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Books, Culture, Economy, Politics, Trump

Considering The Politics of Resentment, Concluding Thoughts (Part 9 of 9)

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This is the ninth in a series of posts considering Katherine Cramer’s Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

I first thought I’d post, chapter by chapter, on Katherine Cramer’s Politics of Resentment after I read her 11.13.16 article in the Washington Post, “How rural resentment helps explain the surprising victory of Donald Trump.”

That’s quite the title, enticing readers (especially opponents of Trump, as I am) to learn about a purported key to his rise.

Her work offers no insights about Trump’s rise.

In Politics of Resentment, Cramer contends that rural voters were resentful, that they favored small government solutions against their interests, and that voters’ concerns were of economic anxiety and not so much about race.

Trump ran on a platform that advocated (mendaciously but insistently) a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending, healthcare supposedly better than ObamaCare, protectionism to compel jobs back to the Midwest, wall-building to restrict immigration from Mexico (although most immigrants are not Mexican), and insistence on a registry for Muslim Americans.

That’s not a small government agenda.

Cramer’s entire book is premised on the notion that rural residents are so resentful they favor small government over their own supposed economic interests.

Trump’s entire campaign rested firmly on lavish promises of spending, a trillion for public works, and a steady diet of anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Indeed, Trump’s campaign only took off after he insisted on immigrations to keep from America a flow of immigrants he falsely smeared as rapists, murderers, etc.

All the while, Trump relied on a steady diet of lies and ludicrous claims from Putin’s trolls to smear his principal opponent. This undermining of standards of truth and evidence is one of the most significant developments of our time, but Cramer’s book has nothing to say on the matter (and neither does her November WaPo article.)

On its own terms, Cramer’s book disappoints; as an explanation of Trump’s rise, it offers nothing useful.

Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Next week: On Monday, I’ll begin a series on Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.27.17

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Good morning.

Whitewater’s Thursday will be rainy with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 58m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred seventieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets today at 5:30 PM.

Ulysses S. Grant is born this day in 1822. On this day in 1963, Dave Brubeck performs at Beloit College.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jacob Carpenter reports that a Milwaukee County Inmate’s dehydration death came after litany of errors, policy violations, ex-2nd-in-command says: “A litany of egregious errors and policy violations preceded the dehydration death of Milwaukee County Jail inmate Terrill Thomas, the jail’s former second-in-command testified Wednesday…. [Former deputy inspector Kevin] Nyklewicz, who has since retired from the sheriff’s office, said jail staff failed on numerous fronts. A lieutenant violated policy by ordering the shutoff of Thomas’ water and failing to document it. Officers never contacted a psychiatric social worker after Thomas stripped off his clothes and shouted incoherently for days. Shift supervisors never intervened after daily required checks of inmates like Thomas in solitary confinement. “I can’t believe that someone would walk through there and not see or not question anything,” Nyklewicz said. Nyklewicz’s testimony followed questioning of other witnesses about another problem in the case: the failure to preserve surveillance video. Jail staff only recovered video showing the second half of Thomas’ weeklong stint on the solitary confinement wing. The missing portion would have shown who shut off Thomas’ water — though other jail staff members have identified who they believe gave the order and who carried it out.”

Charles Lane observes that Trump has set out to protect lumber workers. Instead, he’s helping lobbyists: “Thus did the president renew a trade dispute that has raged intermittently ever since 1982, when the U.S. softwood-lumber industry complained to the Reagan administration about increasing Canadian imports of this key home-building input. Whatever else this struggle has achieved, it has kept a small army of trade associations and law firms fully employed in the nation’s capital. Fighting Canadian lumber “dumping” is the raison d’être of the U.S. Lumber Coalition, founded in 1985 and headquartered — where else? — on K Street. Meanwhile, Canada’s wood products industry has its own Washington legal representatives, retained to draft contentious memorandums for the bureaucrats who adjudicate such matters at the Commerce Department. The average American’s stake in all of this — or the average Canadian’s, for that matter — is considerably less clear than the Trump administration’s rhetoric would imply.”

Jesse Drucker describes Bribe Cases, a Jared Kushner Partner and Potential Conflicts: “For much of the roughly $50 million in down payments [to purchase New York apartment buildings], Mr. Kushner turned to an undisclosed overseas partner. Public records and shell companies shield the investor’s identity. But, it turns out, the money came from a member of Israel’s Steinmetz family, which built a fortune as one of the world’s leading diamond traders. A Kushner Companies spokeswoman and several Steinmetz representatives say Raz Steinmetz, 53, was behind the deals. His uncle, and the family’s most prominent figure, is the billionaire Beny Steinmetz, who is under scrutiny by law enforcement authorities in four countries. In the United States, federal prosecutors are investigating whether representatives of his firm bribed government officials in Guinea to secure a multibillion dollar mining concession. In Israel, Mr. Steinmetz was detained in December and questioned in a bribery and money laundering investigation. In Switzerland and Guinea, prosecutors have conducted similar inquiries.”

Professor Andrew Reynolds, Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describes Trump’s self-proclaimed terrorism expert’s likely fraudulent credentials:

“[Sebastian Gorka’s] dissertation is online and includes the ‘evaluations’ of three referees who each presented a page of generalized comments – completely at odds with the detailed substantive and methodological evaluations that I’ve seen at every Ph.D defence I’ve been on over the last twenty years.

Two of the three referees did not even have a Ph.D. One was the US Defense Attaché at the American Embassy in Budapest at the time, while the other was employed at the UK’s Defence Academy and just had a BA from Manchester University awarded in 1969. This ‘neutral’ examiner had published a book in Hungary with Gorka three years previously. While graduate students sometimes collaborate with their advisors the independent external examiners must have no nepotistic ties with the candidate. More important, a basic principle of assessing educational achievement is that your examiners have at least the degree level of the degree they are awarding. Undergraduates do not award Ph.Ds. In Gorka’s case the only examiner who lists a doctorate was György Schöpflin – an extreme right wing Hungarian Member of the European Parliament who recently advocated putting pigs heads on a fence on the Hungarian border to keep out Muslims. I have been told that Schöpflin was a family friend. Both Schöpflin and Gorka’s father[s] fled from Budapest to London in the 1950s and both moved in exile right-wing nationalist circles.

If that is true, we are left in sum with a degree that was awarded in absence – on the basis of a dissertation without basic political science methodological underpinnings – and apparently from an examining committee of two of Gorka’s diplomat friends, with only BA degrees; along with an old family friend, Schöpflin.

In sum, Gorka’s Ph.D is about as legitimate as if he had been awarded it by Trump University. Facts matter, but so does the gathering, synthesizing and creation of knowledge that is what we call ‘education.’ If you fake a Ph.D you are faking your credentials. He delivers provable untruths to the American public but is believed by many because he presents himself as an esteemed scholar of Islam. Gorka would never have got away with such hutzpah in the UK. Experience and scholarship work in harness to produce answers to questions. When you have neither experience nor training you are likely to not merely get the answers wrong, but not even have an inkling of which questions to ask.”

Sometimes a lion’s had enough:

School District

An Opportunity at Whitewater High (Part 2)

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I posted before on the impending departure of Whitewater High’s principal, as he will be leaving the district for another job. (See, An Opportunity at Whitewater High.)

Three points deserve follow-up.

First, one judges a process – in this case a hiring process – through both its fairness and its efficacy. Of course the district will post for this position (and it matters how it’s posted) but that’s a mere beginning. A result that drives for mere expediency is an unworthy process.

Second, I’ve mentioned before that the former administrator was well-liked (he was congenial) and that he kept labor disputes from being worse than they might have been. Those were both accomplishments (although the second mattered more than the first).

For it all, quick institutional choices saddled others with undesirable results. It’s also true that our last administrator was sometimes surprised at how news actually flowed in the community.  He would be caught off-balance when awareness was predictably more widespread than he understood from the small circle with whom district leaders habitually deal.

(Watch, from 2.2.16, at 14:10 on the video, as then-District Administrator Runez and Director of Business Services Jaeger receive a question about ACT scores, are apparently surprised and unaware how widespread the community discussion on the matter had become, and thumb unavailingly & with unfamiliarity through their own document to find an answer, only to guess wrongly at a number on the district’s participation rate.)

Third, Whitewater’s current district administrator is new, but it’s true of all people that they are asked to make decisions in conditions not wholly of their choosing. A past forbearance in assessing some of these matters was too generous, as it was detrimental to sound practices.

There’s a great deal of good work to be done here; those who choose well will find valuable support for their efforts.

Books, Culture, Economy, Politics, Wisconsin

Considering The Politics of Resentment, ‘We Teach These Things to Each Other’ (Part 8 of 9)

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This is the eighth in a series of posts considering Katherine Cramer’s Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

Cramer claims in Chapter 8 that

Beyond garnering the insight that people use social identities to think about politics, this book also shows how social group divides can operate as the central narrative by which people understand the political landscape and by which they structure their ideas about which candidates to support. In this politics of resentment, when we tell ourselves and others about the reasons behind how events have unfolded, the stories hinge on blaming our fellow citizens. What I am calling the politics of resentment is a political culture in which political divides are rooted in our most basic understandings of ourselves, infuse our everyday relationships, and are used for electoral advantage….

When has this not been true? Evening setting aside her earlier & false claim that small government advocacy stems from resentment against economic in interests (and only as Cramer defines those interests), have not large-scale political movements almost always involved ‘social group divides’ and accusations of blame (including toward the blameworthy)?

There’s nothing new on display here; Cramer esteems her work too highly.

Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Tomorrow: Considering The Politics of Resentment, Concluding Thoughts (Part 9 of 9).

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.26.17

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Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will bring thunderstorms and a high of seventy. Sunrise is 5:54 AM and sunset 7:50 PM, for 13h 56m 25s of daytime. We’ve a new moon today. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred sixty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1986, a catastrophic nuclear accident at the occurs at reactor No.4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, in the Soviet Union. On this day in 1865, the 10th Wisconsin Light Artillery musters out: “It had fought in the battles of Stones River, Resaca, Jonesboro, and Bentonville, the sieges of Corinth and Nashville, the Atlanta Campaign, and Sherman’s March to the Sea. In three years the battery lost only 28 men, three killed in combat and 25 from disease.”

Recommended for reading in full —

M.B. Pell, Joshua Schneyer, and Andy Sullivan report that Hundreds more lead hotspots are identified as Trump prepares to gut programs: “An ongoing Reuters investigation has found another 449 areas around the U.S. with lead exposure rates double those found in Flint. But cities across the country say pending federal budget cuts could imperil efforts to eradicate the toxic metal. “If they go and snatch these funds away, where are we going to get help from?” [Mother of three Laicie] Manzella said. It’s a question being asked in cities across the United States bracing for cuts in programs that identify and eradicate lead poisoning hazards. Awareness of lead poisoning escalated following Flint’s crisis, and more recently from Reuters reporting that has identified more than 3,300 areas with childhood lead poisoning rates at least double those found in the Michigan city. Some of the areas slated to be hit hardest supported Trump in November’s election, though he lost Erie County, where Buffalo is the county seat.”

Lisa Rein reports that the Slow pace of Trump nominations leaves Cabinet agencies ‘stuck’ in staffing limbo: “The Senate has confirmed 26 of Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and other top posts. But for 530 other vacant senior-level jobs requiring Senate confirmation, the president has advanced just 37 nominees, according to data tracked by The Washington Post and the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition. These posts include the deputy secretaries and undersecretaries, chief financial officers, ambassadors, general counsels, and heads of smaller agencies who run the government day-to-day.”

Christine Hauser reports that Chobani Yogurt Sues Alex Jones Over Sexual Assault Report: “The suit, filed on Monday in district court in Twin Falls County, Idaho, named Mr. Jones and the media companies InfoWars and Free Speech Systems as defendants. It called “false” and “defamatory” several reports that appeared on InfoWars alleging that the company’s factory in Idaho, which employs refugees, was connected to a 2016 child sexual assault and a rise in tuberculosis cases. The reports were published April 11 on InfoWars.com and on “The Alex Jones Channel” on YouTube. They were promoted on Twitter under the headline “Idaho Yogurt Maker Caught Importing Migrant Rapists,” and were spread widely online. The founder of Chobani, Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant of Kurdish descent, has been the target of right-wing threats by people who accuse him of employing too many refugees in his factories, which began as a yogurt business in upstate New York and expanded to Twin Falls, a city of about 46,500 south of Boise.”

Jane Eisner observes that Ivanka And Jared Are Spectacularly Unqualified — And Why That Matters: “To cite a recent New York Times story, they “have emerged as President Trump’s most important advisers, at least for now.” And surely the most unqualified ones to ever hold such august positions. But that last part doesn’t seem to matter. Because beyond everything else — the astonishing conflicts of interest and the continued, brazen self-enrichment — these two represent the end of any expectation that expertise is required for government work. Even in a Cabinet that is viewed as the most inexperienced in American history, the president’s daughter and son-in-law stand out for having neither the knowledge nor the experience to reasonably pursue any of the many missions they have been given. They have never sought or held public office, never worked in the civic sphere, never served in the military, never helped craft policy, never made their own name or their own millions — never done anything, really, but follow in the footsteps of their rapacious fathers and build on what they were bequeathed.”

What it’s like to go to a cherry blossom festival in Japan? It’s like this —

Books, Culture, Economy, Politics, Wisconsin

Considering The Politics of Resentment, ‘Reactions to the Ruckus’ (Part 7 of 9)

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This is the seventh in a series of posts considering Katherine Cramer’s Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

In Chapter 7, Cramer describes the conditions immediately before, during, & immediately after the Great Recession, with consideration of Obama and Walker’s candidacies. With regard to Barack Obama, there’s much here that shifts, if not contradicts, Cramer’s earlier insistence that race isn’t a primary motivation in sentiment among rural voters.

In Chapter 3 Cramer contended on both sides of this issue (that race was and wasn’t important):

So yes, it is highly likely that when people refer to “those people in Milwaukee” they are often referring to racial minorities. But notice how complex this is. The urbanites that rural folks were referring to were not predominantly racial minorities. When white outstaters (i.e., those living outside the major metropolitan areas) complained of the laziness in the cities in these conversations, their comments were almost always directed at white people: government bureaucrats and faculty members at the flagship public university.

In that way, antiurban resentment is not simply resentment against people of color. At the same time, given the way arguments against government redistribution in the United States have historically been made by equating deservingness with whiteness, these conversations are about race even when race is not mentioned.

Cramer frames this so that she can insist race isn’t involved (“antiurban resentment is not simply resentment against people of color”) except that it always is (“these conversations are about race even when race is not mentioned”). She knows this not specifically about the residents with whom she converses, by the way, but because “historically [arguments] been made by equating deservingness with whiteness.” Even if Cramer should be right about this general historical truth, she imputes the generality to particular people and conversations. If others can’t see what she sees, well, it’s because she’s more discerning, and knows “these conversations are about race even when race is not mentioned.”

Now consider in Chapter 7 how Cramer describes reactions to Barack Obama:

In general, white people across all types of communities seemed uncomfortable talking about the fact that Obama is African American….At the same time that people seemed uncomfortable with Obama’s race and race as a concept in general, Obama’s theme of change and unity resonated with people—or at least they believed it resonated with others. The professionals in central Wisconsin might have found it necessary to qualify his appeal as a certain “kind” of African American, but they also nodded as one man said, “He is the one with the best truth out there.” I heard glimmers of hope that he was a different kind of politician, one not entrenched in Washington, and one who, especially compared to Hillary, was closer to the people.

When Cramer writes that “white people across all types of communities seemed uncomfortable talking about the fact that Obama is African American” she cannot possibly mean all communities in Wisconsin. It’s simply absurd to contend that whites in Dane County, for example, were uncomfortable with Obama. Here, she must mean rural whites (and perhaps suburban ones).

If this should be so, in her estimation, what does it say about her earlier contention that “antiurban resentment is not simply resentment against people of color”? Of course it’s not simply that, as though the supposed resentment were of one kind only. Yet, if her work should be social science, and not mere political commentary, how much of the resentment she sees is racial in motivation?

Cramer is evasive, but assures us (almost like Justice Potter Stewart’s observation about obscenity, ‘I know it when I see it’) that she’ll let us know when she spots something racist.

A more interesting inquiry for Cramer would have been to consider how views on gender affected the Obama-Clinton primary in 2008. Cramer observes that she, herself, met with sexual harassment from rural residents, but leaves aside a more thorough consideration of gender when describing views of Hillary Clinton.

(Cramer also implies that rural harassment was worse than what a woman might have encountered at university; sexual harassment and assault on college campuses is too often downplayed, and federal Clery statistics do not reflect the extent of actual campus harassment & violence.)

Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Tomorrow: Considering The Politics of Resentment, ”We Teach These Things to Each Other” (Part 8 of 9).

School District

An Opportunity at Whitewater High

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In most communities – and certainly small towns with fewer large institutions – the events at the local high school count for a great deal.

In Whitewater, the high school principal has accepted a job at nearby Bigfoot Union, in Walworth, WI, as district administrator. That district scheduled a public meeting on Sunday afternoon to make final their selection, and posted online their announcement yesterday, but the combination of relevent agendas (and community discussion in Walworth) made the selection evident before the announcement.

The choice of a new principal for Whitewater is a significant matter: a choice of mere convenience or institutional bargaining would be an unsatisfactory choice. Whitewater as a community has had the poor habit of choosing on one of these lesser bases (with too few exceptions). Years of this have been too many, and a test of patience. If there has been a mistake in the face of this, it has been one of unmerited forbearance. No student should have to struggle to receive the courses of his or her ability; no student should have to struggle for acceptance.

This small & beautiful city deserves for her principal a worthy mixture of intelligence, knowledge, scholastic encouragement, and fairness – to fulfill this district’s promise of Every Graduate an Engaged Lifelong Learner.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.25.17

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 5:55 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 53m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred sixty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller first publishes a map to use the name “America” (in honor of Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci). On this day in 1996, Thompson signs the W-2 (Wisconsin Works) program into law.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jacob Carpenter reports on the contention of Prosecutors: Inmate’s water cut off for 7 days before his death in the Milwaukee County Jail: “Terrill Thomas spent seven straight days holed up in a solitary confinement cell with no running water, slowly withering away. Thomas started the weeklong stretch at the Milwaukee County Jail belligerent and loud, the result of an untreated mental illness, prosecutors said. But as the days wore on, he grew weak and dehydrated. He lost nearly 35 pounds and turned quiet, never asking for or receiving medical attention. Barely two hours into his eighth day in solitary, jail staff found Thomas, 38, dead on his jail cell floor, the result of profound dehydration.”

Rebecca Ballhaus reports that Americans Back Immigration and Trade at Record Levels: “Six in 10 Americans said immigration helps the nation more than it hurts—up 6 points since the last sounding, in September 2016. One-third of people in the survey said immigration hurts more than it helps. The result, which marks the highest level of support for immigration dating to at least 2005, comes as Mr. Trump is asking lawmakers to fund a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico and has twice signed executive orders, blocked by federal courts, suspending entry from certain countries. Support for free trade rose slightly in the latest survey, with 57% saying it is beneficial for the U.S. and 37% saying it isn’t—a gap of 20 points, and a record level of support. In July 2016, views of free trade as beneficial outweighed those who saw it as harmful by 17 percentage points.”

Amy Goldstein and Scott Clement report that the Public pans Republicans’ latest approach to replacing Affordable Care Act: “In strategy and substance, the American public disagrees with the course that President Trump and congressional Republicans are pursuing to replace the Affordable Care Act with conservative policies, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Large majorities oppose the ideas at the heart of the most recent GOP negotiations to forge a plan that could pass in the House. These would allow states to choose whether to keep the ACA’s insurance protection for people with preexisting medical problems and its guarantee of specific health benefits. Public sentiment is particularly lopsided in favor of an aspect of the current health-care law that blocks insurers from charging more or denying coverage to customers with medical conditions. Roughly 8 in 10 Democrats, 7 in 10 independents and even a slight majority of Republicans say that should continue to be a national mandate, rather than an option for states to retain or drop.”

Nadja Popovich reports that Today’s Energy Jobs Are in Solar, Not Coal: “Last year, the solar industry employed many more Americans than coal, while wind power topped 100,000 jobs. Those numbers come from a Department of Energy report published in January by the Obama administration that provides the most complete picture available of American energy employment. In 2016, 1.9 million Americans were employed in electric power generation, mining and other fuel extraction activities, according to the report – a field we’ll call power creation for short. More than 373,000 Americans worked part or full time in solar energy, and just over 260,000 of them – or about 70 percent – spent a majority of their time on solar projects.”

Great Big Story describes Preserving One Square Inch of Silence:

Preserving One Square Inch of Silence from Great Big Story on Vimeo.

Gordon Hempton is on a personal quest to preserve silence in nature. The “sound-tracker” circles the globe recording vanishing sounds, including the most elusive one of all: silence. In 2005, Hempton resolved to find the quietest place in Washington’s Hoh rainforest, itself a haven of silence. According to Hempton, the area he found is precisely one square inch. But that little area of quiet—which holds incredible value for the Earth—is endangered. Now, Hempton is determined to protect it from noise pollution like overpassing jets, lest we lose one of our country’s last remaining silent places.

Books, Culture, Economy, Politics, Wisconsin

Considering The Politics of Resentment, ‘Support for Small Government’ (Part 6 of 9)

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This is the sixth in a series of posts considering Katherine Cramer’s Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

In Chapter 6, Cramer declares that

In this chapter, I am going to make the bold claim that support for small government is more about identity than principle.

Cramer explains to readers why she calls this claim ‘bold’:

Why is this a bold claim? We can look back on “Obamacare” or the “Affordable Care Act” and note that which side people took is related to partisanship. And we can say that whether people side with Republicans or Democrats in general is related to their attitudes about the appropriate role of government (e.g., Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Goren 2005; Carsey and Layman 2006). But those correlations do not help us understand why someone without teeth would not support government- funded dental care. Is it really the case that such a person is thinking to himself, “In principle I believe the less government the better; therefore, I am going to vote for the Republican Party and against single-payer health care, even though I need health care myself”? I don’t think so.

There are three components to these assertions: (1) primarily that one’s support for small government is identity-motivated, not principled, (2) that professions of support for small government among rural voters are false, although perhaps unknowingly so, and (3) that the alternative in health care to the market is single-payer.

Her first assertion is profoundly ignorant, so much so that one would think – and from her work might assume – that there had never been principled arguments against government intervention. It’s hard to get a full grasp of how unknowing Cramer must be: it’s as though she’s never read even a small part of classical or neoclassical economic theory, and its philosophical derivatives. Centuries of economic and philosophical literature: just identity politics in disguise, you see.

It’s astounding that Cramer ignores a vast literature – one that has in contemporary times produced over a dozen market-supporting Nobel laureatures in economics & other fields – and reduces this to a Republicans versus Democrats debate. (Most of these laureates where from neither major American political party.)

An omission like this is so great that the entire work begins to look like a political tract masquerading as ethnography. 

Because, you see, all these economists and philosophers weren’t advocating principles, they were either in the grip of identity politics, or committed to ensnaring others in that grip.

Under Cramer’s reading, rural voters – if not urban sophisticates – support small government for irrational reasons, contrary to their economic interests, interests they are too resentful to see clearly.

Finally, and almost as absurdly, Cramer particularly implies that economic interests are a choice between markets and single-payer healthcare (‘I am going to vote for the Republican Party and against single-payer health care’). Single-payer? Senator Sanders might have wanted as much, but neither Pres. Obama nor Sec. Clinton nor most Democrats in Congress pushed for single-payer, the alternative Cramer posits was before rural voters.

Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Tomorrow: Considering The Politics of Resentment, ‘Reactions to the Ruckus’ (Part 7 of 9).

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.24.17

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 5:57 AM and sunset 7:48 PM, for 13h 51m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred sixty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater will hold a public reception for candidates for its open parks & recreation director position from 3:30 – 5:30 PM. Whitewater’s school board meets today beginning at 6 PM in closed session, with an open session beginning at 7 PM.

On this day in 1800, the Library of Congress is established, as part of legislation that “appropriated $5,000 “for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress …, and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them….” Books were ordered from London and the collection, consisting of 740 books and 3 maps, was housed in the new Capitol.” On this day in 1977, the Morris Pratt Insititute, dedicated to the study of spiritualism and mediumship, moves from Whitewater to Waukesha.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rick Barrett reports that Milk plants asked to help save Wisconsin dairy farms: “Mullins Cheese, which says it’s the largest family-owned and operated cheese factory in Wisconsin, has tossed a lifeline to eight dairy farms that were at risk of closing from a trade dispute with Canada. “My field staff looked at them and said, ‘My gosh, these are great, wonderfully kept farms,’” said Bill Mullins, the Mosinee cheese company’s vice president. “I had an opportunity to help a few of them.” But while Mullins has stepped up and signed contracts to buy the milk from eight family-owned dairy operations, dozens of others haven’t been as fortunate. They face a May 1 deadline for when they no longer have a milk processor and could be forced to shut down. Grassland Dairy Products of Greenwood said it’s dropping the farms because the company lost millions of dollars in business when Canada changed its milk pricing policies in a way that favors Canadian farmers to the detriment of U.S. milk producers. State and federal lawmakers in the U.S. have been urgently seeking short-term solutions along with an investigation of trade pacts with Canada.”

Tim Mak reports that the Senate Trump-Russia Probe Has No Full-Time Staff, No Key Witnesses: “The Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe into Russia’s election interference is supposedly the best hope for getting the public credible answers about whether there was any coordination between the Kremlin and Trump Tower. But there are serious reasons to doubt that it can accomplish this task, as currently configured. More than three months after the committee announced that it had agreed on the scope of the investigation, the panel has not begun substantially investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, three individuals with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast. The investigation does not have a single staffer dedicated to it full-time, and those staff members working on it part-time do not have significant investigative experience. The probe currently appears to be moving at a pace slower than prior Senate Intelligence Committee investigations, such as the CIA torture inquiry, which took years to accomplish. No interviews have been conducted with key individuals suspected of being in the Trump-Russia orbit: not Michael Flynn, not Roger Stone, not Carter Page, not Paul Manafort, and not Jared Kushner, according to two sources familiar with the committee’s procedures.”

Ashley Parker and Robert Costa report Inside Trump’s obsession with cable TV: “During a small working lunch at the White House last month, the question of job security in President Trump’s tumultuous White House came up, and one of the attendees wondered whether press secretary Sean Spicer might be the first to go. The president’s response was swift and unequivocal. “I’m not firing Sean Spicer,” he said, according to someone familiar with the encounter. “That guy gets great ratings. Everyone tunes in.” Trump even likened Spicer’s daily news briefings to a daytime soap opera, noting proudly that his press secretary attracted nearly as many viewers. For Trump — a reality TV star who parlayed his blustery-yet-knowing on-air persona into a winning political brand — television is often the guiding force of his day, both weapon and scalpel, megaphone and news feed. And the president’s obsession with the tube — as a governing tool, a metric for staff evaluation, and a two-way conduit with lawmakers and aides — has upended the traditional rhythms of the White House, influencing many spheres, including policy, his burgeoning relationship with Congress, and whether he taps out a late-night or early-morning tweet.”

Uri Friedman observes that Trump Was Wrong About France: “Following Thursday’s terrorist attack on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, which killed one police officer and wounded two others, Donald Trump made a prediction. “The people of France will not take much more of this,” he wrote on Twitter. “Will have a big effect on presidential election!”….Then Trump dispelled any doubt about his message. The attack, for which ISIS has claimed responsibility, will “probably help” Le Pen’s chances, the American president told the Associated Press, “because she is the strongest on borders and she is the strongest on what’s been going on in France.” (This despite the fact that the Champs-Elysees attacker was a French citizen ensconced well within French borders.)….Trump appears to have been proven wrong. On Sunday, in the first round of voting to elect the next French president, Macron eked out a victory against Le Pen and will now face her in a runoff election—results that mirror the way the polls looked just before the attack in Paris on Thursday. It’s too early to determine the extent to which the issue of terrorism influenced the vote. But what’s clearer is that the “big effect” Trump predicted never came.”

John Markoff writes that it’s No Longer a Dream: Silicon Valley Takes On the Flying Car: “CLEARLAKE, Calif. — On a recent afternoon, an aerospace engineer working for a small Silicon Valley company called Kitty Hawk piloted a flying car above a scenic lake about 100 miles north of San Francisco. Kitty Hawk’s flying car, if you insisted on calling it a “car,” looked like something Luke Skywalker would have built out of spare parts. It was an open-seated, 220-pound contraption with room for one person, powered by eight battery-powered propellers that howled as loudly as a speedboat. The tech industry, as we are often told, is fond of disrupting things, and lately the automakers have been a big target. Cars that use artificial intelligence to drive themselves, for example, have been in development for a few years and can be spotted on roads in a number of cities. And now, coming onto the radar screen, are flying machines that do not exactly look like your father’s Buick with wings. More than a dozen start-ups backed by deep-pocketed industry figures like Larry Page, a Google founder — along with big aerospace firms like Airbus, the ride-hailing company Uber and even the government of Dubai — are taking on the dream of the flying car.”

Books, Culture, Economy, Politics, Wisconsin

Considering The Politics of Resentment, ‘Attitudes toward Public Institutions and Public Employees’ (Part 5 of 9)

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This is the fifth in a series of posts considering Katherine Cramer’s Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

In Chapter 5, Cramer describes conversations she had with rural residents. In the early part of the chapter, she recounts discussions about the university system. Some rural residents tell her they don’t like Madison (and UW-Madison) because they see it as politically liberal:

Glenn: UW is the only place where you can be a hippie for forty years and not be out of place. [chuckles] Dan: Sometimes you can’t tell them from the professors, either. [laughs] Tim: Well that’s true, too.
KJC: Right, right.
Glenn: UW and San Francisco got about the same initials. [chuckles] KJC: So what do you think the UW–Madison should be doing here in [this town]? And I mean that very broadly, like from students to ordinary folks who live here, you know beyond student age, are there things they should be doing?
Tim: I don’t know what they could do—I guess I’m like Glenn and the rest of ’em as far as the liberal—I’m not a Madison person. There’s a reason that I don’t live in Madison, I like [this town]. I don’t like Madison at all. It’s big, it’s . . . to me, I don’t like to drive in the city—
Glenn: Best part about Madison is the fifty-five miles that it is away.

But that’s not their primary objection, it turns out:

KJC: Why don’t [students from here] go to Madison? I mean I have all kinds of guesses why, but why do you think?
Tim: Cost is the biggest thing.
Dan: Tuition is higher in Madison than it is in La Crosse or Platteville [cities with other UW System schools] for one thing.

In any event, the university is a topic (but of uncertain priority) because Cramer’s made it one:

My presence alone, though, brought the university into the conversations. The first thing I usually said to these groups, especially during my first visits in 2007 and 2008, was, “Hi! I’m Kathy. I’m from the UW–Madison.” So I want to acknowledge up front that it is likely that these groups would not have talked about the university and higher education as much if I hadn’t inserted myself into their conversations. But my focus was not how much they talked about the university or other aspects of government, but how they made sense of it when they did so. Their conversations about UW–Madison provide a window to their attitudes about government and public employees more generally.

Here, Cramer’s claim about negative views of the university is tenuous, because she can’t show what priority the university has in residents’ minds. (In fact, she guesses they “would not have talked about the university and higher education as much if [she] hadn’t inserted [herself] into their conversations.”)

Oh my: Cramer wants to define a rural consciousness, but by her own admission the role of UW-Madison within that consciousness depends not on residents’ priorities but her own questioning. This is simply flimsy. (It’s for lack of a solid prioritization, presumably, that Cramer offers unquantifiably and nebulously that their responses are a “window to their attitudes.” How big and how clear a window neither Cramer nor we know, as she can’t reliably say.)

Cramer exhibits guilt about her role as an academic:

To be honest, I felt sheepish explaining to people during my first year of fieldwork that I wasn’t teaching any classes. In the midst of conversations about the wear and tear of common rural occupations on one’s body, I had a difficult time thinking of my job driving around the state, inviting myself into coffee klatches as hard work.

An honest admission, but nonetheless an admission of a bias (one that could be both more pronounced in focus-group questioning & less susceptible of review than it would be in data-released opinion polling).

Indeed, Cramer acknowledges that scientific opinion polling reveals that suspicion about education’s value extends far beyond a rural demographic:

Let me end this chapter by acknowledging that people of many walks of life feel distant from institutions of higher education and also public employees. First, consider that public opinion surveys suggest that many people feel a sense of disconnection from institutions of higher education. For example, a December 9–13, 2009, Public Agenda poll of 1,031 U.S. adults found that 60 percent of the public perceives that “colleges today are like most businesses and mainly care about the bottom line,” as opposed to “colleges today mainly care about education and making sure students have a good educational experience.”16 Also, that same poll found that 33 percent “agree strongly” and 27 percent “agree somewhat” that “colleges could take a lot more students without lowering quality or raising prices.”

If so many feel this way (however regrettable those views may be), we can be certain that this skepticism is not unique to a supposed rural consciousness. And as it is not unique, and even appears in rural residents’ conversations at Cramer’s admitted instigation, identifying anti-educational views with rural residents seems truly uncompelling to anyone other than those who would expect to find such views primarily in rural communities.

Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Tomorrow: Considering The Politics of Resentment, ‘Support for Small Government’ (Part 6 of 9).

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.23.17

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 5:58 AM and sunset 7:47 PM, for 13h 48m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 12.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred sixty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

April 23rd is the traditionally observed birthday of William Shakespeare, on this day in 1564. On this day in 1954, playing for the Milwaukee Braves, Hank Aaron hits his first major league home run.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Craig Gilbert observes that Paul Ryan’s national popularity sags: “His favorability ratings have gone from positive to negative for the first time in Gallup’s polling. In a poll by Pew, his approval rating is 29%, his disapproval 54%. In a survey by Quinnipiac, 28% of voters view him favorably, 52% unfavorably. These national polls were all taken in the aftermath of the House GOP’s highly publicized failure to pass a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. But they also reflect broader forces at work in Donald Trump’s presidency. The speaker is now a less popular figure among GOP voters than Trump is. But as a partner of Trump in Republican-run Washington, Ryan has seen his standing suffer among Democrats and independents.”

Patricia Torres and Nicholas Casey report that Armed Civilian Bands in Venezuela Prop Up Unpopular President: “Carlos Moreno, 17, lay sprawled on the ground, a pool of blood around his head….The uniformed men who shot Mr. Moreno were not government security forces, witnesses say. Rather, they were members of armed bands who have become key enforcers for President Nicolás Maduro as he attempts to crush a growing protest movement against his rule. The groups, called collectives or colectivos in Spanish, originated as pro-government community organizations that have long been a part of the landscape of leftist Venezuelan politics. Civilians with police training, colectivo members are armed by the government, say experts who have studied them. Colectivos control vast territory across Venezuela, financed in some cases by extortion, black-market food and parts of the drug trade as the government turns a blind eye in exchange for loyalty. Now they appear to be playing a key role in repressing dissent.”

Dan Balz and Scott Clement report that Nearing 100 days, Trump’s approval at record lows but his base is holding: “President Trump nears the 100-day mark of his administration as the least popular chief executive in modern times, a president whose voters remain largely satisfied with his performance, but one whose base of support has not expanded since he took the oath of office, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.”

Bob Holer reports that Tom Brady gives much to Best Buddies, but has taken millions for his own charitable trust: “The legend of Tom Brady has grown thanks to charming images of his celebrated appearances for Best Buddies International, a nonprofit dedicated to helping intellectually and developmentally disabled people….Yet Brady’s relationship with Best Buddies has changed in recent years. The organization has become a major source of funding for Brady’s own charitable goals. Since 2011, while Brady has served as the face of its signature Massachusetts fund-raiser and helped it raise nearly $20 million, Best Buddies has paid $2.75 million to Brady’s own charitable trust and has pledged to grant the organization an additional $500,000 in 2017 — a total of $3.25 million….Brady “really can’t take credit for being a great philanthropist when he is using other people’s money to help his own organizations,’’ said Daniel Borochoff, president of Charity Watch, a Chicago-based nonprofit that evaluates philanthropies and advocates for consumers. “It’s certainly not pure altruism.’’

What would it be like to work undercover in a Chinese iPhone factory? Dejian Zeng knows:

Books, Culture, Economy, Politics, Wisconsin

Considering The Politics of Resentment, ‘The Context of Rural Consciousness’ (Part 4 of 9)

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This is the fourth in a series of posts considering Katherine Cramer’s Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

If in Chapter 3 Cramer sought to provide the contours (outlines) of a rural consciousness,  in Chapter 4 she attempts to describe the context (the circumstances around it) of it all.

Cramer sees the obvious challenge to her work:

I know many readers will be wondering whether this thing I am calling rural consciousness is justified—that is, whether it reflects real or simply perceived disparities in government resources, concern, and attention.

(She doesn’t concede so plainly other challenges to her work, however: that a small government preference is not necessarily a rural product, any more than a socialist one might not be a rural product, that the divide in large areas is more than rural and urban, indeed more than economic, and that ample work across centuries in market theory sits outside her urban-rural framework but has nonetheless shaped life across this continent and planet.)

And yet, and yet, here’s Cramer’s answer to this question, as she frames it:

I know this because when I describe complaints of injustice among small-town residents to urban audiences, I am almost always asked whether it is actually the case, for example, that rural areas get fewer public dollars than urban areas do. In the conversations I observed in rural Wisconsin, many people thought they were getting the short end of the stick with respect to taxpayer dollars. But was that really the case?

The evidence is mixed.

That’s quite the concession. Imagine someone asking about the effectiveness of a medication, or of a parachute, and receiving that reply: the evidence is mixed.

Here’s how Cramer describes basic fiscal policy for rural and urban Wisconsinites:

In Wisconsin, rural counties do receive fewer public dollars than urban counties. In the aggregate, measures of both state and federal government expenditures at the county level in fiscal year 2010 show that more than 75 percent of this money went to counties with urban metropolitan communities (fig. 4.1)

However, there are far fewer people living in rural counties than urban ones, so a more apt comparison might be one that uses a per capita basis for comparison. Figures 4.2 and 4.3 show two correlation plots, with each dot representing a single county in Wisconsin. This pair of figures shows almost no relationship between how rural a county is and the dollars it receives in expenditures per capita from the state and federal government.1 Excluding outliers, a slight upward trend is evident, with more rural counties receiving slightly more dollars per person; however, the relationship is weak.2 But the evidence certainly does not support the notion that urban counties receive far more than their share of tax dollars per resident.

(Emphasis mine.)

Seeing this, that in fact rural residents aren’t short-changed in the amounts that they receive, Cramer must – if she believes that a rural consciousness depends on rural residents accurately and correctly observing a disparity with urban areas – find another economic explanation.

She does:

While this evidence does not back up the perceptions I heard among many rural residents that there is vastly disproporationate spending in urban counties and higher tax burdens falling on rural communities, many would also be quick to point out that what these numbers do not reveal is how effectively the money was spent. Even if the spending were proportionate across type of place, if the spending failed to meet the needs of people living there, it really would not matter. Some services simply cost less per capita in cities because of economies of scale.4

Where, though, does this economies of scale endnote (#4) lead? Here: “I am sincerely indebted to Ben Toff for these analyses and to Sarah Niebler for a similar set of analyses in the early stages of this project.” That is, Cramer’s presumably thanking Toff and Niebler for their data collection for the preceding Figures 4.1 to 4.9, not to an economies of scale analysis. She offers no such analysis here.

If Cramer cannot provide compelling data for her claim that a supposed rural consciousness rests significantly on an actual mis- or under-allocation of government funds to the detriment of rural residents, then she’s left either with (1) her own misperception of a rural consciousness, (2) rural residents’ misperception of their own condition, or (3) both.

By her own account, she cannot offer, so to speak, unmixed economic data.

That’s quite a predicament for her thesis.

Previously: Parts 1, 2, and 3.

Tomorrow: Considering The Politics of Resentment, ‘Attitudes toward Public Institutions and Public Employees’ (Part 5 of 9).