Monthly Archives: October 2004

hope for reform of gerrymandering

Many political scientists view partisan gerrymandering as the worst flaw in our political system today, worse than campaign finance abuses or poor and biased journalism. By drawing districts that are reliably Democratic or Republican, incumbent politicians have basically stripped voters of their choice. In approximately 385 congressional districts, a vote really doesn’t matter, because the lines have been drawn to preclude competition. Since challengers have virtually no chance, they tend to be weak and under-qualified. In these districts, parties and interest groups make little effort to mobilize voters, so turnout falls. Also, there is little discussion and debate within such districts, so people who live there don’t grasp the diversity of opinion in America. They regard the debate in Washington as mere mud-slinging and believe that every reasonable person agrees with the views that are prevalent in their own districts. Jim Gimpel, Celeste Lay, and Jason Schuknecht show, in Cultivating Democracy, that growing up in an uncompetitive district has a lasting negative effect on one’s civic engagement.

Until recently, I assumed that this problem was basically intractable. Incumbent politicians like things as they are. There is a public interest in competitive districts, but each citizen has relatively little to gain from reform, so it is difficult to mobilize people for this cause. Even if citizens do get mad about gerrymandering, their votes don’t count in most districts. Finally, the courts seem basically tolerant of gerrymandering if the intentions are partisan rather than racial.

But a recent conversation with the lawyer Tom Geogehegan made me more optimistic. It turns out that all the existing case law on gerrymandering pits one major political party against the other. The plaintiff says: You gerrymandered too much, or with unacceptable motives. The defendant says, No we didn’t. Neither party says: The current system for drawing districts violates the Constitution. If a public-interest group were to bring suit on broader constitutional grounds, it would be a novel and untested legal strategy–which means that there’s a chance it would succeed.

By the way, there are several possible remedies for the existing system. One option is a nonpartisan electoral commission, as in Iowa. As a result of Iowa’s reform, that small state has more competitive congressional districts than California and New York combined. One might worry that a “non-partisan” commission would ultimately by hijacked by stealth partisan appointees. An alternative is a computer algorithm that would randomly group citizens in compact districts. In drawing districts, it is necessary to weigh competing values (compactness, “naturalness” of communities, tradition, racial justice, and competitiveness). A computer cannot resolve this balancing problem neutrally. However, it can dramatically reduce the odds of seriously bad results. It can deliver what John Rawls called “pure procedural justice,” which is an important basis for legitimacy.

food for thought

Here is a strange statistical result. My colleagues and I have been teaching

high school students to investigate the causes of obesity in their community—as

a form of civic education. This fall, they are going to conduct and tape interviews

and create a radio show to publicize their results. To give them some data to

work from,

we surveyed all the students in the school’s health classes. The response rate

was poor, because students had to bring in parental permission slips before they could complete

the survey; and there was no penalty for failing to participate. Nevertheless, we

received enough surveys to draw tentative statistical conclusions. Here is the

one that surprises me. None of the 17 kids who said that they ate fast food

every day are overweight (according to their self-reported combination of height and weight). However, 43% of those who said they eat "hardly

any" fast food are considered clinically overweight.

What’s going on? Maybe a lot of kids are mistaken or dishonest, but it’s strange

that the relationship between fast food and body weight would be so linear and negative. The sample is too small for serious statistical analysis,

but we noticed that immigrant kids are more likely to eat fast food, yet less

likely to be overweight. So maybe immigrants eat good food at home but go out a lot

to McDonalds.

There are more possible explanations. For instance, the Washington Post’s “Kid’s Post” section reported last Wednesday that young people order less healthy food at restaurants like Outback Steakhouse and Red Lobster than they do at fast-food places. So maybe it’s good to go to McDonalds if it keeps you from ordering the “surf and turf” at a sit-down restaurant. But most of the kids we surveyed cannot afford regular visits to real restaurants.

In any case, the students’ research task is a lot harder because of this result.

The Bonanza! Group

People who work to improve the quality of public culture deserve our attention and thanks. For example, Adrienne Schatz is one of the co-founders of the “Bonanza!” group. She explains that Bonanza! is:

a network of Republican and Democrat friends who’ve put aside differences – at least in this realm – to create www.bonanzag.com, a very comprehensive, accessible, and truly nonpartisan election resource. We emphasize fact-checking, and have compiled dozens of easily navigable links to information on candidates, issues, registration, voters’ rights, poll monitoring volunteer opportunities, humor (if you haven’t seen the shenanigans at www.jibjab.com, you should …), etc.

the “global test”

Thomas Jefferson said it best: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to [do something drastic that affects the status of other nations,] a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them. … To prove it, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

The founders of the United States asked for no one’s permission to declare our independence (although they needed help from France). Nevertheless, they considered themselves obliged to submit “facts” in support of their decision. If their allegations had been false, then they would have failed the “global test,” as the United States did in 2003 when we presented a false rationale for our invasion of Iraq.

the wrong kind of liberalism

I yield to no one in my commitment to the core moral principles of the center-left. In fact, I will support radical ideas if I am convinced that they will work. However, nothing annoys me more than sloppy argumentation and bad faith on the part of people who vote the same way I do.

A case in point is Joseph Epstein’s “Mystery in the Heartland” from the Oct. 7 New York Review of Books. This is a review of Thomas Franks’ What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that I have not read. (Thus my criticism is solely directed at Epstein, not at Franks.) The puzzle that Franks poses is why people in America’s very poorest county, which happens to be located in rural Kansas, should vote for George Bush by 80%. Epstein’s answer is that they hate and demonize “the latte-drinking, school-bussing, fetus-killing, tree-hugging, gun-fearing, morally relativist and secularly humanist so-called liberal elitists, whose elders have been ‘soft on communism’ while they themselves coddle criminals, women, and same sexers, eat brie, drink chardonnay, support Darwin, and oppose capital punishment in defiance of the ‘moral values’ of ordinary, God-fearing, flag-waving, assault-gun-carrying Americans.”

Why should people adopt this picture of the world? According to Epstein, deeply cynical conservative elites have fooled them into it, most recently by following Goering’s advice at Nuremberg. Goering said:

people don’t want to go to war…. But, after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship…. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.

Epstein invokes Goering’s spirit in his critique of conservatism. There is also a huge photograph of the Reverend Fred Phelps to illustrate his review (in the print version). Phelps is an elderly Kansas pastor who holds a “God hates fags” sign.

But Epstein thinks that the real problem is deeper than cynical elites and hate-mongering reverends. In times of peril, people always turn to fundamentalism, to absolute certainty and stark moral simplicity. In such circumstances, liberalism tends to lose, because, as Learned Hand wrote, the spirit of liberty “is not too sure that it is right. … [It] is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.” Liberals understand what Keats called “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

I wonder if it has occurred to Epstein that he is absolutely certain about the advantages of mid-twentieth-century liberalism. He is a perfect fundamentalist who sees his opponents as wicked and ignorant and his own program as self-evidently superior to theirs. On point after point, he fails to understand the minds of his fellow Americans or to concede any possibility that he might be wrong. Viz …

  • Pace Epstein, George W. Bush is no Herman Goering. To manipulate public opinion into a war against a cruel dictator, if that’s what the President did, is wrong; but it is not the same as seizing foreign countries and slaughtering Jews by the millions. Also, the Iraq war, whatever its motivations, has turned into a net political liability for Bush, who could otherwise run as the victor of Afghanistan.
  • The Reverend Fred Phelps is horrible. I refrain from linking to his site because I don’t want him to get extra points with Google. But even if he is personally dangerous, he is completely marginal. His Anti-Defamation League profile notes that many of his “congregants are related to Phelps by blood. His wife, several of his children and dozens of his grandchildren frequent the church.” This is not a man with a mass movement behind him. On the contrary, his views contradict the explicit principles of evangelical Protestantism. Using his picture to illustrate a critique of conservatism is like appending a photograph of Fidel Castro to a critical article about liberals.
  • Epstein thinks that Kansans have been snookered into privatization of electricity and Social Security and rollbacks of the capital gains tax. I’m against those policies, too. But we ought to ask whether Kansans have good reasons to support what the center-left has offered them as alternatives. Is it possible that they don’t want to pay taxes–or even ask rich people and corporations to pay taxes–because they distrust existing public schools, welfare systems, and regulatory agencies? Maybe it’s not people with glasses of chardonnay who worry them, but bureaucrats and public employees who patronize them and shut them out of public institutions–and deliver mediocre results.

    • Surely a liberal in the tradition of Learned Hand would start by asking what’s wrong with liberalism, before he excoriated his opponents in such a way as to make his side look completely blameless.