Robert David Sullivan

Nobody trusts anybody, and that's great news for authoritarians

My latest column for America magazine looks at the decline of confidence in our major political (and economic and social and religious) institutions, and why that fraying of trust is so dangerous:

What’s the worst-case scenario if trust in public institutions continues to drop? We could see the refusal to fund public schools and libraries; the snubbing of public health directives; a return to the cynical and corrupt patronage system to staff government agencies; and an ongoing characterization of the election process as tainted and therefore illegitimate—all moves to further weaken a sense of community and a concern for the common good. But it is not “bothsidesism” to fear that the left could also exploit widespread nihilism, either by coming up with a Trump-like demagogue of its own or by using the specter of resurgent Trumpism to justify its own restrictions on public speech and democracy.

Read the whole thing here.

And I've been remiss in posting them all here, but I have also had recent columns on the anti-abortion movement and anti-majority rule and on the shift in political power from the federal government to the states (and whether there is a backlash to giving state legislatures so much power).

Dear God, let me vote for someone younger than me before I die

My latest column at America magazine is about the oldsters in American politics who won't leave:

Particularly in the Democratic Party, the seniority system has helped to preserve racial and gender diversity by applying the same criterion to everyone: If you do your job, you keep your job for as long as you want it. This is why so many have been uncomfortable with the suggestions that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have retired before her death at age 87; that it might have been time for Speaker Pelosi to give up the gavel four years ago, at age 78; or that California Sen. Dianne Feinstein may not be up to the job at age 88. (After all, Strom Thurmond, a man, served until he was 100!)

Read the whole thing at America.

Replacement theory and NIMBYism have the same racist roots

I have a new column at America magazine (yes, it's been a while!) on the similarities between the "Great Replacement Theory" so popular on Fox News and the "not in my backyard" opposition to new housing that can be found in even the most liberal and Democratic areas. An excerpt:

Variants of the great replacement theory have been present on a smaller scale in towns and in neighborhoods all over the United States, including in deep-blue Democratic areas. You can find it wherever people say that new housing, inseparable from the new people it would attract, would ruin the “character” of their community. Or when environmentalists adopt the zero-sum logic of the great replacement theory to argue that any population growth in an area represents harm to the people already living there.

You can read the whole thing here.

14 maps on how the Democrats and Republicans carved up America

My newest project at America magazine details when each county in the U.S. adopted its current political hue.

From the intro:

If this year’s presidential election is at all competitive, we will see the major candidates zero in on a handful of “battleground” states and ignore most of the United States. The red-versus-blue electoral map has changed little since achieving iconic status in 2000; all but 10 states have repeated their choice of party three times. A slight majority of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States have voted the same way over the past seven elections; at the county level, the current red-versus-blue map was mostly written by 1988, when the first president Bush defeated Michael Dukakis.

Mitt Romney won 2,090 counties by at least 10 points, and President Obama won 468 counties (mostly larger and more urban) by at least 10 points—leaving 557 counties that could be considered “purple” by the most generous definition. It would take a landslide this fall to shake many of the counties out of their decades-old voting habits. The maps below illustrate how the current political map has evolved over the past century, showing when each country slipped into the groove it inhabited in 2012. 

See the entire project here.

Truthiness and a summing up of the Obama presidency

I've been remiss in posting here, but busy at my paying job at America magazine. I wrote the cover story in our next print edition (not the one at right, but that's a good one too!), on the "15 Ways President Obama has changed the direction of America." I also have a column on Donald Trump as the "truthiness" candidate. Excerpt: 

The fact-free candidate is now poised to take the Republican presidential nomination, and some see his rise as an indictment of American journalism. But Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post does not accept the premise of a negligent press corps. “One of the most frequent complaints I hear,” he writes, “is that ‘the media doesn’t fact-check Donald Trump enough.” His response: “You are mistaking a lack of changed minds with a lack of fact-checking…. That is not a failure of fact-checking. It is the death of the belief in fact.”

 

The disappearance of jobs as a political issue and other SOTU thoughts

This week I covered the State of the Union address for my (Un)Conventional blog at America magazine. On Friday, I noted that President Obama didn't talk so much about creating jobs as about providing some financial security when jobs aren't enough. An excerpt below:

For much of the 20th century, the Democratic Party made “full employment” one of its primary policy goals (the term was in party platforms from 1944 through 1988). But that was when a large share of the workforce belonged to labor unions, which fought against lay-offs and lobbied for such benefits as health insurance and sick days. Now the idea that you can achieve financial security by simply landing a job is as quaint as the notion of starting a college fund with a paper route.

The Republican Party may try to dismiss Obama’s “middle-class economics” as nothing more than prophylactics against financial risk. Instead of subsidizing child care for working parents, why not encourage more Americans to make money by starting their own businesses or investing in the stock market? Opportunity, not financial security, has long been the GOP brand.

But even Republicans are feeling pressure to save the middle class.

On Tuesday, I previewed the speech by responding to a column by Ron Fournier on how Obama has "squandered" the opportunity “to rid the capital of pettiness and gridlock." An excerpt below:

The shaming frenzies around smart alecs from Harvard and MIT

One of the biggest stories in Boston this week, which quickly spread to national media, is about a Harvard Business School instructor nagging a Chinese restaurant for being overcharged $4. While not directly about politics, the Case of the Shredded Chicken with Extra Price is a fine illustration of how easy it is to shape and set public opinion in a few hours. It’s also an example of the anti-intellectualism, and hostility toward scientific inquiry, that course through American society.

Boston.com broke the story on Tuesday, publishing emails in which associate professor Ben Edelman complained about being charged $1 more than the website price for each take-out item he ordered from the Sichuan Garden. Edelman wrote at least five emails, getting more verbose and lawyerlike as he went on. (“I have already referred this matter to applicable authorities in order to compel your restaurant to identify all consumers affected…”)

Read my blog (Un)Conventional Wisdom at America magazine for more on politics, demographics and civic life. Recent posts include "Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the Perversity of Political Triage" and "How Big Can America Get Before Its Political System Starts to Buckle?"

 

Parks & Recreation, Veep, and the politics of the sitcom

This week NBC announced that the final season of Parks and Recreation will begin on January 13. I wrote about Parks, Veep, and other TV shows about politics for America magazine in November ("Uncivil Society"). Below is a longer version of that essay. Please check out my ongoing blog at America's website; today's post looks at how pop-culture obsessions like Serial and True Detective are now paralleled in political journalism and news coverage of events like the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Fifteen years after the premiere of The West Wing, there are more TV shows about politics than ever before, with Scandal among the biggest hits on broadcast television and a half-dozen others in production on various platforms, including Netflix and Amazon. But the trend is not likely to boost interest in this fall’s real-life elections.

It turns out that the key to a successful TV show about politics is to take out the policy. Public officials can hold our interest only if they’re not able to do much of anything. Passing legislation and delivering social services aren’t as dramatic, or as funny, as scheming and outwitting opponents just to stay in office.

The cynical approach to politics is to be expected on series that rely on thrills and plot twists, but sitcoms have not always been so dismissive toward taking an interest in one’s larger community. It was only after the sitcom got hard-edged that politics became an attractive topic.

The rise and fall of empathy

At its peak in the 1970s, the American sitcom was all about empathy. All in the Family teaches the virtues of tolerance, and M*A*S*H attacks the dehumanization necessary to wage war. On the police comedy Barney Miller, the arrestees have stories that would challenge anyone’s “lock ’em up” attitude; the psychology patients on The Bob Newhart Show just need to know they aren’t alone; and on Taxi even people in New York City, including Jeffrey Tambor as a congressman who clumsily pursues cabbie Elaine, usually turn out to be decent souls.

Are Democats waging a "war on suburbia"?

No, but resentment toward prosperous big cities may be a problem for the Democrats in 2016, as I argue in my new post at America magazine. First, I tackle the silly theories of sprawl proponent Joel Kotkin:

Kotkin, a longtime opponent of smart-growth policies and champion of scare quotes, writes of the Democrats, “The progressive ‘clerisy’ and their developer allies may wish to destroy the suburban dream, but they will not be able to stay in office for long with such attitudes.” He argues that the Obama administration is alienating most voters by giving grants to urban developers and funding public transit as part of a “vision of getting Americans out of their suburban homes and cars and into apartments and trains.”

There may indeed be a backlash against Democrats outside of major cities, for reasons I’ll get to, but Kotkin’s theory doesn’t really make sense. Except for those in the construction and real estate industries, voters who already live in suburbia tend to oppose new housing (and traffic) near them, and I don’t know why they would object to squeezing more people into cities. If Kotkin is correct, urban dwellers should be angry at Democrats for not helping them to move out.

A new way to get compact (or anal-retentive) congressional districts

The Washington Post's Christopher Ingraham reports on a software engineer in Boston who's come up with a program to draw "optimally compact" congressional districts in each state, instead of the weirdly appendaged districts we now see all over America.

Brian Olson's new districts are pretty. The goal of making them as close in population as possible (with variations of only a few hundred voters within each state) results in paintbrush-like lines rather than the hard edges that would come from following county boundaries. Some of the new maps look like tubs of Neopolitan ice cream.

Recent writing: The Odd Couple, Veep, and the Koch brothers

I'd be delighted, and ever-so-slightly monetized, if you'd check out my recent work at the A.V. Club and America magazine.

The A.V. Club's "TV Club 10" feature has my appreciation of the 1970s sitcom The Odd Couple, and in particular Tony Randall's performance as Felix:

Randall adds the “manic” to Felix’s depression, and the character crashes hard whenever his enthusiasm leads him astray. (“You always go too far,” Oscar says near the end of several episodes.) Felix can be described as a prototype for the ’90s metrosexual—he must have been a pioneering consumer of moisturizers for men—but his character is even more predictive of how chatty society would become about anxieties and neuroses. In his less hyperactive moments, Felix is candid about his hang-ups (to use a word from his era), a trait that bewilders Oscar but would be considered normal today.

Also at the A.V. Club, my review of the third-season opener of the HBO political comedy Veep:

Veep is can be seen as an argument for libertarianism, since it scrupulously avoids presenting any public official as being concerned with anything other than holding onto power. Last season, for example, the show gleefully revealed that one of Selina’s principal rivals, war hero Danny Chung, was just as petty—but even less disciplined—than the vice president. At the same time, the Mayberry Machiavellians of Veep (to steal a phrase from an appointee of George W. Bush disillusioned by the constant political strategizing in the White House) don’t seem to have much influence over how the country actually runs. Maybe the Leslie Knopes in local government actually help citizens, but Washington is just a sideshow.

And my regular blogging at America magazine has touched on such topics as Jeb Bush and immigration reform, the launch of Ezra Klein's Vox.com site and his musings on politics and stupidity, and the problems of relying on charity to reduce poverty.

Last week, I also wrote about the Koch brothers, big money in politics, and the ouster of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich over his donation to an anti-gay-marriage campaign in California:

Free speech was clearly the loser this time, but Mozilla seems resigned to the outcome. Andrew Sullivan has a predictably heated response: “There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged! Yep, that’s left-liberal tolerance in a nut-shell.”

As a supporter of marriage equality, I have some admiration for the lightning tactics used against Mozilla. What we have here is hardball politics as practiced by the National Rifle Association (and, yes, by the Koch brothers). The campaign against Brendan Eich is similar to the NRA’s battle against President Obama’s nominee as surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, for the sin of tweeting in favor of gun control after the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The strategy is the same: No compromise, no mercy.

 

 

Keeping children out of sight

Today's post at America magazine is about the new American taboos of children walking to school and playing on sidewalks:

For most of the year, children just aren’t as visible as they used to be, and I wonder if that has implications for how we feel about education and about social-welfare programs that disproportionately benefit children.

Read the entire post here.

Keeping up with the minimum wage

My Monday post in America magazine looks at the overwhelming support for a hike in the federal minimum wage, something that is not likely to happen in today's political climate:

Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa and Rep. George Miller of California, both Democrats, have introduced a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10—higher than any current state minimum wage—and then index it to inflation. (It would be $25 if it had kept pace with inflation since 1968.) Poll numbers notwithstanding, this has little chance of passing the GOP-controlled House of Representatives or overcoming a Republican filibuster in the Senate. It is an article of faith for conservative pundits that an increase in the minimum wage will cause employers to simply eliminate jobs. George Will differs a bit in arguing that it’s silly to raise the federal minimum wage when only 3 percent of American workers earn it, but it’s still serves as a benchmark for the 19 states that distinguish themselves by mandating a slightly higher wage, as well as for many employers that attract workers by promising a bit more than the stigmatizing $7.25 an hour.

Read the entire post here.