Kitty Genovese was the young woman who was stabbed to death in New York in 1964. She became famous in death because of reporting by The New York Times and later by Times‘ editor AM Rosenthal’s book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case. The story was that as she was attacked 38 neighbors watched and did nothing. I’ve long known that the story was largely a myth, but it was only today when I listened to CounterSpin that learned just how much of a myth it was.

The show interviewed Marcia Gallo, who last year published the book, “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy. The main thing I knew about the case was that when Genovese was first attacked by Winston Moseley, a man opened his window and yelled at the perpetrator — who then ran away. It’s just that she had already been stabbed; Moseley came back later and finished her off.

What I did not know was that after Moseley first ran away, she then went around the corner and collapsed inside a vestibule where the door was locked. When Moseley again attacked and attempted to rape her, she was yelling for help, but feebly (for obvious reasons) and out of sight. A friend of her’s in the building opened his door, scaring away Moseley again. As the friend called for help, another neighbor held Genovese in her arms until the ambulance arrived. It’s actually a touching scene all around with tenderness as well as the horror of it all with neighbors trying to hold themselves together enough to be helpful. Unfortunately, Genovese died of her wounds on the way to the hospital.

So where does the this notion of 38 witnesses who did nothing come from? Well, the police. In trying to find her murderer, the police were frustrated by neighbors’ lack of interest in helping them — in many cases, refusing even to open the door. But this got morphed into the idea that there were all these people who just sat by and watched Kitty Genovese be murdered. It’s certainly true that some number of people saw or heard some part of one or the other of the attacks. But as we see: at least three of them did do something.

Kitty Genovese’s Murder as Ideological Fodder

What I got from the interview with Gallo was how the case was used for other purposes. In particular, AM Rosenthal was very interested in how individuals allow bad things to happen by not speaking up. He was particularly interested in the rise of Nazism and so on. But he also seems to have been fundamentally conservative. He did not like the social movements that were rising at the time. So he used the case (probably without knowing it) as a way of putting down social movements in the name of individuals treating each other well.

Now, all of us can get behind the idea of individuals being nice to each other. But this is a traditional conservative dodge — used effectively to limit solidarity. It is very curious in the Kitty Genovese case, however, because even had he been right, the issue wouldn’t have been the lack of one-on-one care, but the lack of social cohesion — the lack of solidarity.

Interestingly, we know Rosenthal to be conservative in a couple of ways. For one, he was very keen on the Iraq War. But the other is that he was highly homophobic and this resulted in The New York Times being slow to report on the AIDS epidemic. But Kitty Genovese was a lesbian herself. And I wonder if that fact didn’t contribute to his more easily using Kitty Genovese as simply a means to his ideological ends.

Afterword

Winston Moseley was caught six days after the attack, because his neighbors turned him in for a burglary they had witnessed. This whole idea that city people lose their sense of community is just ridiculous.

I’m a big fan of Brian Beutler. And I agree with his conclusion in his recent article, The Trump Crack-Up Is Just the Beginning of the Republican Civil War. His point is that even if Trump loses the general election badly, the Republican Party won’t change. But he pushed one of the most common and ignorant claims about the Democratic Party, and more generally political science.

According to Beutler, after the three presidential losses (1980, 1984, and 1988), the Democratic Party reassessed itself and decided that it had to move to the right. Thus brought Bill Clinton and victory. That’s a nice narrative. But it’s totally wrong. Carter wasn’t a liberal. He was the beginning of the emergence of what would become the New Democrats. What’s more, he was — as were Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis after him — part of that new breed of Democrats who weren’t really ideological but just technocratic.

We look back on them now as liberal, not because of their policies, but because they lost. Remember, I was around during Bill Clinton’s term. And according to the conservative movement, he wasn’t just liberal, he was a radical — a communist, even. That’s because Democrats are always leftist radicals in the minds of conservatives. And this is why it makes no sense to try to take welfare “off the table.” Did Bill Clinton ending welfare as we know it make the Democratic Party any less prone to attacks that it was the party of welfare recipients? Of course not!

But as I’ve shown elsewhere, and as is documented with scientific precision in Lynn Vavreck’s book, The Message Matters, the economic fundamentals favored the Republicans in 1980, 1984, and 1988. It would have been very surprising if the Democrats had won any of those races, because the fundamentals were not only against them, they were against them forcefully. Carter eked out a slight victory in 1976 because the fundamentals were only against him slightly.

Neither the nation nor the Democratic Party base was begging for the Democratic Party to move to the right in 1992. Bill Clinton was not the answer to the previous three elections. He was, however, a gifted politician in a party that had mostly been taken over by conservative elites. The only thing the party was responding to was the desires of powerful people in or aligned with the DLC.

I find this stuff really annoying because it just isn’t hard. My job — what people are willing to pay me for — is technology writing. If you want me to make Fortran 77 interesting and understandable, I’m your man. I have a basic understanding of computer science and programming. But political writers generally don’t know anything about political science. And it is particularly sad in the case of Brian Beutler, because he’s both smart and insightful. But how about learning a little about the science of it? Instead, it is just fine to depend upon what everyone “knows” — which turns out to be untrue.

So yes, the Republican Party won’t change even if Trump only manages to get 30% of the vote. But the Democratic Party is no different. What’s more, why is the presidency such a big deal? Does political science teach us that the presidency is all that matters? No, of course not. And as it is, 31 state legislatures are controlled by Republicans, compared to just 11 by Democrats! They also control the Senate and the House. And after the next election, they will almost certainly still control the House — and might control the Senate. It seems to me that the Republican Party is doing okay.

This all disturbs me. But we aren’t going to change it unless we can see the truth and look clearly at the political science. And believing that Bill Clinton was a response to political changes in the country is perhaps the biggest part of the problem. Because now conservatives win even when the Republican Party loses. And someone as smart as Brian Beutler should understand that.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that I had totally stopped watching The Daily Show. So I went back and watched a week of it. It’s still quite a funny show. But it is nothing you won’t see on countless other late night talk shows. There is nothing insightful about it. And I say this as one who had my problems with the show under Jon Stewart. I agree with Emmett Rensin in The Smug Style in American Liberalism. There was always a problem with it trying to be non-ideological and thinking that policy fights were really just a question of everyone accepting what the facts are.

But the new show with Trevor Noah is just an exercise is triviality. I have to question the idea of giving the show to a recent immigrant, given the tendency to see one’s new locale as charming and benign. And the United States is really not either of those things. Or at least not things that make for good social satire. Another problem may be his age. Certainly, John Oliver seems to be more in the tradition of Jon Stewart, and he is both older and less of a newcomer to the nation.

Oliver definitely is continuing the smug style of liberalism. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As I’ve noted in the past, when Jon Stewart hosted The Daily Show, I may have had problems with it but I watched it every day. And John Oliver’s long segments on Last Week Tonight are incredible. His most recent was an excellent example, but also telling because it isn’t about politics at all. It’s about scientific studies and the terrible job that the media does in discussing them. Check it out:

This is an old problem in statistics. If you do the same study enough times, you will occasionally get a study that finds something that is incorrect. This is something that drives me crazy about the way polls are presented. I often hear things like, “Candidate A and B are in a statistical tie.” This is because the two candidates are closer than the margin of error. But this is meaningless. The margin of error is just a measure of how many people were sampled. No one poll is very meaningful, although it might by chance be correct.

The reason that the smug style of liberalism is really not a problem to me is because our society is so out of kilter that just getting the facts right is a big deal. It reminds me of what I said about Paul Krugman years ago: he’s a lot more conservative than I am and I look forward to the day that I start disagreeing with him. That day is at hand, of course. Just check out his recent blog post, The Facts Have A Well-Known Center-Left Bias — a clear case of false equivalence.

But it is sad to see The Daily Show sink even below the smug style. It isn’t helped by the fact that Noah now has Donald Trump to slam night after night. It does make me wonder what will happen once Donald Trump goes away and Noah doesn’t have permission to go after so much else that is just as dangerous, but perhaps not as obviously so.

It’s sad to say, but I miss Jon Stewart’s smug style of non-ideological liberalism. I can’t imagine a day in my lifetime that we won’t need it.

Political scientists Boris Heersink and Jeffery Jenkins wrote what I think is an incredibly insightful article over at The Monkey Cage, GOP Voters Picked Trump. Party Leaders Aren’t Falling in Line. Here’s Why That’s Surprising. The basis of the article is what politicians gain by joining a political party and what they give up.

They note that there has been a great deal of research done on what being in a political party provides. The biggest thing is that parties help individual politicians win — elections as well as battles over law making. They also note that relatively little research has been done on what they give up in joining a political party. That may be because it’s kind of obvious: they give up their independence.

Give a Little and Get a Little

Now I understand, none of this is shocking. Everyone has been a member of a group. And you know that you give a little and you get a little. This is, by the way, why I’m against the Bernie or Bust movement. While it’s true that Hillary isn’t my perfect candidate, neither is Bernie. If I wanted perfection, I would write in myself for every elected office in every election ever.

The problem that Heersink and Jenkins highlight is that Donald Trump hasn’t given anything to the party. He is entirely himself without making any compromises to the party. Thus, why should the party offer him all the good things that come with being in the party when he hasn’t and likely won’t reciprocate. I’m very much with John Dean: Donald Trump is a classic authoritarian leader. He’s also a narcissist. It’s all about him. I’m sure that a 1% chance of his becoming president more than offsets a 99% chance that he will destroy the political party he is nominally attached to.

Cruz Is Even More Disloyal to His Political Party

But what goes unmentioned in the article is Ted Cruz. And I think he is an even better example of this. That’s because Trump has used the Republican presidential nomination for his own purposes, but he hasn’t really used the party otherwise. He might have been able to do this well as an independent. Ted Cruz on the other hand, has used the Republican Party to win at the state level and then at the national level. But he has been the very definition of disloyal. He’s been one of the Democrats’ most potent weapons since he entered the Senate.

The conclusion of the Heersink and Jenkins article is that by Republican elites not going along with what their voters clearly want, “The result could be a complete fracturing of the party.” But I think that the fracture appeared a long time ago when candidates like Ted Cruz started getting elected. If you look at the primary so far, over 70% of all Republican votes have been for Cruz or Trump — candidates who take and do not give to the party. The base doesn’t care about the party. The base has been trained by the party itself to think that the base should get everything it wants and should never have to compromise about anything.

And I can’t blame them. Since at least Bill Clinton, the Republicans have not argued that the Democrats, as a political party, are wrong about policy, but that they are foreign interlopers bent on destroying the nation. The Republican Party is already fractured. The question is whether it will be destroyed.

Economist JP Koning wrote a fascinating article last week, What Makes Medieval Money Different From Modern Money? The quick answer: medieval money didn’t have its value printed on it. So, for example, a testoon wasn’t worth any set amount. So if you wanted to buy something that cost a pound, you wouldn’t automatically know how many testoons would be required to pay off that debt. The value of the testoon would be set by royal decree. So if the testoon was decreed to be worth one-twentieth of a pound, you would need 20 of the little buggers to buy the product. Now what has this got to do with monetary policy.

Think back on the 2008 financial crisis. That was just the most obvious sign of the bursting of an $8 trillion housing bubble. And it was that burst bubble that caused the recession. People all over the country woke up one day to find that they actually had a lot less money than they thought they had. Or more often, they learned that they were in a lot more debt than they had thought. That would have been a great time for some inflation. Instead, we got a short period of deflation and then very low inflation for the next 7 years.

The Federal Reserve has had a hard time keeping inflation even at its low 2% target. But what if the Fed could have just dictated inflation? Think of our example above. If the kingdom found itself in recession, the king could proclaim that there were now only 19 testoons in a pound. People aren’t idiots, of course. They would realize that a pound was only worth 95% of what it used to be. So they would raise their prices (products and labor) by roughly 5%. Ta da! It’s like a magic trick: instant inflation.

But now, without doing anything at all, you have helped out the debtors. They would owe fewer testoons than they had before the new decree. This would allow them to deleverage more quickly and get the economy going that much faster. Given that lenders are generally rich, we aren’t worried that modest inflation would reduce their consumption. The king could also use this system to fight inflation by increasing the number of testoons in a pound to 20 or even 21.

Obviously, this is a gross generalization. Koning’s point is that the medieval monetary system was more flexible than one might have thought. But I take away something more sobering. If the Fed had the ability to do this, it might have used it in very minor ways to help out after the 2008 crash. But it wouldn’t have done so aggressively. The Fed chair at that time, Ben Bernanke, has been very clear that he think he and the Fed did a great job.

The problem with the Federal Reserve hasn’t really been a lack of tools, but rather a philosophy that hurting the rich even the smallest amount (a 5% inflation rate would be considered outrageous by those now in power) is unacceptable. I don’t know how much the kings of old used such monetary tools to make life better for the people. I doubt it was used much and for the same reason that our monetary policy is to have a 2% level of inflation: because those in power don’t actually care about the vast majority of the people.