The 2016 election polls showed Hillary Clinton beating Trump handily. This is an old story, but worth a closer look.
David Shor spoke about this on the Bill Maher show. Shor is the shy, self effacing boy genius who entered college at 13, and at 20 was a lead pollster for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. Shor was fired from Civis Analytics in 2020 over a tweet. He now serves as head of data science at Open Labs.
“The big, fundamental reason why polls are wrong – everyone wants to talk about the undecideds breaking, or turnout,” Shor says, “but it’s actually that the survey takers are super, super weird. That’s the big problem.”
What does that mean?
“The biggest thing, looking at 2016, is something called social trust. Social scientists ask, do you think people can be generally trusted? Or do you think people should think for themselves?
“Most people say that people can’t be trusted – something like 60, 70 percent of people. But the few people who do trust the people around them, unsurprisingly, are way more likely to answer phone surveys… You’re getting trusting people, you get nice people. We’ve done personality tests. Such people are way more agreeable – the kind of people who stop what they’re doing, and say ‘Oh, a researcher wants to know my views on contemporary events, oh my God!’
“This has always been true. People with low social trust would never answer phone surveys. But it used to just don’t matter. It used to be that politics was a fight about whether taxes should be higher or lower. And Donald Trump changed that. He changed what it means to be a Republican.
“So, suddenly, when you look among people who trust their neighbors, that group swung to Clinton, by five or six points…
“But there was this silent, hidden majority of people who did not trust people around them, and weren’t answering phone. Those people – disproportionately, white working class voters who lived in the Mid West. That’s the big reason why mid west polls were wrong.
“In 2016, the states were wrong, but at least the national polls were about right. 2020 was way worse. National polls were off by three or four points.
“And the reason, is, basically, the coronavirus.
“When we do our surveys, we join them to the voter file, and we could see, starting in March, that the percentage of people who answered surveys who were Democrat just shot up. The reason was that Democrats were stuck at home. They respected the lock down.
“You can tell with creepy cell phone surveillance data that Democrats were staying home, ad Republicans were out partying and doing Spring break [laughter].
“And those Democrats were desperately answering every survey they could find. And that’s why the surveys were wrong.”
Bill Maher is asking him what was the biggest surprise of 2020 – why did Trump do better with minorities?
“I think the big surprise”, David Shor says, “in 2016, Trump did better with non white voters than Barack Obama did. And a lot of people were ready to write that off. It was Barack Obama, there were lots of reasons he did well with non white voters.
“But in 2018, this should have really been a warning sign. Non white voters trended against Democrats, while white voters trended toward. This was really consequential. We lost the Georgia Governor race. If Stacey Abrams had done as well among Black voters as Hillary Clinton did, she would have been Governor right now.
“2020 was a continuation of that trend. That was the thing that was most surprising to me. A lot of people did not see it coming. Just to run through it, Hispanic voters swung nine percentage points against Democrats. That means one in ten Hispanic voters switched their vote. Black voters, it wasn’t that large, but it was two three percent shift. Asian voters, it wasn’t that large, the data is still out, but it seems it was at least a five, six percent shift.”
Bill Maher asks him if he believes most voters are not Liberal, even among Democrats.
“Among Democrats”, David Shor says, “it’s roughly fifty-fifty. I think the big difference, when you look at ideology, is that among white people, about 90 percent of Liberals vote for Democrats, and about 80 percent of Conservatives vote for Republicans.
“But with non white voters, it’s not like that. And the reason is – this is just arithmetic. Ideology doesn’t vary very much by race. Roughly the same number of white, Black, Hispanic voters identify as Liberal, Moderate or Conservative.
“But partisanship varies a lot. And the reason for why is that Democrats have done really well with non white Conservatives. The story of 2020 is that Democrats used to win Hispanic Conservatives by double digits, and this time Trump won them by double digits.”
Bill Maher asks him if he thinks that woke and Liberal are now two different wings of the party.
“I think the core problem, as the party has become more educated”, David Shor says, “-educated people have increasingly defined the core of the Democratic Party. One thing I like to say is a- a lot of people say it’s a truism in politics – that Democrats are too wonky, we’re eggheads, we talk too much about issues, we need to communicate our values.
“But the median voter does not share our values. Our values are weird, and alien If they had our values, they would be Liberals.
“The only way Democrats historically won elections was by talking about concrete issues that people agreed with. That’s how Bill Clinton won. And it’s how Barack Obama won. I think that was one of Joe Biden’s strengths.”
Bill Maher asks – what are these values that the average voter does not share.
“To go back to the polling thing – social trust is a big one. Liberals actually trust government. They trust society. They really believe in positive sum change, and the potential for positive sum interactions. But also, racial resentment. Attitudes toward gender. What kind of society do people want to live in. What kind of neighborhoods people want to live in. Liberals like to live in exciting, tightly packed cities.
“From a personality perspective, scientists like to study the five factor personality model. Openness to new experiences – this idea of how people respond to novel stimuli. It’s highly correlated with liberalism.
“Some people, when they see a new ethnic restaurant, they get really excited, and energized. But a lot of people, the majority of people, see novel stimuli, and it drains them. It makes them freak out. And that’s why there’s this big geographic sorting.”
Bill Maher asks – we seem we’re about to enter a new era of re-segregation that is coming from the Left. On many college campuses, there are separate Black dorms, graduations and ceremonies. How will that affect elections in the future?
“There are a lot of studies – a study out of North Carolina”, David Shor says, “showing that racially integrated schools make people more liberal.
“The important thing, to go back, is to realize that most non white voters don’t identify as Liberal. We should take that really seriously. Realizing that most voters don’t share our values means we should instead meet people where they are, with values they actually hold, and issues they really care about.”
What do others say
Nate Cohn reports on polls at the New York Times. Here he writes on why 2016 and 2020 polls were wrong:
- A 2016 Review: Why Key State Polls Were Wrong About Trump (May 2017)
- What Went Wrong With Polling? Some Early Theories (Nov 2020; this was written too soon after the election and the conclusions are not clear cut)
The conventional wisdom among pollsters, after 2016, had been that polls can be fixed by accounting for the education degree of the responders. Which they did in 2020, and that resulted in polls that were even more far off. The stay-at-home effect compounded with refusal by non-trusting people to participate in phone surveys.
The loss of trust
Political polls have a particular role in our democracy. They are not used to bridge differences, heal deep fractures, and help us get to a more perfect union… Instead, they are used to run election campaigns.
But, to build that more perfect union, we have to build trust – among ourselves, and in our democratic institutions.
This is not something David Shor is talking about. For him, it’s a matter of reaching out to gauge people accurately.
How loss of trust realigned the left/right political divide
Francis Fukuyama writes that politics has shifted in the past years. We are experiencing a democratic recession – not just around the world, where it was originally observed, but within the United States.
“In the twentieth century, politics was characterized by an ideological divide between a left and a right defined largely in economic terms, with the former demanding greater socioeconomic equality and a redistributive state, while the latter favored individual freedom and strong economic growth. Today the axis is shifting toward a politics based on identity. As part of this change, both the left and the right are redefining their own objectives,” Francis Fukuyama says.
“The psychological basis of identity politics lies in the feelings of humans that they possess an inner worth or dignity which the society around them is failing to recognize. The underappreciated identity may be unique to an individual, but more often it flows from membership in a group, particularly one that has suffered some form of marginalization or disrespect. Identity is intimately linked to emotions of pride, anger, and resentment based on the kind of recognition that one receives (or does not receive). Although perceived economic injustices may stimulate the demand for recognition, this drive is distinct from the material motives that impel homo economicus, and can often lead to actions that run counter to economic self-interest conventionally understood.”
This is a reorientation that happened not just on the right, with the ‘America first’ slogan of Trump – but, also, on the left.
“While the twentieth-century left, whether communist, socialist, or social-democratic, promoted the interests of the broad working class, today’s left is more likely to champion specific identity groups such as racial minorities, immigrants, women, people with disabilities, sexual minorities, indigenous peoples, and so forth. An accompanying idea is that since each of these groups was marginalized in specific ways, remedies need to be tailored to each group. Over time, these group identities have often come to be seen as essential characteristics of their members, defining them at the expense of their individual identities. This ideological shift has had political consequences: Rather than focusing on the old working class and its trade unions (the great majority of whose members tended to belong to the dominant ethnic or racial group), leftist parties in the United States and other developed democracies now see themselves as representing the interests of various minorities. An upshot of this drift away from the old working class has been the movement of voters belonging to that class away from traditional left-wing parties and toward newer populist forces.
“A similar transformation has been occurring on the right. Twentieth-century conservative parties defended free markets and individual rights, often with the backing of business interests that supported free trade and welcomed immigrants. That old right is now being displaced by one that emphasizes a traditional kind of ethnically based national identity and worries that “our country” is being taken over by a cabal of immigrants, foreign competitors, and elites who are complicit in the theft.”
This shift is a wave that goes cross border, and is seen not just in the United States, but in Orban’s Hungary, Putin’s Russia, and in countries like the UK, France, Italy.
One underlying reason – and why this shift is hard to revert – is that, in a social media world, information flows differently.
“Among the hierarchies disrupted by the internet was the one formed by the “legacy media” in democratic countries—media organizations working in print, radio, and television that had over time developed journalistic standards for vetting and verifying information. The rise of Google and Facebook undermined the old media’s business model, and today it is not clear what economic incentives there are to provide reliable news to broad democratic publics.
“The tendency of the new identity politics in both its leftist and rightist varieties has been to fragment societies into ever smaller identity groups. In many ways, social media are perfectly suited to facilitate this decomposition of society. They permit like-minded individuals to find one another, not just in their own nations but around the world, while simultaneously shutting out criticism and disagreement. On the left, sexual politics and “intersectionality” have led to the proliferation of distinct and sometimes mutually hostile identities, while on the right we have discovered the existence of communities such as “incels” (involuntarily celibate males) and of new vocabularies and symbols by which white nationalists can identify one another. Promoting all this have been external actors such as Russia, which seems less interested in recommending its own political model than in heightening distrust and division within Western societies.
“It would be wrong”, Francis Fukuyama says, “to attribute growing social fragmentation simply to the rise of the internet, or to Russian policy. The decline in the authority of traditional social institutions began before the year 1990 and has been growing ever since. These institutions consist not just of governments, but the full range of mediating social structures, including political parties, business corporations, labor unions, churches, families, media outlets, voluntary organizations, and the like. This phenomenon was first noted in the Journal of Democracy by Robert D. Putnam, who published his widely read “Bowling Alone” essay in these pages in 1995. Survey data capture the decline as well, showing how trust in these institutions has fallen over time. While the declines vary by institution and by country, the overall shrinkage in trust is strikingly cross-national—it appears in place after place throughout the democratic world.”
Which brings it back full circle. We are experiencing a crisis of social trust.
So – I’ll leave with an open question. What are we doing to strengthen the bonds, build those new social institutions that can hold us together, to bridge these divisions, and rebuild the trust?
I wonder if this goes beyond the bounds of “fair use”. Also, when did a message that comes down to “Marches – good; looting – bad” become controversial?
I agree #8212; no civilized person disputes this.
I fear that this diary overthinks unfolding US events. The right wing in the US has always been more racist and more misogynist — as well as more authoritarian — than the left. The right wing has also been increasingly anti-science than the left (with the possible infatuation of the left with anti-vaccine hysteria).
The explosion of violence, hate, and ignorance is the direct result of uneducated white racist men realizing that their political power is disappearing as they become a minority of eligible voters. This began with the Tea Party, and exploded into an inferno after Donald Trump and the Trumpists threw gasoline everywhere they could reach while tossing matches at every excuse (in many cases just making up excuses).
My unwillingness to trust these deplorable thugs is not a “crisis”, it is an entirely appropriate response to unvarnished hate and brutality.
A concrete step that I want our government to consider is to make executives and directors of media organizations — specifically including social media — personally liable for civil and criminal penalties when material they publish is knowingly false and shown to encourage crimes. We already hold bar owners responsible when they serve alcohol to already-intoxicated patrons and those patrons kill and injure people. This is particularly important when a money trail from Russian organized crime into media outlets is demonstrated.
A march of American Nazis carrying Swastikas may well be protected speech. When the resulting mob goes on a rampage burning Jewish-owned shops and killing their owners, the organizers of the march should not be protected on First Amendment grounds.
Free speech and freedom of expression does not eliminate culpability and liability for the intentional abuse of those rights.
I grew up without freedom of expression. Had to watch what I was saying to friends – certainly could not say things in public.
All for the same reasons you list here. It was considered subversive, and hurtful to society.
When moving to the US, it was a different world, to be able to say what you meant (and mean what you say). I had to unlearn and un-closet myself, to be able to speak publicly.
It is painful to see some of these same things I experienced being replayed in front of my eyes. It is triggering.
My girls, on the other hand, do not quite understand this. I had a discussion with one of them, today, about Mark Twain. I was trying to explain to her the plotline of Huckleberry Finn.
It so happens that I watched a documentary on Mark Twain, and it explained the novel quite eloquently.
No matter. She cut me off curtly. She was not going to hear what I had to say.
It’s difficult to have to experience this. At least, when I grew up, I had to watch what I said in public – but never to family, or friends.
Now, the dispute is between friends and within families.
People have been primed to police speech, from their perspective, from the level of their intellect, without pausing to reflect that their interlocutor may have had a different life experience.
It’s such a closing of the mind. And it’s pervasive in the young generation, unfortunately.
Just like nationalism and fascism was pervasive in the 1920s and 30s. Back then, also, the movement was very popular with the youth, and spread through colleges like wild fire.
What was your daughter’s objection to discussing Huckleberry Finn? (Keep in mind if I ever read it, it was ages ago and am not familiar with the plot.)
Heh. I would encourage you to re-read it. There’s a LOT going on.
Her objection is that it’s written from the point of view of a white man. She has not read it (and neither did I).
Conversation shut down. Hard.
Though we did, a couple days ago, have a good conversation about an assignment she had in her literature class, about the Odyssey. Not all hope is lost. We’re still communicating.
I’m not sure how old your daughter is. Nearly all of us go through a period when we are very certain about pretty much everything.
Most of us eventually grow out of it. 🙂
FWIW, it is well worth reading. Whites living in New England have almost zero opportunity to understand what southern racist culture is like. The important things haven’t changed since Mark Twain’s day.
William Faulkner is another similar treasure — much less accessible, but worth the effort. I’m told by my friends with graduate degrees in literature that “You don’t read Faulkner, you re-read Faulkner”.
“Light in August”, in particular, conveys necessary insight into the culture of the deep south — it is perhaps more valuable because you have to work harder to get it.
I’ve probably read it more than a dozen times, starting when I was in high school (it was assigned by a remarkably courageous English teacher) and the last time being a few years ago. It is different each time I read it — I strongly suspect because I am different each time I read it.
If she’s going to object to anything written by a white man she’s leaving a lot of good stuff on the table. I know there is content, including epithets, that are objectionable to modern ears. They were objectionable when I was growing up too, but we discussed rather than cancelled them.
I’m not talking about Huckleberry Finn.
I’m talking about sites that issue a call-to-arms to mobilize heavily-armed veterans against, for example the Capitol with Congress sitting in session.
There IS something called “sedition”. It is real, and it is happening as we speak.
There is a middle ground between Stasi and today’s explicit exemption of social media from the liability exposure that hard-copy publications and broadcast networks have lived with for years. That exposure — triggered when a publication has editorial control over its content — has not caused the police state that you describe.
You’re not talking about Huck Finn, or the main stream press, but this pressure to police speech on social media has seeped into the news room, and the classroom.
Printed press is starting to work more like Twitter, Facebook and the likes – not the other way around. Their audience is the same.
It’s even worse, because main stream press used to derive revenue from advertising. Now, they derive it from the audience. They have to write what their audience wants to hear. Which means more fragmentation, more echo chambers, more reason for them to police their speech.
You don’t need a Stasi to enforce conformity and quash free speech; the fragmentation of the audience, the breaking apart into identities achieves the same result.
The First Amendment very clearly guarantees that THE GOVERNMENT will not abridge free speech. Private parties have always been able to exercise editorial control.
There is a HUGE difference.
Hand wringing about the untrusting masses that need to be brought back in the fold smacks of blaming the victim.
My activism, when I have time for it, tries to address the causes of disaffection.
I don’t mean that QAnnon et al are anything but nutso, or should be coddled. But they are nourished by a history of failures and lies of the powerful, from Vietnam and other adventures to toxic pollution to “the economy.”
Even something like the anti-vax cult rests on a foundation of an untrustworthy profit-before-people health system.
And let’s not switch to “authority good, question authority bad” without reflection.
I encourage people who worry about this to address these underlying causes as well as anything else they might do.
And, side note, I am pleased that the pollsters do not know what is going on. I always lie to them; why should I help corporations and monied interests to manipulate me?
The temporary thrill of pretending that those polls tell me anything leading up to an election is not worth it. Meanwhile, maybe leaders will say and do things that reflect what they really belive, rather than what they believe I believe.
Are you suggesting that using “deplorable” and similar vocabulary to characterize those who flock to white supremacist movements like “Proud Boys” or white supremacist demagogues like Ron Johnson is “hand wringing about the untrusting masses”?
The last thing we need to do is describe any member of this mob as a “victim”. Vast numbers of Americans suffer the same ills as these and do not choose to strike out against some designated scapegoat.
We know what happened in 1930s Germany when Jews, members of the LGBTQ community, and others became scapegoats. The German population that embraced the Nazis was also suffering various ills. There was no excuse for that then and no excuse for the same behavior today.
I hope you’re not suggesting that refusing to repeat that horrific mistake is “…switch[ing] to ‘authority good, question authority bad'”.
There is a world of difference between questioning authority and the horrors unfolding from the white-supremacist right in today’s America.
What an odd question!
no.
I apologize. The thread-starter uses such abstract vocabulary that I was struggling to understand your comment. I wasn’t trying to be offensive or insulting, I just didn’t grok your first paragraph.
I was similarly confused about this: “And let’s not switch to “authority good, question authority bad” without reflection.”
I apologize if I came across as overly touchy or argumentative.
Tom, please excuse my delay in acknowledging your handsome note to me. Thank you.
I may be similarly guilty of misunderstanding the original post, but I interpret it as a resounding call to propagandize the view of reality that elites are most comfortable with, all in the name of saving democracy.
But it is the failure of those elites that has jeopardized democracy. So, what is called for to save democracy are actions that address root causes, not ones that try to paper them over.
That is not to say that the problem described is not real.
As for “Question Authority,” the task is to create democratic relationships robust enough to respond to criticism, rather than crushing the criticism.
I confess this has become more of a challenge in the age of Trump, social media bots, and Fox News. But I still think this is an essential task.
I sort of dread the day when being “anti-science” is deployed against those who criticize corporate studies minimizing the effects of pollution, or when there is actual voter fraud someplace and it is unacceptable to challenge it. But maybe that is a fear too far, on my part.
I share your fears of abuse of the quite valid term “anti-science”. I think it’s exactly analogous to the way that Donald Trump seized the term “fake news” and destroyed it.
For me, being “anti-science” means firing or driving away world-famous climatologists who were, at great personal sacrifice, leading federal climate science efforts. It means muzzling those who remained. It means seizing control of crucial public databases used to track the COVID pandemic, and blocking researchers from accessing real-time data.
Being anti-science is not limited to the extreme right. The anti-Vax campaign has loud proponents from the left and extreme left, and promotes rumors that are just as bizarre as anything from QAnon. The COVID vaccine, for example, does not implant tracking chips in its recipients. No vaccine causes or is associated with autistic spectrum disorder.
Opposition to any sort of genetic engineering has become a religious cult among some progressives, with similarly wild departures from fact. Another example is the cult of homeopathy.
I appreciate your kind words.
What is the Democratic Party (and the left) doing to strengthen the bonds, build new social institutions to hold us together, bridge these divisions, and rebuild the trust of those of us who are not members of a racial minority, immigrant, women, disabled, a sexual minority, indigenous, and so forth?
I am more impressed with Joe Biden than I thought I would be. He appears to represent me. I would like to see more of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, specifically as she defends her roots as a bartender and a waitress.
I think the party would help itself by electing more young candidates and focus on the generation that got screwed with the Great Recession of 2008 followed by the Global Pandemic of 2020. They have first hand experience with the failures of free market capitalism and the benefits of government.
I mostly agree with this.
I enthusiastically agree with the second and third paragraphs.
In your first paragraph, I don’t see the need to do anything to “rebuild the trust” of anybody except perhaps the various groups you enumerate. As I see it, our party is finally and very belatedly taking necessary steps to empower those groups after literally oppressing them for generations.
Here is the group that passes your filter: white, native born, male, not disabled, heterosexual, and of European ancestry.
That group has been the beneficiary of a corrupt and exploitative power structure for generations. Any “trust” issues of that group strike me as thinly-veiled resentment and greed — whatever material comforts have been enjoyed in the past by white European native-born heterosexual men that are not disabled come directly from the exploitation of the several named groups (and others).
The more I learn about AOC the more I like her.
Pitting me against a woman or a minority is not going to win my vote. Telling me that I did not work for what I have, that I stole it from others, does not earn my support. Telling the poor residents of the Rust Belt that their plight is justly earned revenge is not a PR campaign I would recommend for the Democratic Party.
This is the same message I hear when Democrats get behind the podium at state conventions and complain that women make 80 cents on the dollar and black women make 60 cents on the dollar and Hispanic women make 50 cents on the dollar with the implied message that the enemy is “White Men”. I can tell you when I am in the audience at those events, I wonder why they all don’t tell me to leave and wonder still, when the person shouting out this message is Senator Ed Markey, a “White Man”.
Making white men the enemy just creates a vacuum. Trump filled it.
Nobody is making white men the enemy.
It is, in fact, YOU that is transforming inclusion and empowerment into attack. Your self-described zeal for advancing the interests of the working class goes by the wayside when it comes to actually paying actual women — especially black or Hispanic women — the same wage as you.
Comments like this are why women still make only 80 cents to your dollar.
The disparity won’t change until those who hold power insist that it change. Some of us support that change, others fight against it.
You understand that those who complain about wage disparities want to raise wages to the level of white men’s, not lower the white men’s wages, right? Not to mention that these are usually the same people who want to raise everyone’s wages through things such as $15 per hour minima.
Of course he understands. He doesn’t care, never had has cared.
He wrote commentary opposed to the Massachusetts equal pay legislation because he said that women would get more increases than him.
Whatever “vacuum” Donald Trump filled, it is not something that happens to everyone — it doesn’t even happen to every able-bodied white European native-born heterosexual male.
I’m reminded of a verse from the venerable Bob Dylan chestnut:
“Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'”
Some of Dylan’s imagery relative to Congress lands a little hard following the events of January 6th.
Bob Dylan was NOT talking about a white supremacist mob sacking the Capitol in order to overturn an election whose winner was the choice of an absolutely overwhelming majority of black Americans.
Of course I know that, but any reference to a battle raging outside the halls of Congress that shakes windows and rattles walls and suggesting they might get hurt is a little triggering right now.
A little triggering? Perhaps “prescient” is even more apropos. The fact that the quoted verse is “a little triggering” is why offered it.
This IS civil war. It is driven by racism. It is driven by demographics. It is driven by an America where white European males are no longer a majority.
The events of January 6 were the direct analog of Fort Sumter.
America of one hundred sixty years ago next month was forced to make a difficult choice. It was riven by overwhelming force that could no longer be denied.
That force is even stronger today. It will not be denied, nor should it be denied. Sexism and racism will not be tolerated so long as women and minorities have the ability to vote.
Each of us must make a choice. Donald Trump and the Trumpists have called the question, and further dithering is no longer an option.
Each and every supporter of Donald Trump and Trumpists have made their choice. That choice has nothing to do with “trust”.
The rest of us have our choice as well.
You lose me with the Civil War analogies, you know that? This is not the start of a four-year armed contest of what turned out to be two reasonably well-matched military forces. This is a criminal act that is already being addressed through our justice system and will continue to be as more are arrested, indicted, prosecuted, and presumably convicted and sentenced. Even if we accept the premise of an all-out war I once again feel like you are trying to draw a bright line with me on the other side from you, which of course will not be the case. It will be a tiny minority of the most deplorable of our fellow citizens vs. all of the rest of us.
I stand by my use of the word triggering. January 6th was extremely personal for me having interned at the Capitol and knowing several who work there. I just prefer not to hear if I don’t have to any reminders of that awful incident whether as a joke, metaphor, poetry, or from whatever side of the spectrum. In the Christian faith we are about mark Christ’s Passion, a story of going quickly from being very popular to being at the mercy of the mob. This year, when we get to the part where the crowd is chanting “Crucify Him!” what I hear is “Hang Mike Pence!”
My my.
You interned in the Capitol. I grew up there. My grandfather worked for the National Park Service giving tours of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. He therefore had a pass to go anywhere he wanted — including pretty much anywhere in the Capitol I (as a 4 year old) wanted to go.
He started with NPS upon his retirement from the DC Transit company with 20 years of service. He got a gold watch (which I still have) and a lifetime pass on any streetcar in the system.
As a pre-schooler, he and I spent any number of Saturdays riding streetcars all over Washington. I knew pretty much every line and every circle (the streetcars turned around at circles at the end of each line). My lifelong love of trains was certainly spurred by my frequent trips to Union Station with him.
I have vivid memories of using the big brass handle in the manually-operated elevator to take he and I up and down the Washington Monument (of course, never with visitors).
I ran the halls of the Capitol and was introduced by him to countless members of Congress, Senators, and staff.
My oldest son is named after him.
So don’t talk to me about how precious your personal memories are. In particular, don’t presume to draw bright lines about what I can and cannot discuss here.
Perhaps Fort Sumter is inappropriate. I’m happy to use John Brown’s raid of the Armory at Harpers Ferry instead. That, too, was treated as a criminal act at the time (as was Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch). John Brown himself was hung for it.
We all have our triggers, yours are no more valid than those of anyone else.
As a historian, I hope you appreciate that the conflict dividing today’s insurrectionists has the same origins, motivations, and passion as the conflict that erupted 160 years ago.
Ironically, given your Easter reference, John Brown was himself a passionate Christian whose lifelong calling was to end slavery.
I am quite confident that we’re going to hear lots of references to the events of January 6 over the next few years. We’re still just beginning to learn how wide and deep the network of connections are between the instigators of that attack, the GOP, and — most unsettling of all in my opinion — currently active members of the armed forces, various law enforcement agencies, and elected officials.
I hope that this insurrection dissolves into irrelevance. I hope that nothing comes of the years of preparation, mountains of money, and pounds of propaganda that led to the January 6 episode.
I think that refusing to “have to any reminders of that awful incident whether as a joke, metaphor, poetry, or from whatever side of the spectrum” is among the worst possible ways to ensure that the insurrection comes to nothing.
We both made more of this than I intended. I certainly did not mean to suggest that my feelings were more valid than anyone else’s, nor did I mean to try to censor you. I just read Dylan’s lines and immediately had a cringe reaction in a way I would not have before January 6th, though I do look forward to hearing news references to that day regarding the progress of various cases.
(As an aside as a big fan of the NPS the part about your grandfather working for them certainly caught my attention!)
Fair enough. I, similarly, did not intend to be hurtful. Perhaps we are all on edge in these times.
I’ll have to check my family history about how long my grandfather worked for NPS, I think he worked there for several decades as well until retiring in 1957.
He was a very interesting guy. Born in 1888, he says he left home after 5th grade. He fought in WWI as a Marine (he was old at 30, and always claimed, chuckling, that he “fought his way in”), and was an active member of the DAV and VFW the rest of his life (I have his awards somewhere, he was a “Commander” of either or both chapters for years and years). His career with DC transit came upon his return from the war, and his NPS career followed that. He was hit by a car while on duty with NPS in 1956 or 1957, and that ended his career. He lived to be 98.
I would hope that was the case, but in all my years hearing this topic mentioned, that is never explicitly mentioned. In a careful examination of the data, it’s not simply that women who do the exact same job as men make less per hour. It is more that jobs that are more commonly filled by women pay less than jobs that are more commonly filled by men. Saying that “Women make 80 cents on the dollar” ignores this reality. I would much prefer that they we said “Many of the jobs filled by women, and minority women in particular, pay wages that are simply not equal to the equal to the jobs that are primarily filled by men. This needs to end.”
Do you have any clue about how thickly sexism permeates this comment?
Try the following simple substitution and see if you still agree:
This comment exemplifies racist attitudes towards blacks and the original from which it is derived exemplifies sexist attitudes towards women.
The comment is also starkly dissonant with actual facts. Consider nursing, for example — a profession that as recently as 2017 was 91% female (https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hr/gender-ratio-of-nurses-across-50-states.html). Various surveys (cf https://mediakit.nurse.com/Nursing_Salary_Research_Report?utm_source=press-release&utm_medium=OCL-website&utm_campaign=RNsalary-survey) report a gender gap of about 9% ($79K/yr vs $76K/yr).
The gender-based wage gap is real and pervasive.
Apparently your thinking has evolved since the Massachusetts equal pay law (https://www.mass.gov/massachusetts-equal-pay-law) went into effect in 2018. In your commentary at the time, you opposed this legislation saying that the result would be that women (and minorities) would get greater pay increases than (white) men like you.
At least in 2018, “this needs to end” did not include taking any steps to actually change the situation. As I recall, you repeated the same canard about professions that women “prefer” over men at that time as well.
Men have always found self-serving rationalizations for their sexism — women are allegedly:
The list goes on and on and on, and of course each is nonsense. These rationalizations are strikingly similar to the rationalizations offered throughout the South in support of the Jim Crow laws and throughout today’s right-wing in opposition to affirmative action programs.
In order to end sexism and racism, it first needs to be recognized and named. The necessary steps needed to change it then need to be put in place.
No man or woman who supports Donald Trump or embraces Trumpism in 2021 can honestly claim to also oppose sexism, misogyny, and racism.
They often do say what you prefer, and I too have wondered how much of the pay disparity can be attributed to different jobs. However, I have also seen studies where that factor is controlled for.
Yes, Once you actually compare professions, the gap closes fast to single digits; depending on how you control, it is between about 3-8%. This gap can be explained by the fact that women are more likely to be the family caregiver. They stay home when a child is sick. They take long maternity leave. These gaps can be addresses with legislation that increases sick day wages and maternity leave. But saying that “Women make 97 cents on the dollar” does not sound as horrible as 80 cents.
On the other hand, men need to speak up as well. We are more likely to live shorter lives and/or die on the job and we spend less time with friends and family. That needs to change as well.
There are always ways to cherry-pick away uncomfortable data in order to arrive at a pre-determined goal.
No data has ever connected a specific cigarette or even a specific brand used by a specific person to the origin of that person’s lung cancer.
For more than fifty years, the tobacco industry has used that to claim publicly (the executives privately admit they are lying) that cigarettes do not cause cancer.
People interested in the truth still agree that cigarettes are carcinogenic.
This was a great and informative post to read. I hope some smart people start deep diving into why the Republicans managed to do better with non-college/non-white voters in 2020 than they did in 2018 and 2016, despite the higher minority turnout in 2018 and 2020. This means a not so insignificant group of non-college non-white voters migrated from Clinton to Congressional Democrats and to Trump. That could be a bad auger for flipping TX or holding onto AZ and GA, not to mention MI and WI downballot races in 22’. I am cautiously optimistic that Congressional Republicans will do worse in 22’ without Trump on the top of the ticket and with Biden not becoming the police defunding socialist boogeyman the right made him out to be.
Elected Democrats on the left and middle of the party have done a great job keeping the message laser focused on the Covid public health and economic recovery. I worry Camberville canvassers coming to Revere and Winthrop in the recent special election spouting defund the police lost more voters than they gained for their candidate and I worry how that tactic bodes for beating Baker in 22’ and nationally in states less progressive than this one. We need to flip the script to the economy and keep it there. The Boston mayors race will be an interesting test case for how woke a candidate can be for a major elected office.