Image via Politico

I’m very interested in this idea that states are the laboratories of democracy. It comes from an opinion by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis where he wrote that a “state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” The idea has always been that the federal government would use the best ideas. Of course, conservatives just use the idea to decimate the federal government and give control to state and local governments for reasons I will get to in a moment.

RomneyCare

During the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney made a really interesting argument about said laboratories. As you will remember, Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts when he got a healthcare reform law passed that went on to be the prototype for Obamacare. In fact, in 2008, Romney ran on this law that he was understandably proud of. But after Obamacare was passed and all the Republicans decided it was “Socialism! Socially, I tell you!” Romney was forced to repudiated the law. But how could he, given that it was the same one he had been so proud of?!

His solution was both brilliant and bold. He said that his law was great, but that was on the state level. It worked great on the state level. But it was wrong to force the law on the entire nation. In other words: states are the laboratories of democracy, and nothing should ever come out of the laboratories! Usually I would agree. Most of what comes out of those laboratories is pernicious in the extreme.

Literacy Tests

In 1855, Connecticut changed its state constitution to require literacy tests to vote. The problem was those Irish! As Steve Thornton explained in Literacy Tests and the Right To Vote, “Citing an old English legal principle, literacy test promoters argued that if a person was not sufficiently educated, his vote could be too easily manipulated. To opponents, literacy tests constituted a legal means to disenfranchising minorities and other ‘undesirables.'”

After Reconstruction, the southern states grabbed hold the results of Connecticut’s laboratory. But there was still the problem that these states didn’t want blacks voting regardless of how literate they were and they did want more affluent whites voting no matter how illiterate they were. Not a problem! “In theory, the literacy requirement applied to every citizen. In practice, however, officials in charge of voter registration could administer the test at their discretion, which resulted in a discriminatory singling out of African Americans, the poor, and other groups.” It wasn’t until an amendment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 1970 that literacy tests were eliminated from Connecticut and other states.

Poll Tax

At the end of the Civil War, almost half the population of Florida was African American. This was a problem as far as the white elite were concerned. So after Reconstruction, they went about setting things “right.” As Darryl Paulson reported in, Florida’s History of Suppressing Blacks’ Votes, “[T]he 15th Amendment did not guarantee blacks the right to vote. Rather, it is a negative statement. It says the right to vote cannot be denied because of race.” In other words, blacks could be denied the right to vote as long as it technically wasn’t because of race.

Enter the poll tax:

Florida did away with the poll tax in 1938, because it created so much corruption due to the buying of votes. But it still took the federal government, in 1964, to outlaw this democratic laboratory innovation in many other states.

Voter ID

A much more recent innovation coming out of the democracy laboratories is Voter ID. What I’ve stressed here over the last few years is that Voter ID laws are really just indirect poll taxes. Republicans (Sorry, but it is always Republicans) see that those who don’t have state issued IDs are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. Forcing them to get these IDs is a kind of tax intended to disenfranchise them.

This great laboratory innovation first came out of Virginia, but it never made it into law because of the efforts the the Democratic Party and the NAACP. It wasn’t until 2004 when the Arizona Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act was passed. The Supreme Court has blocked requiring identification for registering to vote, but the requirement for voting has been upheld. Since Obama became President, there has been an avalanche of these laws.

I’m sure in twenty years, we will all look back at voter ID laws with the same revulsion that we now have at the idea of poll taxes. For now, however, Republicans and other conservatives can walk around with their heads held high saying, “We’re just trying to make sure elections are clean!” But in the end, we will see this new innovation of the laboratories of democracy for the racist, classist, and partisan attack it is.

I don’t have much of a good feeling about the states being the laboratories of democracy. In general, they bring bad things to life. For all the problems of the federal government, it is usually what is required to stop the states from oppressing their own minority groups. And even when they do good things like RomneyCare in Massachusetts, conservatives just ignore them or claim that they don’t scale nationwide. The idea of the states being laboratories of democracy is good in theory, but in practice it is useless. Or much, much worse.

Jonathan Chait wrote an interesting article this morning, How Obamacare Violates the Conservative Cleanliness Fetish. In it, he tried to get to the bottom of the conservative opposition to Obamacare given that it is, after all, a conservative law. He posits the idea that it is all about the conservative obsession of political, social, and ideological hygiene. But he doesn’t go very far in explaining it, so let me take a crack.

You may remember Phil Davison, the man whose overwrought speech for the Republican nomination for Stark County Treasurer went viral. What you may not remember is what he said was the problem with the treasury department: infestation. Or as he pronounced it, “In-fes-tation!” Behind this is the concern about lack of purity: the treasury department had been invaded by impurities. The same thing is going on with Brigadier General Jack D Ripper in Dr Strangelove who only drinks rainwater and “pure grain alcohol.”

Chait quotes a study that show that the greater one’s obsession with cleanliness, the more likely he is to be politically conservative. I believe this goes way back. The literal idea of the proverb “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is about spiritual purity. But people apply to it to the physical world. This is most notable in the 12-step cult where the body being clean of drugs is equivalent to being spiritually clean.

It is not, therefore, surprising that conservatives would be obsessed with purity. Whether they are religious or not, conservatives believe in social standards—the idea that norms are given. Of course, it is curious that Republicans are almost always the first to abandon political norms in their efforts to establish what they think are the given social standards; but this is just because Republicans have become revolutionary in their political fights on behalf of conservatism. From the conservative perspective, if laws do not come from on high, what stops the nation from breaking into one big orgy?

There is a clear germophobic aspect to this. This is the idea that even the smallest impurities harm the body. And the ultimate expression of this is the slippery slope argument. Even if most people don’t see the problem with Social Security, the conservative sees it not as a policy end, but simply as a stepping stone to the Nazis rounding up all the Jews.

What’s more interesting is that fascism itself was obsessed with purity. And most of the conservative remedies to keep the nation “free” lead us far more directly to fascism. InfamousBrad over at Reddit wrote an interesting comment in a recent post, What is Fascism? It read in part:

So for conservatives, it isn’t that Obamacare in itself is all that bad. It is just another element of impurity in the body politic. It won’t kill us off, but it is just another poison to make us weaker and move us along the road to Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Think about this the next time Paul Ryan talks about how the social safety net is making able bodied men dependent. It’s all about purity. Or: “In-fes-tation!”

I live across the street from a family that is very involved with Boy Scouts of America. The father is a scout leader and two of the sons are Eagle Scouts. And they are all very nice people. One couldn’t ask for better neighbors. But here’s the thing: I find the Boy Scouts a deeply creepy institution. And this is not some liberal thing. I’ve always felt this way.

Although it might not be clear to look at me now, when I was a child, I was a very typical boy. I loved my army men and when I got older, I ran around with the other boys playing war with sticks fashioned into guns. So when my friends started becoming cub scouts, you would have thought I would have followed along. But I didn’t. Then, as now, I thought it was all very creepy.

It probably comes from the core of my being—my fascination with the Romantic hero archetype. But the idea of everyone dressing up the same way just wasn’t my idea of what it is to be a man. And more to the point, it wasn’t what my idea of what it is to be an American. As I noted last year:

So I wasn’t exactly surprised to see an old article in The Atlantic by Jennie Rothenberg Gritz about the announcement that the Boy Scouts were going to let gay scouts into their club[1], Christopher Hitchens on the Mildly Fascist Founder of the Boy Scouts. I’m afraid she’s soft-pedaling it. Robert Baden-Powell was very supportive of fascism. And you can see why. Socially, fascism pushes the same kinds of ideas that that the Boy Scouts do: duty to the group and conformity.

Now let me be clear: I don’t think that the Boy Scouts of America are a fascist group. I don’t think that at all. But it wasn’t hard for Mussolini and Hitler to change the Boy Scout programs in their countries to fascist youth groups. And I think that is what is creepy about the group. But that is completely expected. I am the kind of person who rebels against authority. I am an equally bad leader and follower. A society made up of people like me would be no kind of society at all. So we need a lot of people who are willing to conform to create social cohesion.

Just the same, I think it is a major mistake to turn conformity into a fetish. The military does this because it is an unfortunate necessity, just as the very existence of the military is an unfortunate necessity. But to push boys into blind and ostentatious conformity before they are able to make the choice seems wrong to me. It’s too much like indoctrination. What’s more, it is a particular kind of paramilitary indoctrination. And for me, that’s what tips it from concerning to creepy.

[1] But they still aren’t allowing gay leaders. It is not clear what they think they are doing by this ban. Are they afraid gay leaders might rape the boys? Well, their straight leaders seem to already be doing that.

I’ve been biding my time on this whole business with Rick Perry and his actions to get Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg to resign. Over the weekend, Jonathan Chait wrote, This Indictment Of Rick Perry Is Unbelievably Ridiculous. Now, I often disagree with Chait who is awfully neoliberal in many areas. But he is also incredibly smart, informed, and thoughtful. But the truth is, I think that Chait and others are jumping to a lot of conclusions. The truth is, we still don’t know what evidence Perry was indicted on. The dominant media narrative seems to be the one that Rick Perry wants.

The most troubling part of the narrative is that this is part of some Democratic witch hunt. That doesn’t really fly. As USA Today mentioned in an editorial criticizing the indictment, “It is being brought by a special prosecutor appointed by a Republican judge.” So I wish that liberals would stop arguing things such as that it helps Chris Christie by implying that all questions about Republican corruption are politically motivated. This one just doesn’t seem to be.

As for the main argument that the indictment is based upon nothing, well, we just don’t know that. Most interestingly, My San Antonio reported, Perry Aides Offered Lehmberg a Job for Resignation. This muddles everything. On the one hand, Perry’s office allegedly offered Lehmberg a different job in the DA’s office. But they apparently also offered to replace her with a Democrat. That last bit of information would seem to eliminate Perry’s primary motive. Or maybe he felt any other Democrat would be less effective than Lehmberg. Or maybe he was just looking for a way to save face. Who knows at this time?

And that’s the point: we don’t know. James Moore at Huffington Post did a good job of laying out the potential problems for Perry, Why Rick Perry Will Be Convicted. In the article, he noted a bit of an inconsistency in Perry’s claim that Lehmberg was unfit for office because of the drunk driving conviction. Moore wrote:

In addition to this, the special prosecutor Michael McCrum has indicated to Vice that the case isn’t about the veto threat itself. He said, “I’m investigating the circumstances surrounding the veto and whether the governor’s actions were appropriate or not under the law.” And Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker has indicated that at this point, it doesn’t much matter if what Perry did was common, “[C]ourts respond to the argument that ‘everyone does it’ more or less the same way that your mother did.”

In the end, I don’t suppose it much matters. Rick Perry was never going to be the next President. No one on the left likes him. And on the right, he’s been an outcast ever since he indicated that he had a soul in the 2012 primary, “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.” The Republican Party, in fact, does not have a heart and they won’t forget that.

So whether or not Rick Perry gets convicted doesn’t much matter outside of Texas. But I do wish that my fellow liberals would stop arguing that this is partisan and that Rick Perry is some kind of victim. It’s nothing like that.  It’s just Texas.

Michael Hiltzik brought my attention to a new education outrage, Republicans Throw a Conniption Over the Teaching of US History. Sadly, this one is particularly bad not because of the conservatives—I’m so used to anti-intellectualism on the right that it hardly registers. This one is terrible because of the total spinelessness of one very prominent educator.

The whole thing is about the new history outline for Advanced Placement classes issued by the College Board. It seems that retired teacher and AP test guide author Larry Krieger is unhappy because the outline doesn’t push his own personal view of American greatness. He is upset, for example, that Benjamin Franklin isn’t even mentioned in the outline. Can you imagine?! This is a historical figure that all American children have crammed down their throats from the first grade. What possible reason could the outline have for not mentioning him by name? I mean, other than the fact that students get college credit for AP courses and would be expected to have a pretty good understanding of both the man and his importance in the history of America?

What Krieger is really up to is clear in his reaction to this photograph by Jacob Riis of tenement conditions in New York in 1890:

Hiltzik describes the test question and Krieger’s objection:

All of this has led to the Republican National Committee passing a resolution calling the outline “biased and inaccurate” and asking for Congress to defund the College Board. But what is terrible is that the new College Board president, David Coleman, more or less caved as one would expect from the conservative stereotype of a liberal academic:

Thankfully, the teachers who actually wrote the outline are fighting back. Their open letter is the kind of sharp attack that is critical if we are not going to allow ever more knowledge to fall into the black hole of “He said—she said—who can possibly say?” reporting that has now engulfed climate science and constantly threatens evolution theory.

American politics is out of balance. On the right we have ideologues who see everything as a threat to their carefully crafted vision of the nation. That might be okay if it were balanced on the left with a bunch of ideologues who see everything as a threat to their carefully crafted vision of the nation. But the right is not so balanced. Instead, it is “balanced” by practical centrism. As a result of that, we run into these problems all the time where basic knowledge gained from science and other disciplines is attacked as bias precisely because it isn’t biased.

Afterword

It is also possible that Larry Krieger is just using right wing outrage. As I noted above, he is a writer of test preparation material and he seems to own the company Insider Test Prep. So he could see the changes as threatening. On the other hand, nothing is so good for writers of educational materials as changes in standards. It allows used books to become far less valuable, thus increasing sales of new books. So, as Newsweek would tell you, “Who can possibly say?”

Like thousands of other undocumented Honduran children deported after having journeyed unaccompanied to the US, Sosa faces perilous conditions in the violent neighborhood from which he sought to escape.

“There are many youngsters who only three days after they’ve been deported are killed, shot by a firearm,” said Hector Hernandez, who runs the morgue in San Pedro Sula. “They return just to die.”

At least five, perhaps as many as 10, of the 42 children slain here since February had been recently deported from the US, Hernandez said…

In one case, a teenage boy was shot to death hours after arriving in San Pedro Sula on a deportation flight, according to the boy’s cousin, who refused to identify himself or the boy to The Times for fear of reprisal from neighborhood gangs.

—Cindy Carcamo
In Honduras, US Deportees Seek to Journey North Again
H/T: Charlie Pierce