FAIR IS FAIR

I have had my fun with establishment American economists, likening them to denizens of Plato’s Cave, building brilliant careers on guessing at the succession of images flickering on the cave wall.  Still and all, fair is fair, and though they are biologically incapable of forming the words “Karl Marx,” the best of them really are good at predicting shadows.  So this morning, I shall tip my hat to Paul Krugman, shadow guesser supreme, who in this Op Ed column does a nice job of anatomizing the self-destructive inanity of Trump’s trade wars.

A FEW WORDS OF EXPLANATION

I was rather struck by the fact that my post entitled “Two EMail Messages” provoked only two comments, both of them simply links to other sites.  I fear the point of the post may have been lost.  My purpose was to contrast the prosaic and utterly unremarkable content of the phone script with Phil Green’s beautifully articulated cry of despair, something I would have been proud to write had I his polemical skill.  I was trying to illustrate how mundane actual political work is, at the ground level.

I have now made my first 19 calls, leaving the remaining 12 for this afternoon.  The result?  I left 10 messages on answering machines, was told that 5 numbers were disconnected, got one no-answer [no answering machine], one weird sound, was told tartly by one woman to please remove her from our call list, and spoke to one enthusiastic supporter who thanked me for my service.  Is this really a good use of the time of a man who is, as Clint Eastwood puts it in one movie, a legend in his own mind?  Indeed it is.  Since I have nothing better to do, the opportunity cost is zero.  But there is more to it than that.  Let me explain. 

The fundamental fact about midterm elections in America is that most eligible voters don’t vote.  Roughly 35-40% of those who can vote bother to do so.  Republican Freedom Caucus member Mark Walker has won the 6^th North Carolina CD the two times he has run by about 59-41%.  For the sake of numerical simplicity, call it a 60/40 district.  This is an enormous hill for young Democratic challenger Ryan Watts to climb.  It would seem that he must persuade one out of every six Republicans to switch parties, an impossible task.  But appearances can deceive.  Consider.

Suppose that in November the Republicans in the N.C. 6^th CD are a tad dispirited, and not energized because Trump’s name is not on the ballot.  Let us imagine that they turn out at a low but not at all impossible 33%.  At the same time, suppose the local Democrats are fired up, by babies torn from mothers’ arms, by Mueller indictments, by the threat of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and come to the polls in numbers more to be expected in a presidential year, say 50% of them.  Now 1/3 of 60 is 20, and ½ of 40 is also 20, and suddenly a 60-40 district becomes a 50-50 race, in which an upset is entirely possible.

What has to happen for this fantasy to become reality?   Here we come to the on the ground reality of American politics, which is that organizationally, it is radically decentralized.  I am not just talking about the fact that the political organization of each state is a world unto itself, but that this decentralization reaches right down to the county level.  Sometimes, in presidential years, a national campaign achieves a startling degree of efficiency, as in fact Obama’s two campaigns did, but for the most part, and especially in off-year elections, candidates must rely on the organizational muscle of the local party, and that varies greatly from state to state, county to county.

For whatever historical reason, the North Carolina Democratic Party is a rather pathetic mess, so much so that in 2008 and 2012, when I worked here for Obama, I observed that his campaign staff simply bypassed the state party.  It made no use, for example, of the state party’s outdated and inadequate database of voters, addresses, phone numbers, and party registration.  If Ryan Watts is to achieve a Democratic voter turnout sufficient to turn a 60/40 district into a 50-50 race, he is going to need accurate voter records.  Now, Chatham County, where I live, is one of the few Democratic bastions in a Republican CD, and it has a pretty good county Democratic machine, but Alamance County, 30 miles to the northwest, does not.  So the Chatham County Dems are offering a helping hand to the Alamance County Dems by making calls to update the lists and reach out to supporters in Alamance.

And that is why I sat at my desk yesterday, and will sit at my desk today, working my way down the list of numbers and reading from my script.

TWO EMAIL MESSAGES

When I got up this morning, there were two email messages for me, aside from the flood of political money appeals.  In light of the vigorous discussion that has sprung up in response to my post about ringing doorbells, I thought I would reproduce both of them here.  I cannot imagine a more striking contrast.

The first message was from a volunteer with the Ryan Watts Congressional campaign.  She had sent me a list of 30 names and telephone numbers, and I had promised to call them this weekend.  This is the “script”:

“Hello, I am (name) ______ a volunteer with Ryan Watts' Campaign, Ryan is our 6th Congressional District Democratic Candidate. We are inviting you to Ryan's Town Hall on Thursday, July 12th, 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm, auditorium at Alamance Community College in Graham. Will you be able to attend the Town Hall?  Thank you.”

Alamance is a town roughly in the middle of the 6^th CD, just off Interstate 85.

The second message was from Philip Green, a well-known political scientist and radical activist, a professor emeritus from Smith College, a member of The Nation editorial board, and the author of many fine books.  Phil and I first met in Sunnyside, Queens.  He was three and I was two.  It is said we rode on occasion in the same baby carriage on Skilman Avenue.

SEVEN THESES        Phil Green. 7/4/18

I.    The Present

Engels proclaimed in the 19th Century that the choice was "Socialism or Barbarism."  The suspense is over. The barbarians are not at the gates, they're inside. More, they're inside the Temple: ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, Orthodox Christians in Russia, fundamentalists in the Islamic world, evangelical Christians in America. The New Testament as a blueprint for theocratic tyranny and contempt for the weak, the stateless, the needy. No need for Attila; any minister will do.

II.  The Constitution

Stalin famously asked "How many divisions does the Pope have?"  The answer is not recorded, though we know the Pope won in the end.  Donald Trump has asked, over and over again, "How many divisions does the Constitution have?"  And the answer, over and over, has been crystal clear to him: None.  Lots of handwringing by liberal lawyers on MSNBC, exegeses of what this or that passage really means, outcries by Democrats. Drops of fresh tears in the ocean of salt. The 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act are dead. In the latter case Vladimir Putin, the international gangster whose boots he lovingly licks, will help cement the elimination of "free and fair" elections. The 1st and 2nd Amendments are perverted beyond recovery; due process (Amendments 4, 5, and 6) and the Rule of Law have been effectively abolished, the DOJ turned into a "Handmaid" of tyranny.
    The President is the most powerful person on the Planet; nothing he has done or does can be overturned) no matter what happens in the Midterms.  The Supremes, soon to be instantiated as the High Court of Theocracy and Autocracy, as well as an obeisant Republican Party, will ensure all that. The Constitution is indeed, as has sometimes been said, but a piece of parchment. Shreddable. Or like Wiley E. Coyote, it's been running off the edge of a cliff while pretending it wasn't falling.  Gravity has won.

III.  The Police State

Concentration camps.  A legitimized Gestapo that rules at will, wherever it goes, with brute force behind it.  Geheimestaatspolizei. Violence cannot be contained  at a border. The knock on the door is the Law. Militarized police enforce White Supremacy. As one German commentator put it, we have "Anti-Semitism without Jews."  On this Continent, Muslims and Central Americans will serve just as well.  Not to mention transsexuals. And uppity young blacks. And women who don't treat their fetuses with proper respect.

IV.   "Totalization"

Let us celebrate all those clever accommodationsists who predicted the "end of ideology," the "triumph of liberal democracy," and best of all, the end of "totalizing theories," i.e.  Marxism, i.e., "totalitarianism."  Just as the final totalization of all, the unregulated "free" market, was taking over everywhere.  Like those TV sports analysts who lucidly explain why something is happening one play before the opposite comes crashing to life.
    Totalization: in a perfect inversion of Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice, there is no sphere of social living that can justly resist that take-over, nothing that can't be bought or sold, no scrap of welfare that can't be dispensed with, except of course the military budget, the first-resort instrument of white male justice and the capitalism with which it has made its peace.  Ralph Miliband coined the term "totalitarian capitalism" to describe China. Or coming to theater near you,  government by the Kochs, the Adelson, the Thieles, the Mercers. But sure, Leon Golub can hang his art anywhere.

V.  Fascism

The climb may have  been difficult, but the descent is proving to be easy.The  recipe is simple. The Devil's Bargain: the plutocracy gets the votes of the white supremacy tribe–by no means limited to the so-called "working class." In return, the Authoritarian Populist mob, its appeal to violence unrestrained, gets to rule over its opponents in the name of "The People." When I hear that phrase I reach for my passport.  In the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
    Liberals keep complaining incredulously, "but they're voting against their own interests!" Fateful misunderstanding.  For nihilism and bigotry, there's always work to be done. The only requirement is a leader who will call that spirit from the vasty deep. The mob then votes for the grandest self-interest of all: revenge.  Schadenfreud. Ressentiment. Straight out of Central Europe, the train is on its way To The Munich Station. Smash families? Steal children? The best "fuck you" money can buy. Melted ice caps lapping at our shores? "There will be rain tonight...Let it come down." "Find what occurred at Linz/What huge imago made a psychopathic god." Or in Queens. The license to say "Fuck you" to everyone you hate, or feel hard done by, or envy, or above all, feel dispossessed by:  robbed of your centuries-old reward of over-representation.

VI.   Resistance

The police are either legitimate or they are not.  If they are, nothing more to be said.  If not, nothing will come out of nothing. Not marches in the park, not articles in The Nation, not even female veterans of combat running for office everywhere. Good for morale. But they only understand force.  Masses: blocking the Courthouse steps, as in Poland; taking over the forbidden voting places; keeping ICE out of churches, workplaces, homes.  Fighting back.  Not going gentle: making them know what they have to do, and forcing them to do it–letting everyone see their true colors, the stakes, the cost. Losing, but not surrendering.

VII.   The Future?

Nothing is fixed; it's not only shit that happens.  But,

"...imagine a boot, stamping on a human face..."


"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

Philip Green

JUST TO BE CLEAR

I am not offering to ring doorbells and make calls out of faux man of the people humility.  If there were something more consequential I could do, I would do it.  I am beside myself with despair and apprehension, and I need to do something.  Working for the local Democratic challenger is something, and if I can manage to multiply my vote by getting others to the polls, then I need to do it.  Will my efforts all by themselves make the difference?  Of course not.  Will my efforts and those of a relatively small number of others -- twenty, thirty, fifty others -- make the difference?  Very possibly.  I won't know unless I try.  I don't like the mechanics of campaigning.  It is not my preferred way to spend the summer and beyond.  But these really are perilous times.

THANK YOU

I am genuinely flattered by the comments by Jerry Fresia and S. Wallerstein.  However, I shall persevere with my journeyman work of knocking on doors and making calls, or whatever else the Watts campaign wants me to do.  None of that will interfere with my writing, which I do for the most part in my head anyway.  I rather doubt I am suited to be a Thomas Paine.  My inclination is to engage in analysis rather than to issue calls to arms.  I have been writing for sixty years, and I do not think asnyone ever put me on a banner or a bumper sticker.

By the way, I just went on line to check out Paul Krugman's latest Op Ed column for the TIMES, and found this opening sentence, which captures perfectly everything I hate about him:

"As I wrote the other day, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may call herself a socialist and represent the left wing of the Democratic party, but her policy ideas are pretty reasonable."

He really is insufferable.

ALL POLITICS ARE LOCAL

When Susie and I moved south to Chapel Hill, NC, we found ourselves in a blue puddle surrounded by a red sea.  The fourth Congressional District of North Carolina is a safely Democratic enclave that has been represented for thirty years [save for a brief two year lapse] by David Price, a reliably liberal Democrat who holds a Yale doctorate in Political Science and taught at Duke before entering Congress.  He wins re-election each time he runs by anywhere from 15 to 30 points.  As a consequence, voting in Chapel Hill was pleasant but politically pointless.  I might just as well have stayed home.

A year ago, we moved again, this time five miles further south to Carolina Meadows, the continuing care retirement community that is now our home.  Thanks to the precise and thoughtful planning of the Republican majority in the state legislature, Carolina Meadows lies about four and a half feet inside the 6^th CD, an equally reliable Republican stronghold.  The 6^th CD is represented by the execrable Mark Walker, now in his second term.  Walker is an extreme right-wing member of the House Freedom caucus, briefly famous a short while ago for opining, after the Catholic House of Representatives Chaplain was abruptly fired by Paul Ryan, that the House needed a chaplain with a wife and children – which is to say, not a Catholic.  Walker, by the way, was a Baptist minister for twenty years.

The 6^th CD is what the political insiders call an R +9 district, which is to say it usually goes for the Republicans by 18 points, more or less [+9 means 9 points over 50%, not 9 points over the Democrat.]  This year, Walker is being challenged by Ryan Watts, a 27 year old graduate of UNC Chapel Hill making his political debut.  Watts is no fire breathing liberal, but he has articulated a standard moderately progressive program, in hopes that a blue wave will carry him to D.C.  Manifestly, Watts has a big hill to climb, but after all, Conor Lamb eked out a win in a Pennsylvania R +10 district, so hope springs eternal.  I have volunteered to work for the Watts campaign, at least during the next eight weeks before the Fall Columbia semester begins.

In midterms, the whole game is turnout, of course.  The norm is for 35-40% of the eligible voters actually to go to the polls.  Carolina Meadows is in Chatham County, one of the few D-leaning counties of the 6^th CD.  Carolina Meadows itself, as I have reported, is a hotbed of support for the Democratic Party, but getting people here to vote is not difficult.  Carolina Meadows is actually the voting location for our precinct, which means the my fellow old folks can vote on their way to the dining room or the library.  The rest of Chatham County, to our south, is mostly rural land with a few urban centers, such as Pittsboro and Siler City, and there ought to be some Democratic votes to harvest there.

I do not much enjoy politicking, if the truth be told, but I volunteered for Obama and walked door to door for Clinton, so while I diet, I will do what the Watts campaign wants me to do, and hope that I can bring a few lazy souls to the polls.  I think this is the most important election I have participated in since I first knocked on doors in East Cambridge for Adlai Stevenson in 1956.

All politics are local.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Among today’s news stories was a report that the Trump administration, not surprisingly, will oppose considerations of race in college admissions.  As I walked this morning, I carried out an argument in my head, as I so often do, this time against a defender of the administration position arguing in typical self-righteous fashion for college admissions based solely on merit, on demonstrated academic accomplishment or promise.  Rather than key my discussion today to the fact that it is the Fourth of July [we anarchists are not big on national holidays], I thought I would put in some coherent form the substance of my imagined argument.  As always, I find it useful to begin with some statistics and some history [save when talking about Kant, but that is another matter entirely.]

Higher education on the North American continent is 382 years old, if we take the 1636 founding of Harvard College as our terminus a quo.  Over that time, there have been four significant changes in the undergraduate portion of American higher education, all of them taking place in the fifteen years or so after World War II.

The first change was the explosion of public higher educational institutions, dramatically and permanently changing the balance of private and public institutions.  Until the end of WW II, the private sector dominated, even though, as a consequence of the Land Grant Act of 1862, a sector of state universities came into existence.  Although private colleges are created only rarely, so many state university campuses and state college systems have come into existence in the past sixty or seventy years that there are now more than 2,600 college and university campuses in the United States offering four year degrees.

The second change was the transformation of regional colleges and universities into national [and even international] institutions.  Before the war, schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Michigan, et al. served mostly local clientele.  It was unusual, for example, for someone from the Midwest or far west or deep south to go to college in New England.  Starting after the war, schools actively sought nationally representative student bodies.

The third change was the dramatic rise in the number of applicants to the most highly sought after colleges, a change in part resulting from the sharp increase in the number of young people seeking higher educational degrees [I leave to one side the deeper question whether they were seeking higher education.]  A few anecdotal statistics will illustrate this change.  In 1950, when I started my undergraduate education at Harvard, only 5% of adult Americans had college degrees.  Ninety-five percent did not.  Sixty eight years later, 35% of adult Americans have college degrees, still a small minority, but seven times as many proportionately.  When I applied 1949 for admission to Harvard, 2200 young men applied, 1650 were admitted, and 1250 of us showed up to form the class of ’54.  It was much easier to get into Harvard when I applied than it is today to get into the University of Massachusetts.

There was a fourth change, the change that has given rise to the debate about so-called Affirmative Action.  It was a response both to the dramatic rise in the number of high school graduates seeking college degrees and to the transformation of colleges and universities from regional to national aspirations.  Let me explain, again by the use of an anecdote.  By 1960, I had my doctorate, had done a stint in the army, and was an Instructor at Harvard, living in Winthrop House as a Resident Tutor [free room and board in return for talking to undergraduates.]  One day McGeorge Bundy stopped by to visit the Senior Common Room.  He was then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, before he went off to Washington to be Jack Kennedy’s National Security Advisor and oversee the Bay of Pigs and America’s entry into Viet Name.  He remarked that Harvard now was getting 5000 applicants a year [two and a half times as many as a decade earlier, but of course nothing like the 42,742 who applied this past year.]  Bundy said, “One thousand are clear admits, one thousand are clear rejects, and the real problem is making decisions about the remaining three thousand, every one of whom has something to be said for him.”

In short, elite colleges went from having admissions requirements to designing and implementing admissions policies.  Until that period, colleges had simply specified the preparation required for admissions – so much Latin, so much mathematics, and so forth.  But the flood of applicants at the elite schools presented a problem.  Many more young people were applying for admission than there was room for, so some deliberate choices had to be made about what one wanted the entering class to look like.  This was not a problem at the majority of colleges and universities, be it noted.  They were fighting to fill their classrooms.  But with the competition for good jobs in the economy and the rising educational credentials for those jobs, made possible by the increase in the number of college graduates, the value of a degree from an elite college soared, and so did the pool of applicants.

The first result was an expansion of the college bureaucracies.  Entire Admissions Departments, headed up by Deans of Admissions, came into existence.  Little by little, decisions were made at the administrative level that translated in to admissions policies.  A number of admissions criteria were put in place around the country, not only in the private higher educational sector, but in the elite public sector as well.  Everyone these days is aware of at least some of these criteria, but it is worth enumerating them to focus our attention on just how much of a change in admissions practices they involved.  Here are just a few:

1:         Private colleges adopted the policy of giving preference to applicants one of whose parents had attended the college – so-called “legacies.”

2:         Co-educational colleges sought to establish and maintain a rough gender balance.

3:         Colleges actively sought to achieve geographical distribution, sending admissions personnel on recruiting missions to secondary schools in underrepresented regions of the country.

4:         Colleges sought to achieve and maintain a balance of undergraduates pursuing degrees in the Arts and Humanities, in the Social Sciences, and in Natural Science and Mathematics.

5:         Colleges sought to restrict the number of Jewish undergraduates [now a somewhat less popular criterion of admissions or rejection.]

6:         Colleges sought to recruit young men with special gifts or potential in intercollegiate sports.  Later, this policy was extended to young women as well.

7:         Colleges sought to maximize their impact on the larger society by recruiting students who gave evidence of a desire to go into public service of some sort.

NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THESE POLICIES HAS ANYTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH ACADEMIC ABILITY OR ACCOMPLISHMENT.

In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, northern elite colleges began admitting, and then even recruiting, students of color.  And all hell broke loose.  People of the highest and most unimpeachable principle, who had caviled not at all at admission preferences based on legacies, on gender balance, on regional distribution, on fields of concentration, on religion, on sports ability, or on ambitions for public service, suddenly discovered that they were academic purists, concerned that admission be based on academic accomplishment or ability alone.

It would be otiose to observe that these objections are transparently racist.

What in earth would an undergraduate body be like that was recruited solely on the basis of academic considerations?  My personal example, which may of course be dated now, is the contrast I observed between the students walking the halls of Harvard and of MIT.  The Harvard students looked as though they had responded to a call from central casting for a TV advertising gig:  handsome, pulled together, neatly dressed, pleasingly varied in their racial and cultural diversity.  The MIT students were utterly different: tall, short, fat, thin, geeky, black, white, red, brown, yellow, weird.  Pretty obviously one could see that all they had in common was smarts.

The case giving rise to the dispute about affirmative action is the manifest effort of Harvard to hold down the proportion of Asian students, who are the new Jews.  I have no doubt the new assault on affirmative action will succeed, but I do not think I can bear the smug assertions by the supporters of this assault that all they care about is academic ability.  Puleeese.