Parents' Rights Is Lazy Parenting

I was listening this morning to The Daily, and the lead story was about school librarians and book-banning. It got me thinking about the dominant rhetorical strategy being employed by those who want to be Nazis do censorship. Set aside for a minute any human concerns for the marginalized folks whose existence and representation tend to be at the center of this culture war battlefield. Let's take the right-wing, wouldbe censors at their word and assume this is actually about "parents' rights." I am not the first to point this out, but an obvious issue is that Parents' Rights™ actively negates the rights of the majority of parents who don't wish controversial books to be removed from their kids' school libraries. It is more accurately a debate about whether one set of parents has the right to impose their worldview on other parents.

That led me to this conclusion: at its core "Parents' Rights" parents are lazy parents. In effect, they are asking the state* to do their parenting for them. If a parent doesn't want their kid reading Lawn Boy, for example, it is the parent's job to inform their child that they're not allowed to read the novel and then, if necessary, to police the kid's reading. Instead, under the guise of their "rights," these parents are arguing that the schools should restrict access from all students simply because they don't want their child to have access. They apprently can't or won't suprevise their own child and ask the state to do so on their behalf. They can't control their own household so they ask the state to control their entire community. If I remember correctly, folks on the right had a term for situations where the government acts in an overprotective manner, curtailing individual choices: the nanny state. I guess these kinds of criticisms only apply to the state when one disagrees with the state's actions, huh?

--

* - Public schools are special-purpose government entities.

Public Municipal Journalism, a Proposal

I've been thinking about the role of news media in the growing partisan divide and social instability in the US over the last few years. I think it would be an oversimplification to claim that news media have caused these issues, but it seems clear that they at best failed to moderate them and at worse amplified them. Part of the issue undoubtedly is that journalism in the US is predominantly for-profit. We've had a public discussion recently about the problems that arise when we allow profit motives into other essential institutions, like education and healthcare, but we haven't yet addressed the same concerns with the press. The à la carte nature of journalism in the US has fragmented the national narrative to the point of near-collapse, and that fragmentation is largely the result of the capitalistic pursuit of niche markets, selling a branded story that resonates with a particular worldview or identity. This has been particularly disastrous for local newspapers. How might we correct this?

I'm reminded of the idea of the fourth estate. What if we reimagined a free press as being free not only of governmental control but also of capitalist manipulation? I can imagine news organizations that are chartered with very specific operating constraints. What if news media were cooperative firms, owned and controlled jointly by the journalists-workers and the communities they serve? What if they were funded by local millage or bond? What if journalists finally abandoned editorials and the op-ed page?

Across Western Europe, public news media are widely used and trusted sources of news. Most other advanced, industrialized nations have public journalism which serves as the preferred news source, is trusted more than private news media, and is trusted far more than distrusted. While there are populist and ideological divides, the divides are generally far smaller than you'd guess and do not reverse trust (Spain being an outlier). Regardless, we can certainly do better in the US.

The 3B's and Politics

I've written before about the 3 B's approach to understanding religion. Essentially, it argues that we should think about religion as a combination of believing, behaving, and belonging. All religions can be understood to fiddle with those three dials. For example, Evangelical Protestantism sets the knobs for believing and behaving very high, while belonging is fairly low; Reform Judaism sets the knob for belonging at 11, but turns down believing and behaving. In other words, Evangelicals are definitely about having the right beliefs about Jesus but don't care about what denomination or congregation they are a part of, and Jews won't bat an eye if you're an atheist as long as you belong to the tribe. The cultural dominance of Protestantism broadly has hampered the study of religion by focusing too narrowly on believing. We gain predictive power by paying attention to belonging, in particular.

I think that we could gain a lot to apply this same approach to understanding politics. How do people set their relative knobs for political ideas (believing), political participation (behaving), and party identification (belonging)? We've been hampered by an insistence on the importance of political ideology (i.e. conservative vs. progressive) for too long. People's beliefs are often internally inconsistent and at times not in their own best interest (e.g. working-class folks against social benefits programs). If we take party identification as belonging more seriously, these kind of dissonances become less perplexing because people may have the believing dial turned down and the belonging dial turned up. This is quite evident here in the South, where I live, among Republicans. Many have internalized this label in the same way that they have their loyalty to their favorite college football team (which is to say to the bone). They care far more about their "team" than they do about actual policy. Instead of being dismissive of that, we should take it seriously, just as they do.

Voting for Trump Makes You a Bad Person

Voting for Trump is immoral. It is unamerican. It is unchristian. If you haven't already arrived at this conclusion over the last 1343 days, there is nothing I can say to convince you.

Trump is a bad person and a poor president.

If you vote for him, you are complicit.
It is not enough to just not vote for Trump. Not voting for his opponent (because we have a terrible two-party system) is the same as casting half a vote for him. 

Voting for Biden does not make one a good person, but voting for Trump most definitely makes one a bad person.

By all means, though, give me a signal that you plan to vote for Trump so I can unfriend you, both in real life and on social media. I will not pretend, in the name of some imagined civility, that reasonable people can disagree on this. There is nothing to disagree over. This is not partisan. There is nothing partisan about racism, misogyny, and authoritarianism.

A Problem of Scale: Why Civility, Kindness, and Politeness Can Never Save the World

There is a lot of talk these days about the state of civil and political discourse in the United States. The basic claim of many in varying ways is that we must return to civility, that kindness will save us all. It's generally a centerist claim. These are people who claim to be moderates or independents. I think they are fundamentally wrong. Let me elaborate.

Let's start with Emergence Theory. Basically, Emergence Theory says that phenomena emerge from complexity. I think the best example is our own intelligence. We used to think that intelligence was a brute force kind of thing, that having lots and lots of neurons in our brains made us smart in the same way that a computer chip with lots and lots of transistors was more powerful. Cognitive science and computer science are both coming to the same conclusion, though, that it's not the number of neurons but the overwhelming number of connections between those neurons out of which intelligence (and maybe even consciousness, whatever that is) emerges unpredictably out of the complexity of those interconnections. Physics has its own version of this in which the characteristics of the material world at our macro material world emerge out of the complexity of things at the micro or quantum level. Though sociologists and other social scientists rarely use the term, we do have our own version of Emergence Theory. It's what many of us spend the first week of intro-level courses trying to convince undergraduates of, namely that we cannot understand social structure simply by understanding individuals. In other words, society is more than the sum total of the agency of countless individuals.

What does any of this have to do with being civil or kind? Well, if I understand the centerists' argument, it essentially claims that good behavior at the individual level will trickle up to good institutions and structures. For example, if I, a white man, am courteous, polite, and even kind to a black man, this will somehow solve racism. The political version goes something along the lines of, if the Democrat and the Republican family members are able to have a civil conversation at the Thanksgiving table, this will somehow lead to Congress being functional and productive. All of this is, of course, bullshit. It is oversimplification--at best. We would all be better to embrace complexity. It may not be as reassuring as the simplistic centerist understanding, but it's the path to improvement.

Opting Out of 'Optics'

OK, I promise to stop with these little pet peeves postings soon. Stop using the neologism "optics." Unlike "impact" and "proactive" which are business-speak, "optics" seems to be political-speak. The more appropriate synonym is "perception" or perhaps "impression." It's true that languages are in constant flux, but it behooves us to know the cultural and structural push and pull from whence these changes arrive.

It's Time to Take Place out of Politics

FiveThirtyEight has a cool, ongoing podcast series on gerrymandering. It's gotten me thinking about an underlying issue that everyone seems to take for granted and no one I've heard is questioning. Namely, our entire representative democracy is based on geography; that is, we are represented based on where we live instead of (or even in addition to) our political ideology, social identities, etc. That's not to say that politics, identity, etc. aren't a part of electoral politics; it's just that those things are all mediated (inefficiently, I would argue) through place.

Undoubtedly, the central role of place in our democracy is owed to the technological limitations of colonial America. Moreover, land (and thus place) mattered in agrarian society in a way that it longer does in a post-industrial society. Place, then, is a decidedly 18th-century solution to representative democracy that simply no longer represents the people of the 21st century. I've written around this idea previously.

One reason that place has persisted is that place can quite easily be exploited by those with terrible intentions. For example, "state's rights" (i.e. regional autonymy) was invoked as a defense for first slavery and later Jim Crow discrimination. Another example is calls for "local control" as a defense for segregation in school districts.

A term that shows up in the podcasts (which I assume is from the political science literature) is "natural political geography." The basic idea is that people "naturally" sort themselves by place, most importantly by conservative/Republican and progressive/Democrat. In other words, it's not so much that people on the coasts have convinced each other over time to become liberal and that people in the "flyover states" have convinced each other over time to become conservative; instead, it's that people have been more likely to move to specific regions, states, cities, and neighborhoods where people already share their ideology. (Incidentally, sociology has long known of the structural sorting that happens for race and class.) However, there is nothing "natural" about people choosing to live by those with politics that are similar to their own or, more accurately, choosing not to live among those who are politically intolerant to them. If this phenomenon does indeed exist, it is at least in part a response to the fact that we do politics via place.

Our current set of political issues are not bounded. They include structural concerns over race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. We need an electoral system that acknowledges this. Moreover, the problems that SCoTUS is currently considering in Gill v. Whitford, including "packing and cracking," are created by our insistence on place and could be remedied if we admit that we don't live in that world anymore.

Some Notes for Later Use on Campus Carry

Governor Deal signed the campus carry bill into law. I wrote about the lead-up last year. I'm angry. Here are two thoughts for future reference:

First, I'm contemplating buying a costume bulletproof vest to wear in protest while on campus next year.

Second, Freedom of Speech is regularly constrained on college campuses. I do not allow students to use the N-word in my classrooms, for example. Students are generally expected to shut up when told to by a professor. This is, for better or worse, how college classrooms work. Colleges also have so-called Free Speech Zones. One (purported) reason for these is to limit protest to areas that are not disruptive to regular campus activities, like holding classes. The courts have regularly allowed colleges and professors to curtail First Amendment rights. Why should Second Amendment rights be any different?

Stop Moving and Start Fighting: Education Funding and Social Justice

This post started as a rant against my friends and colleagues who move to adjacent communities because the schools are "better." Let me set aside, for the purposes of this post, that their estimation of what is "better" is at best objectively wrong and at worst implicitly racist. I realized well into my writing that I was falling into the same trap that they were: mistaking an institutional issue as an individual trouble. The problem with primary and secondary education as we do it in the U.S., inasmuch as there is a problem, is that we fund it at the local level, that is, mostly with property taxes. Unsurprisingly, places that have higher property values (i.e. more rich people) have more resources for public education, while places that have lower property values (i.e. more poor people and, relatedly, more people of color) have fewer resources for public education. This is the root of all of the problems. Imagine if any other public good were maldistributed in such an obvious way. Live in a wealthy community? You get cleaner air and water, better policing, etc. (Oh, you say these things are actually distributed in this way? How 'bout that.) The solution to this problem is not necessarily to shame individuals who (have the ability to) choose to move their families to take advantage of these inequalities but, instead, to remove the incentives to this type of behavior by restructuring the way that we fund education. Specifically, all school districts should be funded in proportion to the number of students they enroll, not in proportion to the wealth of the people who live in their arbitrary borders.

I want to be clear in that I'm not absolving my friends and colleagues of their decisions to move to adjacent communities for supposed educational reasons. Ideally, they would remain in their originating communities and mobilize their social capital toward the ends of improving local education for not only their own kids but also the kids of parents who have less social and economic capital. 

An Economist Likes Sociology--But Finds It Still Lacking

The Upshot's Economic View just penned a love letter of sorts to Sociology. It's great, and it makes me smile. Go read it. I do have a minor quibble with it, though. In particular, the three final paragraphs were somewhat sour to my taste:

And trying to solve social problems is a more complex undertaking than working to improve economic outcomes. It’s relatively clear how a change in tax policy or an adjustment to interest rates can make the economy grow faster or slower; it’s less obvious what, if anything, government can do to change forces that are driven by the human psyche.

...

It may be true that these lessons on identity and community don’t lend themselves immediately to policy white papers and five-point plans. But a deeper understanding of them sure could help policy makers.

Setting aside the fact that boiling down sociology to "the human psyche" is just wrong, I think this is emblematic of a problem particular to sociology that I have to regularly fight with my students, namely that sociology doesn't imply actual solutions to the social problems that we are quite adept at pointing out. I think it's fair to say that sociology has been less explicit in terms of policy per se. However, sociological research typically does point toward relatively obvious solutions. It's not that they're not there; it's just that they tend to be radical! (To be clear here, I use "radical" properly. It means "to the root," though not necessarily "extreme.")

Sociology shows one of the roots of racism in economic insecurity so restructure the labor market to guarantee employment. Sociology shows one of the roots of gender inequality in the way we organize the workplace so change how we conceptualize the workday (e.g. flex time) and family leave (e.g. require fathers to take time off). Sociology shows the roots of poverty in capitalism itself so replace capitalism with another economic system. As you can see, the policy implications are there; they just happen to be radical and, thus, difficult politically. It's one thing to say, "Hey, just tweak this part of the tax code," and another to say, "Um, you'll need to upend an entire social institution."

The issue is that "Economics" as a discipline would more accurately be titled "Capitalism Studies," and if everything is framed within the rules of capitalism, the solutions--inasmuch as we can call them that--are within those rules as well. In Neil Iwin's words from the Upshot piece, "...economics is only a piece of a broader, societal problem. So maybe the people who study just that [i.e. sociologists] could be worth listening to."

Is There Venison in That Indian Curry?

This recent Upshot piece has really stuck with me. Here are the highlights:

Drawing on work in sociology, I tried to measure whether people thought their most powerful connections were to those in their local circles or to those in a broader orbit. For example, I asked people whether they had played softball on an organized team in the last decade, because this is usually done with members of a community. I also asked about hunting, an activity often done with family or close friends. I asked people about the places to which they had traveled in the last 10 years: Canada, Mexico, Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and South America, and whether they had eaten a meal at an Indian or Japanese restaurant in the last decade.

... The more likely people were to experience other cultures — through travel or food — the more likely they were to vote for Mr. Obama [over Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary], even controlling for things like income, education, personality, racial attitudes and city living. ....

... White Republican primary voters were more likely to vote for one of the other 16 candidates in the race instead of Mr. Trump if they had traveled abroad or gone to an Indian or Japanese restaurant in the last 10 years. ...

Mr. Trump fared worst among white G.O.P. primary voters who had been to Asia, Africa or South America. ... Those who had been to Europe, Australia, Canada or Mexico or had eaten at an Indian restaurant were also less likely to choose Mr. Trump....

In the general election, there were also wide divergences among white voters. People who had been hunting in the last decade favored Mr. Trump by 22 points, while those had played softball favored him by nine points. People who had eaten Indian food favored Mrs. Clinton by 15 points, and those who had been to Europe or Australia favored her by 13 points. These relationships persist after accounting for things like partisanship, income, education and geography.

I have a couple critiques.

First, I do not think softball, hunting, travel, and "ethnic" foods are reasonable measures of local or broad social influence. Playing softball, like bowling in a league, is a form of civic engagement. Hunting, like driving a pickup truck and listening to "country" music, is a statement of cultural identity. Traveling and eating "ethnic" food are measures of cultural capital.

Second, there is an issue of causality to deal with. The author seems to argue that playing softball, hunting, traveling, and exotic dining are predictive of voting behavior because those practices are indicative of one's interaction with others. It seems to be a version of the Contact Hypothesis. Those who are isolated, interacting mostly with those who are a lot like themselves, are more likely to fear the other, to reproduce unfounded stereotypes, and to vote for a candidate who taps into those emotions and beliefs. Those who are more worldly, interacting with foreign cultures through travel, either to another country or to a local "ethnic" restaurant, are less likely to fear the other, to reproduce stereotypes, or to vote for a demagog. There is just as much evidence in the author's research to support the reverse, that those who fear others, hold stereotypical beliefs, and are of a particular political ideology were more likely to vote for Trump and to isolate themselves socially. If the author's assumption is correct, forcing people to interact with foreigners and to travel foreign countries could very well make a difference. If, on the other hand, the alternative is the reality, encouraging contact with other is not likely to overcome the underlying motives and, ironically, might even exacerbate them (see the Backfire Effect).

Still, it's quite interesting research and worth attention.

Baseball AND (Not OR) Politics

Last week, I started seeing friends post this on Facebook:

The idea is to occupy Facebook with baseball to break up all of the political posts. Whoever 'likes' this post will be given a baseball player and has to post a picture of the player along with this text.

It made me cringe.

Let me start by sympathizing with the intent. Contentious politics can be exhausting, especially in a 24-hour news cycle with an idiot, celebrity president, and along with apple pie, I love me some baseball! I feel you. The ability to turn one's gaze away from such a spectacle, however, is a privileged position. In fact, every friend I have who posted this was a white man. We are able to ignore such things only insomuch as they don't directly affect us. People of color and women, among other identities, don't have this luxury as they are far more likely to be directly and negatively affected by such politics.

Even more than this, though, I worry that it was more than just a diversion. Baseball is, after all, the national pastime, and all sports and amusement are intentional distractions from the pressing concerns of everyday life. It is hard to see how "occupy[ing]" a space that is regularly used for civic discourse serves any purpose other than the agenda of those who would benefit from the status quo. Contentious politics, while perhaps regrettable, is a necessary part of democracy. Vigilance is required, and though entertainment is likely necessary to sustain our mental and emotional wellbeing, it can often be a tool toward false consciousness.

Open Letter to My Trump-voting Friends and Family

Dear Friends and Family,

A few of you actively supported Donald Trump's candidacy.

Some of you chose to cast a vote for Donald Trump.

Many of you refused to cast a vote for the presidency, in effect granting half a vote to Donald Trump.

Some of you may be starting to regret these choices. Many of you will come to regret them. To you, I say, I love you, and I am here, ready to embrace you, and welcome you to stand by those of us who will actively resist. I promise not to judge you or to gloat. I promise never to say, "I told you so." I will never hold your previous actions over your head; they are forgotten. What matters is what happens next. I will make room for you.

In Love,

Brad

Yet Another Post about Safety Pins

A few days after the election, my wife and I took my daughter to the Atlanta Zoo--and I wore a safety pin on my shirt. ICYMI:

• Dear White People, Your Safety Pins Are Embarrassing
• Weighing the Symbolic Value of the Safety Pin
• Safety Pins, Awareness Ribbons, and the Challenges of New Symbols
• Safety Pins and Being an Ally

Philip Cohen had a nice retort:

How much energy are we planning to spend criticizing people for failing to show their solidarity according to our expectations?

— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) November 13, 2016

For the record, I think all four of the posts linked above raise important and valid points; all of them also err in the same way: they fail to acknowledge the radicalness of symbolic interactionism.

Symbolic interactionism, briefly stated, is the sociological theoretical perspective through which we recognize that "society" is the sum of individual, face-to-face interactions where people define and negotiate "meaning" through symbols. So, what is a symbol, you might be asking? A symbol is any relatively concrete thing that stands in for an abstract idea. Each and every pixel, letter, and word in this blog post is a symbol. The compression waves emanating from my mouth as sounds are symbols. A flag is a symbol. Indeed, a safety pin can be a symbol. In intro-level classes, I like to use pink-as-feminine as an example. Imagine you have a baby boy, dress it in pink, and introduce him to your parents. You can imagine that most parents would, at the very least, question this. You and your parents would be contesting symbolic (i.e. the color pink) meaning (i.e. masculinity/femininity). That meaning would then be negotiated with other symbols (i.e. words spoken and/or written). Typically, there would be some kind of resolution, even if only to acknowledge intractability.

The same people who argue that a safety pin is "just a symbol" would undoubtedly not make the same argument that the collection of letters, N-I-G-G-E-R are "just symbols." No, they would rightly understand the symbolic importance of the N-word, and it's power to reify and reproduce the cultural and structural impediments to equality for people of color. The same is true, in this case, of a safety pin. Words, as symbols, are powerful. The symbolic/practical bifurcation is a false dichotomy; the two are inextricably linked.

Granted, practical measures are sometimes more costly or risky than the symbolic, but often, what people present as "practical" is actually symbolic. The Civil Rights Movement gives many examples. Consider marching down a street. Many encountered violence for doing this simple action, but the action itself was not practical in that it could not directly affect change; it is definitionally symbolic--and people have died and survived by such symbols.

Let's go back to the zoo. I wore a safety pin. I saw several older white men there wearing "Make America Great Again" caps. They were doing symbolism as much as I was. They all were the objects of another symbol given off by me, a dirty look. It may not be directly material, but it is real and, quite literally, meaningful.

Why Not a Collage of Electoral Colleges?

It looks like, for the fourth time, we will end up with a president who did not win the popular vote.



The Electoral College exists because the Founders feared a popular vote could lead to winners who would represent the interests of a particular region(s) without widespread support nationally. Essentially, it was a way to control for region (or state, more accurately). For example, you could imagine a candidate who was very popular in the Northeast Megalopolis and in Southern California but unpopular everywhere between and who could easily win a popular election. This is a reasonable fear. Why stop with Regionalism, though? After all, most of us today have other aspects of our identity that outway our regional concerns. Race, class, and gender, for starters, could be controlled for. As they are becoming increasingly important, why not control for the college-educated/non-college-educated or urban/rural divides? My point is that, while the interests of the states might have been paramount in 1787, they are not today. In one way, our nation is far more culturally homogenous than could have been anticipated at the founding; in other ways, we are far more diverse than we have ever been. The Constitution has enshrined a solution to a problem that no longer exists.

I am not actually arguing for a demographically-corrected Electoral College. That would be impractical. Instead, let's just go with the popular vote for now.

Politics as Owning vs. Working

Today is Election Day here in the U.S. My wife shared an interesting perspective on the campaign with me last week that I thought I'd relate here. She likened Trump supporters to "owners" and Clinton supporters to "employees." She explained that by "owners" she meant that Trump supporters seem to feel a sense of entitlement, that the nation belongs to them. While it may have some connotations of exploitation that aren't intended in this instance, by "employees" she meant that Clinton supporters seem to feel an obligation to work for the collective good, that we're in this together. It reminded me of the famous line from Kennedy's inauguration speech when he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Core Trumpists are white men without college degrees, those who once were quite privileged but have since seen women and people of color rise to greater levels of equality and who live in a world where a high school diploma is no longer sufficient for prosperity. Core Clintonistas, on the other hand, are by definition a diverse coalition. It's not difficult to see how the former are struggling to come to terms with the challenges to their status and how that challenge can feel like a threat at the hands of the former. Owners and Workers--I think it works pretty well.

Privilege as Virtue among the Wealthy

I don't get a lot of opportunity to keep up with the podcasts I follow during the summer so I'm currently catching up on a three-month backlog. I was listening to this episode of This American Life this morning on my way to work, and I was really struck by this exchange:

Zoe Chace [5:32]: OK, so for the past six months, I've been covering the presidential election. I've been particularly interested in this group of people who are trying to get the biggest bang for their buck out of this election season--Republican donors, people who are in a rare position to put enormous sums into campaigns and watch what the money can do, people like this.

Zoe Chace: So are you a billionaire?

Doug Deason: No I'm not. My father is.

Zoe Chace: This is Doug Deason. He's a millionaire. His dad Darwin Deason is the billionaire. Years ago his dad started a computer services company and made a ton of money in the years since, rolling up and selling off companies, just money making money. Five years ago he sold it to Xerox.

Now Doug, the son, manages their money and their political strategy. Doug is the one in charge of translating money into political power. He doesn't think of himself as a donor, exactly. There's much more thought and strategy than just throwing money at a campaign. He's more like an investor. He's looking around for the best place to put their money, the best Republican place.

... 

Doug Deason [24:00]: The reason [my father spoke more than expected in our meeting with Donald Trump] is because Trump just engaged him, asked him about [his] business, how did he make his money. And they talked about--he kept complimenting down on me that I know how great it is to be able to turn something over to your kids and let them run it, let them do it, which obviously is what I do. So it's nice to be complimented, right? [empahsis added]

So, I may be misreading this, but it seems like Doug feels that acknowledging the reality that his father handed him his business and fortune is a personal compliment. This feels emblematic of the mindset of many wealthy people like Deason and Trump, who somehow rationalize their privilege and advantage as a virtue, all the while chastising the disprivileged and disadvantaged masses as lazy, undeserving losers. So disturbing!

Rationality as a Nonrational Social Position

I teach sociology to undergraduates. As a proponent of a liberal arts approach to higher education, I reject the idea that my students should memorize a series of definitions, theories, etc. Instead, I try to give my students a new way to think about the world, indeed, a new way to think. As difficult as it is to succinctly define sociology, I think that one important distinction between sociology and the other social sciences is that social interaction and behavior is fundamentally rooted in nonrationality. Economics, for example, is rooted in the assumption that, all else being equal, individuals make rational decisions. (Of course, this was not originally a statement about actual human behavior but instead a modeling assumption, but I digress.) The classic example I use in class is voting. For individuals, voting is irrational in that there are clear costs (e.g. educate oneself, travel to polls, spend time in queue, etc.) but no rewards (i.e. virtually no election is ever decided by a single vote). For the group, however, voting is necessary; if every individual acted rationally, social order would crumble, and individuals would be affected negatively. So, we need a way to encourage nonrational behavior, a way to create social rewards. We do this by making the voting process a solidarity-generating ritual, by socializing our young to think of voting as a civic duty, etc. We can apply this same sociological perspective on rational/nonrational to things like religion and crime.

Watching the political conventions these last two weeks with my wife, I have started to think about how contentious politics is of course also inherently nonrational. It's easy (I hope) to see this among many supporters of Donald Trump. Trump's political planks, where they can in fact be clearly deciphered at all, tend to be at odds with the needs of his typical supporters. Middle class white men without college degrees have actually done pretty well, and Trump's scapegoating, isolationism, regressive tax proposals, among others, will do those supporters more harm than good. Their support for Trump, though, is not about a reasoned logic valuing a candidate because of his practical ideas. Instead, since these middle class white men without college degrees "feel" like they aren't doing so well (and, even more, "feel" quite aggrieved), they irrationally support the candidate who is happy to exploit their resentments for political gain; Trump gives voice to those who have seen their privileged status slip with recent social change even as he promises more practical disadvantage than benefit.

I think that part is relatively uncontroversial, at least among sociologists, but what I started wondering about is how the relative rationality of the left fits in with the nonrational bases of the social. Lefties like me and my wife tend to understand our political position as one that is rooted in rationality. We are more likely to trust science, both natural and social, and its claims. We are more likely to be swayed by systematic evidence than emotion (even as emotion is acknowledged and respected). Does this mean, though, that we are somehow immune to the same social forces that motivate Trump supporters or is rationality itself a kind of nonrational social position? I don't know the answer to this, but I suspect that we lefties are not as different as we assume--even as political rationality is inarguably less dangerous than willful political ignorance.

Let me close with an example from outside of contentious politics that might help me better explain. A friend and I were recently discussing religion. He is a Quaker who loathes ritual, while I am an Episcopalian who laps up ritual like water in the desert. His assertion was that people should avoid ritual as a habitual distraction from the things that only rational deliberation can address. My assertion was that human beings actually don't fair so well with abstract rationality alone and require nonrationality to cement our social bonds. Perhaps what the political left can show us is that ritual devotion to rationality is itself akin to irrationality in its practice--even as it has demonstrably different practical results.

I Am Judging You, Trumpists

I've been struggling recently with the appropriate way to think about people who support and plan to vote for Donald Trump. In previous campaigns, I was much more likely to give Republican voters the benefit of the doubt and chalk their political preferences up to some combination of ignorance, self-interest, and false consciousness. That may seem condescending or even self-righteous, but while the American political Left is not without its problems, it is at least more consistently aligned with the preponderance of social scientific evidence than the American political Right. The phenomenon of the Donald Trump candidacy seems qualitatively different, though. At the risk of confirming Godwin's Law, Trump resembles, remarkably, historical examples of fascist demagogues. I am not the first to point out the following, but Trump is exploiting the same racial and economic fears and anxieties as essentially all post-Eisenhower Republicans; the difference is that while traditional Republicans had done this either unwittingly or consciously but in coded language, Trump has been far more explicit. This has made it nearly impossible for me to offer Trump supporters the same pass that I had previously been willing to extend to Republicans in the past. I find myself judging those in the "Make America Great Again" camp because of this. It is impossible for me to believe that as forthright as Trump has been in his demagoguery that his supporters could have missed it and support him despite such a platform; instead, they must be hearing him and supporting him because of those vile statements.

I would be happy to be proved wrong in my assessment. I am not comfortable passing judgment, especially on friends and family. As an exercise, try searching Facebook for "My friends who like Donald J. Trump." (Warning: you cannot un-see this list.) I have about 20 family, friends, and acquaintances who show up. I'd rather they be good people who are getting it wrong than bad people who are getting it right.

Guns Are (Likely) Coming to Georgia Higher Ed (and How Faculty Should Respond)

The stage is set for guns to be allowed on college campuses in Georgia. As I have blogged before, I have a longstanding policy of not allowing guns in my classrooms or office. As far as I am concerned, this policy will not change, regardless of the law. Nevertheless, if House Bill 859 passes the State Senate and is signed by Gov. Deal as is currently expected, guns will be allowed around me, my colleagues, and my students, which is unacceptable for two major reasons.

First, the purported spirit of HB 859, that it "is about personal safety and the ability of Georgians to defend themselves as needed," is not rooted in reality. Study after study has shown that the presence and prevalence of guns is correlated with a decrease in safety, not an increase. This is essentially settled science. At the very least, HB 859 seems to violate OSHA regulations, if not reason.

Second, our lawmakers and governor lack the courage of their own convictions as they continue to restrict firearms and other weapons from the State Capitol, the Governor's office, and the State Supreme Court, among other government buildings. If our elected officials actually do believe that permitted carriers of concealed firearms increase safety, they should move to immediately rectify the inconsistency of the law so that guns could be carried into the galleries of the House, Senate, and Supreme Court; into congresspersons' offices; and indeed, into the Governor's office. If, as I suspect, our lawmakers will refuse to allow guns in their place of work, this belies what they claim is the motivation of HB 859.

Many would note that the business of governing is a contentious matter that makes it more vulnerable to acts of violence, especially to weapons capable of mass carnage from a distance, such as firearms. I would agree, and for those same reasons, firearms also have no place in colleges and universities. My job regularly requires that I teach about and moderate discussions involving highly contentious issues, such as abortion, capital punishment, crime, climate change, gender, homosexuality, immigration, poverty, racism, religion, terrorism, war, and indeed, gun control itself. If lawmakers are uncomfortable debating these issues in the presence of guns, they should not require me, my colleagues, and students to do so.

Here is my proposal:
As professors and instructors, we should respond to HB 859 by simply taking rational steps to protect the safety of ourselves and our students, that is to hold our classes and office hours in the few remaining places where firearms are still logically not permitted, in government buildings and offices, and indeed in the State Capitol itself! By making ourselves visible in first the statehouse and then in local halls, we can draw attention to the hypocrisies noted above. We ask for nothing more than the legal consideration that governmental figures bestow on themselves.