Mixing It Up: A New Progressive Political Strategy

Mixing It Up: A New Progressive Political Strategy

This essay is an attempt to outline a domestic political strategy for progressives that focuses on ways to bridge our class, racial, and political divides.  It is built on the conviction that this cannot happen with more arguing, more posturing, or more manipulation by special interests.  It specifies policy choices that can bring Americans together, not metaphorically but in real life: integrated neighborhoods and schools, national service, unbiased news. It isn’t neutral between liberals and conservatives, it is resolutely liberal, but it does try to frame our choices in ways that can appeal to both sides.

I recently read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, which has become the go-to book for people trying to figure out why so many poor white Americans voted for Trump. Vance tells us how millions of Appalachians migrated out of the hills to find work and brought with them a culture of dysfunction—hair-trigger, chip-on-the-shoulder tempers; distrust of authority; wary of schools and learning; insanely loyal to family but violent and neglectful towards actual wives, husbands, and children. These tendencies were kept in check in the good times, but have eaten away at entire communities as jobs and opportunity evaporated. Today these communities are rife with opioids, alcoholism, suicide, and despair. Trump’s promise to bring back jobs, his belligerence, his scorn for the hated elites, has proven irresistible.

Vance is a thoughtful guy—I heard him recently in a discussion with Ezra Klein from Vox, and he integrates his personal history with a good knowledge of research on many of the issues—but he has a generally conservative takeaway that I think is off-base in one critical respect. He thinks because the problems are cultural that they can’t be solved by public policy. His hillbillies have a ‘learned helplessness’ that he believes is made worse by government policies that often reward people for failing. Bad policies are a serious problem, but Vance makes a mistake that is unfortunately common across the political spectrum in thinking that cultural change can only come from ‘within.’ Yes, cultures—values, identities, norms—do need to change, and not just for Vance’s ‘hillbillies.’ But culture is not something independent of policies and institutions; they are interwoven. And while cultural change has to take place in the head and the heart, the levers to induce it are often external.

The core experience that Vance relates is revealing. The Appalachian mindset cuts its members off from the outside world. Vance describes all the times he suffered from not knowing how the world worked—not just specific skills like how to apply for college or what to wear to a job interview, but deeper intangibles such as how a ‘normal’ family interacts, or how to respond to perceived insults without rage and violence, or how to resist the cycle of impulse buying, debt, and poverty. These ways of behaving were simply outside his experience. Anyone who has tried to unravel the knot of race and class in America has seen the same chaotic family dynamics, the same isolation from the broader world, in our inner cities.

Vance didn’t escape by some miraculous spiritual change. He did it with the help of two big public institutions: the US Marines, and Ohio State University. They were not the whole story—love and guidance from his grandparents were crucial–but they were necessary. Through them he came to understand the outside world and eventually navigate his way to a Yale law degree.

OK, so what is the lesson here? What do we do? Thoughtful people on both left and right properly lament the loss of community and shared identity in today’s America–and beyond, as anyone with even a casual acquaintance with European politics can attest. This problem has contemporary causes but deeper roots: Tocqueville worried two centuries ago about the atomization of modern man in an era of democracy and equality. Middletown in the 1920s and Robert Putnam 20 years ago in “Bowling Alone” lamented that radio, automobiles, and television were increasing social isolation and withdrawal into private life, trends now accelerated by the internet and social media.

What I propose is that we look hard at how this loss of civic community is endangering our democracy, and do something about it. This is what I see: communities of decline in both white and black America; rising economic inequality where a minority wins and the majority loses, spurring a furious winner-take-all mentality to seize the shrinking opportunities still available; political polarization that is furthered by gerrymandering and laws proclaiming ‘money is speech.’ We are segregating ourselves geographically by income, race, religion and politics. Not surprisingly, those who have the least actual contact with immigrants, minorities, or poor white ‘deplorables’ are those who fear them the most.

I think this can be tackled by public policy mixed with purposeful individual action. A ‘bring us together’ strategy that is about really bringing us together, not in some gauzy metaphorical way but real, no-kidding living with and dealing with other Americans across lines of race and class—that’s a way forward I think people can get behind. Americans know something is wrong but don’t know what to do about it. We need to mix it up. Here’s how.

Living together. Vance himself sees clearly that mixing is the key to progress: “As Brian Campbell, another Middletown teacher, told me, ‘When you have a large base of Section 8 [Federal housing vouchers] parents and kids supported by fewer middle-class taxpayers, it’s an upside-down triangle. There’re fewer emotional and financial resources when the only people in a neighborhood are low-income. You just can’t lump them together, because then you have a bigger pool of hopelessness.’ On the other hand, he said, ‘put the lower-income kids with those who have a different lifestyle model, and the lower-income kids start to rise up.’” [my emphasis]

Having said this, Vance turns it into another reason to bash the government: “Yet when Middletown recently tried to limit the number of Section 8 vouchers offered within certain neighborhoods, the federal government balked. Better, I suppose, to keep those kids cut off from the middle class.” This is unfortunate. The answer is, fix the policy so Middletown can do some valuable social engineering. Nobody will mix together if the market is left to its own devices. Do the hard work of convincing cities and counties to put low-income housing in wealthier neighborhoods. Fix restrictive zoning laws. Mobilize the private sector, which in many high-rent areas is unable to attract and keep workers because they can’t afford to live nearby. Use the clout the Federal government has with Section 8 and other housing programs to the same end.

Learning Together I. Housing is closely linked to education. Here too the answer is mixing together, integration. Research consistently shows that integrated schools are the single best way to raise the performance of the poor and minorities. Schools where kids from wealthier, more stable families help socialize their peers in the skills and attitudes needed for success—while learning their own invaluable lessons in empathy and diversity—are the best device we know for positive generational change.

When I lived in Montgomery, Alabama many black residents of a certain age told me similar stories of their own history. They had been lucky enough to go to the public schools when they were integrated (under court order) in the 1970s and 1980s. They had benefited from the better teachers, facilities, and learning environment. They had made white friends, many of whom they still had, giving them ongoing social connections in the business and political world of Montgomery. But most of them were saddened by what had happened since. In the 1990s support for integration ebbed as white politicians used racial and economic fear to undermine support. Court mandates expired. White families moved out of the city or sent their kids to private schools. Today’s black children go to largely all-black schools. Schools with too many students from high-poverty neighborhoods rarely succeed. The older generation of black Montgomerians shakes its head at the contrast between their school years and those of their children and grandchildren: no contact with white society, failing schools, violence and gangs, disrespect for authority.

In much of America we are going in the wrong direction. According to an analysis by ProPublica “In 1972, due to strong federal enforcement, only about 25 percent of black students in the South attended intensely segregated schools in which at least nine out of 10 students were racial minorities. In districts released from desegregation orders between 1990 and 2011, 53 percent of black students now attend such schools.”

Strong, integrated public schools that mix kids together as they grow up: easy to say, hard to do. Well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning parents and politicians have fought tooth and nail to keep poor people and black people out of their neighborhoods and schools. When unable to block programs, they have moved into new suburbs and sent their kids to private academies. Many politicians and activists have given up, and politicians continue to exploit the concerns of middle-class parents worried that their kids will fall behind in the ever-tightening race to get into the right high school, the right summer program, the right internship, the right college. But success here is foundational if we want to pull future generations out of poverty. Our country is failing millions and millions of its citizens.

This is not a pipe-dream. The Washington Post had an article recently about a decades long school desegregation program in Louisville, Kentucky that has been supported by community leaders in the face of fierce criticism. The Republican legislature is now trying to force Louisville to end the program. This is exactly backwards. We need more Louisvilles and more leadership from within our cities and counties to integrate schools and housing.

We also need to be honest about our language. “Privatizing” is often a code word for segregating. Privatized schools and “school choice” are ways for parents to evade integration and send their kids to schools with their own kind. We need to call out these programs which make it easier to unmix society. The remedy is to ensure that our public schools, all of them, are places where parents will not be afraid to send their kids because they are afraid they will fall off the education conveyor belt that leads to a good college and upward mobility. It cannot be acceptable anywhere in our country for schools to lack top-quality resources and teachers.

Learning Together II. If we aren’t mixing it up enough in elementary and secondary schools, we are doing no better when it comes to higher education. This is especially true for our elite schools, the most competitive, the ones where admission is an automatic ticket to success. At many of them strides have been made to include minorities, and there are lots of foreign students, but there isn’t enough real diversity of thought. The disturbing signs of this are seen in attacks on people who don’t hew to ‘acceptable’ standards, like the assaults—verbal and physical–recently on Charles Murray at Middleton College. Smart but often coddled 18 year olds show up on campus and are bathed in a sea of hypersensitivity and faux-outrage that would take a very mature and tough personality to resist. A vicious circle has been created in many departments where teachers and students with non-conforming (not just conservative or traditionalist, but moderate and liberal), views are not welcome and so stay away.

In response we’ve seen the creation of religious and self-consciously ‘conservative’ colleges, like Hillsdale College in Michigan. And there has been an explosion of foundations, thinktanks, and special on-campus institutes funded by the Koch Brothers and other rich conservatives hoping to inject their favorite ideas into the academic bloodstream. But these are cures worse than the disease, replicating the close-mindedness of ultra-liberal schools but with a conspiratorial focus on grooming activists to fight the culture wars. They serve to draw battle lines, not reach across them.

I have looked extensively at articles and essays by Trump-leaning intellectuals, and I can state categorically that nothing aggravates them and unites them with conservatives across lines of class and region and background like hatred of campus-based “political correctness.”  It symbolizes the out of touch, coastal elites. It is toxic because it is seen as not just disagreement with, but contempt for, a set of beliefs and values and behaviors. It is an assault on identity and meaning.

To be fair, many of these attacks are overblown, done for political effect, and based on a few anecdotes, not reality. A free, self-governing academic institution will, in my view, always incline towards pluralism, tolerance, and open-ended debate; in short, it will be liberal. Americans need to be confronted with hard truths about race, class, gender and other blind spots. But when Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld tell us they don’t like to do campus shows anymore because students can’t take a joke, something is wrong.

One battleground is college costs and accessibility. Conservatives are seeking to wring liberalism out of higher education by making once-affordable public colleges more and more expensive, hoping that high costs and daunting student loans will push students away from the humanities and social sciences and into less ‘ideological’ and more lucrative STEM majors. This would be a tragedy for our country: bad for the economy, which thrives not on narrow skills but on innovation and new ideas that bridge disciplines; and bad for democratic citizenship, which needs the perspective of the liberal arts. (A recent example of a state that steered its best and brightest into science and engineering and away from history, literature, and social science: the Soviet Union. That went well.)

Instead, it would be better to democratize higher education by making college more affordable, ensuring that the student body is more broadly representative across all the different parts of the university. Make sure the kids from Middletown and Detroit can go to a good college and, once there, can major in anthropology or English if that’s what they want.

(Mixing would be more likely if employers and society as a whole would stop fetishizing degrees from certain schools. There is plenty of evidence that successful graduates from State U’s are just as talented and hardworking as those from Harvard and Stanford. The top schools are sorting mechanisms that pull in lots of high-achievers who are looking for the imprimatur and network advantages of an elite degree. As long as that is true the wealthy and well-connected will continue to use all their tools to get their kids the inside track, elbowing aside those who get in the way and staying away from ‘lesser’ schools. Maybe putting some judges on the Supreme Court who didn’t go to Yale or Harvard would be a start.)

Serving Together. We don’t ask much of Americans these days. And we don’t do much to offset the increasing tendency of Americans to segregate themselves by income, by race, by religion, by political orientation. We used to have an institution, the draft, that did this for three decades, from 1940-1970. It threw together kids from all parts of the country, all classes, all races (after 1948). The poor, isolated ones from small towns and Appalachia and inner-city ghettoes got a crash course in the wider world. The wealthier and better-schooled got an equally valuable lesson in the narrowness of their comfortable lives, that wisdom and moral fiber are no monopoly of the well-off.

Vietnam ended support for the draft. One reason is that it stopped being a genuine equalizer. The rich and well-connected got exemptions and went to college, while the poor went to the rice paddies. Any mandatory service program that doesn’t apply to everyone is a nonstarter.

Our professional military is more capable than ever, but without the draft it is dangerously distant from the country it serves. In an age with little need for massed infantry, the draft may not be a military necessity. But some way to give our young people the experience of working together for the common good is, I believe, a moral and political necessity. The military can be one option, but not the only one, for a program of required service. And when supporters argue for it, they shouldn’t shy away from its purpose—not to save money, or give young people job skills, but to help create the kind of American citizens we need.

There is a tremendous appetite, in my view, for a national call to service. The privileged young understand that they have unearned advantages and need to get in touch with the ‘real world.’ In Born on Third Base, Chuck Collins tells us that many people born rich are eager to connect with those who have less. The less privileged for their part badly need the skills, the networking, the exposure to the outside world.

Martin O’Malley (remember him?) had a strong national service program in his campaign platform. He called for increasing AmeriCorps, starting multiple new federal service programs, integrating service programs into college curricula, and giving service graduates help with education and future employment. Not a bad plan, thought it’s not clear if a voluntary program is enough or if these programs will pull in poorer, less-educated volunteers. Service Year Alliance is a network that hopes to shift the culture to make a voluntary service year an expected part of life. Sebastian Junger in his recent book Tribe describes eloquently how Americans suffer from not feeling they matter, not feeling they belong to something bigger than themselves. He wants a big national service program. I’m with him.

Getting Informed Together. Just as “choice” in education ends up segregating kids by race and class, so expanded choice in how we get news and media is segregating us into narrow, like-minded circles. It is making us less informed and more vulnerable to being misled and manipulated.

For government to try and clean up ‘fake news’ or limit what Americans can search or say is very dicey. There is no appetite for a Ministry of Information. But there are things we can do.

Teaching us how to navigate our information environment needs to be a priority for our schools, in every subject, every class. It has never been more important to learn the fundamentals of the scientific method, how to marshal facts, scrutinize evidence, make a logical argument, write a coherent paragraph, and factcheck what you see and hear. We need to teach our children a history that tells hard truths and gives them a realistic foundation for confidence and pride in their country. We cannot scrub our information environment clean of germs and viruses–we need to inoculate ourselves, and we need to recognize that this is a heroic task for our educators, and give them the tools and recognition to do the job. They are on the front lines in a war that we must win. Let’s consider a ‘public education’ campaign akin to a public health campaign, with an Information General for the US with a fancy uniform and a platform to spread the gospel.

The information middlemen who are making money off our tweets and clicks also have to take responsibility, and fear damage in some way if they don’t. The incentives need to shift from delivering the biggest payoff to whatever meme or rumor or outrageous fabrication gets the most eyeballs. The culprit behind much of the distortion we see is advertising; if news providers depend on advertising, their first loyalty is not to accuracy or objectivity but to making users keep clicking. If they can achieve this with finger-pointing and partisan attacks and scary conspiracy theories, well then, welcome to Breitbart and Russian internet trolls.

Social media and search sites have competing incentives; they want traffic and users, but they don’t want their brand to become debased to the point that people get turned off. They’re taking hesitant steps to stop the worst offenders. Advertisers will keep ads off sites if they think customers will be offended. So let’s be offended. This requires naming and shaming, threats to boycott products and companies, and a well-funded movement to monitor advertising across lots of blogs and websites. The Facebooks, Twitters and Googles should be held to account by users who threaten to move to more responsible platforms if they don’t take meaningful action.

Walter Isaacson has a wise suggestion in a recent Atlantic article “How to Fix the Internet”:  rework the internet to remove the anonymity that lets hackers, basement-dwelling trolls and Russian interlopers have their way with today’s open system.  Anonymity lets a thousand flowers bloom, but today too many of them have turned into weeds.  As Isaacson says, “In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The internet has proven him correct.”  We should not resign ourselves to seeing our communication system become a weapon aimed at democracy and at truth itself.

The advertising model needs to be rethought.  Isaacson recommends a new Internet protocol should include a built-in funding mechanism to let content providers get royalties from search engines whenever their material is used.  Funding platforms and content providers with user subscriptions or donations (like Wikipedia) might be a way to reduce the incentive to grab viewers with extreme content.

Voting Together. Gerrymandering is often described as “elected officials picking their voters,” rather than voters picking their officials. It works by carefully drawing district lines to create safe majorities for one party or another. Because the general elections are not competitive, the real competition occurs in the primary for the dominant party, which tends to focus on the most extreme and ideological voters, because that’s who comes out for primaries. In short, gerrymandering unmixes voters and makes politics more extreme. It makes it less necessary to craft a broad coalition to get elected. The theory of democracy embedded in the Constitution is that in a large, diverse country politicians will move to the center to grab the mythical “median voter,” requiring compromise and moderation. That’s not what we’re seeing today.

The negative effects of gerrymandering are magnified when it’s easy for special interests to fund elections and primaries. Thanks to Citizens United and earlier, related Supreme Court decisions, there are few restrictions today on how much private citizens, corporations, and PACs can give. Influencing a congressional or state primary where decisions are often made by a few hundred voters is a lot easier than influencing hundreds of thousands in a general election. And the best way to do this is to promote more extreme views to mobilize activists and raise money.

These are problems for which there are good policy fixes. Since the Constitution puts the power to define districts with the states, voters at the state level can support laws taking the power to set district lines out of the hands of legislatures and into a non-partisan commission. This has already been done in California, Colorado, Ohio, and other states. Undoing Citizen’s United and the doctrine that money is speech and corporations are people is harder, because it will take either a constitutional amendment or a shift in the balance on the Supreme Court. But multiple groups are building momentum for change, drawing on widespread dissatisfaction with the Court’s rulings.

Americans are self-congratulatorily exceptional in many ways, and one of them is our extreme conservatism when it comes to changing our political and electoral systems. The vast majority of Americans have no idea that in most of the world it is normal to elect more than one representative from a district, for legislatures to have multiple parties, for elections to result not in gridlock but in prime ministers and parliamentary majorities that can actually enact new policies; in short, for a kind of political diversity that is beyond our experience. The supposed laboratory of the states is a great wasteland of sameness when it comes to real alternatives. Many reforms could be tried at the state and local level if leaders are pressured by activists who want to mix us up by giving more voice to third parties, or funding campaigns with lots of small donations instead of a few big spenders.

Administering Together. Periodically reformers propose that one part or other of the Federal bureaucracy be moved out of Washington to the hinterlands. That time has come. Not only does modern communication make it feasible, but Washington is drowning in too many cars, too many high-priced condos, and too many well-to-do, well-educated, well-meaning bureaucrats and the pricy lobbyists and lawyers that follow them around. Move Housing and Urban Development to Detroit, Agriculture to Omaha, Interior to Albuquerque, Energy to Oklahoma City, Transportation to Philadelphia, Education to Birmingham. The rest of the country will benefit from an infusion of jobs and restaurants. More importantly, there will be less inclination for Americans to think of the government as some set of aliens dropped inside the Beltway by flying saucers, and less inclination for bureaucrats to forget where they came from.

Conclusion. This is not an exhaustive list, just some of the ways we can choose to mix or unmix America. It’s an argument to shift perspective that is politically neutral: that we are better off the more we live together, learn together, fight together, serve together, inform together, vote together, govern together. We have, both wittingly and unwittingly, often chosen to separate ourselves. This is a hard trend to buck because the good things we think we want, more money and freedom and choice, are exactly what let us buffer ourselves from fellow citizens who are different or make us uncomfortable.

The fear that our country is breaking apart is not a liberal or a conservative fear. I heard it in the Occupy movement and the ensuing national conversation about rising income inequality and the threat of a new oligarchy. I hear it in the anger of Trump supporters with identity politics, which they see as privileging sub-national or supra-national values at the expense of anything distinctively American.

Obviously most of what this essay proposes is out of step with the direction of the Trump Administration. But if the analysis here is right, Trump’s policies will make our divisions worse and many Americans will want even more desperately a way forward that brings us together. Liberals need to be ready with answers.

A terrible weakness of contemporary liberal politics, in my opinion, is that it comes across as all taking and no giving, all rights and no obligations. It is a list of things we want government to do for us. When liberals complain that “they” are voting against their self-interest, that’s what they mean: not voting for the clear benefits they’ll get from Washington. But nobody likes to be told that all they care about is their narrow self-interest. People often vote for reasons of identity and values and whether politicians seem to ‘get’ who they are. We need a liberal politics that asks Americans to sacrifice something for the sake of a shared national goal, something beyond requiring the rich to pay higher taxes.

If our American identity is to have real meaning it can’t be only a chest-thumping assertion of our rights, or a commitment to allowing everyone the maximum of individual choice and market access. Nor should it be a mystical Bannonesque communion of blood wrapped in a narrow Anglo-European culture. A democratic society cannot be held together by electrons; we are not going to post and tweet our way to a shared life. Democracy is about people knowing and trusting one another. It needs to be created and sustained every day in the way we Americans choose to live—together, or separately. Living together will require some risks and some sacrifices. Let’s be brave, and choose a life that brings us face to face with our fellow citizens.