Pro-Lifers Care More About Abortion
Following RI politics in the news, one would think pro-choicers dominate and really care about abortion, but the opposite is the truth.
The Governor’s Progressive Priorities
A recent Providence Journal editorial highlights yet another indication that the administration of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo isn’t exactly exhibiting a casual competence when it comes to the basic operations of state government. This time, the problem is the company with which the state has contracted to ensure that people in need are able to make it to their medical appointments, and the House Oversight Committee, led by Representative Patricia Serpa (D, West Warwick), is looking into it:
It has not escaped Ms. Serpa’s attention that there is a pattern of problems in state contracting. For many years, the executive branch has had trouble drafting strong contracts (without requiring an abundance of costly change orders), making sure services are properly implemented, and providing sufficient oversight once services have commenced. At the same time, the Raimondo administration has dramatically increased the number of public-relations people on its payroll.
Public-relations people on the payroll is just the start. Apparently, the governor also has plenty of time for things like this:
Gov. Gina Raimondo is all-in on a statewide bag ban and past opponents of the concept aren’t objecting.
Raimondo gave her support Feb. 14 at the final meeting of the Task Force to Tackle Plastics, an advisory board she created last July with the mission of cutting plastic pollution in the state.
That’s progressives (like socialists) for you: trying to save the world while letting those who rely on their competence for day-to-day operations suffer. The problem, at its bottom, is that people are willing to pay for certain services from government (for themselves and on behalf of others), but not so much for insider excesses and progressive schemes. So, to make way for the excesses and schemes, government has to scrimp on the things for which people are willing to pay so there’s money left over for the things for which they probably wouldn’t.
And at the end of the day, ensuring that the medical transportation vehicles run on time isn’t all that exciting.
What We’re Really Talking About with Abortion Decisions
When we get past the focus that serves the cause of abortion, we find that it is generally motivated by convenience but has no benefit for the mental health of the woman or her ability to achieve positive goals within the next year.
Against Common Ground on Taxes
What does it mean to say it’s “unfair” for the ultra rich to pay the same tax rate as the merely rich?
The Humorous, the Grotesque, and the Fanatical from Pro-Choice Advocates
Planned Parenthood’s promotion of a higher minimum wage presents a multi-layered lesson on what it means to be “pro-choice.”
East Greenwich’s Cienki in the Race for State GOP Chair
Suzanne Cienki, the East Greenwich Town Council president whose local leadership had the town’s government in the headlines for a year, has announced her candidacy to be chairwoman of the state Republican Party:
“The State of Rhode Island is run by the Democratic Party,” Cienki said in letter to GOP Central Committee members. “Unfortunately, this one-party system is the same as a no-party system. The balancing of ideas and checks and balances by opposing parties is vital to a democratic society. The RIGOP needs to clearly identify a platform and educate voters in Rhode Island as to how Republicans will do things differently.” …
“I have the leadership skills, time and energy to devote to the position of chair,” Cienki wrote in her letter to party faithful. “I am not afraid of a challenge and willing to speak out on behalf of taxpayers on many important issues. The state party’s main goals should have a clearly identifiable message, focus on fundraising efforts, and recruit candidates to run for statewide offices.”
Amid the behind-the-scenes chatter, I’ve heard it said that Cienki would be a bad choice because she led her council into a rout by the local Democrats, but Republicans should be wary of that argument. The idea that somebody with the gumption to take on Rhode Island’s established interests should be penalized because she has had to learn from her experience is antithetical to an active movement that can advance a cause.
The way to gain advantage over time is to experiment, take risks, and then learn from the results, both good and bad. Rather than writing off anybody who has a bad result, a movement that reassesses based on that experience and renews the charge will make progress. And if the people who made the mistakes are willing to do the same, they’re particularly well suited to guide the change, at the same time that their participation makes it more likely that the opposition will learn the wrong lessons.
Intersectionality as an Ideological Blockchain
Intersectionality combines with social media so as to create a blockchain that allows radicals to identify and go after dissent and disagreement.
A Consequence of Faceless Bureaucracy Using Cold Data
Back in the sunny days before many people had even heard about the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), let alone before it was a byword for the Ocean State’s dysfunctional government, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity was warning about a “dependency portal.”
The idea behind the system is that state government will consolidate the information it collects for every type of welfare benefit and program it operates. That information would be updated in an ongoing way, and people will automatically receive any benefits for which they are newly eligible.
Of course, the flip side is that people would also automatically lose any benefits for which they are no longer eligible. Moreover, nobody should believe that politicians and bureaucrats would not find other uses for this treasure trove of information.
Turn, now, to Elizabeth Brico’s commentary on Talk Poverty:
… after decades of collecting this data, the government is putting it to use. This information is feeding algorithms that decide everything from whether or not you get health insurance to how much time you spend in jail. Increasingly, it is helping determine whether or not parents get to keep their kids.
When someone phones in a report of suspected child abuse — usually to a state or county child abuse hotline — a call screener has to determine whether the accusation merits an actual investigation. Sometimes they have background information, such as prior child welfare reports, to assist in their decision-making process, but often they have to make snap determinations with very little guidance besides the details of the immediate report. There are more than 7 million maltreatment reports each year, and caseworkers get overwhelmed and burn out quickly — especially when a serious case gets overlooked. New algorithms popping up around the country review data points available for each case and suggest whether or not an investigation should be opened, in an attempt to offset some of the individual responsibility placed on case workers.
Admittedly, I get the impression I wouldn’t agree with some of Brico’s broader assumptions and prescriptions, but empowering a faceless bureaucratic system to intervene intimately in people’s lives based on cold data is a frightening idea on its face.
The Center’s Perspective on So-Called “Fair Housing” Legislation
RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse offers the Center’s view on legislation that would limit landlords’ right to decide whether the way potential tenants’ will pay their rent should be a factor in deciding whether to rent to them, including a mandate to accept Section 8 vouchers:
Based on conversations with landlords I know, there is a major, legitimate, and non-racial reason why some business prefer not to accept clients subsidized by public money and all the red-tape they would have to go through. In this case, once a landlord accepts a federally subsidized Section-8 tenant, that business is now subject to a whole new array of mandates, red tape, and risks that otherwise, it would not have to worry about.
Under this legislative mandate, landlords would be subject to unfair rules by HUD, which we know from the RhodeMap RI debate years ago, does not care about private property rights. HUD has corrupted its mission of putting low-income people into appropriate housing to the point where it routinely tramples on the rights of other private property owners.
Preserving an Elite Under the Guise of “Access”
While the ruling class appears to be looking to spread opportunity, its actions seem mainly to foster a system that preserves their advantage.
The SJWs Claim the Dreams of One of Their Own
Rod Dreher shares a story that shows the urgency of pulling our society away from the social justice warrior (SJW) cliff.
Amelie Wen Zhao is a Young Adult author whose debut sci-fi/fantasy novel, Blood Heir, was set for a June release from a major publisher, as part of a three-book deal. When the deal was announced a year ago, Zhao, who is just starting her career, made her excitement public.
Ms. Zhao has quite a story. Born in China. Fully accredited member of the right-thinking POC community. Unfortunately, a Twitter mob formed, apparently focusing on the fact that the first book’s PR materials described the fictional world as one in which “oppression is blind to skin color.”
The result, as Dreher puts it, is that Zhao learned to love Big Brother. In her apology letter, she expressed gratitude for having been taught a lesson and reports, “I have decided to ask my publisher not to publish Blood Heir at this time.”
Robby Soave is right to quote Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in this context: “There is more than one way to burn a book, and the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” This madness will come for us all if we don’t start stopping it.
One suspects the SJWs miss the irony that they’re bringing Ms. Zhao’s fictional world into being. “Oppression is blind to skin color,” indeed.
Getting Off the Roof for Marijuana and School Choice
Expanding rights and liberties is an important goal, but we can’t pursue it without taking due consideration of the ground on which our society finds itself.
A System That Gets Society What It Wants
Big government and labor unions were mechanisms society built when it really wanted something, but keeping such mechanisms after their purposes are fulfilled is dangerous and disruptive.
Raimondo: Profligate or Puritan?
Is the governor a recklessly spending profligate or a moral puritan looking to punish her subjects for their moral impurities while bringing them to kneel before government?
The Center’s Statement on Governor Raimondo’s State of the State
The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has this to say about Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s State of the State address and budget priorities:
Governor’s Policy Ideas Will Make Matters Worse
More of the same progressive-left policies that are hampering our state today
Providence, RI — With the Ocean State doomed to lose a US Congressional seat because of its hostile tax, educational, and business environment, which chases away wealth, families and potential investors, the policies presented in the Governor’s 2019 State of the State address would only make matters worse, according to the Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity.
“The Governor offered nothing but more of the same, failed progressive-left policies,” commented Mike Stenhouse, CEO for the Center. “Instead of seeking to make our state a more free and welcoming place to live and work by easing governmental intrusion in our lives, the Governor is proposing even further attacks on our individual and economic rights. This misguided vision should be alarming to all Rhode Islanders.”
As prior Governors and General Assembly leaders have erred in the recent past, many items from the Governor’s speech would again make Rhode Island an even worse place to raise a family or build a career:
- With no coherent plan to address our long-time K-12 public-schools problem other than throwing more money at it; and instead of lessening government and union influence over our recently exposed dismal student test scores, the Governor is proposing even more government control over students via her “universal pre-K” and expanded “free college tuition” programs.
- Instead of easing regulatory burdens on employers in a state with one of the worst business climates in the country, the Governor proposed placing job-producers in further economic peril via more onerous wage mandates.
- Instead of combating the deadly use of opioids, the Governor’s unspoken tonight push for legalization of marijuana will only create a stepping stone for further drug abuse and will lead to a further fraying of our state’s societal fabric.
- Instead of protecting and preserving our individual freedoms, the Governor is expanding the attacks and infringements on the rights of the unborn and those seeking to exercise their constitutional right to defend themselves.
- Instead of seeking to provide more affordable and higher-quality health insurance for state residents, the Governor continues to push for sub-standard and unaffordable government-mandated insurance.
- With corporation after corporation pulling out of RI and reneging on their corporate welfare deals, the Governor continues to promote more special-interest incentives that end up producing little more than empty headlines … all paid for by the hard-working taxpayers of our state.
For these reasons and more, Rhode Island suffers from an epidemic of people fleeing our state. “Maybe it’s time to build our own wall to keep people in,” quipped Stenhouse.
Charity and the Guilt of a Race
Rod Dreher has an interesting post on the balkanizing dangers of progressive anti-white rhetoric, and readers with an interest in the subject should read it. What most caught my eye, however, was a tangential sentiment in a quotation Dreher includes from an NBC News commentary by Noah Berlatsky:
Even community service can reproduce racist ideas. It’s hard to see people as equals when you always have power over them, or when your primary experience with them involves giving them charity.
The spectacle of well-intentioned people working, half unconsciously, to solidify and perpetuate their own power is not an encouraging one. “I feel like my findings are pretty dismal,” Hagerman admits. “When you have people who have a lot of wealth alongside this racial privilege, they’re ultimately making decision that benefit their own kids, and I don’t know how you really interrupt that.”
However he arrives at it, Berlatsky’s ideology clearly gets charity wrong.
Maybe that’s a progressive versus traditionalist difference. To a traditionalist — specifically a Christian traditionalist — we’re called to charity because we’re all equal in the eyes of God, and we’re to see God most especially in those who are suffering. The last will be first. If we are comfortable, we should be concerned that we have already received our reward, but when we humble ourselves, we will be elevated in Heaven.
There’s plenty of room for hypocrisy and imperfection in the actual application of this principle, but that’s the underlying view. You owe it to the disadvantaged to help them because, ultimately, they are your equals, and what you have is an indication either that your priorities are wrong or that God has given to you so that you may help others.
The penance of progressives’ materialism is much more stern. The obligation of the privileged is complete negation. You don’t give to others because you are equal; you deprive yourself because you are inferior (and give to progressives, so they can profit from the redistribution of your wealth).
Actually, as Dreher explains, it would be more true to say that the altruistic progressive appears obligated mostly to express guilt and continue on with his or her privilege. Culturally, it’s a ritual sacrifice of the less privileged of their own race for the expiation of guilt.
Choosing Good Means Considering the Consequences
Some leading conservative commentators have been debating what it means to say that President Donald Trump does or does not have good character. This point, from Roger Kimball, seems much more broadly applicable:
I think it is also worth pondering the work that Jonah [Goldberg] wants the adverb “wholly” to do in the deflationary phrase “wholly instrumental.” Any meaningful definition of good character has to involve an instrumental element. Otherwise the character in question would be impotent. This is part of what Aristotle meant, I think, when he observed that “it is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.” In dismissing the connection between character and potency as “wholly instrumental” Jonah flirts with an idea of character that is unanchored to the realities of life.
The idea of character with which Goldberg flirts, according to Kimball, is a particularly progressive one. So many policy debates, these days, wind up with those on the left wanting the government to do something as a statement of morals and those on the right pointing out that the thing that they are proposing government should do will not solve the problem and, usually, will have harmful effects, particularly on our civil rights.
I’ve actually been surprised, in the past, when intelligent, well-meaning people have responded to my observations about a foreseeable side effect of some policy by saying, “That’s not the intention at all.” Well, I know it’s not the intention, but it is almost certainly a consequence. If your policy will not resolve the problem it targets, and if it will have harmful side effects, and if this is reasonably foreseeable, advocates are choosing evil, in Aristotle’s construct, even though their opinions might be good.
In this light, modern liberalism is a game of hedging bets. If you can pretend that the actual consequences of a policy are not obvious, then you can get credit for good intentions whatever may happen. To the contrary, we have the concept of “gross negligence” in the law for a reason. Deliberately failing to consider the consequences of your actions is not an alibi. “How was I supposed to know” is only a defense if one really could not have known.
Character is good when a person fully considers an act and makes a choice that is good (not evil) with as much information as is available. Whether that type of character is resident in the White House, I am not confident. After all, choosing good because it is expedient is not necessarily an indication of good character. However, an electorate that chooses somebody who will do good because he is forced to do good is still the more moral choice for us than a candidate who will do evil while claiming to believe that it is good.
A Political Theory of Blogs and Social Media
I’m not sure I agree with Cal Newport’s description of the difference between blogs and social media (emphasis in original):
Blogs implement a capitalist attention market. If you want attention for your blog you have to earn it through a combination of quality, in the sense that you’re producing something valuable for your readers, and trust, in the sense that you’ve produced enough good stuff over time to establish a good reputation with the fellow bloggers whose links will help grow your audience. …
Social media, by contrast, implements a collectivist attention market, where the benefits of receiving attention are redistributed more uniformly to all users.
Not knowing Newport’s politics, I can’t say for sure, but I’d wager he’s pretty libertarian. I say that because it would explain why he doesn’t see (in my opinion) that social media isn’t collectivist (in terms of distributing the currency of attention); it’s hyper-capitalist. The owners have found a way to break down barriers so that more people can participate in the market, but one of those barriers, as Newport notes, is the requirement for quality. A collectivist attention market would give the social media platforms’ managers the ability to distribute likes, follows, and replies as they thought justified, according to their own criteria.
This analogy actually raises important questions that conservatives strive to answer in contrast to more-thoroughgoing libertarians. The higher quality and other benefits of blogs over social media represent a cultural good that was possible partly because they had barriers (to entry, to production, to audience building) that social media swept away. The conservative question is: By what mechanisms we can balance those cultural goods against the also-good principle that everybody ought to have opportunities?
The (admittedly not very satisfying) answer seems to be the same for online content as for the economy and other broader social goods. Basically, we have to remind each other of the value derived from an older way of doing things and make a deliberate effort to put aside seeming conveniences. We should also develop tools that bridge some of the gap, like using RSS feeds for information rather than social media streams. And of course, we have to make what we offer off the beaten path even more attractive.
Mostly, though, we just have to pray, and hope that less-healthy developments are fads that our society will self-correct.
Tweeted Insight into the Progressive Way
Rep. Ranglin-Vassell’s quick retort about racism when called out for imperiously telling others to keep their mouths shut is a lesson Rhode Islanders ought to observe as progressives become a larger part of our politics.
Ominous Opening to the 2019 General Assembly Session
Progressive State Senator Sam Bell’s opening-day speech is an early indication that the far left will be on the attack for the next two years.
Crawling to Potter
Power is what makes people crawl, whether it’s held by a small town’s big banker or by big government.
The Evolution of a Strip
For readers elsewhere in Rhode Island, WPRI’s brief report about a Fall River store now approved for retail sale of recreational marijuana may not provide a sufficient picture:
The Cannabis Control Commission approved the final retail license for Northeast Alternatives on Thursday during a meeting in Boston.
Northeast Alternatives currently sells medical cannabis at its location on William S. Canning Blvd., a short distance from the border with Tiverton, Rhode Island.
To be more specific, this pot shop is a short distance from the new casino in Tiverton. The image that begins to come to mind is that of Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life.
Also in the news, lately, has been the arrest of some Foxy Lady employees for prostitution. With state governments’ pursuing the strategy of making vices legal in order to profit from them, one can’t help but wonder on which side of the border the brothel will go when state coffers continue to run low.
To be clear, this wonderment should not be taken as a comment on the loosening of any of these laws in particular. We should, however, question this new way of looking at government’s relationship to our liberties and address these changes with open eyes.
The flip side of not believing that government should make everything bad illegal is realizing that not everything legal is desirable. Our social and political processes can figure out where those lines are for any given topic or any particular location, but our decisions will be distorted if we legalize vices for the reason that government can profit from them.
Turning the Corner on Sexism in STEM
You know those table-top games for which you tilt a board in order to get a ball to roll through a maze or obstacle course of some kind? They’re an excellent metaphor for the problem with using government to tilt society to achieve socially engineered outcomes. The ball rolls, picking up momentum, and the means of controlling the board can be awkward.
To improve upon the metaphor imagine that the obstacles sometimes move around in unpredictable ways… and you’re trying to turn the knobs while wearing slippery mittens.
A century and more ago, maybe it was possible to believe in the totalitarian, yet beneficent, governance by experts, but in the intervening years, the experts should have concluded that it can’t be done. The solution is to use cultural means to change things in the culture and structure the laws to provide a neutral playing field.
Instead, progressives have turned both knobs, as if they can get the ball to hop over all the walls. So, we get a social standard that promotes girls and women while demeaning boys and men and a legal regime in which it is permissible to discriminate only against the latter. The obvious question that some of us were asking decades ago was: Even if we grant that male chauvinism is too powerful of a force, how will we know when to stop correcting for it?
That is arguably the implied question of Toni Airaksinen’s PJMedia article on some new research from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI):
Mark Perry, a University of Michigan-Flint professor, appears to be the first to discover that the “STEM gender gap” doesn’t exactly exist after all. According to his recent AEI report, women now earn 50.6 percent of all STEM bachelor’s degrees, and are also overrepresented in graduate school.
While 50.6 percent is only a slight majority, this translates into 8,500 more female STEM graduates per year and about 33,000 more women in STEM grad school. And because college is now a woman’s domain, it’s likely these small disparities will expand over time. …
“The 60/40 gender disparity in college degrees favoring women that the Department of Education forecasts within the next decade should be of much greater concern to society than failing to achieve 50/50 gender parity in a few STEM fields, in terms of the future implications for the labor market, for family formation and other concerns.”
Returning to the metaphor above, anybody who has played those games knows that the trick is to start changing the tilt of the board before the ball has reached a turn. Otherwise, momentum will carry it along in a direction you don’t want to go. Well, we’ve arguably just missed the turn, and with no signs that adjustments are coming.
Instead, we can expect activists to highlight such findings as the fact that, with more choices available to women, fewer of them have gone into computer science. This evidence of people acting according to their interests will no doubt inspire our cultural engineers to keep on pushing, even as imbalances and injustices open up and cause untold damage to our society.
Appearance on In the Arena
IN THE ARENA – 12-09-18 from abc6 WLNE-TV, Providence on Vimeo.
Where Would Excess Health Insurance CEO Pay Go
So, socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is on Twitter highlighting the pay of health insurance CEOs:
What insurance company CEOs made in 2017:
-Leonard Schleifer (Regeneron): $95.3 million
-Dave Wichmann (UnitedHealth): $83.2 million
-Mark Bertolini (Aetna): $58.7 millionWe need a system that provides health care for all, not massive compensation for a few CEOs.
Putting aside Regeneron, which is not an insurance company and is therefore a different conversation, I agree with Sanders that these pay amounts are excessive, but the senator skates by an important point: The reason insurance companies can do this sort of thing is that government insulates them from competition. It also forces market-distorting policies on them, like requiring less-costly insurance customers to pay more to reduce the gap in prices.
For context, the pay for Wichmann that Sanders cites equates to around $2.25 from each of the company’s members, so as an isolated expense, it doesn’t mean much by way of price competition. Still $83 million is a lot of money that could be put toward some other benefit or organizational improvement that would be salable. Government has shaped the market landscape that allows that money to pool in executive compensation. Naturally, the socialist’s solution to this problem is… more government!
Let’s imagine, then, what would happen to this money if the government even more-fully ran our health insurance industry. With no competition, the government would have little incentive to ensure that the CEO’s wages were redistributed in the way that would attract more customers. Would it reduce prices by $2.25 for everybody? That seems useless. If you say it would hire more doctors, do the math, and you’ll find that the United CEO’s pay would maybe allow for another 400-500 for a nation of well over 300 million people.
Two areas in which some significant portion of the money would surely go are predictable based on other government activities: More administrators and bureaucrats would be hired, and targeted special interest groups would receive enhanced benefits or cost savings, to be distributed based on the political value of their support.
This likelihood should lead anybody who thinks the CEOs make too much money and that it ought to fund, instead, an improved healthcare system to the conclusion that we need more market force in health care rather than less. That would squeeze the pay of the top employees and distribute it where the market finds the most value.
The Power Center of Intersectionality
A recent Ordered Liberty podcast took up the topic of intersectionality in away that made it especially clear. According to the discussion, the ideology gives the person with the most direct claim to victimization the lead authority to decry any given target, and then it is the duty of the “allies” to back her or him up. Thus, in the case of shutting down speech, the people doing the dirty work aren’t necessarily even offended themselves, but see themselves as defending others who hypothetically are or might be.
On the podcast, David French and Alexandra DeSanctis emphasize the greater power this system gives to the most supposedly victimized person in the group, but I think it’s much more insidious than that. After all, if that were the case, you could reason with the person flagging the offense, bring in somebody of the same category to dispute it, or persuade the mob that the person leading the charge isn’t reliable.
More likely, the power actually goes to whoever it is who defines what is offensive, which is probably a smaller, more elite group. After all, we regularly see people from minority groups who decline to take offense dismissed as inauthentic. Somewhere, somebody is declaring what interest groups are included in the network and what they should find offensive.
When these declarations are distributed, people within an interest group will either respond with the required offense or, for the most part, simply step back and be quiet out of fear that they’re just different (in a way that makes them the worst thing: privileged). Those who don’t want to go along or step back are brushed out of the picture. With this nucleus of offense, “allies,” who may fear they have no right to voice their contrary opinions, act on behalf of people who might not ultimately be offended themselves.
So, the question is: Where are the orders coming from? For the most part, it seems that people “just know” what the dictates are. It could be that somebody proposes an idea or responds with offense and the proposal either catches on or it doesn’t, suggesting that the power of intersectionality is held by those with the most credibility on the Left in general — professors, activists, famous people, union organizers, billionaire donors, and so on.
Confirming a Conservative Response to Poverty
Writing about public policy day in and day out, one can forget that not everybody follows every argument with close attention. Broad philosophical points of view and underlying intentions can therefore be lost.
Just so, I almost didn’t bother reading a brief essay in which Michael Tanner promotes and summarizes his forthcoming book offering a broad explanation of a conservative policy response to poverty. It’s worth reading, though, because he summarizes some conservative policies specifically in terms of their human objectives:
- Keeping people out of jail can promote work and stable families.
- Breaking up “the government education monopoly and limit[ing] the power of teachers’ unions” is rightly seen as an “anti-poverty program.”
- Preventing government from driving up the cost of living, especially housing, will give poorer families a chance to get their feet on the ground.
- Policies that discourage savings also discourage healthy financial habits.
- A heavy hand in regulating the economy tends to target economic growth toward the rich and powerful.
As he concludes:
An anti-poverty agenda built on empowering poor people and allowing them to take greater control of their own lives offers the chance for a new bipartisan consensus that rejects the current paternalism of both Left and Right. More important, it is an agenda that will do far more than our current failed welfare state to actually lift millions of Americans out of poverty.
My only objection is that I’m not sure that the “paternalism of the Right” is a view that conservatives actually hold rather than a caricature that the Left spreads about us. Of course, the fault is arguably ours, if we don’t often enough express our real intentions.
The Ambiguous Middle in the General Assembly
I’m not sure if the Providence Journal’s Political Scene crew is right to summarize the General Assembly’s left-right divide based solely on abortion and gun rights, but the reported numbers do raise an interesting question: Are the relatively conservative legislative leaders on the edge of a progressive precipice, or are the legislators whose views aren’t explicitly known more conservative than they want to show in floor votes, thereby exposing themselves to progressive attack?
Cranston Republican Steven Frias seems to think the former:
Frias said his own analysis of the ratings suggests that “Mattiello is in the minority among House Democrats on abortion and guns, which helps explain why [he] has dropped the ‘firewall’ rhetoric.”
“Mattiello’s dilemma is whether to allow a floor vote where representatives will be allowed to vote their conscience on legislation related to abortion and guns. Regardless of what he decides, someone will feel duped,″ either the “House liberals … [or] the cultural conservatives who backed [him] for reelection thinking he would be the ‘firewall’ on abortion and guns.”
Frias’ argument: “If Mattiello betrays his culturally conservative constituents it would be a signal to cultural conservatives that they cannot rely on the Democratic House leadership and they should vote Republican in General Assembly races.”
A corresponding dilemma faces quiet conservatives. As long as legislators are allowed to remain fuzzy on these issues, relatively conservative constituents will continue to rely on the good graces of “firewalls” like Mattiello. An unambiguous understanding of the danger would be clarifying as people make their decisions as voters, volunteers, and donors.
Meeting the Challenge of Education Reform
The Providence Journal editorial board is (let’s just say) very forceful on the subject of Rhode Island students’ test results:
The weak and timid reforms he and Gov. Gina Raimondo have advanced, while soothing to special interests, have been plainly insufficient. It is time for a shakeup at the Rhode Island Department of Education and the state Board of Education. Will anyone have the decency to resign for having failed our young people?
Robert Walsh of the National Education Association and Francis Flynn of the American Federation of Teachers have, similarly, served Rhode Island students abysmally. Union leaders in civic-minded Massachusetts understand that an education system is about more than providing salaries and benefits for adults. We know there are many teachers who yearn for a sound, long-term plan to improve standards.
It is a shame Rhode Island cannot simply shutter its Department of Education and hire Massachusetts to run the Ocean State’s public schools as a subset of its own. It at least knows how to do the job.
I saw editorial page editor Ed Achorn pushing back on Facebook against those who respond to these sentiments by pointing out that the Providence Journal endorsed Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo. Part of the editor’s response was that the paper has also implored her to improve her record on education, which I’m not sure quite meets the challenge.
Some of the entities that should be a check on government, like the state’s major newspaper, have this problem: They formulate their solutions as if we had a properly functioning state. Under such circumstances, a governor who had received the endorsement might change out of concern that she would lose it. In Rhode Island, she knows that she has nothing to fear.
Nobody who has secured a role of significance wants to throw down a gauntlet to make any bold changes to the way decisions are made in the state.
It isn’t sufficient to suggest, in passing, that somebody should resign over abysmal test scores. That outcome has to be important enough that advocates will ensure that insiders cannot achieve their other goals unless they address education.
That, incidentally, is win-win, because the insiders’ other goals are, on the whole, corrupt and oughtn’t be achieved, anyway. They need to be made to understand, however, that their only hope of keeping any of their ill-gotten gains is by making improvements in this area.
A Post-Racial Society Would Be More Conservative
So here’s something for a bit of Friday fun:
A new study suggests that the words you use may depend on whether the club secretary’s name is Emily (“a stereotypically White name,” as the study says) or Lakisha (“a stereotypically Black name”). If you’re a white liberal writing to Emily, you might use words like “melancholy” or “euphoric” to describe the mood of the book, whereas you might trade these terms out for the simpler “sad” or “happy” if you’re corresponding with Lakisha.
But if you’re a white conservative, your diction won’t depend on the presumed race of your interlocutor.
Interestingly, the article appears to suggest that the conservative approach is ultimately what minorities want: “research shows that racial minorities are more concerned about being respected than about being liked.” One might speculate that, if minorities believe conservatives don’t respect them, it’s not because of the way in which conservatives behave, but because the liberals who control most of our news and information media expend so much energy painting conservatives as racists.
The article and the study on which it’s based provide a small example of how that works:
What she found, by performing online text analysis of 74 campaign speeches over the last 25 years, was that white candidates who were Democrats used significantly fewer words about “agency or power,” and more about “affiliation and communality” when addressing minority voters. There was no significant difference exhibited by Republican candidates.
The irony, as the paper notes, is that “Whites who may be more affiliative toward Blacks alter their verbal responses toward them in a way that matches negative stereotypes. Despite the patronizing behavior that they enact, these liberal candidates may hold more goodwill toward minorities.”
The bias comes with the imperative that liberals must be right and must be the good guys. Looked at objectively, no irony need be involved. Conservatives are less condescending in their language, and they are less interested in addressing minority groups as minority groups. The latter doesn’t explain the former so much as they are the same thing.
We conservatives take people as they come and present ourselves as we are — as individuals, not as identity groups. We don’t hold less “goodwill toward minorities” as people, but we don’t put much stock in treating them as a group of minorities, as opposed to treating them as a group of our fellow human beings.
