In this 6 1/2 minute video, CGP Gray explains how the mathematics of a one person/one vote system inevitably leads to a two-party system that pleases almost no one.
At the GOP convention in August, Mitt Romney’s cavalier dismissal of global warming got the intended laughs. Today, it seems less funny and the Democrats are capitalizing on the turn of events:
Here’s the transcript:
President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the
oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.
In two short sentences, Romney gives us the broader context for the denial of global warming: the denial of society itself. He echoes Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum
There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
This doesn’t mean that there are no groups beyond the family. But those larger groups are valid only because individuals, consciously and voluntarily, chose to create them. This way of thinking about the relation between individuals and groups has long been an underlying principle of American thought. Claude Fischer, in Made in America calls it “voluntarism” – the idea that the only legitimate groups are the ones that people voluntarily form or join.* The individual has a strong obligation to those groups and their members, but he has little or no obligation towards groups and people he did not choose.
That is a moral position. It tells us what is morally O.K., and what is not. If I did not choose to join a group, I make no claims on others, and it is wrong for others – whether as individuals or as an organized group, even a government – to make any claim upon me.
That moral position also shapes the conservative view of reality, particularly about our connectedness to other people and to the environment. Ideas about what is right determine ideas about what is true. The conservative rejects non-voluntary connections as illegitimate, but he also denies that they exist. If what I do affects someone else, that person has some claim upon me; but unless I voluntarily enter into that relationship, that claim is morally wrong. So in order to remain free of that claim, I must believe that what I do does not affect others, at least not in any harmful way.
It’s easy to maintain that belief when the thing being affected is not an individual or family but a large and vague entity like “society” or “the environment.” If I willingly join with many other people, then I will see how our small individual acts – one vote, one small donation, one act of charity, etc. – add up to a large effect. That effect is what we intended. But if we separately, individually, drive a lot in our SUVs, use mega-amounts of electricity, and so on, we deny that these acts can add up to any unintended effect on the planet.
As Fischer says, voluntarism is characteristically American. So is the denial of global warming. At a recent Romney rally (video here), when a protester yelled out the question, “What about climate?” Romney stands there, grinning but silent, and the crowd starts chanting, “USA, USA.” The message is clear: we don’t talk about climate change; we’re Americans.
At the Washington Post, John Cohen and Rosalind Helderman report:
The 2012 election is shaping up to be more polarized along racial lines than any presidential contest since 1988, with President Obama experiencing a steep drop
in support among white voters from four years ago.
They compare data from a recent poll with exit interviews from 2004 and 2008. The results show that, while Obama is overwhelmingly the favorite among non-whites, he trails him among whites by 23 percentage points.
Cohen and Helderman say that Obama has lost support among whites even just recently. Meanwhile, a whopping 91% of Romney supporters are believed to be white. We are, truly, a deeply divided nation.
For every major topic, the overwhelming majority of front-page articles were written by non-Hispanic Whites, while racial/ethnic minorities were underrepresented compared to the overall U.S. population:
Major newspapers varied in the diversity of those writing their feature articles. The Dallas Morning News was the most diverse, with a particularly large percentage (18.8) of front-page stories written by African American reporters. The San Francisco Chronicle had the least diversity; 100% of its feature political stories were written by White non-Hispanics:
Overall, 93% of the feature articles analyzed in the database were written by White non-Hispanics, 4% by Asian Americans, about 2% by African Americans, and less than 1% by Hispanics. Compare that with each group’s proportion of the overall U.S. population:
These numbers clearly matter in terms of career opportunities and exposure for minorities within the industry. But they also should concern us readers. What does the lack of diversity mean in terms of the issues covered, the political contacts and average-Joe-voters spoken to, the topics seen as important enough to cover?
Amie G. sent along a five minute documentary in which a series of artists and entrepreneurs talk about why the Day of the Dead has become so popular in parts of the United States.
While they don’t discuss issues of cultural appropriation (like at Halloween), they have some interesting things to say about why it is so appealing to a broad audience. A professor of Art History, Ray Hernández Durán, for example, traces it to the growing Latino demographic, the way media has changed, and a history of the U.S. being open to cultural influence.
Gwen’s photographs of a small town in her native Oklahoma were featured in a Business Insider photo-essay about the economic aftermath of an oil boom. It’s pretty great!
Some of our Halloween archives informed a Huffington Post Parents slideshow about the changing nature of costumes: “from silly to sexy.” They quote me using the word “extremification,” so that was fun. And I was pleased to be a part of a piece on race and Halloween costumes at USA Today.
We put together a Halloween-themed Pinterest page, so you can peruse our entire collection of images and click through to our posts if you like. Browser beware!
Finally, I was part of a CNN radio story about the pressure young people are under to make themselves desirable college applicants: The Teenage Pressure Cooker (listen).
And I did a segment for the Los Angeles NBC affiliate about sexy Halloween costumes. I don’t say much of note, but I did manage to say that Halloween was a “gender display ritual,” even for kids and that it a lot in common with a high school prom. I also do an awkward stride through the Occidental College library. Ah, local news. :)
Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:
I have three talks scheduled for Spring so far. If you’re in Boston or Akron, I’d love to schedule a meet up!
Western Political Science Association (Hollywood, CA, Mar. 28-30): panels on “Public Intellectualism” and the “Twenty-First Century Sex Wars”
Harvard University (Women’s Week, Mar. 8-14): “A Feminist Defense of Friendship”
University of Akron (Apr. 19): “Anatomy of an Outrage: Female Genital Cutting and the Politics of Acculturation”
Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:
Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest. We’re inching up towards 20,000 followers on Facebook, so that’s pretty exciting!
A few years back I posted an photograph of two costumes side-by-side: labeled “Beer Man” and “Beer Girl.” I wrote that the practice of using “man” alongside “girl” “reinforces a gender hierarchy by mapping it onto age.” We see this outside of a Halloween context too, like in this vintage ad for pens.
Sara P. found another example, this time from iparty. The flyer puts a girl and a boy side-by-side in police officer costumes. The boy’s is labeled “policeman” and the girl’s is labeled “police girl.”
This phenomenon is an example of just how mundane and ubiquitous gender messages can be.
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more…
In this 6 1/2 minute video, CGP Gray explains how the mathematics of a one person/one vote system inevitably leads to a two-party system that pleases almost no one.
