“The Way We Never Were”: Decades On, Advocates Of ‘Family Values’ Still Miss The Point
A quarter-century ago, amid a political environment obsessed with the decline of “family values,” a book was published that methodically blew holes in the myth-making at the heart of this outlook.
The title summed it up: “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.” Stephanie Coontz’s 1992 book was a work of first-rate history, and it undermined a slew of common misperceptions of family life in America, but it was also a plea to take off the rose-colored glasses that cause us to get so many political issues wrong.
Fittingly, Coontz’s publisher, Basic Books, has released a revised edition just as the moralizing we’ve come to expect from presidential campaigns kicks into overdrive.
You’ll recognize the common conceits: that families must have two parents at all cost; that some people thrive while others fail based on their self-reliance; that private enterprise is the sole engine of economic growth.
Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Washington, is research director at the Council on Contemporary Families, which highlights her work and that of similar scholars. It’s always enlightening.
Here’s the problem she consistently highlights, one that is endemic to politics: Twist the past and base current public policy on these misperceptions, and you will end up with a destructive effort that exacerbates the problems of inequality.
You can’t make America great “again,” a la Donald Trump, if you are clueless to what work life really looked like for most of the 20th century.
You can’t restore traditional family values, a la Ted Cruz, if you start with an interpretation of family that never existed in America.
And you certainly won’t resonate as a ceiling crasher for women, a la Hillary Clinton, if you continue to encourage policies and business structures that promote inequality between men and women and high- and low-wage workers.
Yet it is from this stewpot of historical illiteracy that many politicians ladle out their rhetoric, and voters gobble it up.
When the book was first published in the 1990s, experts of the day were wringing their hands over a range of issues: increasing rates of out-of-wedlock childbirth, numbers of single mothers, women in the workforce and welfare dependency. So many of the studies seemed to focus on women and the imagined threats from their changing roles in society — especially the threats they posed to children.
Yet what Coontz discovered back then would still be news to many: “I found that the male breadwinner family of the 1950s was a very recent, short-lived invention and that during its heyday, rates of poverty, child abuse, marital unhappiness and domestic violence were actually higher than in the more diverse 1990s.”
Here’s another tidbit: Almost a quarter of 1950s brides were pregnant on their wedding day. Keep that in mind the next time you hear a politician alluding mistily to the chaste and virtuous past.
So often we hear that unwed motherhood is a primary cause of poverty and economic insecurity. But Coontz cites current studies showing that income inequality is four times more important than family structure in explaining the growth in poverty.
Getting the story on poverty right is hugely important. It would force any honest politician to focus on things more likely to affect families: quality educational opportunities, access to childcare and family leave policies.
And those advantages are where America, in comparison to other industrialized countries, has really fallen down in recent decades.
Finally, there is what Coontz terms the myth of self-reliance. This one trips up Republicans and Democrats alike. It starts with a revisionist understanding of the role government has long played in aiding businesses, mortgage holders, farmers and college students, as well as the poor in various benefit and tax-credit programs.
Yet only some people are singled out as “takers”: minorities, single mothers and the like. The point is to make slashing their benefits seem like an act of fairness. After all, it is reasoned, it’s important to make people self-sufficient as well to balance state budgets.
“Legislators remain wedded to the historically disproven notion that subsidies to banks and corporations create jobs while subsidies to families create only laziness,” Coontz writes. The data say otherwise.
Remember that the next time a politician starts talking about his family’s humble beginnings and claims “we always stood on our own two feet.”
Media, it must be said, often echo these false narratives — perhaps because it’s so easy. What Coontz’s invaluable research shows us, though, is that to help families we must first understand them. Many of our politicians aren’t really trying.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, April 8, 2016
“Caught Red Handed”: The Latest On Efforts To Privatize The VA
A few weeks ago, the Washington Monthly published a story by investigative reporter Alicia Mundy that challenged the whole narrative about 2014 VA “scandal,” the one in which dozens of veterans were said to have died as a result of lengthy wait times to see VA doctors. In fact, Mundy shows, the department’s inspector general, after an exhaustive review of patient records, could not say with any confidence that even one veteran had suffered that fate. There were certainly problems at some VA facilities; the wait list numbers were definitely being gamed by VA personnel who, like Charlie Chaplin’s factory worker, struggled to keep up with unmeetable performance metrics. The “death wait” allegations, however, turn out to be bogus–cooked up by a Koch brothers-funded group, Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), working with Hill Republicans, in order to panic Washington lawmakers into passing legislation in 2014 to outsource VA care to private sector providers.
In reaction to our story, the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs Jeff Miller (R-Tea Party) wrote an intemperate letter attacking the story’s key findings as “completely false,” allegations we rather easily countered. Then Miller appeared before the commission his legislation mandated and made a damned fool of himself. Then a faction of the conservatives on the commission were outed for writing up a secret draft of the commission’s recommendations–in which they call for full privatization of the VA—in possible violation of the Sunshine and Federal Advisory Committee Acts.
The latest news on this is that leaders of eight prominent veterans’ groups, including the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, sent a letter to the commission chair slamming the secret draft and expressing their united opposition to privatizing the VA. This is an important development. As Mundy explains in her piece, a big reason the privatization push has gotten as far as it has is that the traditional veterans groups allowed themselves to be sidelined politically by CVA. Now, finally, those groups are fighting back. And while they don’t have seats on the commission, they do have 5 million members.
So far, this story has gotten virtually no mainstream press coverage–in part, no doubt, because it contradicts the “scandal at the VA” narrative that the press itself originally reported. But I don’t think this hesitancy will last long–the story’s way too juicy. Independent research mandated by that 2014 legislation not only undermines claims about dozens of veterans dying because of wait times, but also shows that the VA provides the same or better quality care than does the private sector. Yet here you have commission members, many of whom represent corporate medical centers that stand to gain billions of dollars in revenue from outsourcing VA care, caught red handed crafting secret recommendations to outsource VA care at the expense of quality care for veterans.
If I had to bet on who’s going to win this policy war, I wouldn’t, at this point, put my money on the outsourcers.
By: Paul Glastris, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 7, 2016
“The Day Of Reckoning Is Nigh”: The Democratic Race Has Now Devolved Into Nastiness
The Democratic nominee for president will be running against a political novice who is widely despised, or a senator so unpopular that only two of his colleagues support him, or a governor far too moderate for his party’s hard-line base, or someone else chosen at a bitterly contested convention. For Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, what could possibly go wrong?
Plenty. Begin with the fact that the Clinton-Sanders race has devolved into gratuitous and self-destructive nastiness.
The rhetorical hissing and spitting escalated Wednesday when Sanders charged that Clinton — a former senator, secretary of state and first lady — is not “qualified” to be president. It was a ridiculous thing to say. One thing it’s impossible to claim about Clinton is that she lacks an adequate résumé.
When challenged on the statement, Sanders resorted to the she-hit-me-first defense: “She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am, quote-unquote, not qualified to be president.” The problem is that Clinton never said such a thing. In fact, when pressed repeatedly by “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on the question, Clinton touted herself as the better choice but refused to say that Sanders is unqualified. (I should note that I often appear on Scarborough’s show.)
Clinton did, in that interview, echo her standard critique of Sanders, which is that his proposals are pie in the sky. She drew attention to his recent meeting with the editorial board of the New York Daily News in which he was asked for details of his plan to break up the big banks. His less-than-complete answers, Clinton said, show that “what he has been saying about the core issue in his whole campaign doesn’t seem to be rooted in an understanding of either the law or the practical ways you get something done.”
Ouch. Sanders wasn’t that bad at the Daily News. And frankly, his questioners seemed more confused about some aspects of financial regulation than Sanders did.
On Thursday, Sanders was still hopping mad. At an appearance in Philadelphia, he told reporters that “if Secretary Clinton thinks that I just come from the small state of Vermont, that we’re not used to this, well, we’ll get used to it fast. I’m not going to get beaten up. I’m not going to get lied about. We will fight back.”
Clinton clearly wanted to be seen as taking the high road. “I don’t know why he’s saying that, but I will take Bernie Sanders over Ted Cruz or Donald Trump any time,” she said.
Does that ring a bell? Does anyone else recall those early debates in which both candidates pledged to forswear personal attacks and stick to the issues? We’re now at the point that it takes days of bitter squabbling before the campaigns can even agree on a time and place for their next debate. It will be in Brooklyn — Sanders’s birthplace and the site of Clinton’s campaign headquarters — on April 14. One assumes the gloves will be off.
It is no mystery why this once-polite contest has become so testy: What may be the day of reckoning is nigh.
Clinton’s lead in delegates is now big enough that Sanders practically has to run the table in the remaining states. He needs decisive wins, starting with the April 19 primary in New York. Conversely, Clinton can effectively put the nomination out of Sanders’s reach with a big victory in the state that elected her to the U.S. Senate.
The Clinton campaign’s view is that Sanders is already so far behind that he’ll never catch up; they should know, because that’s the position Clinton was in vs. Barack Obama in 2008. It is time, the Clintonistas believe, for Sanders to think about dropping out in the interest of party unity.
I have argued that Sanders has every right to stay in and that his many supporters in states yet to vote should have the chance to express their preference. But if it’s not time for Sanders to pull out, it’s also not time for him to scorch the earth in a way that damages Clinton’s prospects in November should she win the nomination.
Democrats begin general election campaigns with a big structural Electoral College advantage. But they forfeit this edge if progressive voters elect to stay home. The party cannot afford to have Sanders supporters — if their candidate loses — licking their wounds and nursing their grievances.
It ought to be hard for the eventual Democratic nominee to lose. More Clinton-Sanders nastiness just might do the trick.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 7, 2016
“What Are You Waiting For, Democrats?”: Voter ID Laws Are Having Their Intended Effect. It’s Time To Do Something
The biggest news out of the Wisconsin primary isn’t about the horse race, which is largely unchanged. It’s about the election itself—about how the voting happened. As soon as polls opened in urban centers like Madison and Milwaukee, there were reports of long, almost intolerable waits. Students at universities around the state faced hourslong lines to cast a ballot. Others waited just as long for a chance to change their registration.
The proximate cause of these long lines in urban, student-heavy areas is the state’s new voter identification law backed by the Republican legislature and Gov. Scott Walker. It implements strict new requirements for valid identification that excludes most student IDs (in response, some Wisconsin schools have begun issuing separate identification cards for students to vote) and requires voters without official identification to go through a cumbersome process even if they’ve voted in the past. Writing for the Nation, Ari Berman describes elderly, longtime voters who were blocked from the polls for want of the right papers. “Others blocked from the polls include a man born in a concentration camp in Germany who lost his birth certificate in a fire; a woman who lost use of her hands but could not use her daughter as power of attorney at the DMV; and a 90-year-old veteran of Iwo Jima who could not vote with his veterans ID.”
But this was more than predictable—it was the point. “I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate the Democrats have ever put up,” said one Wisconsin Republican congressman, Rep. Glenn Grothman. “And now we have photo ID and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well.”
If the urgency of the issue wasn’t obvious, Grothman made it plain. Voter ID laws in Wisconsin and beyond are a direct attack on democracy, an attempt to rig the game by blocking whole groups of Americans from the polls. In what appears to be a strong cycle for their party, Democrats should take what happened in Wisconsin as a siren for action. Restoring democracy and protecting it from these attacks should be at the center of the party’s agenda.
The burden of voter ID laws falls hardest on the marginal members of society, who are predominately nonwhite, elderly, or both. In Wisconsin, 9 percent of registered voters (300,000 people) lack government-issued identification and fall disproportionately under those groups. And while Wisconsin provides voter ID at no cost through its Department of Motor Vehicles, the dirty secret is that this is a difficult and cumbersome process given the extremely limited hours for DMV offices. (Just 31 of Wisconsin’s 92 DMVs hold normal business hours and most are open just twice a week.) And worse, as Berman notes, Republican legislators in the state made no provision for voter education. They also shut down the state board that monitors elections.
Wisconsin isn’t the only place where voting has been hampered by voter identification laws. In Arizona, a similarly strict law—compounded by a Republican-led drive to close voting precincts in heavily populated areas—brought long waits for people who wanted to cast a ballot. As many as 20,000 Americans weren’t able to vote, many of them Latino.
Three years ago, the Supreme Court struck down the “preclearance” provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of discrimination to get the federal government’s permission before making any changes in how they run elections. Since then, Republican legislatures like those in Wisconsin and Arizona have adopted draconian identification laws that stand as meaningful barriers to the right to vote. They act as de facto poll taxes, forcing voters to spend time and money in order to exercise their constitutional rights. Thirty-three states will require voters to show identification at the polls this November, and the likely outcome will be long lines and complications for countless voters.
Beyond the sort of educational measures that Wisconsin didn’t bother with, it’s too late to do anything this year about the spread of voter ID and other barriers. But this should be a wake-up call for Democrats. Unless there’s pushback, these restrictions will become part of the firmament of our elections, effectively disenfranchising those on the margins of American life. For Democrats now and in the future, reversing those laws—and enhancing voter access—has to be a priority. On the national level, both Clinton and Bernie Sanders should tout their plans to restore the Voting Rights Act and build more voter protections. Below that, prospective Democratic governors and state lawmakers should place voter access at the top of their agendas, a first item for incoming administrations. Everything, from automatic registration and mail-in balloting to ending felon disenfranchisement, should be on the table.
This isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do. If Democrats believe that they benefit from more voters and larger electorates, then they would do well to mimic the Republican approach, but in reverse: Use their power to tilt the playing field toward more access, more participation, and more democracy.
By: Jamelle Bouie, Slate, April 6, 2016
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