Long time readers know I get a bit intemperate when the Old Confederacy is at issue. Here is more fuel for that particular fire with a modern spin. Sam Tanenhaus has an article in The New Republic that’s getting a lot of attention entitled Original Sin. He talks about the modern conservative’s roots going back to John C. Calhoun by way of William F. Buckley and the National Review.

The true problem, as yet unaddressed by any Republican standard-bearer, originates in the ideology of modern conservatism. When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s, they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun. This is not to say conservatives today share Calhoun’s ideas about race. It is to say instead that the Calhoun revival, based on his complex theories of constitutional democracy, became the justification for conservative politicians to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority.

Calhoun was a voice of aggrieved elitism that seems to have characterized the planter class. As Samuel Johnson put it, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Echoes of Calhoun will end up hurting the modern conservative; just as his nonsense led to the ruin of the South when Gen. Sherman undertook to show them what oppression really looked like, if only for a time.

That said, however, I don’t buy the notion that the GOP is in any real danger (let alone “grave” danger) of ceasing to be a national party. They’ll re-calibrate sooner or later, and then the Democrats will be on the defensive nationally.

Brian Howey has a good column entitled HOWEY: Gerrymandering prolongs lack of fair representation. He’s quick to point out that it’s a bipartisan enterprise, but this cycle gerrymandering seems to be advantage: Republican. Nationally, they received 1% fewer votes than the Democrats but won 54% of the House seats. In the state, they took 54% of the vote but 69% of the House seats.

This go-round, Republicans are making soothing sounds about how redistricting should take place, but you can be reasonably sure nothing will happen. Democrats are probably a little more earnest about a non-partisan redistricting plan simply because they’re on the losing end of it. My guess is that Libertarians, if asked, would give you an earful about electoral reforms that need to happen; gerrymandering being only one.

The problem is that structurally, the people who have to agree to the changes are the people who (in the short term anyway) necessarily have benefited from the status quo.

The only way significant changes are likely to be made is if it gets attention and a critical mass from below among the people.

Richard Longworth, writing at the Midwesterner, has an interesting entry entitled Failing Economies Shorten Lives.

He takes a quick look at some of the differences in lifespan among socioeconomic classes, genders, and races.

Genetics may have something to do with it. But not as much as economics and the fallout from economic differences. Poor people get less schooling, which leads to worse jobs, which leads to poorer lifestyles, which leads to stress, which leads to more smoking and drinking, which increases the chances of joblessness, which means no health insurance, all of which adds up to the kind of debilitating despair that never lengthened anyone’s life.

The biggest gap he points out – Native American men in one part of South Dakota versus Asian females in a high-rent district of New Jersey are separated by an average 33 years – with the former living to 58 years and the latter living to 91 years. But that’s maybe a sideshow – there are real and important differences between races and/or socioeconomic classes living side by side; and the expected lifespan for uneducated white people has actually gone down in recent years.

Aaron Carroll, writing at the Incidental Economist has a post entitled The zombie infant mortality explanation. He takes the Wall Street Journal to task for trotting out a discredited chestnut apologizing for the abysmal ranking of the U.S. in infant mortality statistics.

This is of particular interest to me since I heard a lot of this explanation when we were discussing the necessity of health care reform on my blog in the lead up to the Obamacare legislation. The argument is that the infant mortality comparisons are apples to oranges. Our metrics are so much more sensitive, so of course we rank last – because we’re so damn good and try so hard to save babies, we report more deaths. Turns out, not so much.

Let me quote directly from the study (page 66-7):

The high rate of adverse birth outcomes in the United States does not appear to be a statistical artifact, such as a difference in coding practices for very small infants who die soon after birth (MacDorman and Mathews, 2009). Indeed, country rankings remained identical even when Palloni and Yonker (2012) recalculated the rates to exclude preterm births (less than 22 weeks of gestation).

There are lots of reasons why our infant mortality is terrible. This isn’t one of them. It’s a zombie idea.

Reminds me of a good “Usual Suspects” quote about Keyser Soze: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” That’s what I think of sometimes when the discussion turns to problems we have that other countries are better at addressing. So often, there is an attempt to claim that either our condition isn’t really a problem or, if it is, it’s a problem that the other country never really had to deal with. Either the problem doesn’t exist or the solution doesn’t exist. That means we can keep on with the status quo.

Chris Hedges has a good column about neo-Confederacy in Memphis entitled Chris Hedges: White Power to the Rescue. Apparently there is a battle over whether a city park should be named after KKK founder and Confederate traitor in defense of slavery, Nathan Bedford Forrest or after black journalist, Ida Wells.

Like Tony Horwitz before him, I think Hedges is noting that the Civil War remains unfinished. Hedges draws parallels with Yugoslavia in the 90s. In Yugoslavia, ethnic groups discarded history in favor of myths of a glorious past that never existed. Consequently, those groups couldn’t talk to each other any more.

The embrace by nationalist groups of a nonreality-based belief system made communication with other ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural language. There was no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth.

In this episode, set in the modern Confederate States of America, Nathan Bedford Forrest is no longer a man who grew wealthy in the slave trade, committed treason to defend that gravy train, and then, having lost, created a terrorist group devoted to bigotry. No, no!:

Forrest “promoted progress for black people in this country after the war.” Boyd argued that the KKK was “more of a social club” at its inception and didn’t begin carrying out “bad and horrific things” until it reconstituted itself with the rise of the modern civil rights movement.

I see another parallel. Good white Southerners who are not particularly racist and do not have any special antipathy toward nonwhites are likely nevertheless annoyed at the prospect of downgrading the status of the heroic white traitors they grew up admiring; such as Forrest, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and the rest in favor of, say, civil rights leaders, journalists, and abolitionists. David Wong, writing for Cracked.com (yes, I am a consumer of fine literature) gives us “5 Ways You’re Accidentally Making Everyone Hate You.” These all revolve around unspoken power struggles. Number 1 is “You Assumed That Because You Were OK With a Situation, Everybody Was.”

“Why do they have to rock the boat just when things were going good?”
“Why complain now, when we’ve always done it this way?”

He points out that one of the main advantages of power is not having to think about it. You might not think about money when you’re eating at a restaurant; but you sure think about it when you’re starving. (Wong cites this article from the Slacktivist with similar thoughts about Christianity and tribalism.) So, the powerful groups can just put up monuments to icons who are hateful to non-powerful groups and just go about their business without paying much attention; and then start squealing like a stuck pig when the less powerful groups start trying to change things.

At the end of the day, a society’s monuments tell the tale of where the heart of the majority lies. We don’t put up monuments to Cornwallis and King George to pay homage to their solid effort or to celebrate our heritage. When Southerners name their parks after guys like Forrest and put up monuments to him, it tells you that they’re still conflicted about whether or not they’re committed to the Union.

Aaron Carroll has a blog post entitled A pickle for conservative states refusing the Medicaid expansion.

The background is that Obamacare was designed with the companion Medicaid expansion in mind. However, the Supreme Court threw a wrench into matters when it decided that Obamacare was constitutional but it was unconstitutional to mandate that the states expand Medicaid. Instead, now states have the option of expanding Medicaid (mostly at federal expense) or not.

Obamacare doesn’t provide subsidies for people who were supposed to qualify for Medicaid. So, you have a bit of a doughnut hole occupied by people too well off to qualify for Medicaid under current standards but not so well off that they get beyond the expanded Medicaid eligibility and begin to qualify for health insurance premium subsidies under Obamacare.

On the other hand, *legal* immigrants (and I emphasize legal because that’s so often a sticking point — illegal immigrants are out in the cold regardless) don’t qualify for Medicaid unless they’ve been here for 5 years. Because Congress knew in advance that Medicaid wasn’t going to cover them, they’ll be eligible for subsidies under Obamacare. Conservative states that reject the Medicaid expansion might well see a situation where their poor-but-not-poor-enough citizens get no medical insurance assistance but legal immigrants occupying the same economic space do get assistance by virtue of not being citizens.

Random thoughts on reading President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.

This kind of finesses my thought that history demonstrates pretty conclusively that these rights do not exist outside of government and are most definitely alienable. Alienating individuals from their right to life and liberty has historically been the rule and not the exception. And, in the State of Nature, with no government, an individual has no rights; merely the temporary strength to enforce his preferences.

Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.

Skepticism of the invisible hand, it looks like. But those who, themselves, express skepticism of government rules always take for granted those rules of which they approve — restriction of liberty in order to recognize the existence of property, for example. (“In what manner is a right of property in land conferred on me? By imposing upon every body, except myself the obligation not to touch its produce.”) And, by taking such rules for granted, and only protesting when pressed that they are not advocating anarchy, they seek to minimize the acknowledged role of government in order to maximize the simplicity and emotional impact of their anti-government rhetoric.

Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.

Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone.

Bleeding heart liberalism. All of society’s ills cannot be cured at all. To some, in fact, those ills are evidence that God’s favor is lacking; and absence of those ills in some are evidence that the individual is Elect. This is the economy-as-morality-play mentality. It is pretentious of us to attempt to mitigate the righteous punishment of the Lord. (And if it means that we get to keep our stuff and not worry about the poor who will always be among us, so much the better.)

But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.

Collective action, eh comrade? And that business about new responses sounds like so much “living document” claptrap. What’s next, penumbras?

We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.

At some level, a lot of Americans don’t really trust this. To some extent, it’s that morality play thing. If you work hard and conform, you will not be in need. And, even if you work hard but you don’t also conform, you deserve what you get. Because there is also a tribal thing going on. You have to be one of Us before we will regard you as something other than a taker when you are receiving aid. What’s required to be “us” varies – sometimes immutable characteristics like race might be be reasons for exclusion. Other times, it might be something arbitrary like religion or language. And, yet other times, it might be your approach to economic issues — if you attempted to rise above your station by following a fulfilling job rather than taking the crappy, soul-deadening, but more or less stable job, you deserve what you get. The potential of grinding punishment from risks gone bad helps keep people in line.

We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.

Bah, latte-sipping, tofu-eating, hippie-loving nonsense. Real Americans drink bad coffee; eat meat; and love to burn oil. The President wants to emasculate us, condemning us to driving the electric car from the Simpsons’ as envisioned by the “Gasoline Producers of America.” [In a wimpy voice]: “Hello, I am an electric car. I can’t go very fast, or very far. And if you drive me, people with think you’re gay!”

And, speaking of being gay:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall[.]
. . .
Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.

Seneca Falls refers to gender equality. Selma refers to racial equality. And, Stonewall refers to gay equality. That’s a good rhetorical maneuver. You take two “givens” and then try to shoehorn in a more controversial third; putting the burden on the objecting listener to provide meaningful distinctions that separate the third from the first two.

You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.

And, to me, this is the nut. “Citizens.” It’s a significant word. I didn’t use it in the tag line to my blog by accident. Being a citizen confers rights as well as responsibilities. It means that this country is ours; that this government is ours. I read and write about proposed legislation because I enjoy it, sure. But also because I feel like in a small way it’s a way in which I can fulfill my role as a citizen. To pay some attention to what our government is doing and to explain and spread that information to my fellow citizens.

We are the government, we are the country, and those things are us. Only us. Government is not a malevolent third party, abstracted from us. Rather, for good and bad, it is an extension of the citizenry. Government is often an unwieldy tool, but it is a tool all the same. It can be used for good and bad, but ultimately it is a reflection (albeit at times a fun-house mirror reflection) of its citizens.

Politics will continue to be small-bore, particular, and more than a little ugly. The daily grind will continue to demand most of our attention – the mortgage still needs paid, the kids still need to get to school, a customer will still have an emergency that’s going to be your problem, your sporting team will still have a big game coming up, there will be parties, weddings, graduations, deaths, births, holidays, illnesses, and all the rest of it. But, every once in awhile, it’s nice to step back and take the long view of what this country is and what your role in this country might be. And, then, take a deep breath before diving back down into the muck.

Because it’s never too early to start thinking about the next election, I thought I’d check out the List of Presidents of the United States and just see what the history was in terms of incumbent party versus challenging party after a two term President. I skipped the beginning Presidents because things were so much different during the time of the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. So, we’ll start with Andy Jackson and go from there:

1. Jackson succeeded by same party – Martin Van Buren (1 term).
2. Lincoln/Johnson succeeded by same party – Ulysses Grant (2 terms)*
3. Grant succeeded by same party – Rutherford B. Hayes (1 term)
4. McKinley succeeded by same party – Teddy Roosevelt (2 terms)*
5. Roosevelt succeeded by same party – William Howard Taft (1 term)
6. Woodrow Wilson succeeded by opposing party – Harding/Coolidge (2 terms).
7. Harding/Coolidge succeeded by same party – Herbert Hoover (1 term)*
8. Franklin Roosevelt succeeded by same party – Harry Truman (2 terms)*
9. Harry Truman succeeded by opposing party – Dwight Eisenhower (2 terms)
10. Eisenhower succeeded by opposing party – JFK/Johnson (2 terms)*
11. Nixon/Ford succeeded by opposing party – Carter (1 term)
12. Ronald Reagan succeeded by same party – George H.W. Bush (1 term)
13. Bill Clinton succeeded by opposing party – George W. Bush (2 terms)
14. George W. Bush succeeded by opposing party – Barack Obama (2 terms)

*I clearly had some trouble figuring out how to organize those cases where an incumbent won re-election but the vice-president filled some of the first or second term.

No terribly clear patterns, but I guess it looks like in modern times, it’s been less likely for the two term President’s party to win the following election, and almost impossible to win the next two elections.

SB 468, introduced by Sen. Schneider, is one of those oddly specific bills. According to the digest:

Grants civil immunity to the operator of a bowling center for injuries caused to a bowler who slips or falls in the bowling center due to the presence of a substance on the bowler’s shoe that was acquired outside the bowling center and tracked in. Requires the operator to post a conspicuous notice near the entrances and exits to the bowling center. Provides that the civil immunity does not apply if the operator fails to maintain the premises in a safe condition or the injury results from gross negligence or willful or wanton misconduct.

Aside from being more specific than we probably want in a law of general applicability (injuries particularly caused by a substance on a shoe tracked in from outside?), the exceptions tend to swallow the benefit of the immunity. For example, it only applies if the premises were otherwise maintained in a reasonably safe manner. The usefulness of immunity statutes comes from not having to go to trial to have a jury decide whether or not you acted reasonably. Immunity assumes negligence but denies liability. I don’t see this statute ever saving a bowling center operator from having to go to trial.

NPR’s Morning Edition had an interesting segment entitled Making Marriage Work When Only One Spouse Believes In God.

In college, I dated a couple of religious girls and it didn’t strike me as a big deal that we had different opinions on the subject of God. I should have had more of a clue when the Pentecostal broke down crying one evening; she cared for me but was afraid because I would be going to hell. (True story: I dealt with this irritation by going home and drinking and playing Mario Brothers; a beer per level. I’m still a little proud of beating level 8 in that condition.) But, I didn’t have much of a clue because: a) I’ve generally occupied a clue-free zone when it comes to the other sex; and b) I drank a lot in undergrad.

Fortunately, I’ve always led sort of a charmed life when it comes to life’s major crossroads; and I fell in love and married my wife who sees eye-to-eye with me on religious matters. (I suppose there are gradations: I’m probably a bit closer to the agnostic/atheist divide than she is.) When we had kids, it became very clear to me that I would have had a very difficult time of it if my spouse had significantly different religious beliefs than me. I remember one incident where I felt my blood boiling when I learned that a preschool teacher had informed my child that the Big Bang theory wasn’t true. I’m not sure how you cope with that sort of chasm when it’s a spouse you’re butting heads with on what to teach the kids.

And, that’s where I felt a little disappointed by the Morning Edition story. They talked to a couple where one was Lutheran and one was atheist. They respected each other’s opinions, but neither was going to embrace the religious beliefs of the other. Nonetheless, they had a sort of “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” approach to the religious component of their relationship. And that’s laudable. (Some of my best friends are religious!) But they didn’t have kids. I would have liked to learn more about the approach of atheist/believer marriages in how they raise their kids. Probably this wouldn’t be a lot different than marriages where both are believers but from significantly different faiths. I suppose the spouse with the more ardent faith gets to lead the children’s religious upbringing.

Still, I imagine that’s very difficult. My wife and I are simpatico on most of the big issues, and I’m sure that’s made our lives much easier.