Heartache With Hard Work

“This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That’s democracy for you.”
–C. Montgomery Burns

For those who hadn’t noticed, it’s election time in America.  I’m filling out my ballot and it reminds me once again of just how MUCH people in this country are expected to vote on.

President, Senators and Representatives at the national and state level, Governor…sure.  Maybe even an initiative or two – though my distaste for the direct ballot measure grows the more I experience it in action.

But on my ballot, in addition to those races I’m also being asked to vote for Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Controller, Treasurer, Attorney General, Insurance Commissioner, and Member for the State Board of Equalization.  And those are the easy ones because they’re all partisan.  I don’t have to know a thing about Betty T. Yee to vote for her for the Equalization Board because it says “Democratic” next to her name.

But then there is the judicial races.  It takes some digging to find out who these people are. You certainly can’t read the official statements because they’re blander than bland.  “I will uphold the law, etc.”  Which is nice to know I guess, but has nothing to do with what actual decisions they would make.  Fortunately, there are conservative blogs who care about this stuff a lot.  All you have to do is flip their recommendations and you’re golden.  It turns out the LOVE Ming Chin.  So he’s a ‘no.’  And they think Carlos Moreno is the devil incarnate.  So he’s a ‘yes.’  But then you get down to the race for Court of Appeal, Presiding Justice, 6th Appellate District.  And I have zero useful information about Conrad Rushing.

And then there’s the race for Superintendent.  Which is one of the few places where I can’t even just look to the unions for support.  Because I kind of distrust teacher unions.  So the fact that they support Torlakson doesn’t really help me.

And then you get to the city level, where the only truly relevant information I’ve been able to suss out is that one of the 8 candidates is a Republican.  It doesn’t say that on the ballot or anything.  I had to go read some articles in the local newspaper for that.  So I’ve narrowed the field down to seven.  All of them want to help local business, maintain public safety, and preserve the local environment.  Because who wouldn’t want to do those things?

And THEN, there are all the propositions.  Nine of them statewide this year.  I know for sure how I’m voting on most, but still am not sure about a couple.

Ones I’m certain about:
19 (marijuana legalization) – YES
23 (kill AB 32 law on emissions reduction) – NO
24 (repeal the corporate tax loophole) – YES
25 (can pass a budget with a simple majority) – YES
26 (make it even MORE impossible to collect the money necessary to run a government) – NO

Ones that still puzzle me a bit:
20 and 27 (redistricting) – my union tells me to support 27 (which would kill the redistricting commission), and I see the argument.  The commission is equally weighted in partisan terms which doesn’t match up to the actual makeup of the state.  But I remain a bit troubled by the general sense of entitlement: that parties ought to have ownership over redistricting and that this ought to be part of the spoils of electoral war.  I don’t know that the commission is a particularly good way of dealing with that, but surely there have to be more procedurally fair ways of thinking about this matter.

21 (increase licensing fees to pay for state parks) – Obviously I’m sympathetic to the cause.  But this seems like a very strange use of the initiative process.  And I really don’t like the attitude that the appropriate response to our budgeting breakdowns is to pick and choose a few specific things and create specific revenue streams for them.  I’ll probably vote yes, but the whole process feels a bit icky.

22 (prevent raiding of local governments) – Honestly, this one has me a bit baffled. I’ll probably vote no on the general principle that the budgeting process does not need to be made any more complicated.

So what can we make of all this?  Well, my general feeling is that I’m a big political nerd.  And even I felt a bit overwhelmed.  If we want people to make informed judgments, our system is not very well designed to produce that result.

We love to valorize democracy in this country.  But if this is what is meant by ‘democracy’ then something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

The Mission – Unexplainable Stories

There’s a long-running debate about what is causing the coming Republican wave.  The right wants to sell it as a judgment on the Obama agenda, as a re-assertion of the fundamental center-right nature of the American electorate freaking out about the policies the Democrats have pushed.  The left tends to say that it’s simply the economy.  You can guess based on this which side I come down on, but I want to explore the matter in a bit more detail because I think it’s important to see WHY the poles tend to see the arguments this way.

At stake is the question of whether all the seats Republicans pick up can be thought of as ‘rightly’ belonging to them, or whether the victory should be read as an accident of the historical moment—and the true sense of the electorate remains in the progressive camp.

The risk for the left in this argument is that it very easily spills over into accusations of false consciousness.  In effect, if people claim that they prefer Republicans to Democrats, who are we to argue about what they REALLY mean?

I am sensitive to this, and I do think that sometimes the “it’s the economy, stupid” brigade tends to minimize the capacity for voters to actually make up their mind.  There certainly is a lot to the macro-level political science argument that structural factors massively outweigh particular explanations.  But it’s always important to remember that this is a large-scale explanation that does not work at a granular level.  Structure doesn’t erase agency—although it absolutely does constrain it in less visible ways.

That said, it doesn’t take much digging into the polls to find evidence that the “it’s the economy, stupid” theory is pretty apt.  Because on the whole voters still prefer the policies of Democrats to the Republicans and even think that Democrats are better on the economy.  They just aren’t willing to use that preference as a guide for their voting behavior in this election.

Now, I personally think that’s an obnoxious and somewhat petulant way of approaching your vote—using it to send a signal of general dissatisfaction—but it’s a pretty easy one to grasp.  And it doesn’t mean that people have suddenly seen the light on social conservatism or tax cuts for the wealthy.  It doesn’t NOT mean that, perhaps.  It might just be a null test of the whole hypothesis.  We won’t really be able to judge it except in retrospect.

The other thing to remember here is that the overwhelming amount of evidence we get is NOT actually granulated.  We “know” that there is a Republican wave building because of polling data – which is macro-level.  We think we know about the wave because of all the stories about angry Tea Partiers and people at town halls and the like.  But those are, in the grand scheme of things, very anecdotal.  Reporters are stuck in a difficult space where they want to find a story, but they really don’t have any more access to the real macro-level information than any of the rest of us.  So they tell very specific stories informed by specific motivations.  And that means searching out for people telling stories about their votes that seem to validate particular narratives.  But you’re really going to have trouble finding meaningful evidence for ANY narrative at this point in time.

I’m not saying there’s no value to highly specific, thick description of perspectives.  I just think that when you try to employ anthropological tools to tell stories about broad social change and economic motivations you tend to run yourself into trouble.  If we can let the two sit side by side in our minds, and not try to imagine that they are capable of speaking to precisely the same story, then we’ll do just fine.

The Winner Takes It All – Abba

Today the subject is a couple memes that are running around which irritate me.  Not because there’s NO truth in them, but because they serve as overly simplistic ways of approaching situations that deserve a bit more attention.

First, that this is going to be a landslide election, a massive indication of the breakdown in public faith for the Democratic Party, a total public repudiation of Obama and company, etc.  I’ve complained about this before, but it deserves saying again.  In the most extreme of the blowout scenarios, the GOP gets 80-90 seats, and thus obtains…a majority of roughly the same size as the one the Democrats currently have.  The much more likely scenario is a Republican majority of a modest size.  As in: voters will vote roughly equally for the two parties.

That’s not nothing.  It’s certainly a steep drop from 2008.  And it does a lot of damage to the idea that 2006/2008 was the beginning of a strong and sustainable Democratic wave.  But it is simply false to assert that there is no viable argument for Democrats to make, that the narrative is so doomed that all they can do is hang on for dear life.

It’s a tough time to be a Democrat absolutely.  But a big chunk of it is simply the fact that there was a Blue wave in 2008 thanks to the economy.  And since things don’t seem to have improved much since then, that support has dried up.

Second, deficits didn’t cause this economic crisis, but they certainly have been PRODUCED by it.  What generates revenue for the government? Taxes.  And since those taxes come from income and the movement of money around the economy, if there’s a major recession then government revenue gets a lot smaller.

There absolutely are important questions to be asked about long term fiscal stability.  But the FIRST question you ought to be asking is how to facilitate a strong economy upon which all the rest of the fiscal accounting can be done.  And the SECOND question you should ask is how many billions we’re going to be cutting from military spending.  If you claim to care about deficits but take the military off the table before the conversation has even started, I have a hard time taking you seriously.

Third, how exactly did Ferguson ‘win big’ in this whole escapade?  He maintained the status quo, by paying Rooney WAY more money.  Sounds like Rooney is the winner to me.

No, I’m not dead.  And no, the blog isn’t dead either.  Just mostly dead.

Anyways, to tide you over while I do other things and fail to write about music, here’s a video of a polar bear cub seeing itself in the mirror:

Adorable!

I Feel Better (Live) – Frightened Rabbit (from the Liver! Lung! FR! album

I still think of Dan Savage as the guy who writes the sex advice column in the back of The Stranger, but in the 15 years since I first read him, he has somehow turned into one of the most important (and best) voices for queers, for sex and those who like it, and for a progressive sense of society (and politics) in general.

I can’t really say what the secret to his success is, apart from a strident honesty.  My best guess is that he is a great example of how to escape the HHGTTG problem of leadership.  To wit:

The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

The great thing about him, I think, is that he’s a standard-bearer for a movement that he himself feels conflicted about.  He cares about the issues, certainly, but seems to remain in some serious doubt that he ‘deserves’ to be in that role.  His primary gig, of course, is as an advice columnist.  A job whose sole qualification—as he often states—is simply that people ask you for your advice.

That’s a lot of background, but I think it’s important for the point I want to make about his current effort: the “it gets better” project.  After reading about a particularly troubling case of a young gay kid committing suicide, he wrote:

“My heart breaks for the pain and torment you went through, Billy Lucas,” a reader wrote after I posted about Billy Lucas to my blog. “I wish I could have told you that things get better.”

I had the same reaction: I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren’t allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don’t bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

So that’s what he did, making a short film with his boyfriend to make this point, and dropping it on youtube.

I started out skeptical.  Not for any particular reason, but just out of a general sense of distrust for clever attempts to use new media, and for schlocky attempt to sugar-coat life.

But after watching the video–and watching some of the many, many videos made by people who aren’t famous or ‘important’–I think this is actually really important, and good.

They key reason is the way that the constant invocation of ‘it gets better’ does quite a bit more than it initially appears.  I see three main objections that people might make: 1) this kind of thing is faux-activism that doesn’t make a real difference 2) that it would be better to actually focus on improving things where kids ARE, not just telling them to wait until things improve 3) it creates false expectations.  Things might get better if you’re Dan Savage but most people won’t find perfect lives.  There’s some truth to all of these, but I think they each suffer from the problem of myopia.  By which I mean: they treat the literal message as if it’s the only message.

But that’s not at all the limit.  When you say ‘it gets better’ you’re actually doing a lot of things.  You’re expressing sympathy, by communicating to people in tough times that there are people out there who know what you’re going through.  You’re judging their tormentors–making clear that what may seem natural and acceptable to the people in their immediate environment is being criticized and called out by people elsewhere.  That can be a powerful thing.  One of the toughest things about being a kid is that you don’t have a very good outrage-meter.  And for people who suffer chronic bullying, it’s very easy to start doubting yourself.  But perhaps most importantly, you’re not just telling people that things get better, you’re making an accusation that the conditions many young gay kids are forced to endure are unacceptable.  To say ‘it gets better’ is to also state that the way things are right now is unacceptable.

And the message is not just for the victims.  It’s for the culture as a whole.  The fact that thousands of people are making their own videos takes this far beyond the vanity project of one guy.  It makes it a collective work–a cathartic process for people to mark the pain of their own lives and express the joys they’ve been able to find.  It doesn’t sugar coat.  You see that there is endless variety in what it means to grow up.  But that’s precisely the point.  Life is not the simple set of circumstances in which you grow up.  It can be almost anything.

And when we say ‘it gets better’ it’s also a call to action.  The reason it gets better is because people MAKE it better.  And the people who make it better are not just the individuals themselves.  It’s society in general that has to change.  This project is part of that process, to the extent that it draws a line in the sand.  It exposes the parochialism of small minds as the toxic social function that it is.  And, importantly, it does it in the form of making positive statements rather than simply listing out grievances.

It treats gay people as just…people. People who deserve the chance to live normal lives, to possibly do great things, and to possibly do small things.  Not as victims who must endlessly suffer and identify themselves against that suffering–except to the extent that EVERYONE must do that.

And that’s not nothing.  It matters.  I don’t know if it matters a lot.  Change is slow when it happens on a broad social level.  But it does happen.  And when you add up a lot of little things like this, it goes just a little bit faster.

Alaska – Camera Obscura (from the If Looks Could Kill EP)

There’s a small part of me that finds the possibility of Lisa Murkowski running (and winning) a write-in campaign to be hilarious.  Booted out in the primary by the obnoxious Tea Party dude, but still able to win in the general…it would be a good story.

But the more I think about it, the less appealing it is.  Murkowski is, after all, not planning on doing anything differently if she returns to the Senate.  She’ll caucus with the Republicans, seek to regain her old positions of authority, continue funneling millions to Alaska even while complaining about big gov’mint, and generally making a nuisance of herself.

Indeed, this is precisely why she might win.  As Jay Newton-Small notes: “As the most highly subsidized state, Alaskans are feeling the loss of Ted Stevens acutely; during his 49 years in the Senate he brought billions of federal dollars to the Last Frontier. Add to that losing another senior states(wo)man (remember, the more senior, the more pork) and the prospect of a guy — Joe Miller — who wants to ween Alaska off the federal tit is downright scary for a lot of folks.”

If Miller wins, I sincerely doubt it makes a meaningful difference on this front.  But all things being equal I’d appreciate it if the hypocrisy of Alaskans complaining about big government even while raking in the cash from the government was a little less glaring.

As I said last time I commented about Alaska: “I love the idea of Alaska. Open spaces, snow, Northern Exposure, etc. but I can’t say I’m in favor of the politics there.”

No One Mourns The Wicked – from Wicked

Sometimes I really wonder about what makes it into the primetime as a Big Story.  Of all the loopy things that have been said by major Republicans candidates this cycle, I struggle to understand what is supposed to be such a big deal about Christine O’Donnell’s comments about witchcraft.  It wouldn’t even make my top 10 list of crazy stuff that SHE has said.

What’s the story here?  That candidates have lives where they at one time did things differently than they now do?  I guess I would get it if she was out on the campaign trail talking about how her Wiccan faith really influences her approach to public policy.  But remember that the point of her comment was to say that she tried it when she was a kid and didn’t like it.  And now looking back it helps to confirm her faith.

Now, if you were going to complain about this comment, there is some fair ammunition.  We can start with her depiction of ‘witchcraft’ as being focused on devil-worship.  Which, you know, it isn’t.  There are, of course, random folks out there who may self-describe as witches and also claim to worship Satan or whatever, but on the whole the more ‘official’ variants of witchcraft are very clearly pagan, focused on the natural world, etc.

What this suggests, of course, is that O’Donnell had no clue what she was talking about and just made some stuff up.  Her description of what she ‘dabbled’ in comes straight out of the Christian moral panic manual that’s been circulating for centuries and has no resemblance to what actual people do.  So there’s that.

And let’s also remember WHY she brought up witchcraft.  It was because she wanted to argue that Halloween is dangerous because it valorizes devil-worship.

Verdict: she is worthy of some mild derision for the comment.  But this is among the stupidest things to fixate on.  And it’s kind of depressing that a candidate for a major office can be lunatic-fringe nutty on actual POLICY issues and get nary a mention, but mention witches and everyone freaks out.  So yes, they’ve managed to suss out a crazy person but for many of the wrong reasons, I think.

The American media: even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Perfect Drug – Nine Inch Nails

Kevin Drum has a strange post today on Prop 19 (legalization of marijuana in California).  He first points out that a standard criticism (it would provoke a conflict with the federal government’s laws on the subject) is in fact a selling point: “Anyway, a showdown with the feds might not turn out well, but then again, it might produce some useful fireworks. Sometimes that’s what it takes to make progress.”

Absolutely right.  The point of this wouldn’t be to generate a perfect new legal mechanism in California.  It would be to make a clear statement that the whole national structure of our drug laws is completely insane–and to force the federal government to make a proactive case for its position.  If California voters declare that they are against the status quo, and if California law enforcement is instructed to ignore these federal violations, it requires the folks in DC to either punt and let California do what it likes, or it forces them into the difficult position of having to actually defend this stuff.

So, why then, does Drum end by saying: “(So am I going to vote for Prop 19? I’m tempted. But my presumption for voting No on all propositions is pretty strong, and Prop 19 really does have some drawbacks that are probably not suitable for enshinement for all time in the state constitution. So probably not.)” ?

What are those drawbacks?  Further, while I respect the general principle of a high threshold for presumption on matters of direct democracy (basically: I don’t really trust direct democracy very much at all), this seems like a case ideally suited to the matter.  Where the potential problems with the proposition are kind of the point.  The issue is that there are institutional checks within government that make it (think that it is) completely incapable of addressing this matter in a sane and rational way.  In such cases, blowing things up a little bit through the proposition process seems fair.

So let’s say your an idealistic progressive voter.  You were excited about Obama, but wary of the fact that he seemed to speak in generalities but never seemed truly committed to the left.  You’ve grown increasingly aggravated over the last two years as promises have been broken, goals have not been achieved, as sacrifices have been made.  The public option is long dead.  Gay men and women still can’t serve openly.  Guantanamo is open.  Executive powers have been marginally restrained, but not really all that much.  The stimulus was far smaller than necessary.  Financial reform was a lot more toothless than you’d hoped.  We continue to wage a (most likely unwinnable) war in Afghanistan and (despite claims) Iraq.

I’ll set aside for a moment whether it’s fair to hold Democrats or Obama to blame for all of those things.  I think reasonable people can disagree quite a bit about exactly where and how to apportion responsibility.  But it doesn’t really matter for this point.  You can believe it’s entirely down to Democratic cowardice, weakness, lack of commitment to genuinely progressive norms, etc.

The point remains: if Democrats lose the House (and especially if they lose the Senate), the “lesson learned” will be that moving to the ‘far left’ is political suicide.  The conventional wisdom will quickly solidify that the Tea Party crowd gained so much momentum due to public agreement with their claims about the overreaching of the liberal agenda.  They went for too much, too fast.

Now look: we all know that’s poppycock.  More stimulus, more spending, would have improved our current economic situation – and it’s amazing how much anger about specific policies tracks with a general anger about the economic situation as a whole.  I don’t want to drift too far into accusations of false consciousness here, but the point remains fair.  When people say they hate deficits, it doesn’t meant they hate deficits.  Ask 10 average American voters whether they’d take a) big deficits and steady growth with declining unemployment or b) smaller deficits with stagnant growth and flatlined unemployment numbers and most are going to choose option A.

All that said, the narrative is the question here, not the underlying reality.  Because what we’re concerned with is how to ensure that progressive items remain on the agenda, that we move forward on important items.  And the one thing that more or less ensures that the massive movement we saw in this direction in 2006 and 2008 stalls is a massive loss for Democrats in 2010.

Not just because a Republican House is going to be spending too much time impeaching Obama and holding hearings about ACORN to pass cap and trade–although obviously that is a big part of it.  But even more because it’s going to take another whole generation before middle of the road Democrats will be willing to believe that a strong left-of-center agenda is politically palatable.

If they see a big loss as caused by overreach, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll be even LESS willing to mobilize for your preferred agenda.

The point being: it’s good (great, even) that the blue team is diverse, has a lot of different perspectives, including some who spend a lot of time being outraged at the craven nature of the establishment Dems in Washington.  But there’s a big difference between being outraged and holding their feet to the fire and being apathetic.  Choosing to not turn out in November because you’re frustrated by the weak sauce is the surest way to produce more of the same.

I know it doesn’t feel like the greatest message.  Vote for us so that we don’t spit in your face.  But I think it needs to be understood differently.  The issue is that a lot of the country is persuadable on some big progressive issues, but isn’t there yet.  The best way to enter into that process is to ensure that the elected officials have an incentive to take your position seriously.  The best way to do THAT is to be part of their constituency.  Don’t give them the easy out.  Don’t allow the response: “look, we got health care reform (not perfect, but better than anything we’d managed in the previous 70 years), tons of amazing things in the stimulus bill that have been progressive priorities for years, modest progress on financial reform, we didn’t start any NEW wars, etc.  We got all of that and you STILL didn’t vote for me.  Well, then what is my motivation to listen to anything you say?”

I’m not saying that argument would be fair, or wouldn’t be.  I’m just saying it’s what’s likely to happen. Don’t let it happen.  Get motivated for November.  Look at the important differences.  Remember how much this stuff matters.  And make the tough choice to keep pushing the envelope.

Basically: we need to show up big and unified on one day in November so that we can fight with each other for the rest of the two years, and have it MEAN something.

Landslide – Smashing Pumpkins

I’ve got tons of other more significant things running through my head about politics (including a particularly scathing one about the insanity running around the country around the concept of deficits), and about 10 album reviews swirling around in my subconscious, too.  And some comments about the Pitchfork list of the best songs of the 90s.  But all that will have to wait.  For now, just this:

Everyone keeps talking about how the midterms are going to be a bloodbath, a resounding defeat for the Democrats.  The evidence is a massive swing in the House, sufficient to return control to the GOP.  I’m not trying to say that wouldn’t be a big deal.  And I’m not trying to say that it’s meaningless.  But let’s keep some perspective here, people.  Every single House seat is up in every single election.  So if the Republicans win, say, 225 seats.  That means the Democrats win 210.  Which means the country will have demonstrated, in aggregate, a moderate preference for the Republicans.

Like I said, sure it’s significant.  But it’s not anything close to the actual landslide that happened in 2008 in the other direction.  If the Republicans swing an 80-seat majority anytime soon, that will be a true repudiation.  If they manage a tiny majority, well, let’s agree that we might need a bit more time to truly assess the meaningfulness of it.