Category Archives: Politics

Was the popularity of the Kennedy mystique a rejection of 1950s American suburbs?

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The Kennedy mystique has been well established in American culture: John F. and Jackie Kennedy swept into the White House, bringing in the television age, the space age, and jumpstarting the 1960s. But I hadn’t connected this mystique to what critics saw as the bland American suburbs of the 1950s:

In the normal course of the apparat’s work, elevating the Kennedys requires the denigration of the Eisenhowers, the 1950s, and the supposed dullness of the country that the Kennedys rescued us from—“our country of suburbs and Ozzie and Harriet, poodle skirts and one kind of cheese,” as Diane Sawyer oddly put it, while the screen showed a golden brick of Velveeta. Jackie by contrast wore clothes by designers who would have gone into a dead faint at the sight of a poodle skirt. When the Kennedys moved in, added the court historian Michael Beschloss, “we had a White House that looked like a bad convention hotel.” The Kennedys brought French cuisine to the White House, Diane Sawyer added. “No more Eisenhower cheese sauce and cole slaw. .??.??. In our middle-class nation, it wasn’t easy for us to fathom this first lady.” Jackie herself is heard complaining about the marks that Ike’s golf shoes left in the flooring. Dwight Eisenhower, lumbering ox.

This view of the suburbs fits well with a set of suburban critiques that began in the 1950s: the suburbs were bland, about conformity, and were populated by people who couldn’t really act like those nice suburban families on TV and who had popular tastes. In comparison to the Eisenhowers and Ozzie and Harriet on TV, the Kennedys were the cultural elite, the fashionable who had refined tastes and opinions. This same argument can be heard today and still pits two sets of people against each other: the urban intellectuals versus the middle class suburbanites, progressives versus conservatives, fashionable and novel versus bland and predictable, novel versus boring, upscale shoppers versus Walmart (or maybe Target on the slightly higher end) patrons. Perhaps it all goes back to those arguments in the early years of America when Thomas Jefferson advocated for a more rural America and Alexander Hamilton pushed for the capital to be in New York City.

American language about government policy and economic life shifts from community to individualism

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Here is an interesting argument about how common American discourse about public policy and economic life has shifted since the 1930s:

In 1934, the focus was on people, family security and the risks to family economic well-being that we all share. Today, the people have disappeared. The conversation is now about the federal budget, not about the real economy in which real people live. If a moral concept plays a role in today’s debates, it is only the stern proselytizing of forcing the government to live within its means. If the effect of government policy on average people is discussed, it is only as providing incentives for the sick to economize on medical costs and for the already strapped worker to save for retirement.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, as the Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers demonstrates in his recent book, “The Age of Fracture,” American public discourse was filled with references to the social circumstances of average citizens, our common institutions and our common history. Over the last five decades, that discourse has changed in ways that emphasize individual choice, agency and preferences. The language of sociology and common culture has been replaced by the language of economics and individualism.

In 1934, the government was us. We had shared circumstances, shared risks and shared obligations. Today the government is the other — not an institution for the achievement of our common goals, but an alien presence that stands between us and the realization of individual ambitions. Programs of social insurance have become “entitlements,” a word apparently meant to signify not a collectively provided and cherished basis for family-income security, but a sinister threat to our national well-being.

Over the last 50 years we seem to have lost the words — and with them the ideas — to frame our situation appropriately.

This is a fascinating line: “The language of sociology and common culture has been replaced by the language of economics and individualism.” This reminds me of the findings about how public opinion changes when asked about “welfare” versus “assistance for the poor.” The concepts are similar but the connotations of the specific terms matter.

Is the end argument here that changing the language will lead to more communal understandings or does reversing the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon have to come first? It would be helpful to know what exactly these commentators think happened in this period beyond simply the change in language. Could we argue that the success of the community-oriented policies of the mid 1900s that led to a booming economy, rising incomes, suburbanization, and homeownership was “too successful” in that it led to these shifts in language and focus?

The growing gap on environmental issues between American political parties

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As you might suspect from political discussions about environmental and green issues, a sociologist has some data to show the two major political parties in the United States are growing further apart.

Looking at League of Conservation Voters ratings of Congress and the Senate, Robert Brulle of Drexel University in Philadelphia passes along a revealing look at the history of the partisan divide on environmental issues. Averaging ratings for both parties, he and his colleagues show a sharply growing division that started back in the Reagan era.

Asked to comment on whether last week’s “24 Hours of Reality” event led by Al Gore would change any minds about climate change, Brulle pointed to the chart to express his doubts. “The real purpose of these campaigns is to generate news coverage,” Brulle says, stories a bit like this one.

While it is not like there was agreement on these issues in the early 1970s, a growing divide suggests this has become an increasingly political issue, perhaps just like religion.

As favorability ratings on Congress are still at low levels, is there any data to suggest that the two parties have closed the gap on any issues?

Bill Clinton: “The American Dream has been under assault for 30 years”

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Former President Bill Clinton, speaking as part of the 10 year anniversary of his foundation, said “The American Dream has been under assault for 30 years.” He says this has happened for two (actually three?) reasons:

1. The challenges of globalization and the information age “which eliminated a lot of intermediate jobs.”

2. Corporations once had more equal responsibility among shareholders, communities, and workers (roughly 35-40 years ago and earlier) whereas today they act as individuals only beholden to shareholders.

3. A thirty year long anti-government rant that says “the government is the source of all our problems.”

Is this just a list of Democratic Party talking points?

More seriously, Clinton’s first point is well accepted: the world has changed. Globalization and information have changed the American and global economy and America is still struggling to catch up. The Rust Belt cities of the Northeast and Midwest are a great example: the departure of good-paying manufacturing jobs has shifted the landscape and cities and states are still scrambling to fill this void. The second issue regarding corporations is also notable: the quest for profits and meeting shareholder’s expectations has seemed to increase. The gap between CEO pay and that of the average worker has only widened. The median income for all Americans has dropped while some corporations earn record profits. The third point sounds more like a political argument though Clinton’s suggestion that there has been a relative lack of interest in public-private partnerships to address some of these issues may have some merit.

Clinton is in a long line of presidents who have promoted the American Dream which is typically thought to include homeownership, a good education, and middle-class standard of living. It would be interesting to hear what Clinton now considers to be the American Dream to be and how individuals and the country can achieve it. A measure of the American dream, homeownership, actually had increased in the last 30 years until the last few years of economic crisis. Is Clinton suggesting that fewer people now have access to the American Dream or something else?

Additionally, Clinton’s words have some sway since the public perception is that he was the president who presided over the last boom era in the United States.

Same data, different conclusions about poverty in “Rick Perry’s Texas”

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With the increased national exposure of Texas Governor Rick Perry comes more people picking apart his political career. While Perry has been quick to tout Texas’ economic progress during his tenure, the same data regarding the state’s poverty rate can be used to reach different conclusions.

A CNN article titled “Poverty grows in Rick Perry’s Texas” has this to say:

While it’s true that Texas is responsible for 40% of the jobs added in the U.S. over the past two years, its poverty rate also grew faster than the national average in 2010.

Texas ranks 6th in terms of people living in poverty. Some 18.4% of Texans were impoverished in 2010, up from 17.3% a year earlier, according to Census Bureau data released this week. The national average is 15.1%.

And being poor in Texas isn’t easy. The state has one of the lowest rates of spending on its citizens per capita and the highest share of those lacking health insurance. It doesn’t provide a lot of support services to those in need: Relatively few collect food stamps and qualifying for cash assistance is particularly tough.

“There are two tiers in Texas,” said Miguel Ferguson, associate professor of social work at University of Texas at Austin. “There are parts of Texas that are doing well. And there is a tremendous number of Texans, more than Perry has ever wanted to acknowledge, that are doing very, very poorly.”

This is the more negative interpretation of this data that highlights a growing underclass in Texas. Perry may talk about job growth but there is a growing segment of the population that isn’t participating in this growth.

On the other side of the spectrum, a “Democrat and urbanist” (Instapundit’s description) suggests “The Texas Story Is Real“:

Lastly, the poverty rate is higher in Texas than in the US as a whole – 17.2% vs. 14.3%, not a small difference. However, the gap actually narrowed between the two during the 2000s, as the chart below in the percentage point change in the poverty rate illustrates.

[The graph shows the “Change in % of Population For Whom Poverty Status Is Determined (2000-2009).” Texas is at roughly 1.8%, the United States as a whole at roughly 1.95%.]

While every statistic isn’t a winner for Texas, most of them are, notably on the jobs front. And if nothing else, it does not appear that Texas purchased job growth at the expense of job quality, at least not at the aggregate level.  There are certainly deeper places one might drill into and find areas of concern or underperformance, but that’s true of everywhere.  And these top line statistics are commonly used to compare cities and states. Unless Texas critics are ready to retire these measures from their own arsenal, it seems clear that Texas is a winner.  The Texas story is real.

While acknowledging that Texas has a higher poverty rate (and this doesn’t include 2010 data), this commentator suggests that Texas had a smaller increase in this population compared to the United States.

This is a classic example of how two sides that are looking at the same data can come to two very different conclusions. For one, the poverty data indicates that Rick Perry is allowing some of Texas’ population to fall behind while the other suggests the poverty data isn’t so bad since the poverty rate grew less than that of the United States as a whole. In this case, I suspect the data itself won’t win over either side since ideology trumps the data.

More broadly, will most Americans consider these fine-tuned arguments when considering Rick Perry as a candidate? Probably not. Quoting a sociologist in a post yesterday, “Questioning someone’s religious sincerity is totally a factor of whether you already like that person.” This may also apply to their supposed economic impact.

Patent trolls: 20 years, $500 billion in losses

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One of my BU law professors, Mike Meurer, just posted a working paper (pdf) he co-authored with James Bessen and Jennifer Ford titled “The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls.”  Quoting the abstract:

In the past, non-practicing entities (NPEs) — firms that license patents without producing goods — have facilitated technology markets and increased rents for small inventors. Is this also true for today’s NPEs? Or are they “patent trolls” who opportunistically litigate over software patents with unpredictable boundaries? Using stock market event studies around patent lawsuit filings, we find that NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010, mostly from technology companies. Moreover, very little of this loss represents a transfer to small inventors. Instead, it implies reduced innovation incentives.

This works out to around $25 billion in lost wealth per year.  For comparison, even in its pre-Napster days, the RIAA only sold $14.7 billion per year—more than $10 billion less.

H/T Groklaw.

Update:  More analysis by Ars Technica.

Tracking President Obama’s “God talk”

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Decades after the sociologist Robert Bellah introduced the term “civil religion,” academics are continuing to track how politicians talk about religion in the public sphere. Here is an overview of how President Obama is increasing his use of religious language in recent days:

President Obama is “ramping up his ‘God talk’ for the re-election campaign,” says political scientist John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum for Religion & Public Life.

But Green and two other experts who track religious rhetoric in presidential politics speculate this strategy to connect with evangelical voters may not work for Obama…

These kinds of God mentions won’t move the dial for conservative evangelicals but, Green says, they could be just right for ambivalent voters who “don’t want a hard-edged faith shaping national politics.”…

Questioning someone’s religious sincerity is totally a factor of whether you already like that person. Baylor University sociologist Paul Froese says,

If Obama held a prayer rally, it would never work. People who don’t like him won’t believe him.

I wonder how the average American would react to this article. On one hand, the argument here is that appealing to audiences with the “right” religious language matters for votes. On the other hand, is this simply ammunition to make some people more cynical about the use of religious language in election seasons? Politicians have to walk a fine line of appearing sincere but not too exclusive so as to alienate potential voters.

More seriously, this will continue to matter in the months ahead as Americans get longer looks at Republican challengers (and the article contrasts Rick Perry’s approach to religious language). I hope we will continue to get updates on this from these same academics.

Considering the humanity of our leaders

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Here is a fascinating essay that reveals some of the humanity of a polarizing figure: George W. Bush.

Do we even want to know the more human side of our leaders? It is easy to build them up, as a paragon of virtue and strength, or to tear them down, as an enemy who must be defeated. Even though we are more than two years out from the end of his presidency, how many people can read a piece like this with somewhat objective eyes?

Crowd Counting 101

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Every now and then, often connected to politically contentious events like the “Restoring Honor” or “Rally to Restore Sanity” in 2010 or Egyptians taking to the streets in early 2011, you will see articles about how officials and media sources estimate the number of people who attend. Here is a primer on crowd counting. Some of the possible new methods could help give us accurate and not politically-driven counts:

And, as Yip said in a statement about his study, a good way to count crowds could cut through the politically motivated stats we put up with now. “In the absence of any accurate estimation methods, the public are left with a view of the truth colored by the beliefs of the people making the estimates. The public would be better served by estimates less open to political bias.”

I look forward to improved crowd counting.

h/t Instapundit

It doesn’t matter which party is in charge when an economic crisis happens; they will be punished

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As part of a piece looking at whether President Obama should have ever been compared to FDR, Megan McArdle suggests one of the cultural narratives of the Democratic Party doesn’t hold up: the Great Depression wasn’t a “Republican problem” because when looking at other countries, whichever party was in power at the start of the Depression was punished at the polls:

Yet even recognizing that FDR got tremendously lucky in his choice of election years does not cause McElvaine to question the Ur-Myth; instead, he segues into a complaint that Obama needs to be feistier, like FDR was.

Smart progressive Ezra Klein, however, offers what I think is the correct take:

The pat story behind FDR’s victory and the ensuing decades of mostly Democratic dominance is that the president got the policy right and the politics followed. Whatever you believe about FDR’s policies, a more international perspective will disabuse you of the notion that the golden age for the Democratic Party was an ideological triumph rather than an accident of history. As Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, has written, globally, the pattern is clear: Whichever party was in power when the Great Depression hit was booted out of office, and whichever party was in power when the global recovery took hold reaped huge political benefits.

“In the U.S.,” wrote Bartels, “voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved.

Of course, cultural narratives aren’t necessarily rooted in facts but rather in the story that a group or nation or other party wants to tell. Looking at data can help us figure out the veracity of a narrative. This sounds like a good example of using comparative data: by looking at other cases, one can see that what might seem to be a “common sense” observation based on the United States doesn’t necessarily hold up. What we would also want to do is to look at other economic crises, both in the United States and abroad, to see how the severity of the crisis, length of the crisis, relative standing of other countries, and other historical and social factors affect election outcomes after the economic crisis starts.

The takeaway for politicians and political parties? Beware of running for election if the economy took a dive while you or your people were in office.