As a public service, I will divert our attention from “Palinpalooza” towards a provocative article from David Frum in this past week’s New York Times magazine where he serves up this:

As a general rule, the more unequal a place is, the more Democratic; the more equal, the more Republican.

The article is written from the perspective of a concerned conservative.  He references data that show that Democratic support increases as county levels of income inequality increase.  Jim Manzi at the American Scene blog does some interesting analysis of census block group data that supports this relationship.  Andrew Gelman, on the other hand, points out that this relationship is not as robust at the state level, but still exists.

What to make of all this.  Frum places the blame squarely on a familiar GOP bugaboo:

It’s widely understood that abundant low-skilled immigration hurts lower America by reducing wages. As the National Research Council noted in its comprehensive 1997 report: “If the wage of domestic unskilled workers did not fall, no domestic worker (unskilled or skilled) would gain or lose, and there would be no net domestic gain from immigration.” In other words, immigration is good for America as a whole only because — and only to the extent that — it is bad for the poorest Americans. Conversely, low-skilled immigration enriches upper America, lowering the price of personal services like landscaping and restaurant meals. And by holding down wages, immigration makes the business investments of upper America more profitable.

This is an innovative take on re-framing the old class warfare debates.  Understanding the left as an unholy alliance of the culturally-liberal rich and uneducated, undeserving, immigrant poor makes it easier for the GOP to claim the vast middle.  it’s a provocative talking point to suggest that immigrants are responsible for the growing wage inequality in America.  I wonder if we’ll see that line of attack from the McCain campaign in the next 60 days?  Probably not because of the size of the Latino voting population in battleground Western states.  But this might be an argument lurking in the weeds in local races and in 2012.

I wonder if my psychology friends have any ideas as to why inequality would increase Democratic party voting?

Not sure what I’m supposed to do with this item found at the Value Voters summit.  I spend my days trafficking in ideas.  Merely analyzing and seeking to understand these approaches to politics seems insufficient somehow:

Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’ righteous indignation over Obama Waffles. Mine is in development 🙂

This last Friday afternoon at 4:23pm, Metrolink train number 111 crashed head-on with a Union-Pacific freight train between the Chatsworth and Simi Valley stations on the Ventura County Line. For the last three years, I have ridden up and down this line each week day to school and work. This Fall, I’ve been taking the exact same 3:35pm train from LA Union Station to our home in Simi Valley on Mondays and Wednesdays. On Friday, that train crashed, killing 25 people and injuring 135 (80 are still in critical condition). Next Friday, I would have been on that same train, coming home from a scheduled event.

As a local resident and Metrolink passenger, I have been watching the news continually, and have grieved much amidst the emerging, horrific news that many people I have sat beside and across from the last few years were the victims of Friday’s disaster. As our modern drive to quantify disaster proceeds, and as statistics often denature and reduce very human realities to charts and projections (I hope that the news soon gets beyond its almost unthinking number-crunching coverage of the event), I would like to iterate that the loss of the lively faces, voices, hearts, minds, and spirits of the people I have shared transport with on this train the last three years have been simply irreducible. There has seldom been an afternoon or morning where one could not hear the caring discussions, laughter, and the general goodwill of passengers commuting on this train.

One of the best things about riding this train has been that it’s not only a more convenient, cost-efficient, and less stressful way of getting to school and work—but a way to truly travel and converse with people with whom one might have little in common otherwise. As we Southern Californians spend a great deal of time riding around in the private fiefdoms of our own cars, the train is a very public space where commonality meets diversity. For me, it’s been representative of the idea that, no matter what the challenges, life together is better than life apart. I’ve found it to be one of the truly civic spaces of local association amidst America’s increasingly privatized, simulated society. Those who were a part of this disaster on Friday constituted a unique community who will be dearly missed. I’d like to extend my heartfelt condolences to the families of the victims, and all those with injuries and in critical conditions in local area hospitals. I am taking a leave of absence from riding on the Ventura County line, and will be working with (and call on others to work with) our local community to make sure that no accident like this ever happens again.

Don Waisanen

My apologies to Time magazine, but last night’s forum on community service was one of the most coma inducing hours of political television I’ve seen in a long time! This is coming from someone who teaches about civic engagement for a living! It it really of interest to the nation that both candidate believe that community service is important, that citizens have both rights and responsibilities and that (wait for it) we should ask Americans to serve a cause greater than their own self interest? Pretty cuddly stuff here. I am surprised they didn’t hand out red white and blue plush kittens at the event for periodic stroking.

I understand that having the event on 9-11 placed some constraints on how confrontational the moderators could be, but the result was two wasted hours on a critical topic. One line of question which might have made the evening’s events more interesting would be to ask the candidates why our country has become increasingly polarized and whether or not they thought they were contributing to that polarization. Ahem, yes, yes they are.

One of the great tragedies of the last few elections is the decline of engaged people in the middle. Oh, there are swing voters, but these individuals are not necessarily ideologically centrist, rather it appears to be a vast reservoir of unengaged potential voters who have become motivated to participate because of a perceived affinity for the candidate (hockey mom) or because of abstract, untethered principles (change we can believe in). What we lack are true moderates. Can you name me one “moderate” blog?

The great shame of all this is that there is an increasing lack of a “moderate middle” in American politics that could serve as an adjudicator of validity claims from the two campaigs. Case in point, it’s next to impossible to get an objective assessment of how Sarah Palin performed on her first interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson last night. Conservative blogs heralded her grit and blamed Gibson for asking difficult questions. Liberal bloggers mocked her for presumably not knowing what the Bush Doctrine was among other perceived gaffes. The truth has to be in there somewhere.

The proliferation of the internet has exacerbated this decline of a middle. Henry Farrell’s research on on-line blog habits reveals an echo chamber effect whereby liberals read liberal blogs and conservatives read conservative blogs. This virtual polarization is reinforced by the trend towards demographic sorting by lifestyle choice. This is the true “community service” problem we have to engage directly.

Update: Here’s political scientist Cal Jillson’s take on whether Sarah Palin should have know about the Bush Doctrine.

People are grousing about this “lipstick on a pig” scandal, how it seems a new low for American politics. Rick Shenkman, a history professor at George Mason University, recently came out with a book with the transparent title Just how Stupid Are We? He has the typical littany of statistics on how little people know about the basic working of government or elemental facts about policies and ideologies. This research has been confirmed again, and again, and again. He claims that the increased sophistication of public opinion polling and the increased control over political institutions given to the masses gives the people too much power.

Shenkman and others may be right. But It seems beside to point to say that the public is interested in the visceral over the rational. His prescription is that we should “put the people in their place” so to speak and change institutions so that the people do not have as much direct control over their elected officials. But in reality, there seems to be little prospect of either of those recommendations coming to pass.

There’s enough research on the brain that suggests that power of emotional appeals over rational ones. It strikes me that we should take this as fact and move forward from there. A more important question seems to be “is there anything of value in the current way voters make decisions about politics.” If people are basing their support for a candidate based on their affinity for him/her, then we need to engage the problems of civic engagement on those terms.

It is logical that people vote based on affinity. A recent ABC News poll found that Sarah Palin has 80% support among White women with children. Why? Because of propinquity. Propinquity, or the degree of likeness between people, is a heursitic device used to make a choice in the absence of other information. Herbert Simon used the term satisficing to describe roughly the same thing. People take short cuts in making decisions that are time bound and require large amounts of data. One easy way to make the “safest” choice is to say ” If she’s like me, then she’s likely to understand what I am going through and is likely to advocate for me in the White House. And if she’s not advocating for me, then at least it’s cool for my daughter to see a Vice President who looks like their mom.” Of course there are many among that 80% who are conservative evangelicals and are voting their policy preferences, but for the rest, it is a pretty logical heuristic cue to use when the intricacies of policy seem so remote.

We as social scientists might wish it were different, but let’s put the different systems of choice in perspective. On one hand, you vote for someone who supports the policies you support. Given the dense system of checks and balances in the American system, it is unlikely that those policies will be passed. Even if they are, they are not likely to produce immediate results or may very well produce unintended consequences (shout out to Thomas Merton!)

The same goes for what many view as simplistic and disingenouous appleals about “keeping us safe” and “country first.” This morning I watched the very moving 9-11 ceremonies and the speech that President Bush gave at the event in NYC. In his speech, he made the observation that we Americans had not been attacked in over 1,500 days. From an emotional brain perspective, that’s a powerful argument. It is understandable that a voter might take that portion of the speech and satisfice and say “that’s good enough for me.” Protection for external threats is a visceral concern. it seems foolish to have an esoteric argument about how people should use more rational decision rules when selecting a president. Until the Democrats can frame their issues in ways that create a visceral concern among the American public, they aren’t going to get anywhere. And in one sense, they probably shouldn’t.

Thanks to the Creative Class blog for posting about fascinating research being done at Cambridge on geography and personality traits. The study, led by Jason Rentfrow (Cambridge University), finds that personality traits are cluster by region, sort of a twist on the idea of the Big Sort.

The maps reinforce predictable stereotypes of Americans geographic regions. Northeasterners are more neurotic on average, Californians are more open to new experiences and midwesterners and southerners are more conscientious.

Given the incessant discussions of the presidential campaign, I can’t help but wonder how these data track with supoort for the candidates. The Real Clear Politics electoral map suggest that conscientious, extroverted agreeable states are going for McCain over Obama while neurotic, open to experience states are going for Obama. Looking at the electorate this way might help shed light on why the Democratic party struggles against Republicans. Republicans resonate with agreeable, conscientious people to the extent that the Republicans offer an optimistic, uncritical, assessment of the country. To the extent that the Democrats frame the election as based on “fixing problems” they run up against the predispositions among people in vast swaths of the country that are more comfortable with optimistic political messaging.

I don’t know that I buy these categories as exhaustive of the range of personality traits, but they do give pause as we reflect on the massive choice facing us in 55 days.

Mad scholarly props to University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt for articulating in much clearer language the blind spot I observe among Democrats that may very well lose them yet another presidential election.

Hey lays out the traditional “diagnosis” for the “disease” of conservatism on the left:

strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity”—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

His view is that this analysisis a seduction of its own. It makes people on the left feel morally superior.

Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.

Haidt goes on say that all value systems have two elements in common: a Milian harm principle, and laws against doing harm to others. For Haidt, both liberals and conservatives shares But he goes on to identify three virtues identified with a conservative moral system:

ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble).

Haidt’s most provocative argument is that the conservative system might be the more morally sophisticated:

We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s.

As much as I love this quote (the equalizer metaphor makes me think of Spinal Tap — these go to Eleven). My sense is that this is way overblown. Democrats have their own notions of loyalty, respect and sanctity that do not necessarily track with Republicans. Progressives have been very active in a number of movements towards localism (“buy local” campaigns, anti big-box ordinances, and, dare I say it, community organizing). These are all manifestations of an emphasis on the value of community. In fact a good argument that Obama needs to make more is that mocking community organizing efforts is essentially anti-community efforts for local self-determination and pro the broad impersonal forces of global capitalism.

This is why in his prescription, I think Haidt is a bit hard on the Democrats:

Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights–but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring.

This is a straw man view of Democratic ideology. The genius of Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech was to articulate a Democratic morality that s rooted in shared responsibility. Obama has tried to stake out a more communitarian position by tying social welfare policy to a sense of obligation to attend to the “least of these.” He’s used economic populism, claiming that he won’t give tax brakes to “companies who ship jobs overseas.” His repeated pleas for parents to “read a book” and to “turn off the television” are direct attempts to tap into this broader “in-group” based moral system.

But in a broader sense, the Republican convention was a home run because it tapped into this broader moral system much more effectively than the Democratic convention did. This is why McCain is now doing better than Obama among independents. To get them back, the Democrats truly need to connect to what it is about progressive ideology that is pro-American. They have the raw materials to challenge the Republicans (remember, it is President Bush that asked Americans to “go shopping” after 9-11: how pure or sanctimonious is that?) but perhaps not the requisite political chops.

The Republican convention had a series of strange attacks on Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer. Kevin Harris points to an article in the Nation by Peter Drier and John Atlas taking the RNC to task for their attacks on local civic engagement:

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered his own snickering hit job. ‘He worked as a community organizer. What? Maybe this is the first problem on the resumé,’ mocked Giuliani.

A few minutes later, in her acceptance speech for the GOP vice presidential nomination, Sarah Palin declared, ‘I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.’

The Daily Show (god bless em’) had a hilarious take on the comments and crystalizes what seems to be an out of sync contradiction between the campaign’s own theme of service and the Republican party’s professed belief in local community-based problem solving.

What gives? Me thinks this is suppose to be code for “angry left radical activist.” It’s meant to be another salvo at the Democrats for being a party full of Marxists trying to “stick it to the man.” But anyone who has worked with or studied community organizations know that they have become very mainstream. Many of them have been focused on building low income housing and providing job training. “Community organizing” has moved from an emphasis on political activism to one of asset building and community empowerment…things Republicans are supposed to stand for.

According to his Wikipedia’s page, this is what Obama did as a community organizer:

After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago’s far South Side.[12][14] During his three years as the DCP’s director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.[15] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.[16]

This might work the way the Republicans intend. But if it does, I have developed quite a tin ear for political framing, which is pretty scary for a political scientist. A backlash has started against the community development snaps Micah Sifry identifies a facebook group called We Are All Community Organizers was launched immediately after the speeches. As of 4pm Pacific time on Friday, September 5, the list had 5,359 members. Of course, it’s unlikely many of the people on that list were McCain supporters.