One of my favorite UW–Madison professors, defender of free expression Donald Downs:

James Taranto:

The New York Times’s Timothy Egan ended last week on a grumpy note, with a column bemoaning that too many Americans are “politically illiterate—and functional. Which is to say, they will vote despite being unable to accept basic facts needed to process this American life.”

Take a wild guess as to which presidential candidate Egan sees as exemplary of the trend. That’s right:

Trump, who says he doesn’t read much at all, is both a product of the epidemic of ignorance and a main producer of it. He can litter the campaign trail with hundreds of easily debunked falsehoods because conservative media has spent more than two decades tearing down the idea of objective fact.

This isn’t the first such piece to appear in the American press this year. It wasn’t the first such piece to appear on the Times op-ed page last week.William Davies, with “The Age of Post-Truth Politics,” scooped Egan by two days.

Which is marvelously rich. Neither Egan nor Davies notes that three weeks ago the Times published an article on its front page arguing that at least for the duration of the campaign, journalistic objectivity ought to give way to an openly “oppositional” approach, Donald Trump being such a danger to all that is good and holy.

Curiously, though, the author of that piece, Jim Rutenberg, and Egan have something in common beside their loathing for Trump: Both are vexed by the distinction between politics and journalism. In journalism facts are paramount, or at least are supposed to be. Rutenberg wants to change that so that journalists can be more effective political actors. Egan wishes politicians (and voters, and especially Republicans) conducted themselves more as journalists do, or at least are supposed to do.

Also richly comical is the conceit that “post-truth politics” is a Republican innovation, or indeed an innovation at all. You’ve probably heard the story of the first presidential debate in 1960. The way it’s usually told, radio listeners judged Nixon the winner, while Kennedy beat Nixon—image trumped substance—among TV viewers.

American University’s W. Joseph Campbell, on his Media Myth Alert blog, disputes that account. It would overstate the matter to say he conclusively disproves the story—that may not be possible—but he shows that its evidentiary underpinnings are scant and inconclusive.

All of which is testimony to the power of myth. And the legend of JFK does not stop with that debate in 1960. After his assassination three years later, he became an icon of liberals and Democrats, on the strength not of policies and facts but of charisma and glamour. Bill Clinton in the 1990s and Barack Obama in the 2000s were cast as latter-day Kennedys, youthful and idealistic.

Now Republicans have a charismatic nominee, albeit not a youthful one—and Democrats and liberals insist all that matters is experience, policy and facts. Fifty-six years after he lost to JFK, suddenly Nixon’s the one.

Of course it’s completely normal for partisans to rationalize on behalf of their party. But it’s a lovely irony that the rationalization for Mrs. Clinton is that she is the candidate of rationality and fact.

Is that claim true? We’d say Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are guilty of empirical overstretch. Let’s look at a recent example. Trump has been attempting to appeal to black voters, who since 1964 have supported Democrats by overwhelming margins. As noted here, it started two weeks ago in a speech at West Bend, Wis. His campaign took criticism for delivering the message in a mostly white Milwaukee suburb, and it appears to have taken the critique to heart: The Hill reports that over the weekend, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told radio host John Catsimatidis: “We’re planning on additional events in communities of color.”

Last week, as CBS’s Sopan Deb reported, Trump made his appeal again, in blunt and hyperbolic terms:

You can go to war zones in countries that we’re fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities. . . . I ask you this. Crime. All of the problems. To the African Americans who I employ so many—so many people. To the Hispanics, tremendous people—what the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I’ll straighten it out. . . . You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street. You get shot.

The Clinton campaign responded with a statement from staffer Marlon Marshall:

It could not be clearer how much African Americans have to lose under Donald Trump. He is doubling down on insults, fear and stereotypes that set our community back and further divide our country. But again this is not surprising, this is a man who questions the citizenship of the first African American president, has a disturbing pattern of courting white supremacists, and has been sued for housing discrimination against communities of color.

As demonstrated by his bigotry and actions, Donald Trump is unfit and unqualified to be President. We cannot afford this out of touch and divisive thinking in the White House, which is why we must take nothing for granted and work as hard as we can to make sure Hillary Clinton is our next president.

“Donald Trump’s new message to African American voters isn’t just inaccurate, it’s outrageous,” proclaimed Mrs. Clinton’s campaign on its website. But neither that page nor the Marshall statement offered a single fact in support of the claim that Trump’s assertion about the conditions of inner cities was inaccurate. The rejoinder was pure ad hominem—an enumeration of objectionable things Trump had (actually or allegedly) said or done before.

To be sure, the ultimate question in an election campaign is which candidate voters should prefer, so that in the big picture ad hominem arguments are relevant. But they are not relevant to the particular claim Trump was making here.

The openly and notoriously anti-Trump New York Times offered a more sophisticated rebuttal. “The unrelievedly dire picture [Trump] has painted of black America has left many black voters angry, dumbfounded or both,” reported Richard Fausset, Alan Blinder and John Eligon in Thursday’s paper. “Interviews with roughly a dozen blacks here [in Atlanta] turned up no one who found any appeal in Mr. Trump’s remarks.”

This passage caught our attention:

Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, said that black Americans faced challenges, but that Mr. Trump’s depiction of a hopeless, violent black America did not match reality.

“It’s an inaccurate portrayal of the community that seeks to define the community by only its biggest challenges,” Mr. Morial said. “Black America has deep problems—deep economic problems—but black America also has a large community of striving, successful, hard-working people: college educated, in the work force.”

That gave us a hunch, which we confirmed in seconds using the great hunch-verifying machine Google. This is from a New Orleans Times-Picayune story dated May 17, 2016:

For 40 years the National Urban League has documented the great divide between the social and economic prosperity of white and black Americans. And for 40 years the story has remained much the same, said Marc Morial, the league’s president and CEO.

Black people continue to trail white residents in every category the league tracks, presenting “a persistent racial disparity in American life,” that might as well equate to a reversal of fortune for strides toward equality made after the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, he said.

“The similarities of the United States of 1976 and the United States of 2016 are profoundly striking,” Morial said. “We are now, as we were then, a nation struggling to overcome the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression. All gears have been thrown into reverse.”

That’s quite a change in three months!

But what changed, exactly? Surely not the underlying facts. Probably some annual statistics were updated between May and August, but we are unaware of any that showed a sudden and dramatic improvement. In any case, social change is a slow process. A sudden change could be the start of a long-term trend, or it could be a mere anomaly.

It’s possible that Morial’s knowledge of the facts has expanded in the past three months. But it seems unlikely. He is an expert on the condition of black America, and as such he undoubtedly knew almost as much about the subject in May as he knows today.

The likeliest explanation is the obvious one: Trump’s challenging words prompted Morial to change the way he thinks about the same set of facts. Now he accentuates the positive, and he frames the problems of black America as “challenges” rather than grievances.

That can make a big difference. To see why, think about your own life. Remember a time when you had a problem that began as a justified grievance. Perhaps the passage of time wore down your anger, or maybe somebody said something startling that led you to an epiphany. Either way, you solved the problem by changing the way you thought about it.

The facts mattered far less than your attitude toward them. That’s often true in politics as well.

As with Barack Obama, there is more than enough reason to object to Trump without making up things. And to say that  Hillary Clinton speaks the undisputed truth is a triumph of amnesia.

Alexandra DeSantis:

It has been nearly 80 years since the progressive movement began its attempt to alleviate systemic poverty with federal action: first, in the 1930s, via Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” and then, in the 1960s, via Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society.” But judging by today’s landscape, neither vision has proven adequate to the task. Today, government at both the federal and state level spends a combined $1 trillion per year on programs meant to help low-income Americans. Over the last half-century, an estimated $16 trillion has been spent in this manner. And yet, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the official poverty rate in 2014 was 14.8 percent, no better than it was in 1966.

In a recent column for National Review Online, Florida senator Marco Rubio offered a possible reason for anti-poverty programs’ lack of success: “Where liberals see the world of individual and state — that individual needs must be met by an ever-expanding, top-down government — conservatives have the opportunity to promote a vision of society that embraces community-driven, grassroots solutions.”

Most leftists would have voters believe that all conservatives despise the poor and are desperate to end entitlement programs so that they can funnel more government money to big businesses. But as many Republican leaders have proven through their efforts, the GOP’s locally oriented approach is often more successful at lifting people out of poverty than are expansive welfare programs.

One such leader, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, is a staunch advocate of community-based solutions to poverty and unemployment. Moreover, in attesting to the value of local anti-poverty efforts, Johnson can point to his considerable firsthand experience. After traveling around Wisconsin during his first five years as senator — he was elected in 2010, in the wave of tea-party enthusiasm that brought many new conservative faces to Congress — Johnson realized that despite the high levels of unemployment in metropolitan areas such as Milwaukee and Madison, manufacturers across his state still had thousands of unfilled jobs. And so, seeking to solve both problems at once, Johnson partnered with a Milwaukee-area church to institute the Joseph Project, a program that recruits and trains impoverished people, connects them to potential employers, and supports their subsequent careers.

In Milwaukee, where the recent shooting death of a black man prompted three days of riots, it is easy to see why low-income black people are dissatisfied with their situation and ready for new solutions. Wisconsin had the worst socioeconomic conditions in the country for African Americans in 2015, with black unemployment hovering around 20 percent, as well as a high quotient of violence, illegal drug usage, and failing schools. And the unemployment rate for blacks in Milwaukee was four times higher than that of white Americans in the city.

In the face of this untenable situation — one mirrored in most metropolitan areas across the country — Johnson and his staff teamed up with Pastor Jerome Smith Sr., of the Greater Praise Church of God in Christ, to provide unemployed people in Milwaukee, usually African Americans with a history of incarceration or drug and alcohol abuse, with a hopeful path out of poverty and crime.

The project was “a coming together of concepts, of the knowledge that you have all this job opportunity and yet so many people are trapped in that cycle of dependency, despair, and poverty,” Johnson told NRO.

According to Smith, the idea for the project arose after he and several other pastors visited the Sheboygan Economic Development Corporation about an hour’s drive from Milwaukee, a visit facilitated by Orlando Owens, who was serving as director of African-American outreach for the Wisconsin GOP and who later joined Johnson’s staff. It became clear during this trip that a number of corporations had unfilled manufacturing jobs, while Smith knew of countless people in the Milwaukee area who were looking for work.

On the drive back, the Joseph Project was born. Two weeks later, Smith, Johnson, and members of Johnson’s staff conducted the inaugural training session with a class of 14 individuals. Now, almost a year on, nearly 140 people have received job interviews; more than 80 of them have received job offers, and about 60 have maintained employment since.

For each session, Smith identifies about 60 people through his church who are looking for work; he then interviews them to select ten or twelve who are most committed to contributing the effort needed to succeed. Each week-long session takes place in the Greater Praise church building and teaches participants soft skills such as time management and spiritual fitness, as well as how to interview. So far, the Joseph Project has held twelve sessions, and as the program has developed, successful graduates have returned to speak to each new class about the importance of hard work.

Johnson himself has attended nearly every session to give an orientation pep talk. “Having been an employer myself, I tell them the most important attribute to exhibit in an interview is a good attitude,” Johnson said, “and the fact that you want to help the organization succeed.”

Smith gave an analogy to explain Johnson’s essential role in the initiation and continuation of the Joseph Project. “Senator Johnson . . . goes out and kicks open the door by talking to manufacturing companies, and he convinces them that we’re the type of organization that they should be taking employees from,” Smith said.

Smith and the staff members running the program then work to keep that “door” open. “It’s like a big fire door,” Smith explained. “The people trying to close the door are the people in the program who don’t show up for the van on time, who don’t show up for class, who call in sick to work.” …

Both Smith and Johnson stress the dignity that stems from being able to provide for oneself and the crucial role this dignity plays in the Joseph Project’s success stories. One young man, Trayvonn Brown, said in a video that the Joseph Project taught him the distinction between a job and a career. “A job is something where you just work to get by,” Brown explained. “A career is something you do with your life, something that you like. So, I’m trying to find a career.”

“This program shows that local control and local involvement, as well as a faith-based approach, actually work, and we can provide the pilot to have this grow into something bigger nationally,” Johnson said. “I’m not just doing this because I’m a United States senator. . . . I’m trying to use my position here to highlight a success and provide an example for others to follow.”

He also noted that the tremendous government resources poured into anti-poverty efforts have not paid off as anticipated: “There were 29 million poor Americans when the War on Poverty started, now there are 46 or 47 million. The evidence is clear that when we outsource our compassion to the federal government, it hasn’t worked.”

The senator feels strongly, too, that support for local efforts such as the Joseph Project shouldn’t be confined to one political perspective. “There’s no one political party that has a monopoly on compassion,” he said. “We all want our fellow citizens to succeed and to have the opportunity to do so.”

He shot back at those who would accuse Republicans of lacking compassion for impoverished Americans, accusations often based on the fact that conservatives tend to support welfare or entitlement reform. “The charges that Republicans are uncaring are just false. The Joseph Project proves that I certainly care about each of my constituents.”

“This [project] has crossed political parties,” Smith agreed. “It has crossed denominational boundaries. I’m not aware of any other single thing that’s doing that. It’s crossing racial boundaries. That’s powerful. This is making a heck of an impact in the lives of people. Because of us, people are going to eat well on Labor Day and will go shopping with their kids for school.”

Johnson said that local programs such as the Joseph Project are closely tied to federal anti-poverty efforts like House Speaker Paul Ryan’s “A Better Way: Our Vision for a Confident America” policy proposal. As NRO has previously reported, Ryan traveled extensively to meet with low-income people across the country as he developed this plan, and an old friend of his, Bob Woodson, facilitated many of those meetings. Woodson, who founded the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, is also the author of The Triumphs of Joseph, the book that inspired the name of the Joseph Project.

Ryan’s plan is practical, detailed, and comprehensive, disproving liberals’ assertions that Republican leaders don’t care about the fate of poor people. Drawing on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, much of the proposal focuses on solutions grounded at the local level, where it is easiest to identify and address the particular causes of poverty. And, like Johnson and Smith’s program, Ryan’s anti-poverty agenda emphasizes the inherent dignity of work, a dignity afforded to impoverished Americans when they receive employment opportunities rather than a government handout.

Ryan’s chief goals are to limit government regulation and provide financial incentives to those who enable the transition from welfare to work. According to the Republican agenda, the federal government’s main contribution to state-level anti-poverty efforts should be to foster public-private partnerships that support local programs. …

“We have seen the fruits of an approach to welfare that puts work first,” Rubio wrote at NRO. “We must now apply this principle through federalism, empowering problem-solvers who are closest to the ground while teaching the benefits of a working, productive life from doorstep to doorstep, not from on high in Washington.”

No matter how vociferously liberals insist that federal regulations, expansion of welfare, and protection of entitlements will lift citizens out of poverty, the record shows that, in practice, compassionate, conservative leaders such as Senator Johnson are the ones supporting and empowering low-income Americans.