Elections Are the Best Surveys

Many Americans are concerned about the apparent increase in open expression of racist attitudes since Donald Trump, who has made racist remarks for his entire public career, became the Republican nominee for President. Suddenly white supremacy is no longer a taboo in public. “Trump has unquestionably brought people to our ideas,” said Richard Spencer, the white-nationalist leader.

But less attention has been given to an equally noteworthy opposite trend: what Sean McElwee calls the rising racial liberalism of white Democrats. The proportion of white Democrats who attributed racial inequality to systematic discrimination remained steady for 30 years at below 50%, while more believed inequality was due to blacks’ own behavior. That changed suddenly during the Obama Presidency, and the latest surveys show a striking reversal: 54% say inequality is due to discrimination, while only 28% blame the actions of minorities themselves.

One of the defining partisan differences among voters is that Republicans continue to blame minorities for inequality. A series of Pew surveys, which confirm the shift in liberal beliefs, also show that 75% of Republicans and 79% of conservative Republicans say “blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition”. Republicans are less likely than they were 20 years ago to see discrimination as a cause for blacks’ inability to “get ahead”. That is surprising, since younger Americans are more likely to blame discrimination than older ones. Education also plays a significant role: the more educated one is, the more likely to see discrimination as the cause for inequality.

What is happening to racial attitudes in America? McElwee directly compared the responses of white Democrats who had been interviewed in 2011 and in 2016. The shift is startling over such a short time: many gave different answers to questions about whether blacks should just try harder and about the long-term effects of slavery and discrimination. Twice as many agreed in 2016 that “Over the past few years, black people have gotten less than they deserve.” While all age groupings of white Democrats moved away from blaming blacks for inequality, the movement was much stronger among those under 30.

Such surveys help us to understand the beliefs of the American public, but they don’t count. What counts is the special kind of survey called voting, which determines who populates American governments and what policies they enact. Recent primary elections, leading up to the midterms in November 2018, show how these changing partisan attitudes play out in the voting booth.

Stacey Abrams, who won the Democratic primary for Georgia governor, became the first black woman nominated by a major party for governor in any state. She soundly defeated Stacey Evans, a white woman, all across Georgia, including in Forsyth County, a nearly completely white district with a long history of violent racism. Former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez won the Democratic primary for Texas governor, becoming the first Latina woman, as well as the first acknowledged lesbian, to win a major party gubernatorial nomination there. In Illinois, a black woman, Lauren Underwood, won more votes than the six white men in her Congressional primary combined.

This growing racial liberalism among Democrats is matched by increasing gender liberalism. The Democratic nominations in Georgia for both governor and lieutenant governor were contested by two women. The three races for the Democratic nomination for the House of Representatives in which women were candidates were all won by the women. Up to now, Democratic women have been candidates in about half of the 149 Congressional districts that have had primaries. In 65 districts, there was at least one woman and one man in the race with no incumbent, and women were the top vote-getters in 47.

Republicans are not only much less sympathetic to blacks, they are less interested in women holding office. The battle for Georgia governor is symbolic: while two Democratic women competed, the Republican primary featured five men. Across the country, women and men competed in only 14 Republican Congressional primaries with no incumbent, and men won 11.

What will happen when Democratic women, white and non-white, compete against Republican white men in November? Will these newly diverse candidates mobilize new voters? Are independent voters leaning more toward minority and female candidates like Democrats or away from them like Republicans?

Is America heading toward greater equality or back to the past? November will tell.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, May 29, 2018

Why Do Some People Hate College?

I went to a college graduation on Sunday. Graduations are festive events, when everybody dresses up, smiles a lot, and congratulates everyone else. They are called “Commencements” because the ceremony represents the beginning of a new life as an educated person.

A college education in America is expensive, nearly $100,000 for students at public universities in their home states and over $200,000 at smaller private colleges. But as an investment, that expensive education is clearly worth it. College graduates earn on average nearly twice what those with only a high school diploma earn, which adds up to over $1 million in lifetime wages. The unemployment rate for college graduates is about one-third that of high school graduates.

Some Americans sneer at the idea that a college degree is worth anything. They do not argue with these numbers. Instead they criticize the entire American higher education system as fraudulent brain-washing. I doubt that these critics of American universities and colleges have any idea what actually happens on college campuses.

The distrust of political conservatives for intellectuals and higher education has been a feature of our politics for half a century. Before that conservatives had wielded their political power to shape education in their image, to prevent it from challenging the myths which supported their ideology. When I went to school and college in the 1960s, our lessons and instructors supported the status quo. The subject of history, the most politically dangerous of all disciplines, was written and taught to prevent questioning of political traditions.

James Loewen, and many others, have shown how conservative myths dominated history textbooks which were used then in high schools and universities. Slavery, the antecedent of Jim Crow discrimination, was transformed into a humanitarian effort by well-meaning whites to care for inferior blacks, who were happy in their bondage. Women were portrayed as best realizing their limited potential as home-bound caregivers. They, too, were pleased with their limitations. White men taught these myths, assigned textbooks written by white men, in courses selected and organized by white men, and made sure that when one white man retired, another one was found to take his place.

The few men and women who challenged these ideas and the structure that had created and propagated them had been struck down with the powers of the state during the lengthy postwar period of political repression, lasting long after Joseph McCarthy had been repudiated.

The protests of the 1960s targeted not only segregation and the Vietnam War, but also conservative power in American higher education, initiating a fundamental transformation of both knowledge and teaching that have alarmed conservatives.

American conservatives have been infuriated by the gradual dismantling of that whole system since then. The stories that confirmed their historical worldview and their contemporary politics were shown to be whitewash. African Americans and women demonstrated with their bodies that they were not happy with a rigidly subordinated place. The composition of history departments changed and so did their teachings. Studies of race and gender by a gradually diversifying faculty revealed uncomfortable truths about white supremacy and male domination in American history.

Crude conservatives like Wayne LaPierre say this all represents the hostile takeover of our universities by communists. The Heartland Institute, ostensibly embodying loftier intellectual aims, says that college is useless: their “policy advisor for education” Teresa Mull mocks today’s graduates as “ignorant and inept”, because “most college courses . . . are a waste of time.” Revealing what really bothers American conservatives, the example of “brainwashing” she provides concerns teaching about racism.

I don’t know how much experience such people have on American campuses. Their claims are not descriptions, but propaganda in the conservative war against knowledge they don’t like. The majority of conservatives who say that American higher education damages the nation really mean that it damages the propagation of their myths about American racial history, about the proper roles of men and women, about the effects of human society on the natural environment.

Decades of conservative attacks on higher education have succeeded in creating an image of the college teacher as radical, elitist, unpatriotic, and intellectually dictatorial. The students who marched in their robes across the Illinois College campus Sunday, and tens of thousands of students marching across America, know better. They know that no course and no professor is perfect. They know about the flaws and achievements of institutions. But they know that they have been challenged, not brainwashed, encouraged, not repressed, coached and tutored and prepared for useful lives. They say the word “professor” with respect.

The real students I met are thrilled to graduate, because they appreciate how their college years and college teachers have transformed them. They are wiser, more knowledgeable, more skilled, more expressive, and more confident. They know themselves better – what they are good at; what they want; how to use their personal skills to achieve their goals.

At Commencement they’re doubly happy – happy to be done and happy for what they have gained. Good for them and good for us all.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, May 15, 2018

Happy Birthday, Karl Marx

Saturday was Karl Marx’s 200^th birthday. It’s dangerous to even wish Mr. Marx a happy birthday, because his name has become so closely associated with dictatorship and mass murder in the 20^th century. But Marx killed nobody and never advocated killing anyone. He spent his life fighting against repressive monarchies in the 19^th century.

Marx criticized the governments and societies he experienced in Europe, because they limited the freedoms of the majority. Hereditary monarchy, surveillance of political meetings, censorship, and banning of labor unions were discriminatory against the working class.

Marx’s political program for workers was remarkably progressive in the middle of the 19^th century and includes ideas that should be familiar to Americans. The “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 included: the right to vote for everyone (probably he just meant men) over 21; a free justice system; “universal arming of the people”; universal free education; strongly progressive taxes; and separation of church and state.

Marx signed a letter by the International Working Men’s Association congratulating Abraham Lincoln on his 1864 reelection, which ended: “it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.” Marx died in 1883, long before anyone who called himself a “Marxist” entered the political arena.

Marx experienced capitalism in its rawest form. The painfully detailed descriptions of the lives of early English industrial workers by Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels led them both to see the social, economic and moral flaws in a system where some own property and others work for them for wages. In today’s economically wealthy Atlantic world, where their demands for political change have been met for a century or more, their criticism of economic inequality as the basis for political inequality is still valuable.

Besides critiquing the world’s economic system based on the system’s own statistics, and calling for its overthrow, Marx occasionally imagined what real personal freedom for everyone would be like, with no company and no government telling people what to do. In the “German Ideology” in 1845, he wrote: “each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” He argued that such many-sided activity was most likely to produce happy and fulfilled people, willing to cooperate with each other, rather than compete against everyone.

There are strong resemblances to the extreme libertarian wing of Republican politics in America, but they won’t admit it. Marx is an emphatic punching bag for the right, because his writings lay bare the poverty of their appeal to people without property.

Every idea has dangerous possible consequences. Medieval Popes and critics of the Papacy like Luther both thought the Bible admonished them to demean and even kill Jews. People who called themselves Marxists killed millions during the 20^th century.

Thoughtful, courageous, honest and ethical Marxists were inspired by the vision of a free society of free individuals to oppose Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and their versions of Marx’s ideas, often losing their lives in the process. Marxists, both intellectuals and workers, became leaders in the deadly struggle against fascism in Europe, along with certain religious Christians. Christians who risked their own lives to hide Jews from the Germans, and sometimes their own police, demonstrated the hopeful humanitarianism of the Christian message. Does it make sense to toss them in the same pot as Torquemada?

Blaming Marx for the history of the Soviet Union or Communist China is like blaming Jesus for the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition.

On Marx’s birthday, as I do most days, I spent a few hours in my office, dug in my garden, read, and amused myself sharing the NBA finals with my wife. The productive, creative and self-regulated life appeals to me. I don’t like being told what to do or need a boss to tell me to how be useful to society. I like collaborations among equals. I see honor in all types of honest labor and don’t think that the work of executives is worth more than 300 times the work of average employees. I believe that humans become stunted intellectually and morally by a lifetime of one-sided dependent labor. We flourish best when we are able to do many things, develop many talents, control our own destinies.

For those ideas and others for which there is no space here, I am grateful to Marx. I wish the ideologues who perverted his ideas in order to justify becoming political tyrants had paid closer attention to what he meant.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal_Courier, May 8, 2018