propaganda in Russia and in the USA

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(Washington, DC) Russian media serves a steady diet of stories about how the crashed Malaysian airplane was filled with already-dead bodies; definitive proof that Ukraine shot it down to frame the Russian separatists; and even evidence that it’s the same Malaysian jet that vanished in March in the southern hemisphere, stored secretly and deployed now in a plot to hurt Russia. (For a sample of this coverage—I don’t know how representative—see the English version of Pravda today.) Maria Snegovaya reports that the Russian media generates very strong domestic popular support for Putin’s policies.

Western writers like criticize Russian propaganda. Russians write back in the comment fields to denounce such criticism. Many make tu quoque arguments: America does all of this, too (i.e., the propaganda, the killing, or both). They are correct that the following problems are not limited to Russia but are also prevalent in countries like the USA:

  1. Deliberate manipulation of public opinion by governments and media companies;
  2. Macho, militaristic nationalism and its reliable appeal to mass publics;
  3. Confirmation bias, or the preference for information that reinforces one’s existing views and interests; and
  4. Valuing the lives of one’s own countrymen far above the lives of foreigners.

Without these phenomena, it would be hard to explain why the US invaded Iraq after 9/11, how most Americans can forget US involvement in Central American genocide when the victims’ children try to migrate across our borders, or how we can tolerate assassinations by drone missile.

On the other hand, making the tu quoque argument is not good for Russia or for Russians. The United States and other democracies have mechanisms for error-correction and accountability that may be badly flawed and frayed today, but that are still hard-won and worth fighting to defend. They are absent in Putin’s Russia. Russians are the primary victims of that lack.

One mechanism is partisan competition. George W. Bush dominated American public opinion at the onset of the Iraq War. But a little-known Illinois state senator was one of those who strongly criticized the invasion. Six years and a few months later, that state senator succeeded Bush in the White House, having benefited politically from his opposition to the war. I am not satisfied by the Schumpeterian justification for elections—that they allow us to vote the incumbent idiots out when their performance becomes intolerable. But a Schumperian democracy is better than none at all. Incumbents are vulnerable; the opposition has powerful incentives to criticize them. Those protections are missing in Putin’s Russia.

Additional protections come from a genuinely independent civil society and press. I realize it is hard to demonstrate that the press and civil society are more effective in the US than in Russia, since they are not working all that well here. Mark Kleiman writes:

Russian mass media is now dominated by an extreme-nationalist lunatic fringe, built up by Putin and his cronies but no longer under their detailed control. … It’s a scary picture. What’s scarier is that, if you change the names, it applies to the relationships among the plutocrats, the GOP apparatchiki, and the world of the Murdochized press, the Koch-driven think-tanks, and Red Blogistan.

That is a claim of equivalence. I heard a similar argument in June from a Russian delegation of academics who visited me in my office. They insisted that they have more NGOs (millions!) than we do and that Putin funds them to ensure their independence from Western influence. I had no crisp refutation to offer, nor was I interested in asserting our system’s superiority. The worthwhile question is not which country has a better public sphere. But I am highly skeptical that Russians are, in fact, being served by an independent press or a robust civil society. If my skepticism is correct, then they and their neighbors (not Americans) are the ones who will suffer.

adult civic education in the Workforce Redevelopment Act

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The Workforce Investment Act of 1998 consolidated federal adult education programs. Congress just passed a re-authorization that has gone to the president for his signature. Section 201 deals with Adult Education and Family Literacy. The reauthorized section 201 “create[s] a partnership among the Federal Government, States, and localities to provide, on a voluntary basis, adult education and literacy activities.” The list of purposes for these activities begins with employment and job skills, as one would expect for a Department of Labor program. But the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools alerted me to section 4(b), which mentions another outcome: “acquiring an understanding of the American system of Government, individual freedom, and the responsibilities of citizenship.” Section 243 then specifically mentions “integrated English literacy and civics education.” Funds for this purpose are to be allocated–in part–on the basis of the number of newly naturalized citizens per state. Money can flow to nonprofits, state agencies, universities, libraries, etc.

Of course, everything depends on how these provisions are implemented. Civics education for new immigrants could be mere jingoistic propaganda, or it could be well-intentioned and yet poorly handled. However, as I argued in a CNN.com column last year, we can and should educate new immigrants for effective and responsible civic participation. That will be good for them as individuals, good for their communities, and good for democracy. I am enthusiastic about these provisions in the Workforce Investment Act. It is now up to us to make sure they are well implemented.

Frontiers of Democracy 2014

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I’m with more than 140 scholars, practitioners, and activists from as far away as India, Ukraine, and Israel at Frontiers of Democracy 2014. We are streaming some of the conference live, but another good way to check in on the conversation is to follow the Twitter hashtag #demfront. So far, I’ve hear lots of tough, passionate, and thoughtful conversation about whether the small-scale democratic practices that we create–practices marked by deliberative and relational values–have anything to do with the large-scale structures that dominate our lives. One way that they might relate is by actually shoring up existing institutions, at the expense of justice. But can we critically assess powerful structures in a way that gives us agency? If this conference became a critical seminar on global crony capitalism, would we do anything differently after we left?

makers and takers, from Galbraith to Romney

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Mitt Romney hurt himself in the 2012 campaign by saying that only 47% of the American people were “makers,” while an outright majority were “takers.” This thesis came from Arthur Brooks and Nicholas Eberstadt. They have argued that people who receive more than they pay into the welfare state will vote to expand it. They have also argued that the proportion of net beneficiaries has risen to become, for the first time, a majority. They see that shift in the political balance as fatal to capitalism. In the age of Ronald Reagan, conservative economic proposals often had a populist and majoritarian ring, but now some leading laissez-faire thinkers are hostile to majoritarian democracy on the grounds that the mass public has lost its commitment to free enterprise.

I don’t know if it has been noted that the current right-wing argument is a mirror-image of the left-wing diagnosis popularized in the late 1950s by John Kenneth Galbraith. The concern then was that a majority had become bourgeois, leaving an outvoted minority in real deprivation. Just as today’s American Enterprise Institute economists dread that voters will kill capitalism, so Galbraith and his social democratic colleagues feared the death of the welfare state at the hands of an affluent majority.

In the Affluent Society, 1958 (40th anniversary edition, p. 235), Galbraith argued that cumulative postwar economic growth had “reduce[d] poverty from the problem of a majority to that of a minority. It ceased to be a general case and became a special case. It is this which put the problem of poverty into its peculiar modern form.”

He explained (pp. 238-9):

With the transition of the very poor from a majority to a comparative minority position, there has been a change in their political position. Any tendency of a politician to identify himself with those of the lowest estate usually brought the reproaches of the well-to-do. Political pandering and demagoguery were naturally suspected. But, for the man so reproached, there was the compensating advantage of alignment with a large majority. Now any politician who speaks for the very poor is speaking for a small and generally inarticulate minority. …

In consequence, a notable feature of efforts to help the very poor is their absence of any great political appeal. Politicians have found it possible to be indifferent where they could not be derisory. And very few have been under a strong compulsion to support these efforts.

The concern for inequality and deprivation had vitality only so long as the many suffered while a few had much. It did not survive as a decisive issue in a time when the many had much even though others had much more. It is our misfortune that when inequality declined, the slate was not left clean. A residual and in some ways rather more hopeless problem remained.

I think Galbraith was right at the time. His argument implied that Reaganite/Thatcherite conservatism would be popular–and its time came. But that doesn’t mean that Romney et al. are completely wrong in their political diagnosis today. Nearly forty years of declining living standards for the median voter and rising economic inequality could shift the balance back in favor of redistribution.

See also “Ulrich Beck v Mitt Romney: makers and takers in the Risk Society” and
“why is oligarchy everywhere? (part 2).”

needed: the case method for civics

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David Garvin has written, “All professional schools face the same difficult challenge: how to prepare students for the world of practice. Time in the classroom must somehow translate directly into real-world activity: how to diagnose, decide, and act. A surprisingly wide range of professional schools … have concluded that the best way to teach these skills is by the case method.”

I propose that we need cases for citizens. Of course, there are many case studies available. Participedia provides hundreds of examples of citizens’ engagement with government. Many books (including my own) tell stories of successful or failed civic efforts.

But the case method is a little different. A “case” in this context means a deliberately incomplete story. It ends at a point of decision for a character or small group. The decision is contrived or chosen to be difficult in the specific sense that it is unresolvable by any formula or algorithm. Such difficulty may arise because the situation involves conflicting and incommensurable values or because the facts and likely outcomes are uncertain–or both. These two sources of indeterminacy are extremely common. Yet we must act. Garvin writes:

“The case system, ” business school alumnus Powell Niland, now of Washington University, has observed, “puts the student in the habit of making decisions.” Day after day, classes revolve around protagonists who face critical choices. Delay is seldom an option. Both faculty and students cite the “bias for action” that results—what Fouraker professor of business administration Thomas Piper calls “courage to act under uncertainty.”

In the Summer Institute of Civic Studies last week, we discussed a case study from Harvard’s Pluralism Project. It involves an adult leader (who, coincidentally, I happen to know) who helped youth organize an interfaith event in a synagogue and who must decide, at very short notice, what to do about a sign that says, “We support Israel.” This is a case about religious pluralism, but we could also consider it a case of civic action. We need more cases like it.

By the way, if you follow the argument of Bent Flyvberg (whom we also read in the Institute), then you will conclude that all knowledge of the social world is particularistic and case-specific. The only valid knowledge comes from cases. I think that is too strong. General knowledge is also helpful. If there are no laws or algorithms that tell us what we should do, there are at least useful rules-of-thumb and principles, both explanatory and normative. Yet cases play an essential role, especially if the purpose is to educate citizens to act.