Are We the People to Blame for the Breakdown of the Legislative Process?

[This is a continuation of a recent post. Look here for the beginning of my discussion of this book.]

Congress no longer works. This is not a news flash. The question is, Why? Fishing through the tangled skeins clogging the federal legislative pipes requires careful, detailed and objective analysis of sociological data, looking at correlations between trends unlikely at first glance. It also takes a long look into American history. And so the explanation given in The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop, is not easily reducible to one short phrase. Bishop’s answer is NOT shameless gerrymandering or any kind of [conscious]“conspiracy.” Instead, he says, the Big Sort is the increasing ability of Americans to choose to associate primarily if not exclusively with people like themselves.

What's wrong with wanting to hang out with people like us? How can that account for the failure of Congress to do its job?

There have always been competing political parties in the U.S., and there have always been certain voter “blocks” and interests in competition. As Smith traces the history of partisanship, however, increasing divisions emerge in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, and gaps dividing Americans have been steadily increasing since that time. Okay, so why? The argument is complex, the data surveyed diverse and impressive, but I’ll try to compress the argument into a somewhat lumpy nutshell.

1)    Prosperity and economic security enabled more Americans to choose where they would live.

2)   Choice enabled people to congregate in communities with like-minded individuals, those with the same values and lifestyles.

3)   People in conversation primarily (or only) with like-minded individuals reinforced and strengthened each other’s commitments. When necessary, individuals adjusted their beliefs to conform to those of the group.

4)   Marketers, churches, and political parties increasingly began to target groups-- “tribes”--rather than appeal to a “mass market” or the country as a whole.

5)   To win the allegiance of “tribes,” political parties and churches (following market research) set out to attract groups rather than individuals, and to do this they could not challenge beliefs already strongly held.

6)   Consensus within groups became more extreme than prior individual beliefs had been.

7)   The middle view, those who could see both sides or agreed partially with one side and partially with the other, those who believed in compromise, etc. dropped out of the picture.

8)   Campaigns on both sides of the political divide demanded party purity, and moderate candidates were purged/

9)   “Without a sizable group of moderates, Congress has a harder time passing major legislation. The parties engage in the horseplay Americans see daily in Congress . . . while significant issues are sidelined.”

10)                 Legislative bodies “’either go lurching from one side to another, which means we have no continuity; or they are immobilized.’”

[Caveat: My ten steps could probably be reduced to five or enlarged to 20 and could certainly be formulated differently but are my quick and dirty synopsis of what the author took an entire book to explain.]

The political form of the “Question of the One and the Many” used to be, “How do the many – the diverse, those with different beliefs and backgrounds and values and interests – come together to live as one nation?” That question has been superseded in the last 30-4o years, as political marketers seek to ask instead how segments of voters can be isolated and converted. Demonizing the “other side” is part of the [marketing/identity] process.

“Us vs. Them” studies are a lot scarier than you might imagine.

People enhance their social identities by viewing their own groups positively and seeing other groups negatively. ... The price of identity is that despite what the human relations movement had hoped, differences aren’t diminished when groups come together. Instead, as social psychologists found out, differences are exacerbated.

And it’s even worse than that.

Researches found that there didn’t have to be any discernible dissimilarity [my emphasis added] between groups for “us” versus “them” conflict to arise. People adopted group identifications with only the flimsiest of pretexts.

In study after study, it turned out, incredibly --

The simple fact of assigning people groups led to discrimination....

The good news (were you hoping there would be some? I know I was) is that knowledge of different Others can reduce prejudice and increase tolerance, but it takes more than putting opposing groups in the same room. Psychologist Gordon Allport found that a number of necessary conditions besides proximity must also be met:

Ø    Groups must see themselves as equals.

Ø    Meetings between groups “should take place as a regular pursuit of an ordinary and shared goal.”

Ø    Meetings should “avoid artificiality.”

Without these conditions, disagreement between members of different groups will typically result in avoidance and silence rather than discussion.

Political scientist Diana Mutz, from the University of Pennsylvania, found that Americans are very reluctant to talk politics with those who might disagree with them.

In a comparison of citizens from twelve countries, Americans are the least likely to discuss politics with someone holding a different view. ... [T]hey avoid political confrontations personally – more so than people in any other country in this study.

Is it not paradoxical and horribly ironic that in the land of free expression, conformity and fear keep us from expressing ourselves except with those who already think the same way we do?

Do your friends share your political and religious beliefs and values? Are you able to talk to – and listen to -- those with different beliefs? How do you see the legislative future of American government? Divided by geography, by income, by education, by religion, and by political party, is there any hope that "one nation" will be able to move forward?

It would be so cool to get bipartisan groups together to read and discuss this book!

*  *  *  *  *

This is a complete change of subject and has nothing to do with the rest of today's post, but I wanted to note that for some reason (I'm sure there is a reason, but for the life of me I cannot identify it) new titles I'm adding to my "Books Read 2013" list are now appearing at the bottom rather than the top of the list. It's messing me up, so if anyone has a solution, please clue me in. Thanks!

*  *  *  *  *

Coming back a day later to take another stab at this. Here's my synopsis in only four steps:

1) Since the early 1970s, Americans have chosen, increasingly, to live and associate as much as possible with those "like" themselves, in terms of income, education, lifestyle, and religious and political affiliation. 

2) Churches and political parties, following market research, have learned to target these belief and value groups to "sell" their "products."

3) Groups with different beliefs have moved further away from each other, become more extreme as they move apart, with the result that like-minded communities have become geographical, and so political districts have become increasingly polarized.

4) In polarized districts, moderate political candidates at the regional level cannot find party support, and so the middle drops out -- leaving in Congress two extremes with no ability or motivation to work together.

The author believes [on what grounds?] that only a younger generation can (and will?) reverse this trend, and yes, given enough time a pendulum does reverse direction, but where, in its swing from one extreme to the other, is the Early American ideal of a diverse citizenry overcoming differences to work together? Will our grandchildren achieve what we have lost?

COMPLETE COINCIDENCE??? The current New Yorker magazine opens with a piece by Steve Coll, called "Party Crashers," in which he follows one politician, through a brief number of years, adjusting his utterances and his votes in Congress again and again to satisfy the extreme of his party's line but ultimately failing to be "pure" enough.

Political purges have no logical end point; each newly drawn inner circle leaves a former respected acolyte suddenly on the outside.

Are we waking up yet?

Visiting Fictional Worlds in January

My introduction to M. J. Rose was with the novel, The Book of Fragrance, much of it set in Paris. With her new work of fiction, Seduction, once again Rose seduces readers with a journey of exploration into the mysteries of mind and time. We walk beaches and descend into caves on the Isle of Jersey. Traveling to the past, we sit in seance with Victor Hugo as he tries desperately to make contact with his drowned daughter. Do you believe in ghosts? This novel will suspend your disbelief and hold you enthralled.

What I Was, by Meg Rosoff, took me by surprise. The slim volume opens with an unhappy young boy, going off to yet another English boarding school, anticipating yet another academic and social failure. When a new relationship blooms to change his life forever, it isn’t the one you expect—and you certainly don’t anticipate where it will go. Like Seduction, What I Was is set in the United Kingdom, the latter on England’s rocky coast.

What can I say—what do I need to say—about Alexander McCall Smith’s Miracle at Speedy Motors, another in the series of books about Mma Ramotswe of Botswana’s fictional Ladies #1 Detective Agency? These stories never disappoint me. I love my visits to Botswana’s world of red earth and bush tea, and I enter completely into Precious Ramotswe’s investigations and home life. She is not perfect, and sometimes her errors embarrass her, but she is a good, kind, thoughtful, and strong person. Her beloved father would be very proud of her!

The Land of Green Plums, by Herta Müller, brought a radical shift in mood, as I moved from sunny, democratic Botswana to find myself in bleak Romania under a harsh dictatorship permeating every institution, every place of work, and every personal relationship. The best future the young people can hope for is escape. The style and chronology of the novel are disorienting, probably intentionally so. I was halfway through before I “found my feet,” and even then the going wasn’t easy but was well worth the effort.

Then there was The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb. Put off by the length of Lamb’s novels, I had never read one before but something about this one—maybe the title—drew me in. Beginning with the actual shooting at Columbine High School, Lamb takes his fictional narrator, a high school teacher, back to childhood and forward years after the event, exploring different kinds of violence, what it means to feel like an outsider, family secrets, marital and family relationships, disturbed adolescents, post-traumatic stress, women’s prisons, and so much more that I know the list begins to sound like a sociology textbook, but believe me, it reads like real people living real lives, and everyone I know who’s read it says the same. For the first 200 pages you wonder if you’ll be able to read on much longer—how can you stand to keep going???--and then you are so caught up that you can hardly put the book down to attend to your own life, wanting to know what is going to happen to Caelum, Maureen, Velvet, and every incidental character whose life intersects with theirs.

And now, the novel I’m reading at present: Very unlike any of these others, The Son of Marietta, by Johan Fabricius, published in 1936, opens with a group of “players” (actors) traveling in horse-drawn coaches across central Italy in late fall. They stop at an inn in a provincial cathedral town. One of the women with the troupe has a baby but is unable to nurse the crying child, and after the landlord’s wife offers her own breast the child is left behind, with a little money, and grows up in the public house. Later, for a few years, the girl Marietta takes refuge in a convent, and there the new bishop finds her and takes her into his own home, first as help to his housekeeper, then as his almost-adopted daughter, and—then? I am about a quarter of the way through the book, and the main character, he of the title, has not yet appeared on the scene. This is not a fast-moving story. And yet the portraits are well drawn, and the situations, though far from modern, are very recognizably human, so I am not at all impatient. It is a luxurious escape on cold winter nights, a good excuse to go to bed early!

Have you read any good novels lately?