“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
“Gun Debate Reclaims Center Stage In Democratic Race”: Granting Gun Manufacturers Immunity From Lawsuits
The bulk of the attention surrounding Bernie Sanders’ interview with the New York Daily News this week focused on the senator struggling at times with policy details. In response to a variety of questions, the Vermont independent gave responses such as, “It’s something I have not studied”; “I don’t know the answer to that”; and “I haven’t thought about it a whole lot.”
But another area of contention surrounds a subject Sanders understands perfectly well.
Towards the end of the interview, the Daily News editors noted, “There’s a case currently waiting to be ruled on in Connecticut. The victims of the Sandy Hook massacre are looking to have the right to sue for damages the manufacturers of the weapons. Do you think that that is something that should be expanded?” Sanders, seeking clarification, said, “Do I think the victims of a crime with a gun should be able to sue the manufacturer, is that your question?”
Told that it was the question, he replied, “No, I don’t.”
As Politico reported, this isn’t sitting well with some of the lawsuit’s Democratic supporters.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy and Gov. Dannel Malloy attacked Bernie Sanders on Tuesday for stating that shooting victims should not be able to sue gun manufacturers, an issue that has dogged the Vermont senator throughout his presidential run.
“I don’t know why our party would nominate someone that’s squishy on the issue of guns, this is a very personal issue for those of us that represent Sandy Hook,” Murphy, who is a supporter of Hillary Clinton, said in an interview with POLITICO. “The idea that Sandy Hook families should be completely barred from court is really backwards and unfair.”
Keep in mind that Connecticut’s Democratic presidential primary is April 26, just a week after New York’s. The state’s governor and both of its U.S. senators have already formally endorsed Clinton.
It’s important to note that, in Monday’s interview, Sanders elaborated on his perspective on this issue. After expressing his opposition to lawsuits targeting gun manufacturers, the senator circled back to add some specificity to his position: “In the same sense that if you’re a gun dealer and you sell me a gun and I go out and I kill him [gestures to someone in room]…. Do I think that that gun dealer should be sued for selling me a legal product that he misused? [Shakes head no.] But I do believe that gun manufacturers and gun dealers should be able to be sued when they should know that guns are going into the hands of wrong people. So if somebody walks in and says, ‘I’d like 10,000 rounds of ammunition,’ you know, well, you might be suspicious about that. So I think there are grounds for those suits, but not if you sell me a legal product.”
In other words, the senator’s position has some nuance, even if it’s one of the few issues in which Sanders faces criticism from the left.
Complicating matters further, Paul Waldman explained yesterday that Sanders’ previous approach to the issue points to some relevant shifts.
It gets complicated because of Sanders’ past opposition to gun laws. He opposed the Brady Law, and supported the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), a 2005 law that granted gun manufacturers and sellers sweeping immunity from all kinds of lawsuits (Clinton voted against it). He has justified that vote by saying that he wouldn’t want to see “mom and pop” gun stores sued when a gun they sell gets used in a crime, but the truth is that the bill went way beyond that. […]
And here’s what’s really strange: Sanders continues to defend his vote for the PLCAA, even though he recently signed on as a co-sponsor to a bill that would repeal it.
The result is a picture that’s a little murky. As the Democratic race continues, it’s an issue that appears ripe for a real, substantive debate.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 7, 2016
“Bad Luck Bears”: Bernie Sanders; From The Guys Who Brought You George W. Bush
The team that brought you the George W. Bush administration in 2000 has gathered behind a new candidate: Bernie Sanders.
A host of prominent Ralph Nader backers has joined team Sanders in 2016, excited by his message discipline and aggressive fight against the establishment powers that be.
In the Democratic socialist from Vermont, they see a flag-bearer for the same issues while the Democratic establishment views him as a persistent pest who is raking in money by the fistful without a clear and obvious path to the nomination.
And the same way that Nader’s staunchest supporters had no kind words for the eventual nominee then-Vice President Al Gore, some of Sanders’s surrogates are spending their time bashing Hillary Clinton, making it even more difficult for the party faithful to rally around him.
Throughout Nader’s consecutive failed presidential bids, he picked up a cadre of high-profile endorsers ranging from actress Susan Sarandon to academic Cornel West. The rest of the roster backing both men includes actor Danny Glover, former National Nurses United Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro, musicians Ani DiFranco and Bonnie Raitt, country singer Willie Nelson, and Ben Cohen, one of the founders of Ben & Jerry’s, just to name a few.
“There are some pretty obvious parallels,” Oliver Hall, Nader’s lawyer and long-time friend said in an interview with The Daily Beast.
While the players on the bench supporting these candidates are remarkably similar, so far Sanders hasn’t drawn the collective ire of the Democratic Party quite nearly as much as Nader did. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
After all, many personally blamed Nader for pulling Democratic votes away from Gore in 2000—ushering in Bush.
It’s tough to blame them for being angry. Bush edged out Gore by 537 votes, while Nader—the Green Party candidate—took over 97,000 votes in Florida, which Democrats thought could have tipped the scales in Gore’s favor.
The spoiler effect, a term ascribed to 1992 candidate Ross Perot, was redubbed as “The Nader Effect,” used as shorthand for a candidate that is going nowhere spoiling an election for a like-minded but more viable party nominee.
Nader has been adamant that he is not the one to blame, writing in 2004 on his presidential campaign site, that his voters wouldn’t have swung the election in Gore’s favor.
“In the year 2000, exit polls reported that 25% of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all,” he wrote.
The 2000 campaign efforts (some of which were led by his own supporters) to get Nader to drop out fell on deaf ears.
And 16 years later, a much more successful candidate has no interest in cutting his bid short either—despite almost daily urging from the Democratic establishment.
But still, the longer Sanders has stuck around the more he appears to get under Hillary Clinton’s skin.
Now the winner of 14 states, including a surprise victory in Michigan, Sanders is frequently painted as a message candidate spoiling the prospects of an establishment Democrat looking to finally secure the nomination after falling short eight years ago.
His staunch opposition to the Iraq War, something for which Clinton voted, and support for a single-payer healthcare program mirror some of the central tenets of Nader’s campaign.
Hall told The Daily Beast that the similarities between the candidates are apparent and even now he’s still tired of hearing that the latter is the reason Bush won in 2000.
“It’s ridiculous and pathetic,” he said in a phone interview. “If the Democratic Party is a serious organization, they need to tolerate free discussion of ideas.”
He contended that the same people who have accused Nader of indirectly leading the United States into its worst war since Vietnam are the ones imploring people to vote for Hillary Clinton this year.
“When Nader ran as a third party candidate, everybody attacked him,” Hall said. “Now they’re attacking Sanders for running as a Democrat.”
And as Sanders continues to exceed expectations in the primary, currently leading Clinton by a small margin in Wisconsin—the next contest—Hall questioned the former secretary of state’s strength as a candidate.
“How good of a candidate can Hillary Clinton be if she can’t handle debate in the primary election process? That’s the entire purpose of a primary election.”
And his endorsers have taken note.
West, a prominent academic and progressive Democratic stalwart, backed Ralph Nader in 2000 before giving Sanders his blessing in 2015. Once Gore was the nominee, he chastised him for picking Senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate given his opposition to affirmative action. West referred to it as “an act of disrespect to the black community,” according to a 2000 article in the Chicago Tribune.
Earlier this year, West wrote an op-ed for Politico describing Sanders as being “better for black people” than Clinton.
West has not responded to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
Sarandon, another Sanders backer who recently drew controversy for suggesting that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump might be ultimately better for the United States than Clinton, was also all in for Nader in the past. She served as the national co-chair for Nader’s steering committee in 2000 and was named as a plaintiff in a lawsuit he filed against the Federal Election Commission which alleged that corporations sponsoring debates could constitute as illegal corporate campaign contributions.
Documentarian Michael Moore also endorsed both candidates. In September 2000, he appeared at a fundraiser upon the Green Party candidate’s behalf, dispelling the idea that Nader was a spoiler in the race.
“A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush?” Moore said at the time. “No, a vote for Gore is a vote for Bush. A vote for Bush is a vote for Bush. A vote for Nader is a political Molotov.”
In 2000, Sanders publicly vouched for Nader himself, while the latter campaigned in Vermont.
“He’s an old-fashioned guy who believes that maybe the ordinary people should be running this country rather than the multinational corporations,” Sanders said introducing Nader at an event, according to an AP story at the time.
Sanders’s national spokesperson Symone Sanders also previously worked as a communications officer for the Ralph Nader-founded organization Public Citizen.
He changed his tune by 2004 though when Nader tried to run again, saying “virtually the entire progressive movement is not going to be supportive of Nader,” according to an AP story.
“We’ve got to come together to defeat George Bush, we have to develop a strong progressive movement to make sure we make the changes in this country that we need,” Sanders said in 2004. “But our main task right now is to defeat Bush and I think Nader’s effort could have some impact in dividing up that vote and that’s a negative thing.”
Nader himself did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast but he has expressed support for Sanders’s candidacy and his ideas.
The animosity between Nader and Gore supporters that bubbled up in the 2000 general election is already stewing in a similar capacity in the 2016 Democratic primary with surrogates like Sarandon and actress Rosario Dawson criticizing Clinton and the big-money interests they contend she stands for.
“Shame on you,” Dawson said referring to Clinton at a recent rally in New York. “I don’t have to vote against someone; I can vote for someone who’s on our side.”
She went on to criticize President Obama at a Harlem town hall days later, suggesting that he wasn’t able to keep up momentum to elicit big turnout in the 2014 midterm elections.
Another Sanders surrogate, rapper Killer Mike, got into similar hot water for quoting activist Jane Elliott’s line in February saying: “A uterus doesn’t qualify you to be president of the United States.” Implicit in the remark was not sexism, but rather that gender should not determine who one votes for.
The difference, of course, compared to the fervor around Nader is that these conflicts of opinion are not necessarily going to negatively impact the chances of a Democratic president being in the White House next year.
But from the start, Sanders’s campaign was concerned about appearing like just another Nader.
“The one thing he’s determined not to do is to be another Ralph Nader,” adviser Tad Devine said in April, 2015 as Sanders was preparing to announce his candidacy. “And the only way to avoid doing that is to avoid being a third-party candidate from the left in the general election.”
Time will tell if that promise holds up.
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, April 5, 2016
“Enough Is Enough”: It’s Time For Reporters To Break Out Of The Trump Rally Press Pens
Is the only thing more shocking than Donald Trump’s campaign manager being charged with simple battery of a reporter the fact that the crime isn’t all that startling, given the bullying campaign’s open contempt for reporters?
Enough is enough.
With Trump’s top aide, Corey Lewandowski, now facing charges, focus has shifted back to the increasingly abusive relationship between the GOP front-runner and the campaign press, and the unprecedented barrage of attacks journalists have faced, including constant insults hurled at them by the candidate himself. (Reporters are “disgusting” “horrible people,” Trump regularly announces.)
Sadly, news organizations have brought some of the degradation on themselves by acquiescing to all kinds of Trump campaign demands, such as the rule that they camp out inside mandatory press pens at events. Basically, the Trump campaign disparages the media, and news organizations do nothing in response — except shower him with even more coverage. (Talk about a win-win for him.)
“For ratings and clicks, they’ve allowed themselves to be penned up like farm animals at his rallies and risked scuffles with the Secret Service for covering the events like actual reporters,” wrote Eliana Johnson at National Review.
In fact, the press pens have become a hallmark of Trump’s war on the press.
“Unlike other presidential campaigns, which generally allow reporters and photographers to move around at events, Trump has a strict policy requiring reporters and cameramen to stay inside a gated area, which the candidate often singles out for ridicule during his speeches,” Time reported.
And Time should know.
In February, a Secret Service agent lifted Time photographer Chris Morris up off the ground and choke-slammed him onto a table after Morris momentarily “stepped out of the press pen to photograph a Black Lives Matter protest that interrupted the speech.”
It’s long past time for journalists to demand their freedom from Trump press pens. It’s like deciding to finally stop taking Trump’s phone-in interviews. Escaping from the pens represents a simple way for news organizations to assert their obvious right to cover the Trump campaign on their own terms, rather than being penned in at campaign events and living in fear of having access denied if coverage is deemed to be too critical.
Covering the Trump campaign on a daily basis today appears to be a rather miserable media existence. Reporters are threatened by staffers, and the Trump communications team seems to be utterly nonresponsive to media inquires. (“There is no Trump press operation,” one reporter told Slate.)
But it’s even worse than that. Just ask CBS News reporter Sopan Deb. In January at a Trump rally in Reno, a Trump supporter demanded to know if Deb was taking pictures on behalf of ISIS. Then, in March, after Trump’s raucous would-be rally in Chicago was canceled, Deb was covering mayhem unfolding on the streets when he was “thrown to the ground by Chicago cops, handcuffed, arrested, and detained in jail.”
I give journalists on the Trump beat credit for trying to make the best of a very bad situation. My question is why aren’t bosses standing up more forcefully for their staffers on the Trump front line? Why aren’t executives saying “enough” to the campaign bullying? And why don’t they take collective action and fix the obvious problems with how the Trump campaign is mistreating the press?
In case you missed it, last year 17 journalists representing scores of news organizations met for two hours in Washington, D.C., because they were so angry with how Hillary Clinton’s campaign was limiting access for journalists.
“The problems discussed were the campaign’s failure to provide adequate notice prior to events, the lack of a clear standard for whether fundraisers are open or closed press and the reflexive tendency to opt to speak anonymously,” The Huffington Post reported.
Looking back, the press’s Clinton complaints seem minor compared to the disrespect and invective the Trump campaign rains down on the press. But at the time, news organizations banded together and insisted that changes be made. (“The Clinton campaign is far less hostile to reporters than Donald Trump’s campaign,” The Huffington Post recently noted.)
So why the relative silence in light of the constant Trump mistreatment of the press? Why did news outlets quickly marshal their forces when Democrat Clinton was the target of criticism, but they apparently do very little when the Republican front-runner is trampling all over the press? Why the obvious double standard for covering Trump and Clinton?
Note that last November, several news organizations discussed their concerns with the Trump campaign. “Representatives from five networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and CNN — discussed their concerns about the Trump campaign restrictions on a Monday conference call, but did not present the campaign with any specific access requests,” according to The Huffington Post.
But very little came of it. “Facing the risk of losing their credentialed access to Trump’s events, the networks capitulated,” BuzzFeed reported.
Indeed, in the wake of that meeting, press pens at Trump rallies have recently become even more restrictive, with longer avenues of exit and entries created to separate journalists even further from rally attendees.
More recently, BuzzFeed reported, “Two network sources also confirmed the unprecedented control the television networks have surrendered to Trump in a series of private negotiations, allowing him to dictate specific details about placement of cameras at his event, to ensure coverage consists primarily of a single shot of his face.”
So yes, news organizations have had behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Trump campaign. But the result has been to let Trump “dictate specific details about place of cameras at his event.”
Just amazing.
And note that it’s not just the press pens. Here’s a list of the news organizations that have had reporters banned from previous Trump events, presumably because the campaign didn’t like the news coverage: The Des Moines Register, Fusion, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Politico, The Huffington Post, National Review, The Daily Beast, and Univision.
Over and over we’ve seen this pattern play out: Report something negative about Trump and watch your press credentials get yanked. This kind of bullying, of course, is unprecedented for American presidential campaigns. The tactic goes against every principle of a free press, inhibiting the news media’s unique role in our democracy to inform the public, without fear or favor.
Yet to date, I’m not aware of outlets banding together to make concrete ultimatums in response to the Trump campaign’s bullying. Instead of collective action, we get sporadic, nonbinding complaints from editors.
But what kind of signal does that send, other than capitulation?
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters For America, March 31, 2016
“Establishment Heroes?”: Romney, Ryan Won’t Come To The Republicans’ Rescue
It’s a dream more than a few Republican officials have no doubt had in recent months: the party’s presidential nominating contest remains unresolved through June, and a contested election opens the door to Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan rescuing Republicans by riding in on a white horse. “Finally!” party officials declare in the dream. “Our establishment heroes will rescue us from the dreaded Trump monster!”
There are, of course, all kinds of problems with the fantasy. For one thing, both Romney and Ryan – who comprised the party’s failed 2012 ticket – have said they have no intention of seeking national office in 2016. For another, if the party sticks to its Rule 40, neither of these guys would even be eligible for the nomination.
But even putting this aside, there’s a more obvious problem: the American mainstream just doesn’t like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan that much. Public Policy Polling published some interesting results today:
PPP’s newest national poll finds that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan wouldn’t exactly be the solution to the GOP’s Donald Trump problem, with Romney doing even worse head to head against Hillary Clinton than Trump does.
That’s not an exaggeration, by the way. For all the recent interest in Trump’s poor standing with the American mainstream – interest that’s well deserved given his position as the GOP’s frontrunner – Romney actually fares worse in hypothetical general election match-ups.
In the PPP results, both Clinton and Sanders lead Trump by about eight points nationally. Romney, however, trails both of the Democratic candidates by double digits.
The pollster’s analysis added, “Romney is incredibly unpopular nationally now – his 23/65 favorability rating is even worse than the 29/63 Trump comes in at.” It may seem odd, but when Romney delivered his recent speech condemning Trump, most of the public liked the attacker even less than his target.
And what about the Republican House Speaker? PPP found that the Wisconsin congressman would trail Clinton and Sanders in a general election by 5% and 7%, respectively, which is pretty similar to the advantages Clinton and Sanders enjoy over Trump.
In other words, the imagined saviors of the party wouldn’t actually save the party. Plenty of voters remember the last two Republicans on the national ticket, but that doesn’t mean they’re remembered fondly.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 31, 2016
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