Democrats and demographics

If you read Thomas Edsall's New York Times opinion columns -- and you should if you care about intelligent presentation of data about the political opinion and trends among the United States population -- you might think that he contradicted himself in a couple of recent articles.

On March 4, he wrote about popular responses to rising economic inequality and offered a dismal prediction about inequality's implications for people who hope to use the Democratic Party to win populist changes.

... minority voters – and Democrats generally, including single women and single mothers – are far more supportive of taxing the rich than Republicans or independents. Gallup, in April, 2013, found that three-quarters of Democrats think the “government should redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich,” while 72 percent of Republicans opposed such action.

However, this leftward ideological and demographic shift is taking place largely within the Democratic electorate and much less so among the public at large.

With recent history as a guide, the smart handicapper will take the safe bet on the power of money over demographics. For the moment, the political reality is that the Democratic Party does not have the stomach to seriously engage the issue of inequality, and remains far too conflicted to take on the concentration of power and income at the top. Those benefiting most from the system as it is will continue to determine the operative definition of optimal inequality.

He goes on to document that Democrats are nearly as dependent on big money as Republicans, so the preferences of the base have a hard time getting heard.

A week later, Edsall weighed in on the hardy perennial topic of how Democrats could increase their vote among members of the white working class. For decades, many white working class voters have distrusted Democrats as the party of affirmative action and care for poor people, policies they firmly believe advantage black and brown folks at their expense. But in this column, Edsall shares data about why this may be changing.

White working-class voters outside the South are becoming more open to the Democratic Party because, as the P.R.R.I. polling on abortion and same-sex marriage shows, they are coming to terms with the cultural transformations stemming from what sociologists call the “second demographic transition.”

As I wrote last September, one of the more visible dividing lines between left and right in American politics is the extent to which voters in a particular state or region have adopted the values of this second demographic transition — a lessening of sexual constraint, extensive nonmarital cohabitation, delayed childbearing, reduced fertility, family disruption, a stress on personal autonomy and individual self-expression, declining religiosity and growing acceptance of women’s rights.

For decades, the cultural conflicts that emerged from the 1960s gave the Republican Party highly effective wedge issues to build support among white working-class Americans.

These voters were first the “silent majority,” then “Reagan Democrats” and subsequently “angry white men,” but they were crucial at every point to the conservative coalition that produced presidential victories for the Republican Party in five of the six elections between 1968 and 1988.

The declining commitment of white noncollege voters outside the South to conservative values has been masked, politically and culturally, by the continued ferocity of sociocultural and racial conservatism among working class whites in the South. But insofar as the second demographic transition is taking hold among these voters in the North, the Midwest and the West, Democratic prospects may well be better than national polling data suggests.

If these voters, who are by-and-large sympathetic to economic populist policies like raising the minimum wage and taxing the rich also finally are making peace with the 60s and thus participating more comfortably in the Democratic coalition, the party's demographic advantage will simply become overwhelming.

If East Coast pundits paid a little more attention to California, they'd notice this has already happened in the Golden State.

In the early 2000s, I was commissioned to study election data for an outfit that was trying to sell itself as helping Democrats win statewide elections. After a decade of losing a series of nasty fights over initiatives (see Prop. 187, Prop. 209, and Prop. 227)designed to divide the state along age and racial lines, we'd elected a Democratic governor -- and then lost him to a smart Hollywood cartoon character. What was it going to take to forge a winning Democratic coalition in this racially and socially fractured state? I spent a week or so looking at numbers, and though I had to be encouraged by the increase in the proportion of the electorate from the various communities of color over the previous decade, I concluded that the process of forming a new Democratic majority would be a long slog. Why white people would remain a majority of the electorate until 2040 at the earliest!

I was simply wrong about my timeline. Whites will still be a majority of the electorate for a long time to come in California, but a significant and growing fraction of the white population became ready to dial back racial and cultural fear much earlier than I'd expected. The result, plus the very hard work of unions and community groups to increase turnout among new voters of color, is that today California is the new model Democratic state. The Democratic coalition doesn't need a majority of white voters; it needs a significant fraction, maybe 40 percent of these mostly married whites, and a lot of other voters. And in California, that is the shape of the electorate.

The outcome of these happy demographic changes is that the struggle about whether the democratic process can be used to moderate inequality now resides not between Republicans and Democrats, but within the Democratic party.

This isn't something that demographic change can make us complacent about. In progressive San Francisco, where all office holders are Democrats and actual leftists have long been a force, progressives have lost power to tech tycoons and developers. They were smart, but we were also somewhat asleep at the switch after a decade of hard fought victories. In consequence, the mass of more entrenched San Franciscans again need to struggle for the soul of the city.

Edsall's slightly contradictory data do point toward where this is going. We need to understand where the fights take place these days and organize our Democratic coalition accordingly. We still need more Democrats -- but even more, in California we need better Democrats. This should be a project that many in the aging white working class can get behind.

Saturday scenes and scenery: this enlightenment stuff is tough work

At the Metropolitan Museum, Gonkar Gyatso's figure, the "Dissected Buddha" labors through myriad "glittering but irrelevant fragments of consumer media."

Some of the surrounding fluff and furor:








What a life! Thanks Met.

Friday cat blogging: addendum via Henri Rousseau

It's kind of MOMA to allow photos. These critters were not to be missed.

"Degenerate Art"

The Neue Galerie, in New York, opened a show this week titled Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937. Pursuing my art-oriented vacation, I slipped in yesterday.

The German National Socialists, the Nazis, viewed their movement as at war with modern creativity. On assuming power in 1933, they not only expelled Jews, queers and even Socialists from academia and burned books they considered tainted -- they also seized art that offended their vision of Aryan purity. In 1937 in Munich they assembled a huge show -- "Entartete Kunst "-- out of the offending works by such artists as Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Klee.

Most of the art works that the Nazis stole did not survive the war, though even today pieces turn up in odd corners of the world. Many of the artists did not survive either. The current show highlights works by Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde and Max Beckmann among others. I suspect that some of these German and Austrian abstract expressionists were considered rather staid by their peers. It was a bit of revelation to me that several seemed to be working Christian themes, not what I expect from self-conscious members of a European avant-garde.

It was somehow disconcerting to view all this in a hyper-elegant setting, north along Park Ave. from the Metropolitan Museum.

Apparently the original, admission-free, Nazi Degenerate Art show was hugely popular. Neue Galerie's exhibition displays looping 1937 video of the gawking crowds. Some of this footage leads off this musically overwrought 1993 documentary about the Nazi show. The history of Nazi crimes lends itself to overwrought presentations.

Friday cat blogging: meet Emerson

Very infrequently, this sleek domestic black panther will accept a bit of cuddling.

Rant: this is violence!

GOP Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska told the activists: "Abortion is not a women's issue. It is not a men's issue. It is not a health care issue. It is a violence issue."

TPM

You bet abortion is a violence issue; restricting access sentences women to a lifetime of responsibilities that they may not be ready for. It diminishes the life chances of unwilling parents. It risks the quaity of life of their potential children. And the same politicians who work so hard to enforce pregnancy on the unwilling struggle to cut the "discretionary budget" -- the social and economic supports for families and children -- that might make unintended child rearing something more than servitude.

Yes, this is violence.

Responsible niche market

The lettering on the glass reads "Made in Downtown LA; Vertically Integrated Manufacturing."

A sandwich board explains further:

Nice to see someone thinks there might be a competitive advantage in paying the people that do the work enough to live on. Hope it is true.

Roads we don't need

Moving Beyond the Automobile: Highway Removal from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Having lived in proximity to three of the highways discussed here, I know we can do without them! The damage Robert Moses did to Buffalo makes me particularly sad. The Niagara River is lovely, when you can access it.

Sight seeing

We're taking Spring Break -- my academic partner gets a week holiday so we're in New York City getting our minds expanded by art.

Yesterday's highlight was Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China at the Met.

Not surprisingly, those billion Chinese have a lot going on.

What appears a fairly traditional landscape ....

... turned out on closer inspection to hide a forest of people and buildings. (Click any of these images to enlarge.)

This industrial scene was one of several hanging sets of scrolls titled "Crying Landscapes." It reminded me vividly of the oil refinery I would drive past as a child along with my mother on the main route between Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Towers burned off gases night and day. The place both sparkled and stank. Just a few miles further on was the Hooker Chemical Company, years later made notorious by its poisoning of the Love Canal neighborhood.

What I remember about seeing the refinery and Hooker was that these facilities were sources of pride to my mother. Hadn't such scientific and modern facilities won the war against Hitler? She looked at them with delight and satisfaction. They were not yet emblematic of ugliness, of blight.

US compounding past wrongs in Ukraine?

It seems to be nearly impossible for people in the United States to say much sensible about the upheavals in Ukraine. We tend to begin from bottomless, ahistorical ignorance. Ceaseless peace advocate David McReynolds offers one thoughtful analysis. Here's an important section:

The context of the Ukrainian Crisis:
... I want to step back away from the immediate crisis of Ukraine, for a look at the history which dictates much Russian policy - under Putin as it did under Stalin.

Russia has no natural barrier - no river, no mountain range - to guard it on its Western border. It has suffered invasion from the West three times in recent memory - under Napoleon and then twice under the Germans. In the last invasion, under Hitler, between 25 and 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives. All the factories, dams, railroads. towns and cities West of a line from Leningrad in the North to Moscow to Stalingrad in the South were destroyed. Americans make much of 9.11 (and I don't make light of it) but for Russia it was not just a handful of buildings in one city which were destroyed - it was entire cities, leveled. And then with the wounded to care for, the orphans, the widows.

Americans have never understood what the war meant to Russia and why, after the war, the Soviets sought to build a "protective band" of territory between itself and Germany. This was Eastern Europe, which under the iron boot of Stalin became "people's democracies" or "presently existing socialism".

Something Americans (perhaps including our President and the Secretary of State) have forgotten was that Russia wanted to make a deal with the West. It had made peace with Finland, which (again, memories are short and we have forgotten this) fought on the side of the Nazis. The Soviets withdrew from Austria after the West agreed that Austria, like Finland, would be neutral.The Soviets very much wanted a Germany united, disarmed, and neutral. Stalin did not integrate the East Germany into the Eastern European economic plans for some time, hoping he could strike that deal. But the West wanted West Germany as part of NATO, and so the division of Germany lasted until Gorbachev came to power.

I would have urged radical actions by the West in 1956 when the Hungarian Revolution broke out - it was obvious that if the Soviets could not rule Eastern Europe without sending in tanks (as they had already had to do in East Germany in 1953), they posed no real threat of a military strike at the West.

What if we had said to Moscow, withdraw your tanks from Hungary, and we will dissolve NATO, while you dissolve the Warsaw Pact.

But of course the West didn't do that. The US in particular (but I would not exempt the Europeans from a share of the blame) wanted to edge their military bases to the East. When the USSR gave up control of Eastern Europe, the US pressed for pushing NATO farther East, into Poland and up to the borders of Ukraine.

Pause for a moment and assume that revolutionary events in Canada had meant Canada was about to withdraw from NATO and invite in Russian military advisers.

What do you think US response would be?

Why are we surprised that Putin has said, very clearly, "no closer - back off".

In this case Moscow holds the high cards. Europe is not going to war over Crimea. And it needs Russian gas. Sanctions will cut both ways - Europe is very cautious and, irony of ironies, it is Germany which is behaving with the greatest diplomacy.

If, out of all this, US planners accept the fact that there are real limits to how far East NATO can push, then the crisis will have helped us come to terms with reality. It may even lead us to consider dissolving NATO!

Read it all here.

Men working

The monthly employment report came out Friday. 175,000 jobs created (unless they adjust the numbers which they almost always do) and 6.7 percent unemployment. Not terrible, but not good.

Somehow, I don't think these men are counted as "working" by the statisticians.







This activity sure looks arduous to me.

Once upon a time, this might have been "work," according to an excerpt from The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers that Rule Our World.

Until the nineteenth century, the concept of unemployment was alien. Most people didn’t earn a wage; they did not have “jobs.” They farmed, or traded, or served, or fought. Some were artisans or blacksmiths or stevedores, but most worked the land to nurse food out of stubborn soil. Factories were small, with a few dozen workers. There were mines here and there, and, of course, servants. But there was no framework of employment versus unemployment, only of want versus plenty, hard work versus idleness, good times versus bad.

... In the United States, the birth of economic statistics was part of an overall movement toward social and political reform. The drive to create these statistics was fueled in part by a rising national suspicion that large companies, monopolies, railroads, and banks were reaping disproportionate rewards and thereby robbing the common man of his hard-earned gains. ...

That meaning is still implicit in the statistics that frame our lives.

Saturday scenes and scenery: San Francisco women

In honor of International Women's Day, I give you some of the women I've glimpsed when walking precincts for my photography blog. Click on any of these to enlarge.

We come in all kinds.

How could Europe have fallen into barbarism in 1914?

Can a book be called "delightful" whose subject is how European states blundered into a war that took about 37 million lives and set the stage for another 20 years later that killed 60 million more people? Delightful is an adjective I'd use for Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan's The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. "Accessible," "arch," and "wry" would also apply.

MacMillan's subject is one of the great conundrums of 20th century history, chewed over ever since the Great War of 1914-18 began. As she points out, disputes about how the war happened and who was at fault that already raged during the fighting have never abated. Vast troves of memoirs and archives have become available. As the hundredth anniversary of the war begins, we should see a bumper crop of additional offerings.

MacMillan sets the scene for her story with this not-at-all-novel description of the context:

The nineteenth century was an extraordinary time of progress, in science, industry, and education, much of it centered on an increasingly prosperous and powerful Europe. Its peoples were linked to each other and to the world through speedier communications, trade, investment, migration, and the spread of official and unofficial empires. The globalization of the world before 1914 has been matched only by our own times since the end of the Cold War. Surely, it was widely believed, this new interdependent world would build new international institutions and see the growing acceptance of universal standards of behavior for nations.

... War, it was hoped, would become obsolete. It was an inefficient way of settling disputes. Moreover, war was becoming too costly, both in terms of the drain on the resources of the combatants and the scale of the damage that new weapons and technology could inflict. ... Why did the forces pushing towards peace -- and they were strong ones -- not prevail? They had done so before, after all. Why did the system fail this time?

Essentially, MacMillan plumps down for a "great man" theory of this history. In her telling, particular rulers, politicians and generals in the great European states made successive calculations and miscalculations that destroyed the long 19th century European peace. She convincingly asserts that whatever impression we may have of that "peace" floats in an illusory afterglow of delusion. (She neglects to mention that for many resident's of Europe's colonies in the 19th century, there was never any meaningful "peace".) She's not much for economic or demographic explanations. As she points out, the data barely exists to measure what "public opinion" might have been in these countries at the time.

Instead, MacMillan gives us vivid portraits of her cast of historical actors. I think it is fair to say that she subjects the great men of the time to the sort of dismissive gossip that is usually only accorded to famous women. The result is enjoyable. The German Kaiser Wilhelm has been a comic-opera figure in many histories, but MacMillan is downright vicious:

He was naturally restless and fidgety, his features animated and his expressions changing rapidly. ... He was handsome, with fair hair, soft fresh skin and gray eyes. In public he played the part of ruler quite well, in his variety of military uniforms and his flashy rings and bracelets and with his erect soldier's bearing. ... Wilhelm II was vain, bombastic, and neurotic. ... insecurity ... lurked behind the bristling mustache, which his barber carefully waxed every morning. ...Wilhelm was an actor and one who secretly suspected that he was not up to the demanding role he had to play.

She doesn't confine her ridicule to Kaiser Willie; here she describes a German politician who served as Chancellor in the pre-war decade:

[Bernhard von] Bulow, the man who was supposed to solve Germany's international problems, was an amusing, charming, cultivated, and clever career diplomat. He was also intensely ambitious and, like his new master, Wilhelm, lazy. ... Over the years, Bulow had gained a deserved reputation among his colleagues for being devious, untrustworthy and slippery as an eel, said [Frederick von] Holstein who initially considered him a friend. "Bernhard von Bulow," wrote Holstein in his diary, "is clean-shaven and pasty, with a shifty look and an almost perpetual smile. Intellectually plausible rather than penetrating. He has no ideas in reserve with which to meet all contingencies, but appropriates other people's ideas and skillfully retails them without acknowledging the source."

When she's not mocking her actors, MacMillan describes the long series of late 19th and early 20th century "crises" over trade, colonies, and military alliances through which European states maneuvered. She quotes one of her actors, the English Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, about this sequence of nearly-missed conflicts:

"The consequences of such a foreign crisis do not end with it. They seem to end, but they go underground and reappear later on." The powers had fresh reasons to mistrust each other, and key decision-makers and their publics were closer to accepting the likelihood of war. ...

In 1914, according to MacMillan, accumulated humiliations, misunderstandings and some real conflicts of imperial interests turned the assassination of an Austrian Crown Prince who nobody much liked by a Bosnia anarchist in Sarajevo into the proximate cause of the Great War. She is caustic about this causes belli.

That gave Austria-Hungary, as happens surprisingly often in international relations, power over its stronger partner. By 1914 Germany's leaders felt that they had little choice but to support their ally even as it pursued dangerous policies, much as the United States continues to support Israel or Pakistan today.

In the end she gently blames the men who went to war and suggests we should do better:

We must remember, as the decision makers did, what had happened before that last crisis of 1914 and what they had learned from the Moroccan crises, the Bosnian one, or the events of the First Balkan Wars. Europe's very success in surviving those earlier crises paradoxically led to a dangerous complacency in the summer of 1914 that, yet again, solutions would be found at the last moment and the peace would be maintained.

And if we want to point fingers from the twenty-first century we can accuse those who took Europe into war of two things. First, a failure of imagination in not seeing how destructive such a conflict would be and second, their lack of courage to stand up to those who said there was no choice left but to go to war. There are always choices.

I'm not, ultimately, an enthusiast for "great man" history. But this is a wonderful telling, much deeper than my summary, without the dry heaviness of many historical recitations. This is, after all, a terrible saga of human folly. MacMillan's volume probably shouldn't be anyone's sole source for the origins of World War I, but it certainly deserves to be a major source. And reading it is delightful.

Friday critter blogging: waiting, eagerly

Their person said they liked to be photographed.

This may make you puke ...

The publication pictured seems to be the "newsletter" of the military forces that work at the US prisoncamp at Guantanamo Bay.

H/t: tweet from @carolrosenberg who has reported on Gitmo for years for the Miami Herald.

Further along in her twitter stream, she points out:

Russia leases Sevastopol from Ukraine like U.S. leases Guantanamo Bay from Cuba.

Sigh.

Why was it again that CCSF should lose its accreditation?

It turns out that City College of San Francisco is actually better than average among California's two-year colleges at graduating its students and getting them into the UC system. So reports demographer Hans Johnson, Co-Director of Research for the Public Policy Institute of California.

By most measures, City College fares well relative to other community colleges in the state. The share of students who complete college by earning a degree or certificate, or by transferring to a four-year college, is higher at CCSF than in the rest of the state. This advantage holds even when we limit our analysis to students who are initially unprepared for college-level work, which suggests that it is not simply the mix of students drawn to City College that drives its outcomes.

CCSF apparently ranks below average in math remediation -- I assume that means teaching math to students who didn't get properly prepared in high school. But given the number of English learners CCSF attracts, another measure is amazing:

... the share of students who successfully complete remediation in English is higher than the statewide average, as is the share of students who successfully complete ESL courses.

Yet the accrediting commission is still threatening to close this San Francisco institution in July. It's got to be that something about an institution with strong unions and strong faculty governance produces revulsion among education bureaucrats.

Ash Wednesday 2014

A cross, drawn by pouring out a water bottle, briefly marks a spot where a young man was murdered in San Francisco's Mission district.

The Christian season of Lent begins with the admonition: "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return." I will go tonight to receive ashes drawn on my forehead. This is a ritual that feels right to me. I believe I would do better to live in the consciousness that we all die. But I don't do it, of course. There is something about being alive today that fosters the illusion I'll go on, and on, and on ...

I should note today the passing of Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, the author of How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter, a truly enlightening book. This is science, not mumbo jumbo. To read Dr. Nuland is to appreciate that we will die and that we have a relatively low chance of experiencing a "good death." We're human.

A couple of months back, George Johnson explored how, in the rich world, the usual causes of death are changing. More of us used to die from various manifestations of heart disease, but today's medical practice has advanced to the point that

when difficulties do arise they can often be treated as mechanical problems — clogged piping, worn-out valves — for which there may be a temporary fix.

Cancer, however, still cuts us down despite all the good efforts of the doctors; we all accumulate pre-cancerous mutations and, if we aren't run over by a truck or afflicted with Alzheimers, one of them is likely to get us.

Reading about how we die makes me wonder: are old people in our society frequently scorned and ignored simply because they remind us we're all going where they are -- unless we're unlucky enough to encounter the grim reaper before we get there? Seems likely.

Warming Wednesdays: a rebuke to the rule of the market

Cyclones, blizzards, drought, fire and flood -- scientists can't say any particular weather event is a direct result of global warming, but they are quite ready to say that "extreme weather" will be one of the consequences of our heating up the planet.

Writing in February as the south of England was engulfed by flood waters, Seumas Milne sought to explain how climate change denial could be on the rise as the evidence of our senses points to massive disruptions.

What lies behind the political right's growing refusal to accept the overwhelming scientific consensus? There's certainly a strong tendency, especially in the US, for conservative white men to refuse to accept climate change is caused by human beings. But there shouldn't be any inherent reason why people who believe in social hierarchies, individualism and inequality should care less about the threat of floods, drought,  starvation and mass migrations than anyone else. After all, rightwing people have children too.

Part of the answer is in the influence of some of the most powerful corporate interests in the world: the oil, gas and mining companies that have strained every nerve to head off the threat of effective action to halt the growth of carbon emissions, buying legislators, government ministers, scientists and thinktanks in the process. ...

But climate change denial is also about ideology. Many deniers have come to the conclusion that climate change is some kind of leftwing conspiracy – because the scale of the international public intervention necessary to cut carbon emissions in the time demanded by the science simply cannot be accommodated within the market-first, private enterprise framework they revere. ... In the words of Nicholas Stern's 2006 report, climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen".

My emphasis.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Mission morsels

San Francisco is not like the rest of the country. While the national unemployment rate is 6.6 percent, we're enjoying 4.8 percent here in the midst of the tech boom. That means many employers are looking to hire.

They resort to some odd stratagems. This "Joe" may not be the most articulate writer of "help wanted" notices, but he's demonstrating enterprise by putting a sandwich board on a wide boulevard.


I have to wonder how the "busser" -- when they find one -- will be able to afford to live in a town where a fixer-upper house just sold for $1.4 million, over $500 thousand over the asking price. I also have never stopped thinking of the squat building where this Zagat Rated restaurant is located as the Kentucky Fried Chicken it was for many years.

Month reviewed; much afoot!

Over the weekend, I found myself drafted by my comrades in WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras to quickly turn out about 2000 words about events around the world over the last month. We post one of these "Month in Review" essays at the beginning of each month. So I wrote vigorously.

After the post went up, folks said to me something I've said to other authors: "You sure had a tough month; so much was happening. ..."

I think, if driven to review world affairs regularly, most of us would say that about any month.

I will say February was dramatic. If interested, you can read Uprisings in Venezuela and Ukraine: a Challenge to the US Left at the WarTimes site. While there, you can sign up to receive infrequent emails about peace, justice and what some people are trying to do to make those happy aspirations real.