Ideology and Memory

August 16, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Political ideology shapes what we see and what we consider important, as I’ve blooged recently (here and here). Ideology also skews what we remember and how we remember it.

The worst terrorist attack on this country happened on Sept. 11, 2001. George W. Bush had taken office nine months earlier on Jan. 20, 2001. Yesterday, Rudy Giuliani said, referring to Bush’s two terms,“Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States.” Here’s the video.



He is not the only one to make this mistake. Bush’s former press secretary Dana Perino left the White House at the end of Bush’s term and took a job at Fox News, where in 2009 she told viewers, “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”  (A video is here. Push the slider to the 0:35 mark.)

I do not think that Giuliani and Perino are deliberately lying. It’s just that their political views have prevented them from seeing or remembering the facts. The belief that George W. Bush effectively prevented terrorist attacks does not square with the fact that the attacks of 9/11 happened when Bush had been in office for nine months. If the facts don’t fit the belief, too bad for the facts. They are no match against the need for cognitive consistency.

What is striking about the Giuliani/Perino view is how widespread it is. I have long thought that one of the great public-relations achievements of the Bush administration was its ability to create the impression that the attacks happened on someone else’s watch. Many people seem to believe that it was someone else’s fault, though they never get around to thinking who that might be. Maybe Obama.

Even today, few people publicly blame the Bush administration for being asleep at the switch. That is certainly true of Giuliani. He loves to recount his reaction on that day.

At the time, we believed that we would be attacked many more times that day and in the days that followed. Without really thinking, based on just emotion, spontaneous, I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, “Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president.”

The Bush-Cheney administration had been in office for nine months, getting regular reports from its terrorism experts like Richard Clarke warning of Al Qaeda, reports that Bush-Cheney discounted. Clarke, when he heard the news on the morning of Sept. 11, said to himself, “Al Qaeda.”
Rudy Giuliani said, “Thank God George Bush is our president.”

Given his public commitment to Bush, Giuliani could not very well publicly acknowledge any facts suggesting that Bush was at all responsible for the attacks. It seems that he cannot even acknowledge those facts to himself. And so he winds up making a statement that is so obviously wrong the video instantly flies around the Internet (or at least around the leftward territories). 

A Boy Named Sue Ashley

August 12, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Has anyone here ever seen the movie ‘Gone With the Wind’?” I ask my class during a discussion of names. “Do you remember that there was a character named Ashley Wilkes?” I say. “That role was played by Leslie Howard.”

Most students have not seen GWTW, and they are surprised to learn that Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes is the one on the left. They know that Leslie can be a boy’s name, though it’s mostly for girls. But Ashley? Yes, Ashley. Until about 1939 (the year “Gone With the Wind” was released), Ashley was unknown as a name for girls. As a name for boys it was not common – most years, fewer than 10 per 100,000 – but it was not weird, certainly not among Southern gentry.

(Click on an image for a slightly larger view.)

Then starting around 1950 and accelerating in the 1960s, Ashley took off among girls, followed by a smaller boom among boys. (The y-axes on the graphs are not the same scale. Male Ashleys at their peak in 1980 numbered only about 40 per 100,000. In the peak year for girls, the rate was nearly 700 per 100,000.)

Boys names becoming girls names is not unusual. Nameberry has a list of more than sixty names that have “morphed from blue to pink.”  The reverse almost never happens. Leslie is a good example. Until 1940, it was rare among girls, fairly common for boys. Up until about 1910, it ranked in the top 100 names for boys.

In the mid-1940s, Leslie became increasingly popular for girls, increasingly unpopular for boys. These contrasting trajectories suggest a sort of “there goes the neighborhood” effect. As girls move in, boys move out. Eventually the name becomes thought of as feminine, and parents no longer consider it fit for boys.

Kelly follows a similar pattern. For boys, the name is unusual; for girls it’s unheard of.

Then, around 1950, the number of boy Kellys triples in a decade, though those numbers are still relatively small – only in its peak year, 1968, does it break into the top 100 and then just barely at #97.  But following the boys by ten years or so, girl Kellys come on strong.  From ranking 904^th in 1950 Kelly rose in popularity so that by 1966 she was in the top 20, where she remained for another fifteen years. The gender tipping point came in the late 1960s. Kelly became a girl’s name, and parents of boys stop choosing it.

The unusual thing about Ashley is that it reverses this pattern. The increased popularity for boys follows the girl Ashley boom by about ten years. That is, a small but increasing number of parents continued to name boys Ashley even after the name had become established as a name for girls.

Despite this exception, the unwritten rule of naming seems to be that you can give a girl a predominantly male name; she and her name will still be accepted. You might even be in the vanguard of a trend, like the parents in the late 1940s who named their daughters Ashley. But you can’t send a boy out into the world with the name Sue.                                        

Males are more constricted by norms of masculinity than are females by the norms of femininity. And not just in naming. Girls will do boy things, but the reverse is less common. It’s more acceptable for a girl to be a “tomboy” than for a boy to be a “sissy.”  Girls will watch movies targeted at boys, but boys shy away from girl-centered films. Among adults as well, women give favorable evaluations to TV shows targeted at men,  but men are less able to appreciate shows outside their narrow band of interest. (Walt Hickey at FiveThirtyEight thinks men are “sabotaging” women’s shows by giving them low ratings.) 

The same is true in fashion, where women can choose from a wider variety of colors and styles, including those usually for men. Men’s choices  are more constrained. Men will not wear skirts, but women will wear pants and even pants suits, an item of clothing I mention only as a cheap way of getting to one final name.

It follows the usual pattern – a male name, albeit an uncommon one, declining in popularity, crosses over and becomes a name for girls. Its popularity increases rapidly. Up to a point. That point was 1993. Hillary was doing fine before that, but then for some reason, parents of daughters were no longer with her.

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.”