Today in 1961, singer Jackie Wilson got a visit from a female fan who demanded to see him, enforcing said demand with a gun. Wilson was shot when he tried to disarm the fan.
The number one album today in 1964 encouraged record-buyers to “Meet the Beatles!”
Today’s blog is about a member of my family who died earlier this month. A gathering of a group of his friends is taking place Saturday, when I cannot be there due to sportscasting commitments.
Even though I come from a relatively small family, I had a lot of relatives in my parents’ generation, some of whom are still living. My father was the oldest boy in his family, and my mother was the youngest of three, so I had aunts and uncles older and younger than my parents.
On my father’s side, I have three aunts I could describe as the “cool aunts.” Two are younger than my father, and the one who is older lives in California and New Mexico, which makes her automatically cool. Whatever fashion look I got from middle school Christmas gifts came from them.
Greg was one of the uncles who married into the family. With one exception, all the uncles in my family married into the family. After I started watching movies. I decided that Greg was like having Steve McQueen as your uncle, and the uncle I’m related to was like having Burt Reynolds as your uncle. (He died in 2016.)
Greg went into the Army after high school and then the Special Forces in Vietnam, was injured there and then spent nearly a year at an Army hospital in Okinawa. He almost never talked about his Vietnam experience. He was one of those people you had to work on to get him to open up, but when you did, he could be hilarious.
He talked quite a bit about his experience immediately after Vietnam, which was three years at UW–Madison as an engineering student on the GI Bill in the height of the protests against the war in which he had just fought. Greg had a second-floor apartment on State Street, and would watch the daily antiwar protest start on the Library Mall and then proceed up State Street to the Capitol, with the protestors/mob smashing business windows along the way. He knew Paul Soglin when Soglin was a UW Law School student and a leader of the protesters.
One day, Greg went to a class. This happened to be the day of a student strike protesting the war, which was to close the campus. As he told the story, he found his access to the classroom blocked by a student who announced he couldn’t go in. Greg said he had a class. The student said he couldn’t go in. The student found out that getting in the way of an ex-Green Beret was a poor decision on the student’s part. As Greg told the story, he was the only student who actually went to class that day, which made him easy to find when the police came to arrest him for assault, which was later amended down to disorderly conduct.
My uncle and aunt lived in Auburn, N.Y., for a few years. (That was where, as Greg told the story, their motorcycle broke down.) Then they came back to Wisconsin so Greg could take over his father’s building business. Thereafter he was a stockbroker and then started a machine shop in Appleton, which made him a reader of Marketplace Magazine back in a previous life of mine. He was a fan of my work.
Greg was never a parent, so he probably didn’t really know how to deal with little kids. I do recall that he would take quarters and hold them in his fists, and my brother and I would work to get the quarters out. That was difficult, because he was a strong guy.
One of the purposes of cool uncles is for them to introduce you to activities your parents may not necessarily endorse. That included driving their truck in a field a couple of years before I was legally able to do so. A couple of decades later, in their basement following the Packers’ clinching their second consecutive Super Bowl berth, I sat in their basement and smoked the only tobacco product I have ever smoked in my life — a Cuban cigar.
Before that, he purchased a dark green 1969 Corvette. (Which replaced a Harley–Davidson motorcycle.) I’m not sure which 427 V-8 engine it had, but I do know it had the M-22 “rock crusher” four-speed manual transmission. It did not, however, have power steering or brakes. He took it out with me one day, and we reached, shall we say, extralegal speeds. And then he let me drive it. I had never driven a stick before, nor had I ever driven a car without power steering before. (They’re easier to drive while moving.) He was amazingly patient while I figured out how to take off without killing the engine. Later on he bought another one he was going to rebuild, but I don’t believe he ever finished it.
He was single-minded in his pursuit of his hobbies. The first I remember was photography. He had more lenses and filters than I previously seen in 1970s-vintage photography (before zoom lenses became a thing). He also thought it was fun to take his flash and fire it in people’s faces to temporarily blind them. Sometime later he took up pool, and then after his vision made it hard (in his opinion) to play he dropped that for piano.
They had a succession of dogs. The first I remember was Brandy, a golden retriever that might have been the best-trained dog I have ever seen. If you snapped your finger, she would stick out a front paw for a handshake. She went bird-hunting, even when she was old enough to need painkiller shots before she went out. On the day of the bicentennial Independence Day, Greg, Brandy, my dad, my brother and I all went out on the Madison lakes in a boat he owned, on one of those perfect summer days. Earlier that day our new puppy, Dolly, followed Brandy around so close that she kept getting hit in the face by Brandy’s tail.
Brandy was followed by Kelly, an Irish setter. I went out with them as he was training her, and nearly collapsed laughing when she started barking at a bulldozer blade that was just sitting in the woods. Greg thought that was less funny than I did.
About a decade later, when Mrs. Presteblog and I were living in Appleton, they went to a Caribbean island for a diving vacation. My brother was tasked with caring for Kelly and their other dog (I believe she was Susie the black-and-white setter), but he had to be out of town that weekend, so he asked me to feed them and let them out. I got to their house, and of course the dogs were overjoyed to see humans and seemed quite sad at the prospect of my leaving them alone. And so I brought them back to our house, where we had our two dogs and one cat, for the rest of the weekend.
Nick the male spaniel thought having three girl dogs around was the greatest thing ever. Puzzle the female spaniel did not agree, and decided to follow me around even more than usual out of jealousy we had never seen before from her. The cat, meanwhile, got up on our fish mounted in our loft, a place we never would have guessed she could have reached due to her girth, to stay away from the dogs while monitoring their presence. We have a photo of my feeding four dogs treats, all of them at rapt attention.
They also had, for a while, big birds. I got an introduction to one of them when he let out a macaw (Tigger, I think, was his name) and said macaw flew up onto my back, and then walked up to my shoulder.
I didn’t hunt with Greg, but cars were a common interest, as were the Packers, in their Gory Years and then in the 1990s when they returned to the top of the NFL. So was music.
One day we visited them in Richland Center. They had what appeared to be a state-of-the-then-art sound system with big speakers and a reel-to-reel tape player. For whatever reason he decided to play Chicago’s “Ballet for a Girl from Buchannon,” which included “Make Me Smile.” I had heard the latter, but not the whole thing. And never as loudly as he played it that day.
Did that make an impression? Well, I have seen Chicago four times in concert, most recently in Madison in May, with our trumpet- and trombone-playing sons.
I always looked forward to going to their house. He started presenting us with Bloody Marys you could chew and beer chasers. We watched Super Bowl XXXI there, with my parents and a group of their friends. (Afterward we decided in a snowstorm to drive to Lambeau Field, but that’s another story.)
One Sunday we decided to visit Frank’s Pizza Palace in Appleton. He wasn’t dressed for the day when we got there, and so someone made a comment about that. He didn’t say anything, but went upstairs and returned a half-hour later, wearing a suit, outdressing everyone else in the restaurant.
An even more epic night than that was Dec. 31, 1999, when the family determined the best way to depart 1999 and welcome 2000 was a course-per-hour dinner. We went along with our oldest son, who couldn’t see anything because he was four months in utero. I remember driving home after 2 a.m., listening, for one of the few times in my life, to Art Bell to see if any of the more dire predictions of Y2K were coming true. The next day — actually later that day — we drove back to watch the 2000 Rose Bowl.
These are my experiences with Greg that stand out. I hadn’t seen him for a few years after my uncle and aunt divorced. I now regret not having reached out to him since then. We’ll have to schedule a Bloody Mary you can chew sometime this weekend in his memory.
On Valentine’s Day, this song, tied to no anniversary or birthday I’m aware of, nonetheless seems appropriate …
… as does …
… and (though perhaps in a general, not romantic, sense, or if you worked at the former WLVE, “Love Stereo 95,” in the 1980s) …
… unless you have determined that …
The number two single, believe it or don’t, today in 1961:
In an unrelated development that day, Frank Sinatra began Reprise Records, which included artists beside Sinatra:
Now that Democrats have failed in their attempt to remove the president from power, it’s worth asking why they haven’t seriously considered the reverse: removing power from the president.
We have seen, over the 33 months since Donald Trump took the unusual step of firing FBI Director James B. Comey, any number of behavior-specific explanations for why the 45th president must go: For coordinating with the Kremlin, obstructing the Russia investigation, making “racist comments” about four congresswomen, saying he would accept “dirt” from foreign governments about his domestic political opponents and finally the House’s two impeachment articles: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
But what we have not seen is anything like a structural critique of ever-accumulating executive branch power itself. Democrats don’t like the way Trump uses his authority, but that doesn’t mean they want any less of the stuff in the White House, particularly when they get back the keys. To the contrary.
In his response to Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, leading presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) lamented that the tariff-happy president wasn’t being punitive enough toward American companies. “The NAFTA 2.0 deal that he recently signed,” Sanders said, “will not prevent a single corporation from shutting down factories in the United States and moving them to Mexico.”
In her official Democratic Party response, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer focused not on Trump’s monarchical gestures during the speech — granting a scholarship, promoting a veteran, presenting a Medal of Freedom on the spot, theatrically reuniting a military family — but rather, on all the things Democratic governors are accomplishing by executive fiat in defiance of their legislatures.
“Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers unilaterally increased school funding by $65 million last year,” Whitmer bragged.
A lawsuit is in the works over Evers’ illegal veto.
The Democratic presidential field, with the notable exception of faltering front-runner Joe Biden, has been engaging in a race to see who can make the most elaborate promises of immediate executive action. Forget 100 days; we’re now talking 100 hours to see what that magical Oval Office pen and phone can do.
On Day One, President Elizabeth Warren would wipe out student loans for 42 million people, ban fracking “everywhere” and block any future fossil fuel leases on public lands and offshore. We are still awaiting the full Day One list from a future President Sanders, but we know it includes an executive order to “legalize marijuana in every state in this country.”
Legalizing marijuana is a wonderful and long-overdue idea, but Sanders’ way of getting there is not. Federal law, including the odious Controlled Substances Act, is constitutionally required to originate from or be struck down by either Congress or constitutional amendment. A presidency with enough power to legalize Activity X irrespective of Congress or the desires of states is a presidency with enough power to criminalize that same activity when the other team wins. It’s a seesaw of authoritarianism, and we should all want to get off.
What’s remarkable about the personal response to Trump’s imperial actions is how completely different it is compared with the structural reaction against President Nixon’s. Democrats (and some Republicans) in the wake of Watergate went on a spree of pruning back the runaway executive branch.
The 1973 War Powers Resolution reasserted the legislative branch’s authority to declare war and approve emergency military actions. The 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act — which, fun fact, is the law Trump violated by withholding appropriated aid to Ukraine — sought to reestablish congressional power of the purse. The 1974 upgrade of the Freedom of Information Act was designed to prevent governments from hiding their activities. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was supposed to block warrantless snooping of U.S. citizens.
Even reciting the names of those reforms helps explain why anti-Trump animus has not translated into renewed skepticism of executive power. Presidents of both major parties, particularly during this century, have fought doggedly to break free from their institutional shackles. George W. Bush, with his high-ranking veterans from the Nixon administration, made rolling back the Watergate reforms a key philosophical aim. Barack Obama, after campaigning as a constitutionalist, made a mockery of war powers in Libya.
And the more tribal Congress has become, the more willing it has been to forfeit anything like the consistent application of constitutional prerogatives, particularly concerning the wielding of life-and-death military power.
For anyone who would like to once again see an independent legislature, the 99% partisan impeachment process in both chambers of Congress is cause for despair. As is the Democratic presidential field’s will to executive power. If ever America is to get off the populist seesaw, we’re going to need to root less for politicians, and more for the rules and mores than can restrain them.
The problem with Walsh’s point is: Would you rather, now, see Donald Trump with more power or Nancy Pelosi? Would you rather have, in the 1980s, seen Ronald Reagan with more power or Tip O’Neill? There is, however, an obvious flip side: Would you rather have, in the 1990s, seen Bill Clinton with more power or Newt Gingrich? Would you rather have, in the late 2010s, seen Barack Obama with more power or Paul Ryan?
The political and cultural war between red and blue America may not be settled in our lifetimes, but it’s clear which side is gaining ground in economic and demographic terms. In everything from new jobs—including new technology employment—fertility rates, population growth, and migration, it’s the red states that increasingly hold the advantage.
Perhaps the most surprising development is on the economic front. Over the past decade, the national media, and much of academia, have embraced the notion that the future belonged to the high-tax, high-regulation economies clustered on the East and West Coasts. The red states have been widely dismissed, in the words of the New York Times, as the land of the “left behind.”
Yet the left-behind are catching up, as economic momentum shifts away from coastal redoubts toward traditionally GOP-leaning states. Just a few years ago, states like California, Massachusetts, and New York held their own, and then some, in measurements of income growth from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Now the fastest growth is concentrated in the Sunbelt and Great Plains. Texans’ income in the latest 2019 BEA estimates was up 4.2 percent, well above California’s 3.6 percent and twice New York’s 2.1 percent. The largest jumps—and this may matter a lot in 2020—took place in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa.
The same pattern is visible in overall job growth. Over the past decade, only two blue states—California and Washington—ranked in the Top Ten. Last year, according to estimates by the economic-analysis firm EMSI, only purplish Colorado made the top tier, which was led by Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. These top states are now adding jobs at almost twice the rate of California and even more quickly than laggards like New York or New Jersey.
Without exception, the major blue states, even when they are doing well, usually have experienced slow population growth. Now some, notably New York, are actually losing population. California, once the growth beacon, is seeing virtually no growth: a state of almost 40 million gained a measly 50,000 residents last year.
Virtually all the states losing domestic migrants are deep blue. According to Census Bureau estimates, between 2010 and 2019, New York led the losing states, with a net domestic-migration loss of 1.379 million, followed by California (912,000), Illinois (856,000) and New Jersey (491,000). The big gainers were red, led by Florida, which gained 1.29 million, Texas (1.15 million), North Carolina (476,000), and Arizona (454,000). These states are often the destinations for blue-state refugees.
Some blue-state defenders downplay the demographic shift, though it’s real enough: much of the migration is coming as a result of more people, notably millennials, ditching metropolitan areas with large and dense urban cores to more dispersed, and more affordable, urban locations. Data developed by William Frey of the Brookings Institution indicate that all of the ten metropolitan areas with the greatest millennial net migration from 2012 to 2017 were in the South and West, while a reverse youth movement has taken place in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. As millennials enter their thirties, many are seeking to nest in states where housing prices are lower. In markets such as Columbus, Atlanta, Dallas–Fort Worth, and Houston, house prices are from one-third to one-half, adjusted for incomes, lower than those in Los Angeles or San Francisco. These migrants often seek out suburban areas with good schools and safe streets. Such areas exist in the blue states, too, but they tend to be more expensive.
Immigration flows, long a source of demographic vitality for coastal metropolitan areas, have been shifting to the interior, as Brookings has noted. From 2010 to 2018, the foreign-born population of Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, Columbus, Charlotte, Nashville, and Orlando increased by more than 20 percent, while San Francisco’s foreign-born population grew only 11 percent, and New York’s by 5 percent. Los Angeles suffered a loss of nearly 1 percent. The foreign-born are also headed in increasing numbers to unlikely locations such as North Dakota, which experienced foreign-born growth of 115 percent, and South Dakota (58 percent), while states such as Minnesota and Iowa had more than 25 percent growth.
Many urban politicians act as if talent will continue to cluster in elite places like San Francisco, New York, West Los Angeles, or Seattle, but companies seeking to recruit educated workers increasingly flock to places like Dallas–Fort Worth, Orlando, Nashville, and other affordable red-state metros. The movement of corporate offices has been particularly marked, with an estimated 1,800 firms leaving California for the Lone Star State in just one year. These companies are not just low-wage employers but high-paying firms like Toyota, Nissan, McKesson, Bechtel, Jacobs, Parsons, and Sanford Bernstein. Once a jobs magnet, California has emerged as the largest sender of jobs to Texas. Between 2000 and 2013, the Golden State was the source of more than 51,000 jobs, about one-fifth of all jobs moving to Texas. The most recent survey for Chief Executive Magazine ranks Texas, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Indiana as more business-friendly, while blue bastions California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Connecticut stood at the bottom.
The impacts on higher-wage-sector growth are evident. In the category of business and professional employment, the largest source of high-wage jobs, the biggest gains over the decade were in Utah, the Carolinas, and Texas; only blue Oregon and purple Colorado were in the top 10, which also included some surprising Midwestern states such as Missouri, Michigan, and North Dakota. Last year, the red-blue gap strengthened further, with Utah and Idaho growing almost 50 percent faster than California, and almost five times as quickly as New York or New Jersey. Even the high-tech sector, long clustered in a handful of places, gradually is moving toward red America. Over the past decade, three prominent blue states—California, New York, and Washington—ranked in the top ten, with North Carolina, Utah, and South Dakota in the lead. Last year, however, New York dropped toward the middle, while Idaho, Utah, and Tennessee took the top spots.
The process of geographic change is more like a slow, steady drip than a torrent. Such long-term trends in employment and demographics will take years, even decades to overturn. New York, California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts have been building their intellectual capital for generations, and they likely will remain preeminent in certain core industries—tech and entertainment in California, finance and media in New York and Connecticut—for the foreseeable future.
But these shifts will have consequences. New York and California depend heavily on high-income earners to fund their massive budgets, with the very rich accounting for roughly half of all income-tax revenues. When these affluent individuals saw their state and local deductions drop in 2017, they were more tempted to decamp to low-tax states like Florida. But even before the change in federal tax policy on local deductions, a Bloomberg study found Florida and South Carolina reaping multi-billion dollar gains from migration, much of it from states like Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Just in 2017 and 2018, Illinois lost over $12 billion in income due to out-migration. This year, perhaps not surprisingly, Governor Cuomo blamed New York’s fiscal challenges in part to the migration of wealthy people from the state.
California’s losses are less extreme, perhaps a testament to the power of the tech economy and the state’s beauty and mild climate. Yet rather than the rich arriving “in droves,” as the Los Angeles Times insists, more people making over $200,000 left than came, by a small margin, from 2014 to 2016, according to IRS data, even as the middle orders were leaving in large numbers. In California and other blue states, a legacy of high spending, a slowing economy, and burdensome taxes is taking its toll, particularly on the state and local budgets. Overall, despite its still-strong economy, California suffers from a significant pension burden; U.S. News places California 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
Then there are political consequences. Power has been shifting out of the Northeast for decades, and the area, which in 1950 had 115 members of the House, now has 78, down one-third. California, waxing for well over a century, is now growing below the national average, and is likely to lose a seat. Meantime, red states will probably gain seats. Texas is expected to pick up three seats; Florida two seats; and Arizona, Colorado, Montana, and North Carolina one each.
Of course, changes in Washington could alter this trajectory. Widespread endorsement by Democratic candidates to ban fracking in places like Texas, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania could drive these states into recession. In Texas alone, by some estimates, 1 million jobs would vaporize, while nationwide, according to a Chamber of Commerce report, a full ban would cost 14 million jobs—far more than the 8 million lost in the Great Recession.
Policies that will raise energy prices and regulate manufacturing could harm states like Utah, Nevada, and Michigan, where industrial workforces have expanded during the past decade. By contrast, such policies will have little direct effect on states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, or California, where manufacturing employment has either declined or stagnated.
But if the current stalemate in Washington continues, we can expect the economic, demographic, and political shift from blue to red states to continue—and even accelerate. It can only be reversed, or slowed, when the political and business leadership in blue states finally recognize that their current policies are, economically and demographically, unsustainable.
Notice that Wisconsin is not listed in this piece. Too much blue.
The number one R&B single today in 1961 was Motown Records’ first million-selling single:
The number one single today in 1972:
Birthdays begin with that well known recording star Lorne Greene:
The, uh, interesting week last week prompted two writers I read to proclaim we’re in a crisis.
First, David French:
I thought—after federal officials let Jeffrey Epstein kill himself in prison—that I could no longer be shocked by incompetence. Yet, here I am, the day after the Iowa caucuses, shocked again. Also today, some thoughts on how Twitter creates its own reality, and we can’t do anything to stop it. Today’s French Press:
- Iowa’s meltdown is a perfect representation of a true national challenge.
- The human reason Twitter (or something like it) will always have too much influence.
If you follow my writing at all, you know that I think that policy is far less consequential to American life than culture. Now, that doesn’t mean at all that politics or policy are irrelevant or that they don’t influence culture to some extent, but if we’re weighing the relative importance of American culture versus American policy to the health of the nation, our culture is far, far more consequential.
And here’s a cultural reform of great potential consequence—let’s make America competent again. As I type this newsletter, we still have no official results from the Iowa caucuses. And the story of the meltdown is simply excruciating. Here’s how the New York Times begins its account:
DES MOINES — Sean Bagniewski had seen the problems coming.
It wasn’t so much that the new app that the Iowa Democratic Party had planned to use to report its caucus results didn’t work. It was that people were struggling to even log in or download it in the first place. After all, there had never been any app-specific training for this many precinct chairs.
So last Thursday Mr. Bagniewski, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Polk County, Iowa’s most populous, decided to scrap the app entirely, instructing his precinct chairs to simply call in the caucus results as they had always done.
The only problem was, when the time came during Monday’s caucuses, those precinct chairs could not connect with party leaders via phone. Mr. Bagniewski instructed his executive director to take pictures of the results with her smartphone and drive over to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters to deliver them in person. She was turned away without explanation, he said.
The app didn’t work. The phones failed. The county couldn’t even deliver the results in person. And then, compounding the errors, the Iowa Democratic Party couldn’t clearly explain what went wrong. David Axelrod’s tweet was blunt and absolutely correct:
The Iowa Democratic Party will eventually announce the winner …
But let’s back up for a moment and imagine an alternative history of the United States. In this alternative history, we simply ask what would be different if American politicians, journalists, election officials, bureaucrats, and captains of industry were simply better at their jobs—in matters large and small.
What are the ripple effects if Palm Beach County election officials designed a less-confusing ballot for the 2000 election? How does America change if our intelligence agencies were more accurate in their assessment of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs? Or, if we still failed on that front, how is our nation different if military and civilian leaders had not made profound mistakes at the start of the Iraq occupation?
We can do this all day. Let’s suppose for a moment that industry experts were better able to gauge the risks of an expanding number of subprime mortgage loans. . Would we be more trusting of government if it could properly launch a health care website, the most public-facing aspect of the most significant social reform in a generation? How can we accurately judge foreign threats if ISIS is dubbed a “jayvee team” the very year that it explodes upon the world stage and creates the largest jihadist state in modern history?
The ripple effects of incompetence are staggering. It’s easy to mislabel or misunderstand it as malice, especially when a person feels the sting of its consequences. And when the incompetence is particularly egregious, conspiracy theories can flourish. I mean, are we supposed to believe that federal officials wouldn’t keep close watch on the most famous prisoner in the entire federal prison system? Really? At a time when the media is reporting establishment Democratic alarm at the rise of Bernie Sanders, are we supposed to believe that the abject failure of that same establishment when Bernie is on the cusp of a potentially game-changing victory is entirely accidental and innocent? Really? Even after 2016?
In a time of negative polarization, “they can’t do their job” turns into “they hate me” and—ultimately—“their job is to screw me over.”
America will never be free of mistakes, and the more difficult and complex the job, the greater the likelihood of confusion and failure. But perhaps America’s political and journalistic class needs a bit of a course correction—instead of measuring virtue by ideas and intentions, let’s place a greater emphasis on execution and accountability. No one is entitled to a job. No state is entitled to its premier position in presidential primary contests. Incompetence has consequences, and those consequences should not be borne exclusively (or, if possible, even primarily) by its victims.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. The work ethic in this country has slipped as workers bitch about their bosses (sometimes justifiably), badly run businesses get government bailouts (see General Motors), and a certain political party believes all businesses are crooks, and acts upon that belief.
Arthur Brooks made these comments at Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast:
As you have heard, I am not a priest or minister. I am a social scientist and a university professor. But most importantly, I am a follower of Jesus, who taught each of us to love God and to love each other.
I am here today to talk about what I believe is the biggest crisis facing our nation — and many other nations — today. This is the crisis of contempt — the polarization that is tearing our society apart. But if I do my job in the next few minutes, I promise I won’t depress you. On the contrary, I will show you why I believe that within this crisis resides the best opportunity we have ever had, as people of faith, to lift our nations up and bring them together.
As leaders, you all know that when there is an old problem, the solution never comes from thinking harder in the old ways; we have to think differently — we need an epiphany. This is true with societal problems and private problems.
Here’s an example of the latter: I have three kids, and two are still teenagers. (Pray for me.) Two years ago, when my middle son, Carlos, was a senior in high school, my wife, Ester, and I were having a rough parent-teacher conference. It was his grades. This was an old problem which we had tried everything to solve, but we were getting nowhere. We left the conference in grim silence and got in the car. Ester finally broke the silence.
“We need to see this problem in a whole new way,” she said.
“I’m all ears, sweetheart,” I answered, “because I’m at the end of my rope.”
“At least we know he’s not cheating,” she said.
See, that’s thinking differently! And that’s the spirit in which I want to address the problem of political contempt.
(By the way, in case you’re wondering what happened to Carlos: Currently he’s in Parris Island, S.C., at boot camp for the U.S. Marine Corps. We couldn’t be prouder of him.)
To start us on a path of new thinking to our cultural crisis, I want to turn to the words of the ultimate original thinker, history’s greatest social entrepreneur, and as a Catholic, my personal Lord and Savior, Jesus. Here’s what he said, as recorded in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, chapter 5, verse 43-45: You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”
Love your enemies! Now that is thinking differently. It changed the world starting 2,000 years ago, and it is as subversive and counterintuitive today as it was then. But the devil’s in the details. How do we do it in a country and world roiled by political hatred and differences that we can’t seem to bridge?
First, we need to make it personal. I remember when it became personal for me.
I give about 150 speeches a year and talk to all kinds of audiences: conservative, progressive, believers, atheists and everything in between. I was speaking one afternoon some years ago to a large group of politically conservative activists. Arriving early to the event, I looked at the program and realized I was the only non-politician on the program.
At first I thought, “This is a mistake.” But then I remembered that there are no mistakes — only opportunities — and started thinking about what I could say that would be completely different than the politicians. The crowd was really fired up; the politicians were getting huge amounts of applause. When it was my turn to speak, in the middle of my speech, here’s more or less what I said:
“My friends, you’ve heard a lot today that you’ve agreed with — and well you should. You’ve also heard a lot about the other side — political liberals — and how they are wrong. But I want to ask you to remember something: Political liberals are not stupid, and they’re not evil. They are simply Americans who disagree with you about public policy. And if you want to persuade them — which should be your goal — remember that no one has ever been insulted into agreement. You can only persuade with love.”
It was not an applause line.
After the speech, a woman in the audience came up to me, and she was clearly none too happy with my comments. “You’re wrong,” she told me. “Liberals are stupid and evil.”
At that moment, my thoughts went to … Seattle. That’s my hometown. While my own politics are conservative, Seattle is arguably the most politically liberal place in the United States. My father was a college professor; my mother was an artist. Professors and artists in Seattle … what do you think their politics were?
That lady after my speech wasn’t trying to hurt me. But when she said that liberals are stupid and evil, she was talking about my parents. I may have disagreed with my parents politically, but I can tell you they were neither stupid nor evil. They were good, Christian people, who raised me to follow Jesus. They also taught me to think for myself — which I did, at great inconvenience to them.
Political polarization was personal for me that day, and I want to be personal to you, too. So let me ask you a question: How many of you love someone with whom you disagree politically?
Are you comfortable hearing someone on your own side insult that person?
This reminds me of a lesson my father taught me, about moral courage. In a free society where you don’t fear being locked up for our opinions, true moral courage isn’t standing up to the people with whom you disagree. It’s standing up to the people with whom you agree — on behalf of those with whom you disagree. Are you strong enough to do that? That, I believe, is one way we can live up to Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies.
Let’s take a step back now and diagnose the problem a little bit.
Some people blame our politicians, but that’s too easy. It’s us, not them — I am guilty. And frankly, I know many politicians, many of them here today, who want a solution to this problem every bit as much as I do.
What is leading us to this dark place that we don’t like?
The problem is what psychologists call contempt. In the words of the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, contempt is “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.” In politics today, we treat each other as worthless, which is why our fights are so bitter and cooperation feels nearly impossible.
The world’s leading expert on marital reconciliation is Dr. John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington. Over the course of his work, Dr. Gottman has studied thousands of married couples. After watching a couple interact for just one hour, he can predict with 94 percent accuracy whether the couple will divorce within three years.
How can he tell? It’s not from the anger that the couples express. As I already told you, anger doesn’t predict separation or divorce. The biggest warning signs, he explains, are indicators of contempt. These include sarcasm, sneering, hostile humor and — worst of all — eye-rolling. These little acts effectively say, “You are worthless” to the one person a spouse should love more than any other. Want to see if a couple will end up in divorce court? Watch them discuss a contentious topic and see if either partner rolls his or her eyes.
Why do they do that? The answer is that it’s a habit, and that habit is tearing their marriage apart. And like a couple on the rocks, in politics today, we have a contempt habit. Don’t believe it? Turn on prime-time cable TV and watch how they talk. Look at Twitter — if you dare. Listen to yourself talking about a politician you don’t like. We are guilty of contempt.
It’s a habit, and it’s tearing our society apart.
How do we break the habit of contempt? Even more, how do we turn the contempt people show us into an opportunity to follow the teachings of Jesus, to love our enemies?
To achieve these things, I’m going to suggest three homework assignments.
First: Ask God to give you the strength to do this hard thing — to go against human nature, to follow Jesus’ teaching and love your enemies. Ask God to remove political contempt from your heart. In your weakest moments, maybe even ask Him to help you fake it!
Second: Make a commitment to another person to reject contempt. Of course you will disagree with others — that’s part of democracy. It is right and good, and part of the competition of ideas. But commit to doing it without contempt and ask someone to hold you accountable to love your enemies.
Third: Go out looking for contempt, so you have the opportunity to answer it with love. I know that sounds crazy, to go looking for something so bad. But for leaders, contempt isn’t like the flu. It’s an opportunity to share your values and change our world, which is what leadership is all about, isn’t it?
I’m asking you to be kind of like a missionary. I’ve had missionaries on both sides of my family, and they are amazing entrepreneurs. They don’t go out looking for people who already agree with them, because that’s not where they are needed — they go to the dark places to bring light. It’s hard work, and there’s lots of rejection involved. (Here are words that have never been uttered: “Oh good, there are missionaries on the porch.”) But it’s the most joyful type of work, isn’t it?
I’m calling each one of you to be missionaries for love in the face of contempt. If you don’t see enough of it, you’re in an echo chamber and need a wider circle of friends — people who disagree with you. Hey, if you want a full blast of contempt within 20 seconds, go on social media! But run toward that darkness, and bring your light.
My sisters and brothers, when you leave the National Prayer Breakfast today and go back to your lives and jobs, you will be back in a world where there is a lot of contempt. That is your opportunity. So I want you to imagine that there is a sign over the exit as you leave this room. It’s a sign I’ve seen over the doors of churches — not the doors to enter, but rather the doors to leave the church. Here’s what it says:
You are now entering mission territory.
If you see the world outside this room as mission territory, we might just mark this day, Feb. 6, 2020, at the National Prayer Breakfast, as the point at which our national healing begins.
God bless you, and God bless America.
Well, someone has to go first. Think that’s going to happen in Washington or Madison?
Today in 1964 — one year to the day after recording their first album — the Beatles made their first U.S. concert appearance at the Washington Coliseum in D.C.:
The number one album today in 1969, “More of the Monkees,” jumped 121 positions in one week:
Today in 1972, Pink Floyd appeared at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, during their Dark Side of the Moon tour.
The concert lasted 25 minutes until the power went out, leaving the hall as bright as the dark side of the moon.
In 1964, an optimistic theory was slain, as such theories often are, by reality. Bernie Sanders’s supporters should take note. So should all who are interested in rethinking how the parties choose presidential nominees.
The “conservatives in the woodwork” theory was: Millions of conservatives, bored by centrist presidential candidates, skipped elections but would pour out of the woodwork and into polling places if offered “a choice, not an echo.” So, conservative Republicans achieved the nomination of Barry Goldwater, who then lost 44 states, partly because those swarms of nonvoting conservatives were mostly fictitious. A conservative majority had to be patiently made, which took 16 years.
Goldwater understood that after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a distraught nation would not choose to have a third president in 14 months. But he also thought that his candidacy could make his party markedly more conservative. If Sanders has a “socialists in the woodwork” theory, he is daft. But some Sanders supporters might think a second Donald Trump term is an acceptable price to pay for a Sanders nomination that moves his party as dramatically leftward as Goldwater’s nomination moved his party rightward.
The nation, however, needs a nominating process that minimizes the probability of kamikaze candidacies and maximizes the probability of selecting plausible presidents. Hence it needs a retreat from the populist idea that the voice of the people is easy to ascertain and should be translated, unmediated and unrefined, directly into nominee selection. Populism has been embraced by both parties since 1968, when Hubert Humphrey won the Democrats’ nomination without entering any primaries. (Although a switch of about 300,000 November votes spread over four states would have made him president.)
(Side note: Nostalgic liberals say that Sirhan Sirhan took away Robert Kennedy’s chance of becoming president by shooting him. CBS’ coverage of Kennedy’s assassination was preceded by a report from Mike Wallace saying that, based on the information CBS was able to gather, Humphrey was likely to have already locked up the nomination, regardless of the California primary results. Humphrey did not himself run in primaries because by the time Lyndon Johnson said he would not seek and he would not accept the nomination of his party as your president the deadlines to enter the primaries had passed, though stand-in candidates did run on his behalf.)
In 1972, Democrats made their process more plebiscitary — more primaries, less influence for political professionals — to elicit and echo the vox populi. This, however, produced a nominee favored by the party’s most intense minority, the anti-Vietnam War cohort: South Dakota Sen. George McGovern lost 49 states. Twelve presidential election cycles later, both parties are still uncomfortably holding the populist wolf by the ears.
Political scientist Raymond J. La Raja and Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution recommend a recalibration. They do not favor what political realities would not permit: abandoning primaries. (La Raja and Rauch prefer them to caucuses, which are more susceptible to capture by the elderly and those “for whom politics is a passion.”) Rather, they recommend leavening mass participation with vetting by professionals — “political careerists with skin in the game” serving as gatekeepers or quality-control evaluators of candidates before the primaries begin. “In 2018, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee worked aggressively to weed out weak and extreme candidates in swing districts.”
Doing something similar in presidential politics is difficult. The process has no gatekeepers: Remember the 2012 cycle, when Herman Cain had his 15 minutes as a front-runner? Misguided campaign finance regulations have diverted money away from experienced parties to unseasoned groups with minority agendas. The 2016 process illustrated the difficulty of aggregating voters’ preferences when there are many candidates: A demagogic charlatan won without winning a majority of primary votes until after the nomination was effectively settled. Sanders’s success so far this year demonstrates La Raja and Rauch’s warning that in a congested field of candidates, many will shun coalition-building in favor of wooing purists.
In 1924, the parties’ professionals blocked the presidential ambitions of industrialist Henry Ford, a racist and anti-Semite. In 1976, Democratic insiders helped clear the field in Florida’s presidential primary to enable Jimmy Carter to end the candidacy of the racist George Wallace. Today, however, the power of party professionals is negligible compared with that of the media. They prefer flamboyant political showhorses to transactional, coalition-building workhorses, and become accomplices of fringe candidates and combative amateurs.
La Raja and Rauch suggest various “filters” by political professionals to mitigate the “democracy fundamentalism” of today’s nomination process: e.g., more political professionals as “superdelegates” eligible to vote on conventions’ first ballots; pre-primary votes of confidence in candidates by members of Congress and governors; “abolishing or dramatically increasing” contribution limits to the parties. But a precondition for all improvement is, they acknowledge, “to change the mindset that regards popular elections as the only acceptable way to choose nominees.”
Limiting and influencing voters’ choices by involving professional politicians early in the nomination process would require risk-averse political professionals to go against today’s populist sensibility. But if this November the choice is between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the professionals might consider letting go of the wolf’s ears.
Blogger Ann Althouse wrote last year:
Why are Democrats having such a hard time just being normal? Trump is so abnormal that it would seem that he can be defeated by simple, boring normality. But that’s not exciting enough, apparently, and Democrats have decided to go even further beyond the norm.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 