Is there anything intelligent that can be said about the movement -- on the part of several hundred thousand Americans -- to petition for their state to peacefully leave the US? I will confess that I don't really follow American public life with anything like the attention that I should. Like most Canadians, I watch the odd news report and move on, usually with a quick "thank you" to the powers that be that I am Canadian and live in Canada. Said differently, while I teach my students not to stereotype Americans, to recognize the country for its diversity and its positive characteristics (to not treat Fox News as if it were the US but recognize the honesty, hard work, and principles of most of Americans), I fall into the Canadian trap of making broad assumptions about the US, as much as anyone else.
With regard to the petitions set up for individual states to separate from the US, the stereotype is easy … almost too easy. Those setting up the stereotype seem to be (from what I can tell) by and large white, extremely right wing, and prejudiced. Their concern seems to be not with the United States but with the fact that they have a black President and they do not like it … not one bit. To follow the stereotype, the problem these people have is not with their freedom (which is no different today than it was yesterday or the day before) but with the fact that they see a black leader as somehow an infringement on their freedom. The fact that these petitions are coming, by and large, from southern states with a history of virulent racism seems only to confirm this stereotype. Disturbing stuff.
For us in Canada, however, there might be other ways we can look at this movement that are more profitable because we have our own history of separatism (leaving aside that the US does as well, and far more violent). Here is a first effort to say something intelligent about the US separatist movement, acknowledging that I might fail (I might not say something intelligent at all). There are several things we might learn from this movement.
First, a lot of people do not like democracy. Sure, they like it when their "side" wins. But, in this case, losing an election seems to be considered tantamount to something that is horrible, a disaster of unusual proportions, a threat to the very fabric of society, freedom and democracy. This can happy. Populations can elect authoritarian governments and even totalitarian ones. But, it is unusual and I do not think anyone could reasonably argue that the last American election produced an authoritarian government. After all, the Democrats won the presidency but the Republicans won the House of Representatives. The Democrats won the Senate but hardly swept it and two independent members (not members of either major party) now have Senate seats. The Republicans, moreover, outpoll the Democrats in terms of state governors. So, even if one does not like Obama, there is no evidence that the US is drifting to authoritarianism, much less totalitarianism. Indeed, the election produced results that might have made the US "founding fathers" smile: checks and balances. The Congress has to negotiate with each other and the president; the president has to negotiate with the Congress to pass laws. This is what the founding fathers wanted. They did not want one group (one party, let's say) to control everything. They wanted divisions that forced negotiations. And, in this sense, the election produced exactly the results that it was supposed to produce (at least according to a best-case scenario interpretation of the US Constitution).
One can have a debate about democracy -- its meaning, social and economic dimensions, etc. -- but no one would doubt that a representative democracy is a legitimate form of state organization (legitimate understood in a colloquial way). So, why do not some people like this result? Why do they dislike it so much that they are willing to leave the US? The conclusion I am putting forward is that they do not actually like democracy. If their side wins … great, something to celebrate. If their side loses, they want to take their toys and go home. The first thing that we should learn, then, about this movement is that a small percentage of Americans do not like democracy and so their commitment to the US is contingent on getting what they want out of it. One might wonder whether or not these are good citizens. After all, citizens are not supposed to make their loyalty to the nation contingent upon getting exactly what they want out of it and leaving if they do not, are they? If I did that, I would have set up my own separatist movement ages ago.
The second thing to learn is that setting up petitions is easy to do and so people do it (it is particularly easy in this day and age. I sign a number of electronic petitions each year). The ease of signing an electronic petition might have led some signatories to not consider what they were doing: a sort of heat of the moment type of thing. Why? Because there is an odd contradiction between their rationale for rejecting Obama and questioning his legitimacy and their own actions. You might recall (see a former blog) that some Republicans have claimed that the Democrats won the election because Obama promised Latina/o and black and youth voters "things." In other words, Obama voters only voted for him because they go things and this is supposedly bad and illegitimate. (I'd argue that providing services to citizens is part of the job of the state, but that is another story and another blog.) Yet, when these signatories don't get what they want … the argument is reversed. Democratic voters are bad for voting to get what they want; they are right to leave (destroy their country) when they don't get what they want. If they had won, on the other hand, they would have gotten what they wanted and so would not separate. You see where I am going. The very thing separatist signatories fault Democratic voters for is the thing they are doing. We can learn, than, not that these people are irrational but that the logic of American separatism is oddly contradictory.
Third, we can learn that so-called "moral issues" are important to these people. Now, I do not agree with the definition of moral issue (gay marriage, abortion) because it leave out other issues (equality, rule of law, environmental protection, care of the poor) that strike me as moral issues as well. Said differently, I think the division between "moral issues" and environmental and economic issues is artificial. Be that as it may, what seems to animate these people are "moral issues" and not economic issues. The state intervening in the economy to protect, say, the poor is treated as bad; the state intervening in the society to prevent women's choice is treated as good. We can agree or disagree with this logic (for the record, I disagree) but we should learn that for a certain sector of society (again, I think small, I think jobs and education and health care are the issues of import to most Americans), these issues count and count more then other issues.
Finally, I think we learn about the dangers of heightened rhetoric. For the last several years, the extreme wing of the Republican Party has ramped up the rhetoric against Obama. Ramping up rhetoric can be a good political tactic. It helped Chretien win his second majority; kept Martin in power longer than he otherwise would have been. Harper's crew deployed it against both Dion and Ignatieff (vote for Dion and the economy will be destroyed; do not vote for Ignatieff because he is a tourist Canadian). But, the fact that something is a good political tactic does not mean that it has no other implications. By ramping up the rhetoric, the Tea Party made the last election -- again, for a certain section of Americans -- a life and death battle between truth and God (on the one side) lined up with freedom and democracy against totalitarianism (remember all those Obama "death committees" and Obama = Hitler signs) -- and it is no wonder that those people are now deeply worried.
The truth, of course, is that policy disagreements are rarely about this type of Holy Order versus the reign of Satan type of thing. As I said, daily life in the US has not changed a great deal since Obama came to power (which might be a reason to be concerned about him if you were a Democrat), the American constitution is working the way it was designed, there is nothing unusual with citizens wanting a state to provide services, etc. But, the important point is what Obama came to symbols to those opposed to him. He symbolized not alternative policies that one can like or dislike, but night and day.
So, that is my first effort. Is there anything I am not considering? My argument is that we should look past the stereotypes and silliness of separatist signatories and, when we do, we do not find hard and fast conclusions (for instance, that this is motivated by racism) but instead, a series of issues that might be worth considering in a comparative perspective; things that we can learn about the way in which democratic societies function and the problems this functioning encounters.
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Mitt Romney slumps in new U.S. poll - The Globe and Mail
This news story provides the latest polling information on the upcoming US election:
Mitt Romney slumps in new U.S. poll - The Globe and Mail:
The truth of the matter is that Obama will not lose this election.
We have to be circumspect in our assessment of polls. As the recent Alberta election demonstrated, even massive and sophisticated polling can be inaccurate and, at times, remarkably so. This is something all pollsters know. It is why they include the margin of error in their own description of their numbers. The margin of error usually reads something like this:
This poll is accurate to within plus or minus three percent, nineteen times out of twenty. What this fictional example (which is actually pretty standard wording for real polls) means is that the poll itself is about three percent wrong ninety five percent of the time. So, for instance, a poll that said "50% of Americans have a favourable view of Obama" is actually saying something like "somewhere between 47 and 53% of Americans have a favourable view of Obama. The ninety five percent (nineteen times out of twenty) means that 95% of the time the result I just examples (somewhere between ...) is right. And, five percent of the time, the "somewhere between" is even wider. In other words, this poll begins by letting us know that there is a five percent chance that it is completely wrong. The higher the number of people polls, whether or not it is a rolling poll, the more sophisticated the polling methodology and analysis, will make a poll more accurate (a poll, for instance, of 1000 people is more accurate then a poll of 100 just by virtue of random chance). Other factors include who is polls (how diverse the polling sample, for instance, is important. A poll conducted only in, say, New York is less accurate of the American national picture then a poll conducted in diverse parts of the country, etc.).
The other problem with polls is that they lend the wrong impression to politics. They get us thinking about politics as a popularity contest and voting as something akin to calling into American Idol. This might be the way people think about potential candidates between elections, but it does not reflect how people actually approach voting. As we saw in Alberta, a lot of Albertans did not like the ruling PCs but when it came time to cast their votes, they sat down, thought about it, and said "gee, given the other options, the PCs are the best choice." This is another reason why mid-term polling is often different then election time polling. If an election is far in the future, those polled may just be offering their views at the time, as opposed to a serious consideration of how they might vote because, after all, a poll is not a vote.
With all this said, then, we need to be careful about polls -- and there have been at least a couple -- that show Obama running ahead of Romney. The best we can say is that these polls might or might not be an accurate reflection of how Americans will vote on election day. What is more, there is a lot of time between now and election day and the American presidential election system is complicated. Contrary to what most Canadians believe, American do not have a direct vote for the president. George Bush Jr., for instance, actually had fewer votes the Al Gore in his first election victory. This does not happen often -- that the winning candidate has fewer votes then a losing candidate -- but it can and does happen owing to the way the American system works (which is through something called an "Electoral College" in which votes are weighted on the basis of state population and a person getting the most votes in a state, most of the time, gets all that particular state's support in the Electoral College regardless of their margin of victory or whether or not they had a majority of the votes cast).
My blunt statement: Obama will win, is not, therefore, based on recent polling. It is based on an analysis of American voting patterns and the particular body of people who came together to elect Obama. The rise of the Tea Party disguised the fact that the Tea Party was highly unrepresentative of the US. Even thought they like to picture themselves as average Americans, they represented minority religious views and were near universally white. I have not checked this out in terms of the data we have, but my guess is that Tea Partiers were overwhelmingly small-c conservatives to begin with and likely working or lower middle class. In other words, conservative white working and lower middle class evangelicals. Judging from their protests and platforms, I'd also suggest that some of them were simply not well informed about policy issues (the idea of rolling pay dates, for example, for "public servants" if the government ran out of cash was just silly, but I blogged on that some time ago. It missed the point that the military are public servants and hence constitute a big chuck of the government budget line and it missed this question: how long would you work at your job if someone told you you'd only be paid every second or third day day?)
The Tea Party seemed to catch the Democrats by surprise. It likely shouldn't have but the Tea Party did not "play by the rules." You can call your opponent names, but you don't call him Hitler. You can oppose what your opponent is doing but you don't derail the state to meet your political objectives. Instead, the Tea Party set a whole bunch of new rules and mobilized in a way that surprised the Democrats. This combined with some pretty ineffective government from the Obama administration led to a mid-term collapse in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Don't bet on that happening again. First, the Democrats now know what is coming. "You're going to use thinly veiled anti-Hispanic racism to mobilized an economically fragile white base. OK, we'll take that and appeal to the very Hispanic voters -- millions of Americans in key states -- and appeal to them." The Democrats have now had two years to develop a response to Tea Party rhetoric. My bet is that they have used that time to good advantage and can counter the negative Tea Partyesque campaigning that will come their way. Second, the Democrats misjudged the importance of the mid-term elections. They let the pro-Obama coalition they mobilized lapse. Again, they won't make that mistake this time. Moreover, the base that elected Obama views the presidential election as more important. Finally, Obama and the Democrats never had the white conservative evangelical vote to begin with. Indeed, Obama actually did worse among that constituency then his predecessors had done. In a large number of ridings (what American call districts) with significant evangelical populations, Democratic vote actually went down -- despite Obama's national win -- in the last presidential election.
What is more, the Democratic base (moderate Christians, ethnic minorities, youth, women) view conservative evangelicals with something approximating fear. They have no desire to see a return to what they viewed as the horrors of the Bush administration and will not be tricked by a supposedly moderate Republican who must, of necessity, court a more extreme voting block (in the manner of Bush with his "compassionate conservatism disguising the extremist views of his supporters). In other words, the Tea Party transformed politics from politics into a war for the "soul" of the nation; the Democrats will be happy with this rhetoric and say "exactly" so ... who would you prefer to have running things? America is a fractured country; deeply divided on ethnic, religious, gendered, and class lines. The majority of Americans who supported Obama will reach the same decision they reached last time 'round. "We'd rather have someone like us running things then someone like ... say, a cross-dressed Sarah Palin."
Mitt Romney slumps in new U.S. poll - The Globe and Mail:
The truth of the matter is that Obama will not lose this election.
We have to be circumspect in our assessment of polls. As the recent Alberta election demonstrated, even massive and sophisticated polling can be inaccurate and, at times, remarkably so. This is something all pollsters know. It is why they include the margin of error in their own description of their numbers. The margin of error usually reads something like this:
This poll is accurate to within plus or minus three percent, nineteen times out of twenty. What this fictional example (which is actually pretty standard wording for real polls) means is that the poll itself is about three percent wrong ninety five percent of the time. So, for instance, a poll that said "50% of Americans have a favourable view of Obama" is actually saying something like "somewhere between 47 and 53% of Americans have a favourable view of Obama. The ninety five percent (nineteen times out of twenty) means that 95% of the time the result I just examples (somewhere between ...) is right. And, five percent of the time, the "somewhere between" is even wider. In other words, this poll begins by letting us know that there is a five percent chance that it is completely wrong. The higher the number of people polls, whether or not it is a rolling poll, the more sophisticated the polling methodology and analysis, will make a poll more accurate (a poll, for instance, of 1000 people is more accurate then a poll of 100 just by virtue of random chance). Other factors include who is polls (how diverse the polling sample, for instance, is important. A poll conducted only in, say, New York is less accurate of the American national picture then a poll conducted in diverse parts of the country, etc.).
The other problem with polls is that they lend the wrong impression to politics. They get us thinking about politics as a popularity contest and voting as something akin to calling into American Idol. This might be the way people think about potential candidates between elections, but it does not reflect how people actually approach voting. As we saw in Alberta, a lot of Albertans did not like the ruling PCs but when it came time to cast their votes, they sat down, thought about it, and said "gee, given the other options, the PCs are the best choice." This is another reason why mid-term polling is often different then election time polling. If an election is far in the future, those polled may just be offering their views at the time, as opposed to a serious consideration of how they might vote because, after all, a poll is not a vote.
With all this said, then, we need to be careful about polls -- and there have been at least a couple -- that show Obama running ahead of Romney. The best we can say is that these polls might or might not be an accurate reflection of how Americans will vote on election day. What is more, there is a lot of time between now and election day and the American presidential election system is complicated. Contrary to what most Canadians believe, American do not have a direct vote for the president. George Bush Jr., for instance, actually had fewer votes the Al Gore in his first election victory. This does not happen often -- that the winning candidate has fewer votes then a losing candidate -- but it can and does happen owing to the way the American system works (which is through something called an "Electoral College" in which votes are weighted on the basis of state population and a person getting the most votes in a state, most of the time, gets all that particular state's support in the Electoral College regardless of their margin of victory or whether or not they had a majority of the votes cast).
My blunt statement: Obama will win, is not, therefore, based on recent polling. It is based on an analysis of American voting patterns and the particular body of people who came together to elect Obama. The rise of the Tea Party disguised the fact that the Tea Party was highly unrepresentative of the US. Even thought they like to picture themselves as average Americans, they represented minority religious views and were near universally white. I have not checked this out in terms of the data we have, but my guess is that Tea Partiers were overwhelmingly small-c conservatives to begin with and likely working or lower middle class. In other words, conservative white working and lower middle class evangelicals. Judging from their protests and platforms, I'd also suggest that some of them were simply not well informed about policy issues (the idea of rolling pay dates, for example, for "public servants" if the government ran out of cash was just silly, but I blogged on that some time ago. It missed the point that the military are public servants and hence constitute a big chuck of the government budget line and it missed this question: how long would you work at your job if someone told you you'd only be paid every second or third day day?)
The Tea Party seemed to catch the Democrats by surprise. It likely shouldn't have but the Tea Party did not "play by the rules." You can call your opponent names, but you don't call him Hitler. You can oppose what your opponent is doing but you don't derail the state to meet your political objectives. Instead, the Tea Party set a whole bunch of new rules and mobilized in a way that surprised the Democrats. This combined with some pretty ineffective government from the Obama administration led to a mid-term collapse in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Don't bet on that happening again. First, the Democrats now know what is coming. "You're going to use thinly veiled anti-Hispanic racism to mobilized an economically fragile white base. OK, we'll take that and appeal to the very Hispanic voters -- millions of Americans in key states -- and appeal to them." The Democrats have now had two years to develop a response to Tea Party rhetoric. My bet is that they have used that time to good advantage and can counter the negative Tea Partyesque campaigning that will come their way. Second, the Democrats misjudged the importance of the mid-term elections. They let the pro-Obama coalition they mobilized lapse. Again, they won't make that mistake this time. Moreover, the base that elected Obama views the presidential election as more important. Finally, Obama and the Democrats never had the white conservative evangelical vote to begin with. Indeed, Obama actually did worse among that constituency then his predecessors had done. In a large number of ridings (what American call districts) with significant evangelical populations, Democratic vote actually went down -- despite Obama's national win -- in the last presidential election.
What is more, the Democratic base (moderate Christians, ethnic minorities, youth, women) view conservative evangelicals with something approximating fear. They have no desire to see a return to what they viewed as the horrors of the Bush administration and will not be tricked by a supposedly moderate Republican who must, of necessity, court a more extreme voting block (in the manner of Bush with his "compassionate conservatism disguising the extremist views of his supporters). In other words, the Tea Party transformed politics from politics into a war for the "soul" of the nation; the Democrats will be happy with this rhetoric and say "exactly" so ... who would you prefer to have running things? America is a fractured country; deeply divided on ethnic, religious, gendered, and class lines. The majority of Americans who supported Obama will reach the same decision they reached last time 'round. "We'd rather have someone like us running things then someone like ... say, a cross-dressed Sarah Palin."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)