Blaming the Bishops

April 5, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

People who write op-eds sometimes attribute their own opinions and ideas not to themselves but to “the public” or “America.” “The public seems to be angry about values,” wrote David Brooks in 2010, though as I pointed out in this post, surveys at the time showed that values ranked low among the issues the public was concerned about. In January, 2016, during primary season, Times op-ed writer Ross Douthat was projecting his own feeling about “decadence” onto supporters of Trump and Bernie Sanders (here) .

Thomas Groome, who came to the US from Ireland in 1972, has a similar intuition about US Catholics and why they are no longer the loyal Democrats they once were. In a Times op-ed (here) he writes:

This was due at least in part to the shift by many American Catholic bishops from emphasizing social issues (peace, the economy) to engaging in the culture wars (abortion, gay marriage). Along the way, many Catholics came to view the Democrats as unconditionally supporting abortion.

The logic of the argument is this:

• When bishops emphasized Church’s position favoring change on social issues, Catholics sided with Democrats because the Democrats too emphasized social issues.
• When bishops emphasized the Church’s position against abortion, Catholics sided with Republicans because the Republicans opposed abortion.

Obviously, Groome doesn’t like the bishops’ shift in focus.  But has it really driven Catholics to abandon the Democrats? Protestants, too (White Protestants, that is), have become less Democratic, and surely they are not paying much attention to Catholic bishops.

Some of the letters that the Times printed letters in response to Groome’s op-ed agreed that the Democrats’ support of abortion rights was losing them the Catholic vote. (“I’m an Irish-Italian Catholic who would normally vote Democratic, but the incessant and strident pro-abortion stance of the Democratic Party sickens me and perhaps others in the country.”)
 
This argument assumes that anti-abortion sentiment is more widespread among Catholics, regardless of whether the bishops were responsible for it. But the GSS and other surveys show little difference between Protestants and Catholics on this issue. 

Perhaps there is a difference in salience, with more Catholics, like the letter writere, making abortion their primary political concern. Unfortunately, the GSS hasn’t asked about that in thirty years, and I know of no other survey that allows for Protestant-Catholic comparisons on this question. What the mid-80s GSS found was that Catholics were indeed more likely to assign a great deal of importance to abortion. However, those Catholics were still a 20% minority. For the large majority of Catholics and Protestants, abortion was less important.

Besides, even if the views of the bishops were being relayed by parish priests, there were fewer Catholics in the pews to hear the message. Catholics have become less religious. The percent who say they never go to mass has increased while those who attend regularly has declined.

A better explanation seems to be that what the bishops say matters far less than do demographic trends. On things like income, education, urban/suburban/small town, etc. White Catholics resemble White Protestants. In presidential elections, Protestant-Catholic differences in voting have usually been only two or three percentage points. In the two most recent elections, the Republican candidate did better among White Catholics than among White Protestants (59-57% for Romney,  60-58% for Trump).

What’s significant is not that church doctrine these days has so little sway in the political views of US Catholics. We are long past the time when anyone thought that Catholic politicians would be “taking orders from the Pope.”  So it’s not surprising that Catholic voters are not taking orders from the bishops. More interesting is that religious identity has become so divorced from political identity. In 1960, Kennedy got 78% of the Catholic vote. Forty-four years later, Catholics preferred the WASP George W. Bush over Catholic John Kerry 52-47. (And if you factor out Hispanics, among White Catholics, Kerry lost by an even larger margin – 56-43.)

From Kennedy 78% to Kerry 43% is a big drop. But it’s unlikely that the bishops or even abortion had much to do with it. 

EdSpeak Deliveryman

April 2, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

When my son lived at home, a favorite family game when we ate out was MenuSpeak – scanning the restaurant menu for meaningless adjectives and adverbs.

Tender moist morsels of succulent chicken sauteed to perfection and topped with a reduction of the finest white wine delicately seasoned with fragrant, aromatic spices and herbs carefully selected by our talented chef.

Restaurants are always cooking things “to perfection,” probably because the instructions on the pre-portioned, flash-frozen dishes tell the staff exactly how long to set the microwave for.

I was reminded of our game recently when I received* a copy of the Executive Summary of a report that a university prepared for an accreditation review. The Key Findings of the  Summary comprise seven “standards,” written to perfection in EdSpeak. I give you Standard III.

Design and Delivery of the Student Learning Experience.  The University provides students with rich and diverse interlocking learning experiences that include a revitalized General Education Program that reflects stronger coherence, rigorous and innovative academic programs that are relevant and integral to the generation of the flat global world, and a range of other high impact co-curricular activities that offer significant opportunities for students to enrich their learning experiences.

I took out the adjectives and similar verbiage. Here’s what was left.

The University provides students with a General Education Program and co-curricular activities.

I think this means that they offer a lot of courses and also credits for non-classroom work. As for the rest, I have no idea. I do see that if I were there, I would not be a teacher. I would be a Student Learning Experience Deliveryman. I would deliver tender moist morsels of learning experience.

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* In keeping with the political spirit of the times, I am not going to disclose my sources. 

The Winds of Privilege

March 25, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

One day last summer on Long Beach Island, I was riding my bike to the fish store. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful ride. I was pedaling along almost effortlessly. Just a couple of weeks of getting around by bicycle – no car, no subways – had made a difference.

I got some scallops – always fresh on LBI and always delicious – and headed home. But on the way back, I suddenly noticed that I was pushing against a headwind. By the time I got home, I had broken a sweat. The funny thing was that on the way up, with a strong breeze at my back easing my ride, I hadn’t noticed the wind factor at all.

(Not me, and not Long Beach Island.)

Privilege is like cycling with the wind. It’s invisible to the privileged.

The picture below has been making the rounds of the leftish hemisphere of the Internet. It shows Republican legislators discussing the health care bill – Ryancare, Trumpcare, GOPcare, the AHCA, whatever. It’s the bill they promised to vote on yesterday and then didn’t. One of the issues under discussion was whether “essential benefits” would include maternity services.

Mike Pence (that’s him in the center) tweeted the photo, adding “Appreciated joining @POTUS for meeting with the Freedom Caucus again today. This is it. #PassTheBill 2:21 PM - 23 Mar 2017.”

What’s striking is not that a men-only conference is deciding on health care legislation about women. It’s that none of them noticed. If they hadn’t been so utterly clueless, one of them would have suggested bringing in a few token women for the photo op. (I suspect that some of them later regretted their insensitivity – not to women, but to “optics.”)

In July 2016, Pew Research (here) did a survey on perceptions of gender discrimination. The question offered two choices

• Significant obstacles still make it harder for women to get ahead than men
• Obstacles that made it harder for women to get ahead are largely gone.

The results are not all that surprising.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

A gender gap cuts across party lines, though it cuts most deeply in Republican territory, where twice as many men as women think that obstacles to women’s success are history. That GOP stag party deciding on maternity benefits is fairly representative of the party, though as the survey shows, ideology is purer among those at the top. Besides, the boys in the photo are the Freedom Caucus. If Pew had surveyed Tea Partistas, the 75% bar in the graph would be even higher.

Half the Republican women think that women face significant obstacles, but the issue may not be high on their list. After all, ninety percent of them voted for Trump (or perhaps against Hillary). If you’re going to vote for a serial pussy-grabber, that headwind you’re pedaling against can’t be very important.

The BBC, in its story (here) on the Pence photo, also included this companion picture from Saudi Arabia – the group that was launching the Qassim Girls Council. See any women?

Also seated, though not seen in the photo, were five other members of the council. All men.

Ignorance, Bliss, and Political News

March 18, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I can’t listen to the news anymore,” I said, “It’s too depressing.” The guy I said this to has been in journalism most of his adult life, so I’m sure he hasn’t cut back. If anything, he’s binge newsing these days. But I’m not alone. Google “news depressing” and you get nearly 40 million pages to choose from.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Arthur Brooks thinks so too in his Times op-ed today.

in the past couple of years, I have noticed a happiness pattern that relates to politics. Namely, the people most in the know tend to be unhappier than those who pay less attention.

Does an interest in politics lead to depression?  Is political ignorance bliss? When Arthur Brooks thinks what I think, I have to check my personal reactions and impressions against better information. Brooks provides some.

I analyzed the 2014 data from the General Social Survey. . . The results were significant. Even after controlling for income, education, age, gender, race, marital status and political views, being “very interested in politics” drove up the likelihood of reporting being “not too happy” about life by about eight percentage points.

I went to see for myself. I didn’t control for all those variables – I figured the cell sizes would get very small. But the overall picture I got from the GSS was very different from what Brooks said.

(GSS respondents have three choices on the Happiness variable: Very Happy, Pretty Happy, Not Too Happy. I have left out the middle group.)

I don’t know why I didn’t find what Brooks found. Nor am I not sure what to make of the results. Unhappiness is highest among both the most interested and the least. Does this suggest “moderation in all things (or at least all things political interest)”?

Maybe 2014 was a strange year. The GSS had asked a similar question about political interest in three previous years. The sample size is larger, and the data spans sixteen years.

This time the trend is clear, and it clearly contradicts Brooks. As political interest decreases the percent who are “not too happy” increases, and the percent who are “very happy” increases.

But even if the correlation went the way Brooks thinks it does, his explanation makes a huge leap of logic. The news is depressing, he says, because it shifts our “locus of control” from internal to external. It creates “a belief that external forces (such as politics) have a large impact on one’s life.”

An external locus of control brings unhappiness.. . . . An external locus is correlated with worse academic achievement, more stress and higher levels of depression. To be sure, an external locus of control is not necessarily inaccurate. . . . However, the external locus of control can also be based on an illusion that something affects us — meaning that the resulting unhappiness is unnecessary.

Brooks assumes that what news junkies get from the political news is information about things that will affect their lives. That’s a big assumption. My impression is that for many news watchers, the political news is like sports. They root for their preferred politicos and policies in the same way they root for their team– not because a victory directly affects their lives but just because they want their side to win. The support for banning Muslims in order to keep America safe from terrorism is strongest in places where people’s lives are least likely to affected by a terrorist attack.

Unlike sports news, political news often has a moral component. We want to see our team triumph not just because winning is fun but because in this case it is morally right. People might hate the Yankees or the Cowboys, but nobody is chanting for them to be locked up for their sins. The partisan news shows specialize in stories that provoke moral outrage, and these are the shows most likely to be watched by those with a strong interest in politics.

But even if Brooks is wrong about the data, and even if he is wrong that paying attention to the news shifts our locus of control to external, his advice about locus of control seems sensible.

Get involved in a tangible way — volunteering, donating money or even running for office. This transforms you from victim of political circumstance to problem solver.