Liberal NIMBYism

June 5, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Via Grist’s Dave Roberts, I came across this piece from The Stranger on micro-housing in the city, which you might think sounds rather prosaic…until you remember the awesome and hideous power of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard, for the uninitiated).

The very quick and dirty version of the story is that Seattle is facing a demographic boom and a housing crunch, and that these micro-apartments offer a way for the young and the not-rich to live in the city in an affordable way. It sounds pretty good, right?

A significant number of locals disagree. They’re worried that these housing complexes will change the character of the neighborhood, that they’re a financial windfall for dishonest developers, and that, well, the wrong kind of people might move in. And what kind of people are the wrong kind of people? 

“Anyone who can scrape up enough money to live month-to-month can live there,” [one neighborhood activist] said, worried that low-income interlopers would jeopardize his chances to sell his own house. “I don’t think most people want to live next to a boarding house with itinerant people living in it.”

Now keep in mind that this is in Seattle — not exactly a place you’d mistake for the Deep South or some other hotbed of conservatism. But just like Boston in the early 70s, when outrage over busing and school integration caused an extreme amount of social disruption and controversy, we see that a lot of otherwise progressive people become downright reactionary when they’re forced to actually live their principles. It is, in a word, gross.

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Immigration Reform’s Big Tent

April 21, 2013 By

FarmLabor

Here’s a pretty good New York Times piece on whether or how the Boston Marathon bombing has affected their views on immigration reform. (It’s got a touch of Jane Goodall with the plebes; but, well, it’s the Times.) If the piece is anything to go by, it looks like most folks’ opinions haven’t been changed one way or the other. People who hated immigration reform before hate it even more now. Those that supported it before still support it now. Surprise!

It’s nice, though, that there’s a wide-ish swathe of support for reform of some kind. As tends to be the case with large political coalitions, however, there’s a lot of variation among people’s understanding of what, exactly, they’re supporting. This gentleman from Malvern — near where I grew up! — probably doesn’t envision a post-reform America the same way, say, Jose Antonio Vargas does:

Like nearby Wayne, Malvern is part of a suburban belt that has grown more Democratic in recent elections. Attitudes toward immigration reform seem to be changing, in part along generational lines. Frank Cunningham, a 27-year-old accountant, said that he, unlike his father, favors a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.

“The way I was raised, my dad says, ‘If you come into the country illegally, you don’t deserve to be here,’ ” Mr. Cunningham said. “But I’m wondering who is going to do those jobs?”

It is what it is, as they say. Or: politics makes strange bedfellows. Whichever.

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Outreach, Rand Paul Style

April 14, 2013 By

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I’ve been thinking lately about Rand Paul’s recent attempt at what is called minority outreach at Howard University, “the historically black college” (apparently the mandatory phrasing). I’ve been thinking about what, exactly, Paul did wrong. And I’ve been thinking about whether it’s fair of me to focus on where he misstepped instead of where he succeeded

I’ve spent as much time as I have on this because I’m quite aware of the liberal malady of knee-jerking cries of racism when it comes to the GOP. The fact that I didn’t have much of a sense of Rand Paul (besides his being Ron’s son and, y’know, named Rand — as in Ayn) until he blew up my RSS with his artless critique of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that didn’t help either.

As tends to be the case with Ayn Rand fanatic-styled libertarians, Paul appears to be really, really bad at the whole empathy thing. The flip way he talked about segregation was an obvious sign; but the way he approached the Howard students — arrogant, condescending, defensive — was nearly as bad. You would think an intelligent, accomplished adult would be capable of at least asking himself, How might this sound to somebody who is not me?, when reading over his speeches.

There’s an incongruity between the gesture and the execution of the outreach, too. On the one hand, there’s his decision to do it at all, which is conceivably admirable and indicative of an open-mindedness of spirit. But on the other hand, the way he comported himself during his remarks and the back-and-forths afterwards was nearly the complete opposite; he was closed-off and combative. He lied about his previous positions. And (least of all) he was awkward. Truly, truly awkward.

I was trying to imagine what Paul was — or more accurately wasn’t—thinking. Because his was a distinct kind of social buffoonery, like volunteering to lead the pre-dinner prayer when you don’t know it and are a strident New Atheist to boot. It wasn’t just maladroit, it was casually so; it was as if Paul didn’t care if his ostensible audience, Howard University students, felt that he might as well have said, “Pipe down! Respect your 19th century Republican elders!”

Ultimately, I came to a conclusion. This was a publicity stunt. This was not “starting a conversation.” It had all the trappings of an almost Obama-esque display of post-partisan outreach and inquiry, but the real point for Rand (and, some would say, Obama) is a chance to bask in the reflection of his self-righteousness writ large nationwide.

It’s well known that Senator Paul wants to run for president in 2016, representing a “new” Republican and a hybrid Tea Party-Ron Paulite coalition. Everything he’s done since 2012 — the 13-hour filibuster over drones, now this address at Howard — has only added fuel to that fire. His filibuster, the argument ad absurdum about a drone strike at a Starbucks, was beside the point, a paranoid distraction from the drone program’s real problems of transparency and due process.

Howard was another missed opportunity. Paul could’ve expounded on his vision of a Left-Right coalition assembled to end the War on Drugs. Or he could’ve extended libertarianism’s open hand by renouncing the PATRIOT Act, stop-and-frisk, and countless other routine violations of our civil liberties. But all we got instead, besides some schadenfreude-y videos, was one more example.

Just one more example of what it looks like when a politician uses the desire for change as an excuse to seize the spotlight.

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A Little Rant About the New Jackie Robinson Movie

April 12, 2013 By

Since 42, the Jackie Robinson biopic, comes out today, I figured now’d be as good a time as ever to complain about it.

I haven’t seen it and don’t really plan to anytime in the future; but my problem is actually with the film’s tagline, not the film itself (though you gotta figure one is in concert with the other). In case you haven’t already seen the poster — and the offending slogan — here it is:

42 poster

So in case it’s not obvious, what bugs me about this is the first person plural. There’s a lot wrapped up in that “we” — and I think most of it vaguely annoys me, while some of it gets me outright into rant mode.

First of all, who is we? All Americans, I assume? Is it the filmmakers’ contention, then, that “a game divided by color” was divded by all of us? That segregation (and more directly, Jim Crow) was the product of all of our making, black and white alike? I suppose you could defend that position just so long as you take “acquiescing in the face of murderous terror” as a gesture of creation or consent.

What’s more, Jackie Robinson isn’t special because he “made us see greatness” — Jackie Robinson is special because he made (some) of us see a human being. That’s the historical significance of Jackie Robinson. His being a great player is inconsequential; and you can’t understand why he was a great man if you won’t acknowledge the brazenly political nature of what he did.

For chrissakes, isn’t this a whole movie about that political and social context?

I’m ragging on 42 but in fairness this is a Hollywood and America thing rather than a 42 thing. The framing implicit in the slogan is just too perfectly in keeping with the sanitized, Hallmark-esque version of the Civil Rights Movement that has predictably taken hold in the mainstream.

In this telling, Jim Crow was just something that happened — like a tsunami or cancer. It was horrible, yes, and it was sad and it involved evil things. But the people who did those evil things are all gone now and History (capital-H) has proven them wrong so that’s that.

And what’s more, we live in a post-racial society; we don’t have to get into the ugliness of blame and sides and right and wrong. Let’s all just thank the heavens that we were born with more enlightened racial sensibilities, and let’s enjoy watching Greatness — which is colorblind, dontchaknow.

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What Spurs the GOP’s Conservative Base

March 24, 2013 By

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Andrew Kohut, former Pew Research Center president and founding director, has a big op-ed in WaPo arguing that while the GOP’s intransigent conservative base keeps it competitive at the Congressional level, it at the same time renders the White House out of reach. It’s not really a new argument, but Kohut’s a nonpartisan establishmentarian, so when he makes it, it counts as news.

Kohut says there are three factors keeping Republicans from being a truly national political party: the consequences of what he calls an “Obama backlash,” conservative anxiety over the “changing face of America,” and the epistemic closure wrought by the “conservative media.” The second and the third reasons make sense.

But the idea that the Obama backlash is a thing unto itself rather than a consequence of racial panic and a media echo chamber — this is nonsense. Simply look at Kohut’s numbers. Race is the salient characteristic of so-called Obama backlash:

The nation’s demographic and social shifts have also played a role in galvanizing the new bloc. Conservative Republicans are more likely (33 percent) than the public at large (22 percent) to see the growing number of Latinos in America as a change for the worse. Similarly, 46 percent of conservatives see increasing rates of interracial marriage as a positive development, compared with 66 percent of the public overall.

During Obama’s first term, ethnocentric attitudes — on immigration, equal rights and interracial dating — grew by 11 percentage points among conservative Republicans but did not increase significantly among any other political or ideological grouping. Some academic surveys found similar partisan polarization on racial measures over the course of Obama’s first term.

Race has loomed larger in voting behavior in the Obama era than at any point in the recent past. The 2010 election was the high mark of “white flight” from the Democratic Party, as National Journal’s Ron Brownstein called it — the GOP won a record 60 percent of white votes, up from 51 percent four years earlier.

Here’s the order of events, it seems. Conservatives who were already ambivalent about racial equality (most obviously seen in the response to interracial marriage) more or less immediately reacted to Obama’s becoming president with profound anger and ideological retrenchment. In nearly every way, their political complaints jostled explicitly or as a subtext with race. More than four years later, this subgroup’s antipathy for the president hasn’t wavered one bit, largely thanks to conservative media’s comforting and insulating echo chamber.

Let me pause for a second to emphasize that I am not saying all opposition to Obama stems from racial animus. Without question, it does not. There is more than enough room to find reasons to dislike the president without one’s being forced to straddle the line separating reason from superstition. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the fact that there is a highly uniform and unyielding minority of self-described conservatives (not Republicans, but conservatives) who currently have great influence over one of America’s two major parties.

And they’ve got problems with people of color, the president first and foremost among ‘em.

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