The High Cost of the GOP's Populism

With the blame game having started in the wake of Donald Trump's fall in the polls, many Republicans are blaming each other for the problems faced by their party .  Hard core Trump supporters blame the "never Trump" Republicans and/or the "Republican elites" for Trump's decline.There is little effort among the majority of Republicans to admit that  (i) their party selected a horrific candidate and (ii) past GOP policies, including fanning the flames of racism, have helped create the anger that is the main force behind Trump's support. Conservative columnist Michael Gerson puts the blame across the board and particularly goes after the ultra conservatives in Congress.  Here are column highlights: 

With defeat now the likely outcome for the Republican presidential nominee, the blame shifting has begun early and in earnest.

Isn’t it more likely that Republicans are losing because their candidate has committed enough gaffes to torpedo 10 campaigns? Because he has premised his appeal on prejudice? Because he displays no appreciation of constitutional values and offers himself as a strongman? Because he has no knowledge of, or interest in, public policy? Because he is an erratic narcissist with a compulsive need to crush and humiliate his critics? Holding Never Trump forces responsible for all this is akin to blaming the spectators in Lakehurst, N.J., for the Hindenburg disaster. The pointing and gawking did not cause the flames.

A more sophisticated form of blame by other conservatives goes like this: Yes, Trump is a poor vehicle for the blue-collar, populist revolt, but that uprising was invited by the arrogance and indifference of globalized elites, including Republican elites. Chief executives, politicians and Wall Street types live in a bubble of affluence, caring little for American interests and lacking sympathy for their fellow citizens who are sinking into despair, addiction and the floodwaters of Louisiana.

For the record, I am in favor of the Davos set becoming more sensitive to the struggles of their countrymen. But all these fat cats at Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Pfizer and Microsoft deserve at least a bleat in response. They are leading participants in an economic system — with its global supply chains, freely moving capital and rapid innovation — that, during the past 20 years, has taken about a billion people out of extreme poverty around the world. This is arguably the greatest humanitarian achievement in history.

The United States has benefited from being the most engaged and adaptable economy in this global system — selling goods in other countries and buying goods (cars, smartphones, clothing) that have dramatically improved the daily lives of nearly every American. But rapid economic change has also laid waste to whole industries and the communities sustained by them, resulting in toxic stress and terrible suffering. Since the 1940s, American manufacturing output (as a percentage of gross domestic product) has been remarkably stable. But manufacturing employment has fallen by about two-thirds (as a percentage of the U.S. workforce). This is not so much the result of CEOs making a quick buck on outsourcing as a reflection of automation and global competitive pressures.

Our political system has been negligent in helping millions of Americans adapt during a period of rapid economic change. But those on the left and right who promise to reverse the process of globalization are economic charlatans. Their main policy response — tariffs and other forms of protectionism — is a proven path to trade wars and global recession, which hurt the vulnerable most. 

Conservative economics offers three positive alternatives: Provide a growth-oriented economic environment (including opportunities to sell overseas). Give workers the education and skills to succeed in a modern economy. And subsidize the wages of lower-skilled jobs to provide a decent living. 

Who are the obstacles in pursuing such policies? On the latter two, they are not globalized elites; they are more likely to be conservative ideologues. Thirty American CEOs at Davos would come up with several ideas to improve, say, educational standards. Thirty members of the House Freedom Caucus would oppose all of them on principle. In fact, conservative populists are now working along with education unions to undermine rigorous education standards, apparently on the theory that educational failure is acceptable so long as local officials do the failing. 

The response to these economic arguments from populists is usually ad hominem: Of course an elitist would say something like that. Which is particularly annoying coming from conservative elites, who are embracing the cheapest form of populism, involving no intellectual energy, no policy innovation and no actual help for those in need. The poor deserve better tribunes.

Gerson has a point.  Driving home yesterday I heard a portion of a Trump "speech" and it was all generalities aimed at exciting his followers with no on single specific policy proposal.  Just a blame game and selling himself as a strongman/dictator who would make things "change."

Why Conservative Christian Homeschoolers Are Fighting Standards That Don’t Apply To Them

Extremist Mike Farris

I continue to believe that the derangement of today's GOP tracks directly to the rise of the Christofascists within the GOP base.  Given the 90% overlap between the Tea Party and self-styled "conservative Christians," that hijacking of the GOP includes the rise of the Tea Party.  The goal of this crowd?  To impose their sick, fear and hate based religious beliefs on all and to oppose anything that might suggest that their fantasy world view is wrong.  Nothing terrifies these folks more than having to think or face the possibility that they have built their lives on an untrue myth.  A piece in Think Progress tracks how this ties into the effort by the home school crowd to oppose education reforms even when they do not apply to them.  Note how Virginia extremist and failed statewide candidate Mike Farris is in the thick of the opposition - and making a nice $400,000 a year in the process.  Here are highlights:

Opposition to the educational standards known as Common Core has come from an array of Tea Party groups, conservative think-tanks, Glenn Beck, and the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity — and a few voices on the left as well. But one of the most active sources of opposition has been an unlikely group: a Christian conservative organization that works to defend the rights of homeschooling parents.

Homeschoolers are not actually covered by the educational standards. Still, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has spent tens of thousands of dollars in opposition to the Core State Standards Initiative, including federal lobbying, a microsite, and even a fully produced 39-minute documentary.

While HSLDA has tried to present these public school standards as an “immediate threat” to homeschooling families, critics from inside and outside of the homeschool movement wonder if it is part of a pattern of fear-mongering by an organization eager to maintain its membership base.

An attorney and ordained Baptist minister, Farris joined with J. Michael Smith in 1983 to establish an organization to provide advocacy and legal representation for parents who chose to educate their children at home. Farris was a already veteran of the Christian Right movement, having worked against the Equal Rights Amendment under anti-feminist legend Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970s, as head of the legal department at Concerned Women for America, and as a state director for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the early 1980s. Today, HSLDA estimates its current membership as about 82,000 families. The organization, based in Purcellville, VA, reported in 2013 that its annual budget is more than $10 million. 

Some homeschooling advocates were not thrilled that the movement’s most visible organization was and remains a religious one. Mark Hegener, publisher of Home Education Magazine, told ThinkProgress that Farris’ “approach is a narrow religious agenda, and homeschooling is just his shtick.”

Farris argued that “Christian beliefs have been thoroughly eradicated from public schools,” and those schools are a “multi-billion-dollar inculcation machine” to push “secular humanism and new age religions.” It also quoted Farris as describing public schools as “godless” promoters of “evolution, hedonism and one-world government.” 

Farris won the 1993 Republican nomination to be Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. . . . even the state’s Republican U.S. Senator John Warner refused to back him and Farris lost by nearly 9 points (as the Republican nominee for governor won by a more than 17-point landslide).

Though opponents have tried to convince parents that the Common Core is a massive federal plot to usurp state and local control of education with a national curriculum — some even labeling it “Obamacore” — it is not actually even a federal program, nor a curriculum. 

This claim of a federal takeover is one of a series of objections Michael Farris and his Home School Legal Defense Association have cited in their massive anti-Common Core campaign.

One common attack on HSLDA has been that its work often extends to topics that are not directly connected to the rights of homeschoolers. So far this year, its federal lobbyists have worked to stop ratification of treaties, including U.N. Conventions on the Rights of the Child, the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, as well as passage of a bill to prevent corporations from denying birth control coverage in their healthcare benefits.  

In the 2006, the group even lobbied for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. A statement on the group’s website explained that because “Same-sex marriage attacks the traditions of the family in western civilization,” it thus constitutes an “attack on parental rights.”

Kunzman concurred, telling ThinkProgress that he has frequently heard people in homeschool community criticize HSLDA as a group that “only survives financially by continuing to manufacture crises. That’s how they fundraise. Threats to homeschool freedom get the base riled up, so people contributing believe they need legal protection and political advocacy.” This victimization narrative has proven beneficial to the organization in good times and bad, he suggested: “If they win something, it’s great promotion of their services. If they lose, it’s ‘the threat is real and you’d better support us.’” 

[M]ajor concern is that if states have common standards for the public schools, standardized tests like SAT, ACT, and GED will be aligned to the Common Core and homeschooling parents who opt not to use Common Core curricula will see their kids do poorly and not get into college. Warning that kids taking these examinations might “soon encounter progressive ideologies including social engineering and alternative lifestyles,” HSLDA claims on its website, homeschool students who “are not adherents to the Common Core” could “find themselves at a significant disadvantage come test time.” 

Read the full piece.  Ultimately, opposition boils down to opportunistic extremists like Farris seeking to make a very comfortable living while  force the larger public to embrace ignorance so that small minded parents don't have their house of cards belief system threatened.  Greed and selfishness are at the core.

The Racist History of the Charter School Movement

In addition to seeking to achieve an evolution free approach to science where religious based lunacy is allowed to hold complete sway, many charter school advocates have another agenda: to get their children away from "those people."  Yes, I mean blacks and other racial minorities.  It's an agenda that is allied with the white Christofascists effort to get school vouchers for religious based schools.  An article in Southern Studies looks at this often unmentioned agenda.  Note that as usual, Virginia figures in the history of this ugly agenda.   The attitude from 1959 mentioned in the article is alive and well in today's Virginia GOP.   This unspoken road to de facto school segregation not surprisingly very popular with the white supremacists at The Family Foundation.  Here are highlights:

As a parent I find it easy to understand the appeal of charter schools, especially for parents and students who feel that traditional public schools have failed them. As a historical sociologist who studies race and politics, however, I am disturbed both by the significant challenges that plague the contemporary charter school movement, and by the ugly history of segregationist tactics that link past educational practices to the troubling present. 

The now-popular idea of offering public education dollars to private entrepreneurs has historical roots in white resistance to school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The desired outcome was few or, better yet, no black students in white schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five cases decided in Brown, segregationist whites sought to outwit integration by directing taxpayer funds to segregated private schools.

Two years before a federal court set a final desegregation deadline for fall 1959, local newspaper publisher J. Barrye Wall shared white county leaders' strategy of resistance with Congressman Watkins Abbitt: "We are working [on] a scheme in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to our corporation, reopen as privately operated schools with tuition grants from [Virginia] and P.E. county as the basic financial program," he wrote. "Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with 'em."

Meanwhile, in less blatant attempts to avoid desegregation, states and localities also enacted "freedom of choice" plans that typically allowed white students to transfer out of desegregated schools, but forced black students to clear numerous administrative hurdles and, not infrequently, withstand harassment from teachers and students if they entered formerly all-white schools. When some segregationists began to acknowledge that separate black and white schools were no longer viable legally, they sought other means to eliminate "undesirables."

Attorney David Mays, who advised high-ranking Virginia politicians on school strategy, reasoned, "Negroes could be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they could not maintain, by hazing if necessary, by economic pressures in some cases, etc.

These nefarious motives may seem a far cry from the desire of many charter school operators to "reinvent" public education for students whom traditional public schools have failed. In theory, these committed bands of reformers come with good intentions . . . . In others, however, this sparkling veneer masks less attractive realities that are too often dismissed, or ignored . . . 

Providers in these fields have a disincentive to accept or retain "clients" who require intensive interventions to maintain desired outcomes -- in the case of education, high standardized test scores that will allow charters to stay in business. The result? A segmented marketplace in which providers compete for the "good risks," while the undesirables get triage. By design, markets produce winners, losers and unintended or hidden consequences.  Charter school operators (like health insurers who exclude potentially costly applicants) have developed methods to screen out applicants who are likely to depress overall test scores. 

Whether intended or otherwise, these sifting mechanisms have the ultimate effect of reinscribing racial and economic segregation among the students they educate -- as the research on this topic is increasingly bearing out.

In the West and some areas of the South, it appears that charter schools "serve as havens for white flight from public schools," according to the Civil Rights Project.  

How can we compare the performance of charters versus traditional public schools if we don't know whether they are enrolling the same types of students? At the national and state levels, policymakers are pushing for the rapid expansion of charter schools on the basis of hope rather than evidence.