Trump shoots the messenger, though not on 5th avenue…and why he gets away with it

If Democrats would stop blaming voters’ bigotry and ignorance for their election losses and pay attention to the legitimate concerns behind the rise of Trump they might better understand why their approval rating is still significantly lower than his.

AI generated image.  Gemini refused to depict
Trump standing on 5th Avenue with a smoking gun.

The president may not have been standing in Fifth Avenue when he metaphorically shot his labor statistics messenger, but close enough.

There is widespread agreement that Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, poses great danger to the future health of the economy. To quote one expert reaction:

If policymakers and the public can’t trust the data—or suspect the data are being manipulated—confidence collapses and reasonable economic decision-making becomes impossible. It’s like trying to drive a car blindfolded. This manufactured chaos will reduce business investment and consumer spending, making a recession—and soaring unemployment—far more likely in coming months.

Trump’s political instincts, however, are almost always better than the reasoned judgement of establishment thinkers like Heidi Shierholz, who wrote that paragraph for the Economic Policy Institute.

How can that be?

A day or so before the commissioner lost her job, journalist Jesse Singal (a liberal journalist) told an interviewer that his reporting on social science research has revealed a disturbing pattern of shoddy methods, ideological bias, groupthink, and outright corruption. Experts, he said, “have screwed up so badly so often”

The crisis in expert authority is a disaster in its own right—we should be able to trust the studies that are published—but one of the knock-on effects of it is it does fuel folks like Trump who take the burn-it-down-approach.

Singal spoke before the firing of Ms. McEntarfer, but he had no trouble coming up with an example of a Trump administrator burning something down: Robert F. Kennedy’s attack on expert vaccine consensus. As if on cue, a week after Singal’s interview, Kennedy announced a $500m cut to  mRNA vaccine research funding.

Singal’s findings turn liberals’ “believe science” lawn sign narrative on its head. In that story, scientists are the heroes. They give us a set of uncontested facts that make our lives better. Those who attack scientific consensus are the villains who are causing the crisis in expert authority, which undermines reasonable decision-making and leads to chaos.

Singal suggests a somewhat different story, in which failings of scientific expertise are at least partially responsible for the “crisis in expert authority.”

And the crisis extends beyond science to every kind of expert in government, education, the media—just about every institution and by extension, democracy itself.  In every case, there is at least some kernel of truth to the sense that experts and institutions have failed us.  And Democrats have become the party that defends the experts and institutions against Trump's attacks on them. 

Meanwhile, Trump has a plan for reviving the middle class that requires attacking those institutions and, in spite of his many blunders, his low approval rating is still significantly higher than the Democrats’.

Democrats could stop blaming voters’ bigotry and ignorance for their losses, acknowledge the failings of elite experts and institutions, and come up with a better plan to restore working class prosperity.

Or they can keep doing what they've been doing and wait for the anti-incumbency cycle to run it's course after Trump’s policies inevitably fail and voters decide they hate the Republican Party even more than they hate Democrats.

Then the party of experts will have a slim majority for a few years until their policies inevitable fail again. 

Notes

This recent Atlantic article offers a list of the ways that Trump is likely to fail. Note to self: read this again in a couple of years to see which of these predictions came true.

It’s Trump’s economy now. The latest financial numbers offer some warning signs (AP, Aug. 2).

Even if Trump manages to revive the manufacturing sector, it's not going to restore middle class prosperity.  Here's why. 

Jesse Singal’s book, “The Quick Fix” focuses on bad science in psychology. 

Here's an example of a left wing party that defeated a Trump-like opposition by admitting past mistakes.

Violence drowns out explanations

From the peaceful Mayday protest in DC

If the success of a protest movement depends on winning converts to the cause—fellow citizens who will either join it or vote with it—then recent opinion polls should give an indication of how the movement is doing so far.

In early June, YouGov polled about 3,000 American adults before and after the June 14 No Kings rally. The results were encouraging. Before June 14, 33 percent said they strongly approve of the protests; after, that number climbed to 38 percent, with another 9 percent approving “somewhat,” and somewhere between 16 and 25 percent of others who could be won over. 

In my last post I suggested that a better theme could win over those fence-sitters. Since then, the Senate passed a federal budget that would throw millions off health insurance while giving lucrative tax breaks mostly to the wealthy.

It’s also crucial that the movement remain peaceful and that it distances itself from any violence that occurs in connection with protests. By a margin of 42 to 35, respondents told YouGov they believed participants in recent Los Angeles protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were mostly violent.

And note how closely those results track with opinions on public approval of the protest (45-36 percent disapproval).

These results are consistent with extensive studies of 20th century protest movements around the globe, which found that nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent ones.

But also, when individuals associated in the public mind with an otherwise peaceful movement commit violent acts in conjunction with or close proximity to protests, it tends to undermine popular support.

No one understood this better than Martin Luther King Jr.

By 1962, his movement had been succeeding in winning popular support, largely because of the contrast playing out on the nightly news between peaceful protesters and violent segregationists who opposed them, especially Southern cops with their dogs and fire hoses. In Albany, Georgia, the movement encountered a different dynamic.

Unlike segregationists in other cities, Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett restrained his men from retaliating violently and against protesters. When gangs of local blacks—characterized by King biographer Taylor Branch as “juke-joint” hoodlums who were not “movement people,” began throwing bricks and bottles at police outside a meeting of organized protesters at Shiloh Baptist Church, Pritchett pushed through the crowd and into the Church, walked up to the podium, and spoke to the crowd.

“We respect your policy,” he said but added: “I ask your cooperation in keeping Albany peaceful. This business of throwing rocks is not good.”

Of course the movement people inside the church agreed—but what power did they have against the hoodlums outside?

King was in jail at this time. Later during the campaign, when organized protesters marched to the jail with the goal of being arrested to show the contrast between their peaceful demands for basic rights and unreasonable Southern resistance, “angry Negro bystanders” started hurling beer bottles, rocks and bricks at the arresting officers.

During the riot Pritchett quipped to reporters: “Did you see them non-violent rocks?” Press reports included a photograph of a cop holding a rock that knocked out two of his teeth. The New York Times published a “lauditory profile of Chief Pritchet,” Branch wrote. It seemed that a Southern cop, "not King, was the “master of nonviolence that night.”

But now, King was out of jail. When one of his associates suggested he should rationalize the violence  as an understandable response to segregation in his comments to reporters, King refused. The violence, King reasoned, would drowned out any such explanations, Branch wrote.

Meanwhile, King declared a day of penance and went on a “peacemaker’s tour of Albany’s Negro dives” to explain the nonviolent strategy to its patrons and how their violent reactions had undermined the movement. “We don’t need guns and ammunition, just the power of souls,” King told them.

King was modeling his behavior on Mahatma Gandhi, who fasted whenever his followers resorted to violence.

It’s important to note the connection between the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement and the fortunes of the Political Party more inclined to support its goals and thus associated with it in the public mind. 

Princeton Politics Professor Omar Wasow studied press coverage of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and found that “when the [protest] tactics were primarily nonviolent, the counties proximate to nonviolent activism tended to vote more liberally.” But when violence broke out in connection with protests, those counties voted more conservatively. Violent protests in reaction to King’s assassination may have helped to elect Richard Nixon in 1968. “In the counties with violence, the Democratic vote fell by at least 2 percent, which was enough to help Richard Nixon win the 1968 presidential election,” Wasow said.

This year, a May 25 YouGov Poll had the Democratic Party’s popular approval under water by a whopping 20 percent (58-38% unfavorable). Having been blamed for lawlessness at the border, and rising crime in cities, the Democrats can’t afford to be associated with more of the same.

Of course the current anti-Trump movement has no one well-respected and credible leader like King to make the case to purveyors of violence.

Violent eruptions on the sidelines of peaceful protests—like those at the recent Los Angeles anti-ICE riots or during the George Floyd protests of 2020—are probably inevitable.

But it’s imperative that leaders of the movement and the Democratic Party unequivocally, clearly, unambiguously, and in unison condemn the violence rather than try to justify it as many did in 2020, ignoring King’s maxim that violence drowns out explanations.

For example, Nicole Hannah Jones, a prominent figure in the “race reckoning” of 2020 and mastermind behind the New York Times 1619 project, argued that property destruction isn’t violence if no one is hurt—this at a time when police stations were burning on the nightly news, once famously behind a CNN reporter describing “mostly peaceful protests.”

Ta Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most prominent African American advocate of the 2010s, proclaimed that "The people who are called on to be nonviolent are the people with the ability to do the least amount of damage; whereas, we don't call upon those who have the most power and actually can do the most damage."

The Nation published an article with the headline: “In Defense of Destroying Property: We cannot conflate the destruction of plateglass with the violence that is being protested.”

Any nuance behind comments like these are sure to be drowned out by images of burning police stations and Waymos, as the polls on the LA protests show.

Also in their June polling, YouGov asked people about their lingering perceptions of the George Floyd protests and found that 46 percent thought they were “mostly violent,” and only 33 percent remembered them as “mostly peaceful.”

You would think the party and the leaders of organizations behind the protests like Indivisible would learn from past mistakes, but I’m not hopeful.

When the Democratic pollster (and self-described socialist) David Shor posted Wasow’s article after violence broke out during BLM protests in 2020, he was attacked relentlessly on Twitter by fellow liberals and then fired from his job at Civis Analytics, a consultancy founded by one of President Obama’s campaign analysts.

At least one Democratic member of Congress is repeating the mistakes of 2020 and instead of unequivocally distancing the cause from violence as King did, asserting “nobody was shot, nobody was killed” and “there was no violence,” at a time when Waymos were burning in the background. 

Note

On the Albany protest and King's response to violence see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 604-621.

The role of protest in the opposition

 

I made this sign for the "No Kings" protest June 14 along the bridge over the interstate in Littleton. I had to leave early, while the protest was still going on, and as I was walking back to my car, displaying the sign for drivers waiting in a very long line of stalled traffic, a man in a pickup truck leaned over a child in the passenger seat and shouted “Fuck You” while saluting me with his middle finger. “Faggot,” he added, as the traffic inched up and I kept walking.

I was hoping to make a sign that would be persuasive, but instead it was provoking. Or maybe it wasn’t the sign so much as the protest itself, or the traffic jam it caused.

On Monday, the Caledonian Record ran a front page photograph of a 7-year-old girl at a similar protest in nearby St. Johnsbury Vt.  She was standing with her mother, holding a hand made sign with hearts and flowers and the words “Fuck Trump,” and smiling proudly for the camera. A letter-to-the-editor called the image “disgraceful, disgusting, and disrespectful.”

He was angry at the newspaper for printing the photo, but I was glad they did; it reminded me that nastiness in politics these days goes both ways. And neither side shields their kids from it.

Meanwhile, no one seems open to persuasion.

This was the first anti-Trump protest I’d attended as a participant since they began in 2016, though I had shown up at two others in DC in April and May as an observer.

My reluctance to join reflects the thoughts I expressed here shortly after the election, in agreement with Conor Friedersdorf’s article in the Atlantic arguing against a “Resistance 2.0” movement. History is full of protest movements that backfired, and Trump’s ever growing vote totals suggested to me that #Resistence 1.0—the congressional investigations, impeachment resolutions starting in the first months of his presidency, and widespread and persistent street protests that began in the lead-up to the 2016 election—hadn’t stopped more people from voting for Trump every time he’s been on the ballot.

Friedersdorf suggested that Democrats and their supports should act like a “normal opposition party” instead of a resistance movement.

For elected Democrats, that would mean cooperating with the governing party where possible and finding areas of bipartisan agreement on legislation that will improve the lives of Americans.

Senate Democrat Amy Klobuchar, for example, persuaded, the administration to get behind a bill she sponsored allowing victims of "revenge porn" to force social media companies to erase it. The Take-it-Down Act was signed into law last month.

Meanwhile, advocacy groups in the opposition can launch court cases against the administration when it violates the Constitution and degrades Democracy.  The Brennan Center for Justice is focusing intensively on this project. 

So far, Trump has obeyed most of the court injunctions, Klobuchar pointed out, including recently if belatedly, regarding two immigrants detained without due process, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and Mahmoud Khalil. Contrary to popular rhetoric on the left, we are not yet in a “constitutional crisis,” she said.

So what can the rest of us do in a normal opposition?  

The party in opposition and its supporters, Friedersdorf said in December, should keep in mind “that new House elections are just two years away” and Democratic candidates should be able to win away some of Trump’s voters if he reneges on promises he made that are important to them.

Trump has promised again and again that he won’t cut Medicaid. But the Big Beautiful Bill that he supports reduces its funding by almost a trillion dollars and could throw 20 million people nationally and 46,400 in NH off heath insurance according to estimates by Democratic legislators. That loss would be absorbed disproportionately by rural hospitals, about half of which are already operating at a loss.

New Hampshire is a purple state, but Littleton is the rural end of the state where health care providers are already scarce. The Record reported on Tuesday that Ammonoosuc Community Health Services, was closing its Franconia branch, in part because it expected to lose $524,430 if the House’s Big Beautiful Bill gets through the Senate.

It’s an example of how these cuts won't just hurt people who get thrown off Medicaid.  I have good employer-sponsored health insurance, but Ammonoosuc is my health-care provider. PBS estimates that 400 rural hospitals are vulnerable to closure because of the proposed cuts.

In the 2026 midterm election NH will have an open Senate seat. Protesters could help to make Medicaid cuts a more salient issue in the election.

Admittedly, my sign was flawed. Who was    
going to read all those stats from their car as
they dove by.  This woman had the right idea.

In planning for the next election, Friedersdorf wrote, Democrats need to “Focus on offering a better alternative to voters, not ousting the person they chose.”

The majority of the signs in all three protests I attended were aimed more at critiquing Trump than suggesting the better alternative.

In fairness to the sign painters, it’s not very clear what the Democratic Party is offering, aside from “Not Trump.”

In the last election, health care was the only one of the five top issues important to voters and which they trust Democrats more than Republicans to address. And the party won the 2018 midterms by promising to save the ACA (Obamacare). But in 2024, that was not a major focus of Democratic  campaigns.

I agree that Trump poses a serious threat to basic democratic and constitutional norms. But that’s an argument that the left has been making for 10 years and it just doesn’t resonate with the voters Democrats need to win over.

And voters polled in the last election said “delivering change that improves Americans’ lives” was more important to them than “preserving America’s institutions” by a whopping 78 to 18 percent.

They also said the next president needs to deliver a “shock to the system” rather than restore stability by 53 to 37 percent. The chaos of Trump 2.0 may change their minds.  But maybe it won't.

The No Kings Rally was an impressive accomplishment. Organizers estimate that 5 million people turned out in cities and towns in all 50 states. Clearly a lot of patriotic Americans want to do their part in opposing the current government and preserving constitutional democracy. But their efforts will be no more effective than those of #Resistence 1.0 if the Democratic Party doesn’t also offer Trump-voting fellow Americans a better alternative and if protesters don't target their messages to winnable voters--who may or may not include the guy in the pickup.  

Note: 

Updated on 7-6-25 to reflect new estimates of how many will lose insurance based on changes made in the Senate (Joint Economic Committee)

Dems' next move: Oppose or #resist?

 

A bipartisan opening?

In the aftermath of the election, Democrats need to decide whether their relationship to Trump 2.0 is resistance (again) or the normal opposition of a minority party.

Resistance failed last time

It's not clear what #resistance 1.0 accomplished. Indictments in the past year and even 34 felony convictions didn’t hurt Trump in the polls and may have helped him. His standing with primary voters rose six points in the week after the first indictment, in the hush money case. And it bolstered his fundraising.

The court cases were the last chapter of the first resistance movement. The first chapter began during the 2016 campaign but the movement really got going after the election that year. #Resisters flooded social media and street protests erupted all over, culminating in the “pussy hat” march in DC. Pundits and journalists pledged not to “normalize” Trump, and introduced more “moral clarity” into their headlines, using the words “lie” and “racist” to characterize Trump’s pronouncements, instead of trusting readers to make those judgments. According to the Times, the #resistance was being “televised, podcasted, hashtagged, Snapped, Facebooked, Twittered and Periscoped.”

The “breakout hit” of the genre was “Pod Save America,” started by former Obama staffers, including the one who wrote the president’s speech at the White House Correspondence dinner that inspired Trump to run for president. That tells us something about why the #resistance failed.

The street protesters said they were marching against Trump, but you might excuse his 63 million supporters for thinking they were marching against their votes—or against American Democracy. According to Wikipedia,

Numerous petitions were started to prevent Trump from taking office, including a Change.org petition started by Elijah Berg of North Carolina requesting that faithless electors in states that Trump won vote for Clinton instead, which surpassed three million signatures.

Calls for impeachment began even before The Donald took office, and two Democrats filed formal articles of impeachment just six months after the inauguration.

And, according to an article in the Washington Post on inauguration day, 2017, the drive to impeach coincided with efforts by “Democrats and liberal activists” to “stymie Trump's agenda.” Let’s not talk about the pee tape.

Perhaps all the dire predictions and early talk of impeachment led to a boy-who-cries-wolf phenomenon when Trump actually did impeachable things during his presidency. At any rate, whatever the legal or ethical merits of all the protests, impeachments and indictments, their political impact was negative. Trump’s vote totals only increased every time he ran:

2016: 62,984,828

2020: 74,223,975

2024: 77,302,580

It’s not likely that there will be one unified approach to Trump 2.0 given the diversity of the Democrats’ coalition and the prominent role of the “shadow party” and random left-crazies, like the people calling in bomb threats and swatting cabinet nominees last week.

What would opposition look like?

Conor Friedersdorf makes the case for Democrats acting like a normal opposition party:

Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery. Don’t hesitate to criticize him when he does something bad, but avoid overstatements. They are self-discrediting. And know that new House elections are just two years away. Focus on offering a better alternative to voters, not ousting the person they chose. Meanwhile, oppose Trump’s bad ideas by drawing on the normal tools Americans use to constrain all presidents. Our constitutional and civic checks on executive power are formidable, frustrating every administration. So be the John Boehner to his Obama. Even if ill intent exists in Trump’s inscrutable mind, his coalition does not wish to end democracy. Some will turn on the president when he merely has trouble fulfilling basic promises.

Step one: cognitive empathy

One object of the opposition is to win the next election. Democrats won’t make a comeback if they don’t make a better effort to oppose Trump while winning back some of his voters. The first step is to try to understand them. (The fancy term for that is "cognitive empathy," which I've argued frequently on this blog is an essential capacity of democratic citizenship.)

I was not optimistic this will happen after I watched John Stewart interview professor Heather Cox Richardson, an Exeter alum whose Substack blog has well over a million subscribers, takes in more than $5 million annually and is deeply admired by my Democratic friends (one of them sent me the YouTube link). While Stewart kept bringing up the failures of the Democrats—their capitulation to Reagonomics and de-industrialization, Harris’s “hugging” of Dick Cheney and defense of the rigged system—Richardson kept putting the blame back onto the voters.

How do you explain the shift of so many Hispanics, Blacks and women to Trump? Stewart asked. Cox Richardson replied with an allegory involving 10 people in a room: “They are hearing stories that say you must turn against those two people at the bottom or we’re going to turn against you.” Trump voters, she said “carry confederate flags and carry Nazi flags” and include “white women who will die from lack of medical care” because of how they voted.

This condescending notion of false consciousness—of uneducated peasants perpetually acting against their self-interest out of gullibility, ignorance and wickedness—is a favorite hobby horse of the super smart denizens of the academic left and is really annoying to anyone who is the object of the analysis.

Unfortunately, it sometimes also slips out of the mouths of Democratic politicians, as when Hillary Clinton put Trump voters in a basket of deplorables and most recently when Obama said sexism was preventing Black men voting for Harris.

People who want the Democrats to do better in the next election should stop assessing the morality, or IQ, or rationality of the 77 million Trump voters, and focus on what the party can do to win them over in the next election.

Maybe Democrats could win back some working class voters if they said something like this about the election results (whether or not it’s true):

The American people understand that our economic and political systems are rigged. They know that the very rich get much richer while almost everyone else becomes poorer. They know that we are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. The Democrats ran a campaign protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges. Trump and the Republicans campaigned on change and on smashing the existing order. Not surprisingly, the Republicans won.

That’s Bernie Sanders, in an Email he sent to me, and a few other people I assume (Nov. 23). If, as he’s been saying for some time now, the system has been “rigged” against your interests for 40 years, maybe a vote for Trump isn’t completely irrational.

Maybe the system has been rigged after all

(For a counterpoint to the Stewart/Richardson discussion, here’s another Exeter alum with a different view)

Should Democrats Compromise?

Resistance implies that any compromise with the “fascists” in power is capitulation to evil.

But despite being in the minority, the opposition party is also part of the government and has an obligation to govern in the public interest. So, in addition to working on winning more votes in the next election and just trying to stymie Trump’s agenda (and the wishes of 76 million voters), they should be looking for opportunities to cooperate with the party in power whenever it could improve the lives of Americans or advance the national interest.

In the first Trump term Bernie opposed the USMCA (Trump's NAFTA renegotiation) but more House Democrats voted for it than Republicans and it did make some small changes that seemed likely to benefit American and Mexican workers and American dairy farmers. 

Other bipartisan legislation back then included reforms to the criminal justice system, addressing the opioid crisis, funding vocational training, reforming the Veterans administration, and granting aid to farmers.

(See “President Donald J. Trump Has Shown that Extraordinary Bipartisan Achievements Are Possible” at the UC Santa Barbara American Presidency Project.)

Trump may or may not have been sincere when he said: "When Republicans and Democrats talk, debate, and seek common ground, we can achieve breakthroughs that move our country forward and deliver for our citizens." But the fact that he said it shows he wants to be seen as open to bipartisan compromise.

Democrats must exit the campaigning mode and find issues where they can force him to honor this pledge. Trump’s party has a slim majority in the House and lacks a filibuster-proof Senate majority so Democrats will have some leverage between now and the midterms.

One promising area is labor. Trump selected a labor secretary backed the PRO Act, which would make union organizing easier, but half of Republicans oppose her. Democratic Senators will likely play a key role in her confirmation, but should also push the administration to follow her appointment through with concrete pro-labor policies. Democrats might also look for an area of compromise in Trump's appointment of a critic of the pharmaceutical industry to head HHS. 

On Sunday, Sanders tweeted his support for Elon Musk’s plan to cut defense spending and Musk responded: “cool.” Another possible area of compromise? 

Roadblocks

I see two characteristics of the Democratic coalition that will make it hard for the party to effectively perform a normal opposition.

First, the party has come to be dominated by educated elites who are just so culturally different than the working class voters who have been trending rightward, that cognitive empathy may just be impossible.

Second, the liberal values of Democrats often come in conflict with any populist impulses they may have and pose a difficult dilemma. A passage from Alan Wolfe’s Future of Liberalism identifies this problem:

There are and always will be issues in which liberalism's commitments to openness, proper procedure, or fairness will come into conflict with democracy's insistence not only on fulfilling the will of the majority but on doing so as rapidly as possible…. For all their commitment to equality, liberals do believe that the political views people sometimes hold are not, if they had more knowledge and were open to more deliberation, the political views they should hold.

Wolfe uses the Supreme Court’s Brown school desegregation decision as an example of liberal values properly trumping majority opinion. But he also praised the Court’s deference to majority sentiments in the South with their “all deliberate speed” ruling and the slow pace of desegregation in practice. The Court

opted to give those people, and the political institutions that represented their views, sufficient time to grow into the position they ought to have rather than the one they did have. Ten years later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, giving the decision in Brown ex post facto democratic legitimacy. The lesson was clear: liberals could and should break with public sentiment in order to ensure that what was popular and what was right could become the same thing.

This comment echoes the great historian of Populism, Lawrence Goodwyn, who coined the term "ideological patience."  

Some parts of the Democratic coalition have been promoting views that may or may not be the views that Americans “ought to have,” notably in the past election promoting transgender rights.

Polling has shown that an ad ridiculing Harris’ support for funding of gender re-assignment surgery for prisoners played a key role in moving undecided voters to Trump. As Jonathan Chait has argued, Democrats can live up to liberal principles by defending the dignity and legal rights of transgender people without going along with every demand of the most radical gender activists, especially those involving minors.

This is a delicate line to walk, however, and I’m afraid the over-educated people who dominate the party and it's many factions (the "shadow party), won't manage to come together along that line with ideological patience for their fellow citizens.

Lies, damned lies, and politics

There’s been a lot of commentary in the press this past week about the role of lies in politics.

In his Tuesday column on Donald Trump’s lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, Jamelle Bouie wrote: “Politics is not the place for perfect honesty, but some measure of truth telling is necessary to the project of collective self-government.”

We all know that politicians bend the truth in making their case. Joe Biden and Tim Waltz, to name two prominent examples on the other side of the isle, have gotten caught in some whoppers.

If lying is an unavoidable part of politics, where is the line between what Bouie refers to as “some measure of truth” and lying that could destroy “collective self-government.”

It's a question that has become particularly urgent this hurricane season as Trump-flavored politicians circulate lies as brazen as Margorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion that the government is somehow causing catastrophic weather events.

Bouie vaguely suggests the line between acceptable and unacceptable lying is whether politicos “strive for some correspondence to reality when they make their case to the public.”

You-tuber Vlad Vexler is more precise. He defines the unacceptable liars as “post-truth populists” who “have consciously given up on trying to make their lies internally consistent,” so that it becomes impossible to tell the difference between truth and lies.” Their goal, he argues, is to destroy faith in institutions and politics itself and to foster the feeling that leaders “prioritize others over you.”

Vexler said this before Trump started claiming that FEMA disaster relief money was being channeled to illegal immigrants.

Where Bouie argues that brazen lies are anti-democratic, Vexler suggests instead that they are anti-political. They lead citizens to believe that “there is nothing you can do to inflect the political process.”

I think that’s a better explanation.

Bouie writes that without access to the truth, we can’t perform what he says is an essential part of democracy : reasoning and deliberating with fellow citizens.

In his book, In Defence of Politics, Bernard Crick separates democracy from politics, and the book includes a chapter with the title “A Defence of Politics Against Democracy.”

The democratic concept of “sovereignty of the people”—the right of “the people to choose the government they want”—suggests that in democracy, the people get their way.   In theory, “all power is supposed to stem from an undivided and indivisible ‘people,’” Crick writes.

But another essential concept of democracy—“majority rule”—means that minorities—the losers in elections—do not get their way.

“Sovereignty of the people” doesn’t address Crick’s incisive question: “which people?” (Crick, 59-60).

A key feature of populism is to define “The people” against an enemy. Trump has referred to journalists as “enemies of the people”; Bernie Sanders’ to “billionaires.” Enemies like that must be suppressed, populists say, but Crick defines politics as “the activity by which differing interests within a given territory are conciliated,” not suppressed.

But if democracy is elevated over politics, democracy is at risk. Tocqueville spoke of "democratic despotism" and worried that if ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority."

Hannah Arendt, a survivor of totalitarianism, was quoted in my local newspaper last week on how the destruction of politics in a democratic system leads to authoritarian government: “Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strong man who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up.” Established authoritarian dictatorships, Anne Applebaum wrote in the June Atlantic, suppress citizens yearning for democracy not by discrediting the notions of popular sovereignty or majority rule, but by promoting apathy and cynicism about the potential of political action to create a better world. “Their goal is to persuade people to stay out of politics.”

---

Leftovers

Hannah Arendt was quoted by Lynn Wurzburg of St. J. Oct. 9, 2024, Caledonian Record Crick talks about the problem of sovereignty on pp. 59-60 of Defence of Politics. Danielle Allen also confronts this problem in her book on citizenship, which I wrote about elsewhere on this blog:

One of the most important lessons students need to learn to become democratic citizens is that in spite of the individual freedom and sovereignty that democracies promise their citizens, we don’t always get our way even in a well-functioning democracy and are often asked to sacrifice our personal preferences and interests for the good of the whole, the survival of democracy, and the maintenance of peace. When our candidate loses the election, when we are drafted and sent into battle, and when policies favored by the majority disadvantage us or go against what we think is good, we are sacrificing something. https://www.billjordan.net/2022/08/teaching-citizenship-in-polarized.html

We should all LOVE politics

Last spring, I gave students in our Washington Internship Program an excerpt from Bernard Crick’s insightful book, In Defense of Politics. Crick defines politics as “that solution to the problem of order which chooses conciliation rather than violence and coercion, and chooses it as an effective way by which varying interests can discover that level of compromise best suited to their common interest in survival” (30). In diverse societies with conflicting interests, it is the alternative to authoritarian or totalitarian systems, which aim to eliminate or suppress interests that conflict with the interests of those in power. 

More simply put, it is government that relies on conciliation rather than coercion.

What I love about Crick's book is how he identifies “anti-politics,” behaviors and ideas that undermine conciliation, compromise and peaceful coexistence among diverse people.  We've got a lot of anti-politics in the US today.  

As I read the book I came to see anti-politics in "We are the 99%" populism of Occupy Wall Street; MAGA populism of Jan. 6; parents teaching their children to fear strangers; librarians who purge their collections of political views they oppose; schools and universities that don't train their students to talk to each other across difference and foster political mono cultures; media outlets that cater to their audiences' biases ("audience capture"); members of Congress who denigrate compromise; moralism, virtue signaling, cancel culture and other features of the culture war.

To elaborate on one example, cancel culture moralism is a form of anti-politics that is performed by well-intentioned progressives but makes progressive reform less likely to be achieved. Lisa Featherstone explained the problem well in the socialist periodical, Jacobin. The feminist argument that “the personal is political,” she writes, has been changed to “the political is personal.”

As an idea, “the personal is political” helped women to understand that an abusive boyfriend or a sex-pest boss was neither their own fault nor their problem to bear alone, but rather a political problem with political solutions. But the notion that the political is personal does the reverse. It takes our political impulse, or desire to analyze the world in political terms and change it, and turns it inward.

In a world where the political is personal, it becomes important to perform your essential political goodness. Put an “In This House, We Believe” sign on your lawn. Kick off that corporate board meeting with a land acknowledgement. These may sound harmless, but the corollary to all this individual goodness is the hunt for badness. When the political is personal, we must work to identify those individuals who embody everything that is politically bad—perhaps someone who has made a bad tweet—and punish them as such (Winter 2022, p. 94).

I asked my students to reflect on how Crick’s conceptions of politics and anti-politics informed their work in congressional offices and/or their understanding of current events.

Leo, who follows European politics more closely than most Americans connected Crick’s ideas to Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s right-wing prime minister.

When looking at her example, it's easier to see the value of an adept politician and the folly of following an “outsider” like Trump or Obama. Neither were able to build consensus, indeed both of them created deep divisions within the country. Obama with the “Obama Coalition” and the rise of identity politics, and Trump with his harsh rhetoric. Neither was able to achieve any major bipartisan accomplishment. In fact, Joe Biden is arguably the first President since Clinton to pass a major bipartisan piece of legislation. Senator [Thom] Tillis [R, NC], for instance, was an important backer of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Acts.

Brenda connected her experience on the Hill to Crick’s writings and another piece we’d read, about 1990s House Speaker Newt Gingrich, “The Man Who Broke Politics.” Among other changes, Gingrich shortened the House work week to just three days:

It’s necessary not just for politicians but for voters to engage in discussions across the aisle, no matter how much our instinct tells us we hate the other party.

Now, politicians are flying back to their district on a Thursday afternoon, with no incentive to talk to lawmakers on the other side. Thus, we've seen intense polarization that limits bipartisanship and the work of Congress. We begin to believe all Democrats are lazy and dishonest, and that all Republicans are close-minded.

Clara saw first hand how compromise is essential in governing. Her comment reflects the experience of many of my interns who tend to arrive in DC with more of a campaigning mindset but leave with an appreciation for the importance of deliberation, conciliation and compromise in governing.

Rep. [Salud] Carbajal [D-CA] is more of a moderate Democrat than I had hoped to work for way back in November. Yet I’ve found that interning for him has opened my mind to more viewpoints and the value of compromise than ever before. The office keeps track of whether the bills he cosponsors are bipartisan, a number now hovering at 64%. I found myself feeling proud when that number rises. In the least productive Congress of all time, it is of the utmost importance to make concessions within each bill. Is it worse to pass an imperfect bill, or nothing at all?

Clara may have had in mind the very weak Civil Rights Act of 1957, which she’d read about in Robert Caro’s book, Master of the Senate. Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson agreed to so many compromises to get it past the segregationist Southern senators that many liberal supporters of Civil Rights were inclined to vote against it. Johnson, according to Caro, won the liberals over by arguing that if they passed “one civil rights bill, no matter how weak … others would follow.” Also, “Once a bill was passed it could be amended: altering something was a lot easier than creating it” (893).

Perhaps Johnson was thinking of the Social Security Act of 1935, which excluded agricultural and domestic workers, thus excluding 65 percent of Black workers in deference to the Southern segregationist bloc. By 1957 the act had been amended six times with more to follow, and the 1950 amendment extended coverage to farm and domestic workers.

Will Harris legislate like her boss did?

Perhaps our most popular piece of legislation was the result of compromise.

Sometimes when we fight, nobody wins.

In a generally unflattering profile of VP Kamala Harris in the Atlantic last October, this was the most damning passage in my view (emphasis added):

Harris’s aides once described her to reporters as potentially a key emissary for the administration in Congress—helping corral votes by way of “quiet Hill diplomacy.”  But she lacked the deep relationships needed to exert real influence. Congressional officials told me that Harris rarely engaged the more persuadable holdouts on either side of the aisle…. Harris shifted the terms of the discussion when I asked how her Senate background had proved useful in the administration’s push for legislation: “I mean, I think the work we have to do is really more in getting folks to speak loudly with their feet through the election cycle”—an unusual image, though the point was clear enough: Electing more Democrats might be more effective than trying to twist more arms.

For now, Senate Democrats are not fighting for time with Harris when she’s on the Hill. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a Democratic office that actually engages with her or her team on a regular basis,” one Democratic senator’s chief of staff told me. Traditionally, this person said, officials from the executive branch who visit the Capitol are cornered by lawmakers hoping to get their priorities before the president. But few people are “scrambling to make alliances” with Harris.

In The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It, Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson argue that in a representative democracy elected leaders need to be able to shift back and forth between campaign mode and governing mode if they want to govern effectively. One cause of polarization, they argue, is that US election seasons—especially for the presidency—last so long.

Here's their point:

Compromise is difficult, but governing a democracy without compromise is impossible….

The compromising mindset displays what we call principled prudence (adapting one's principles) and mutual respect (suspecting opponents). . . .

The uncompromising mindset that characterizes campaigning cannot and should not be eliminated from democratic politics. But when it comes to dominate governing, it obstructs the search for desirable compromises. The uncompromising mindset is like an invasive species that spreads beyond its natural habitat as it roams from the campaign to the government. (1, 16-17, 22)

President Biden succeeded in getting major legislation through Congress because he understands this need for principled prudence and mutual respect in governing and he proved that even in these polarized times it is possible to work out bipartisan compromises. Harris’s comment, and her “fight” slogan, suggest that she thinks the only way to get worthwhile legislation passed is to win enough seats in Congress so she can avoid negotiating with the opposing party. But the reality of American politics now and in the foreseeable future is evenly divided government, along with a Senate filibuster, that makes legislating impossible without compromise. Even within the Democratic coalition, compromise with conservative party members is sometimes necessary, as Biden discovered when Joe Manchin blocked the Green New Deal.

Hopefully, Harris can pivot from fighting and winning the election to compromising and signing legislation as president.

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Trump: All politicians are "saps and weaklings"

Would you trust your democracy to this man?

Sycophant: a servile self-seeking flatterer.

In the earliest days of the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, Donald Trump spoke openly to Atlantic writer Mark Leibovich about his strategy for capturing the Republican Party.

Trump said

he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.

“I will roll over them,” he boasted…. They were “puppets,” not strong people. He welcomed their contempt, he told me because that would make his turning them in supplicants all the more humiliating.

“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”

The rest of the article shows how, one-by-one, the “spineless ciphers” of the Republican Party went from bitter Trump critics to pathetic lackies. The article is accompanied by a row of photographs of the culprits, with quotes criticizing and then capitulating to their new master. Marco Rubio is a particularly sad example. He called Trump a con artist and “the most vulgar person ever to aspire to the presidency” in 2016 and this year said electing Trump is “the only way to make America wealthy and safe.”

But the most detailed account of a transition from Trump critic to enthusiastic member of the Trump “brownnoser brigade” appeared in a profile of Utah Senator Mike Lee by Tim Alberta, also in the October Atlantic.

Lee may have been the Republican who worked harder than any other to keep Trump from the party nomination in 2016. At the Republican convention that summer he tried to change the rules to allow Trump’s delegates to switch their vote. When that failed, he organized a floor protest of Trump’s nomination, which also flopped. After the Access Hollywood video came out in October, he posted a four-minute video calling for Trump to “step aside” and hand the nomination to a more worthy candidate.

Once Trump assumed the presidency, Lee changed his tune. The candidate whose attitude toward women and disdain for Democracy made him unfit for office became a “genuinely likeable person” who “has deep empathy for Americans.” From that point on, Lee’s ass-kissing knew no bounds. He

* compared Trump to an icon of his Mormon faith;

* collaborated with the president’s defense team during the first impeachment;

* participated in the administration’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election by recommending the now notorious, indicted attorneys Sydney Powell and John Eastman to lead the legal team, devising the “alternative electors” strategy, and spending “hours” on Jan. 4 calling state legislators on Trump’s behalf;

* continues to defend his and Trump’s actions in those efforts, calling them “unconventional” but perfectly legal.

Trump has offered to make Lee his attorney general and Lee has signaled a willingness to do Trump’s bidding in that position. When asked if he would insulate the DOJ from political pressure, he dismissed the notion as “romantic.”

The MAGA movement is portrayed by its enemies as first and foremost, a threat to democracy. I would suggest, however, that it is better understood as a threat to politics, the activity—the craft—through which democracy is practiced, which involves conciliation, discussion, deliberation, compromise,  toleration of opposition and acceptance of election results. It is how we manage conflict and opposing interests without resorting to violence or coercion. It is how complex, diverse societies establish stability and order while preserving "essential freedom" (Bernard Crick).

Trump may be a populist or a demagogue. He is also a crusader against politics and politicians and he has tapped a deep well of anti-politics in American society. What’s most disturbing about him is not his policy agenda or his offensive speech but his ability to so easily dispatch the political leaders of a venerable American institution and turn it—and them—into instruments of his will.

What remains to be seen is whether Trump is one of a kind or if others will follow using his playbook. Could the Democratic Party be just as vulnerable to such a hostile takeover, or was the Republican Party somehow ripe for the pickin’.

Watching "Babylon Berlin"

 When I first started teaching high school I was struck by how skilled my students were at using Hitler analogies to make a point. It turns out that someone named Goodwin noticed a similar tendency in online discussions and invented a term for it, which he named after himself.  Hitler is a pathetic way to make an argument. It's an impulse that leads to things like mustachioed pictures of Obama or Trump and should be avoided by all intelligent, fair-minded people, even in 9th grade.

As I begin my fourth sabbatical, however, I must confess that I have a tendency to succumb to my own personal corollary to Goodwin's Law:

"As I devote more time to reading, the probability of picking up a book on Germany between the wars approaches 1."

This sabbatical it was Richard Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich. As it happens, my daughter was watching "Babylon Berlin," so I also ended up re-watched seasons 1-3 with her, and now we are into the new season 4.

Watching that show about 1920s Berlin after reading Evans helped me make more sense of the complicated plot of the series. And it made what I'd read in Evans about that period come alive.

I found an encyclopedic fan website (historica.fandom.com) that explains the plot, the characters, and the background. I highly recommend this series, and if you do tune in, the website helps to make sense of the complicated characters and plot. Also, TVTropes.org has BB character summaries—don't click on the white redactions; they are spoilers. There are a few real characters mixed into the plot and the fan site doesn't clearly distinguish between them, so it's good to use Wikipedia to separate truth from fiction.

It's satisfying to be watching a TV show and suddenly notice a character you've just read about in a history book. Gustav Stresseman, the Wiemar foreign minister, appears a couple of times, winning the Nobel Peace Prize and surviving an assassination attempt. (The show's protagonist, Gereon Rath, saves him from a fictional plot in 1929—the real attempt happened in 1925.) Evans wrote that Stresseman was the Weimar Republic's "most skilled, most subtle and most realistic politician." He was a monarchist, but he was willing to participate in democratic politics and he was able to build a bridge between the anti-democratic nationalists and the Social Democrats. His death in 1929, coinciding with the crash of the US stock market, made the rise of the Nazis more likely. Those two events are the hinge between seasons 3 and 4.

The film also reinforces the most significant impression I took away from the book, Evans' case for contingency. In the film, we don't know how things will turn out and the good guys are determined, smart, and effective. They face many obstacles, but they have a way of defeating the villains. Evans also tells us that the rise of a viciously racist fascist regime in Germany leading to World War and Holocaust was not the inevitable fruit of German history and culture and the politics of Weimar, which has been a common assumption of most post-war writing about the rise of German antisemitic fascism. In fact, just before the market crash triggered the depression, he writes, Germany's experiment in democracy "seemed to have weathered the storms of the early 1920s" and was entering "calmer waters. It would need a catastrophe of major dimensions if an extremist party like the Nazis was to gain mass support" (230). After the stock prices crashed, German unemployment rose from 4.5% to 24%.

Before 1914 Evans claims, if you had to predict which European country would have created the Holocaust, it would have been France, not Germany. The film does portray lots of antisemitism in the Wiemar period, but it was by no means universal. Jewish characters hold important positions and are respected and admired by the film's protagonists. Nor was the persecution of homosexuals an inevitable product of German culture. The film's depictions reflect the fact that Berlin was the most tolerant city for gay culture in Europe during the 1920s.

I've been repeatedly drawn to this history because of what Germany's failed experiment in republican government tells us about the vulnerabilities of democracy in the face of a version of right-wing populism with certain parallels to the present. The idea that democracy is fragile has become painfully obvious in the 21st century and historians like Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder have been showing us scary parallels between the Nazis and Trump since at least 2016.

In a parallel that was hard to ignore, Evans begins his chapter on "Culture War," saying that Germans in the 20s "suffered from an excess of political engagement and political commitment . . . no area of society or politics was immune from politicization" (392-395). In recent years, Americans have politicize personal identity, pregnancy, school libraries, and even Thanksgiving dinners. As my new favorite political thinker writes, "the attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics" (Crick, 151).

And yet, Evans' point about contingency is well taken. The differences between America today and Germany in 1929 could not be greater. Our democracy is not new and was not imposed on us by hated conquering foreigners. The US Constitution has deeply ingrained roots and its principles are baked into civic culture. We don't have a violent revolutionary leftist movement like the German Communist Party, loyal to a foreign enemy nation and dedicated to overthrowing the system—Antifa notwithstanding. We aren't suffering in the aftermath of defeat in a war that wiped out 2.7 millions countrymen, paying reparations to our subjugators. And even if the Fed fails to avoid a recession, it is unlikely that we will end up with 24% unemployment.

In short, Weimar Germany is not a road map of our future, and Trump is a bad guy in his own unique way. Don't draw a mustache on him.

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Source: Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics.

Should we teach social justice?

(Second in a series: Could I Be Wrong?  Believe Science? 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens)

Diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice. Who could be against any of these things?

Protest movements for social justice are undeniably an essential element of democracy. My book looks at African American social justice advocacy during World War I and my US history courses spend a lot of time on how social movements improved American democracy. From time to time, I’ve joined campaigns for contemporary causes.

In the absence of protest, modern representative democracies act almost exclusively in the interest of the classes that control the levers of government—at best about 20 percent of the population. Only under pressure from protest movements do they sometimes throw the bottom 80 a bone. The history of American democracy is unthinkable without the abolition, women’s suffrage, labor, and civil rights movements.

But while I want my students to understand the role those movements played in history, I think it would run counter to my role as a teacher to recruit them into a movement that I support or to embrace one particular vision of social justice. I know that many of my colleagues disagree with me about this. And it has often seemed that my school does too.

But we don’t all agree on the same vision of social justice. If teachers can promote a particular partisan agenda, half the nation’s schools will cultivate right-wing crusaders, and the other half will produce left-wingers, and the electorate will become ever more polarized.

And the dispositions, inclinations and tactics of citizens are the opposite of those required for a political campaign. Where citizens should be open minded, aware of the likely flaws in their thinking and open to compromise, activists and campaigners must suppress their doubts as they crusade for the cause.

I do think it’s possible to play the role of citizen in a spirit of “political friendship” with rivals and still campaign for certain partisan outcomes—but it’s essential to understand the difference between the two and to be able to make the shift into the different roles as appropriate.*

As a teacher at Exeter I try to be as politically neutral as possible in the classroom. When students try to guess my politics, they are wrong more than half the time. But in my free time, I helped students canvass for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 New Hampshire primaries. These students came to support Sanders on their own. I just gave them rides in my car—which still has a “Feel the Bern” bumper sticker.

Meanwhile, in the classroom, I make a special effort to support conservative students because they are in such a small minority at the school and I value their presence because it makes for a more realistic political environment in my classroom. They also improve the thinking of liberal students by forcing them to defend their positions.

But we are increasingly living in ideological bubbles. The US is “more geographically polarized today” by party affiliation “than at any point since 1860.”  Which means that public schools have less ideological diversity, and students encounter fewer people with different viewpoints than their parents. Private—especially boarding—schools might offer more diversity, since they can bring students together from different communities, yet they seem to be getting more polarized as well, as Michael Powell showed in his reporting on liberal, elite New York City independent schools and as the recent 12% rise in enrollments in conservative Christian schools suggests.

Teachers can open students’ minds to opposing views by playing the devil’s advocate. But that’s less useful in helping students develop cognitive empathy than encountering real people with sincerely held views (Hess and McAvoy, 117). But in a school where the devil’s advocate is seen as an actual devil, teachers may be wary of making his case.

For example, during a DEI faculty workshop I attended, I posed a question to the presenter we had invited to speak. How do we protect the feelings of African-American students in a discussion about Affirmative Action? I was concerned that the conversation might turn to questions about the qualifications of students at our highly selective school who might be perceived as beneficiaries of racial preferences.

His answer: the teacher should intercede in the debate and explain why the student opposing affirmative action is wrong.

I agree that some opinions should not be given serious consideration in any classroom. But an important difference between, say, slavery and affirmative action is that one is a settled question in contemporary national politics, and the other is still open and subject to debate. A majority of the US population and the Supreme Court and a significant minority of African Americans oppose affirmative action according to some polls, and opponents raise legitimate questions about its effectiveness.

If we shut off debate on unresolved questions, how will we resolve them if not through violence and intimidation, or the suppression of basic political rights? And if they can be discussed in Congress and the courts and the nation’s press, to shut them down in schools is to prepare students for a political fantasy world.

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Things to read in relation to the above. 

The other Blog posts in this series: Could I be Wrong? Believe Science? and 11 Strategies for Teaching Politics.

I wrote on this topic back in 2022.  See "On Teaching Social Justice."  Here's a passage: "To advance any version of social justice in a democracy (or republic, if that’s your preferred term), we need to be willing and able to deliberate, compromise and form coalitions with fellow citizens and that requires mutual respect even between rivals. The best contribution teachers can make to advancing social justice is to graduate citizens with that sort of democratic disposition."

*In The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It, Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson argue that in a representative democracy elected leaders need to be able to shift back and forth between campaign mode and governing mode if they want to govern effectively. One cause of polarization, they argue, is that US election seasons—especially for the presidency—last so long.

For a more useful answer to my question about affirmative action, see Hess and McAvoy, Chapter 5, “A case of Political Friendship,” which looks at the methods that a masterful teacher of politics, Joel Kushner, employed to “mitigate negative costs” in discussions of controversial topics. Also relevant to teaching affirmative action is chapter 8, “Ethics of Framing and Selecting Issues” which makes a helpful distinction between open and closed political debates and how to deal with them differently. I wrote a summary of the chapter here. 

Public opinion on affirmative action varies according to how the question is asked and who is doing the polling. This June, 2023 poll by Pew says 50% of Americans (including 29% of African Americans) oppose affirmative action in selective college admissions, while only 33% approve.  Like so many issues, if you search hard enough, you can find a poll to support many different positions on affirmative action, but you will never find one that suggests it is not still a matter of controversy. On the other hand, no one even bothers to run polls on whether slavery is a legitimate system of labor.

For an example of an essay that raises legitimate questions about the effectiveness of race-based affirmative action by an Exeter Latina student, see Nataly Delcid, “At private school, my family’s income sets me apart more than ethnicity,” Washington Post, July 12, 2023. She agrees with the 60% of surveyed Americans who told Rice University pollsters in 2019 that affirmative action should be based on family income not race or ethnicity.

Quite understandably, DEI training like the session I mentioned, often backfires. See “Is Your Company’s Diversity Training Making You More Biased?” Psychology Today, June 7, 2017.

According to a recent paper by the economists Ethan Kaplan, Jörg Spenkuch, and Rebecca Sullivan, the U.S. is more geographically polarized today than at any point since 1860, when a geographic cleavage in political preferences was about to send the nation into the Civil War.  See: “The Real Culprit Behind Geographic Polarization,” Atlantic, Nov. 26, 2018.

The term social justice is associated with left-wing causes, but conservatives have their own version of what is socially just—they just call it something different. Efforts in New Hampshire and Florida by conservative politicians to insert content from the conservative online propaganda website PragerU into public school curricula are no better than liberal teachers basing their history courses on content from the Howard Zinn Education Project.  See Steven Porter, “Top education official in NH recommends unaccredited PragerU course for academic credit,” Boston Globe, Aug. 9, 2023. See also my thoughts about the NYT 1619 project as a source for US history educators. 

 This series: Part 1: Could I Be Wrong?  (civics education and epistemic humility); Part 2: Social Justice?  (Teaching citizenship to students with different values) and Part 3: Believe Science?  (curbing meritocratic hubris in tomorrow's leaders); Part 4: 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens.

On teaching social justice

Over the past decade or so, independent private schools have increasingly adopted the teaching of social justice into their mission statements. One strives to “bring an anti-racist, intersectional social justice lens to every aspect of our school community.”  Another has established a social justice “Institute.”

Trustees at my school called for “a new cross-department faculty working group to focus on incorporating themes of race, equity and justice into the curriculum of each department.” 

An article on the NAIS website acknowledges that elite private schools are “primary sites for the production and perpetuation of unequal social relations,” but says they nonetheless “can and should play a key role in social justice education” and train their students to be “agents” of “systemic change.”

Often, social justice at these schools seems to mean little more than recruiting a more diverse group of students and faculty and treating them fairly. (See, for example the blurb under this “Social Justice” heading on the Independent Schools of St. Louis website.)

But if schools do want to train students to become agents of systemic social change, they face a big problem. 

We don’t all agree on what constitutes social justice or how to bring it about. “Conservatives Do Believe in Social Justice,” a Heritage fellow writes. It involves “fulfilling our duties” and “empower[ing] more people to engage themselves in the market and flourish.”

A conservative vision of social justice would not include things like redistribution of wealth, affirmative action, abortion rights, or other elements of the left version.

In fact, conservatives tend to avoid using the term because of its historic linkage to progressive causes going back to the early 1900s.

And when they hear it used to describe a curriculum, they assume it means the school intends to indoctrinate students into a liberal or even radical-left political program.  They are not wrong.  After all, 83 percent of campaign contributions from teachers go to Democrats.  And even a self-described “left-wing New York City Democrat” describes the social justice curriculum at her son’s private school as “Maoist social reeducation.” 

So, though everyone on some level might hope for more social justice, the term—especially when used by schools—has become a source of division, contributing to the polarization that makes it harder to achieve any kind of social reform at all.

I would like to suggest that schools can graduate students who will be agents of a more just society not by “teaching Social Justice,” but by cultivating an attitude toward fellow citizens that will facilitate democratic problem-solving.

More and more of us have come to see those who disagree with us as enemies, bent on destroying society and scheming to oppress political opponents. That attitude justifies preventing political rivals from voting, or cancelling and silencing them—and it erodes support for democracy itself. The number of voters who say it is essential to live in a democracy has declined significantly in recent years especially among younger people. Even before Donald Trump began running for president, an increasing share of Americans were saying that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing.

The loss of faith in democracy is understandable, given the inability of our governments to solve our most pressing problems. But to advance any version of social justice in a democracy (or republic, if that’s your preferred term), we need to be willing and able to deliberate, compromise and form coalitions with fellow citizens and that requires mutual respect even between rivals. The best contribution teachers can make to advancing social justice is to graduate citizens with that sort of democratic disposition.

These citizens must understand that everyone has a different idea about what “social justice” looks like but that we can still approach each other in the spirit of what Danielle Allen calls “political friendship,” a term she borrowed from Aristotle, and updated for our current predicament.

Allen holds that all citizens in a democratic polity have an overriding interest in resolving our differences peacefully. The alternative—unrestrained political rivalry—generates distrust, resentment, and enmity that is likely to result in breakdown of democracy and in extreme cases, civil war.

(Read an earlier post for a more complete explanation of “Political Friendship")  

“Political friendship” lacks the partisan connotations of “Social Justice” and is inherently unifying rather than polarizing.

Teaching it in schools would do more to advance a liberal policy agenda than explicitly promoting a particular version of social justice. Attempts at indoctrination tend to backfire. If you’ve ever tried to tell a teenager what they should think, you know what I mean.  

(Go to the notes, below, for some examples of liberal indoctrination backfiring)

And advancing the progressive vision of social justice, with its heavy emphasis on reforming social and economic systems, depends on positive legislation more than the conservative vision, which tends to favor the status quo.

(See my post on how capitalism leads to ever more inequality in the absence of countervailing legislation)

Polarization of the electorate feeds the gridlock that makes it so difficult to pass the legislation that might advance progressive causes.

Political friendship holds the promise of reducing polarization. It says that today’s rivals maybe tomorrow’s allies on a different issue, so it’s best to treat them like future allies rather than permanent, irredeemable enemies.

Allyship is a popular theme in the contemporary social justice movement. My school organizes “affinity groups”: one each for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians based on their race, and a fourth for “white allies,” based on support for an anti-racist, social justice agenda, in the apparent expectation that white people have no interests of their own and could be relied on to think only of the interests of people with different skin color.

In these sorts of programs, white allies are asked to “check their privilege” and commit themselves to fight racism, calling out or cancelling other white people who show signs of bigotry.

This strategy relies solely on the altruism of white descendants of Europeans, who are simultaneously condemned as the historical perpetrators of racism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

It is a doomed strategy, because it misunderstands the basic nature of political alliances.

In a 1967 essay defining “Black power,” Martin Luther King explains, “Our victories in the past decade were won with a broad coalition of organizations representing a wide variety of interests,”

A true alliance is based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common interest into which they merge. For an alliance to have permanence and loyal commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which it benefits.

To wait passively for “allies” with nothing to gain for themselves to be “somehow infused” with the “blessings of good will,” would be the “height of naiveté,” he wrote. See below for more on King's essay.

Alliances get things done and they require bargaining and compromise, tolerance of differences, and some common interest.

The future electorate will be made up of our current students. Given the divided nature of US government, an electorate that is steeped in the concept of political friendship and a more realistic understanding of political alliances would seem better prepared to build the coalitions and work out the compromises necessary to get any legislation passed to engage in collective problem-solving and advance social justice.

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Notes and further thoughts and readings on teaching social justice

The private school paradox.

According to the NEA website:

Social justice is about distributing resources fairly and treating all students equitably. … Sadly, a look at schools across the nation makes it clear that fair distribution of resources and equitable treatment don’t always happen. Students in poorly-funded schools don’t have the technology, new books, or art and music programs that create a well-rounded education, while students in affluent areas have the latest academic resources, school counselors, librarians, and more to help them succeed. 

As this Times piece indicates, private schools have seemed more enthusiastic than public schools in promoting social justice. But it seems fairly obvious that in spite of their well-crafted statements on social justice and whatever social justice lessons they are teaching their highly privileged students, those schools, by their very existence, do much more to exacerbate the problem of educational inequality, which is one of the worst examples for liberals of social injustice.

As a student at one private school put it:

Students who choose to attend private schools deplete public funding for public schools, divert private funding and weaken public classroom environments. If these students are to serve as advocates for social justice, they must first condemn how their choice to attend private school contributed to socioeconomic inequality.

Backfire

In an Atlantic piece, “The Terrifying Future of the American Right” (Nov. 18, 2021), David Brooks suggest that trying to teach social justice in schools may backfire. He points to younger conservatives he met at the National Conservatism Conference, held in Orlando in Nov. 2021, who are coming to dominate the movement. Speaking about liberals, one said: “What they want is to destroy us.” These conservatives, Brooks adds, “went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction.” Brooks thinks he would have done the same if he had attended college in that environment.

The LA Times tells the story of how this happened to Stephen Miller, who rebelled against what he saw as a “campus indoctrination machine” at Samohi High School in “The People’s Republic of Santa Monica.” It's where he mastered the tactics of lib-baiting that catapulted him to prominence as a Trump troll and White House aide.

And of course conservatives make up for their weak policy agenda by using indoctrination in schools to stoke the culture war. At times they seem obsessed with educational institutions, teachers,  professors, and administrators.  For example, this website tracks everything elite educational institutions (including Phillips Exeter) do under the banner of DEI, critical race theory and social justice education.

Even many liberals are opposed to what they see as political indoctrination in their children’s schools. “Most of the teachers and parents I talk with just want school to be school—not some kind of Maoist social reeducation,” writes the parent of a fifth grader at an independent private school, who describes herself as a left-wing New York City Democrat. Issues associated with social justice and characterized by the right as “wokeness” and cancel culture, tend to unite Republicans and divide Democrats, according to the data analysts at Five-Thirty-Eight.

Conservatives and Social justice

The Heritage fellow’s Conservative vision of social justice can be found here.

A conservative critique of teaching “social justice” in schools is J. Martin Rochester, "Social justice miseducation in our schools," Nov. 1, 2017, Thomas B. Fordham Institute (a conservative education think tank).

 

First, schools should mainly stick to what they are uniquely entrusted to do—teaching math, physics, English, and other subject matter and, beyond that, a love of learning. Schools should not aspire to be churches or social work agencies. In an already overcrowded school day in which our schools struggle to find the time to get students to become proficient in “the three R’s,” social justice training can be a huge distraction.

Second, more importantly, it is sheer hubris for teachers to bring their own personal political agenda into the classroom. What happened to free inquiry? In my own teaching, I try to keep my ideological dispositions to myself rather than using my lectern as a bully pulpit, if only to promote critical thinking as opposed to indoctrination. I expose students to a wide range of views from left to right. For example, when I teach about multinational corporations and globalization, I have them read everything from Karl Marx to Milton Friedman.

Educators for Social Justice talk a lot about diversity, but do they promote the most important type of diversity—diversity of ideas? Contrary to their claim that they celebrate “disagreement,” they seem to promote only a politically correct, left-leaning perspective.

King on alliances

The quote above is from King, “Martin Luther King Defines Black Power,” New York Times, June 11, 1967. I first heard this quote in an interview with Jared Clemons on The Dig podcast, June 24, 2022. Clemons adds that for King, 

successfully combating race prejudice meant successfully changing the material circumstances in which individuals found themselves. This latter point is critical, for it implies that the only way to reduce race prejudice is to alter the conditions that exacerbate the perpetuation of race prejudice. In other words, the causal pathway is such that material conditions change human practices, which shapes attitudes, not the other way around.

See Clemons’ essay, “From ‘Freedom Now!’ to ‘Black Lives Matter’: Retrieving King and Randolph to Theorize Contemporary White Antiracism,” Perspectives on Politics, Cambridge University Press, June 8, 2022. Go back up to essay.