Meanwhile in Obama's Neighborhood

I love this picture so much. It's my son Jonah.  Who loves baseball more than anything.  At least for the moment.  Trucks and trains and dinosaurs and the Wild Kratts and Harry Potter have come and gone.  Now it's baseball.  For a kindergartener he is pretty good.  Last year in T-ball he batted lead off, it looks like he will again this year, after graduating to little league.  He catches the ball when it is thrown to him.  He has a good swing.  He went 3 for 3 the other day, earning the game ball.

How many kids have been in similar photos - in their baseball uniforms, hair messed up, infield dirt on their hands and arms, loose toothed-grin, holding up the game ball? We went to Cooperstown last summer, and the town was full of little leaguers, and it made the whole experience better. In isolation, the Hall of Fame creates the impression that baseball is a museum artifact, something from our past, played by men, captured in old photos. But when you walk around the streets of the town, and see all the kids in their team uniforms, you know it's a living game, still played by kids, who love it. 

Jonah's team is diverse - kids from different backgrounds, different races and ethnicities, one girl among all the boys.  Their parents show up and cheer, and talk to one another.  Like Cooperstown, an afternoon spent watching Jonah's Cardinals teammates provides a reminder that baseball is a living game, and every summer a new group of kids pick up bats and put on gloves and play the game with gleeful enthusiasm.    

In the moment, while Jonah is playing, it's idyllic.  The field his team plays on is a few blocks from Barack Obama's Kenwood home.  I've written about this before - Hyde Park has the ability to convince you that we've made great strides, that we are no longer a nation divided by race and class and faith.   But that's wrong.  What I thought would be a transformative presidency has become a four-year long battle for modest progress, accompanied by some frustrating failures.  

Like Jonah, I love baseball.  It wasn't always easy.  I never could hit.   Growing up in Cleveland, through decades of horrible Indians teams, I never had anyone to cheer for.  Until the 1990s, when Kenny Lofton and Albert Belle and Omar Vizquel and Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez and Carlos Baerga came along and took the Indians to the playoffs year after year.  I've tried to teach Jonah that the beauty of baseball isn't the long ball; although we give a disproportionate share of attention to home runs, most runs score because players get on base, and wait for someone to drive them home.  My favorite players - Kenny Lofton and Omar Vizquel and Derek Jeter and Paul Konerko- have always been situationally smart hitters.  


It's useful to think of politics this way.  Every now and then a slugger gets to the White House - like FDR or LBJ.  But usually what we should hope for is someone who consistently gets on base, keeps his head in the game, and tries to move around to score.  It turns out, that's the kind of President Obama is.  Like a lot of people, I get frustrated when a rally gets snuffed out, and we go back to the dugout with nothing to show for it.  We're lucky today's Republican Party is made up of sore armed losers who can't pitch.  They keep serving up slow moving tosses, that Obama can easily hit out of the infield.  So we stay in the game.  As we look at 2012, the goal should be to take the game into extra innings.  Then score a bunch of runs by playing smart, patient ball. 

Winning over Obama

President Obama’s announcement yesterday that he supports gay marriage has been followed by everything I expected.  Celebration – more celebration on Facebook than in the streets, but jubilation nevertheless.  And the predictable Republican reaction.  The party who howled with outrage at the idea that progressives were calling their regressive moves on women’s health and reproductive issues a “war on women,” quickly began calling Obama’s remarks the start of a new “war on traditional marriage.”  Other, more clear-eyed and strategic Republicans see political calculation in Obama’s announcement.  And they have been complaining about it.  They are certainly right.  But so what?  In an earlier posting I said:

I'm a proud Democrat, but I am comfortable saying the Democratic Party has seldom been heroic, even if some of its signature legislative achievements have been sweepingly transformative. The party's accomplishments - bringing immigrants into the political process, defending the right of African Americans to vote, improving work conditions for laborers - were often the products of cagey political choices, securing votes so politicians getting rich from public office could remain in office. It has been the party of corruption and compromise, machine politics and patronage. The Democratic Party has always been less a leading man, more a colorful character actor. Now and then, like Ernest Borgnine in Marty, the party brought home the big prize, delivering a social safety net to keep Americans from falling into destitution as they age, guaranteeing civil rights, fighting a war on poverty.  But that's about right. Political parties and the politicians who guide them aren't great causes or prophets. Our prophets - Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King and others like them who took on our society's inequalities and division - weren't politicians.

I’m fine with the fact that this was a politically astute step, and you should be too.  Think about it this way: the Democratic Party, since Roosevelt and Truman shifted the party dramatically to the left, has always addressed its political vulnerability by bringing new voters into the process.  Like Obama’s announced support of gay marriage, Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces, and the insertion of a civil rights plank in his 1948 campaign platform, was politically risky.  It had costs.  The Dixiecrats bolted, and the Democratic Party began a long slide in the South.  But in the 1948 general election, Truman captured seventy-seven percent of African American ballots, the first time a Democratic candidate for the White House ever got more than fifty percent of the black vote.  The party’s civil rights stance helped Truman (just barely) win key swing states like California – which was more progressive than the rest of the country - and Illinois and Ohio - overwhelmingly Republican states with large African American populations.

Was Truman thinking about reelection when he issued Executive Order 9981 and integrated the military? Not entirely, but he was responding to political pressure. And once he started down that path, pressure built.  In the spring of 1948 the NAACP issued a Declaration of Negro Voters which encouraged black voters to tie their votes to efforts to follow through on recommendations issued by the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which in October of 1947 had published a landmark report mapping a way forward, through aggressive federal intervention, toward a more inclusive national union.  The integration of the armed forces was one example of targeted federal action, the NAACP and African American voters wanted to see more.

And so our country has lurched forward, with one party – my party – seeing opportunity in activists’ calls to expand inclusion, and reduce poverty, and tackle discrimination.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, has consistently taken a more regrettable path.  While Democrats have tried to win the White House and majorities in Congress by bringing more people into the political process, and championing their political causes, the Republican Party, at least since Richard Nixon, has sought to divide the country and disenfranchise voters. Nixon's southern strategy in 1972 established a playbook, and the Republicans have built their campaigns around wedge issues and division and peddling hate ever since.  Over time, they also developed an interest in removing minority and low-income voters from state voter registration lists.  If they can make it harder for African Americans and Latinos and college students and the poor to vote, they can reduce the Democratic Party’s numerical superiority.  All in all, through regressive voting restrictions and fear Republicans have sought to tear away at the Democratic Party’s advantages in numbers.

The typical voter is a complex, almost incomprehensible combination of different preferences and beliefs.  If, through fear and deception, Republican candidates can convince voters that Democratic candidates want to end their way of life – rather than extend it to those at the margins of society – Republicans can pry working class voters away from the Democratic Party. 

The recent passage of Amendment  1 in North Carolina is a perfect example, and nicely compares with Obama’s choice.  Consider this, from the New York Times:

“We are not anti-gay — we are pro-marriage,” Tami Fitzgerald, chairwoman of the executive committee for the pro-amendment Vote for Marriage NC, said at a victory rally in Raleigh, where supporters ate pieces of a wedding cake topped by figures of a man and a woman. “And the point, the whole point is simply that you don’t rewrite the nature of God’s design for marriage based on the demands of a group of adults.*"

The strategy was to convince voters that activists were trying to overturn “God’s design for marriage.”  In actuality, the marriage equality movement is fundamentally conservative.  It is a reaffirmation of the role of marriage in our society.  Advocates for gay marriage want to extend the reach of the institution so others can enjoy its legal and social benefits.  While so-called defenders of marriage argue that the pro-LGBT movement is “radical” in its efforts to “redefine marriage,” in truth, there is very little here that seems radical.  A more radical position – one I hold – is that marital status should be irrelevant to our decisions about who we chose to build a home with, or have children with, and legal protections and governmental and employer-supplied benefits shouldn’t be tied to marriage.  

In the end, if I’m asked if Obama’s resistance to marriage equality, and his eventual “evolution” to embrace it are tied to politics, I’ll acknowledge they are.  But so what?  That’s what my party does.  It builds coalitions by expanding the circle of inclusion.  I’m happy about that.

*  Actually, Tami Fitzgerald's point is profoundly wrong, at least for America.  We are a secular democracy, deeply rooted in a tradition of universal rights.  So, in fact, if a "group of adults," i.e. voters and their elected representatives, decide to "rewrite" what one group perceives as "God's design," because that "design" violates the rights of others, then that's what we do.  And we don't apologize for it.  It isn't an attack on their religion.  It is a legal and constitutionally permitted effort to attack bias and overturn unequal public policy. 

The Republican war on science finds a new front

Rick Santorum's views on college - describing it as part of Obama's elitist project to indoctrinate Americans into the secular misery of leftist political thought - have raised some eyebrows. Many analysts have assumed this was a play for the blue collar vote, tied to his rhetoric on the dignity of physical labor. Santorum's grandfather, he'd like to remind you, was a coal miner.

But this isn't the first time Santorum has attacked the academy. In 2008 Santorum said this:

[Satan] understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest. They were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different—pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia a long time ago fell. You say, well, what could be the impact of academia falling? Well, I would make the argument that the other structures that I’m going to talk about here had the root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders of our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall.

Another way to view Santorum's attack is to see it as a new wrinkle on the Republican's war on science. Why have Republicans taken such a dim view of science? It has multiple origins. Obviously, the persistent attacks on the evidence of climate change are tied to the harm a switch to non-carbon-based fuels would bring to the quarterly earnings of big oil. The attack on teaching evolution is a reactive defense of Biblical stories about the origins of life. They get away with it, in part, because Americans have such a poor scientific IQ. As I said in 2008:

This is the party that denies the scientific evidence of global warming, despite the fact that the peer-reviewed consenus tells us that human activities are producing ecological effects and warming the planet. This is the party that wants to overturn how biology is taught in our schools, by replacing the teaching of evolution, which is overwhelmingly confirmed by scientific evidence, with stories from the Bible. Science, Republicans like to tell you, is an ungodly assembly of theories and assumptions and probabilities. They'll tell you it isn't fact. Here's where I raise my hand and say: We know that. What we have done is build an architecture for assessing the reliability of findings. Experiments and models need to be carefully described, all assumptions and measurement judgements transparently disclosed, and the findings need to be presented with necessary caveats. Then, everyone else who wants to present a challenge is free to do so. Through a process where peers argue about findings, make necessary adjustments, and assemble a resulting consensus, we arrive at what we know about the world. The problem for Republicans is that they don't like what science tells them, so they offer hard-to-defend counter-claims and launch baseless attacks.

What Santorm has done, though, amplifies the argument, reshapes it in new, strange ways. Interestingly, although Santorum portrays his attack on college as a celebration of the working class, contextualized in the wider history of his hand-wringing over the professoriate, it seems clear that he fears that his faith can't survive a confrontation with the searching, evidence-based academic skepticism that characterizes life on college campuses. He is afraid the scientific method will reveal the holes in his religion.

So Santorum rejects skepticism because he feels his divinely revealed truth will be shown to be a lie. Merely an assembly of superstition and magical thinking and far-fetched stories. It turns out that Santorum's religion is a 96-pound weakling, and science is the bully kicking sand in its face. How alarming to find this holy warrior has no confidence in the faith he is defending.

And how different from the brave faith of my friend Marthame Sanders. His faith was tested by the rigor and skepticism of the University of Chicago. It survived, and is confident. In a recent sermon, offered to his congregation in Atlanta, he employs neuroscience and psychology to understand the limits of our capacities for empathy and sympathy. He reaches into science to see that our wiring makes our capacity for sympathy - our ability to think about the lives of others and make judgements about their worth - unreliable. Marthame isn't frightened by science, he grasps its value, as a vital tool for understanding the world around us. And he finds in this world a place for religion. He sees a world made up of the poor, and vast diversity, and, due to circumstances arising from many causes, we are limited in our ability to care about their suffering, and the misery of others unlike us. In Corinthians he finds a pathway through this, and a sustainable foundation for a deep sympathy for the wide sweep of humanity. And from this sympathy comes a way to address our divisions, and the will to understand the suffering of others - in Iraq and Palestine, in Darfur and Somolia, and in America's inner cities - as indistinguishable from our own. That is a faith with confidence and purpose. So different from Santorum's.

Ask your neighborhood Republican to define "intrusive"

Time and time again I'm astonished by Republicans. How can they get through the day? If I had a head full of such wildly inconsistent opinions, I think I'd take to my bed, gulping aspirins to try to quiet the howling between my ears. Yet, there they are, walking around, on Wall Street and in Amarillo, even appearing on T.V., debating.

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell has decided it isn't necessary to force a transvaginal ultrasound on a woman seeking an abortion. His new perspective is a surprise, since he had previously backed a Republican sponsored bill which requires women to get an ultrasound prior to receiving an abortion. In order to capture a useable image, the bill requires a transvaginal ultrasound for women in the first trimester of their pregnancies. A Democratic sponsored amendment that would have requested a woman's consent prior to the transvaginal procedure was defeated by the legislature's Republican majority.

Evidently, the widespread attention the bill has received, heightened no doubt by Presidential election-year politics, and McDonnell's own ambitions to be selected as a Vice Presidential candidate, shifted his thinking. Now he says, “Mandating an invasive procedure in order to give informed consent is not a proper role for the state." He's OK mandating an ultrasound, and requiring the doctor to offer a transvaginal option, but if the patient says no thanks, he wants to leave it at that.

This is where things get weird. After all, a law requiring a doctor to provide images of your uterus, whether the images are produced from a transvaginal procedure or merely by waving the wand over a blue-goo covered belly, seems awfully intrusive to me. Nevertheless, one of the migraine-inducing inconsistencies in the modern-day GOP is this: Looking at someone's uterus is OK. But looking at me in my underwear isn't. This is the party, after all, who got worked up over the Transportation Security Administration's decision to roll out full-body scanners at America's airports because these scanners were "too intrusive." In fact, even Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, who evidently thinks taking snapshots of women's uteri is OK, is on record saying the body scanners are "over the line" and unnecessarily intrusive. As Jon Stewart has helpfully pointed out, maybe someone should explain to McDonnell that his bill is like requiring a pat down of a woman's uterus.

Update: March 1. Dahlia Lithwick adds a helpful perspective to the analysis of Virginia's mandatory ultrasound bill. From her essay in Slate:

State Sen. Ralph Northam, who is a pediatric neurologist, tells me today that the amended bill doesn’t solve the underlying problems of the original ultrasound law. “This will be the first time in the history of the Commonwealth,” he says, “that a group of legislators are telling doctors how to practice medicine.” He adds that by making the transvaginal procedure optional, the bill forces doctors to do a trans-abdominal ultrasound even in the early weeks of a pregnancy, before anything can even be seen. “They are telling us to do a costly and unnecessary procedure that won’t even work,” he explains. In the end, he says, calling it an “informed consent bill” is misleading.

And indeed it is misleading. It is more than that. Pretending that the bill's intention is to give women "more information" about a medical procedure is transparently phony. Hospitals and clinics already have in place carefully structured processes to guarantee that patients know what they need to know about medical procedures, potential risks, and likely side effects. The American Hospital Association's Patient Bill of Rights has become the template for how most care-givers approach these questions. Among the protections the AHA's Bill of Rights provides is this:

The patient has the right to and is encouraged to obtain from physicians and other direct caregivers relevant, current, and understandable information concerning diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. Except in emergencies when the patient lacks decision-making capacity and the need for treatment is urgent, the patient is entitled to the opportunity to discuss and request information related to the specific procedures and/or treatments, the risks involved, the possible length of recuperation, and the medically reasonable alternatives and their accompanying risks and benefits.

So why does Governor Bob McDonnell think he needs to get involved? It is inescapably clear this is about making abortions harder to get. Poor women without insurance will have to pay for the procedure - the state mandates the procedure but doesn't pay for it. Women will need to wait for 24 hours after the procedure to have an abortion. This imposes an unacceptable burden on all women, but especially low-income women working hourly jobs, who will need to give up two days of work, or portions of two days, to have the ultrasound and the abortion done.

Strangely, there is a golden lining in all of this, if you squint hard enough. McDonnell has been careful to position all of his rhetoric about this in the landscape of medicine. Does that mean we have turned a corner, and the political conversation about abortion is now taking place in the realm of medical science, not morality? Much of what politicians say about abortion now, and the justifications for their legal obstacles that aim to prevent women from getting abortions, involves concerns about the "psychological and emotional health" of women who get abortions or, as in this case, concern about women "as patients." Clearly this is tactical. Abortion opponents still oppose abortion on moral and religious grounds. But the fact that the argument is now taking place in a new space, in the secular world of medical care and patients' rights, is a good thing. It is impossible to win an argument about what God wants. It is simple to win an argument about whether or not we have adequate protections for patients in place. We may not, but that is a dispute that can be addressed with evidence, rather than theological insight, and through established mechanisms, rather than intrusive laws.

Yahoo for making the right look stupid, but do something too

Charles Murray's Coming Apart, like The Bell Curve, which he also co-wrote, has become another opportunity to examine why America's poor have no one to blame but themselves. Oh, and liberals too. And the sixties and our culture of moral relativism. Declining wages, growing poverty, evaporating hope, failing schools, none of this has anything to do with the plight of the poor. According to Murray, the problem is a cultural failure, permitted and accelerated by liberal elites. We no longer ask the poor to take responsibility for their lives, or their families, or their behavior. As Murray puts it, the problem is "American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn't." Reread that. Because, if you are a liberal like me, Murray doesn't mean what you think he means. The problem isn't, as is true, in Cleveland and Detroit and Youngstown and Flint, that jobs that once helped a breadwinner provide for his family are gone, the problem, according to Murray, is that doing menial work to try to provide for your family is no longer a source of status in contemporary America. The sixties, according to Murray, destroyed our value system. Somehow, all these years later, we still crave the highs that recreational drugs promise, and casual sex, and easy going good times. Screw work, man!

Murray is right that you can deposit blame for America's decline at the feet of liberals, but not for the reasons he proposes ("that liberal elites, while themselves living lives of probity, have refused to proselytize for the bourgeois virtues to which they subscribe, thus leaving their less discerning fellow-citizens to flounder in the anti-bourgeois legacy of the counter-cultural 1960s"), but because we have become too timid in our defense of the role of government in resisting the persistent assault of corporate capitalism, which aims at pauperizing workers, stripping them of all defenses, limiting their ability to organize, and eliminating their voice in any conversation about social and economic policy. We haven't failed because we let the unemployed smoke pot and live lives filled with unrestrained sexual abandon. We have failed because we have allowed corporations and bankers to dismantle government, defund our schools, and disenfranchise the poor.

Don't misunderstand me, the bad guys are greedy corporate predators, like Bain-era Mitt Romney, and the multinationals that dismantled cities across the rust-belt, eliminating jobs and shifting work overseas, and the Republican party that elevated this ideology of greed and exploitation to the center of their party platform. But I think Democrats have become absorbed, since Clinton, with winning the rhetorical war and have lost sight of what they should do: use government to help the vulnerable. Andrew Sullivan's new Newsweek piece says: "Obama’s greatest skill is in getting his opponents to overreach and self-destruct." Clinton era triangulation was an effort, similarly, to out-position his opponents on the right. As Haley Barbour claimed at the time, Clinton developed "the amazing ability to turn 180 degrees in a wink".

Where is the commitment to champion compassionate, liberal, pro-government politics? Democratic presidents can't only be measured by their ability to make the right look stupid. They have to get things done too. In winning these skirmishes, liberals have lost site of the war, and the right has rolled across the country taking territory.

In a federal system, a commitment to effective government begins in Washington, but requires a similar commitment at the state and local level. While Democrats have been busy deploying defensive tactics in D.C., Republicans have succeeded in dismantling local government,starving counties of tax revenue, and, in the process, destroying public education.Privatizing services that once were public, surrending to for-profit contractors the fees and assessments that residents once paid municipalities. And, of course, distracting voters with a whole array of bogeymen, like gay marriage. In my home state of Ohio in 2004, for example, when voters should have been worried about the continuing economic slide of the state, Republicans got Ohioans agitated about same sex matrimony. This happens time and time again, from place to place, and the response by Democrats has been, on the whole, to move to the right, running candidates that could be "acceptable" to the supposedly right-leaning electorate. The result is, all across America, local politicians, whether Democratic or Republican, who have no deep commitment to the idea that government is good, especially when it is devoted to the work of assisting the most vulnerable. It's sad and profoundly discouraging. And this, not Murray's fantasy about the persistence and destructiveness of sixties-era values, is the source of poor America's plight.

Obama's Politics and Game Theory

I have been required, time and time again, to explain President Barack Obama's bargaining beliefs. Why does he always seem to get taken to the cleaners by his Republican opponents? I've grown increasingly disinclined to have these arguments. It's like being a Cleveland sports fan. Why keep cheering for a loser? Yet I do, whether it's the Indians or the Browns or the President.

With the help of Jon Elster and Cristina Bicchieri, I think I have a handle on it. Obama is a conscientious bargainer, but a slow learner. To see this more clearly, let's use something I can't use very well: game theory.

Classic two player games are designed to show what rational actors would do given specific known payoff formulations. For example, consider this:

This is a simple two player game. In this game, there is common knowledge that both players are rational. The rules are straightforward. One player moves at a time. Player I can either move down, terminate the game, and walk away with a 1, leaving player II with nothing. Or, he can chose to extend the game, offering player II a chance to either: a) move down, allowing player II to collect 2, leaving player I with nothing; or b) continue the game to the third node, where player I will terminate the game, either walking away with 3, and leaving player II with nothing, or - less plausibly - giving 3 to player II and walking away with nothing himself. Given this scenario, a rational player will take the first payoff available. If player I is rational, he will terminate the game at node 1. If player II gets the chance - because player I waffles or misunderstands the payoffs - he will end the game, walking away with 2.

Barack Obama is not rational, at least not in the simple formulation depicted in this game. He has commendable, but in this political environment naive, faith in bargaining. For Obama, the game looks like this:



Obama has confidence that as political opponents negotiate, the ability to accomplish even greater things - grand bargains - emerges. He's not wrong. A body of theory I often return to - Putnam's work on social capital - informs us that repeated engagement helps build trust and patterns of reciprocity. We get better at working together the more we try. This allows us to risk things that we might not attempt otherwise. We feel less vulnerable, because we have confidence that our opponents/collaborators will not take advantage of a concession. To illustrate what I mean, imagine a school board and a teachers' union making some difficult decisions about how to keep schools open in the face of a budget crisis. The teachers and the administrators have had a history of encounters, bargaining over issues large and small, and across that iterative history of encounters, the two sides have learned that, although they view challenges through different lenses, each side wants to serve the public good, and educate as many kids as possible, as well as possible. With that in mind, the two sides might agree to a bargain that cuts pay for new teachers, preserves pay for more experienced teachers, and creates a process requiring neighborhood school boards to make recommendations about how, and under what criteria, new teachers are given tenure and higher pay. The school board gets the cuts it wants, but surrenders some control over how teachers are assessed and rewarded. The teachers make some concessions regarding entry-level pay, but map out approaches to promotion that allow teachers working in difficult settings - violent, low income neighborhoods filled with struggling families, for example - to be evaluated by context-relevant criteria. It's a socially preferred outcome - schools stay open, teachers stay on the job - that might not be possible if the two sides were negotiating without trust and expectations of reciprocity.

Obama's problem is that he is negotiating with opponents who have no interest in serving the public good. He has been too slow to learn this, perhaps because his faith in the value of iterative negotiations is too strong. He believes in engagement, and the power of long-term rationality. If Republicans and Democrats continue to work together, he believes each party can get some of the things they want and the country will be better off. But he's misjudged his opponents, while they have quickly learned to take advantage of his vulnerabilities. What we get is something like this:

Republicans, knowing they can, because Obama is loathe to defect, continue the game across several iterations, then terminate, winning twice as many concessions as they could have had they defected earlier. Obama is left to hope he gets some political gain because he is the only participant in the game with the nation's interests in mind, or because he is the only adult in the room. But, in the meantime, his poll numbers drop, his followers are dispirited, and we haven't really done anything to help the unemployed, or regulate banks, or solve our most stubborn, long-term problems. I have many friends who believe faith is a wonderful thing. In this case, it's a handicap.

Wages and the Wages of Sin: Evangelicals as the Right's Soldiers

The comparison I mapped out in my last post - linking the collapse of democratic politics in Brazil in 1964 with the current political sentiments of the Republican Party - can be developed a little further.

As industrialization developed and deepened in Brazil in the years prior to 1964, the goods being manufactured in Brazilian factories were higher end consumer goods, destined for elites, or products, in most cases manufactured in Brazil by foreign corporations, intended for global markets. If the goods produced in Brazilian factories were manufactured to be sold to Brazilian consumers, then the state and Brazilian industrialists might have felt compelled to improve workers' pay. With better wages, consumers could buy more goods, increasing demand, creating opportunities for growth, and putting more profits into manufacturers' pockets. Because this wasn't the case, Brazilian technocrats and industrialists had no incentive to grow workers' wages. In fact, to compete in the global market, Brazilian planners and manufacturers wanted to suppress wages, to manage production costs. The result was an increasingly desperate working class which attempted, through unions and politics, to air their grievances and demand a larger share of the nation's wealth. In the end, industrialists, state technocrats, and the military stepped in to overturn democratic institutions and suppress working class aspirations.

This parallels America's present economic realities to an unmistakeable degree. American manufacturers don't produce consumer goods in any meaningful quantity anymore, with perhaps the exception of the automobile industry. The items we do manufacture - medical devices, sophisticated technology for business, precision-manufactured parts for industry - aren't targeted to rank and file consumers. As a result, it is irrelevant to American corporations whether workers make enough to buy toys and shoes and clothes and kiddie pools. What matters is how well business is doing, since the market for our manufactured goods is the business sector. Wages can drop, unemployment can rise, and Wall Street doesn't blink. But when businesses stop buying, Wall Street reacts. Over the years, America's business sector has corrupted the country's political leaders, as lobbyists and campaign contributions have marginalized the interests and the voice of nation's working class. Regulatory oversight has been dismantled, workplace safety has been compromised, the right of workers to unionized has been attacked, wages have stagnated, and the wealthy have grown wealthier, all while politicians, including Democrats, sat by and watched. Our compromised political process, incapable of producing meaningful solutions for an increasingly desperate working class, has lost its legitimacy.

In Brazil, industrialists joined with the military to overturn democratic institutions. That hasn't been necessary here. Corporations and their lobbyists have managed to render our political institutions irrelevant. Here, the coup was carried out without armed forces.

But the right does have foot soldiers to aid it in its efforts. The evangelical right, as deeply concerned about social chaos and moral decline as the Brazilian military was, has been recruited by the Republican Party to take the battle to the streets. In a nation of increasing diversity, shifting moral precepts, and growing tolerance for non-traditional forms of sexual identity, the Christian right has moved from moral panic to moral panic, accomplishing three things useful to the Republican Party. First, by mobilizing to prevent the legalization of gay marriage and address fears about the declining influence of Christianity in America's civil institutions, Christian activists have increased Republican turnout. Second, they have managed to shift the frame of political discourse, positioning moral issues ahead of economic concerns. Third, by doing so, they have divided middle-class and working-class voters, and persuaded working-class Christians to ignore appeals from their unions and co-workers, voting for morally-crusading Republican candidates, who, once elected, set about the work of suppressing wages and attacking unions. It's a cynical type of politics, divisive and deeply anti-populist.