Radio: Political Parties and Social Change

I was interviewed by David Shen and Zach Schalk for the first episode of their podcast, Square 1. I touch on a lot of the themes I talk about here, but you can hear them instead of read them. The short version is that I am skeptical of the possibility that electoral activity alone can bring about significant change, and emphasize the important of non-electoral activity even in producing electoral outcomes.

You can listen here.

Here are the works I mentioned:

Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems by Thomas Ferguson

Party Politics in America by Marjorie Randon Hershey

Politics, Parties, & Pressure Groups by V.O. Key

The Most Basic Fact About Politics is Slack

What’s the most important thing you should understand if you want to make sense of American politics? Ask most well-informed people, and then answer will be Polarization. The parties–both party-in-government and party-in-the-electorate–have gotten more ideological, less willing to compromise, leading to gridlock. Some will rightly note that this has been largely asymmetrical, a product of changes in the Republican Party not the Democrats. But the rest of the story remains the same. Less often it is noted that polarization isn’t really an issue among the public, only among the elites–especially members of Congress.

The polarization story often treats this as some sort of natural phenomena, or a tendency that was always there with fragile efforts to stop it failing to do so. Or it is chalked up to the power of money, or even of the Koch brothers themselves. Rarely is it treated as something about which something can be done.

A Rant About Public Education and Redistributing Resources and Power.

Unable to come up with any good jokes about dresses or llamas, I had some things to say about public education, ed reformers, and the push back against them. I then Storified it.  Check it out. In retrospect, I wish I had fleshed out who I mean by “those at the bottom, who are systematically demobilized.” I meant to refer to race and class primarily, but also LGBTQ, non-English primary language, etc. Resources certainly includes massive inequalities in school funding, but also who has access to what resources within schools or even particular class rooms. Comments as always are welcome.

De Blasio is Winning, But We’re Not (At least not yet)

So first–the good news. There is dissension in the ranks of NYPD. It seems that PBA head Pat Lynch went too far, and a not insubstantial portion of the PBA membership has been pushing back. News of a contentious meeting, with much yelling and pushing and shoving, showed the cracks within the PBA. Perhaps because of this, Lynch backed off his call for the mayor to apologize, although I think some people are overinterpreting his changed position:

“Despite statements to the contrary, our demands have never been for a simple apology, but for clear and unequivocal expressions of support for our members and an equally strong condemnation of those who have stirred up hatred and violence towards police officers,” he wrote [in an internal memo].

“We have also demanded that these words be backed up by concrete actions to hold anti-police agitators accountable and to protect our members from further attacks.”

In the same memo, Lynch took credit for what he called a “shift in the mayor’s tone.” Still, this is being framed as a defeat for Lynch, and despite the fact that he hasn’t changed that much, it’s not an unreasonable conclusion. The memo, as the New York Daily News noted, came a day after a poll of NYC voters showed Lynch with an 18% approval rating.

Given De Blasio’s reputation as a progressive, and the fact that his campaign highlighted criticism of stop and frisk, it’s easy to see this as a victory for Black Lives Matter movement, as a step towards less punitive and racially discriminatory policing. But that would be a mistake.

NYPD Will Not Reform Itself

Motives, Procedures and Hope, or How Not to Bring About Change

Policing practices, mass incarceration, and the general punitiveness of policy directed towards those at the bottom are all things I have been trying to grapple with for a long time. On the one hand, the levels of punitiveness are absurd and indefensible as ways to ensure public safety or achieve anything I’d consider a legitimate policy goal. This would be true even if they were applied evenly. On the other hand, punitiveness is always dished out in a highly stratified manner. These two things are connected–unless justified on the basis of supposed inherent Black criminality and dangerousness, these policies wouldn’t have been possible.  They require Othering in order to be legitimated. And if they were applied with anything like an even hand, significant public push back from more politically powerful communities would be swift.

New York City is certainly not the only place where policing has focused on low-level petty crimes and ‘disorder,’ justified by the claim that addressing these minor issues would reduce more serious threats to the public. But it has been a prime mover in it. Broken Windows policing was implemented by Bill Bratton during his first tenure as NYPD commissioner, and when he was appointed again by Mayor Bill DeBlasio it was clear to all observers that the city would continue to be committed to this style of policing. Bratton’s appointment was an early disappointment for many DeBlasio supporters, especially since raising the issue of stop and frisk had been a key to his campaign.

The State of the Union is Ambivalent (2013)

Last year Elias Isquith asked me to contribute a piece to a forum he did on the State of the Union speech. There was some dispute between the contributors over how they read the speech which was my jumping off point. I’m posting it again before this year’s speech because most of what I had to say is still applicable, even if some of the details have changed.

Pete Souza [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The fact that people have such different readings of this speech isn’t that surprising. It reads to me like it was designed to do just that – let each of us hear what we want to hear.  Our normal way of understanding the SOTU is outward.  We tend to think of the president seeking to persuade the opposition or independents.  But there are two ways we might think of ‘us’ as the target.  First, speeches can be used to mobilize one’s own supporters to action. Second, they can be used to demobilize one’s own team. But ultimately, the impact depends on how we react.  We can use the good things that were mentioned as a resource, in making demands.  Or we can assume that the White House has the issue in hand and therefore we can stand down – at least until we get marching orders.  The latter is a losing proposition, regardless of your thoughts about the president’s own motives. I cringe at the barrage of emails about supporting the president’s agenda. We should have our own agenda, and pressure him to support us.

Of course, we all know that the president faces a hostile Republican majority in the House, and an obstructionist Republican minority in the Senate which, as a result of Harry Reid’s unwillingness to undo the filibuster, has a great deal of power.  Because of the sequester, there will likely be fiscal legislation, and because of Republicans’ fear over losing the Latino vote in perpetuity, immigration legislation will at least get a hearing.

So I thought I’d focus more on some other things, including those the White House has more control over.

Five Economic Reforms Americans are Open To

Last week, Jesse Myerson caused a major stir with a Rolling Stone piece, Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For. It’s a great piece, and we should all be fighting for them.

It’s a new year, but one thing hasn’t changed: The economy still blows. Five years after Wall Street crashed, America’s banker-gamblers have only gotten richer, while huge swaths of the country are still drowning in personal debt, tens of millions of Americans remain unemployed – and the new jobs being created are largely low-wage, sub-contracted, part-time grunt work.

Millennials have been especially hard-hit by the downturn, which is probably why so many people in this generation (like myself) regard capitalism with a level of suspicion that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But that egalitarian impulse isn’t often accompanied by concrete proposals about how to get out of this catastrophe. Here are a few things we might want to start fighting for, pronto, if we want to grow old in a just, fair society, rather than the economic hellhole our parents have handed us.

The piece did two things. First, it drove conservatives absolutely insane, and second, it led to a serious discussion of these policies that previously were largely at the margins of the agenda.

Inequality is a Problem: There is Too Little

Talk about inequality is in the air. Everyone seems to agree it’s a problem, although a lot of people seem to offering the same old policy proposals to address it. It’s almost as if they are simply attaching what they already want to do to the rhetoric of today’s demands. But maybe the problem is that we misunderstand what exactly the problem of inequality is as far as elites are concerned.

Speaking of which, Jonathan Cohn points us to this story by Scott Amey from the Project On Government Oversight

On the same day that the President spoke eloquently and fervently about the rising income inequality in the United States, the ever-contractor-friendly Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) increased the maximum amount of contractor compensation that can be charged to government contracts from a mere$763,029 per employee per year to what OFPP apparently considers a much more reasonable $952,308 per employee per year. This increase primarily affects the employees of the largest government contractors—most notably defense and information technology firms. So taxpayers are now on the hook for paying up to nearly $1 million for every one of these contractor executives or employees every year.

Against “The War Against X”

I’ve been complaining about the framing of the various “War(s) Against X.” So I thought it worth talking a bit about why.

Listening to political discussions, there seem to be wars everywhere. There’s a war on women, a war on voting, a war on the poor. (The right has their wars too, like the war on Christmas, but I assume ones actually related to policy are meant to be taken more seriously.)

To begin with “War on X” rhetoric seems purely defensive.  That is, it is only useful for critiquing Republicans, not for advancing any sort of positive agenda.  In addition, it implies status quo was acceptable .  It suggests the goal is, for example, to stop SNAP cuts, not to ensure food security, or stop new abortion restrictions, not ensure access.  The War Against Voting is about new voting restrictions, but does that mean that only old voting restrictions are acceptable? There’s some implication, maybe, that we are for autonomy, or freedom and equality, or democracy. Implication enough for those who want to find it to hear it, not enough for anyone else to. In reality, I saw innumerable commercials for Terry McAuliffe, and the only thing conveyed was that Ken Cuccinelli was extreme and McAuliffe was in favor of abortion rights in cases of rape and incest.

To Change the Education Narrative, Build a Movement

This morning there was a great segment on the Melissa Harris Perry Show where she interviewed Diane Ravitch about her new book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.  I’ve had my disagreements with Harris Perry over education in the past. But it’s obvious that she cares deeply about public education. And it’s been clear to me that, even when her guests have largely accepted the frames of choice and accountability and crisis, she has remained skeptical. Given the dominance of the position Ravitch criticizes, it was nice to have a segment where she, later joined by Pedro Noguera and Trymaine Lee, could lay out the critique of the corporate education reform movement and discuss some of the impacts on students.

That said, there was one question posed by Harris Perry that didn’t get addressed, that I wanted to offer my own answer.