American Anger: It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Other Party - Note for a lecture, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United"

Lynn Vavreck APRIL 2, 2016, New York Times

image from article

Americans are angry. That’s the sentiment that many believe is driving the
2016 election. They are angry because the rich are getting richer, the average
guy is struggling and the government in Washington hasn’t done anything to
stop the trend.

But it may not be that simple.

Data on the nation’s economic recovery, people’s reactions to current
economic conditions and their overall sense of satisfaction with life do not
suggest Americans are angry. In fact, historical measures indicate people are
about as happy and satisfied with the economy and with their lives as they
were in 1983, when Ronald Reagan told us it was “morning again in America.”

So why does it feel more like a 1 a.m. bar brawl?

The answer may have more to do with political parties than economics, or
at least with the interaction of the two. Today’s voters have sorted themselves
and polarized into partisan groups that look very different than they did in the
late 1980s. And members of each side like the other side less than before.
Americans aren’t annoyed only by the economy; they’re annoyed with one
another.

Objective economic conditions measured by the Federal Reserve suggest
that the nation’s recovery began in 2010, when gross domestic product started
to expand, unemployment started to fall and real disposable income began to
increase. By 2015, the misery index — a combined measure of unemployment
and inflation — was about as low as it had been since the 1950s, meaning an
active demand for goods and services along with low unemployment and
inflation.

Most Americans seemed to appreciate this growth. Data on the Index of
Consumer Sentiment, one of the longest­-running measures of Americans’
views of the economy, shows that by the end of 2015, consumer sentiment was
as positive as it had been in the mid-­2000s and mid­-1980s. It was nearly
identical to where it was at the end of 1983, when Mr. Reagan’s re-­election
romp began to take shape.

Even breaking the consumer sentiment data down by income levels does
little to buoy the argument that Americans were pessimistic. From 2009-­2015,
the average gap in economic satisfaction between the upper and lower thirds
of the income distribution was 13.7 points, much lower than it was during the
Reagan years (21.3) and lower than the gap during the administrations of the
elder George Bush (14.7), Bill Clinton (16.7) and George W. Bush (18.4).

As we entered 2016, Americans of all income levels felt positively about
the economy, though by some indicators many people had not recovered. The
employment-population ratio and median household income, for example,
began to recover only in 2015.

To get a sense of whether these economic factors were affecting the
general mood of the nation in a way not captured by consumer sentiment, I
examined one of the longest­-standing measures of general happiness. Since
1972, the General Social Survey has asked people to “take things all together”
and rate their level of happiness. The 40-­year trend shows only modest
changes — and may actually suggest a small increase in happiness in recent
years.

Describing Americans’ mood as distinctively angry in 2015 elides this
evidence. Americans were optimistic about the nation’s economy and generally
happy — in fact, no less optimistic or happy than they had been historically.

But there was a sense in the fall and winter of 2015 of one change. Using
analytic tools provided by Crimson Hexagon, I calculated the average monthly
increase in the share of news articles about the 2016 election with the word
“angry.” Between November 2015 and March 2016, the share of stories about
angry voters increased by 200 percent.

Some evidence suggests that the ire came from politics. When asked by
pollsters about trusting the government, the direction of the country,
American progress or the president, Americans were gloomier than their
economic assessments might have predicted. Broken out by party, these
pessimistic views reveal a growing partisan divide, one that’s been distilling
around racial attitudes for nearly two decades.

The increasing alignment between party and racial attitudes goes back to
the early 1990s. The Pew Values Survey asks people whether they agree that
“we should make every effort to improve the position of minorities, even if it
means giving them preferential treatment.”

Over time, Americans’ party identification has become more closely
aligned with answers to this question and others like it. Pew reports that,
“since 1987, the gap on this question between the two parties has doubled —
from 18 points to 40 points.” Democrats are now much more supportive (52
percent) of efforts to improve racial equality than they were a few decades ago,
while the views of Republicans have been largely unchanged (12 percent
agree).

That Democrats and Republicans have different views on issues is not
surprising. But recent work by Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and his
co­-authors shows something else has been brewing in the electorate: a growing
hostility toward members of the opposite party. This enmity, they argue,
percolates into opinions about everyday life.

Partisans, for example, are more concerned that their children might
marry someone of the opposite party (vs. people in Britain today and the
United States in 1960). They found partisans surprisingly willing to
discriminate against people who are not members of their political party.
We’ve entered an age of party­-ism.

Writing in The Washington Post, Michael Tesler, a University of
California, Irvine, political scientist, explained that because the growing
partisan divide is partly fueled by racial attitudes, partisans (in Washington
and in the electorate) also take increasingly opposite positions on many
racially inflected controversies.

Some are political, like police misconduct. Others spill into areas we think
of as more social than political, like sports, music and movies: about Academy
Awards nominations, for example.

Democrats and Republicans like each other a lot less now than they did
60 years ago, in part because they have sorted into parties based on attitudes
on race, religion and ethnicity. These attitudes and emotions have been
activated in the lead-­up to the 2016 election. Add to this the fact that the
country is becoming less white and that nonwhites are disproportionately
more likely to be Democrats, and an explanation for the anger emerges.

Lynn Vavreck, a professor of political science at U.C.L.A., is a co-author
of “The Gamble,” about the 2012 presidential campaign.

The Fractured Republic -- Note for a lecture, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United"

amazon.com

Basic Books, 2016

Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish, and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges.

No wonder, then, that Americans--and the politicians who represent them--are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time. The Left looks back to the middle of the twentieth century, when unions were strong, large public programs promised to solve pressing social problems, and the movements for racial integration and sexual equality were advancing. The Right looks back to the Reagan Era, when deregulation and lower taxes spurred the economy, cultural traditionalism seemed resurgent, and America was confident and optimistic. Each side thinks returning to its golden age could solve America’s problems.

In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin argues that this politics of nostalgia is failing twenty-first-century Americans. Both parties are blind to how America has changed over the past half century--as the large, consolidated institutions that once dominated our economy, politics, and culture have fragmented and become smaller, more diverse, and personalized. Individualism, dynamism, and liberalization have come at the cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, and social order. This has left us with more choices in every realm of life but less security, stability, and national unity.

Both our strengths and our weaknesses are therefore consequences of these changes. And the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life will need to be answered by the strengths of our decentralized, diverse, dynamic nation. Levin argues that this calls for a modernizing politics that avoids both radical individualism and a centralizing statism and instead revives the middle layers of society—families and communities, schools and churches, charities and associations, local governments and markets. Through them, we can achieve not a single solution to the problems of our age, but multiple and tailored answers fitted to the daunting range of challenges we face and suited to enable an American revival.

Republicans and Democrats are fixated on nostalgia — and have deformed our politics. Note for a lecture, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United"

“Freedom From Want” by Norman Rockwell, 1943. (National Museum of American Art)

By Michael Gerson Opinion writer, Washington Post May 2 at 7:56 PM 

The 2016 presidential race already counts an extraordinary accomplishment: It has made the 2000 election seem like the good old days.

Before Bush v. Gore became a Supreme Court controversy, the contest seemed to demonstrate that American politics was modernizing in a hopeful direction. Clintonism (including Al Gore’s slightly revised version) had helped Democrats come to terms with what was right about Reaganism, particularly on crime, trade, welfare and basic economics. George W. Bush was Reagan-like on taxes and trade, but set out to compete with Clintonism on domestic policy — proposing conservative and free-market methods to improve educational outcomes for minority children and provide prescription drug coverage in Medicare. It seemed as if 21st-century versions of liberalism and conservatism were conducting plausible arguments about how best to govern in response to new economic realities.

A decade and a half later, the parties have turned hard against both visions. The left has systematically forced Hillary Clinton to uphold the banner of anti-Clintonism on crime, trade, welfare and basic economics. The right was content, at first, to reject Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Now a significant portion of the GOP base, under Donald Trump’s leadership, is rejecting Reaganism in favor of nativism, protectionism and isolationism.

Both Clintonism and Reaganism, no doubt, needed updating. But the parties have gone further, essentially abandoning the two most compelling, successful governing visions of the past few decades. With the influence of Bernie Sanders and the success of Trump, American politics has launched into uncharted ideological waters.

The seas are pretty choppy. We are seeing the interplay of (1) fear caused by rapid economic change, (2) deep political polarization, (3) declining trust in almost all institutions and (4) strong resentment against political and economic elites. The result is a political atmosphere charged with radicalism and heavy with threats.

How in the world did we get to this state of disunion? One unexpected, compelling explanation comes from Yuval Levin, in his new book “The Fractured Republic.” Levin faults a “perverse and excessive nostalgia” by baby boomer politicians for the America of the 1950s and 1960s. For liberals, this was a golden age of job security, growing wages, high tax rates and relative economic equality. For conservatives, it was a promised land of family stability, community strength and conservative social norms. Levin describes this as a “consolidating America” in which industrialization, restricted immigration and the shocks of depression and war led to greater social, political and economic cohesion than the United States had ever seen.

But this postwar period was also an inflection point. The second half of the 20th century saw the “deconsolidation of America,” with growing social libertarianism, vastly expanded immigration, the globalization of labor markets, the growth of information technology and general abundance. These were centrifugal forces that made both our economy and our culture far less cohesive and centralized. 

Both right and left, in Levin’s account, miss the cohesion of mid-century America, and yet both are also relieved (in different ways) to be freed from those forces. “The right generally longs for cultural consolidation,” Levin told me, “but is glad for the economic deconsolidation. And the left longs for economic cohesion but is glad of the cultural liberation.” Each side is convinced the other has achieved the greater victory and thus believes the country is going to hell.

This backward-looking approach has deformed American politics. “Because both parties are channeling that nostalgia,” argues Levin, “their objectives and priorities tend to be embodied less in concrete policy proposals and more in vague and aimless frustration, which often manifests itself as populist anger.”

Levin warns of a real risk: a kind of general deconsolidation that becomes extreme individualism, leaving men and women isolated, aimless and alone. The answer, however, is not to recapture the culture and reimpose economic or social cohesion (which Levin regards as a hopeless task). It is to cultivate community in the space between the individual and the government. “The middle layers of society,” argues Levin, “where people see each other face to face, offer a middle ground between radical individualism and extreme centralization.”

Instead of desperately trying to go back in time to recover lost unity, Levin urges citizens to look forward — as well as downward, to improve the cultural patch around them. This future orientation may seem like an odd message for a conservative — and it is all the more powerful for coming from one. The goal is not to make America great . . . again. It is to make America great in a distinctly 21st-century way.

Trump understood the voters the GOP forgot - Note for a lecture, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United"

Supporters of Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump cheer at a campaign rally in Costa Mesa, Calif., last month. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

By Eugene Robinson Opinion writer May 2 at 7:56 PM 

The Donald Trump rampage — still hard to believe after nearly a year — is a symptom of something deeper and more profound: the Republican Party’s slide into complete incoherence.

Rarely has a major party’s establishment been so out of touch with its voting base. Rarely have so many experienced politicians (Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, et al.) been so thoroughly embarrassed, and so cruelly dispatched, by a political neophyte. Rarely have feelings been so raw that one leading Republican (John Boehner) would publicly describe another (Ted Cruz) as “Lucifer in the flesh.”

What does the GOP believe in? There was a time when anyone with a passing interest in politics could have answered that question. Today, who knows?

This ideological disintegration has been years in the making. I believe one fundamental cause is that after winning the allegiance of millions of “Reagan Democrats” — mostly white, blue-collar, and Southern or rural — the party stubbornly declined to take their economic interests into account.

Traditional Republican orthodoxy calls for small government, low taxation, tight money, deregulation, free trade and cost-saving reforms to entitlement programs. If I were independently wealthy, that might seem an agreeable set of policies. Ditto if I were one of the “small-business owners” to whom GOP candidates sing hymns of praise.

But most working-class Republicans are, get ready for it, working-class. They are more Sam’s Club than country club. They don’t own the business, they earn wages or a salary; and trickle-down economics has not been kind to them. Their incomes have been stagnant for a good 20 years, they have seen manufacturing jobs move overseas and job security vanish, they have less in retirement savings and home equity than they had hoped, and they see their young-adult children struggling to get a start in life.

This segment includes military families that have borne the awful weight of more than a decade of war. Repeated deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq have caused tremendous strain; “wounded warriors” have returned bearing grievous physical and psychological scars.

What adjustments did the GOP establishment make for these voters? None. Most of the governors, senators and former somebodies who ran for the presidential nomination, and failed, offered nothing but flag-waving pep talks and demagoguery on social issues — along with promises to stick with trickle-down orthodoxy and intervene in trouble spots around the world. Only Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, who were dismissed as yesterday’s news, seemed to realize that working-class Republicans even existed.

Did Trump cunningly craft a message for these orphaned voters, or did he stumble across his populist appeal by way of beginner’s luck? At this point, it hardly matters. He offers policies, however far-fetched, that address their wants and needs. He rails against the free-trade pacts that he says robbed the nation of manufacturing jobs. He promises not to cut entitlements and often hints at boldly expanding them. He pledges an “America first” foreign policy that withdraws from entanglements and eschews interventions.

Trump also plays on these voters’ insecurities, resentments and fears. He makes Hispanic immigrants and Muslims his scapegoats. He goes beyond attacking President Obama’s policies to also impugn his identity — in effect, portraying the president as the incarnation of demographic change that many white Americans fear. And Trump delegitimizes establishment Republicans by painting them as cogs in a system that is rigged to favor the rich and powerful. (In this, he’s basically right.) 

Faced with Trump’s challenge, GOP grandees have failed to react in any meaningful way. Trump’s closest challenger for the nomination is the least-liked Republican in the Senate, a man who believes the party’s problem is that its presidential candidates haven’t been orthodox enough.

In no way do I minimize the ugly side of Trump’s appeal — the naked chauvinism, the authoritarian streak, the cynical appeal to his supporters’ worst instincts. But it is wrong — and, for the Republican Party, suicidal — to ignore the fact that he is doing more than merely rousing the rabble. Trump is filling a vacuum left by years of inattention to voters who have been patronized and taken for granted. The fissures he exposed in the GOP will not go away.

Trump captures the nation’s attention on the campaign trail

View Photos

The Republican candidate continues to dominate the presidential contest.

The party now seems on the verge of anointing a presidential nominee who does not subscribe to many of the party’s core beliefs — yet who has absconded with much of the party’s base. Post-Trump, Republicans will have a choice: They can develop new policies or look for new voters.

America Needs a Prime Minister - Note for a lecture, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United"

Government is broken, and changing the type of people elected to Congress won’t make a difference. Amending the Constitution will.

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Terry Moe on his new book, “Relic,” which argues for a constitutional amendment to strengthen the executive branch.

By 

THOMAS J. MAIN, WALL STREET JOURNAL

May 2, 2016 7:26 p.m. ET

In an election year, candidates are holding forth predictably about finding solutions to persistent problems, fixing ineffective programs and even—at last—meeting the needs of the American people. William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe, professors at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, respectively, think that a change in the very structure of American government is needed before any such promises can be kept. The thesis of “Relic” is that the United States is “burdened with a government designed for a bygone era.” The times have changed, “but the core of the Constitution . . . has not.”

The solution, Messrs. Howell and Moe believe, is a constitutional amendment that would allow the president to submit bills directly to Congress, which would be required promptly to vote them up or down, without amendments, on a strict majoritarian basis. The essence of their idea is to strengthen the agenda-setting power of the president, whose new role would be more like that of a prime minister under a parliamentary constitution.

In a parliamentary system, the chief executive is chosen by the legislature, so a unified government is guaranteed. In our separation-of-powers system, the presidency and the congressional majority may well owe allegiance to opposing parties. Indeed, America is often plagued by a divided, even antagonistic, government. Legislators—with no responsibility for picking the president or carrying out his agenda—are left free to pander to their constituents. Citizens expect no less and withhold their votes if their representatives fail to deliver the goods. Congress is thus held hostage by well-organized lobbies. 

Messrs. Howell and Moe call such a Congress “parochial,” because it is controlled by local interests and feels no broader mission or purpose. Moreover, it is a powerful institution. Congress—being closer to the people—has the whip hand over the president, who is required to take a national perspective. It is “difficult for government to act,” the authors write, and when it does act, “it tends to produce weak, cobbled-together, patchwork policies that lack coherence and are not effective.”

The authors provide ample evidence of this cycle of dysfunction. ObamaCare is “an incredibly complex patchwork that no one would have favored or designed if working from the ground up,” and so, they say, are the policies that govern education, taxation, welfare and energy. They emphasize a point that Tea Party followers and campaign-finance supporters often fail to grasp: Changing the type of people elected to Congress—whether by making them more ideologically pure or less obsessed with fundraising—will not make a big difference. Constitutional design determines the incentives that legislators face. “What we’re seeing is an institutional phenomenon, not a personal one.”

ENLARGE

PHOTO: WSJ

RELIC

By William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe
Basic, 233 pages, $26.99

Given the difficulty of amending the Constitution, wholesale revision—like switching to a parliamentary system—is impossible. Messrs. Howell and Moe thus propose their very limited but highly consequential constitutional amendment. As they summarize it: “The president would propose. Congress would decide, up or down.” No constituency-pleasing amendments to the president’s legislative package would be allowed, nor would any delay. Such a change would do no more, they say, than extend the fast-track authority that presidents now enjoy in trade deals to all policy matters. The rest of the Constitution would remain unchanged.

The authors’ idea follows neatly from their diagnosis: If the problem is a localistic Congress with powerful incentives to serve narrow interests, the solution is a stronger president ready to implement a national agenda. “Presidents,” they write, “are the champions of coherence and effectiveness in a fragmented, parochial political world.” 

The case for constitutional reform in “Relic” is the best—certainly the most realistic—in many years. Yet some caveats apply. First, the authors might have given American politics more credit for facilitating strong, coherent legislation as opposed to the weak, patchwork variety. Single-party dominance—achieved under FDR and LBJ and, for a while, under Barack Obama—occurs often enough to make vital episodes of dramatic lawmaking possible. And even under divided government, policy entrepreneurs selling appealing ideas have achieved victories that were widely thought to be impossible. Examples include tax reform under Ronald Reagan and welfare reform under Bill Clinton.

“Relic,” as its title suggests, lays great stress on how different the Founders’ world is from our own and on how outdated their work must now be. That the 18th and 21st centuries are radically different is indisputable but not relevant to the argument. At issue is not the Constitution’s age but its effectiveness, and “Relic” documents ample contemporary pathology. Moreover, one may question the authors’ claim that “the founders did not believe that all men are created equal.” Recent scholarship shows the famous lines of the Declaration of Independence were indeed meant to extend to all people, and suggestions to the contrary are probably not helpful in today’s highly polarized political climate.

Akhil Amar, a professor of law at Yale, has shown that reforms that have not already been tried in state constitutions are not likely to be taken up at the federal level, and no state has come close to adopting the proposal that Messrs. Howell and Moe put forward. A less bold reform, though, has been adopted by many states and might encourage constitutional changes for the better, whether they resemble the one in “Relic” or something else. How about an amendment requiring—say, once every 25 years—a national ballot that asks voters whether they would like to hold a constitutional convention? Just getting people to think seriously about constitutional reform would be progress. The cogent analysis in “Relic” helps to achieve that goal.

Mr. Main is an associate professor at the Baruch College School of Public Affairs and editor of the anthology “Is the American Constitution Obsolete?”

Teeter on Obama, U.S./Russia

JB Note: In my modest opinion, Mark Teeter is one of the best observers of Russia today. Unlike many USA commentators about this complex country, he actually lives there and speaks the language professionally (and I'm not talking about Americans saying "do svidaniya" after a polite "public diplomacy" meeting between citizens of the two countries). Here's a recent of his many elucidating Facebook entries:

Mark H. Teeter added 4 new photos.

4 hrs ·

'OBAMA OUT': Who Will Miss Him & Who Won't
-- My generation of U.S. Russianists has seen an odd convergence around this man: while a considerable segment of our own population (the Whacko-Americans) has spent 8 yrs conjuring pretexts for loathing their president, an even larger segment of the Russian population, unbeknownst to the W-A’s, has concluded that they are right, but there's more to it: Obama is not merely the Great Satan, he specifically has it in for *them.*

If you’ve been watching the Russian and American bodies politic react to each other’s principals for a half-century, you find yourself at a loss: there’s nothing with which you can compare these parallel states of unconnected, widespread and rabid antipathy for one leader of the two entities. Their only common element is racism – as publicly unacknowledged in one polity as it is taken for granted in the other – yet somehow the notion that two otherwise dissimilar groups of white people *can* jump to the same nutbar conclusions seems too easy. Or too frightening.

The convergence will diverge, in any case, and relatively soon. On the US side, something like two or three years from now – when, for one thing, the numbers comparing 2008 and 2016 will have settled into the public consciousness (to the extent that they can) – BHO will be taken by most Americans, W- and otherwise, for what he is: the final third of a triad (w/ FDR and LBJ) that reconfigured the country’s social landscape sufficiently so that while not everybody reveled in happiness (by a fur piece), enough of the majority perceived enough of a chance for its pursuit that they were willing to suspend disbelief and give it a shot. This state of relative equilibrium between great expectations and the American Dream is what passes for civil society in our tradition. And it’s pretty good.

Russians, for their part, will have no such reason to look back and Get It. There is no conceivable way – conceivable to my cadre of Russianists, anyway – by which the Russian public at large can uproot the image, expertly media-sown in already fertile soil, of Barack as all-purpose, all-powerful Boogie Man. Not simply because this POTUS cannot shed his skin, but to a greater extent because the desperate need for such a monster-cum-scapegoat will continue, indeed deepen, over the time period in question.

This country’s crude but long-profitable fossil-fuel/strip-mining economy is atrophying, and cannot get better before it gets worse. No one here wants to – or is going to – admit that the failure to diversify it, to open the country to domestic and global investment/development insured by a rule-of-law judiciary, is their fault. It’s someone else’s fault; with the exception of a very few segments in time, it has been for a thousand years. The fact that this particular Someone Else did not actually have it in for you – or indeed do a great deal of thinking about you one way or another before you promoted him to Prince of Darkness – will prove neither easily demonstrable here nor, in fact, worth trying to demonstrate: no one else, in the end, will care very much what the Russian vox populi will be voxing.

This is particularly saddening, of course, to American Russianists who have spent their adult lifetimes assuming two things: the intrinsic value of studying, learning from and spreading the culture that has grown out of successive societies here; and second, more naively, that the greatest and most unnatural impediment to doing our job, to sharing this culture with our own and others – the edifice erected around it after the disaster of 1917 – had been suddenly and irrevocably removed in 1991.

It hadn’t. An American president elected less than two decades later, one whose parents had actually met while taking Russian 101 in college, could become the locus of evil in the world for a generation of Whacko-Russians who, in remarkably short order, could no longer imagine otherwise.

The socio-psychological landscape of Russia had become so alternately Dugin-ized, Surkov-ized and Putin-ized that a great people could perceive neither the fatal weaknesses of the anti-culture that was defining its terrain nor, any longer, the traditional strengths that might save them from it.