NYTimes op-ed on Liberals not understanding Conservative

Some of the initial gripes surfaced in the aftermath of the Trump victory. Is it really a generational and gap? Some wonkish reading for those who want to get an extra sense of the "madness". The voices in the op/ed give the point that it's deliberate. I chopped up the article to fit the 10k limit

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opinion/liberals-conservatives-trump.html?

Many Democrats continue to have little understanding of their own role — often inadvertent, an unintended consequence of well-meaning behavior — in creating the conditions that make conservatives willing to support Trump and the party he is leading.

I asked Karen Stenner, the author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic” and no fan of the president, for her explanation of the political dynamic in the current struggle between left and right. She emailed back:

Consider some of the core features of our ideal liberal democracy: absolutely unfettered freedom and diversity; acceptance and promotion of multiculturalism; allowing retention of separate identities; maintenance of separate communities, lifestyles and values; permitting open criticism of leaders, authorities and institutions; unrestrained free expression (of what many will consider offensive/outrageous/unacceptable ideas); strict prohibitions on government intervention in ‘private’ moral choices.​

In fact, Stenner argues, these values are the subject of intense debate. They lie at the core of what divides America:

These reflect some of the fundamental fault lines of human conflict and are unlikely ever to be resolved or settled because we can’t just be socialized or educated out of our stances on these issues, as they are the product of deep-seated, largely heritable predispositions that cause us to vary in our preference for and in our ability to cope with freedom and diversity, novelty and complexity, vs oneness and sameness.​

Not only are the values that the left takes for granted heatedly disputed in many sections of the country, the way many Democratic partisans assert that their values supplant or transcend traditional beliefs serves to mobilize the right.

Stenner makes the point that

liberal democracy’s allowance of these things inevitably creates conditions of “normative threat,” arousing the classic authoritarian fears about threats to oneness and sameness, which activate those predispositions — about a third of most western populations lean toward authoritarianism — and cause the increased manifestation of racial, moral and political intolerance.​

I am quoting Stenner — and later in this column, the public policy analyst Eric Schnurer — at length because they both make arguments about complex ideas with precision and care.

“Libertarians and/non-authoritarians,” Stenner writes,

are likewise aroused and activated under these conditions, and move toward positions of greater racial, moral and political tolerance as a result. Which increases political polarization of the two camps, which further increases normative threat, and so it goes on. This is what I mean by the core elements of liberal democracy creating conditions that inevitably undermine it.​

How does the undermining process work?

A system like our ideal liberal democracy, which does not place any constraints on critiques of leaders, authorities and institutions; and does not allow any suppression of ideas no matter how dangerous to the system or objectionable to its citizens; and does not permit itself to select who can come in, or stay, based on their acceptance/rejection of fundamental liberal democratic values, has both:

(1) guaranteed perpetual generation of conditions of normative threat, and all the activation, polarization, and conflict that that produces, and

(2) disallowed all means for protecting itself against that “authoritarian dynamic,” which otherwise might have included allowing: some selectivity in regard to the fundamental values of those who are allowed to come, and to stay; constraints on certain kinds of critiques of leaders, authorities and institutions; constraints on free speech that exclude racist or intolerant speech; some ability to write moral strictures into public policy to reflect traditional beliefs where the majority “draws the line.”

If a liberal democracy were to allow those things, it would no longer be a liberal democracy. But if it does not allow those things, it is extremely difficult to protect itself from fundamental threats to its continued existence.

Stenner’s analysis poses a strategic dilemma for liberalism and the Democratic Party. Insofar as Democrats seek to stem the conservative tide, a crucial factor will be their ability to increase their understanding of their own role in the process that has culminated in conservative dominance.

Eric Schnurer, a writer and public sector management consultant who has worked for many Democratic politicians and presidential candidates, addresses what he sees as the lack of recognition on the part of liberals of what motivates conservative voters.

“Both sides of this increasingly polarized divide see the other as trying to extirpate their way of life — and not inaccurately,” Schnurer wrote in “War on the Blue States” in U.S. News and World Report earlier this month:

Blue America spent the last eight years dictating both economic and cultural changes invalidating virtually every aspect of Red America. Liberals see all that as both righteous and benevolent — we’re both promoting better values and willing to help train them to be more like us.​

Schnurer elaborated on this line of thought in an email:

The prototypical Trump voter sees a changing America leaving him behind; part of this is economic, part of it demographic, part cultural. I think liberals tend to see this as a thin cover for racism, a reflection of troglodyte viewpoints, and in any event unwarranted as the world these folks are resisting would be better even for them if only they’d let it, by giving up their benighted religious views, accepting job training in the new technologies, and preferably moving to one or the other coasts or at least the closest major city.​

Red and blue America often draw diametrically opposed conclusions from the same experiences and developments, Schnurer contends:

I don’t think there’s much argument that the modern economy is killing off small towns, US-based manufacturing, the interior of the US generally, etc. There is, or could be, an argument as to whether that’s just the necessary functioning of larger economic forces, or whether there are political choices that have produced, or at least aided and abetted, those outcomes. In any event, while most of us in Blue World see these changes as beneficent, they have had devastating effects on the economies of “red” communities.​

Schnurer observes that

This is a classic political problem of general benefit at the cost of specific individual harm. At a minimum, “we” — as a country but also as a self-styled progressive subset of that country — have given inadequate thought to those harms and how to ameliorate them; but I think you can also make the argument that we have exacerbated them.

Long-term trends may be working in favor of the left, as the recent governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey suggest, but liberals, Schnurer argues, are using policy to accelerate the process without determining the costs:

For example, we could adopt protectionist policies, which of course we haven’t because both mainstream Democrats and Republicans see them as counterproductive in the long term; but we have also attempted more actively to steer the economy more quickly to the likely, proper, outcome by shifting national tax and spending priorities toward new energy technologies, and away from fossil fuels.​

 

That op/ed referred to this op/ed. I can't say I disagree any of the points even if I'm optimistic there will be some healing. Hope it's more a reflection of anger than trending reality.

War on the Blue States
The Trump/GOP tax bill that was before the Senate on Friday represents an historic transfer of wealth from the vast majority of Americans to the wealthiest few. But it may wind up better remembered historically as the 21st century version of the Kansas-Nebraska Act – which led inexorably to what might soon be remembered as America's First Civil War.

Thomas Jefferson himself recognized that the 1820 Missouri Compromise had set the country on a dangerous course by locking ideological and economic differences into an unbreakable geographic division. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in 1854, had the almost-immediate effect of destroying whatever remained of ideological agreement across state and sectional boundaries – rearranging the nation's politics into binary, competing geographic agglomerations (basically, as today, the Northeast and West Coast versus the South and southwestern prairies) with competing economic models and supporting ideological near-uniformity. The rest is history.

Political commentators are increasingly suggesting that we are in the midst of, or headed toward, another "civil war," metaphorically speaking. I'm not speaking metaphorically at all. This tax bill is not so much a tax bill as a declaration of war. A declaration of war on not just certain identifiable states but also their predominant ideology and economic model.

Let's start with the economic model. Unlike the usual tax bill that simply gets Christmas-treed up with presents for everyone, the GOP decided this year to hand out lumps of coal.

Who do Republicans now hate almost as much as the poor? The college-educated – especially professionals and those in the sciences. Their tax bill doesn't just eliminate the deductibility of interest payments on college loans – making college a little harder to attain for those of modest means – it actively attacks college endowments and makes taxable the tuition waivers most universities provide their graduate students, aiming pretty much to end the production of Ph.Ds in the United States.

Of course, we don't really need those if we don't intend to remain at the forefront of the new economy. And, apparently, we don't.

Just look at another element of the tax bill, the much ballyhooed conversion of our corporate taxes to a "territorial" system. What this means, in short, is that we'll now subsidize corporations to move their operations offshore; of course, they've basically done so already with manufacturing – now they'll have the same incentive as to white collar jobs. Why stick around in the U.S. anymore, anyway? There won't be any more of those needed scientists.

The only jobs that will stay here are those that have to – like resource extraction or waiting tables for the people who own resource extraction industries. There might be a few other service jobs that survive, but the tax bill also eliminates the deductibility of business expenses specifically for professional services firms, which will crater entrepreneurship, financial services, lawyers, doctors – you know, the U.S. economy. (We needn't even get into the simultaneous unraveling of net neutrality to kill off the innovation that made the new economy what it is to begin with.)

In case you don't get the drift yet, how about this comparison: Subsidies for the solar industry will be terminated early. But not because subsidies are anathema to conservatives: They're being added for oil drilling in the Arctic. And for beer brewers. It would be even more pointed if the beer subsidies were being funded by tax hikes on chardonnay growers – although the bill to aid disaster victims in Texas and Florida pointedly excludes all funding for the wine country in California devastated at about the same time by record wildfires.

Clearly, the economic agenda has begun to merge into a cultural one. And so the tax bill manages to work its way into several overtly cultural issues. It's simply not enough to grant tax-exempt status to churches that engage in conservative political activity; the bill tosses in a new tax-exempt status for "unborn children." And, for good measure, it repeals the individual mandate that's the centerpiece of Obamacare.

Perhaps this doesn't yet strike you as an intentional assault on everything that makes blue states "blue states." So there's even a provision in the bill to do that explicitly: the elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes, which is intended both to punish those states for choosing to pursue liberal policies like, oh, public education, and simultaneously to require them to pay more for the anti-government conservatives' dirty little secret – the federal government is really a mechanism by which the blue states subsidize the red ones. But the tax bill simultaneously undermines the foundations of the blue state economies – education, science, entrepreneurship, cleaner industries and a social safety net – that make this possible.

And that's where this scheme is likely to take its place alongside the Kansas-Nebraska Act as the codification of sectional divisions no longer bridgeable through normal politics.

Both sides of this increasingly-polarized divide see the other as trying to extirpate their way of life – and not inaccurately. Blue America spent the last eight years dictating both economic and cultural changes invalidating virtually every aspect of Red America. Liberals see all that as both righteous and benevolent – we're both promoting better values and willing to help train them to be more like us. Yes, and that's what the imperialists always say. Hence the Trump voters' uprising. And now they're getting back by imposing their values and destroying the arrogant elite's culture and economy.

But there's a major difference: The blue states actually pay for the red states and their chosen culture. Already, as I've noted before (here and here), blue states are starting to go their own way. Once the effects of this new tax bill begin to be felt, they're going to start wondering a lot more openly why they're staying in a union like this. Republican leaders have been willing to turn a blind eye to Trump's proxy presidency for Vladimir Putin for the sole reason of pushing through this tax plan. Ironically, it's their tax plan that will do more to destroy America as we know it than any overt collaboration with Putin.