by Kieran Healy on July 17, 2008
Bruce Western writes in the current Boston Review about the prison boom and its effects, summarizing findings and extending arguments he’s been developing for a few years, and which I’ve often written about here.
There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor’s degree. … Nearly all the growth in imprisonment since 1980 has been concentrated among those with no more than a high school education. Among young black men who have never been to college, one in five are incarcerated, and one in three will go to prison at some time in their lives. The intimate link between school failure and incarceration is clear at the bottom of the education ladder where 60 percent of black, male high school dropouts will go to prison before age thirty-five. … These astonishing levels of punishment are new. We need only go back two decades to find a time when imprisonment was not a common event in the lives of black men with less than a college education.
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by John Holbo on July 17, 2008
Bruce Bartlett has a piece in the WSJ. His thesis statement: “Historically speaking, the Republican Party has a far better record on race than the Democrats.” Here’s the antidote. You can guess how this sort of thing is going to go:
In 1900 (under President McKinley) and again in 1922 (under Harding), Republicans tried to enact an antilynching law. Coolidge asked for legislation again in his 1923 State of the Union message. Unfortunately, Southern Democrats in the Senate routinely filibustered every Republican effort to aid African-Americans.
Thus: “[McCain] should explain that African-Americans will be much better off in the long run if they are receptive to candidates of both parties instead of being virtual captives of only one, which is then free to take them for granted.”
But surely if African-Americans feel the need to be specifically receptive to long-dead candidates of not just one but both parties, then a oijia board, not a ballot box, is the appropriate medium.
It would be kind of fun to flip this Bartlett logic over and sort of cross it with Mark Penn microtrends. You could have necrotrends: McCain needs to reach out to recently deceased left-handed soccer moms. Or: Obama needs to be sensitive to the concerns of long-dead jai alai dads. So forth. So long as political considerations are divorced from concerns about biological vivification, the possibilities are endless. If some politician is caught with a ballot box stuffed with the names of the deceased, he could defend himself on the grounds that only letting the living vote is sheer ‘animism’.
Bartlett does not even claim, in the op-ed, that there are living Republicans who deserve the support of African-Americans, due to their support for civil rights. The most recent instance he cites is Richard Nixon, who supported affirmative action as a way of busting racist unions. He is, apparently, seriously arguing that African-Americans should consider voting for dead people.
In short: these attempts to argue that McCain can’t be running for Bush’s third term because he’s running for McKinley’s second are getting a bit far-fetched.
This line is nice (paging Rick Perlstein): “Richard Nixon is said to have developed a “Southern strategy” of using racial code words like “law and order” to gain votes in the South.” Yes, that certainly is said.
UPDATE: I almost forgot. I sort of wrote this post two weeks ago, reviewing a Michael Swanwick story about democracy among the undead. “Salem Toussaint stood in the doorway, eyes rolled up in his head so far that only the whites showed. He held up a hand and in a hollow voice said, ‘One of my constituents is in trouble.’”
by Kieran Healy on July 15, 2008
By now you’ve probably all seen this:
Kevin Drum has one reaction. He also presents a remix of the cover, though I don’t think it’s all that effective. The New Yorker probably doesn’t have the neck to run a McCain followup that would really enrage the cable-news and spin-cycle bottom-feeders, but even if they did, it’d be hard to find a good analog to this one. Here’s one possible place to begin:
I’d suggest putting Dubya in Walken’s uniform, or the “Mission Accomplished” flight suit, and instead of the watch have him holding a tiny, angry-looking John McCain.
by Henry on July 13, 2008
Duncan Black links to Amity Shlaes at the Washington Post telling us that Americans are too whiners. As he says, having people like Shlaes and Gramm mouthing off is a public service in a general election (if only McCain would nominate David Bernstein as a senior surrogate, my happiness would be complete). But talk of Shlaes reminds me of her notorious 2005 FT column
It is early to be getting partisan about New Orleans. …Iraq has not caused the US to botch Katrina – either the preparation or response. On the contrary, the fact that the country and President Bush personally were already mobilised for disaster has saved lives.
the US was prepared for Katrina. All the old and new federal offices worked together and confronted the storm early. Nearly two days before Katrina hit New Orleans, the president made millions available to Louisiana by declaring the state an official disaster area. In a press conference on Sunday morning, he instructed the country to listen for any alerts – and warned straightforwardly that he could not “stress enough the danger this hurricane poses to Gulf coast communities”. On Sunday too, Alabama and Mississippi received access to cash when they in turn were declared disaster areas. Citizens of New Orleans with special needs were instructed to go to the Superdome.
Very shortly after writing this appalling piece of hackery, Ms. Shlaes ceased to be a columnist at the Financial Times.1 I don’t think that it’s at all unwarranted to surmise that the column and Ms. Shlaes’ rapid departure were connected.
So we may possibly have some idea of what it would take to get a columnist fired at the FT. I’d be interested to know what it would take to get a persistent vendor of mendacious and malignant tripe such as, say, Charles Krauthammer, fired from the Washington Post? By the man’s own admission, his credibility is problematic. A few months ago, we passed the fifth anniversary of his statement that
Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.
Indeed.
1 A search by date suggests that Shlaes produced one more column (which tried to blame the Katrina shambles on the Evils of Federalism, directly contradicting what she had said the previous week), a piece for the wealth section, and a book review over the next couple of weeks, and was then gone forever.
by John Holbo on July 12, 2008
So I’m listening to this Peter Beinart/Jonah Goldberg bloggingheads exchange on patriotism and, round about minute 8:00 Goldberg grumbles about the rhetoric of progress and ‘parliament of man’ and all that. Then:
Barack Obama talks about making America better by remaking it, by reinventing it. The aesthetics of his campaign are about a revolution. Well, it seems to me that if you believe this country needs a revolution, if you believe that it needs to be remade, then your love for it isn’t that profound.
Has the man never celebrated the 4th of July? What does he think the fireworks are supposed to represent? His mom told him it’s just a pretty light show (she didn’t want her young son to think revolution is a good thing) and he never thought to ask again when he grew up?
Why did the founding fathers hate America? [click to continue…]
by Henry on July 11, 2008
I have a Bloggingheads dialogue with Eric Posner up, where among other things, we talk about the origins of the netroots. The (not very original, I suspect) theory that I put forward in the dialogue is that this wasn’t the result of any necessary affinity between the left and the Internet, but instead a historical accident, resulting from the emergence of a new medium at a moment when US progressives were (a) extraordinarily frustrated with the Iraq war, and (b) deeply disenchanted with the traditional means through which they might have found expression of their views in happier times (TV and purportedly ‘left’ newspapers like the New York Times; the Democratic party). This is less a political science judgement than a semi-journalistic one – I haven’t done enough specific research to really do more than articulate my best guess as to what happened. I am interested in working more on this in a more serious way at some stage though, and would love to both people’s views (preferably good disagreements with my argument) and any evidence for or against that they can think of. More generally, there is a lot of work to be done updating the social movement literature to deal with these new Internet mediated movements – at the very least, there are a few dissertations in it.
by Henry on July 10, 2008
Matt Yglesias gets political spam from Airtran
AirTran got ahold of my email address somehow or other over the years and sends me occasional doses of spam. Normally, it’s to promote some deal or something. But now they’re giving me rants against the evils of oil speculators
But it turns out that this is part of a much larger campaign. Cue Zephyr Teachout:
I got an email this morning from United, asking me to go to a petition site, which asks me to enter my zip code and send a note to my MOC to “Stop Oil Speculation” and lower energy costs. Tracy Russo reports she got the same email from Northwest. The entire coalition list is at the bottom of this post, and includes the Petroleum Marketers Association of America and Agricultural Retailers association, as well as Delta, Continental, US Air, American, Airtran…
I don’t think this is big news in the good way, mind you—its important because it signals that corporations are willing to use their massive databases to try to leverage political will in Washington. I’m sure this isn’t the first of its kind, but its the first of such a scale that its caught my attention (I’m happy to be rebutted in the comments). We’re talking tens of millions of emails (possibly nearing a hundred million? Jose Antonio Vargas, can you find out?) if all the airlines’ lists are involved. This is clearly just the beginning, and its a crude one—a few years from now you’ll see more organizing, including international organizing, to leverage corporate databases to influence policies that help corporate wealth.
This is an interesting challenge to Clay’s account of how the politics of group formation is changing (all the more so as one of his key examples of group empowerment is airline customers who are annoyed at their treatment. I think that Clay’s fundamental claim – that the transaction costs that have hitherto often blocked group formation have been lowered dramatically – is both important and indisputably correct. But this doesn’t necessarily have a levelling effect on power relations, as Clay sometimes seems to suggest when he talks about mobilized consumer groups, protesters etc.
My impression is that we still don’t have good concepts for figuring out the consequences of lowered transaction costs of group formation and communication, partly because we are fighting a set of tired arguments between techno-evangelists (Glenn Reynolds’ dreadful An Army of Davids standing in for multitudes here), and techno pessimists (Andrew Keen, Sven Birkets and other guardians of traditional hierarchies) about whether the Internet is a generally empowering or disempowering phenomenon. It’s neither, of course, and it’s in the detail of which particular groups get empowered and disempowered, and under which circumstances, that the interesting questions lie. I’d be very interested in Clay’s views about how to move forward in this direction (or in another, of course, if he thinks I’m wrong)
by Henry on July 8, 2008
Having handed in my tenure file, and gotten my book accepted (yay!), I’m now, for the first time in years, in a place where I can think about doing some really serious reading outside the topics of my research, while I wait for the results to come in on the first, and do copy preparation on the second. So I’m in the market for good books about American politics, society, and history to fill in some of the holes in my knowledge of same as a non-US native. What I’m looking for are interesting, intellectually rich, accounts of American politics, preferably with a minimum of boosterism. Less Doris Kearns Goodwin then, than The Boys on the Bus. I’m interested both in academic books with a general appeal and good popular histories with intellectual bite. I’m also happy to entertain suggestions for good fiction that touches on these subjects – first on my list is Peter Mathiessen’s Shadow Country (I read one of the books that it’s based on, Killing Mr. Watson, years ago, and loved it). So please submit recommendations in comments. Up before I start on this list, I hope, my reviews of John McGowan on American liberalism and Dan Solove on reputation and the Internet.
by John Quiggin on July 6, 2008
by Henry on July 1, 2008
Eric Lawrence, John Sides and I have just finished writing a paper which looks at the first decent dataset that allows us to figure out what blog readers look like. This isn’t a final version (there are comments from Eszter and a couple of other readers that we want to incorporate – further comments and criticisms welcome), but it is just about fit for wider human consumption. The paper is available at SSRN (if you’re signed up with them, we’d love you to download it from there cos it’ll bump up our hit count), and at http://www.themonkeycage.org/blogpaper.pdf if that’s more convenient. So what do we find?
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by Henry on June 30, 2008
More on the Mickey Tax, courtesy of a set of talking points forwarded by my person in the Travel Industry Association, which are (to put it mildly) quite unconvincing on the major points of contention. I’ve decided to adopt this piece of legislation in the same way that some people and organizations adopt highways – expect more on this over the coming months. Also, NB that this is one of those activities where the Internet really has changed everything – it would have been infeasible for me to investigate this stuff without Congresspedia, online access to Her Majesty’s Government’s taxation guidance documents for airlines etc. Talking points and response below the fold.
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by Henry on June 26, 2008
When I saw that the Mickey Tax1 issue had been taken up by Atrios and Kos, I guessed that it wouldn’t be long before I started seeing some pushback. A former student of mine did some research a couple of years ago that suggests that Kos is the most widely read blog on the Hill, with a fair readership among Republicans (who want to see what’s coming down the pike) as well as Democrats, and I’d imagine that Markos’ fulminations got some attention in the right places. Sure enough, I got an email last night from a flack at the Travel Industry Association (the lobby group that’s been most heavily involved in pushing the Mickey Tax), offering to set me right on my various misconceptions about this Act. I replied that I would be happy to receive any proposed corrections/new information, but reserved the right to publish them on this blog. I haven’t gotten any response and don’t expect one, but will update this post if I’m wrong.
In the meantime, I’d like to take advantage of CT’s cross-national readership, and encourage those of you who live in visa-waiver countries to hassle your politicians, and write to your newspapers about the Mickey Tax. This, unlike the Iraqi translators appeal, is not a life or death issue, but it will lead to substantial amounts of money ($200 million) being transferred from tourists’ pockets to an outrageous boondoggle fund unless it gets stopped.
I particularly encourage you to use the terms ‘Mickey Tax’ or (Markos’s coinage) ‘Disney Tax’ in your communications. I imagine that the fervor of the Disney corporation for this particular rip-off would be dampened if incoming tourists to the US came to understand the political origins of the fee, and were able to draw the relevant conclusions about where to spend, or not to spend, their hardwon money once they had gotten in. The terms ‘Mickey Tax’ and ‘Disney Tax’ seem to me to draw these causal connections in a straightforward and useful way. Of course, Irish people in particular may think that the Mickey Tax is even more outrageous than it is, but that doesn’t necessarily seem to me to be a bad thing.
1 Term a trademark of This Blog, although I’m grateful to Atrios for seeing that it made for a better title than throwaway aside.