Information and Power — Again

August 24, 2017 
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a post shortly after the election (here), I speculated that person holding the real power in White House policy decisions would be the chief of staff not the president.

Regardless of whose voice was loudest and most broadcast in the media or even who had the ultimate power to make decisions, what mattered was who controlled the information that would base his decisions on. 
                                                           
As it turned out, I was wrong. The theory may have been right, but Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, did not centralize the flow of information. According to an article in Politico today,

White House aides say Priebus spent much of his time doing damage control and never instituted a holistic approach or managed to corral the flow of people and paper through the Oval Office.

That may change. Priebus is out. The new chief of staff is John Kelly, who will try to be the kind of chief of staff I envisioned.

In a conference call last week, Kelly initiated a new policymaking process in which just he and one other aide . . . will review all documents that cross the Resolute desk. The new system, laid out in two memos co-authored by Kelly and Porter and distributed to Cabinet members and White House staffers in recent days, is designed to ensure that the president won’t see any external policy documents, internal policy memos, agency reports and even news articles that haven’t been vetted. The keystone of the new system is a “decision memo” that will — for each Trump policy — integrate the input of Cabinet agencies and policy councils and present the president with various options, as well as with the advantages and drawbacks of each one.

In such a system, who has more power – the person who chooses A or B, or the person who controls the content of A and B? If Kelly is successful, the “advantages and drawbacks” will be reduced to tweet-length decision memos that challenge neither Trump’s attention span nor his preference for avoiding complexity.

The advantage of having a powerful central person is efficiency. Things get done. The risk of centralization is a “groupthink” structure that excludes inconvenient but important ideas. That might be an improvement over the disorganized and ineffective administration we have seen for the past seven months. But it might also mean that the things that get done turn out to be disasters – disasters that a more open system might have avoided.

Another possibility is that even Kelly will not be able to close Trump off from other sources of information – television, family, and wealthy contributors.

Repetition, Context, Meaning

August 23, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Barcelona” is a tender and amusing song in the second act of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” I saw a production of the show last night at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

It’s early morning, Bobby’s apartment. Bobby and April, a dim-witted stewardess (this was 1970) have just had their first night together. She gets out of bed and starts putting on her airline uniform. He is ostensibly trying to persuade her to stay.

“Where you going?”
“Barcelona.”

It’s not the answer you expect when someone asks “Where are you going?” and it gets a smile or even small laugh. But when I heard the line last night, the word also reminded me of the events of a week ago – the terrorist driving a van through the crowds in La Rambla. It was a strange feeling, almost jarring at first – these two meanings of the word floating in the air at the same time. It was like hearing two versions of the same tune simultaneously in different, dissonant keys.

But by the second or third time April said “Barcelona” (she sings the word only four times, but it seems like more), the word meant to me what it had always meant. Repetition of the word in the context of the show blotted out the other connotation.

Repetition and context change a word. I was reminded of something African American novelist David Bradley said on “60 Minutes” several years ago. He was talking about the problem of the word nigger in Huckleberry Finn. A censored version of the novel had recently been issued.

Bradley uses the original version, and when he teaches the novel to high school kids, the first thing he has them do is repeat the word. They just say, “nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger. . .” over and over, a dozen times or more. Then he says, “OK, now let’s talk about the book.”

The word repeated and repeated out of its usual context loses its usual overtones. The students will now be able to hear the word in the context of the book that Mark Twain wrote.


Here’s a version of “Barcelona” with Neil Patrick Harris and Christina Hendricks.

   

The Day they Defined Dixie Deviance Down

August 22, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Thinking About the Unthinkable was the title of a 1962 book about thermonuclear war. The author was Herman Kahn. In an earlier book, Kahn maintained that thermonuclear war, like any other war, was both possible and winnable. Critics responded that to even bring discussion of such a war into the realm of rational debate turned the horror of mass annihilation into an acceptable idea.

A half-century later, Donald Trump is helping to bring the ideas of White nationalism – once closeted and unacceptable – into the realm of legitimate political discourse. At least, that’s the argument made by Emily Badger in the New York Times today* (here)

Critics fear that Trump is inviting white supremacists out of the corner, helping ideas that have become widely reviled in America to be redefined as reasonable opinions — just part of the discussion.

It’s what Pat Moynihan called “defining deviance down.” People can change their ideas so that what had once been deviant is now acceptable.

Unfortunately, it’s not always clear how norms change. People who write about the process wind up using the passive voice, a lot, as Badger does with both verbs in the second part of that sentence:  “ideas that have become widely reviled”; “to be redefined.”

Who is doing the redefining?

It probably helps if the the green light on expressing those ideas comes from an important and mainstream source – the leader of the free world, for example. Or how about a respected magazine, not Brietbart or the Daily Stormer. And how about a “Senior Fellow” some place, just to give the whole thing the trappings of scholarship? 

So here we have Arthur L. Herman, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, writing in the National Review. His article bears the title “Confederate Statues Honor Timeless Virtues – Let Them Stay” (here). If you have any doubt as to how wrong Herman is historically, read the Eric Foner piece I quoted yesterday, or see this article by Justin Fox at Bloomberg. Fox, in a footnote, cites a relevant statistic: in the 1890s in Alabama there were 177 lynchings.   

What Herman does in his article is not so much defining deviance down but rather standing it on its head. Those 177 lynchings, he argues, were good times compared with the court decisions and passage of civil rights laws seventy years later. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

[Robert E. Lee’s] dream of a new South descended into Jim Crow after he died. This is in fact the best argument that those who want these statues gone can make: that the “reconciliation” between North and South was done on the backs of blacks, and that the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow were the price America paid to have peace in the aftermath of civil war. From a historical point of view, it’s almost convincing, even though what American blacks suffered under segregation was nothing compared to what liberalism has inflicted on them since the 1950s, as it destroyed their families, their schools, and their young men and women’s lives through drugs and guns and the gangster-rap culture “lifestyle,” which is really a death style. [emphasis added]

For much of his article, Herman sounds like the stereotypical old White man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, though he’s barely into his sixties. Perhaps his views about the relative joys of Reconstruction and Jim Crow will fade as the people who hold those views age and depart this plane. But it’s also possible that when those views are given the official stamp of National Review and the Hudson Institute, they become, even for younger people, less deviant and more thinkable. No doubt, Herman Kahn, one of the founders of the Hudson Institute, would be pleased.

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* Badger cites two noteworthy sociologists, Tina Fetner and Sarah Sobieraj

The Statues That Were Never Built

August 21, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

At the ASA meetings in Montreal, someone (and I wish I could remember who it was) told me that the blog post of mine he really liked was the one about “negative space” (here). It’s from 2012, and I had only the vaguest memory of it, but here’s the gist. It started with what my grad-school roommate had said about the life drawing course he was taking.

One evening he came home and reported that the teacher had given a brilliant instruction that allowed him to make a real breakthrough.  What the teacher had said was this:     Don’t draw the figure, draw what’s not there.  Draw the negative space around the subject. In social science too, the solution to a problem sometimes starts with thinking about the part that isn’t there.

Today’s New York Times op-ed by Eric Foner (here) provides an excellent example. Much has been written in the past week or so about the statues of Robert E. Lee and other heroes of the Confederacy that are now central points in a political-cultural tug-of-war. Historians examine the provenance of the statues – who put them up and when – to reveal what these chunks of stone are saying. But, says Foner, we can also learn a lot about the statues and their meaning by thinking about the statues that are absent from the public square.

If the issue were simply heritage, why are there no statues of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, one of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s key lieutenants? Not because of poor generalship; indeed, Longstreet warned Lee against undertaking Pickett’s Charge, which ended the battle of Gettysburg. Longstreet’s crime came after the Civil War: He endorsed black male suffrage and commanded the Metropolitan Police of New Orleans, which in 1874 engaged in armed combat with white supremacists seeking to seize control of the state government. Longstreet is not a symbol of white supremacy; therefore he was largely ineligible for commemoration by those who long controlled public memory in the South. As all historians know, forgetting is as essential to public understandings of history as remembering. Confederate statues do not simply commemorate “our” history, as the president declared. They honor one part of our past. Where are the statues in the former slave states honoring the very large part of the Southern population (beginning with the four million slaves) that sided with the Union rather than the Confederacy? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery or to the hundreds of black lawmakers who during Reconstruction served in positions ranging from United States senator to justice of the peace to school board official? Excluding blacks from historical recognition has been the other side of the coin of glorifying the Confederacy.

According to a YouGov poll, most of the public (54%) see the statues as symbols of Southern pride. Only half that many see them as symbols of racism. And a plurality of the respondents disapprove of removing the statues, though there is an understandable difference between Whites and Blacks.  (I’m puzzled by the high rate of “No Opinion,” especially among Blacks.)                       

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

I would expect that most of the statue supporters in the South would say that they are motivated by Southern pride and not racism. But after reading Foner’s article, I wonder how would they respond to a proposal that their town square add a statue of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet? Or Frederick Douglass? Or the first Black senator from their state?