Who’s Shameless?

August 11, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

How can Donald Trump, with his 39 Pinocchios from Fact Checker, continue to make false and outrageous claims? How could he denigrate the gold star parents of a Musliim US soldier killed in Afghanistan? Why has he no sense of shame?

Trevor Noah, interviewed on Ezra Klein’s podcast, suggested that it started with bankruptcy. For most people, declaring bankruptcy is a matter of shame. It is a public admission of failure. But for a business, it’s not really so bad. American bankruptcy laws allow business persons to pick themselves, dust themselves off, pay their creditors and suppliers a fraction of what they are owed, and start all over again. Which is what Trump has done at least four times. Even if he might have felt a slight touch of shame the first time, it quickly wore off in subsequent bankruptcies. Trump the businessman might have taken a financial hit, but Trump the public person suffered no loss of social standing.

Before looking for other explanations – surely they must be out there – I wanted to  see the extent of the image of Trump as shameless, I went to Google.

Nearly 700,000 hits. The difference between him and other polticians must be huge. For comparison, I tried the Democratic nominee.

Hillary, by this measure, is not quite so shameless as the Donald, but 500,000 seemed like a lot. Then again, her opponents could reel off a list of scandals dating back to her days in Arkansas. I tried a few successful presidential candidates.

Obama and Bush were not so far behind. The toll was high even for Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, who served before shouts of “shameless” could be echoed around the Internet. Besides, Reagan and Carter, whatever you thought of their policies, seemed like decent human beings. Yet their quotient of “shameless” pages runs to hundreds of thousands. I confess I am ignorant of the ways of the Google algorithm and what those numbers actually reflect. Still, nearly half a million seems like a lot.

Maybe this is not about the politicians themselves. It’s about reactions to those politicians, especially in a polarized polity. Partisans strongly committed to their own point of view often believe that those who disagree with them are acting in bad faith. (See this earlier post about politics and perception.) They think that their own views are so obviously valid and true that a person who sees things otherwise must be denying reality and deliberately lying. These denials and lies are so blatant, so transparent, that most people would be ashamed to utter them. Who could say things that they know are factually and morally wrong?  The politician who is shameless. But the shamelessness may be mostly in the eye of the beholder

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.