Social Science that Matters (?)

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

The social sciences, some would argue, suffer from a ‘soft’ problem.

As Laurence Smith et al. describe in a 2000 article published in the aptly-named, Social Studies of Science, “Dating back at least to the writings of Auguste Comte, it has been thought that the sciences can be arrayed in a hierarchy, with well-developed natural sciences (such as physics) at the pinnacle, the social sciences at the bottom, and the biological sciences occupying an intermediate position.”

This hierarchy indicates somehow the ‘hardness’ or ‘softness’ a discipline. The natural sciences are more purely ‘science;’ more genuinely a description of nature as it is. The social sciences, on the other hand, are ‘softer’ – less predictive, testable, rigorous, or, perhaps, simply more subjective.

It’s generally unclear just what defines the hard/soft hierarchy, but in comparing a number of different definitions, Smith continually found the same thing: physics is the hardest science, sociology is the softest. Chemistry and biology are both well in the ‘hard’ science camp, while the analytic social sciences of psychology and economics skirt the ‘soft’ boundary and approach ‘hard’ territory.

This model makes social science out to be the poor cousin of the more prestigious natural sciences.

Whether you agree with that assessment of the social sciences or not, the inferiority complex and sense of always needed to justify the existence of one’s field effects the way social science is done.

As Danish economist and urban planner Bent Flyvbjerg describes, “inspired by the relative success of the natural sciences in using mathematical and statistical modelling to explain and predict natural phenomena, many social scientists have fallen victim to the following pars pro toto fallacy: If the social sciences would use mathematical and statistical modelling like the natural sciences, then social sciences, too, would become truly scientific.”

This pushes the social sciences down a computational path – a route, Flyvbjerg argues, which leads these otherwise valuable disciplines to produce more and more amounting to less and less.

“The more ‘scientific’ academic economics attempts to become,” he writes, “the less impact academic economists have on practical affairs.”

Furthermore, the whole attempt is foolhardy. As Flyvbjerg argues in Making Social Science Matter, “social science never has been, and probably never will be, able to develop the type of explanatory and predictive theory that is the ideal and hallmark of natural science.”

In emulating the computational and analytical approaches of the ‘hard’ sciences, social science aims to be something it is not and looses itself in the process.

As an (aspiring) computational social scientist, this argument seems like something worth thinking about.

Perhaps Flyvbjerg is too quick to write off the value of statistical approaches in social science, but nonetheless I find he has a compelling point.

Rather than trying to capture the episteme of natural sciences, Flyvbjerg argues the social science would do better to embrace phronesis. As he explains:

“In Aristotle’s words phronesis is a ‘true state, reasoned, and capable of action with regard to things that are good or bad for man.’ Phronesis goes beyond both analytical, scientific knowledge (episteme) and technical knowledge or know-how (techne) and involves judgements and decisions made in the manner of a virtuoso social and political actor.”

Essentially, social scientists should not obsess with trying to measure and quantify everything, but should rather aim towards the humanist goal of seeking to understand what is good and what is bad.

Perhaps unlike Flyvbjerg, I don’t see an inherent conflict between these aims. I can imagine that amidst the realities of a bureaucratic academy and fervent publish or perish pressures, scholars might find themselves forced along a too narrow path – but I see this as a broader challenge facing academia, not a singular failing of social sciences.

There is, I think, great value in developing computational models for complex social systems; in seeking to quantify and measure numerous facets of human interaction. The failing in this episteme approach comes only when phronesis is ignored completely.

In his own work on urban development, Flyvbjerg has a great saying: power is knowledge.

“Power determines what counts as knowledge, what kind of interpretation attains authority as the dominant interpretation,” he writes in Rationality and Power. “Power procures the knowledge which supports its purposes, while it ignores or suppresses that knowledge which does not serve it.”

These words come amidst his in-depth account of the bureaucracy and power which continually corrupts an ambitious urban development project in Aalborg. Most notably, this corruption rarely comes in the form of overt suppression, but rather a subtle, persistent distortion of information. “Power often ignores or designs knowledge at its convenience.”

This reality is in sharp contrast to the democratic ideal which “prescribes that first we must know about a problem, then we can decide about it. For example, first the civil servants in the in the administration investigate a policy problem, then they inform their minister, who informs parliament, who decides on the problem. Power is brought to bear on the problem only after we have made ourselves knowledgeable about it.”

Accepting the distorting effect of power, it’s reasonable to be skeptical of computational “knowledge.” In this sense, an episteme approach would only serve to further the interests of power – adding scientific credibility to an already distorted presentation of knowledge.

This is a valid concern, but again I find it to be a question of extremes. All methodological choices have consequences, all findings require interpretation. Understanding that dynamic has more value than walking away.

Power is knowledge isn’t an admonition that knowledge ought to be abandoned all together – rather it is a reminder: knowledge isn’t produced in a vacuum. Power shapes knowledge. Try as you might to be neutral and unbiased, this dynamic is inescapable. The computational social scientist is intrinsically a part of the system they seek to study.

Political Parties

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Much has been made this election cycle of the influence of the “political establishment.”

On the Democratic side, some are arguing that unpledged delegates – “super delegates” – are polluting the democracy of the system. On the Republican side, at least one candidate has been crying foul over party rules, and it certainly does seem like there’s been a concerted effort by the Republican establishment to prevent the nomination of the current party frontrunner.

My impression is that most people’s opinion on this topic is driven largely by how a party is treating their favored candidate. A reasonable reaction, I think – as a general rule, things seem fair when you’re winning and unfair when you’re not.

But, this debate introduces a more broadly interesting question: what should the role of parties be in a democratic society?

While the role of a political party in determining its candidates is arguably less than democratic, there’s simultaneously something laughable about outrage over their influence. That is – this is exactly the way U.S. political parties are supposed to work.

Our political parties are not unbiased voices of the the people – they are organizations, designed to advance a given platform.

Again, one may still have qualms with the democratic nature of this system – there’s no democracy in system where the only choices are Pepsi and Coke – but this is the way our system is designed to work.

And that’s not inherently a bad thing. Representative democracy is more than a practical alternative to pure democracy – there are, in fact, some benefits to a system which (thoughtfully) aggregates the breadth of public views.

It strikes me that, as much as the party infrastructure is decried as unjust, the real problem here is that – in the United States – we are deeply entrenched in a two-party system. No doubt Parliamentary systems have their own challenges – but this is a big challenge of the U.S. system.

The problem, that is, isn’t that political parties have too much power over who their nominees are – it’s that a dramatically sparse field of political parties have too much power over our system.

Politics in an Ideal World

Posted on April 4, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Not long ago, a friend asked me why anyone would want to engage in politics for politics’ sake. We worry about such things because we have to, but wouldn’t it be better, in some theoretical, ideal world, if we didn’t have to?

Imagine, for a moment, a perfect world; a society so flawless that it was always just and fair without any need for engagement from its citizens. In such a world, people would have no need for the frustrating practice of politics – they would be free, instead, to devote their time to more productive endeavors.

Now, such a thought experiment immediately raises all sorts of practical concerns; but let’s for a moment put those aside and assume that such an ideal society is both attainable and sustainable. In such a world, what would the role of citizens be?

In thinking about this question, it seemed natural to turn to John Dewey, philosopher, educator, and unwavering proponent of what he called the Great Community . Dewey’s 1927 book, The Public and It’s Problems defended democracy and responded directly to the skeptical critique of Walter Lippmann.

You’ll note here a subtle shift in language – is the thought experiment one of politics or one of democracy? Much lies, I suppose, in the definitions of these terms, but I’ll borrow here from Dewey in detangling them:

We have had occasion to refer in passing to the distinction between democracy as a social idea and political democracy as a system of government. The two are, of course, connected. The idea remains barren and empty save as it is incarnated in human relationships. Yet in discussion they must be distinguished. The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion.

To be clear, Dewey had little loyalty to the specific mechanisms of political democracy:

There is no sanctity in universal suffrage, frequent elections, majority rule, congressional and cabinet government. These things are devices evolved in the direction in which the current was moving, each wave of which involved at the time of its impulsion a minimum of departure from antecedent custom and law. The devices served a purpose; but the purpose was rather that of meeting existing needs which had become too intense to be ignored, than that of forwarding the democratic idea.

So, if ‘politics’ is simply the act of engaging in a narrow system of political democracy whose mechanisms randomly sedimented over time, it’s unclear that Dewey would have much zeal for the idea of politics as an essential element of human life.

However, ‘politics’ can also be interpreted through the wider lens of democracy as a social idea; a concept to which Dewey was deeply committed.

For Dewey, democracy wasn’t a set of systems or an inventory of regulations; it was a way of life:

Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.

In this sense, ‘politics’ is the very element which transforms the “physical and organic” stuff of “associated life” into the moral entity of community. The work of politics is the work of building the Great Community:

We are born organic beings associated with others, but we are not born members of a community. The young have to be brought within the traditions, outlook and interests which characterize a community by means of education…Everything which is distinctively human is learned…To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community; one who understands and appreciates its believes, desires and methods, and who contributes to a further conversion of organic powers onto human resources and values.

Importantly, Dewey argues that the two senses of politics cannot exist separately; without the broader understanding of social democracy, the mechanisms of political democracy reduce to nonsense: Fraternity, liberty and equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions.

It is only through the engagement of the people in this deeper politics, in democracy as a way of life, that we can ever achieve the mechanisms of political democracy we strive for.

If, some how, the ideal world described above were possible – if justice rained from the sky with no effort from below; such a society would still be lacking in the moral concept of democracy writ large.

Dewey was under no illusion that transforming the mechanisms of political democracy would be an easy undertaking – but it was a transformation he believed could only occur through the political work of the Great Community:

The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not a despotic master. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consumption when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.

Education, Democracy, and The Establishment

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Last week, drawing on the work of Walter Lippmann, I raised several concerns about the about inclusion of popular voice in democracy.

In some ways, these concerns seem at odds – what is democracy if not the free governing of the people by the people? To reduce the voice of ‘the people’ in any political system is to draw it away from democracy and, perhaps more critically, to violate democratic ideals.

It cannot be denied that there is a tension here. A tension between the noble goal of empowerment of every day citizens and the truly hard work of governing itself.

What good is allowing the people to govern if ‘the people’ are not truly fit to govern?

At its core, this debate boils down to one of education versus problem solving. Myles Horton, educator, organizer, and long time director of the Highlander Folk School, spoke about this debate through the lens of organizing:

If the purpose is to solve the problem, there are a lot of ways to solve the problem that are so much simpler than going through all this educational process…But if education is to be part of the process, then you may not actually get that problem solved, but you’ve educated a lot of people. You have to make that choice.

If you’re a community organizer whose goal is to solve a problem in the community, you may need ‘the people’ in the sense that you need the strength of their support; you need the power that comes from numbers. Any good community organizer would also want the identification of the problem and definition of a solution to come from the community; but this is still a somewhat shallow form of engagement.

An organizer, working in partnership with the community they are organizing, guides the direction of action; provides professional feedback and support on what strategies and tactics are most likely to succeed. This type of organizing is more empowering than what community members might experience otherwise and can lead directly to much-needed positive outcomes in the community.

But it is not education.

Horton describes a particularly memorable scene in which, gun to his head, he refused to tell a community member what action to take. “Go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I’m not going to tell you,” he recalls.

In recollecting the moment, Horton explains his reasoning. If he had told what to do “all would be lost.”

He saw himself not as an organizer, trying to work towards a just system, but rather as an educator, developing citizens capable of building their own just systems.

From this, I find that theorists such as Lippmann are right: if we want a political system which most fairly distributes resources, which is just and thoughtful in its approach, the broad and unfiltered inclusion of the mass of public voices is not the best way to accomplish that goal.

But such a concern overlooks a critical point: is that indeed our goal?

If instead we want a political system which empowers every person to participate; which truly believes that all people – all people – have a right and responsibility to engage in public work; if we want a society that truly values the input, insights, and voice of every single member – that is a different goal to work for.

And, indeed, such an educational approach is not the best way to achieve immediate political goals.

If you want to change policy, engage the people; if you want to change systemic structures, educate the people.

Of course, all this hardly settles the debate: if no amount of education and preparation could prepare ‘the people’ to govern, such efforts would find long-term as well as short-term failure.

As a matter of practicality, one can argue this course without degrading the people too much. That is, to say that ‘the people’ are unalterably unfit for the lofty task we set them to is not intrinsically to claim that commoners are too stupid, lazy, or uncaring for this task.

The world is a complicated place. With the constant influx of information and the deep histories that have brought us to the societies we have today, no individual person could hardly be expected to have all the knowledge and expertise needed to justly rule.

Considering that this task would be deeply challenging for even an idealized world leader, whose sole task is to consider such issues and whose efforts are supported by a staff of experts – you can hardly expect an average person, whose time and worries are reasonably devoted to other matters, to be up to the task.

Arguing this path isn’t an insult to the common man; it is rather a recognition of impossible goal society’s ideals have set for them.

The challenge that I see is that we find ourselves caught between these two paths. It is a sort of pseudo-democracy, in which we comfort ourselves that we, the people, are the ones to govern, but in which we each deem the majority of our peers as unfit for the task.

In this way, we can always blame the “them”: if political engagement were only restricted to those who are correct (like us), than we could have the ideal government we long for. Such disenfranchisement would be the most efficient way to achieve our ends, but – knowing how unjust it would be if “they” were to disenfranchise “us” – we instead settle into a deep melancholia for the world.

And, if one thing is certain, such political ennui fulfills its own unfortunate goal – to maintain the status quo and cement the standing of those with the most power; effectively disenfranchising both the “us” and the “them.”

Populism and Democracy

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Yesterday, I discussed some of the concerns Walter Lippmann raised about entrusting too much power to “the people” at large.

Such concerns are near blasphemy in a democratically-spiritual society, yet I consistently find myself turning towards Lippmann as a theorist who eloquently raises critical issues which, in my view, have yet to be sufficiently addressed.

At their worst, Lippmann’s arguments are interpreted as rash calls for technocracy: if “the people” cannot be trusted, only those who are educated, thoughtful, and qualified should be permitted to voice public opinions. In short, political power should rightly remain with the elites.

I find that to be a misreading of Lippmann and a disservice to the importance of the issues he raises.

In fact, Lippmann’s primary concern was technocracy – the governing of an elite caring solely for their own interests and whose power ensured their continued dominion. Calling such a system “democracy” merely creates an illusion of the public’s autonomy, thereby only serving to cement elites’ power.

I do not dispute that Lippmann finds “the public” wanting. He clearly believes that the population at large is not up to the serious tasks of democracy.

But his charges are not spurious. The popularity of certain Republican candidates and similarly fear-mongering politicians around the world should be enough to give us pause. The ideals of democracy are rarely achieved; what is popular is not intrinsically synonymous with what is Good.

This idea is distressing, no doubt, but it is worth spending time considering the possible causes of the public failures.

One account puts this blame on the people themselves: people, generally speaking, are too lazy, stupid, or short sighted to properly execute the duties of a citizen. This would be a call for some form of technocratic or meritocratic governance – perhaps those who don’t put in the effort to be good citizens should be plainly denied a voice in governance.

Robert Heinlein, for example, suggests in his fiction that only those who serve in the military should be granted the full voting rights of citizenship. “Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part…and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”

Similarly, people regularly float the idea of a basic civics test to qualify for voting. You aren’t permitted to drive a car without proving you know the rules of the road; you shouldn’t be allowed to vote unless you can name the branches of government.

Such a plan may seem reasonable on the surface, but it quickly introduces serious challenges. For generations in this country, literacy tests have been used to disenfranchise poor voters, immigrants, and people of color. And even if such disenfranchisement weren’t the result of intentional discrimination – as it often was – the existence of any such test would be biased in favor of those with better access to knowledge.

That is – those with power and privilege would have no problems passing such a test while our most vulnerable citizens would face a significant barrier. To make matters worse, these patterns of power and privilege run deeply through time – a civics test for voting quickly goes from a tool to encourage people to work for their citizenship to a barrier that does little but reinforce the divide between an elite class and non-elites.

And this gives a glimpse towards another explanation for the public’s failure: perhaps the problem lies not with “the people” but with the systems. Perhaps people are unengaged or ill-informed not because of their own faults, but because the structures of civic engagement don’t permit their full participation.

Lippmann, for example, documented how even the best news agencies fail in their duty to inform the public. But the structural challenges for engagement run deeper.

In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa documents how poor, white coal miners regularly voted in local elections – and consistently voted for those candidates supported by coal mine owners. These were often candidates who actively sought to crush unions and worked against workers rights. Any fool could see they did not have the interest of the people at heart…but the people voted for them anyway, often in near-unamous elections.

To the outsider, these people seem stupid or lazy – the type whose vote should be taken away for their own good. But, Gaventa argues, to interpret that is to miss what’s really going on:

Continual defeat gives rise not only to the conscious deferral of action but also to a sense of defeat, or a sense of powerlessness, that may affect the consciousness of potential challengers about grievances, strategies or possibilities for change….From this perspective, the total impact of a power relationship is more than the sum of its parts. Power serves to create power. Powerlessness serves to re-enforce powerlessness.

In the community Gaventa studied, past attempts to exercise political voice dissenting from the elite had lead to people loosing their jobs and livelihoods. If I remember correctly, some had their homes burned and some had been shot.

It had been some time since such retribution had been taken, but Gaventa’s point is that it didn’t need to be. Elites had established their control so thoroughly, so completely, that poor residents did what was expected of them without hardly a thought. They didn’t need to be threatened so rudely; their submission was complete.

Arguably, theorists like Lippmann see a similar phenomenon happening more broadly.

If you are deeply skeptical of the system, you might believe it to be set up intentionally to minimize the will of the people. In the States at least, our founding fathers were notoriously scared of giving “the people” too much power. They liked the idea of democracy, but also saw the flaws and dangers of pure democracy.

In Federalist 10, James Madison argued:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

To give equal power to all the people is to set yourself up for failure; to leave nothing to check “an obnoxious individual.”

Again, there is something very reasonable in this argument. I’ve read enough stories about people being killed in Black Friday stampedes to know that crowds don’t always act with wisdom. And yet, from Gaventa’s argument I wonder – do the systems intended to check the madness of the crowd rather work to re-inforce power and inequity; making the nameless crowd just that more wild when an elite chooses to whip them into a frenzy?

Perhaps this system – democracy but not democracy – populism but not populism – is self-reinforcing; a poison that encourages the public – essentially powerless – to use what power they have to support those crudest of elites who prey on fear hatred to advance their own power.

As Lippmann writes in The Phantom Public, “the private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row …In the cold light of experience he knows that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns in theory, but in fact he does not govern…”

On Public Opinion

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Walter Lippmann was notoriously skeptical of “the people.”

The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist was all too familiar with the art of propaganda, with the ease with which elites could shape so-called “public opinion.”

In 1920, Lippmann – who had worked for the “intelligence section” of the U.S. government during the first World War – published a 42-page study on “A Test of the News” with collaborator Charles Merz.

“A sound public opinion cannot exist without access to the news,” they argued, and yet there is “a widespread and a growing doubt whether there exists such an access to the news about contentious affairs.”

That doubt doesn’t seem to have diminished any in the last hundred years.

Civic theory generally imagines an ideal citizen to be one who actively seeks out the news and possesses the sophistication to stay non-biasedly informed of current events. But debate over the practically of that ideal is moot if even such an ideal citizen cannot gain access to accurate and unbiased news.

Lippmann and Merz sought to empirically measure the quality of the news by examining over three thousand articles published the esteemed New York Times during the Russian Revolution (1917-1920).

What they found was disheartening:

From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all. Yet on the face of the evidence there is no reason to charge a conspiracy by Americans. They can fairly be charged with boundless credulity, and an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions with a downright lack of common sense.

Whether they were “giving the public what it wants” or creating a public that took what it got, is beside the point. They were performing the supreme duty in a democracy of supplying the information on which public opinion feeds, and they were derelict in that duty. Their motives may have been excellent. They wanted to win the war; they wanted to save the world. They were nervously excited by exciting events. They were baffled by the complexity of affairs, and the obstacles created by war. But whatever the excuses, the apologies, and the extenuation, the fact remains that a great people in a supreme crisis could not secure the minimum of necessary information on a supremely important event.

And lest we think such failures are relegated to history, consider the U.S. media’s coverage leading up to the Iraq War. Here, too, it seems fair to say that whatever the motives of media, they were indeed derelict in their duty.

Such findings gave Lippmann a deep sense of unease for “popular opinion.”

“The public,” he writes in The Phantom Public (1925), “will arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough perhaps to decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece.”

The public makes its judgements on gut instinct and imperfect knowledge. Most do not understand a situation in full detail – they know neither the history nor the possible implications of their views. They are consumed with the details of their own daily lives, raising their eyes to politics just long enough to briefly consider what might be best for them in that moment.

Such a system is sure to end in disaster – with public opinion little more than a tool manipulated by elites.

As Sheldon Wolin describes in Political Theory as Vocation, such a system would be ‘democracy’ in name but not in deed:

The mass of the population is periodically doused with the rhetoric of democracy and assured that it lives in a democratic society and that democracy is the condition to which all progressive-minded societies should aspire. Yet that democracy is not meant to realize the demos but to constrain and neutralize it by the arts of electoral engineering and opinion management. It is, necessarily, regressive. Democracy is embalmed in public rhetoric precisely in order to memorialize its loss of substance. Substantive democracy—equalizing, participatory, commonalizing—is antithetical to everything that a high-reward, meritocratic society stands for.

This is the nightmare Lippmann sought to avoid – but it also the undeniable reality he saw around him.

In elevating “the voice of the people” to “the voice of god,” our founders not only made a claim Lippmann considers absurd, but paved the way for a government of elites, by elites, and for elites – all in the hollow, but zealously endorsed, name of “the people.”

The Hardest Problems are the Easiest to Ignore

Posted on March 22, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

I was somewhat surprised this morning – though perhaps I should not have been – to find coverage of terrorist attacks in Brussels to be the sole focus of the morning news.

I wasn’t surprised by the news of an attack somewhere in the world – a grim reality we’ve all grown sadly accustomed to – but I was surprised at the intensity of coverage. Broadcast morning news coverage isn’t, you see, my typical source for international news.

Suddenly it was all they could talk about.

Where was this attention when a suicide bomber attacked a busy street in Istanbul over the weekend? Or when three dozen people died in the Turkish capital of Ankara last week?

Even from a wholly self-interested perspective, recent attacks in Turkey seem noteworthy as the EU increasingly relies on Turkey to address the Syrian refugee crisis.

But even as I wondered why Belgium elicited so much more concern than Turkey, I felt the sinking sense of an answer.

Where, indeed, was the coverage of attacks in Beirut just days before the now more infamous attacks in Paris?

On it’s surface, this bias in coverage and compassion seems to most obviously be one of culture, or cultural perspective, for lack of a better word. Perhaps people in France and Belgium are perceived to be “more like us” than people in Lebanon or Turkey. The disparity is essentially racism with an international flavor.

Another theory would be one of newsworthiness – Turkey, Lebanon, and many places in the Middle East regularly suffer from terrorist attacks. In a cold sense of the word, such an attack is not news – it is expected.

Such an explanation, though, has the ring of a hollow excuse. The sort of defense you come up with when accused of something unseemly. And the two ideas – that we show greater concern for those in Western Europe because they are “more like us” and that we are more interested in unexpected events – are not entirely unrelated.

In the States, people of color die every day in our cities. And most often, their deaths go unreported and unremarked on by society at large. A murder in a white suburb, though, is sure to grab headlines.

Neighbors grapple to make sense of the shocking news. Things like this don’t happen here. This is a safe community.

It’s not that suburbs are intrinsically more safe, I would argue, but rather that we as a society, would never allow violence in suburbs to rise to the levels it has within the inner-city. Suburbs are already where our wealthy residents live, but in addition to that privilege, we collectively treat them with more time, attention, and care.

Violence in suburbs and attacks in western cities are shocking reminders that we’ve been ignoring the wounds of this world. That we’ve pushed aside our our responsibility to confront seemingly intractable challenges, closing our eyes and hoping those ills only affect those who are different.

All this reminds me of Nina Eliasoph’s thoughtful book, Avoiding Politics: How Americans produce apathy in everyday life.

Working with various civic groups, Eliasoph notes how volunteers eagerly tackle seeming simple problems while avoiding the confrontation that comes from the most complex issues. In one passage, Eliasoph describes the meeting of a parents group in which one of the attendees was “Charles, the local NAACP representative” and “parent of a high schooler himself.”

He said that some parents had called him about a teacher who said “racially disparaging things” to a student…Charles said that the school had hired this teacher even though he had a written record in his file of having made similar remarks at another school. Charles also said there were often Nazi skinheads standing outside the school yard recruiting at lunchtime.

The group of (mostly white) parents quickly shut Charles down. Responding, “And what do you want of this group. Do you want us to do something.” Eliasoph notes this was not “as a question, but with a dropping tone at the end.”

Afterwards, Eliasoph quotes the meeting minutes:

Charles Jones relayed an incident for information. He is investigating on behalf of some parents who requested help from the NAACP.

The same minutes contained “half of a single-spaced page” dedicated to “an extensive discussion on bingo operations.”

Eliasoph’s other interactions with the group indicates that they aren’t intentionally racist – rather, they are well-meaning citizens to whom the deep challenge of race relations seems too much to handle; they would rather make progress on bingo.

And this is where the cruelest twist of power and privilege come in: it is easy to ignore these hard problems, to brush them off as unavoidable tragedies, to simply shake your head and sigh – all of this is easy, as long as it’s not happening to you.

Exit, Voice, and Presidential Elections

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In spring 2003, I was living in Japan.

That’s where I was when the Unites States invaded Iraq for “Operation Iraqi Freedom” as it was colorfully named by my government.

Throughout the months I lived abroad, I tried to keep up on the news from home; daily scouring reports from the U.S., the U.K., and Japan. The flavor of news coming out of each country was markedly different – the U.S. blindly patriotic, the U.K. supportingly reserved, Japan politely disapproving.

The details and word variation between articles told remarkably different stories, and I hoped, I suppose, that by reading multiple accounts I could somehow triangulate the truth.

The news coming out of the U.S. was particularly disturbing.

It was as though the whole nation had gone mad.

Other countries reported stories of schools being bombed by U.S. troops; my country was on some tear about Freedom Fries.

This was in the infancy of the blogosphere, so apart from the few people I kept in touch with over AOL Instant Messenger, my only sense for public opinion back home came from the sycophantic mainstream media. A media which has, in fact, somewhat reformed in recent years in response to its catastrophic failure of that time.

And perhaps this is why I’m inclined to sigh whenever someone declares that they will move to Canada, or, perhaps, the moon, should someone they strongly dislike be elected President.

I heard that a lot when President George W. Bush won reelection, and I’m hearing it a lot now.

It’s hardly a solution.

I hardly mean to imply that the Iraq War would have played out differently had I not been abroad; but it seems fairly certain that such warmongering tendencies would only be worse should all progressives decide to leave.

At the very least – I have to say – let’s not leave the nuclear launch codes behind.

In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert O. Hirschman outlines the three ways in which a person might interact with an organization, community, or state. As you may have guessed, the options are: exit, voice, and loyalty.

A person might stay loyal to an organization and support it’s views and actions; a person might exit an organization, leaving its undesirable policies in search of greener pastures; or a person might exercise voice: speaking up and fighting to make the organization the way they’d like it to be.

There are, of course, many instances throughout human history where people have been forced to exit for fear of their lives and wellbeing. One report estimates that there are nearly 60 million refugees in the world today. Theirs was not an exit taken lightly.

But the situation in the United States – while disheartening – is hardly so harsh.

I know most people are joking when they speak of plans to move away, and yet – it is a troubling sign of resignation.

We may not be the unparalleled superpower we might fancy ourselves to be, but we are still a nation which wields the potential for great harm or good.

If elections don’t go the way we like, it shouldn’t be cause to flee, but rather a call to action: our voices would be needed more than ever.

The (Re)Emergence of American Hate

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

A certain presidential candidate, known for his racist, sexist, and otherwise outlandish rhetoric has recently won his third primary.

And if it wasn’t disturbing enough that people in KKK robes showed up to support him at the Nevada primary – an action which may or may not have been a poorly executed protest – one of the country’s most notorious white supremacist leaders unofficially endorsed this candidate today saying that anything other than voting for him was ‘treason to your heritage’.

Now, I have a general policy of not giving space to hate groups – which thrive on the attention generated by their shocking acts, but this is getting too serious to ignore.

But, here’s the thing – it’s not the idea that a particularly distasteful candidate might actually become president that I find so alarming. It’s the fact that he genuinely has so much popular support.

Donald Trump is making it acceptable to be a racist again.

Of course, racism has long been alive and well in this country. It never really died the quiet death we hoped it would. Through the activism of 60s and the “colorblindness” of the 90s, we just shoved it into the closet, hoping it would never spill out again.

In 1925, the KKK had “as many as 4 million members,” a number which shrank dramatically following the civil rights movement. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates the group at 4,000-5,000 members today.

Of course, I still think the number of members is about 4-5 thousand more than I’d hope to see in my country – but that membership become even more disturbing when you consider that there are normative social pressures likely to prevent people from expressing their believes.

That is, our country is full of closeted racists.

Racists who aren’t closeted any more.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that 74% of South Carolina Republican primary voters favor “temporarily barring Muslims who are not citizens from entering the United States.”

Furthermore, a recent poll by Public Policy Polling found that in addition to barring Muslims, “31% [of Trump supporters] would support a ban on homosexuals entering the United States as well, something no more than 17% of anyone else’s voters think is a good idea.”

Again, 0% would be a better figure here.

The New York Times also reports that, “Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Southern states during the Civil War.”

This is profoundly disturbing.

I’d almost prefer to blame this all on Donald Trump. If we can only stop him from winning the Presidency, then all our racial problems will be solved.

But here’s the thing: Trump is the symptom, not the disease.

A significant number – a significant number – of white Americans seem ready to re-don their white robes. Americans who otherwise are not entirely unlike myself.

I find that terrifying, and I’m hardly the most at risk.

It is not enough to wave our hands, to hope that the Republican establishment comes through with blocking a Trump nomination. We have to recognize that there is a growing racist sentiment – or, perhaps, a growing willingness to express that sentiment.

My greatest concern is not that Trump will be elected – it’s that even after he is eventually defeated, this profoundly, openly racist faction of Americans will continue to grow.

Gender and Politics

Posted on February 9, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Women, historically, can’t seem to get a fair shake.

For centuries, women in the west have been subjected to a sinner/saint duality. That is, any woman who fails to live up to an idealized construction of womanhood must automatically be relegated to the lowest depths of depravity – there is no middle ground, no subtly to society’s judgement of femininity.

As one author puts in examining this trend in Victorian literature, “When a woman deviated from the Victorian construction of the ideal woman, she was stigmatized and labelled. The fallen woman was viewed as a moral menace, a contagion.”

A contagion. For a woman, that’s how serious any momentary personal failing – or perceived failing – might be.

In modern times, this duality has haunted women seeking positions of leadership and power. Female leaders must be confident but not assertive; nurturing but not emotional, dedicated mothers and dedicated employees. In short, women must fulfill masculine ideals of leadership without losing an ounce of idealized femininity.

This is not challenging: it is downright impossible.

Victoria Woodhull was the first woman in the U.S. to run for president. She ran in 1872, a good 50 years before U.S. women won the right to vote. Woodhull, who was married twice and held the radical notion that women ought to have the right to marry and divorce as they choose, was widely accused of being a prostitute.

No doubt, this was simply a term for a woman who spoke her mind.

Ultimately, Woodhull spent election night in jail, arrested with her husband and sister for “publishing an obscene newspaper.”

“Obscene” in this case meant highlighting the “sexual double-standard between men and women.”

That is the history that has led us here. To the second president run of the most viable female candidate our nation has ever seen.

(I would, of course, be remiss here if I didn’t mention the dozens of other impressive women who have run for this office.)

And make no mistake, Hillary Clinton has suffered from the same old-fashioned double standards which have plagued women for generations. But solidarity on that issue is not enough to determine a vote.

When Clinton entered the 2008 race her campaign miscalculated a core fact about her base. Women, she expected, would be with her. Women of all ages.

This was not true.

As Abraham Unger, Assistant Professor of Government & Politics at Wagner College, wrote of the 2008 primaries, “Senior women, who came of age during the pioneering period of the feminist movement, did vote for Clinton, while younger women were drawn to Obama. Women in the middle were split between the two.”

With Barack Obama running a historic campaign of his own, it became impossible to disambiguate the effects of race, gender, age, and class in determining a person’s political affiliation. A vote for someone other than Clinton wasn’t a vote against womanhood; it was a vote for something more.

Women, it seemed, would have to wait.

When Clinton launched her current bid for the White House, I wondered what tactics she would take to close the age gap. Surely, she had learned that young women weren’t unquestionably in her court.

And yet here we are – watching the surprising rise of an old, white man – matching Clinton beat for beat; capturing the hearts, minds, and votes of younger voters.

Again, we see young people – men and women alike – drawn to the upstart, outsider candidate. The one who encourages us towards hope; towards radical change of a broken system.

Clinton supporters are not impressed.

I’ve been floored by some recent comments. Gloria Steinem said that young women supported Sanders because they were thinking “Where are the boys?” Meanwhile, Madeline Albright warns that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”

Is this the feminism we are supposed to be defending?

To be clear, we’d do well to be mindful of the subtle impact of sexism. Anyone who doesn’t support Clinton should do some careful thinking about their reasons and motivation, watching out for the impulsive and flippant urge to deride her voice, pantsuits, or (lack of) emotions.

At least we can take comfort in the scrutiny of Marco Rubio’s boots.

But let’s never use gender as litmus test – one way or the other.

The truth, I suppose, is that feminism is changing.

I can’t truly appreciate the feminism of women who are older than me. Women who were mistreated or outright fired explicitly because of their gender; much less the feminism of women who were pushed into loveless marriages, who were forced upon by their husbands and who had no voice or recourse in the matter.

We should not forget the fight of Victoria Woodhull, nor of countless other women who have pushed relentlessly towards gender parity. There has been much to fight for, and the fight still goes on.

But right now, right here in this moment, thankful for all the women who have come before me – I am not looking for boys nor concerned about hell. I am simply looking for the candidate who most closely speaks to my diverse political concerns.

In this race, for me, it happens that person is man. But how lucky for me – I have a vote in the matter.

And no one can take that away.

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