The North Carolina News Observer reported that the state school voucher program was found to be unconstitutional by Judge Robert Hobgood. It’s rare to see such a powerful decision. It is clear what the law was meant to do: gut the public education system. This is always what conservative education “reform” is about.

According to the article, of those requesting vouchers, the majority were for religious schools. “Also, private schools do not have to give state exams or meet public school regulations.” So in addition to harming the public schools, the law was also a gift to the Christian conservatives who are afraid that their children might be taught real science or real history. I’m sure even Jonathan Chait would see the mendacity behind this kind of reform.

According to qnotes, “Hobgood also ruled that the new scholarship program pushed public money to schools that can discriminate in admissions and are not required to maintain curriculum or teacher certification standards.” This goes along with the hypocrisy that Digby noted among conservative education reformers. They are obsessed with the effectiveness of unionized teachers, but they don’t give a thought to just how horrible parent teachers or, in this case, religious educators might be.

Note that this isn’t just about conservative education reform. This says something very important about the education reform movement generally. Like a lot of liberals and moderates, those in the education reform movement take their cues from the conservatives. Now they wouldn’t be in favor of anything as egregious as this North Carolina law. But their focus on “ineffective teachers” and destroying due process employment rights for teachers (“tenure”), is not a focus they came to all by themselves. The big money and the conservative base was pushing it and the liberals went right along with it.

What I see happening is that in the end, teachers unions will be neutered. Teachers will have much less independence and job security. But at best children won’t get any better an education. So a huge effort on the part of liberals will not accomplish their goals, but will accomplish the goals of disingenuous conservatives. It seems to me that there is another educational problem in this country that is getting in the way of improving the education of our children: liberals are being educated by conservatives. I’m sure smart conservatives are tickled that so many liberals are helping them do their dirty work. But this wouldn’t be the first time that large segments of the Democratic Party acted as useful fools for the Republicans.

Back in December, Patrick Howley wrote an article in The Daily Caller, Liberals Want to Stop Men From Checking Out Women. It’s a very short article intended to offend, and it did. It’s also plain dumb. Just as conservatives have some mythical idea of “America” that doesn’t exist, hasn’t existed, and can’t exist, they have some weird idea of what “progressives” are.

Normally, I would not even bring him up. But last night, I came upon a 40 minute interview he did with Sam Seder on The Majority Report. I was just looking for something to listen to for a few minutes while I did some cleaning. But I was drawn in and I ended up listening to the whole thing. It was hypnotizing. It didn’t become better over time. It was just the same thing over and over again.

At first, I felt sorry for Howley. He sounded about as bad as I would if Rush Limbaugh invited me to debate on the show. The guy clearly has no experience in live media. He sounded nervous and, frankly, like a teenager. Seder was extremely nice to him until almost the very end. It wasn’t necessary to counter him. Seder just clarified what he was saying. And that was more than enough.

Howley is a very typical libertarian. By that I mean that he’s fairly smart (subgenius) but he has never thought outside the bounds of the Ayn Rand essays he’s read. The best example of this was his take on sexual harassment. Basically: he doesn’t think it exists. His opinion is that if your boss is hitting on you, you can just get another job. The boss will be punished by the market because he won’t get the best employees. This is the kind of theoretical notion of freedom that makes libertarianism so toxic. And coming from a conservative affirmative action case like Howley, it’s disgusting. What does he know about the economic problems of the working class? Being 25 years old and working his whole life in conservative media, I can safely answer: nothing.

But what was most striking was how mad this young man was about the things that he had decided that “progressives” were going to do to him. Soon, they were going to make it illegal to ogle women. How did he know that? Because that’s what progressives are always doing! How would such a law work? Because that’s what progressives are always doing! How would you define ogling? Because that’s what progressives are always doing! Really: it was hypnotizing.

His real complaint, although he won’t admit to this is that people complain about things he writes. He calls this “suppressing his free speech.” This is a common tactic of conservatives: when people don’t like what they say, conservatives claim liberals are trying to suppress them. What’s really going on is that liberals are having a debate and the conservatives generally do poorly. When Rush Limbaugh is one of the great thinkers of your movement, you are in trouble. Regardless, last year I attacked Howley in an article, Humor Attempt Turns Racist. Many other people attacked him too. But the article he wrote is still online. He was not fired, much less arrested. His free speech was not suppressed.

But this is his idea of freedom: he should be immune to any criticisms. But some woman who works at McDonald’s should have to put up with sexual harassment because she’s “free” to find another job. This is Rob Portman logic. You may remember that Portman had always been against same sex marriage. But then his gay son came out to him. And suddenly Portman was for same sex marriage. That was because it suddenly affected him. He didn’t like the idea of his son being discriminated against. It was fine as long as it was only other people’s sons.

It’s the same thing with Patrick Howley. (In general, it is the same thing with all conservatives, most especially libertarians.) He wants to maximize his freedom, which he assumes is freedom in a general sense. He can’t even understand what life is like for a woman whose best job prospect will only ever be a job at McDonald’s. I imagine Howley in a Marie Antoinette haze, “The poor are struggling with their jobs at fast food restaurants? Then let them work at The Daily Caller!” Meanwhile, Howley is out there fighting those “progressives” who are planning to do terrible things to “freedom.” Because that’s what progressives are always doing!

I hate it when a commentator does his job so well that he leaves me with nothing to add. That was the case yesterday with Kevin Drum, Chart of the Day: Welfare Reform and the Great Recession. What I think I can do, however, is make his point a bit more clear. The issue here is how “block granting” is destroying welfare in this country and how conservatives want to use them to destroy most other programs that help the poor and middle classes.

You should remember that Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 to “end welfare as we have come to know it.” And he followed through with that promise but in an abbreviated way: he simply ended welfare, although it wasn’t particularly clear at that time. He got a whole lot of plaudits for this “reform” because the welfare rolls really did go down. But that had nothing to do with the law; it was all due to the smoking hot economy. Of course people got off welfare: there were jobs available!

Once the economy tanked in 2000, people lost their jobs and slid back into poverty. But now the main welfare programs did not respond as you can see in the following graph from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP):

There are various reasons that welfare isn’t available for people when they want it. For example, there are now limits to the amount of time any person can get certain kinds of welfare. But the biggest problem here is that Clinton’s welfare “reform” turned federal welfare into block grants to the states. As as I’ve talked about many times around here: when the federal government provides money for programs it doesn’t administer, there is little incentive to maintain the funding. And that’s just what happened. According to CBPP:

And this is why conservatives love “block granting.” It has nothing to do with the oft-claimed conservative principle that local governments are more responsive to their people. As you see from the CBPP quote, most states do only the bare minimum to get the federal dollars. So the real reason that conservatives like block grants is that they are a politically viable way to destroy programs they don’t like.

Of course, there are ways to make block grants actually work. Here’s Kevin Drum on what we aren’t going to see coming from Paul “Poverty Slayer” Ryan:

No they won’t! Don’t buy the conservative propaganda about block grants.

Whenever Jonathan Chait writes about the education reform movement, he should be required to put a statement at the start of it. It should be something like this: “My wife works in the education reform movement.[1] As a result of this, I have absolutely no objectivity. Unlike most of what I write about, I have no sense whatsoever for nuance. I just hate the teachers unions and what little I will say about them will represent the most extreme factions. So it is really for the best if you don’t even read what follows because I have nothing interesting to add to any discussion on the issue of education reform.” But instead, he pretends as though he were objective and interesting. Meanwhile, his readers get intellectual whiplash from one article to the next as he moves from liberal to conservative and back again.

His article today was a particularly egregious example of this, Obamans, Selling Out, and the Proxy Fight for the Democratic Party’s Future. His complaint in the article is that supporters of teachers unions attack Obama surrogates[2] rather than Obama and this is wrong because… Really, I don’t know why. He says that they don’t attack Obama himself because the President is popular inside the unions. So the union leadership is trying to protect its members in the best way that it can. And this is wrong because… Again, I don’t know.

The whole purpose of the article seems to be to allow him to write, “The splits within the Democratic Party over whether public services should be designed for the benefit of providers or consumers tend to come out at the municipal level.” Ouch! In case you missed it, Chait is saying that teachers unions are a constituency just like the the school kids. And who you gonna support, huh?! Those greedy teachers or those poor kids? Except, there’s another constituency that Chait doesn’t mention: the people employed in the education reform movement. He must know about it, because his wife works in it. It’s a constituency too.

But in the Jonathan Chait world of black and white education reform, people working for “reform” are only looking out for the kids—unlike those dirty teachers unions that would reduce the school day to 25 minutes if they could. It’s just ridiculous. My problem with the education reform movement is that it seems focused on one thing: teachers unions. It doesn’t spend its time trying to combat the very worst thing about our educational system: inequality based upon the widespread use of local property taxes to fund public education.

When it comes to the people who are always ranting about the budget deficit, Chait has no problem seeing that they aren’t interested in what they claim to be. He sees clearly that these people have ulterior motivations like cutting aid to the poor. But when it comes to education reform, Chait couldn’t be more naive. It seems to not even occur to him that some, maybe even most (Look at who funds the movement!), are not quite so pure. And that’s why his writing about education reform is useless.

[1] According to her Twitter account she is, “Director of Performance Management and Human Resources, Center City Public Charter Schools.”

[2] One of those surrogates is Education Secretary Arne Duncan, which hardly seems to apply. Would he make the same claim if liberals complained about Obama’s Defense Secretary (which we did)?

Update (22 August 2014 10:06 pm)

I want to make clear that this is not about the education reform movement not adopting my favorite issue. I’ve been attacked on this before. People will say that there is no political will to deal with the issue that I am most concerned about and ask if we shouldn’t at least do whatever it is that we can. There are a couple of issues here. One is that education funding inequality is not just any other issue. It is like taxes in the budget deficit debate. If someone isn’t willing to deal with this issue, it shows that they aren’t serious. At best it shows they only want to nibble around the edges of the problem. Another issue is: why is it politically viable to go after teachers unions and to push testing, testing, and more testing? I think a lot of it is that the people who are willing to give millions of dollars for education reform are mostly interested in something else. I’m all for things that work. But at one time, charter schools were what would save us. In fact, to many people, they still are. But it’s turned out that other than moving a lot of teachers out of unions, the charter schools haven’t done that much good. On average, they are about as good as public schools. I think I have plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the motivations of the education reform movement. And so does Jonathan Chait.

For the last few months, Dean Baker has taken to referring to the “skills gap” in a unique way. If you read the Very Serious Commentators, you will doubtless have heard about the supposed skills gap. It is a form of apologia intended to justify high unemployment. The argument goes like this: people aren’t out of work because there is a lack of jobs; rather, they are out of work because they don’t have the skills necessary for the jobs that are available. And to bolster this, the commentator will find some employer who claims that, for example, he just can’t find manufacturing workers who can do trigonometry. What is almost never stated in such articles is that the example employer is only willing to pay slightly more than minimum wage for such skills.

Baker has been saying for a while there is a skills gap: the managers of these companies that can’t find qualified employees to hire don’t know basic economics which would tell them that if they want skilled employees, they need to pay them more money. He’s joking, of course. What’s really going on is that these employers are being disingenuous. Obviously, any employer would be able to sell more stuff if he could undercut the competition by paying less than the going rate for workers. Usually, it turns out that such employers are really just conservative ideologues trying to make a political point.

Today, Baker published a related article, It’s Hard to Find Good Help, Chicago Cubs Edition. It’s the kind of story that makes me boil over with rage, because we are talking about a baseball franchise. Major League Baseball has a Congressionally created monopoly—the only one in existence. And franchises are very profitable. But they still do everything they can to screw the American worker.

According to Talking Points Memo, Cubs Cut Workers’ Hours To Avoid Obamacare Mandate, Then Disaster Struck. The Cubs management didn’t want to have to provide healthcare for their grounds crew, so they cut back their hours to less than 30 per week so they wouldn’t have to. First: the Cubs don’t already provide healthcare for their grounds crew?! Second, that is the most petty thing I’ve heard this week. The disaster was that because the crew was under-staffed, the field got muddy and the Cubs ended getting a winning game overturned. So great! They totally deserve that.

But that’s not the best part of it. The best part of it has to do with the managerial skills gap I talked about at the beginning of this. Here’s Dean Baker:

This is entirely typical. My experience in the corporate world is that there is basically no correlation between success and competence. And many managers don’t get their information about government programs from objective sources but rather from people like Michael Savage. So it isn’t surprising in the least that the Cubs management got this wrong. They are as competent as they are kind.

Update (23 August 2014 3:45 pm)

Today, Dean Baker is back with another in his series, It’s Hard To Get Good Help: Trucking Industry Edition. He explains:

This pattern will exist pretty much anywhere people claim that employers can’t find workers. You know when it is for real because wages go up sharply. Something I should have noted above: during the Great Depression, conservatives made exactly the same claims, “Workers didn’t have the right skills!” But then we geared up for World War II and suddenly all those “unemployable” workers found jobs. The skills gap was a myth then and it is a myth now.

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.