Daily Archives: September 14, 2007

Understanding the Southern White Voter; Coming to Terms With the Southern White Politician

Jack’s comment on the thread down a ways returned me to a subject Ive spent a lot of time thinking about. It’s probably not really appropriate for a Vermont blog, but for now, it’s the only blog I really have access to, so I’m gonna go for it. The comment, in regards to John Edwards, was:

I agree with everything Edwards says, or close enough. Still, there's something about the way he presents himself. Remember when Carter was running for president and the caricature was of this guy in overalls with a gigantic smile? All through this video there were these flickers of a smile that put me off. I guess it's kind of like I thought in 2004: he seems a bit too shiny to appeal to people.

Whether he was aware when he wrote it or not, I believe Jack’s comment has cross-cultural overtones. The psychology of the South is complicated and doesn’t fit easily into soundbites.  But it useful – even important – to understand it, given the impact the south has on our nation’s politics.

Clichéd as it sounds, reading some Faulkner can give you a basis on which to build on, but it hardly gives you a picture of the modern-day south (and when I'm speaking of the south – I'm speaking of the one I grew up in culturally, which is the white south). Still, the last line of Absalom, Absalom provides some extraordinary insight, and I wish I could find the exact quote. After regaling his northern college roommate with the tales of his family and background, the focal character is told by his roommate that he understands him now – that he (the focal character) actually despises the south. The focal character, a seemingly proud southerner, is thunderstruck by this, and the book ends with him almost sputtering in response, insisting that no – he doesn’t hate the south… he really doesn’t.

(Now I really hope I’m not totally misremembering  that… it has been a while)

As is often the case with individuals, a seemingly overabundance of pride can often be the flip side of an inferiority complex, and the resulting bipolar dichotomy that presents only causes more deep-seeded problems. Such is the case with the collective psyche of the South. It really wasn’t that long ago that Southerners lost a war for independence, and then had it piled on through what amounted to a corrupt occupation of “carpetbaggers” by the victorious force. This perceived colonization, the resultant corruption and the economic collapse of the post-plantation era (while the industrial north grew) fed the  action-reaction dynamic which created the Klan in much the same way we see terrorism spring from Arab communities who feel a comparable dynamic in their own countries.

But that’s only the beginning. The Klan was (and is) a moral evil – and it was a southern moral evil. One that seduced people throughout southern civic infrastructures. Coming to terms with that moral evil that was a product of their own culture was (and is) no easy task. Anger, rejection, denial all come with that – but in acceptence, there is also shame, and that shame feeds that original dysfunctional dynamic of the superiority/inferiority dichotomy. In confronting the ugly racist in their midst and in themselves (during the original Klan era, and again in the civil rights era), southerners made a liberational step forward, but in some ways deepened the collective neurosis that led to the Klan to begin with.

This is why southerners often seem to collectively vote against their own self-interest. There is extraordinary poverty and corporate corruption in the south, but southerners continue to promote the worst sort of politicians into positions of power. The state of the southern consciousness, with all this baggage, is both more susceptible to the suggestions that “the other” is to blame (and subconsciously, that they don’t need to feel the shame or guilt they’re not sure how to manage) – even though “the other” (be they blacks, Jews, gays, Catholics, etc) are generally every bit the victims they are – usually more so, as that vulnerability makes them appealing targets.

Putting these political kleptocrats into power deepens the problem further by making the conditions on the ground worse due to GOP neglect, but also by perpetuating the insidious laissez-faire mantra that if you’re poor, it’s your own fault. That you’re lazy and no good, unworthy of help, and if you weren’t you’d obviously be rich already. The need to offset this piling on to the pre-existing inferiority dynamic is profound, and it drives substance abuse, domestic violence – you name it.

It also accounts for much of the appeal of evangelical Protestantism in the area. Evangelicalism not only gives you a higher purpose and the promise of reward, as all religions do, it gives you the “born again” dynamic of re-inventing yourself. It is the 12 step program all rolled up into one passionate experience, and comes bundled with a community of like-minded people. Still, such catharsis therapy is a quick fix, and the problem remains, but now – not only do the opportunities for blaming others remain (especially given the monochromatic character and anti-gay rhetoric of evangelical churches), there is also an opportunity to externalize that self-loathing by dumping onto the backs of those who have not been “born again” as you and your new community have been.

It’s all very, very ugly to look at from within , as well as from without, as – like the history of the Middle East – it forces non-southerners to confront the historical and interpersonal role they’ve played in perpetuating this unsustainable and destructive situation. And there’s no easy fix. Economic equality, education, pro-active social programs, and individuals both inside and outside the south moving outside their comfort zone to look at themselves and interact respectfully with each other as individuals is the only way out. It’s a frustrating way that takes generations upon generations.

As a side effect, southern activists are often the last people who can tell you how to appeal to “the southern voter.” Southern progressives (and there are many) have that inferiority complex hardwired too, and as a result, feel the need to set themselves apart from their fellow southerners by dumping some of the trappings, almost pleading to their northern counterparts that they’re just like them, and passing that advice along to politicians from other regions. I remember asking Howard Dean when he was just starting his presidential campaign what he was doing to reach southern voters, and he responded that he didn’t need to do anything special, because southerners were just like everybody else and responded to the same things. I have no doubt that he received that advice from supportive southern progressives who find it downright therapeutic to believe.

So how does this apply to southern politicians and their “veneers?”

There’s another side effect of the inferiority/superiority bipolarity dynamic – one that takes longer but increases steadily – depression. With low-grade depression comes apathy and a sense of futility.

With that in mind, take a look at the voter turnout rates across the country and you’ll find the lowest turnout is in the south. Sometimes the difference is quite dramatic.

Many have, at some level, given up. They expect nothing from their candidates, who they long ago concluded were all crooks – but in a deeper and more profound way than people in other parts of the country have come to believe that. To large extent, a candidate can win an election, just by getting people’s attention. When I was a young Kentuckian, millionaire Democrat Wallace Wilkinson defied political logic by winning the Governor’s race in what was essentially a vanity campaign – simply because he said he would institute a lottery. This got enough people’s attention that he squeezed out a few more votes, took the primary, and then the state. What were his other stances? Who knew? Who cared? Because they’re all a bunch of crooks.

It’s this dynamic of rock-bottom expectations that has encouraged a culture of crappy acting from politicians. They’re terrible at sounding sincere, but nobody expects them to be sincere, so they get elected – and they then decide that it was because they fooled people into thinking they’re sincere. Politicians learn from successful politicians, and before you know it – everybody’s got the saccharine smile and cheesy veneer.

Now Bill Clinton got people’s attention because he was actually good. He actually seemed sincere, and many in the south had never seen a politician who felt as though he wasn’t simply going through the motions.

John Edwards too, I believe is sincere, but he has two things working against him in regards to his presentation: one, he is not as talented a presenter as Bill Clinton, which wouldn’t be a problem were it not for number two – that he comes from a political tradition that says you HAVE to put on the smile. You HAVE to do the cheesy grin. If you don’t, you’re going to lose.

Now I actually think Edwards isn’t so bad at it, but I suspect I’m viewing him through a hardwired, southern cultural lens that you Yankees aren’t. One thing I will say is that others are far worse – and I think his superior performance to many of his southern political peers is due to sincerity, rather than acting skills. That’s not to say that I think he’s a saint, but neither do I think he’s making up these opinions wholecloth.

Anyway, my point is that with a southern, white politician, you’re going to get the “veneer.” For the moment, it’s a hardwired cultural mannerism that may look odd or distatsteful from up here, but it comes with the package – at least for now.

Hopefully not too much longer, though, because I'm pretty sick of the cheesy grin thing myself. It's time has passed… 

Denying Global Warming

I have been in a discussion with an educated and articuLte  friend who does not believe that global warming exists.  He gave me some stuff to read, and this ofrced me to think the issue through.  Most of these thoughts would have applied before I read the material, by the way.  Since I am not a climate scientist or even an earth scientist, you can read my thoughts as coming from a reasonably informed layman, and certainly not a specialist.

  • I totally agree that climate models are highly unreliable and primitive. I understand the GIGO principle, and I have a lot of faith in the ability of combinations of technical innovations and economic incentives to alter predicted outcomes, as evidenced all the way from Malthus to the Club of Rome.
  • The evidence against climate change is equally weak however, and the advocates like Richard Lindzen (MIT) of that position strike me as more than somewhat panglossian.  I see two general approaches from the deniers:  One is to measure actual climate change, and finding no relationship or an inverse relationship based on a simple regression between average temperature and time, conclude that there is nothing to global warming. This “modeling” approach is even weaker than the climate models that are being criticized.  I put them in the same category as arguments that there is no scientific proof that smoking is linked to cancer.   The second approach is to conclude that since global average temperatures are within historical extremes, that any warming trend that may exist is normal and we should just get over it.

 

My big problem with all this is that I do not believe that diagnostics that simply rely on looking at average temperatures is revealing.  The earth’s climate is the result of highly complex interactions of multiple forces ranging from sunlight reflected from ice on the poles, to the actions of ocean currents, forest coverage, passing events like volcanic ash, and yes, human action including the atmospheric impacts of industrialization.  The climate models have probably not captured the first order effects of all these factors, much less the second or third order ones.  But I have studied system dynamics enough to understand that any dynamic inter-related system that is subject to hysteresis and variable time lags is vulnerable to wild gyrations when the system is disturbed, although those gyrations may come slowly  and build from apparently small causes.

 

As an economist, I generally look for changes in systems at their margins, not at their average, just as a pool of water dries up from the surface and retreats from its banks, not from its depths.  I also am a fan of catastrophe theory (see Rene Thom), which suggests that systems can exhibit smooth predictable change until a threshold is passed, and then exhibit a sudden and non-linear change of structure.  I also am enough of a statistician to understand the difference between Type I and Type II errors and enough of an economist to attribute costs to each, especially when the costs of reversing an error are very high.

 

So put all that together, and I see evidence at the margins that something is happening to the climate – at the margins, some cities and coastlines are being drowned, storms of surprising strength seem to be showing an increase, ice is certainly melting at the poles and glaciers are shrinking, polar bears are drowning and weather patterns are appearing outside the norms.  Add to that Chinese pollution, the loss of Amazon rain forests, and disturbances in the cycle of rainy and dry seasons in Africa, and the causes for concern start to rise.

 

Is all that evidence of global warming?  Not conclusively, but then I start thinking about Type I and Type II error – if there is no global warming but we act to prevent it, there may be some detriment to economic growth, although I suspect that the net effect of that impact would actually be positive as carbon trading will probably create innovation, jobs and growth in response to the price incentives that are the justification for such trading systems.  (And just because Enron wanted to make a business of emissions trading doesn’t make it a bad thing.  Their problems were not due to that.  There is an active market in emissions trading in Los Angeles and also in the EU.)  But if there is global warming and we do nothing, the result will be quite unpredictable, although those impacts will fall more on our children and grand children. I certainly do not want my descendants cursing their forebears for doing nothing when they still had the chance.

 

And to argue that global warming is unambiguously beneficial because it will increase farming yields strikes me as the worst sort of chicanery.  To look at simple averages does not reveal the full potential for local dislocations that are impossible to model, but are likely to be very significant – storms, flooding, droughts, forest fires, desertification, population movements and associated wars for resources – these things have happened in the past, and they were often a result of local climate changes.  It is the apparently anomalous local changes at the margin that eventually reveal themselves in changes of averages.  It took decades for the computer revolution to start showing up in US productivity numbers.  But that doesn’t mean that the computer revolution wasn’t happening.

A Case for Salami Tactics

It is pretty hard for the Dems to de-fund the war for a couple of reasons: 1) the funding is currently wrapped up with a number of other pretty important initiatives, including the war in Afghanistan. 2) the President has a large degree of discretion to move budget money around to keep the war going, 3) it would allow Bush and the GOP to blame defeat on the Dems, which would give our party yet another generation of the 'vietnam'complex on national security issues. 

So what could our congressional leaders do?  The president is about to ask Congress for another $200 billion to fund the war for next year.  Getting 60, let alone 67, senators to vote for deadlines etc is not going to happen.  So, maybe what we do is engage in a series of small incremental steps (salami tactics) to keep the heat on moderate republicans until they break.  Here is what I propose:

1) Break the budget request down into 4 parts: now through December 20 (X-mas), X-mas through April (“Mission Accomplished”), April through to the month before the GOP convention, last portion covering through early October 08.  Each chunk will have to be fully debated and authorized.   This would force the war debate on to the front page at very awkward times for the GOP.

3) With each chunk of funding, Dems up the ante.  For the first, maybe we just include Webb's troop rotation provisions, for the Christmas budget we include changing the Mission of US soldiers to training, for April we push a deadline, etc…   

Rather than push a big confrontation now, which we are likely to lose, we need to look at gradually breaking down GOP unity by proposing an escalating range of restrictions on the war.  Each restriction should build on the previous gain. 

The aim of the effort would be to force moderate GOP senators – Coleman, Smith, Snowe, Sununu etc to slowly break with the president.   It would also suck the oxygen out of anything else inside the Beltway for the next year, ensuring that the MSM has plenty of fodder in the run up to '08.

 

 

 

State: Yankee lax on checks (per Rutland Herald)

Per The Rutland Herald:

Inspection process criticized; tower work nearly complete

VERNON – The state says it is not satisfied with the inspection process at Vermont Yankee nuclear plant’s cooling towers, even as Entergy Nuclear Thursday announced it is on the verge of returning the reactor to full power this weekend.
[…]
David O’Brien, commissioner of the Department of Public Service, and other state officials also suggested Thursday that Entergy think seriously of replacing the wooden structure of the cooling towers with a different material, in order to make the plant more reliable, especially if the company plans on operating another 20 years.

“I’m very disappointed in the inspection process,” O’Brien said after the briefing, as officials were given a tour of the repairs to the three-story high cooling tower. “There was inspection work that could have been done.”
[…]
Sullivan told O’Brien that while other nuclear reactors with similar cooling towers were switching to composite materials instead of wood, there were no plans to make such a change at Vermont Yankee.

The company said it didn’t see the rotted wooden beams, which caused the collapse because they were blocked by sheets of perforated plastic, through which millions of gallons of cooling water drips.
[…]
O’Brien also said the state would revisit Entergy’s original 2002 power contract with Vermont utilities to see whether there was some relief for Vermont utilities and its ratepayers because of the power reduction.
[…]

The Vermont Delegation Response

The following comes courtesy of the Welch press office…

Leahy said, “It seems clear that the President has no idea how to end this war and has every intention of laying it on the doorstep of the next President.  He would leave as many troops stuck on this treadmill next summer as we had there a year ago.  The surge that was supposed to usher in a political solution among Iraq’s warring factions has failed, with a settlement no closer today than it was one, two or three years ago.  Meanwhile we have become an excuse for Iraq to avoid reaching a settlement.  We have been in Iraq longer than we were in World War II.  It’s time to begin bringing our brave troops home from the middle of Iraq’s civil war.”

Sanders said, “President Bush misled us into this war 4 1/2 years ago, and he is still misleading us.  Bush’s ‘troop withdrawal’ program will leave us with as many troops in Iraq as we had before the ‘surge’ troop buildup — about 130,000.  Even more importantly, this president has no idea as to how to end this war.  Bush’s advisors concede that this war, already longer than World War II, could go on for another five to 10 years.  This is unacceptable.  We need to bring our troops home and develop a new and more effective strategy for fighting the very serious problem of international terrorism.”

Welch said, “The President made clear tonight that there is no end in sight to the war in Iraq.  He continues to blindly pursue a failed military strategy for a civil war that demands a political and economic solution.  The American military has achieved every objective this President has given them.  They are now stretched beyond their capacity, leaving America exposed to threats elsewhere around the world.  Continuing to referee a civil war with no end in sight is unacceptable to our military, unacceptable to the American taxpayer, and unacceptable for America’s national security.  President Bush has no strategy in Iraq other than running out the clock on his presidency, knowing that this war will soon be another President’s burden.  It is imperative that Congress finally use the power of the purse to end this war and bring our troops home.”