Quote of the Day: “Have people who identify and look and dress and act like women, forced to go into a men’s room. Have people who identify and look and act and dress like men forced to go into a ladies room. Are you nuts?” Rep. Alan Grayson speaking to Congress about the recent North Carolina law.

Climate change. Crumbling infrastructure. Dark money in politics. Health care costs. Immigration policy. Foreign policies toward China, Russia, and the Middle East. Transgender use of bathrooms.

Yes, these are all pressing issues. That is, all but one.

I’ve blogged about this in the past, marveling at how the party of Lincoln has evolved from Boardroom Republicans to Bedroom Republicans to Bathroom Republicans. And they have found a new class of citizen to discriminate against.

And I’ve laid out the facts about transgendered people.. Here’s the short of it.

So the facts are these. Gender identity is a product of both biological and social factors. It is formed very early in life, and once formed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to change. Transgendered individuals are found in virtually every society on this planet and some societies even identify transgendered persons as a unique gender.

So Republican governors are full of s#!t when they claim that this is a “local” issue. It is not. It is a global fact.

Once again I have to ask: how in the hell did America manage to put use of gender-appropriate bathrooms on the same level as all the other issues facing our country. I’ll stick my (childhood) Lutheran neck out and claim that there is no biblical support for any of that discriminatory policy. Continuing, what kind of family values condone discrimination against someone unlike yourself? And I’ve already stuck my experimental scientist neck out on the matter of the facts (above); three-year olds do not make a conscious choice to be transgendered. Below is a lot more.

A couple of days ago Rep. Alan Grayson (D, Florida), candidate for US Senate, addressed the House of Representatives about what he calls the Great American BathRoom Controversy.

Following is the full text, in italics, of Grayson’s remarks (from an email message dated May14th, 2016). Grayson’s remarks are the most cutting and impassioned that I’ve seen on this sorry topic. It’s a long speech, but please read on. I wind up at the end with an update with a local theme from this morning’s Daily Star.

“I rise today to address the Great American bathroom controversy. This is a picture, on my right, of someone who may or may not be recognizable to many Americans today. I’ll say her name; the name may be more recognizable to some. Her name is Christine Jorgensen. y or may not be recognizable to many Americans today.

Christine was born in 1926; she grew up in the Bronx like I did. She went to Columbus High School, near the public housing where I grew up in the Bronx. In fact, my father taught history at Christopher Columbus High School. I don’t know whether he taught Christine or not. But it is possible.

In 1945, Christine was drafted and served in the U.S. military. Now that may be a puzzle to some of you listening to me right now, who say, ‘I didn’t realize that women were drafted in the 1940’s.’ Well, at that time, Christine’s name was George. George Jorgensen. That’s the name she was born with. She was, in fact — on her birth certificate — male. Something she struggled with greatly all through the time she was growing up, being a male. Something she struggled with, being in the military.

And then after leaving the military service in 1951, she heard about the possibility of changing her gender, so she went to Denmark and underwent three or more surgeries, plus a very substantial amount of estrogen treatments; she came back to the United States, and then forever thereafter, after 1953, was known as Christine Jorgensen. Christine Jorgensen was “out,” she was well known in America as someone who was transgender.

I knew about her story when I was growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s. She made no effort to hide it. She didn’t feel any shame about it. She was proud of the fact that she’d been able to take advantage of what medicine had to offer, and live the life that she felt she would have been able to have, if at the beginning, she had had the proper gender.

She had some degree of fame. Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew referred to her once in a speech to mock one of his opponents. She performed both as a singer and as an actress all through the 1950’s, through the entire 1960’s, and well into the 1970’s. She was the most famous transgendered person in America, probably to this day.

Now, I have to tell you, I don’t know exactly where she went when she “had to go.” I don’t know exactly whether she went into a men’s room or ladies room, but here’s the interesting thing: Even though this was something new under the sun, even though America never had to address this issue before, no one ever even bothered to ask. I don’t remember anybody saying, ‘Christine Jorgensen, she ought to go to the men’s room, she was born a male.’ Or for that matter, ‘Christine Jorgensen, she identifies as a female, she should go to the ladies room.’ Isn’t it odd that America in the 1950’s seems to have shown a lot more maturity than America is showing today, with our great bathroom controversy right now — where the cisgender people of America try to dictate to the transgender people of America where they can go to the bathroom. Or at least, frankly, the more bigoted among us.

We had a law pass recently in North Carolina. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it passed almost exclusively with cisgendered Republican votes. They tried to dictate to which bathroom Christine Jorgensen would have to go, if she were alive today and had to relieve herself. And amazingly enough, they decided in their ‘wisdom’, that Christine Jorgensen, if she were alive today, like all other transgender brothers and sisters, Christine Jorgensen would have to go to the bathroom she didn’t identify as, but instead, the bathroom on her birth certificate.

This is particularly ironic. There was one form of discrimination that Christine Jorgensen did face in her lifetime. She was not allowed to get married. Not allowed to get married to a man because her birth certificate said that she was a male, and she was not issued a marriage license on account of the fact that a male was trying to marry a male.

My goodness! Here in America, just in the past 12 months or so, we finally managed to solve that problem, and Christine Jorgensen could get married today to her lover. Now we have a whole new problem. Now, thanks to Republicans, bigots in North Carolina, we have a law that would require Christine Jorgensen to go to the men’s room.

Think about that. Think about that.

In fact, the natural consequence of that law is what I’m about to show you right here.

Here Grayson includes a photo of two women using urinals in a men’s bathroom.

So you folks in North Carolina who are obsessed with where the transgender people go to the bathroom, this is the result you’ve come up with.

People who self-identify as women, people who look like women, people who act like women, they somehow are being driven into the men’s room. And the same thing is true of transgender people who identify as men. You’re going to force people who look like men, act like men, you’re going to force them into a ladies room.

My God, what’s wrong with you? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

More follows the break.

Continue reading →

Cross-posted from SkyIslandScriber.com.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” (from the Wiki entry)

What is unfolding in American politics has not been seen in over 100 years. And what is happening this year may never have been seen before. We are witnessing the division of one of our two major political parties with what amounts to a divorce between two factions. One is a traditionalist group (“establishment”) and the other is an awakened, psychologically distinct movement (“Authoritarians”). The distinction has its roots in psychological and political science research.

The summary of that research, the analysis and synthesis, has produced the most important document of this election year. The report, to be covered in some detail here, enlists fundamental social psychological research in service of our understanding of current political events. We will learn why “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” — the Republican Royalty — have failed to contain the movement headed by Donald Trump. We will learn why that means that a major political party is fracturing in real time. If my assessment is correct, we are the audience in the theatre of history witnessing a centennial event.

Resistance to the rise of Donald Trump

Here is how the LA Times’ editorial leads off (Daily Star editorial this morning).

Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. Many people have said it — politicians of both parties, economists, pundits, business leaders — but millions of GOP primary voters don’t seem to be listening.

Much of the Republican base has taken leave of its senses, a flight blamed alternately on inchoate anger, disgust with inside-the-Beltway candidates and misplaced affection for a plain-speaking cartoon character who often seems to utter whatever nonsense comes into his head.

In another op-ed in the Daily Star, Michael Gerson speculates about strategies before and during the Republican convention that would deny Trump the nomination.

The New York Times summarizes reactions of Trump supporters to attempts to block Trump’s nomination as the GOP candidate (specifically Mitt Romney’s speech).

Conservative talk radio shows lit up Friday with incensed callers who said they were “livid,” “mad” and “on the verge of tears” as they listened to Mr. Romney scoldingly describe what he called Mr. Trump’s misogyny, vulgarity and dishonesty, and urged them to abandon him.

“The Trumpists out there,” predicted Rush Limbaugh, “are going to feel like the establishment is trying to manipulate them, sucker them, and they’re just going to dig in deeper.”

They did.

Limbaugh’s analysis is incredibly important for understanding what is unfolding in 2016 and what it means for American politics in the long run. More on that below.

“take over the GOP or blow it up”

… Steve from Temecula, Calif., said he had a message for Mr. Romney: “The Republican electorate is not a bunch of completely ignorant fools.”

“We know who Donald Trump is,” he added, “and we’re going to use Donald Trump to either take over the G.O.P. or blow it up.”

“the people want Trump”

Frustrated Republicans seized on Mr. Romney’s status as a party insider who was insulated from the realities, indignities and rage of average Americans headed to the polls this year. “He’s an establishment figure,” said Faith Sheptoski-Forbush of Romulus, Mich. “So that’s what you get.”

She called Mr. Romney’s diatribe against Mr. Trump “a desperate attempt” that left her deeply disappointed in him.

“What we need is the voice of the people,” Ms. Sheptoski-Forbush said. “The voice of the people want Trump.”

But there were positive reactions to Romney’s speech.

New Yorkers “offered their gratitude”

As Mr. Romney hopped between television stations on Friday, proclaiming his dismay over Mr. Trump’s crudeness, challenging his decency and questioning his integrity, he declared that his overtures were breaking through — though not necessarily to the audience he intended. In an interview conducted inside the headquarters of Bloomberg News in Manhattan, far from the crucial primary voting states that could decide Mr. Trump’s fate, he observed that Midtown office workers had offered their gratitude as he rode up to the studio.

“Just coming up the escalator, Mr. Romney said, people said, “ ‘Thanks for what you did yesterday.’ ”

Contrasting those reactions reveals a deep schism among Republican voters.

Why Humpty cannot be put together again

It is natural that during an election year that the focus is on the candidates. The media combs through the record to reveal their policy positions and their personal foibles. We hear about Sanders’ socialism and Clintons’s emails. We are forced to hear about Fiorina’s face and Trump’s hair. But this year, especially this year, the focus on individual candidates is not the main news.

The big story is the voters themselves. The assertion that “millions of GOP primary voters don’t seem to be listening” to “politicians of both parties, economists, pundits, business leaders” is flat-out wrong. They are listening and they do not like what they are hearing. The other assertion that “the Republican base has taken leave of its senses” is just as wrong. The part of the Republican base responsible for Trump’s lead in the polls and at the ballot box is perfectly sensible; they are just not well understood by the “politicians of both parties, economists, pundits, business leaders”. So who are those voters?

Of particular interest is that subset of mainly Republican voters who are called, for want of a better term, Authoritarians. They are not “Trumpist” and there is no “Trumpism” (even though I’ve used those terms myself). Those terms are candidate-centered and thus misleading about the underlying psychology. Those voters represent a movement that has gained voice through Trump. We are witnessing “The rise of American authoritarianism”. That’s the title of a review of research on Authoritarians by Amanda Taub at Vox.com (see also AZBlueMeanie’s review of related articles)

The quotes above from some of Trump’s supporters reflect a widening split between Republicans – between the Establishment (Elites, Traditionals) and the new Authoritarians. Research on the authoritarian personality suggests a new alignment in American politics. The more the Establishment leans on Trump, the more alienated and defensive his Authoritarian supporters become. Similarly, the more the Democratic candidates advocate for social change and a restrained military, the more threatened the Authoritarians become. The irony here is that both the Republican Establishment and the Democrats are sources of external threat which activates Authoritarian tendencies. Usually external threat tends to draw people together and reduce intra-group differences. But in this case the threat comes from within the Republican party, a party that increasingly seems fatally divided.

Some of the staunchest conservatives blanch at the ideas espoused by Trump. But those ideas, to the extent that he voices them, reflect the beliefs of the Authoritarians who support him. It is hard to see how those groups can be united given the mutual dislike and distrust. Even if they were to come together in 2016 to defeat the Democratic nominee, the schism will be a lingering, festering wound in the “Republican” “party”.

A précis of modern research on the Authoritarians

What do we know about Authoritarians? The answer is important because one of the puzzles of the rise of Trump has been why he attracted so many so quickly.

The following snippets are from Taub’s “The rise of American authoritarianism”.

[Matthew MacWillians, a PhD student at U. Mass.] polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator. He later repeated the same poll in South Carolina, shortly before the primary there, and found the same results, which he published in Vox …

Here, in a single chart, is the principle result of MacWilliams’ research. Individuals who score highly on measures of Authoritarianism are also those who are most likely to support Trump.

[Another research group headed by] Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which “activated” authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.

These Americans with authoritarian views, they found, were sorting into the GOP, driving polarization. But they were also creating a divide within the party, at first latent, between traditional Republican voters and this group whose views were simultaneously less orthodox and, often, more extreme.

The field [of research on Authoritarians] has come to develop the contours of a grand theory of authoritarianism, culminating quite recently, in 2005, with [Karen] Stenner’s seminal The Authoritarian Dynamic — just in time for that theory to seemingly come true, more rapidly and in greater force than any of them had imagined, in the personage of one Donald Trump and his norm-shattering rise.

According to Stenner’s theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or “activated” by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian.

It is as if, the NYU professor [ and author of The Righteous Mind ] Jonathan Haidt has written, a button is pushed that says, “In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant.”

But political scientists say this theory explains much more than just Donald Trump, placing him within larger trends in American politics: polarization, the rightward shift of the Republican Party, and the rise within that party of a dissident faction challenging GOP orthodoxies and upending American politics.

More than that, authoritarianism reveals the connections between several seemingly disparate stories about American politics. And it suggest that a combination of demographic, economic, and political forces, by awakening this authoritarian class of voters that has coalesced around Trump, have created what is essentially a new political party within the GOP — a phenomenon that broke into public view with the 2016 election but will persist long after it has ended.

Conclusions about Authoritarians in America’s politics

… Authoritarians may be a slight majority within the GOP, and thus able to force their will within the party, but they are too few and their views too unpopular to win a national election on their own.

And so the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.

… although the latter two groups are presently forced into an awkward coalition, the GOP establishment has demonstrated a complete inability to regain control over the renegade authoritarians, and the authoritarians are actively opposed to the establishment’s centrist goals and uninterested in its economic platform.

For decades, the Republican Party has been winning over authoritarians by implicitly promising to stand firm against the tide of social change, and to be the party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and compromise. But now it may be discovering that its strategy has worked too well — and threatens to tear the party apart.

Now, you can see, why I’ve capitalized Authoritarian. It is my way of elevating that group to the same status as Democrat and Republican.

Further reading: A linked table of contents

You owe it to your understanding of current events to read all of Taub’s article. Its target audience is you. Here are links to parts of her article that you can use to read it in manageable chunks.

I. What is American authoritarianism?
II. The discovery.
III. How authoritarianism works.
IV. What can authoritarianism explain?
V. The party of authoritarians.
VI. Trump, authoritarians, and fear.
VII. America’s changing social landscape.
VIII. What authoritarians want.
IX. How authoritarians will change American politics.

Whatever your reading preference, please, please read this article in its entirety. Now! History is happening and it will not wait for you.

Crossposted from SkyIslandScriber.com.

That’s what President Obama labeled economic inequality. Some writers went beyond and identified economic inequality as the central issue for the 2016 presidential election. To be sure, the death of Justice Scalia and the political battle it created seems to have usurped inequality as a central issue. But one way or another, the Supreme Court nomination and confirmation will be settled. Extreme economic inequality will remain. The gap between rich and poor continues to increase. It is the dividing issue between the two political parties. How inequality is approached distinguishes, if not divides, the two Democratic candidates.

Scriber thinks the issues reduce to three questions. (1) What does the electorate know about inequality? (2) What are its consequences? (3) What do we do about it?

What does the electorate believe about inequality?

This graphic is the best place to start. Take 5 minutes and watch the YouTube visual representation of inequality in America.

That graphic was based on the original report on the discrepancies between our ideal distribution of wealth, our guess about that distribution, and the reality. An article in Scientific American covers this and two additional research reports.

Here’s the abstract of a followup piece of research: “How Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay“.

Do people from different countries and different backgrounds have similar preferences for how much more the rich should earn than the poor? Using survey data from 40 countries (N = 55,238), we compare respondents’ estimates of the wages of people in different occupations—chief executive officers, cabinet ministers, and unskilled workers—to their ideals for what those wages should be. We show that ideal pay gaps between skilled and unskilled workers are significantly smaller than estimated pay gaps and that there is consensus across countries, socioeconomic status, and political beliefs. Moreover, data from 16 countries reveals that people dramatically underestimate actual pay inequality. In the United States—where underestimation was particularly pronounced—the actual pay ratio of CEOs to unskilled workers (354:1) far exceeded the estimated ratio (30:1), which in turn far exceeded the ideal ratio (7:1). In sum, respondents underestimate actual pay gaps, and their ideal pay gaps are even further from reality than those underestimates.

The disconnects between what we believe about inequality and the reality extend to our beliefs about the American dream, that is, mobility. Here’s the abstract of “Building a More Mobile America – One Income Quintile at a Time”

A core tenet of the American ethos is that there is considerable economic mobility. Americans seem willing to accept vast financial inequalities as long as they believe that everyone has the opportunity to succeed. We examined whether people’s beliefs about the amount of economic mobility in the contemporary United States conform to reality. We found that: (1) people believe there is more upward mobility than downward mobility, (2) people overestimate the amount of upward mobility and underestimate the amount of downward mobility, (3) poorer individuals believe there is more mobility than richer individuals, and (4) political affiliation influences perceptions of economic mobility, with conservatives believing that the economic system is more dynamic—with more people moving both up and down the income distribution—than liberals do. We discuss how these findings can shed light on the intensity and nature of political debate in the United States on economic inequality and opportunity.

We may be free and brave but we sure are not equal. Scientific American continues.

We may not want to believe it, but the United States is now the most unequal of all Western nations. To make matters worse, America has considerably less social mobility than Canada and Europe.

By overemphasizing individual mobility, we ignore important social determinants of success like family inheritance, social connections, and structural discrimination. The three papers in Perspectives on Psychological Science indicate not only that economic inequality is much worse than we think, but also that social mobility is less than you’d imagine. Our unique brand of optimism prevents us from making any real changes.

George Carlin joked that, “the reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.” How do we wake up?

The article in Scientific American was introduced this way.

In a candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, “Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” …

So societal upheaval is a possible outcome of the obscenely extreme gaps between rich and poor. That possibility is explored below.

What are the consequences of extreme inequality?

I posted two lengthy reports in the recent past so I will just provide the links and brief comments.

Societal upheaval is a possibility. Or maybe a certainty? The “pitchforks” article was written by a billionaire and addressed to his fellow 0.1%ers.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

I ended my post this way.

… if candidates do not take on the issue of economic inequality, the pitchforks will come. My fear is that the pitchforks will be assault weapons and their wielders, led by some demagogue, will be wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, carrying their bibles, and chanting Liberte’ and Christianite’.

Another certainty is that inequality has a variety of side effects, one being shorter life expectancies: “only the poor die young” was my title.

The NY Times has the report on a correlate of increasing wealth inequality: life expectancy. If you are at the bottom of the wealth ladder, you are likely to die sooner. And that trend in life expectancies of rich and poor, like wealth inequality, is on the increase. The numbers are stunning. …

Experts have long known that rich people generally live longer than poor people. But a growing body of data shows a more disturbing pattern: Despite big advances in medicine, technology and education, the longevity gap between high-income and low-income Americans has been widening sharply.

Below is a table based on research reported by the Times showing the differences between the top and bottom 10% brackets. The wealthiest are outliving the poorest and that difference is increasing.

And because the wealthiest live longer they are disproportionately the beneficiaries of social network programs like Medicare and Social Security.

What can we do about it?

Nick Hannauer in the “pitchforks are coming” article calls for FDR-like policy changes, one of which could be a return to higher top tax rates. Paul Buchheit (commondreams.org) concurs and lists 5 Reasons the Top Tax Rate Should Be 80%.

Here is a sixth: “over two-thirds of Americans favor increased taxes on people making over a million dollars. The desire to reduce inequality is not extreme at all.” The evidence? Most Americans do not know how severe the inequality is but have reasonable views on the proper distribution of wealth..

Informed Americans understand that an economic war has been waged against the middle and lower classes. As a result, there are at least five good reasons why the tax rate on the upper classes should be MUCH higher.

(1) Massive Redistribution Has Occurred. Upward.

Total U.S. wealth increased by a stunning 60 percent since 2009, from $54 trillion to $86 trillion, but 3/4 of that massive increase went to the richest 10% of Americans.

(2) Subsidies to the Rich are SIX Times Greater Than Subsidies to the Poor

The cost of the entire Safety Net is only about ONE-SIXTH of the $2.2 trillion in tax expenditures, tax underpayments, tax havens, and corporate nonpayment, the great majority of which went to the richest Americans.

(3) The Super-Rich are the Main Beneficiaries of Our Nation’s Prosperity

… The wealthiest individuals and corporations are the main beneficiaries of tax laws, tax breaks, property rights, zoning rules, patent and copyright provisions, trade pacts, antitrust legislation, and contract regulations. …

… Businesses rely on roads and seaports and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, communications towers and satellites to conduct online business, the Department of Commerce to promote and safeguard global markets, the U.S. Navy to monitor shipping lanes, and FEMA to clean up after them.

But instead of paying for all the taxpayer-funded benefits, S&P corporations have spent 95 percent of its profits on stock buybacks and dividend payouts to enrich their investors.

(4) Progressive Taxes Actually Work

The prominent economic team of Piketty and Saez and Stantcheva determined that “the top tax rate could potentially be set as high as 83%” before the highest earners are discouraged from attempting to earn more. The National Bureau of Economic Research goes further, proposing a top marginal rate of 90%, and even some conservative analysts concede that the optimal maximum may be at least 50%.

Since the 1970s libertarians and business leaders have rallied behind trickle-down theory. Thus a series of tax cuts for the rich. But evidence from numerous sources leads to the conclusion that there is no correlation between tax cuts and GDP growth, and that in fact the cuts cause governments (as common sense would dictate) to lose revenue.

(5) Higher Taxes Won’t Make Rich People Leave

During the Republican debates Chris Christie claimed that higher taxes caused wealthy New Jersey residents to leave the state. It’s not true. A Stanford study found that lower-income residents left New Jersey at approximately the same rate. “Overall,” said the authors, “higher income earners show greater residential stability and geographic embeddedness than do low income earners.”

Conclusion

When you pick and choose your candidates, try holding them to this, Scriber’s, standard: if our policy makers really want to “make America great again” they should be addressing wealth inequality and its consequences for public health. We need to fix this and fix it fast. Tweaking the edges is not likely to get it done.

Bill Maki is another southern Arizona resident who writes about a variety of issues on his blog, skyislandscriber.com. He will be contributing posts here on the Restore Reason blog as well and is graciously allowing me to cross-post on his blog. Welcome Bill.