US Politics

The 1984 documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” is available for free on hulu.com – you just have to be prepared for the commercial interruptions. I remember seeing it in a theater when it came out – I must have been 17 or 18 – and being devastated. The opening shot, the famous footage of Dianne Feinstein announcing the assassination of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk, is still shocking. But more shocking to me was the verdict in the Dan White trial – guilty of manslaughter. I knew about Milk’s death going into the theater, and I’m pretty sure I had heard of the “Twinkie Defense” but I hadn’t put them together. At one point in the film, Jim Elliot – a previously homophobic auto machinist who got to know Milk through his union work – comments on the verdict: “if it had just been Moscone that got killed, I think he [White] would have been guilty of murder and he would have been at San Quentin the rest of his life. But, sad to say, I think there’s a lot of people in this world that still think that if you kill a gay, you’re doing a service to society. I think I’d have thought that too if I hadn’t been associated with Harvey and the gay community – I probably would have felt the same way.” I distinctly remember thinking: “that’s absolutely right.” I don’t think I had any (out) gay friends at the time, and it was a shocking revelation to me that gays faced this kind of attitude as a matter of course.

It’s interesting to compare “The Times of Harvey Milk” to “Milk.” Despite Sean Penn’s amazing performance, I like the documentary much better – but this very well could reflect my own failings in film appreciation. Some footage is used in both – including the Feinstein announcement. But the clips don’t always serve the same purpose. In “Milk”, they show President Carter telling an audience to “vote against proposition 6” – the 1978 California initiative to prohibit gays and lesbians (and arguably anyone who supported gay rights) from teaching in public schools. But “The Times of Harvey Milk” shows more. Carter had finished his speech, and began to leave the podium. Off-mike, Governor Jerry Brown says to him: “and Ford and Reagan have already come out against it, so it’s perfectly safe.” Carter leans back to the mike and says: “Also, I want to ask everybody to vote against proposition 6.” He smiles, and walks off. Anyway, whether or not you’ve seen “Milk,” you should find 1-1/2 hours, brace yourself, and watch “The Times of Harvey Milk.”

Finally, a move toward strike action from the right-hand side of the chattering classes. I really hope they don’t figure out that by staying at home and doing nothing they might actually be doing everyone a favor, because that would mean they were engaging in a kind of altruism.

Two recent versions of the same argument. First, the simplified 800 word version, from Roger Cohen.

To paraphrase Mauriac, I love France, but I don’t want there to be two of them, least of all if one is in the United States. … I think President Obama’s counter-revolution goes in the right direction. … Still, the $3.6 trillion Obama budget made me a little queasy. There is a touch of France in its “étatisme” — the state as all-embracing solution rather than problem — and there’s more than a touch of France in the bash-the-rich righteousness with which the new president cast his plans as “a threat to the status quo in Washington.” … You know possibility when you breathe it. For an immigrant, it lies in the ease of American identity and the boundlessness of American horizons after the narrower confines of European nationhood and the stifling attentions of the European nanny state, which has often made it more attractive not to work than to work. High French unemployment was never much of a mystery. Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries. Churn is the American way. … If America loses sight of these truths, it will cease to be itself.

Matthew Yglesias today

I’m probably not breaking any news if I tell you that American business really hates unions and, thus, really hates the Employee Free Choice Act. Thus, even though John Boehner is trying to destroy the American economy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is squarely focusing its fire on pro-EFCA Democrats. Your typical business executive would rather let the world burn, or see his children fed to a pack of wild boars, then see a union form at his firm. And it makes a certain amount of sense—businessmen appreciate the value of class solidarity. If you run your company into the ground, you get a nice severance package and another job at another company. But if you let your company be unionized, you’d be dead to your brethren. An attack on one is an attack on all, and they all stand together on this point.

Adam Smith, 233 years ago:

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.

Back when I was the director of the humanities program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we had our conferences and our lecture series and such things.  For obvious reasons, it is much more difficult to host such things than to be a guest at them, and the experience taught me not only what it’s like to have Host Anxiety Dreams but also—I hope!—how to be a Good Guest.  What’s it like to deal with the Guest From Hell?  Well, one year, at the urging of a colleague, I booked a speaker who wound up changing his flight arrangements at the last moment, at a stunning cost of $1000, and then cancelled on us anyway.  When he eventually arrived, the next semester, he gave a mildly interesting if off-the-cuff talk, went home, and then sent me an outraged email when his honorarium arrived, for, although it was in the amount we’d stipulated, it was not in the amount to which he had (quite quickly!) become accustomed.  When I pointed this out to him, things quickly escalated to the point at which he threatened to tell my dean on me, to which I replied,  please do, by all means, and I will be happy to copy your department chair and dean on all our correspondence, going back to your initial change of travel plans and subsequent cancellation.  That ended that little exchange, and I don’t believe we’ve kept in touch since.

Anyway, having encountered a few Guests From Hell, I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to host an entire Speakers’ Series From Hell.  And now I know!

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Washington, DC —Responding to Republican charges that President Obama’s proposed budget includes $8 billion for a high-speed, magnetic-levitation train that “will deliver customers straight from Disney . . . to the doorstep of the moonlight bunny ranch brothel in Nevada,” Democratic leaders today unveiled plans for a “Love Train” that will join “people all over the world.”

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David Brooks has been getting a lot of flak for this column (which is a follow up from this one a week earlier).

We [moderates] sympathize with a lot of the things that President Obama is trying to do. … But the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. … a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor … an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new. … U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment … All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward. … U.S. … skeptical of top-down planning. … U.S. has traditionally had a relatively limited central government. … Obama … actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. …The first task will be to block the excesses of unchecked liberalism. … up to moderates to raise the alarms against these ideological outrages. … moderates will have to sketch out an alternative vision. This is a vision of a nation in which we’re all in it together — in which burdens are shared broadly, rather than simply inflicted upon a small minority.

How do schools with disadvantaged populations beat the odds? England’s Chief Inspector of Schools just released a report examining a group of schools that do and analysing what they have in common:

• They excel at what they do for a high proportion of the time
• They prove constantly that disadvantage or not speaking English at home need not be a barrier to achievement
• They put students first, invest in their staff and nurture their communities
• They have strong values and high expectations that are applied consistently and never relaxed
• They provide outstanding teaching, rich opportunities for learning and encouragement and support for each student
• They are highly inclusive
• Their achievements happen by highly reflective, carefully planned and implemented strategies
• They operate with a very high degree of internal consistency
• They are constantly looking for ways to improve further
• They have outstanding and well-distributed leadership.

This is exactly what you’d expect from the school improvement and effectiveness literature. I’ve been reading a lot of this lately, and what is surprising is how much convergence there is on this. You might think that having achieved such a high level of consensus it would be easy to move into some sort of policy promoting such schools. But it’s not so easy.

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Andrew Sullivan links to a New Scientist story suggesting that they do.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. … Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

But if you look at the actual study (PDF), not so much.

The fourth column reports that in regions where more people report regularly attending religious services (per National Election Studies 2004), overall subscription rates are not statistically significantly different from subscriptions elsewhere (p 0.848).

… Furthermore, I found no significant relationship between subscriptions to this adult entertainment service and presidential voting in 2004, based on poll data by congressional district. However, using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anonymized U.S. Internet users, Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in blue states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the red states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism.

What evidence there is in the paper of a relationship between religious faith and porn consumption seems, as best as I can interpret the relevant table, to be based on a simple OLS regression with no reported control variables. Nor does there seem to be any discussion in the piece of correlations between porn consumption and voting patterns in the most recent presidential election.

I’m not sure whether to blame the New Scientist or the paper’s author, who perhaps seems (if quoted fairly and accurately, which is of course by no means certain – he could have made a few vague handwaves that were taken completely out of context) to have hammed up his results a bit in the interview. But even if there were strong results, they wouldn’t necessarily tell us much. The data is all aggregated at the state or zipcode level, but the decision to purchase or not purchase porn online is obviously an individual one. There are all sorts of obvious ecological problems in drawing inferences about religious people’s individual propensities from aggregate data. This is directly analogous to Heritage horseflop claiming that because rich states tend to support Democrats, therefore the Democrats are the party of the rich. As Gelman, Park et al. showed, that inference was directly misleading. Similarly, even if people in more religious or Republican states were more inclined to purchase porn online, this doesn’t imply that religious people or individual Republicans were more inclined to purchase porn online, and I can think of at least two or three plausible alternative causal mechanisms that would explain the observed correlation.

While we’re waiting for Jonah to pronounce, Sheri Berman, whose arguments about 1930s social democrats and fascists is the issue of debate, has a piece in Dissent that I’d like to respond to. Sheri argues that the current crisis is a major opportunity for the left, but that it is hampered in its ability to respond because of internecine arguments over whether we should try to reform capitalism, or get rid of it altogether. She singles out Michael Harrington as her main exemplar of a leftist whose failure to appreciate the benefits of capitalism led him to irrelevance and political near-incoherence.
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Link.

It needs a comment box.

Brink Lindsey has a post at Cato Unbound criticizing Nancy Rosenblum’s work on partisanship (I’ll be contributing to the seminar myself in due course).

she cites findings from the political science literature that independents tend to be less interested in politics, less informed about the issues, and less likely to participate in the process than are their partisan fellow citizens … All fair enough. Yet knocking independents down a peg doesn’t change the fact that partisanship in America today is a dreadful mess. … under present circumstances at least, partisan zeal ought to be attacked rather than defended.

I’ll confine my bill of indictment to two charges. First, partisanship undermines clear thinking. Second, it undermines moral integrity. In both cases, the root cause is the same: the conflation of friend and foe with right and wrong. … partisans are vulnerable to believing fatuous nonsense. … their beliefs, whether sensible or otherwise, about a whole range of empirical questions are determined by their political identity. There’s no epistemologically sound reason why one’s opinion about, say, the effects of gun control should predict one’s opinion about whether humans have contributed to climate change or how well Mexican immigrants are assimilating — these things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Yet the fact is that views on these and a host of other matters are indeed highly correlated with each other. …

Even when partisans know what the score is, they’re constantly tempted to shade the truth, or at least keep silent, in order to be a good team player. Recall, for example, the fury unleashed this past fall on the handful of conservative commentators who were willing to admit the obvious: Sarah Palin was obviously, embarrassingly unprepared for the office she was seeking.

My colleague Sara Goldrick-Rab has a piece at Brookings arguing that the education money in the stimulus package should double funding for community colleges (from $6b to $12b) and should simultaneously add an accountability system, gather necessary data, and foster innovation. Here’s a quote, but read the whole thing:

Since 1974, only 149 new community colleges have been built, and many campuses today are bursting at the seams. While community college students tend to enroll part-time, even these students require space in which to learn. In the first two years, this spending would amount to just 1.4 percent of the proposed costs of the recovery package, and would support infrastructure upgrades that truly stimulate the economy. Over the longer term, it would add modestly to federal higher education expenditures, but would ensure that our nation realizes an economic payoff from increasing enrollments.

The federal government should not simply expand funding, but use these new resources explicitly to promote greater success for community college students. Colleges receiving enhanced funds would be required to track and report student results, such as completion of a minimum number of credits, earning a degree, and landing a good-paying job. Over time, a majority of federal dollars would be awarded based not on enrollment, but on colleges’ performance on these critical measures.

The Washington Monthly has a piece up now, “Toy Story”, by Matthew Blake, that looks to me quite wrong-headed. Subtitled “Does the reform of a small agency herald the return of competent government oversight?”, it’s about the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and, more specifically, the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSI). The Act passed in the wake of that Barbie lead paint scandal you faintly remember, with strong bi-partisan support in both the House and Senate. Blake suggests that perhaps the Act can be a positive model for more robust consumer safety legislation and enforcement generally.

The new law offers a realistic approach to oversight, mandating third-party lab testing for all children’s products—a reasonable alternative to keeping tabs on the vast network of foreign supply chains or simply handing responsibility over to the companies themselves. Under the act’s provisions, CPSC regulators don’t need to travel around the world, just to several universities where they can ensure that testing laboratories are looking for lead in children’s toys, not getting briefcases of cash from Mattel or Wal-Mart. And if this approach to testing toys works, federal regulators will have a strong argument to expand it to other consumer goods.

The problem is that what is convenient for regulators may be prohibitively inconvenient for businesses, particularly small ones. Are all small producers – i.e. those who can’t afford to pay for a university lab to certify that this batch of 100 hand-knitted monkeys doesn’t have any lead in it – supposed to go straight out of business? Start here: the handmade toy alliance. “If this law had been applied to the food industry, every farmers market in the country would be forced to close while Kraft and Dole prospered.” And, as it turns out, the law doesn’t cover just toys. [click to continue…]