Weber at the DNC

August 3, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Like those Japanese soldiers in Southeast Asia who held out long after Worrld War II was over, a few Bernie supporters are vowing to stay in the jungles fighting the good fight. Some are going with the Green party. The Guardian quotes one of them: “I just really strongly believe that you should always vote your conscience.” 

She is voicing what Max Weber called an “ethic of conviction.” In “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), Weber distinguished between that ethic and an “ethic of responsibility.” Conviction, as the name implies (at least in this English translation*), carries a religious certainty about ultimate values. Those who operate solely on an ethic of conviction refuse to compromise those values. How could conscience let them do otherwise? They remain faithful to their values regardless of the actual consequences in the shorter term.  Weber quotes the maxim, “The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord.”

By contrast, those guided by an ethic of responsibility pay attention to the immediate effects of an action or policy. “One has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one's action.”

These two ethics seem contradictory. Yet, Weber says, those who engage seriously in politics must blend these two seemingly incompatible orientations.

The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not absolute opposites. They are complementary to one another, and only in combination do they produce the true human being who is capable of having a “vocation for politics.”

Max Weber, meet Sarah Silverman (2016): “Can I just say to the ‘Bernie or Bust’ people: you’re being ridiculous.”

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* The German term, Gesinnungsrthik, has been translated as “Ethic of ultimate ends,” “Ethic of single-minded conviction,” “Ethic of absolute conviction or pure intention,” “Ethic of principled conviction,” and “Ethic of intention.”

The Social Fox Construction of Reality

August 2, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why do they love Trump? I often lean to the psychological explanation that many of the Trumpistas are voting with their emotions. It’s not about policy. It’s not about what might be best for their own lives or the country. They like Trump because he gives voice to their thoughts and feelings, especially thoughts and feelings that are unacceptable in the current cultural orthodoxy. Trump expresses their many resentments – against cultural elites, against economic elites, against immigrants, against the poor – especially the Black and Hispanic poor – against government.

I’m not quite ready to abandon that view, but Mark* at the blog West Coast Stat View (here) has a simpler explanation. Voting for Trump is rational. It is realistic – that is, it is consistent with reality. Mark doesn’t explicitly use the term “bounded rationality,” but he’s getting at something similar.  A decision may seem irrational to others (“What was he thinking?”); we ourselves may find it irrational looking back on it (“What was I thinking?”). But at the time, it  made sense given the available information and our ability to process that information. The problem was not with our rationality but with the boundaries that limited what we could see. It was consistent with our reality.

The important question in voting then is “Which reality?” And the answer Mark gives for Trump voters is: “the reality of Fox News.”

The tile of Mark’s post is “Explaining Trump in Four Words,” and the four words are, “Republicans believe Fox News.”

Here is Mark’s summary of that reality:

Global warming is a hoax The government and the media are hostile to Christians Food-stamp recipients live on steak and lobster While America is the most taxed nation in the world The financial crisis was caused by government policies that required loans to be made to poor minority members The 2008 election was probably stolen President  Obama's birth records are possibly fraudulent, the product of a massive cover-up President Obama is certainly anti-American As are most Democrats Voter fraud is rampant Islamic terrorist are on the verge of major attacks on Americans America is in decline

A few hours after the The West Coast Stat View post appeared, Trump told an interviewer, “You have radical Islamic terrorists probably all over the place, we’re allowing them to come in by the thousands and thousands.” A dozen Pinocchios or Pants-on-Fire ratings from fact-checkers won’t matter. Those thousands of terrorists streaming in to the US are a reality for Trump and for his followers.

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* I’m not on a first name basis with Mark. I don’t know him at all. But I’ve searched WestCoastStatView and cannot find his full name or that of his co-blogger Joseph. Which is too bad because they run an excellent blog.

Race, Voting Laws, and an Old Joke

July 30, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

A federal appeals court yesterday overturned North Carolina’s new Voter ID laws. The judges unanimously agreed that the laws “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The law, of course, did not mention race at all. Neither did its historical antecedents – laws that required a poll tax or a literacy test. Or the secret ballot.  Yes, as I was surprised to learn, the secret ballot too, in its early days, was supported and used as a tool to suppress the votes of minorities.

The voting that we now take for granted – privately marking a ballot provided by the government – did not become standard in the US until well into the 19th century. The first presidential election where secret ballots predominated was the election of 1896, which, not coincidentally, was the first year without an election-day killing. Earlier in the century, voters got their ballots from newspapers –this was back in the day when newspapers were highly partisan – and brought them to the polls. These tickets were long and brightly colored –  a different color for each party – and the only way to keep them secret was to fold them up and put them in your pocket. But that was considered unmanly.

Some of the first secret-ballot laws were passed in the 1880s in states where women had won the right to vote – Massachusetts, New York – and wanted to be protected from public scrutiny and possible harm. The other states that went for the secret ballot at this time were in the South. This was the post-Reconstruction era, the era of Jim Crow laws. The secret ballot also had support from Northern states that wanted to suppress the immigrant vote.

Historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore, interviewed on by Terry Gross NPR’s “Fresh Air” back in February, explained:

LEPORE: It was a way to disenfranchise newly-enfranchised black men. None of them knew how to read – they’d been raised in slavery, lived their entire lives as slaves on plantations. The real success of the secret ballot as a national political institution had to do with the disenfranchisement of black men. GROSS: So the secret ballot was a way of helping them get the vote. [Note that Terry Gross is so thoroughly modern that she doesn’t grasp what Lepore is saying.] LEPORE: No, it was preventing them from voting. If you could cut your ballot out of the newspaper and knew you wanted to vote Republican, you didn't have to know how to read to vote. Immigrants could vote. Newly-enfranchised black men in the South could vote. It actually was a big part of expanding the electorate. But people in the North were like, hey, we don't really like when all those immigrants vote. And people in the South were like, we really don't want these black guys to vote. There were good reasons for the secret ballot too. [It was] very much motivated by making it harder for people who were illiterate to vote. It’s essentially a de facto literacy test. [I have edited this for clarity. The full transcript is here.]

                       
If you could not read, you could stilld clip your ballot of the newspaper whose views matched your own and put it in the ballot box. But if you had to go into a booth and choose candidates from a printed ballot, you were lost.

But what if some Blacks might be able to read the ballot?

Some counties in Virginia, in the 1890s print some regular ballots. But then they print ballots in Gothic type - like, deep medieval Gothic type. And they give all those ballots to the black men. Its a completely illegible ballot.

There’s a joke that I first heard during the campaign for voting rights in the 1960s. [The version I heard included a word too offensive these days to use casually, so I have censored it.]

On election day in Alabama, a Black man shows up at the polls. “Sure, you can vote, boy” the poll watchers tell him, “but you know, you got to pass the literacy test.” The Black man nods. “Can you read, boy?” He nods again. The poll watcher hands him a newspaper – the Jewish Daily Forward.

“Can you read it, boy?”

“Well,” says the Black man, “I can’t read the small print, but I can read the headlines.”

“Yeah? What’s it say?”

“Schvartzim voten nisht in Alabama hay yor.”

The official title of the North Carolina law when it was proposed was

An act to restore confidence in government by establishing the voter information verification act to promote the electoral process through education and increased registration of voters and by requiring voters to provide photo identification before voting to protect the right of each registered voter to cast a secure vote with reasonable security measures that confirm voter identity as accurately as possible without restriction, and to further reform the election laws.

The shorter title was

Schwartzim ain’t votin’ in North Carolina this year.

Honor and Politics at the RNC

July 28, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

So far, the speakers at the Democratic convention have seemed much nicer than their Republican counterparts. The Republicans reveled in demonizing, insulting, and humiliating the people they disagree with. Trump of course, is the shining example, with his insulting names for his opponents. But that style is just a nastier variation on a theme that runs through Appalachia and the South – honor.

It’s not just Trump and the Trumpistas.

Maybe it was because I’d just been reading Honor Bound, Ryan Brown’s new book about “honor culture,” that I paid attention to this clip that Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs tweeted from the Republican convention. Ted Cruz had just spoken at a contentious breakfast meeting with the Texas delegation. Trump had already sewn up the nomination and many Texans resented Cruz’s refusal to endorse Trump. Here's a screenshot. For the full 28-secod video click on the link.

Texas delegates argue pic.twitter.com/DqbTZeWy1h

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) July 21, 2016

The delegate on the left, a Cruz backer, tells the bearded delegate (Steve Toth).“You’re a coward” 

“I’m a Texan,” says Toth.

“No, you’re a coward,” says the other.

The Cruz supporter makes a reference to Trump’s statements to the effect that Cruz’s wife is ugly and that Cruz’s father was in cahoots with Lee Harvey Oswald.  “If he said that about your wife or your dad, I hope you’d do the same thing. I hope you’d have some character to stand for your family.” A few seconds later, Toth responds to the earlier accusation, “You’re calling me a coward, sir.”

If you’d asked actors to improv Southern honor culture in thirty seconds, you couldn’t get much better than this. The central element in the culture of honor is reputation. From that, the rest follows:

• Hypersensitivity to insult, especially insult to one’s reputation and character or that of one’s family
• Chivalrous defense of women (so long as those women are loyal)
• Value on group loyalty
• Formal politeness
• Willingness to use violence to defend that reputation. (This does not make an overt appearance in this clip, but I could easily imagine that “You’re calling me a coward, sir,” being followed by, “Them’s fightin’ words.” Similarly, the Cruz supporter is implying that when a man scurrilously insults your family, you don’t then make deals with him. You challenge him. You fight him.)

The “coward, sir” line nicely embodies the aspect of the Southern culture that Dov Cohen calls “the paradox of politeness.” Cohen, along with Richard Nisbett, contributed much of the early thought and research on honor culture. Some of their experiments tested how men would react to a person who was being annoying and rude. Northerners showed their anger earlier on and increased their anger as the provocations continued. Southerners remained polite. . . up to a point. But when that point was reached, as Ryan Brown puts it, “Southerners went ballistic. Their reactions were so extreme, in fact, the researchers decided the study should be shut down.”

Honor culture extends beyond personal interactions. Its ethos gets written into l aws and policies. The most obvious examples are gun laws and stand-your-ground laws. States and regions where honor culture runs deepest are least likely to restrict guns and most likely to permit their use against other people. The arguments favoring these laws are always about protecting what’s yours - your life, your property, your family -even when you might safely retreat.

Those arguments rarely mention protecting your reputation and honor. And even in Texas, if you shoot a man for calling you a coward, you’re probably going to wind up in prison. But jurors, judges, and parole boards might be more sympathetic there might be more sympathetic than those where people are less burdened by the idea of honor.