my point of view - that beyond the moment conditioned my attitudes for many years thereafter.   I am writing this now from the other end of the tunnel, married 28 years and with two adult children.  It's possible to speak of those earlier situations today, even if memory has developed its own spin about what happened.  I'm pretty sure that I would have been unable to talk with anyone about it at or around when these events occurred.  That's not because I didn't think about it.  It's because I didn't trust anyone to have such a conversation.

The first was in 7th grade.  I was 11 or 12.  There were parties that kids would host on Saturdays, in the afternoon or evening. At some of these the purpose of the party seemed to be for kids to pair up, boy-girl, and then make out.  I was horrified by that prospect.  I didn't have a girl to pair up with and when the few of us who were left over were hanging around, there really wasn't anything for us to do.  Should I have asked one of the unpaired girls to be with me?  I never did that.  I remained uncomfortable the whole time.

Sometime later, at a different party, I had a good time with a girl there, more by accident than by anything else.  The whole thing was spontaneous and unplanned.  For a short time thereafter we were boyfriend and girlfriend.  One afternoon a bunch of us road the bus to another girl's house so that each boy-girl pair could make out.  This time I had a girlfriend so that wasn't the problem.  But as we were lying on the bed I had misgivings about kissing her.  It wasn't that I didn't want to do that.  I was concerned about the implied message I'd be sending.  Suppose we made out but then I broke it off soon thereafter.  Would that be okay or not?  I had no answer to that question.  So we lied on the bed and perhaps expressed some tender words, but didn't do any kissing.  Inadvertently, my shyness in that situation broke it off with her.  The funny thing is that at a subsequent party, where we played spin the bottle, I did kiss her. By then I just wanted a kiss and didn't care about the consequences.  But it was too late for that to patch things up.

Now I will fast forward to my senior year in high school, in the fall when I was 16.  I went on a double-date where the other guy was my friend David and the two girls were friends as well. We went to see the French Connection.   We sat in two different rows.  My girl and I were right behind the other couple, with each of the guys sitting on the aisle.  After the movie started I desperately wanted to hold my girl's hand.  But I was having a panic attack about doing it and was simply too afraid to initiate this simple thing.  I may have talked a bit to the girl during the movie. That wasn't overwhelming.  Holding her hand was.  I never got that far.  I liked this girl quite a bit.  That didn't matter about overcoming my own fear of how to handle the situation.

I could give many further incidents.  I will note something else instead.  I struggled with my weight in high school and college.  There are probably many causes for that.  One, obvious in this context, is that being overweight offers a ready-made excuse for failing at the boy-girl thing.  And, related to that, eating (think ice cream or some other treat) is kind of a consolation prize when having failed.  Now I want to juxtapose this with a couple other factoids.   Somewhere in the junior high - high school time frame I learned that a typical boy has a sexual thought about once every eight minutes.  In other words, sex is on our minds much of the time.  The other is the time period in which I went to high school.  The sexual revolution was by then in full swing.  Seemingly, everyone was making love with everyone else.

So I found myself incompetent at prelude to romance, everything that would lead up to an act, whether the act was a kiss, holding a girl's hand, or in my then unrealistic aspirations it also included nookie.  This incompetence had many dimensions - not knowing what I really wanted, not knowing how to deal with the paralyzing fear that would crop up in the moment, and then having no sense whatsoever of the girl's perspective.  The thing was, I knew what it meant to be competent in other areas.  I definitely was not a failure across the board.  But in this most important of life skills, prelude to romance, I was bottom of the barrel. 

Then I made an intellectual error, projecting that the situation was quite different for most everyone else, particularly those guys who were not overweight and not too nerdy. They figured it out.  They had plenty of experience and with that they got good at it.  In contrast, people like me dawdled and remained incompetent at prelude to romance.  Further, as we got older and they made progress while we were standing still, it actually felt like we were moving backwards.  This was my (I now believe incorrect) understanding of things until quite recently.

What was my mistake?  There is definitely learning by doing, but only some doing produces real learning.  The type of doing that works is called deliberate practice. With deliberate practice, you try for things just outside of the current skill set.  This is needed to take the next real step.  But sometimes these tries end for naught.  Real learning entails risk of failure as an intermediate step. So real learning can be bruising to the ego, especially when you expect to be good at the new thing from the get go.

I don't know if guys still do this, but when I was in high school there was a metaphorical baseball scorecard about how the guy did in the latest romantic encounter.  It was measured by what base the guy got to.  On this metric, many guys had much better early scorecards than I had, but it's quite possible that they plateaued after that and, if so, were actually not that different from me.

Now another hypothesis (guess) that explains the plateauing.  People often try to make safety plays in situations where their egos might take a bruising.  So they end up repeating what they did before, which produces no learning at all, rather than try something new, where they might learn from the experience.  Regarding why the weekend tennis player never makes it to the professional level, this is probably enough of an explanation.  However, on not being competent at prelude to romance, I think more is needed to explain the plateauing, since the rewards from getting better are much larger and are perceived as such.

The paralytic fear that I experienced while on that high school date, and on other occasions too, is quite a motivator.  People who have experienced such fear more than once, in situations that others would consider ordinary and not threatening, have a very powerful motivation to encourage them to avoid a repeat of such circumstances.  Now I have another hypothesis to advance, one that makes sense to me.  The shy person and the bully face very similar situations.  But they manage the situations quite differently.  The shy person opts for avoidance.  The bully opts for control. Juxtapose this with the type of intellectual error I made.  Assume others make the same error as well.  It would be much easier to simply chill out on incompetence at prelude to romance if the perception was that many others were likewise struggling with this.  When the perception, however, is that others are full steam ahead, then this incompetence has the makings of a personal crisis.  It's with this mindset that the person looks for a safety play.

Now let's bring authority into the mix.  I'm no expert here, but I do have more relevant personal experience to tap into as a professor and as a campus administrator.  Undergraduate students perceive the relationship between them and their instructor as vertical.  The students tend to be deferential to authority.  This is true even as other organizations break down hierarchical relationships in favor of flatter structures with more equality among members. There have been things written that argue the perception of the professor as authority depends on the gender of the instructor.  Perhaps that is true.  If so, it fits into the story being told here.

Vertical relationships are inherently trust relationships. The subordinate trusts that the superior will act in accord with what is best for the organization as a whole.  Trust relationships of this sort create a reputation for the superior.  Preserving the good reputation then serves as motive for the superior to indeed act in a way that is best for the organization. Yet it is possible that the superior instead 'cashes in' on the reputation.  I actually teach about this in my class on the economics of organizations.  We look for ways where the cashing in won't happen, whether ethos or incentive.   Neither of these are perfect.  Cashing in sometimes happens. And if the perception is that you can cash in but go undetected, then the behavior will persist.  The incentive argument against cashing in definitely includes the likelihood of being caught as part of the incentive.

Now I want to switch to my experience as an administrator.  What might be exhilarating in the work early on eventually starts to seem like a burden.  This is especially true under two different circumstances. One is that you take a lot of criticism/flak for making decisions that you feel are right but that remain controversial.  You didn't sign up for the job to take such criticism and you start to look for compensations that continue to make it worthwhile to do overall.   The other is that you plateau in your learning from doing the work and look for other reasons than the work itself for continuing to do it.  Compensations of various sorts might then offer these other reasons.  In my own case, I definitely felt I was plateauing a year or so before I retired. I recall that at staff meetings I would monopolize the conversation more than was really good for the group, just because I could do that based on my position. It's a simple example to illustrate the point.

There is still one more point that is needed to give this story some bite.  With this one I have no experience, so I'm having a harder time trying to explain it.  It is that non-consensual sex is nonetheless perceived as reward by the person committing rape.  What is the origin of that perception?  Does it stem from incompetence at the prelude to romance or from something else?  Admittedly, this is the part of the story where patriarchy might creep back in, even as I've been trying to construct an alternative to that explanation.  Alternatively, it might be a confounding of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, where guys get so caught up in how many times they've reached home plate that it becomes their entire focus.  Then the pleasure of the moment becomes subsidiary, perhaps even entirely lost. 

* * * * *

With #MeToo we have reached the possibility of punishing rape after the fact, outside of the legal system, via embarrassment of the perpetrator by exposing multiple such acts, with that possibly leading to other painful consequences, such as loss of job.  This does not preclude subsequent legal penalties being imposed, but the legal penalties may be less important than the public embarrassment in the overall scheme. Fundamentally from an economics perspective, this is a deterrence approach.  Deterrence can be effective.  Yet most of us subscribe to the view that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Deterrence may not always be a very good preventative, either because the person the prevention is aimed at is immature (e.g., young male drivers are known to be high risk for automobile accidents quite apart from the consequences on future car insurance premiums) or because the person rationally believes he can get away with it, which the powerful might still believe in spite of #MeToo.

The purpose of doing a causal analysis is to look for other ways to prevent misogyny and rape, methods that would take effect before the fact.  While I meant my analysis as broad strokes only, and even with that it may be that the approach is wrongheaded so something entirely different is needed, I did want to conclude with posing a question that assumes the approach is not too far off the mark.  Is there anything that might be done during the teenage years, also during the early twenties, in other words for high school and college students, that might combat their feelings of incompetence at prelude to romance and might help them understand that they are not alone in having these feelings?

I definitely do not have a full program to offer here.  I only have a few errant thoughts.  Back around 1990, I was teaching an undergraduate class where several of the kids were taking ballroom dancing (perhaps to fulfill a physical education requirement, but of that I'm less sure).   It seems to me that a class in ballroom dancing, one that would get the shy kids to take it, is the sort of thing that might work.

More recently, I attended a workshop on campus about effective use of clickers in high enrollment courses.  One of the presenters was the instructor for a Gen Ed course on Human Sexuality, taught in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health.  They did anonymous surveys in that class, where the student's identity remained hidden, asking about some pretty personal questions about the student's own sexual practices.  As you might imagine, there was intense interest in the results those surveys produced and the anonymity was a key feature to get large if not universal participation.  That made it seem possible for students to get accurate information about their peers in this domain, though whether that could be done earlier, in high school, and done online rather than with clickers, I leave for others to determine.  Further, we'd need to determine whether students would be as interested in information about those prelude acts as they seem to be about the sex itself.  That would have to be investigated.

I want to note one thing that seemingly cuts in the wrong direction.  Some part of being competent at prelude to romance has to entail being competent at face to face conversation, including the type where romance is not part of it at all. Yet we know that younger people get less practice at this now because they are on their electronic devices so frequently.  (The nervousness that I talked about above is likely absent when the communication is mediated by an electronic device.)   I, for one, believe that young people should get much more practice of their schmooze skills with part of the goal that they learn to like the experience.  Yet how to do that effectively is something we are all struggling with.

Once in a while I ask myself whether in some social domain, race relations for example, are we better off today than we were 50 years ago?  Now the question I'm asking is what can we do now so we are better off 50 years from now?  I hope others start to ask the same question.

The Neville Chamberlain Moment

The name Neville Chamberlain is associated with the word appeasement.  Chamberlain was the Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1937-40.  The appeasement refers to Britain's and France's reaction to the German annexation of the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia.  This was allowed to happen without resistance, in an effort to maintain peace.  World War I was a distinct memory and avoiding war was the motivation for appeasement.

Yet Chamberlain was still Prime Minister in 1939, when Germany annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia.  That move made Chamberlain change his tact.  Britain declared war on Germany, a necessary reaction to this uncontained aggression.  This escalated what was a regional conflict into World War II.  Clearly Chamberlain didn't want war.  But there was no viable alternative.

With the very odd casting of Jeff Flake in a leadership role, Republicans as a whole in Congress are now having their Neville Chamberlain moment.  This is not just their embrace of Donald Trump.  It is a longer trajectory thing where the Republicans have practiced a scorched earth approach to legislation - there wasn't a single Republican vote for Obamacare, even though it was modeled on a Republican approach to health care.  The ultimate scorched earth tactic was not taking up the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

As I write this, I don't know what will happen to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, but I suspect that Republicans in Congress have been surprised how difficult the process has been.  It should be a wake up call to them that they need to change their ways. How many other Republicans in Congress share Flake's view that the tribalism needs to end, I don't know.  Those that do share the view need to be much more forthcoming about it.

At present, there is a sense that the outcome of the November election still hangs in the balance.  Remaining silent on both Trump and tribalism thus is a kind of hedge.  As a very large number of Republicans are not running for reelection, notably Speaker Paul Ryan, it seems clear that the hedge approach takes its emotional toll, just as appeasement must have done for Neville Chamberlain.

While previously I had thought that some of these Republicans might speak out during the lame duck session of Congress, I now believe that the various events surrounding the Kavanaugh nomination have triggered an urgent need for Republicans to push back against their own scorched earth approach.  That needs to happen now.

In all likelihood, if that did happen, the Democrats would make large electoral gains this November and the Republicans would return to minority party status, but we would avoid the Civil War that seems increasingly inevitable.  The Democrats offer their own sort of resistance, of course.  But the Democrats can't prevent that Civil War on their own. 

The Median Voter Model and Was Hillary Clinton The Wrong Candidate?

This will be a very brief post (for a change).

As our politics has seemingly become more polarized, the insight that Anthony Downs gave us in An Economic Theory of Democracy, which cast into the strategic positioning of candidates when voting is by majority rule, what Harold Hotelling had previously modeled for spatial competition, seemed to make sense in a bygone era but was obsolete now.  Suppose that is not true and the Median Voter Model is still applicable.

The conjecture here is that median voters are suburban women in Republican households.  A surprise to me, and I think to many others who have looked at the results from the 2016 election, is that as grotesque as Donald Trump's behavior was to women, in a way that should have been evident to all, Republican suburban women largely voted for Trump anyway.  Hillary Clinton had been so demonized by the Republican attack machine that they wouldn't vote for her, even as bad as Trump was.  It is in that sense that I mean Hillary Clinton was the wrong candidate.  It's not about her politics and positions.  It's that she couldn't win these critical voters. (Incidentally, if you notice now that Nancy Pelosi is supposedly the most hated politician in the country, this is pretty much for the same reason.)

The situation with Kavanaugh, I believe and I'm sure many others believe as well, will be determined by how suburban Republican women see his nomination at this point.  My guess are that such voters are repulsed by Kavanaugh, even if many won't articulate that because they don't want to be overtly critical of the Republican party.  If that's right, at a minimum the confirmation vote for Kavanaugh will be delayed till after the election in November, and quite possibly it will be withdrawn.

Of course, this all could be wishful thinking.  But it is clear that the Republican attach machine can't go after Christine Blasey Ford now, and Chuck Grassley's decision not to grant her request to delay the testimony before his committee till after an investigation has taken place will almost surely blow up.

Of the Senate Republicans - they are hoist on their own petard. 

Dissonance and Democracy

It feels as if we're living within a William Faulkner novel with the entire country part of the story.

Some of my friends have been posting in Facebook about the speech President Obama made on my campus this past Friday.  I watched it on replay, in bits and chunks, so I could work through what I was hearing.  It is a speech addressed to college-age students who are old enough to vote.  The core message was exactly that.  Vote.  Work to get out the vote of others.  If enough of that happens, the system will autocorrect, not immediately but over time, not perfectly but sufficiently that we can feel good about the society we live in.  President Obama was careful enough to say there is no guarantee this will happen.  The current situation, with concentrated powerful interests holding sway, has means and motive to sustain that. But the masses have voting as a way to restore real democracy.

The thing is, this is not a fair fight and it hasn't been for some time.  The Constitution itself builds in some of this unfairness.  Wyoming gets the same number of Senators as California.  And Puerto Rico, which has more than 5 times the population of Wyoming, gets none. This much we probably have to live with.  But that unfairness might be brought to the light of day.  To my knowledge, it largely goes ignored.

Then there is the gerrymandering, which has received considerable attention.  To a certain extent, gerrymandering does at the House of Representatives district level what making a state into a state does at the Senate level.  Gerrymandering is definitely not in the Constitution.  The number of Representatives per state is determined roughly by the Census.  The population of the state relative to the population of the country as a whole gives the pro rata number of Representatives for that state.  But the borders of the individual Congressional districts within a state are set at the state level.  Currently the Republicans hold the vast majority of governorships and state houses.  You can pretty well guess that the gerrymandering will continue.

Then there is voter participation.  In today's New York Times there is an Op-Ed about voter suppression.  It is disturbing to read about how the voter suppression discriminates against poor minority voters.

Then there is the Citizen United decision and the ridiculous consequences on campaign spending.   The Koch brothers are reported to be spending $400 million on the upcoming election.  That's free speech!

This past week David Leonhardt wrote in a column that argued, among other things, that the Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat.  In a column a day later, Paul Krugman said it really was two Supreme Court seats that were stolen.  The seat Merrick Garland would have filled is one.  That the seat went unfilled may have turned the election, where a majority of voters nonetheless voted for Hillary Clinton. So the Presidency itself may have been stolen (Krugman didn't say that, but I am) and that, in turn, is how the second Supreme Court seat got stolen.  I'm more inclined towards Krugman's accounting on this matter than Leonhardt's.

So, one wants to know first whether the view by President Obama - get out the vote - can overcome this unfairness or not.  If getting out the vote does work, do the Republicans then get punished for their theft of Supreme Court seats.  Or do we just move on with business as usual?

I do think President Obama can be fairly criticized now for his administration not making a big deal about Russian interference in our elections.  It is possible that his administration could have made a big point of this in August 2016.  But they didn't.  They kept a lid on the information.  I believe that was so they wouldn't be accused of tipping the election, even while the Republicans were doing everything they could to do just that.

Then one wants to know if it is time for Democratic voters to take off the gloves too and start to fight dirty, to match the Republicans who have been doing it for some time.  What would fighting dirty mean?  I confess here something of a mental block.  My thought process is that I'm both worried and scared about what might happen.  I would like to have the powerful interests and Republicans in Congress share those feelings.  So I've been asking myself what would do that.  My mental block is that I haven't had good answers to that question apart from the threat of violence upon them. But maybe there are other answers.  Perhaps embarrassment can work or organized campaigns (shut down Koch Industries - they exacerbate global warming, shut down Fox News - they regularly broadcast lies, and so on).   I am not skilled about how to make video go viral, but that knowledge exists. Such campaigns are possible.

It also might be that some more surreptitious methods, employed by hackers with Democratic sympathies, can work some magic.  I don't know, but it also seems possible.

Play it clean or play it dirty, not as a first mover but as a response to the Republicans, which should it be?  I think that question is worth asking as is thinking through an answer. 

It seems there still is a lot of faith in the election process. Should there be?

Who is still pissed off about hanging chads?

Yesterday somebody knocked on my front door.  The person was campaigning for County Clerk, which I soon learned is responsible for the accuracy in the vote totals from Champaign County.  This person pointed out that the current County Clerk is on the ballot for a different office and has endorsed somebody else for the County Clerk.  You would think under the circumstances that would be grounds for recusal, but apparently not.

There has been much written about various attempts at voter suppression, invariably by the Republicans, plus the gerrymandering which gives the Republicans an unfair advantage, and of course the Citizen's United decision which means a huge amount of negative ads will be put into play by individuals, errr, corporations.  Why do we take all that as a given and yet assume actual vote totals will be reported accurately?  Let's note that now the Republicans control the vast majority of state governments.  The process of voting itself is determined at that level.

This, of course, says nothing about the possibility of external hacking, nor of efforts to deter that.  It seems that threat is real.  How likely it is, I couldn't say.  But should we be confident that it won't happen at all?

I'm writing this having just read Michelle Goldberg's latest column.   She links to this prediction from FiveThityEight, that Democrats have a 5/7 chance of taking back the House.  (Where have I heard predictions like that before?)  Goldberg then does her analysis of what will likely happen in the House, should the Democrats retake control there - investigations, not impeachment.  The investigations will include a real look into Trump's tax returns.

It's a nice thought, but certain people clearly don't want that outcome to happen.  What steps will they go to so as to preserve the current Republican majority.   And if there is cheating about reporting vote totals, but that is only uncovered after the new Congress has been seated, what then?

Earlier today, I read Paul Krugman's latest column, which argues that we could be turning into Hungary or Poland, and that will happen if the Republicans keep control of the House.  What if we're already there?

What of Trump Supporters Now and in the Future?

For the first time in quite a while, I watched the NewsHour yesterday.  They had an interesting segment about reactions to the Cohen and Manafort charges.  While much of what was shown featured Senators giving their views, at around the 2:37 mark there are some brief interviews with a couple of Trump supporters who were at an event in support of Trump.  Watching the news, you never know if such interviews typify the views of everyone else in that audience or not.  But I'm going to assume they do.  In the rest of this piece I'm going to try to make sense of what I heard from them.

I want to begin with a couple of non-political contexts, each that I believe provide a useful parallel.  The first of these was my experience serving on a jury back in April.  The trial was about spousal violence.  There actually was very little evidence presented.  The wife testified.  The husband testified.  And a police officer who visited the wife after the fact also testified.  That was pretty much it.  The testimonies of the wife and husband were mutually contradictory.  Our job as jurors was to determine which testimony was credible.

The whole process happened in one day, which was different from my prior jury experience. Jury selection occurred in the morning, then the trial itself, then jury deliberation and verdict.  If memory serves, we finished before 6 PM.  The judge came into the jury room after the trial to thank us for our service.  He told us the husband was facing other charges, so there would be a different trial.  And then he said he'd be sending a letter to us asking us about how to improve the process.  (Jury service is now one week.  When I previously served it was two weeks.  That change is the sort of improvement the judge was asking about.)

I had been on juries twice before, once in the 1980s, then again in the 1990s.  I found it quite an emotional experience.  This time was no exception.  Partly to purge those thoughts from my system, I wrote a long letter to the judge to critique the jury deliberation process.  I got a very nice letter in response, a couple of weeks later.  Below is the paragraph of my letter that I think most relevant here.  It is about cognitive bias in making jury decisions.

A second matter is what I would term voting for guilty reluctance, which I also experienced in my prior jury service. From some side conversations I had while we were chatting but not deliberating, I know that at least a couple of jurors were quite concerned with the regret they’d feel afterward, in case the jury had made an error in its verdict and that subsequently became evident. The potential regret is asymmetric. There is far more concern about finding an innocent person guilty than there is in finding a guilty person innocent. This influences the standard of proof for such individuals. Beyond a reasonable doubt becomes needing a smoking gun to conclude guilt. In deliberations we discussed what beyond a reasonable doubt means and I explained that it doesn’t mean 100% sure of guilty, which the others I believe understood. Nevertheless, the reluctance to vote for guilty impacted the way some jurors considered counter narratives, which if possibly true contributed to reasonable doubt. Here I think all the members of the jury, other than me, are quite unclear about the difference between possibility and probability. A long list of essentially zero probability events taken together still doesn’t make for reasonable doubt, but I don’t believe the other members of the jury understood this. If you could offer a counter narrative (and I did a bit of this during our deliberation near the end) that in itself made reasonable doubt appear more likely to jury members.

At least for the juries I have been on, I believe that it is easier for jurors to vote for innocence, irrespective of the evidence.  I also believe this is independent of political disposition.  If it is accurate as a general impression, it is something to keep in mind.

Let me turn to the other example, which is from teaching and learning.   I wrote about this in a blog post called Is reason taking a beating?  The paragraphs below are from the end of that post.

In the book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain teaches us that students don't know what to do when they confront evidence that contradicts their prior held world view.  Perhaps it is surprising to learn that the initial student reaction is to deny the evidence.  The world view has sanctity and deep down the student wants to preserve it.  The excellent teacher understands the tension the student is under.  With patience and persistence, the instructor nudges the student to reconsider his position.  It would be good for that position to account for the evidence that is observed.  Of course, in this case Bain is referring to an academic matter.  When looking at circular motion the students are apt to have an Aristotelian view.  A Newtonian perspective appears unnatural.  There is a getting used to period necessary to take on the new perspective.  There is leadership in helping students make the transition.

One might hope that having had such a lesson in college adults would then be open to the possibility that their perspective needs to change when the evidence implies a contradiction with a prior held view.  Instead, it seems, for many of us our beliefs harden and evidence to the contrary gets ignored.   Leadership has taken a holiday.  Pandering becomes the order of the day.

* * * * *

Let's now consider that video segment. My interpretation is that those two Trump supporters who were interviewed are living in a bubble of false belief.  The recent news has put pressure on the skin of that bubble, no doubt.  But the bubble hasn't burst yet and I doubt it will burst anytime soon.  What will happen if and when it does burst?  Alternatively, might it be possible to relieve some of the pressure gradually, rather than in one big burst?  If so, would that make the adjustment to what comes next much easier?

I'm going to switch perspective now to consider my own feelings and that of my friends who post about these things in Facebook.  There is a lot of anger.  There is contempt for Trump as well as for the Republicans in Congress who have enabled him.  We have already convinced ourselves that he is guilty.  To paraphrase from that song in Marat / Sade, we want our impeachment now!  Further, there is contempt for Trump supporters, since their votes ultimately enabled this outcome.  For example, Charles Blow's column this morning first exhibits a good deal of vitriol against this triumvirate, after which he asks, out of frustration, whether Republicans in Congress will finally stand up.  This, it seems to me, is the normal response from people of my ilk.

Yet, expressions of such feelings to Trump supporters quite likely will cause an opposite reaction - they will harden in their support for him.

There was a clip during the NewsHour show of a quick interview with Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who cautioned against this rush for impeachment. (I couldn't find the segment in my brief search, so I'm doing this from memory.)  I'm going to try to make sense of that observation, which I found odd when I first heard it but upon reflection seems sensible to me.

The process that leads to impeachment needs to seem fair and impartial.  Letting the Mueller investigation conclude first is absolutely necessary.   Of course, resignation is an alternative to impeachment and it might be preferable, because it is an admission of guilt. On the other hand, if there isn't a two thirds majority in the Senate for impeachment, then there is the possibility that Trump simply holds on.  In this case, wouldn't die-hard Trump supporters continue to remain in their bubble?

It is human nature to rush to judgment.  It takes quite a lot of training to do otherwise and be patient enough to let the process conclude first.  On the politics of the thing, my sense is that upscale Republican voters who live in the suburbs are more likely to conclude that impeachment is necessary now than their working class and/or rural brethren.  If in large numbers those suburban voters either don't vote at all in the midterms or vote Democratic, evidently the support of Trump within Congress will begin to wither.  Two more years of essentially the same thing will start to look like doom and gloom for the Republicans. 

It would be far better for an impartial process if some Republican leaders in Congress openly distanced themselves from the President.  We haven't seen this yet.  But it may be coming based on the changing reality, with Trump's guilt increasingly evident.  This is an argument to move slowly on impeachment, but it makes the most sense if the underlying politics does have some of Trump's base waver.

This puts the Democrats in Congress in something of a bind.  As the minority party, normal push back against the majority is to be expected. But I believe there needs to be some asymmetry in approach.  The Republicans have pursued an ends justifies the means approach and have been quite rigid about their goals - cutting taxes on the rich, selecting conservative judges. They have otherwise shown little to no leadership in not pushing back against Trump until now. In contrast, the Democrats need to work to end the divide in the country that might come about in a post-Trump world.  So, as a long term proposition, they actually should care about Trump supporters, some of whom might vote Democratic in the future, if such voters were nurtured properly along the way.

The above makes it seem that the message is what matters, while the messenger can be ignored.  I'm pretty confident that most of us don't believe that.  These days I get most of my news online, primarily from The New York Times and The New Yorker.  Once in a while I will go to the CNN site to see if it says similar things.  For the most part, it seems that way to me, though I definitely haven't done exhaustive checking on this.  Yesterday and today, for the first time, I visited the Fox News site.   Certainly, it is different from the others. Yesterday, it seemed to be  soft pedaling on the Cohen and Manafort charges.  Today it was taking them on more squarely but from a different angle.

The featured article this morning (I couldn't find it on the homepage in the afternoon) was about an interview given by a juror on the Manafort trial, a die-hard Trump supporter.  I found that surprising in itself.  I would have thought that jury selection would dismiss candidate jurors who had very strong feelings for or against Trump, as you might consider that prejudicial in considering the evidence.  I also learned from the piece that this woman was the sole holdout on those ten counts for which there ended up being a hung jury.  She reported that the experience was combative and highly emotional.  She claimed to focus solely on the evidence, except she entirely dismissed the testimony of Rick Gates, the primary witness in the case.  You might concur with her that Gates is a very slimy fellow, yet you might still work through his testimony to see if pieces of it were credible.

This essay about the holdout juror demonstrated a few things for me apart from how Fox News elevated its importance.   First, in spite of my little bit about Ken Bain's book above, we need to recognize that not everyone will change a prior held view that is inconsistent with evidence, though some might.  Next, a jury room is almost surely not the right place for getting people to reconsider their own world view, especially if the deliberations are combative.  (The movie 12 Angry Men is good entertainment, but I think totally unrealistic in this respect.)  Then too, I believe it takes much longer, for a person to come to a different set of beliefs than what jury deliberation allows  One takes a certain comfort from believing that one's world view is accurate.  It is unsettling when you challenge your own views, especially if you haven't had prior practice doing just that.  Working through that period of discomfort takes time, a lot of time.  Finally, the jury deliberation may not bring up many of the relevant questions one needs to encounter to change ones beliefs.

For example, Trump had now turned on Michael Cohen.  But previously, Trump had chosen Cohen as his lawyer and the two had a relationship this way for quite some time.  How does one reconcile both of these facts?  Did Trump understand Cohen well then?  Or was Trump deceived only to learn the truth later?   I'm belaboring this some just to show the type of questions a Trump supporter needs to work through.  I'm guessing that will not happen unless somebody else guides the Trump supporter through those questions.   But in real conversations of this sort that I've participated in, on academic subject matter rather than politics, the discussions are always far ranging an not linear at all.  Other factors are brought in that bring a richness to the discussion and raise additional questions that weren't contemplated at the outset.  These lines of thinking need to be allowed to play out.  Indeed, doing so is critical for the participants to relax and be open.

I wrote about this a year ago in a post called Gentle Conversations.   I wonder if in the future our politics can change along the lines sketched in that post, so rather than pronouncements from Washington that are mediated by one of the news organizations, there are people who do outreach on location and engage in repeated conversation with the locals.  There might be a bit of proselytizing to it, but more importantly there would be mutual learning about each other, where people's beliefs come from and why.  You might consider it a kind of therapy, done over coffee in a small group setting.  Perhaps not surprisingly, this conception parallels many of my thoughts about undergraduate learning.  (For example, see my series of posts on Inward Looking Service Learning.)

I find it not difficult at all to write off the Republican leadership in Congress, as well as outside lobbying groups that exert far too much influence on what Congress actually does.  But I find myself, quite unlike Charles Blow, wanting to be empathetic with normal voters who strongly support Trump.  I don't want to write them off at all.  I want us to come together.   Near term that seems impossible.  I wonder if longer term, it might happen. 

A Short Story About Our National Politics

This is best view by first going to full screen and then sizing it to your own comfort.

How to Unify the Left and the Center - One Voter's View

There have been many pieces as of late in the New York Times about the Democratic Party moving to the Left.  Is it good or bad?  Is it really happening?  What will the consequences be?

This has been cooking for some time.  To establishment types, Bernie Sanders' showing in the 2016 Democratic Presidential Primaries must have been something of an eye opener.  Nonetheless, the recent defeat of Joseph Crowley by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to have have set off alarm bells.  If you believe the stories in the news, this outcome wasn't anticipated at all.  There are two possible interpretations of this result.  The first is that Crowley, an entrenched politician, lost sight of his own constituency.  Instead, he was captured by the special interests and the higher ups in the Democratic Party.  This story makes Crowley seem quite similar to Eric Cantor, so it emphasizes that a many term incumbent became out of touch with the voters.  The second explanation focused on the fact that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is an avowed Democratic Socialist,  just like Bernie Sanders.  In the current environment, as least in her district, those views are more closely aligned to what the voters want, as it includes them in the political conversation.  No doubt there is some overlap between these explanations.  They are not mutually exclusive.

I was delighted with this outcome, expressing my pleasure in the daily rhyme I post to Twitter.  It is wonderful to have a young and charismatic candidate who can generate excitement among the voters and encourage them to feel that good things are possible.  For far too long our politics have ignored the economics of inequality and its pernicious social consequences.  (Readers at the U of I can get access to this piece through the Library via a database from EBSCOhost.  Scroll down a little on this page to find the appropriate entry.) Note that this piece was published in September 2016, before Trump became President.  The pessimism expressed in the piece might need to be amplified, in light of more recent events.

It does seem that Democratic Socialism addresses the issues of income inequality squarely, which probably explains why Bernie Sanders proved to be such a popular candidate.  His supporters sensed this too.  In this interview with Noam Chomsky, who supported Bernie Sanders but who said he'd vote for Clinton over Trump, in case she got the nomination, Chomsky remarks about Socialism as a label but then refers to Sanders as a New Deal Democrat.  If that is an accurate depiction, it reflects how much rightward our society as a whole has moved.

Indeed, a couple of years ago I found this piece on how Facebook regards your political preferences.  (Trying it just now, I couldn't find my ranking.  They may have removed this "feature.")  I checked mine out then and it said I was very liberal.   I really don't think my political views have changed much over the years.  Circumstances have changed much more dramatically.  I view myself as moderately liberal, a Keynesian on macroeconomics, while on microeconomics I prefer to look at the situation on a market by market basis, rather than pick a one-size-fits-all approach.  I will illustrate below.

Competitive markets work well when there are a lot of players, none of which has too large a market share.  Markets that are highly concentrated work less well.  In the early 1990s the big buzzwords in economics were network externalities.  Technically this means a user gets more benefit from a product or a service when other users are in the same product or service.  The old style argument for why monopoly occurred was economies of scale.  That argument didn't go away, but with the move to computers and being online, economies of network started to seem the much more powerful force.  Further, as became evident in The Microsoft Case, an incumbent that was a monopolist in one market would parlay that advantage for the competition in emerging markets, thwarting the competition which didn't have the deep pockets to endure a sustained price war.  This leads to a vicious cycle where the incumbents seek economic rents and industry gets ever more concentrated because the incumbents capture the new markets as well as maintaining monopoly in their old markets.

This is unlike the story Schumpeter envisioned when he described "creative destruction."  In the Schumpeterian approach laissez-faire is fine because the incumbent's advantage is temporary.  New entrants then discipline the incumbent, and perhaps one takes over entirely.  In the new story, however, laissez-faire is a disaster for income inequality.   There needs to be a counterforce to rein in the rent seeking and to keep the profits from being expatriated.  I am not sure that American antitrust law is sufficient for this.  Unlike when those laws came into existence, the incumbent companies are now all multinationals, operating around the globe.  Global trade agreements need to be seen in this light.  They should not be just about opening foreign markets for U.S. based firms to enter. 

This market power in the product market translates into market power in the input markets.  (Instead of monopoly, a single seller, we talk about monopsony, a single buyer.)  Monopsony in the labor market means lower wages for employees.  Thomas Edsall's most recent column makes just this point.  It also revives a rather old dual labor market theory, which seems increasingly relevant.  For those employees with the right sort of human capital, think of the computer programmers who write the code at the big IT companies, they are paid a pretty penny. Other workers who provide more commodity-like labor services, janitors may be the quintessential example, don't earn a wage premium at all, even if their work is necessary.  Indeed, in the current environment those workers are not employees.  They work under contract for a services company.  That sort of work doesn't pay well and offers no job security.

If the work happens near to where the product or service is sold, these imbalances can be remedied, in part, either by raising the minimum wage or by having the workers unionize and bargain for better wages.  However, when the work can happen anywhere, and do note that these big multinationals have global supply chains already in place, then attempts to raise the wage locally that are not matched by increases in productivity will migrate the jobs elsewhere, in the union setting to a right-to-work state, in the increased minimum wage situation by off-shoring the jobs.  Thus, to remedy the ills of inequality in this case it is necessary to engage directly in income redistribution.

The income redistribution can be in kind, as subsidies for certain goods and services, health care and education come to mind, or as direct income transfers, such as with Social Security.  There are then two dimensions to consider.  First, who is worthy to receive the income redistribution? Second, how intensive should the income redistribution be?   If you believe that hardly anyone is worthy and that for others the income redistribution should be nil, that makes you Conservative/Libertarian in your views.   Such people tend to believe in the just-world hypothesis - life is fair as is.  Perhaps they will grant an exception to a veteran who experienced a severe and disabling injury in combat or to a child who has a rare and potentially fatal disease.  Otherwise, their approach is - no handouts.  At the opposite extreme, you believe that everyone is worthy and that there should be income equality after the redistribution has occurred.  This makes you either a saint or a communist.  The rest of us are somewhere in the middle, with our politics described by how close we are to one extreme or the other.

I want to note that even Ms. Ocasio-Cortez refers to her natural constituency as working people.  From this I infer that working people are worthy in her eyes, while those who are able in body and mind but who are out of work and not seeking employment are not worthy.

I will observe that in my own teaching, I hold similar views.  A student who comes to class regularly and shows some effort in doing the assigned homework is worthy in my eyes.  Such students frequently don't seek help when they are struggling, because there is shame in that.  I find myself reaching out to them in some way to help get them through my class.  Students who frequently skip class, in contrast, I put into a different category. I am irritated by their indifference to showing up and I show that irritation when communicating with them, in response to a query they make.  I want to note that this is an imperfect way to differentiate students, as I learned a few years ago when I discovered that a student of mine had Crohn's disease.  I would have been entirely unsympathetic at the time except for the fact that my best friend's son was suffering from a similar ailment.  He had to spend much time in the hospital for treatment and had to drop out of college for a while as a consequence.  I ended up with my student cutting him some slack so he could deal with his situation as best as he could.  More generally, there can be mitigating circumstances with the student that the instructor is simply unaware of.  How should the instructor account for that in determining who is worthy?  Alas, I am not sure how to answer that question.

Recently I read a piece by Bertrand Russell from 1932, which challenges the notion that people who work are worthy.   The notion is a holdover from the Puritan work ethic, which developed when society was largely agrarian, well before the industrial revolution took place.  At that time labor was scarce and everyone worked hard. The only possible exception was the landed gentry.  Bertrand Russell was commenting during the Great Depression, where production capabilities were much better, but where distribution still depended on working or not.  He talks about moving to a 4-hour work day, so the spoils can be shared more evenly.  Nowadays, with the increasing possibility that work can be automated, this linkage between working and being worthy is even more tenuous.  Yet I fear it is ingrained with us in how we were raised.  This notion requires further examination so we can come up with something more sensible that fits current circumstances better.  Noting that, I want to push on because I don't yet have an answer as to what that something more sensible should be.

There is no doubt that regarding their positions Bernie Sanders would be regarded as to the left of Hillary Clinton.  And I find myself closer to Sanders position-wise.  Yet I voted for Clinton in the primaries.  I thought she was the better candidate.  Trying to reconcile that apparent contradiction is why I'm writing this piece.  The reconciliation, which will be given in the next section, no doubt requires some wishful thinking, perhaps a lot of wishful thinking.  Yet I think it a worthwhile exercise to go through.  As I view my pieces as think alouds, the real purpose of the piece is not to offer up a solution as a nice package wrapped in a bow, but instead to encourage others to think it through for themselves.  That exercise needs to be done before the internecine politics within the Democratic Party can be resolved amicably, if indeed it can.

Let me conclude this section with a few reasons why I found Bernie Sanders less than a completely satisfying candidate.  He is very strong on identifying benefits for working people, each which he tends to deliver as a sound bite.  So the proposal is typically under specified.  The price tag, in particular is not considered.  As an opening bid in a negotiation to produce legislation, that is fine.  But as the end result it is problematic.

For example, consider the proposal to make college free.  There is no doubt that student loan debt is a real problem, one that requires a substantive solution.  Back when I was applying for college, the New York City system colleges were free, while the SUNY system colleges did require students to pay tuition, and then there were private universities that required much greater tuition.  While I don't have the data on this, I believe that many of my high school classmates in Bayside attended Queens College, which was part of the New York City system.  I'm guessing that they lived at home while they attended college, to keep down the costs of room and board.  Fast forward to now and Governor Cuomo has embraced the Sanders proposal.  Students from families below a certain income threshold can attend for free; presumably their tuition is paid for by the state.  But how does this work in practice?  Do low income students still not attend the residential campuses because they can't cover the room and board costs?  Do the universities receive the full amount of tuition they would have received or did the state commit to pay less?  If so, what will happen to the quality of instruction given lower tuition revenues?

Now let me make a little leap, which I'm prone to do in my reasoning.  K-12 has been free for quite some time.  Yet we know that public school quality varies substantially.  Public schools in rich neighborhoods tend to be high quality.  Conversely, public schools in poor neighborhoods tend to be low quality.  There is a strong racial component to this.  If you read Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation you'll learn we have apartheid schools in the poor neighborhoods.  It is 64 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision.  Yet de facto we are still in a Plessy v. Ferguson world.    Recognizing that, might we simply reproduce that outcome at the college level if we make college free?  Alternatively, might the funds be better spent on K-12 and improving the quality there?

There is a lot of complexity here.  Making soundbite policy proposals in the presence of such complexity is not a good thing, in my view.  It may excite a lot of voters, who can chant those soundbites for themselves.  But it is a kind of fool's gold.  Hillary Clinton's proposals were not nearly as aggressive, but they were more thought out and did have a price tag that came with them. I respected her preference to deliver proposals that way and thought she got unfairly blamed by association with Bill Clinton for his indiscretions, which surely came as no pleasure to her. I also thought that she got pummeled by the Republican attack machine, not just in the recent campaign, but all the way back to the early 1990s.  She may have adopted a shell of protection as a result and that makes her appear less candid in public speaking.   Yet I didn't think it would influence her decision making on policy issues.  I reckon her a nerd, like me.  Her reasoning through the analysis would drive the decisions.  This is why I voted for her.

* * * * *

Here is the plan to unify the Left and the Center.  I will cast this as a bargain between ordinary working people and upscale voters.    As it is now, both types believe the system doesn't work for everyone.  The ordinary working people get discouraged by this.  The various social ills have been documented.  More important for this plan is their voting behavior.  Anthony Downs taught us about the Paradox of Voting.  Voting takes time and effort, getting to the polls, waiting in line to vote, and beforehand learning about the candidates and developing a preference for the preferred candidate.  So the costs are evident to the voter.  The benefits are less evident, especially when there are many voters so there is a likelihood that one individual vote won't matter in determining the outcome.  This is all the more the case when it is believed that it doesn't matter which candidate wins, because the system is broken.  The paradox is that some people do vote when the cost-benefit calculation would predict that they will not vote.

As it turns out in practice, income is a predictor of voter participation.  Low income people tend to vote at a lower rate.  Participation increases with income.  Let me explain why this matters.

The Democrats are at a disadvantage electorally for two different reasons.  Democratic voters tend to be concentrated in the cities.  Republican voters tend to reside in rural areas. For both control of the Senate and for winning the Electoral College, this gives an advantage to the Republicans.  The other reason pertains to gerrymandering Congressional districts.  When Democrats win a House race, they win by a wide margin.  When Republicans win, the races are often closer.  Without the gerrymandering the Democrats would have more seats in the House.

Heretofore, most political strategists would argue that the election is won by making the right sort of appeal to independents, those who do vote regularly.  They are the swing voters who will decide the election.  That is not the argument being made here.

Instead, the Democratic strategy should be to significantly expand voter participation rates among ordinary working people. Let us note that 40 years ago labor unions performed that function in many places and the party machine did it in other places, such as Chicago when the first Mayor Daley was in office.  This function needs to be restored and indeed expanded.  Democrats can overcome the Republicans inherent advantage if they are quite successful with this approach.  This is one side of the bargain.

Now let's consider upscale voters.  They too recognize that the system doesn't work, but they have become proficient, perhaps even expert, at gaming the system for their own advantage, even if this is to the detriment of others.  They have been raised under the principle - vote your pocketbook.  In this they have been coopted by the Republicans who always want to cut their taxes.  They completely disagree with Republicans on the various identity issues.  But on bread and butter matters, what has mattered to them is the bottom line.  And looking at after-tax income, they've done well under Republican administrations by this measure.  So while they understand that income inequality is a problem, they have kept their heads in the sand in regards to doing anything to fix the problem.  Changing this is the other side of the bargain.

We will consider this bargain twice.  Once in the near term, then again in the long run.  As I've written quite a lot about the motivation for the long run, I will simply cite a couple of these pieces and note that it is fundamentally an ethical matter.  It is all about social responsibility or, if you prefer, it's about embracing JFK's famous line, "Ask what you can do for your country."  You don't hear many politicians challenge their own constituencies this way.  That needs to change.  Much of my wishful thinking is that indeed will happen as people come to realize the necessity of doing so.  One piece of mine that articulates the requisite principles in some depth is entitled A New Progressivism?  Love of country is the bedrock on which the JFK ideal is built. That must be restored.  Doing so will require the lion's share of the heavy lifting.  The other piece, which pertains as much to our ordinary social interactions as it does to our national politics, is called How well does my dad's morality hold up?  I was raised to "be a mensch."  My dad had quite colorful language for those who weren't.  If people treat others as human beings in their normal interactions, and we include upscale voters in that, then they should come to recognize that with the way things are now voting their pocketbook is a mistake.  They need to vote for a system that can work for everyone.

What about the near term motivation for upscale voters.  I think it is quite different, entirely tactical in nature, and is based on revulsion with our current government.  The Republicans fight like hell to secure electoral advantage and then deliver government that is incompetent and nonsensical.  Upscale Democrats want to win now.  They want a government they can respect and one that is liberal on the identity issues.  They want an end to playing political football with Supreme Court nominees.  And they are willing to pay (in higher taxes) to achieve those ends.

That's the basic idea.  Now let's amplify on it some.  The recent history of our national politics is that the Democrats controlling the Presidency and both houses of Congress has happened in two-year stints, the first two years of the Bill Clinton Presidency and again the first two years of the Barack Obama Presidency.  Otherwise, when Democrats have controlled the Presidency there has been divided government.  Back in 1994 the Republican won back the House with the Contract for America.  Then in 2010 something similar happened with the rise of the Tea Party.  There was quite a lot of enthusiasm among young voters in 2008, when Obama was then a candidate.  That cooled substantially for a variety of reasons.  The economy was in crisis and the urgency seemed to be to protect the financial system from utter failure, rather than to help ordinary people who were out of work and perhaps in underwater mortgages.  Obamacare passed, but the Public Option was abandoned and some viewed that as a betrayal.  Further Obama campaigned in 2008 on being above the petty politics, but the Republicans played the obstruction game where they could and the President looked foolish at times for not subsequently playing hardball himself.

To rectify the ills of income inequality will take a sustained effort over a decade or longer.  The bargain I'm talking about must sustain for the duration. That will take quite some doing.  It can't be done in just one election cycle.  So part of this is about having to sustain the bargain over time.

Another point to consider is whether the Left will embrace the bargain.  The alternative, it would seem, would be to ignore the upscale voters entirely.  If they can get the voter participation rates up high enough they won't need the upscale voters to sanction what they are doing.  They can raise taxes on the upscale voters because they will control the government.  Then they won't need to be part of any messy compromises.  Surely that will be a tempting path to follow.

At issue is whether the Left can overcome the Paradox of Voting with their own core constituency by going it alone.  Of course, I can't do those calculations for them in a way that will be convincing.  They must do it themselves.  But I wonder if those who supported Bernie Sanders back in 2016, especially those who then were lukewarm to Hillary Clinton, possibly not voting in that election as a consequence, feel some regret for their decisions now.  With the experience of the Trump Presidency so demoralizing, and thus with a sense of urgency that we shouldn't repeat the mistake in 2020, perhaps these people have reconsidered their own decision making.  It is sometimes comforting to be The True Believer, who doesn't compromise come hell or high water.  But after a sustained period of disappointment, does one still cling to the old ideals?  I really don't know how these conflicting motives will play out.  My hope is that those in leadership roles on the Left will see this bargain as an opportunity worth pursuing.

Then there is getting down to the nitty-gritty.  How much will taxes be raised on upscale voters?  What programs aimed at ordinary working people will be implemented when their price tags have been carefully worked out?  Will the coalition hold when people see the actual numbers?  Or will unrealistic expectations on each side doom the bargain?  I don't know the answer to this but I want to note one thing here that should be addressed.

The way legislation is done now, each bill is taken up sequentially, with its own budget and spending provisions. What is really needed for the purposes of bargaining, however, is to take up the collection of bills that will be proposed and deliberated upon, so one can see their consequence in aggregate.  The bargain has to be about that aggregate, rather than be done on a one-at-a-time basis.  Some years ago I wrote a paper called How to Save the Economy and the Democratic Party - A Proposal.  At the time I didn't anticipate the Bernie Sanders candidacy, and I thought infrastructure investment, job creation in construction work, and an emphasis on doing something substantial to make America Green, would be the basis.  Surely there is some overlap between that agenda and seriously addressing the ills of income inequality.  But they are not one and the same thing.  I recognize that.  However, developing a full economic plan and coming up with a process for doing so is the way to convince the public that the system works.  That needs to be the focus.

* * * * *

I want to close by trying to connect the second half of the essay to the first.  Though I've watched The West Wing TV show (multiple times) I am largely ignorant of how a real get out the vote campaign can work and what it will take to get such a campaign to counter the intensive efforts by Republicans at voter suppression.   Likewise, I am ignorant about what it will take for a politician to compromise on prior held views or change them entirely and yet do so with utter conviction.  (While I wasn't going to vote for Mitt Romney back in 2012, no matter what, that he came out against Obamacare even though he had done essentially the same thing earlier as governor of Massachussets seemed expedient and entirely disingenuous to me.  He wanted to be President and and would say anything to achieve that end.  That's the sort of politics that can't work in this case.)

I have a fantasy of what would work.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is campaigning with Tim Kaine and they are each making an address to an audience of Democratic voters in a large auditorium.  This is not a Presidential campaign stop, but rather an event to rally the base.  Alexandria talks first.  Her speech is aimed at upscale voters.  She tells them about their need to embrace higher taxes and explains why steep increases are necessary.  The uber rich surely will also pay quite a lot more, but if the focus is only on them the effort to raise taxes will fail.  That there are so many good spirited upscale voters who willingly embrace the tax increase makes it possible to impose.  Then she turns to talking about underlying motivations for doing so.  Perhaps it is penance for the years of neglect of ordinary working people.  Perhaps it is waking up to the fact that they've been played by the Republicans.  And perhaps it is simply that they can see the train leaving the station and they want to be on it.

Then Tim takes the podium.  He talks about how the market is failing ordinary working people, who need help.  This help must be provided by the government.  We need to elect representatives who understand this as job one. Then he tells them about their job, to educate themselves about such candidates and by all means to vote, in the primaries and in the general election.  He talks about voting as an expression of social responsibility.  Then he talks about legal ways to counter the Republican voter suppression efforts.

After this Alexandria approaches the podium where Tim is already standing and she gives him a big hug.  Then they raise their arms in celebration.

Wishful thinking for sure, but what I'd like to see happen.