A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

In Which the Wall Street Journal visits Fountain County: A Village in the Interior of “Indiana”

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In which our reporter travels to the interior of “Indiana.” The people there, known as “Hoosiers,”  call this a “farm.”

The Wall Street Journal has a good article by Michael Phillips about a woman who escaped Fountain County to go work in San Francisco then came back and reflected upon the differences between the places. It’s good in the sense that it’s well written and worth reading. I am frustrated by the genre, however.

There seem to be an abundance of newspaper articles and magazine features about indifferent coastal elites are who are too dismissive of flyover country and that’s how Donald Trump got elected. Too often, these pieces seem to be patronizing inasmuch as they do not examine the underpinnings of Trump country’s feelings and hold the people there to an expectation that their opinions be founded on facts that are more or less correct and their resentments directed in more or less the proper directions.

The pieces generally seem critical of big city types for being too dismissive of rural and Midwestern populations. They are less often critical of rural types for being too dismissive of big city types. The onus is on the urban populations to bridge the gap. I don’t think I’ve seen any pieces on the conservative, rural person from Trump country who goes into the city and discovers that city-people have value and that they have reasons for being fearful of Trump and supportive of the Democrats. And, I think the reason for that is, somewhat ironically, a condescending view of the mental and emotional capacity of red state and rural citizens. As if they are children and, therefore, we shouldn’t hold them to an adult’s standard of behavior.

For example, there is not much push back against rural voters who express sentiments such as:

The wife of her father’s best friend suggested Ms. Cronkhite wasn’t welcome back in farm country.

“We are too busy anyway working our asses off for 12-16 hours every day to feed you ‘coastal’ people and everyone else in this world and I know this may come as a surprise to you, but that even includes Blacks, LGBTs, Muslims, Women and on and on,” wrote Jahn Songer. She and her husband own a local bank, farm corn and soybeans and run a crop-dusting service.

“So keep your elitists’ rear ends in your little office cubicles while we handle the tough, physical things that keep you and your perfect friends alive,” Ms. Songer wrote.

As if it’s reasonable to think that people who do jobs in cities aren’t doing real, hard work. As if the mental work done in offices is less valuable than jobs with physical components. But the writers in these rural-America-as-undiscovered-country pieces seem content to give people like Ms. Songer a pass on opinions like this as if she’s from some benighted tribe who can’t be expected to know that the sun isn’t really swallowed up by a dragon every night.

Just an aside about the rural counties in this part of Indiana. I used to do a lot of collections work which would take me to the counties within a 60 mile radius of Lafayette. By the nature of collections, I was always dealing with poor, financially stressed individuals. And, other than maybe Tippecanoe County itself, these were fairly rural counties. Despite this commonality, there was often a different vibe from county-to-county. The way the process works, after you get a judgment, if the judgment isn’t paid, you drag people into court to testify about their income and assets and see if you can work out some kind of payment plan.

In Benton and White counties, for example, the people who couldn’t pay were generally fairly positive and polite. They didn’t have much money. I’m positive a fair number of them lied to me to one extent or another to keep some income, assets, or cash beyond the reach of my clients. But they were genial about it. In, say, Fountain or Clinton counties, there was more of an angry edge to the encounters. And this wasn’t based on just a couple of encounters. I went to these counties several times per year from 2000 – 2010. I never really figured out why the people in some of these counties were generally positive while other people were generally negative. But there seemed to be some sort of contagious cultural negativity or cultural positivity  from area to area which would fester or bloom as the case may be. Like I said, just an aside. I’m not sure if my anecdotal sense of this could be quantified in any real way.

To the larger point of this particular article, I’d like to see a counterbalance of articles wherein rural Americans go to the big city and find out that they’ve been too dismissive of city folks rather than just these anthropological pieces where city people go into the dark interior of America and Learn Lessons.

CBO: Tax Legislation is Worse than You Thought

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The Washington Post has an article entitled, “Senate GOP tax bill hurts the poor more than originally thought, CBO finds.” It increases the burden on those with incomes of less than $30,000 in 2019, those with incomes of less than $40,000 in 2021, and those with incomes of less than $75,000 in 2027. Those making over $100k tend to do better and, of course, those with incomes of more than $1 million per year are making out like bandits.

Senator Hatch complains that the burden on a lot of these people is just in the form of increased health care costs, so it doesn’t really count. If you squint and turn your head just right, poor people are actually better off. As Win Moses, former lawmaker out of Fort Wayne, put it:

Tax cuts for the highest incomes by taking health care away from the lowest incomes is not fair or good for America. And we’ve proven several times that “Trickle Down” economics doesn’t get to the working middle class.

I always get grief from my conservative friends when I say stuff like this, but reducing wealth disparities in the country isn’t just a matter of bleeding-heart, feel-good liberal mumbo jumbo like fairness and equality. Concentration of large amounts of wealth in a few hands distorts markets and democratic processes. The system can tolerate — even thrives under — certain amounts of inequality. It creates incentives that fuel the economy. But, beyond a certain point, things start to break down.

Conservatives like their own appeals to “fairness” to promote tax restructuring for this. Assuming, usually without saying, that money acquired is the same thing as money earned, they’ll say it’s unfair for money to be taken from the people who have it and given to people who don’t have it. But, I find appeals to fairness used on behalf of the wealthy about as persuasive as appeals to fairness on behalf of the poor. I’ll not shed a tear if Paris Hilton or Donald Trump, Jr. make less so that the poorest among us can get that nagging cough looked at without having to skip a mortgage payment.

Ultimately, I’m more of a utilitarian, I guess. How much wealth disparity do we need in the system to maintain the incentives that fuel the economic engine? What kind of a baseline standard of living do we need to provide the poor to minimize civil unrest, reduce crime, and — as best we can — promote a healthy, productive, broadly educated populace instilled with the kind of civic virtues that make our communities good places to live? In short, for me, it’s not so much about fairness as about striking a balance that’s as functional as possible. This new tax law isn’t it.

Red States, Blue States, and Family Values

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These rings are not married. Their promiscuous side-hugs will lead to an unwanted pregnancy, a shotgun wedding, and an ugly divorce.

Nicholas Kristof, writing for the New York Times, has a column entitled “Blue States Practice the Values that Red States Preach.” I clicked through because it reminded me of a post I had written seven years ago with the ungainly title, “Red States: ‘Families form Adults;’ Blue States: ‘Adults form Families’.” That post was discussing a book by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone’s called Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture.  Sure enough, Kristof mentioned Cahn and Carbone.

Liberals and conservatives don’t necessarily disagree, in broad terms, about some basic ideas like it’s a bad idea to get pregnant when you’re young and marriage should be entered into with the idea that you’ll stay married. Their approaches to realizing these goals are different, and this may have something to do with the underpinnings of those goals.

[Now is the time for a huge caveat. Any time you say red states this, blue states that or liberals this, conservatives that, you’re going to be engaged in huge generalizations riddled with exceptions. People aren’t monoliths, and we forget that at our peril. When we get in the habit of forgetting it, we end up abstracting and dehumanizing those in the “other” camp. To paraphrase, Paul McCartney & Wings, you’d think people would have had enough of it. That said, here I go again.]

Conservative thinking on marriage and sex seems more often to be tied up with their views on morality and/or religion. Liberal thinking seems more utilitarian. Cahn and Carbone said, “In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families.” The expectation in red states is that people will have children early and the parents will grow into their responsibilities. The expectation in blue states is that people will wait to have families until their education and financial situation is more secure. Kristof quotes them when they say:

“Blue family values bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatization of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families.”

Kristof notes the statistics that seem to show that blue states are doing better in terms of teen pregnancy and durable marriages. Kids in red states are also more likely to have had sex in high school. People in red states tend to get married younger and, probably because of that, divorce more frequently.

It seems to me that liberals are more likely to regard sex as problematic only in relation to negative consequences related to sex (e.g. disease, unplanned pregnancy). If you mitigate the consequences, then sex becomes less problematic. Conservatives are more likely to regard the act of sex itself (out of wedlock) as problematic, independent of the consequences. In fact, the purported liberal goal of “consequence free sex” was a buzz phrase hurled by conservatives to deride liberal values for a period of time. (Maybe it still is and has been for a long time. But I noticed an uptick in the phrase back in 2014 and not so much since then.)

Because the liberal view of sex is more utilitarian, they are more likely to try to mitigate the negative consequences through things like sex education and birth control. There also isn’t much in the way of public opprobrium about sex out of wedlock. That enables teens and young adults in blue states to have sex without getting married and without getting pregnant until they’re ready. That, in turn, results in later pregnancies, fewer unwanted pregnancies, later marriages, and fewer divorces.

Conservatives who view sex out of wedlock as wrong in and of itself, regardless of the consequences, don’t have that flexibility. Humans being what they are, relatively few are going to maintain the discipline necessary to avoid having sex into their late 20s or early 30s. Making it forbidden probably makes it even more appealing and, consequently, more difficult to forego. Sex education and making birth control readily available are non-starters because that sends the message that something other than abstinence is acceptable. Repeatedly telling kids not to have sex is a little like telling someone not to think of a pink elephant — probably makes the undesired behavior more likely. Birth control is used less. Pregnancies happen more often at younger ages. Marriages happen younger and tend to be less successful. Divorces become more prevalent. But, if God has decreed that sex out of wedlock is immoral, what, really, are your options?

My intent wasn’t to make this a “blue states rule, red states drool” kind of post. But, I suppose to a religious conservative, it will probably come off as condescending and one-sided. That said, I don’t know how you get to the desired results without either what I regard as unrealistic standards of discipline and/or getting rid of the idea that out-of-wedlock sex is inherently bad regardless of whether you mitigate the consequences.

Thirteen Years

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My posting has been pretty light in recent years, but I felt like I should at least commemorate another anniversary of this blog which dates back to November 15, 2004. Recently, I listened to an episode of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense podcast. I forget exactly how he phrased it, but he felt adrift in the current political climate which had caused him not to feel comfortable making the show. Under the old framework, he felt knowledgeable and felt like he had insight into what was going on that he could share. In a political landscape with Trump and all that comes with him, that feeling wasn’t there.

I can’t blame my light posting entirely on that feeling. This blog was started with a focus on state government. But, frankly, it’s hard to focus on what the study committee has to say about cold beer sales when confronted with the spectacle of ostensibly moral people going into contortions trying to defend a pedophile to save a Senate seat for “their” side or the President’s son incriminating himself in the Russia scandal or whatever the dumpster-fire-of-the-day might be in D.C. Sometimes I can’t resist blogging about that stuff, but the bright shiny national stories are generally pretty well covered.

Besides that, since Facebook and Twitter came around, blogging has always felt a bit like running into a headwind. There’s the immediate gratification of pounding out 140 characters with something pithy and immediately getting likes or replies. And, of course, there is work, family, coaching soccer, community involvement, etc. etc.

On the other hand, I do like having a place where I’ve been able to collect some thoughts over the years; and I’ve made a lot of friends through this effort. And, bill season is always fun. So, I’ll keep at it, and see if I can add any value with Year 14.

A Sustainable Middle Class

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This is based on a comment I made in a Facebook thread on the upcoming tax proposal. There was a discussion about whether taxes are too high and whether we spend too much or too little public money on social services. Nothing here is particularly new, but it seemed worth including on my blog.

I think our economy is changing in ways that aren’t sustainable. The traditional model where you are reasonably intelligent and willing to work reasonably hard and, as a result of your efforts are able to make enough money to sustain a middle class lifestyle seems not to be working for a lot of people.

I know there is disagreement about whether people are lazy or dumb or have unrealistic expectations about what constitutes “middle class.” But I don’t think the explanation for why so many people are struggling is simply that they are lazier, stupider, or greedier than they were 50 – 60 years ago.

So, with that as my premise, I don’t know that social spending is the best answer to helping people reach and remain in the middle class, but it seems to be a possible answer. If the middle class continues to erode, wealth disparity continues to grow, and a sense of hopelessness spreads further in the population, I think we’re in for some ugly social upheaval.

I feel like a primary goal of our economic, social, and legal systems should be focused on helping people reach and remain in the middle class. To me, this means a good education, a good work-life balance, good access to healthy food, safe communities, clean air, fresh water, and affordable healthcare. I’m probably missing some critical elements, but these don’t seem unreasonable or too pie-in-the-sky. The best way to get people to a place where they are law-abiding, educated, and productive and the economy to a place where work is adequately rewarded is apparently hellishly difficult, otherwise we would have made it there. But, we get distracted by all manner of things and so it’s easy to lose sight of our larger goals. To me, this is a big one.

Also, a Monty Python quote posted by a friend recently seems appropriate right about now:

Well, it’s nothing very special. Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

Relief from the existential exhaustion of perpetual dynamism

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Tipsy posted a link to a very interesting piece from R.R. “Rusty” Reno at First Things entitled “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism”. I am not linking to it as full-throated agreement. For starters, he has a negative view of corporate push back in support of gay rights during Indiana’s RFRA debate. But that’s just one piece of a much larger discussion which, for any flaws one might find, is undeniably thoughtful.

All right – that throat clearing out of the way, I was most struck by this passage:

Retro figures such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn gain traction, not because voters believe in socialism, but because they intuit that they cannot live in a world of pure dynamism and openness. We are drowning in freedom. … And in our age, which has taken economics to be the key to almost everything, that intuition naturally comes into focus with calls for limits on economic freedom.

Retro-socialism is a dead end. But in the absence of alternatives that promise stability and relief from the existential exhaustion of perpetual dynamism, Sanders, Corbyn, and others on the left are likely to garner support. The same can be said for populist sentiments that endorse nationalist economic policies of protectionism and subsidies that fly in the face of free market principles.

(emphasis added). This reminded me of the sense I got from history books when I was researching Indiana history for my bicentennial series, particularly the part about the 1920s and the rise of D.C. Stephenson & the Klan. Warren Harding’s promise of a return to “normalcy” had a lot of resonance.

Following [World War I] which, itself, was hot on the heels of the Progressive movement and the Industrial Revolution, Americans generally and Hoosiers in particular would be bone weary of change raising the appeal of a return to “normalcy” and giving rise to the Klan who promised a return to the good old days.

At the time I was writing, I framed it in terms of the people at the top of the social heap being exhausted (because they are the ones who have the most to lose from change.) Reno frames it as a core human desire “to give ourselves in loyalty to permanent things” by which he mostly seems to mean God but in a more general sense to “ends, purposes, and projects to which we can entrust our loyalty.”

Whether it’s God or something else that we stand for, as the saying goes, “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” And when we’re exhausted by change, we seem to be particularly vulnerable to malignant hucksters promising a return to the good old days.

Puerto Rico: Our Unrepresented Territory to the South

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Puerto Rico is suffering. Like a lot. 3.4 million Americans have been without power for 5 days and the prospect of getting the electric grid up and running seems to be distant. 90% of the distribution system may have been destroyed. 91% of cellphone sites are also out of service, according to the FCC.

Despite this crisis, I’ve been hearing more about whether football players will stand or kneel during a game. Judging from the emotional energy spent online during the past couple of days, the manner in which sports professionals choose to observe the national anthem and conduct their protest is more alarming than the prospect of 3.4 million Americans facing a humanitarian crisis. Hell, I’m guilty of knowing and talking more about Kaepernick than what’s going on in San Juan which is, by the way, the only Puerto Rican city I can name without looking at a map.

I think this is a combination of the bike shedding effect and a sense that Puerto Rico isn’t *really* American. The “bike shed effect” is based on a metaphor used to describe Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. I actually like the term “bike shed effect” here better because I don’t want to dismiss the concerns of Kaepernick or those who oppose him as “trivial.”

He provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.

The flag thing is relatively easy to have an opinion about. If you only know the broad strokes — the flag is good & you should stand and honor it OR racism is a problem in America and peaceful protest is a core part of our democracy — you know enough to have an opinion on the issue and get into an emotionally invigorating fight with someone about it. There are lots of people with more nuanced opinions and understanding of the details, but those aren’t necessary to get in the game.

Puerto Rico, by contrast, what a mess. It’s all so big and hopeless, far beyond our poor power to add or detract. And, besides, lots of bad stuff happens in the world. We can’t be concerned about all of it. Maybe if they were Americans . . .

Well, maybe they’re technically Americans, but Puerto Rico doesn’t really seem like part of our country. Part of it certainly has to do with race. They’re mostly people of color, and we have this concept of Americans being mostly white.  But it’s certainly not just race. What the hell is an “unincorporated territory of the United States,” anyway? It seems to be a concept invented by the Supreme Court in the case of Downes v. Bidwell which loosely translated amounts to having your cake and eating it too.

“While in an international sense Porto Rico (sic) was not a foreign country, since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense, because the island has not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”

An unincorporated territory is a territory as to which, when acquired by the United States, no clear intention was expressed that it would eventually be incorporated into the Union as a State. Consequently, we’ve possessed Puerto Rico for 119 years without either making them a State or letting them go their own way. They don’t have a Representative in Congress or Senators in the Senate. (If they did, there would probably be more and swifter federal action on the crisis taking place there.) So, it’s not terribly surprising that citizens of the 50 states don’t have a clear idea what to make of Puerto Rico.

I’m no expert in Puerto Rican history, but just as a crash course, here you go: The U.S. took possession of Puerto Rico in 1898 after the Spanish American War. That war saw us fighting Spain, supposedly because of provocations on their part in Cuba — but probably because they were growing weak and we were growing strong. Spain didn’t have any business having an empire in our backyard. And, anyway, all of the other cool kids were getting empires. So, we had our splendid little war, defeated Spain, freed Cuba, and took over the Philippines, Guam, and  Puerto Rico for good measure. Puerto Ricans have officially been U.S. citizens for a century (having been granted citizenship in 1917). While they have some local autonomy, “ultimate governance of the island is retained by both the U.S. Congress and President.”

Consequently, they are Americans but not Americans. And, while they struggle with the crisis caused by Hurricane Maria, including conditions that we would find intolerable elsewhere in America, we are fairly indifferent to the plight of our fellow citizens. At least when compared to our concern for whether athletes  stand or kneel during a pregame ceremony.

 

 

Changing Minds Happens on the Periphery

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I had a quick Tweet where I suggested, “If you communicate with someone in a way that makes them shut down, you’ve eliminated yourself as a source of feedback for that person.” I was about to contribute to the ensuing discussion with some additional thoughts, but it seemed easier to turn this into a blog post.

Changing minds happens on the mental equivalent of peripheral vision. There are too many defense mechanisms in place if you try to go at it head on. First of all, you have to establish a relationship. And, I don’t mean this in a cynical way. Don’t establish the relationships to manipulate someone into changing their mind. Establish the relationship because the person has value. Even if you disagree with someone in major ways, there will be points of common interest or common cause among people of good will. Talk about sports, beer, kids, the challenges of work, the wonder of nature and the stars, anxieties about the future  . . . whatever.  While you’re talking about these things, chances are that you can move each other on the other stuff indirectly or subtly.

If someone knows you as a person, they can very well disagree with you strongly, but they’re a lot less likely to write you off as delusional or malicious (unless you’re, in fact, delusional or malicious). Coming at someone you barely know and demanding that they agree with you because [citations] just isn’t going to work.

This is slow, often unsatisfying, and, if the need is urgent, impractical in a lot of cases. But, even if it’s not sufficiently effective, it’s still more effective than shouting at someone then calling them dishonest or malicious or stupid for not agreeing with you. Even if you have the most iron clad citations of all time.

And it only works when you’re talking about people of good will. There is, of course, malice in the world. But I think it’s less prevalent than we imagine. (As I say, over and over, everyone is the hero in their own mental narrative.) This doesn’t work for the malicious. You’re just going to have to persuade enough people of good will, then organize them to steamroll the malicious people of the world.

Taking Offense

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Some people take offense because they have legitimate grievances. Others seem to take offense because doing so gives them a kind of currency and at least momentary significance. A lot of offense taken and/or expressed probably has some mix of the two.  What prompted this post was online debate over Tina Fey’s “sheet cake” skit. Some are calling it a tone-deaf response to the legitimate problems of Trump by a privileged white woman. Others are calling it incisive satire by a woman aware both of real problems and her privileged position.

I’m an educated white male professional and United States citizen with just about any kind of privilege you’d care to name. So, I’m in a uniquely bad position to judge where one stops and the other begins. I don’t have any particular take on the Fey skit. All I can say is that I was mildly amused by it.

In some sense, I think the complaints about “political correctness” is a flip side of the same coin. Some folks making this complaint are just assholes who are mad that someone is calling them out on being jerks. Others are people of good will who legitimately feel like, despite the best of intentions, they are scorned by people who put what seem like arbitrary landmines everywhere in the culture. A lot of the complaints probably have some mix of the two.

(No doubt I have given offense here by engaging in an impermissible degree of “both sides”ism.)

Those statues are about marking territory, not preserving history

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Some statues are better than others

The Internet has suddenly become full of self-styled statue enthusiasts and historical preservationists. Their specific focus of interest are statues in the public square glorifying Confederates who took up arms against the United States. The flurry of slippery slope, whatabout, and bothsides arguments is almost blinding in its intensity. They conjure up dire images of an Orwellian world where history is erased, forgotten, and repeated.

Taking these arguments at face value, good-natured people seeking a reasonable compromise say, “how about a museum?” This suggestion is mostly ignored. It’s ignored because the wailing about history is a pretext. We have a million books about the Civil War. The statue of a noble-looking Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson in a public place of honor tells you nothing about the men or their times.

These statues are about marking territory. They are about demonstrating who is in control of the public square and promoting their values. These statues mostly cropped up in the Jim Crow South and during the height of the Civil Rights movement. That’s not a coincidence. The people in control were sending a message by venerating this very specific slice of American history; by venerating men whose only notable role in our history was committing treason in defense of slavery. That message will not be communicated if those statues are in a museum, surrounded by information and context that gives perspective to their place in history.

Does this mean we have to take down statues of George Washington? No. Because we still value his contributions to this country. Who is the “we” that gets to decide these things? That’s the real rub, and the real source of anxiety and concern. The “we” who are increasingly leaning toward tearing down monuments to treason are different than the “we” who decided to put them up in the first place. But, mostly the folks who were so powerful in the old “we” can’t say that out loud. So, we get a lot of hand-wringing about historical preservation.