Anyway, here’s to another fun year of polite political discussion. I’d love for it to contain less trump and Congressional investigation but both appear to be on the docket.
What’s the betting line on who will be the next speaker?
I’m a fan of somebody who didn’t try to overthrow the government or help those who did. That shouldn’t be as high a bar as it seems to be…
I’ve been informed that saying some people currently in Congress were involved with attempting to “overthrow the government” is ridiculous hyperbole that can shut down discussion.
As I’ve stated here many many times before, I appreciate discussion with people having different views. I always have. So for anybody offended in that way, please read around that and let’s move on with my apologies.
I’ll restate: I’d prefer the Republicans elect as speaker an individual who was not involved, directly or indirectly, with any of the violence of January 6, 2021 or in the lead-up to it, or in supporting the violent people afterward.
A more unlikely hope: the not-crazy part of the GOP caucus gets together with the not-crazy part of the Democrat caucus and elects somebody who will work to get legislation passed that has a chance of becoming law with a Democrat-controlled senate and presidency.
@FritzCat You mean they should take the initiative and just do it? That would be interesting. I’d love to see that happen, including what would hopefully be a bunch of bipartisan legislation over the coming two years.
I have no idea who that would be, but the one person I’ve heard mentioned a couple times is the GOP head of the “problem solver’s caucus”.
@davirom@dirtdoctor@FritzCat Kinzinger. He’s way too conservative for me policy-wise but he at least believes that the government should operate from a factual basis and he strikes me as an honest person. I wouldn’t be upset if they nominated him. There’s no rule that the speaker needs to be an elected member of the house.
@davirom@FritzCat@klezman I don’t agree with all his thoughts on policies either, but at least it seemed like he actually wanted to govern and wasn’t just about himself, fundraising, or getting likes on social media. People can disagree about best way forward for country, but we all can’t have our “alternative” facts, or whatever Kellyanne Conway called it.
Here we have the spectacle of 20-odd (and I do mean odd) representatives holding the House and by extension Congress and America hostage to their extreme views. By extreme, I mean “My Kevin” is too liberal for them. With the House so evenly split between D’s and R’s, so long as they act as a block they can extort concessions from so-called mainstream Republicans. But to what avail? Ask Kevin how giving concessions is working for him.
My impression is that what the 20-odd want from government is to shut it down, and they are succeeding.
@davirom That’s also what I’m wondering. What’s Kevin’s end-game here? Just the prestige of being called “speaker” until he loses a motion to vacate? He’s given away so many concessions that even if he ends up in the chair he’s got basically no power.
And good point about the 20-odd wanting government to be broken. Arsonists in the fire department.
@davirom I’m not sure they’ve suggested that Kevin is too liberal. They literally just don’t like him despite him offering concessions previously unheard of within his caucus.
Since every Congressional race has become nationalized, every bit of sensational behavior is rewarded and they have been liberated from requiring party funds to campaign for office.
@canonizer@davirom@Mark_L Agree on term limits, but if I could change only 1 thing, it would be to eliminate gerrymandering. That should reduce the number of far left and right representatives that can win districts. It would also lead to a more representative government, at both the federal and state level.
@davirom@dirtdoctor@Mark_L as someone who identifies as liberal/progressive, i will say that it is not as easy just to eliminate districts when urban areas are going to be more liberal and rural ones more conservative. Drawing competitive districts that could lead either way would probably look artificially hub and spoke visually.
@canonizer@davirom@dirtdoctor@Mark_L
Term limits - sure. I don’t think this will be as effective as many others do.
No more gerrymandering - 100%. Independent distributing commissions, zero consideration of partisan affiliation in the process, and generally trying to follow existing administrative lines.
Two more that I think would help:
The house needs more members. Like 100 more. The representation is getting more and more skewed as large states like California and Texas are underrepresented and small states are war overrepresented.
Ranked choice voting. This can help eliminate both the extreme candidates but also the stranglehold the two parties have on the system. Alaska has it right on this one.
@davirom@dirtdoctor@klezman@Mark_L oh, we are short 100s of representatives. it should be locked against the least populous state and proportionately distributed from there. I think this started in the 20s? I once knew the story of why the House stopped growing but can no longer recall. There’s no reason for small states to be protected by over representation in both chambers.
@davirom@dirtdoctor@klezman@Mark_L Eh, I don’t get this argument. Wyoming has 550k people and 1 rep in the house. California has over 40m. The senate is supposed to be the body that gives over representation to small states but to equalize the voice of californians would require 72 congresspeople. It’s a distorted overrepresentation.
I can understand the argument against growing the civil service or bureaucracy in the hypothetical but I don’t understand how a person can be against both direct democracy and fair representation.
@canonizer@davirom@dirtdoctor@klezman Using Wyoming as the basis for “over-representation” is not a very good argument. Since each state (rightfully, IMO) is guaranteed at least one representative, the smallest population (WY) might appear to have a disproportionately “large” advantage (1 rep. for 58K population). The states with 4 or more representatives are all very close to 1 representative per 750K of population. There is almost no “unfairness” to be found.
@canonizer@davirom@dirtdoctor@Mark_L I would actually be ok with Congressional districts going across state lines to equalize the population in each district. This is one of those things that sounds better in theory than in practice, though. Too many other issues to sort out to make something like that work.
Failing that, I’ve not yet encountered a persuasive argument for over representing small states in the house. (Or for the electoral college in the 21st century, but that’s a debate for another day.)
@canonizer@davirom@dirtdoctor@Mark_L
Well, this is a question that’s easy to answer, but it depends on the definition.
According to the US Census, there are just over 761k per House seat on average after the 2020 census. Let’s first define “fair” as being within a 10% variance of that number. That gives us between 685-837k people per seat. I think that’s a very generous variation for this measure, but by that standard the following six states are overrepresented:
Maine, Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming
These four are under represented: Delaware, Idaho, South Dakota, and West Virginia
If you instead tighten the window to 5%, you get 723-799k people. Then you get seven more that are overrepresented:
Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon
And you only get Utah added to the list of under represented states.
Of course this problem gets worse when you port it over to the electoral college. One way to quiet the calls for abolishing it is to have it be more fair by having more fair representation in the House. I happen to think the electoral college is anachronistic, but I know there are those who very strongly believe in its benefits, and those people would strengthen their argument, imo, by advocating for a larger house.
Let’s first define “fair” as being within a 10% variance of that number.
I consider that a fallacious definition of “fair”. States with smaller populations are very unlikely to fit that definition because the “granularity” of the 761K will automatically put some at a higher or lower distance from the average.
@canonizer@davirom@dirtdoctor@Mark_L that’s fine, I understand the math here. But to answer your question I had to pick a definition and so I picked two alternatives. Obviously when you’re dealing with integers there will be edge effects, like with Rhode Island and Delaware. We can agree no matter what they these will happen yet can still discuss the degree of over and under representation in the house when the number of Representatives hasn’t increased in many decades.
@canonizer@davirom@dirtdoctor@klezman I guess the question is, why the need to increase? (I tried to find the total cost of a representative, but didn’t get a clear answer. But I tend to think that we waste too much money on government and there is no need to add more.)
@canonizer@davirom@dirtdoctor@Mark_L more fair representation in the house and in voting for president if we’re keeping the electoral college.
100 Representatives more at even 5 million each (that buys a lot of staff!) is a whopping $1.65 per person per year in the country. For better governance that seems a bargain. (Although there’s certainly an argument to be made that more Representatives didn’t necessarily mean better governance.)
@davirom@dirtdoctor@klezman@Mark_L I guess my response to “why more” would be because this is one of the few places that we have actual representation. There is a fair critique that much of what does the actual governing of us comes from unelected officials.
The number of people each congressperson represents has increased steadily and maybe their constituencies are too big to do that adequately? By maybe, I think it’s definite.
Today President Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to 14 individuals, including 3 posthumously to DC police officers who died shortly after the insurrection, 5 to other police officers for their defense of the Capitol, and 3 to Republican election officials who resisted intimidation by Trump himself or his proxies to invalidate election results in their jurisdictions.
Fox’s lead on the story: “Biden says wrong day at January 6 ceremony honoring officers, remembers ‘what happened on July 6’”.
I rarely, RARELY, agree with conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg but he makes some good points in today’s op-ed that appeared in the LA Times. For those who don’t want to read it, basically he says the chaos in the House is not ideology driven, and it may not be possible to apply conventional ideological labels to the current crop of Republicans.
From Jonah Goldberg:
Kevin McCarthy’s epic struggle to become speaker of the House produced a lot of memorable images, but the most unforgettable was probably of Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) being physically restrained from opening a fresh can of whup-ass on Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), after Gaetz ensured McCarthy’s 14th failure to get the gavel.
The significance of the near-altercation is that it had next to nothing to do with conventional ideological differences. Rogers is a very conservative Republican. Gaetz is a cable news popinjay who happens to be in Congress.
Indeed, the relentless torrent of never-in-doubt-but-often-in-error commentary last week exposed the poverty of our political vocabulary. While it’s true that 19 of the original 20 anti-McCarthy Republicans were members of the House Freedom Caucus (or were endorsed by its campaign arm in the midterms), the majority of the roughly 50 HFC members sided with McCarthy (R-Bakersfield). You might not have known this amidst all of the “establishment versus Freedom Caucus” punditry.
Similarly, the holdouts were routinely called “ultra-conservatives” or “hard-line conservatives” as if their opposition was driven by a deeper, more sincere commitment to conservative principles. But is anti-McCarthy Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) really more “conservative” than pro-McCarthy loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)? Heck, do either of them qualify as meaningfully “principled” at all?
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the rebels’ first choice for speaker among the anti-McCarthy forces, was a steadfast supporter of … Kevin McCarthy.
Even such non-ideological shorthand as “pro-Trump” and “anti-Trump” clarifies little. McCarthy has played Renfield to Trump’s Dracula for years now, but so did most of the folks on the “Never Kevin” roster. During the Trump years, Rogers voted with the president more than Gaetz, himself a thorough Trump sycophant.
One source of this confusion stems from the widespread cockamamie delusion in certain quarters of the right that being part of “the establishment” is code for “moderate,” “sell-out,” or “RINO.” Another magnet next to the compass for would-be navigators of the political landscape is the notion that Donald Trump is not now and has never been part of the Republican establishment, a view that seems to be counterintuitively held most adamantly by people who insist the GOP is forevermore Trump’s party.
Among the many problems at play here is that it is very difficult to have serious conversations about serious things if we don’t have accurate labels for the things we’re talking about. As George Orwell observed, language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
One way out of this morass is to talk less about ideology and more about factions. To the extent they ever existed, the days of the GOP’s ideological coherence are over. Just look around. According to the old standards, defeated Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming was a fairly orthodox conservative, but she’s now a pariah for being a member of the anti-Trump faction. For years, opposition to abortion was a defining criteria for being politically conservative. Trump is now blaming that position for the GOP’s midterm losses. Defense spending, long a conservative litmus test, fully emerged last week as an intra-Republican fault line.
The chaos isn’t confined to Congress. Fox News brahmins were all over the place last week, with Sean Hannity carrying water for McCarthy while Tucker Carlson hurled epithets at the pro-McCarthy camp, including at colleagues.
The advantage of the term “faction” is that it’s inherently non-ideological. The founders anticipated that factional conflict would define our politics, and it has. But for most of our history, those factions often had less to do with clear ideological disputes than regional, economic or cultural conflicts.
The challenge with mothballing ideological language in describing today’s GOP is that it makes the comfortable right-left, us-versus-them verbiage that rules everything from fundraising to punditry obsolete.
Some factions today do have ideological flavors like nationalism, populism or, relatedly, foreign policy non-interventionism. But what fuels — and funds — them is a cultivated radicalism and contrived hostility to an establishment that barely exists beyond the formal powers of leadership. If anyone in power amounts to “the establishment” then, sure, McCarthy and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate minority leader, are the establishment.
The question for Republican leaders is whether they will be able to forge a governing faction, particularly in a climate where Democrats have every incentive to let Republicans feast on each other, and the conservative base values opposition for its own sake. Thanks to the GOP’s tiny majority, last week’s rebels have learned the power of faction. Whether the majority can exert similar power remains to be seen.
The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession
Jan. 14, 2023
An image shows a row of books, all in different colors, which say “History” on their spines. They decline in size as the image moves from left to right.
Credit…Soohee Cho
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By Daniel Bessner
Mr. Bessner is a historian.
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When I received my Ph.D. in history in 2013, I didn’t expect that within a decade fights over history — and historiography, even if few people use that word — would become front-page news. But over the last few years that is precisely what has happened: Just look at the recent debates over America’s legacy of slavery, what can be taught in public schools about the nation’s founders and even the definition of what constitutes fascism. The interpretation of the American past has not in recent memory been as public or as contentious as it is now.
Maybe it started with The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” and which accompanied a national reckoning around race. That provoked, perhaps inevitably, a right-wing backlash in the form of “The 1776 Report,” a triumphalist, Donald Trump-directed effort. Then came a raft of laws in conservative-governed states across the country aiming to restrict and control how history is taught in public schools.
History, as the historian Matthew Karp has written, has become “a new kind of political priority” for people across the political spectrum, a means to fight over what it is to be an American: which values we should emphasize, which groups we should honor, which injustices we should redress.
The historical profession has likewise been roiled by controversy. Last August, James H. Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, published an essay in which he argued that present-focused narratives of African slavery often represent “historical erasures and narrow politics.” The piece engendered a firestorm of reproach, with scholars variously accusing Dr. Sweet of attempting to delegitimize new research on topics including race and gender; some even accused Dr. Sweet of outright racism.
Yet as Americans fight over their history, the historical profession itself is in rapid — maybe even terminal — decline. Twelve days after Dr. Sweet published his column, the A.H.A. released a “Jobs Report” that makes for grim reading: The average number of available new “tenure track” university jobs, which are secure jobs that provide living wages, benefits and stability, between 2020 and 2022 was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic.
The report further notes that only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later. The work of historians has been “de-professionalized,” and people like myself, who have tenure track jobs, will be increasingly rare in coming years. This is true for all academic fields, not just history. As Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott note in their book “The Gig Academy,” about 70 percent of all college professors work off the tenure track. The majority of these professors make less than $3,500 per course, according to a 2020 report by the American Federation of Teachers. Jobs that used to allow professors to live middle-class lives now barely enable them to keep their heads above water.
What is to blame? In the past generation the American university has undergone a drastic transformation. To reduce costs, university administrators have dramatically reduced tenure. And as the protections of tenure have withered away, the size of nonteaching university staffs have exploded. Between 1976 and 2018, “full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164 percent and 452 percent, respectively,” according to a 2021 paper on the topic. Professors have been sacrificed on the altar of vice deans.
At the same time, in an effort to fund research that might redound to their financial benefit and to demonstrate their pragmatic value to politicians and to the public, universities have emphasized science, technology, engineering and math at the expense of the humanities. As the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported, citing data from 2019, “spending for humanities research equaled 0.7 percent of the amount dedicated to STEM R.&D.”
The humanities, including history, are often considered more an object of ridicule than a legitimate lane of study. Look no further than statements from politicians: Rick Scott, the former governor of Florida, assembled a task force in 2012 that recommended that people who major in history and other humanities fields be charged higher tuition at state universities. In 2016, Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky said that “French literature majors” should not receive state funding for their degrees. Even more recently, in 2021, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mocked people who go into debt to “end up with degrees in things like zombie studies.” And it’s not just Republicans: President Barack Obama remarked in 2014 that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree,” implying that if a degree didn’t make money it wasn’t worth it. (Mr. Obama later apologized to a University of Texas art historian for his remarks, clarifying that he did believe art history was a valuable subject.)
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These material and ideological assaults have engendered a steep decline in undergraduate humanities majors. In the 2018-19 academic year, only 23,923 graduating undergraduates received degrees in history and related fields, which, the A.H.A. notes, is “down more than a third from 2012 and the smallest number awarded since the late 1980s.”
Private groups, which traditionally provided significant financial support to budding humanities scholars, have taken the hint and increasingly stopped supporting the humanities and soft social sciences. The Social Science Research Council recently ended its International Dissertation Research Fellowship program, which in the last 25 years funded over 1,600 scholars exploring “non-U.S. cultures” and “U.S. Indigenous communities,” declaring that the program “accomplished many of the goals it had set for itself.” The Ford Foundation has similarly decided to conclude its long-running National Academies fellowship program for historically marginalized scholars in order, the foundation’s president declared, “to invest more deeply in movement-building work.”
It’s the end of history. And the consequences will be significant.
Entire areas of our shared history will never be known because no one will receive a living wage to uncover and study them. It’s implausible to expect scholars with insecure jobs to offer bold and innovative claims about history when they can easily be fired for doing so. Instead, history will be studied increasingly by the wealthy, which is to say those able to work without pay. It’s easy to see how this could lead American historical scholarship to adopt a pro-status-quo bias. In today’s world, if you don’t have access to elite networks, financial resources or both, it just doesn’t make sense to pursue a career in history. In the future, history won’t just be written by the victors; it’ll also be written by the well-to-do.
If Americans don’t seriously invest in history and other humanities disciplines, we encourage the ahistoric ignorance upon which reaction relies. Many Republican politicians support “divisive concepts” laws that try to regulate what college professors teach. Are they aiming at an easy target in the culture war? Perhaps. But it’s also true that a humanities education encourages thinking that often challenges xenophobic and racist dogma. Progress depends on studying and arguing about the past in an open and informed manner. This is especially true in a moment like our own, in which Americans use history to fight over which vision of the country will dominate politics. If there are no historians to reflect meaningfully and accurately on the past, then ignorance and hatred are sure to triumph.
Without professional historians, history education will be left more and more in the hands of social media influencers, partisan hacks and others unconcerned with achieving a complex, empirically informed understanding of the past. Take, for example, Bill O’Reilly’s 12-books-and-counting “Killing” series — the best-selling nonfiction series of all time, according to Mr. O’Reilly’s publishers — whose very framing sensationalizes the past by focusing on “the deaths and destruction of some of the most influential men and powerful nations in human history.” The same could be said about Rush Limbaugh’s “Rush Revere” series for young people, in which a time-traveling and tri-corner-hatted Mr. Limbaugh teaches “about some of the most exceptional Americans.” Or consider Twitter, where debates over history regularly erupt — and just as regularly devolve into name-calling. If professional historians become a thing of the past, there will be no one able to temper these types of arguments with coolheaded analysis and bring a seriousness of purpose, depth and thoughtful consideration to discussions of who Americans are and who we want to be as a nation.
Americans must do everything in their power to avert the end of history. If we don’t, exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies will dominate our historical imagination and make it impossible to understand, and learn from, the past.
Daniel Bessner is an associate professor of international studies in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and a co-host of the foreign affairs podcast “American Prestige.”
@canonizer This is yet another symptom of the dysfunctional nature of wages in today’s USA (and plenty of other places, too). Value to society != value to shareholders, and I’d argue society is more important than shareholders.
Zero Growth Economy:
As a normal American consumer, that concept struck me as, well, “unAmerican”.
However, there seem to be some thinkers who are considering the possibility, and it might just be the solution to many of the world’s problems.
There are books by the likes of Tim Jackson, which I haven’t read yet. But, for a starter, here’s a short article in the New Yorker.
@FritzCat I’ve seen that idea kicking around for a few years now. The expected infinite growth of the economy is simply not sustainable if we want to have a planet to live on, so other solutions are welcome. I think most of them include done form of internalizing what are now external costs, like the millions of tonnes of microplastic now out in the ocean, in our food, and in the air that we breathe.
@canonizer I am as well, but this seems to be a function of big spending and tax cut bills being passed only when one party controls both legislatures, with no support from the other party. On one hand, I can understand (although don’t agree with it) Republicans trying to use any leverage they have since Democrats passed most of the recent spending bills without any Republican support. If Democrats had a similar mechanism to dispute tax cuts, I’m sure they’d try to use it as leverage as well.
At the same time, I don’t recall these same Republicans requiring spending cuts before passing the Trump tax cuts. The theory that tax cuts pay for themselves through increased growth rarely happens, and didn’t happen with the latest tax cuts. If these Republicans truly cared about fiscal responsibility, they would come to the table with a plan addressing both sides of the equation, not just spending cuts.
@canonizer@dirtdoctor
I like the approach of the executive claiming that the 14th amendment prohibits the country from defaulting on its debt and letting the Congress sue if they disagree. That’d end the stalemate.
I agree with pretty much everything else you said. I’d just add that the Republicans don’t really seem like they care about balancing the budget. Trickle down economics has been shown to not work. Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. So let’s see what, if anything, the house majority can come up with on policy. I would like to see what a serious Republican fiscal policy would look like under this leadership.
@dirtdoctor@klezman agree with both of you. Both sides have contributed to the growing debt. The Republicans use as a leverage tool is horrible. The party doesn’t seem to understand that upsetting the dollar so reserve currency is bad.
What’s the betting line on who will be the next speaker?
I’m a fan of somebody who didn’t try to overthrow the government or help those who did. That shouldn’t be as high a bar as it seems to be…
I’ve been informed that saying some people currently in Congress were involved with attempting to “overthrow the government” is ridiculous hyperbole that can shut down discussion.
As I’ve stated here many many times before, I appreciate discussion with people having different views. I always have. So for anybody offended in that way, please read around that and let’s move on with my apologies.
I’ll restate: I’d prefer the Republicans elect as speaker an individual who was not involved, directly or indirectly, with any of the violence of January 6, 2021 or in the lead-up to it, or in supporting the violent people afterward.
A more unlikely hope: the not-crazy part of the GOP caucus gets together with the not-crazy part of the Democrat caucus and elects somebody who will work to get legislation passed that has a chance of becoming law with a Democrat-controlled senate and presidency.
@klezman Perhaps the Democrats should start voting for a Republican who they think they can work with. Perhaps one who is not an ardent Trumper.
@FritzCat You mean they should take the initiative and just do it? That would be interesting. I’d love to see that happen, including what would hopefully be a bunch of bipartisan legislation over the coming two years.
I have no idea who that would be, but the one person I’ve heard mentioned a couple times is the GOP head of the “problem solver’s caucus”.
@FritzCat @klezman Interesting concept, but I’m afraid it would be the kiss of death politically for the Republican in question. Witness Liz Cheney.
@davirom @FritzCat @klezman Too bad they gerrymandered the Illinois rep that was willing to sit on January 6th committee. I forget his name.
@FritzCat @klezman there’s no benefit for Democrats to cut this short other than to confirm a democrat or possibly someone not in Congress
@davirom @dirtdoctor @FritzCat Kinzinger. He’s way too conservative for me policy-wise but he at least believes that the government should operate from a factual basis and he strikes me as an honest person. I wouldn’t be upset if they nominated him. There’s no rule that the speaker needs to be an elected member of the house.
@davirom @FritzCat @klezman I don’t agree with all his thoughts on policies either, but at least it seemed like he actually wanted to govern and wasn’t just about himself, fundraising, or getting likes on social media. People can disagree about best way forward for country, but we all can’t have our “alternative” facts, or whatever Kellyanne Conway called it.
@davirom @dirtdoctor @FritzCat couldn’t have said it better myself
Here we have the spectacle of 20-odd (and I do mean odd) representatives holding the House and by extension Congress and America hostage to their extreme views. By extreme, I mean “My Kevin” is too liberal for them. With the House so evenly split between D’s and R’s, so long as they act as a block they can extort concessions from so-called mainstream Republicans. But to what avail? Ask Kevin how giving concessions is working for him.
My impression is that what the 20-odd want from government is to shut it down, and they are succeeding.
@davirom That’s also what I’m wondering. What’s Kevin’s end-game here? Just the prestige of being called “speaker” until he loses a motion to vacate? He’s given away so many concessions that even if he ends up in the chair he’s got basically no power.
And good point about the 20-odd wanting government to be broken. Arsonists in the fire department.
@davirom I’m not sure they’ve suggested that Kevin is too liberal. They literally just don’t like him despite him offering concessions previously unheard of within his caucus.
Since every Congressional race has become nationalized, every bit of sensational behavior is rewarded and they have been liberated from requiring party funds to campaign for office.
@canonizer @davirom Just impose term limits and 99% of the problems will be flushed away.
@canonizer @davirom @Mark_L Agree on term limits, but if I could change only 1 thing, it would be to eliminate gerrymandering. That should reduce the number of far left and right representatives that can win districts. It would also lead to a more representative government, at both the federal and state level.
@davirom @dirtdoctor @Mark_L as someone who identifies as liberal/progressive, i will say that it is not as easy just to eliminate districts when urban areas are going to be more liberal and rural ones more conservative. Drawing competitive districts that could lead either way would probably look artificially hub and spoke visually.
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @Mark_L
Term limits - sure. I don’t think this will be as effective as many others do.
No more gerrymandering - 100%. Independent distributing commissions, zero consideration of partisan affiliation in the process, and generally trying to follow existing administrative lines.
Two more that I think would help:
The house needs more members. Like 100 more. The representation is getting more and more skewed as large states like California and Texas are underrepresented and small states are war overrepresented.
Ranked choice voting. This can help eliminate both the extreme candidates but also the stranglehold the two parties have on the system. Alaska has it right on this one.
@davirom @dirtdoctor @klezman @Mark_L oh, we are short 100s of representatives. it should be locked against the least populous state and proportionately distributed from there. I think this started in the 20s? I once knew the story of why the House stopped growing but can no longer recall. There’s no reason for small states to be protected by over representation in both chambers.
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @klezman Personally, I think one of our problems is that we already have too much government.
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @Mark_L Does “too much government” equal “too many representatives”?
@davirom @dirtdoctor @klezman @Mark_L Eh, I don’t get this argument. Wyoming has 550k people and 1 rep in the house. California has over 40m. The senate is supposed to be the body that gives over representation to small states but to equalize the voice of californians would require 72 congresspeople. It’s a distorted overrepresentation.
I can understand the argument against growing the civil service or bureaucracy in the hypothetical but I don’t understand how a person can be against both direct democracy and fair representation.
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @klezman Using Wyoming as the basis for “over-representation” is not a very good argument. Since each state (rightfully, IMO) is guaranteed at least one representative, the smallest population (WY) might appear to have a disproportionately “large” advantage (1 rep. for 58K population). The states with 4 or more representatives are all very close to 1 representative per 750K of population. There is almost no “unfairness” to be found.
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @Mark_L I would actually be ok with Congressional districts going across state lines to equalize the population in each district. This is one of those things that sounds better in theory than in practice, though. Too many other issues to sort out to make something like that work.
Failing that, I’ve not yet encountered a persuasive argument for over representing small states in the house. (Or for the electoral college in the 21st century, but that’s a debate for another day.)
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @klezman I should have said 1 rep for 580K in WY.
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @klezman
Are there any over represented small states that you can specify, beyond the guarantee of one representative?
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @Mark_L
Well, this is a question that’s easy to answer, but it depends on the definition.
According to the US Census, there are just over 761k per House seat on average after the 2020 census. Let’s first define “fair” as being within a 10% variance of that number. That gives us between 685-837k people per seat. I think that’s a very generous variation for this measure, but by that standard the following six states are overrepresented:
Maine, Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming
These four are under represented: Delaware, Idaho, South Dakota, and West Virginia
If you instead tighten the window to 5%, you get 723-799k people. Then you get seven more that are overrepresented:
Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon
And you only get Utah added to the list of under represented states.
Source: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2020/data/apportionment/apportionment-data-table.pdf
Of course this problem gets worse when you port it over to the electoral college. One way to quiet the calls for abolishing it is to have it be more fair by having more fair representation in the House. I happen to think the electoral college is anachronistic, but I know there are those who very strongly believe in its benefits, and those people would strengthen their argument, imo, by advocating for a larger house.
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @klezman
I consider that a fallacious definition of “fair”. States with smaller populations are very unlikely to fit that definition because the “granularity” of the 761K will automatically put some at a higher or lower distance from the average.
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @Mark_L that’s fine, I understand the math here. But to answer your question I had to pick a definition and so I picked two alternatives. Obviously when you’re dealing with integers there will be edge effects, like with Rhode Island and Delaware. We can agree no matter what they these will happen yet can still discuss the degree of over and under representation in the house when the number of Representatives hasn’t increased in many decades.
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @klezman I guess the question is, why the need to increase? (I tried to find the total cost of a representative, but didn’t get a clear answer. But I tend to think that we waste too much money on government and there is no need to add more.)
@canonizer @davirom @dirtdoctor @Mark_L more fair representation in the house and in voting for president if we’re keeping the electoral college.
100 Representatives more at even 5 million each (that buys a lot of staff!) is a whopping $1.65 per person per year in the country. For better governance that seems a bargain. (Although there’s certainly an argument to be made that more Representatives didn’t necessarily mean better governance.)
@davirom @dirtdoctor @klezman @Mark_L I guess my response to “why more” would be because this is one of the few places that we have actual representation. There is a fair critique that much of what does the actual governing of us comes from unelected officials.
The number of people each congressperson represents has increased steadily and maybe their constituencies are too big to do that adequately? By maybe, I think it’s definite.
Today President Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to 14 individuals, including 3 posthumously to DC police officers who died shortly after the insurrection, 5 to other police officers for their defense of the Capitol, and 3 to Republican election officials who resisted intimidation by Trump himself or his proxies to invalidate election results in their jurisdictions.
Fox’s lead on the story: “Biden says wrong day at January 6 ceremony honoring officers, remembers ‘what happened on July 6’”.
@davirom “Fair and balanced”, my ass. Or have they retired that slogan now?
Now we get to hear all about Hunter’s laptop.
I rarely, RARELY, agree with conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg but he makes some good points in today’s op-ed that appeared in the LA Times. For those who don’t want to read it, basically he says the chaos in the House is not ideology driven, and it may not be possible to apply conventional ideological labels to the current crop of Republicans.
From Jonah Goldberg:
Kevin McCarthy’s epic struggle to become speaker of the House produced a lot of memorable images, but the most unforgettable was probably of Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) being physically restrained from opening a fresh can of whup-ass on Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), after Gaetz ensured McCarthy’s 14th failure to get the gavel.
The significance of the near-altercation is that it had next to nothing to do with conventional ideological differences. Rogers is a very conservative Republican. Gaetz is a cable news popinjay who happens to be in Congress.
Indeed, the relentless torrent of never-in-doubt-but-often-in-error commentary last week exposed the poverty of our political vocabulary. While it’s true that 19 of the original 20 anti-McCarthy Republicans were members of the House Freedom Caucus (or were endorsed by its campaign arm in the midterms), the majority of the roughly 50 HFC members sided with McCarthy (R-Bakersfield). You might not have known this amidst all of the “establishment versus Freedom Caucus” punditry.
Similarly, the holdouts were routinely called “ultra-conservatives” or “hard-line conservatives” as if their opposition was driven by a deeper, more sincere commitment to conservative principles. But is anti-McCarthy Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) really more “conservative” than pro-McCarthy loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)? Heck, do either of them qualify as meaningfully “principled” at all?
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the rebels’ first choice for speaker among the anti-McCarthy forces, was a steadfast supporter of … Kevin McCarthy.
Even such non-ideological shorthand as “pro-Trump” and “anti-Trump” clarifies little. McCarthy has played Renfield to Trump’s Dracula for years now, but so did most of the folks on the “Never Kevin” roster. During the Trump years, Rogers voted with the president more than Gaetz, himself a thorough Trump sycophant.
One source of this confusion stems from the widespread cockamamie delusion in certain quarters of the right that being part of “the establishment” is code for “moderate,” “sell-out,” or “RINO.” Another magnet next to the compass for would-be navigators of the political landscape is the notion that Donald Trump is not now and has never been part of the Republican establishment, a view that seems to be counterintuitively held most adamantly by people who insist the GOP is forevermore Trump’s party.
Among the many problems at play here is that it is very difficult to have serious conversations about serious things if we don’t have accurate labels for the things we’re talking about. As George Orwell observed, language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
One way out of this morass is to talk less about ideology and more about factions. To the extent they ever existed, the days of the GOP’s ideological coherence are over. Just look around. According to the old standards, defeated Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming was a fairly orthodox conservative, but she’s now a pariah for being a member of the anti-Trump faction. For years, opposition to abortion was a defining criteria for being politically conservative. Trump is now blaming that position for the GOP’s midterm losses. Defense spending, long a conservative litmus test, fully emerged last week as an intra-Republican fault line.
The chaos isn’t confined to Congress. Fox News brahmins were all over the place last week, with Sean Hannity carrying water for McCarthy while Tucker Carlson hurled epithets at the pro-McCarthy camp, including at colleagues.
The advantage of the term “faction” is that it’s inherently non-ideological. The founders anticipated that factional conflict would define our politics, and it has. But for most of our history, those factions often had less to do with clear ideological disputes than regional, economic or cultural conflicts.
The challenge with mothballing ideological language in describing today’s GOP is that it makes the comfortable right-left, us-versus-them verbiage that rules everything from fundraising to punditry obsolete.
Some factions today do have ideological flavors like nationalism, populism or, relatedly, foreign policy non-interventionism. But what fuels — and funds — them is a cultivated radicalism and contrived hostility to an establishment that barely exists beyond the formal powers of leadership. If anyone in power amounts to “the establishment” then, sure, McCarthy and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate minority leader, are the establishment.
The question for Republican leaders is whether they will be able to forge a governing faction, particularly in a climate where Democrats have every incentive to let Republicans feast on each other, and the conservative base values opposition for its own sake. Thanks to the GOP’s tiny majority, last week’s rebels have learned the power of faction. Whether the majority can exert similar power remains to be seen.
@davirom I agree also. It has bothered me that they’ve been calling the chaos faction “conservative”.
I know not everyone is going to have access to the times but thought this op ed was worthwhile from a perspective of historian on the study of history in our climate - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/opinion/american-history-college-university-academia.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Sunday Opinion
And pasting if there’s anyone interested
Account
OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession
Jan. 14, 2023
An image shows a row of books, all in different colors, which say “History” on their spines. They decline in size as the image moves from left to right.
Credit…Soohee Cho
Give this article
By Daniel Bessner
Mr. Bessner is a historian.
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When I received my Ph.D. in history in 2013, I didn’t expect that within a decade fights over history — and historiography, even if few people use that word — would become front-page news. But over the last few years that is precisely what has happened: Just look at the recent debates over America’s legacy of slavery, what can be taught in public schools about the nation’s founders and even the definition of what constitutes fascism. The interpretation of the American past has not in recent memory been as public or as contentious as it is now.
Maybe it started with The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” and which accompanied a national reckoning around race. That provoked, perhaps inevitably, a right-wing backlash in the form of “The 1776 Report,” a triumphalist, Donald Trump-directed effort. Then came a raft of laws in conservative-governed states across the country aiming to restrict and control how history is taught in public schools.
History, as the historian Matthew Karp has written, has become “a new kind of political priority” for people across the political spectrum, a means to fight over what it is to be an American: which values we should emphasize, which groups we should honor, which injustices we should redress.
The historical profession has likewise been roiled by controversy. Last August, James H. Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, published an essay in which he argued that present-focused narratives of African slavery often represent “historical erasures and narrow politics.” The piece engendered a firestorm of reproach, with scholars variously accusing Dr. Sweet of attempting to delegitimize new research on topics including race and gender; some even accused Dr. Sweet of outright racism.
Yet as Americans fight over their history, the historical profession itself is in rapid — maybe even terminal — decline. Twelve days after Dr. Sweet published his column, the A.H.A. released a “Jobs Report” that makes for grim reading: The average number of available new “tenure track” university jobs, which are secure jobs that provide living wages, benefits and stability, between 2020 and 2022 was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic.
The report further notes that only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later. The work of historians has been “de-professionalized,” and people like myself, who have tenure track jobs, will be increasingly rare in coming years. This is true for all academic fields, not just history. As Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott note in their book “The Gig Academy,” about 70 percent of all college professors work off the tenure track. The majority of these professors make less than $3,500 per course, according to a 2020 report by the American Federation of Teachers. Jobs that used to allow professors to live middle-class lives now barely enable them to keep their heads above water.
What is to blame? In the past generation the American university has undergone a drastic transformation. To reduce costs, university administrators have dramatically reduced tenure. And as the protections of tenure have withered away, the size of nonteaching university staffs have exploded. Between 1976 and 2018, “full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164 percent and 452 percent, respectively,” according to a 2021 paper on the topic. Professors have been sacrificed on the altar of vice deans.
At the same time, in an effort to fund research that might redound to their financial benefit and to demonstrate their pragmatic value to politicians and to the public, universities have emphasized science, technology, engineering and math at the expense of the humanities. As the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported, citing data from 2019, “spending for humanities research equaled 0.7 percent of the amount dedicated to STEM R.&D.”
The humanities, including history, are often considered more an object of ridicule than a legitimate lane of study. Look no further than statements from politicians: Rick Scott, the former governor of Florida, assembled a task force in 2012 that recommended that people who major in history and other humanities fields be charged higher tuition at state universities. In 2016, Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky said that “French literature majors” should not receive state funding for their degrees. Even more recently, in 2021, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mocked people who go into debt to “end up with degrees in things like zombie studies.” And it’s not just Republicans: President Barack Obama remarked in 2014 that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree,” implying that if a degree didn’t make money it wasn’t worth it. (Mr. Obama later apologized to a University of Texas art historian for his remarks, clarifying that he did believe art history was a valuable subject.)
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These material and ideological assaults have engendered a steep decline in undergraduate humanities majors. In the 2018-19 academic year, only 23,923 graduating undergraduates received degrees in history and related fields, which, the A.H.A. notes, is “down more than a third from 2012 and the smallest number awarded since the late 1980s.”
Private groups, which traditionally provided significant financial support to budding humanities scholars, have taken the hint and increasingly stopped supporting the humanities and soft social sciences. The Social Science Research Council recently ended its International Dissertation Research Fellowship program, which in the last 25 years funded over 1,600 scholars exploring “non-U.S. cultures” and “U.S. Indigenous communities,” declaring that the program “accomplished many of the goals it had set for itself.” The Ford Foundation has similarly decided to conclude its long-running National Academies fellowship program for historically marginalized scholars in order, the foundation’s president declared, “to invest more deeply in movement-building work.”
It’s the end of history. And the consequences will be significant.
Entire areas of our shared history will never be known because no one will receive a living wage to uncover and study them. It’s implausible to expect scholars with insecure jobs to offer bold and innovative claims about history when they can easily be fired for doing so. Instead, history will be studied increasingly by the wealthy, which is to say those able to work without pay. It’s easy to see how this could lead American historical scholarship to adopt a pro-status-quo bias. In today’s world, if you don’t have access to elite networks, financial resources or both, it just doesn’t make sense to pursue a career in history. In the future, history won’t just be written by the victors; it’ll also be written by the well-to-do.
If Americans don’t seriously invest in history and other humanities disciplines, we encourage the ahistoric ignorance upon which reaction relies. Many Republican politicians support “divisive concepts” laws that try to regulate what college professors teach. Are they aiming at an easy target in the culture war? Perhaps. But it’s also true that a humanities education encourages thinking that often challenges xenophobic and racist dogma. Progress depends on studying and arguing about the past in an open and informed manner. This is especially true in a moment like our own, in which Americans use history to fight over which vision of the country will dominate politics. If there are no historians to reflect meaningfully and accurately on the past, then ignorance and hatred are sure to triumph.
Without professional historians, history education will be left more and more in the hands of social media influencers, partisan hacks and others unconcerned with achieving a complex, empirically informed understanding of the past. Take, for example, Bill O’Reilly’s 12-books-and-counting “Killing” series — the best-selling nonfiction series of all time, according to Mr. O’Reilly’s publishers — whose very framing sensationalizes the past by focusing on “the deaths and destruction of some of the most influential men and powerful nations in human history.” The same could be said about Rush Limbaugh’s “Rush Revere” series for young people, in which a time-traveling and tri-corner-hatted Mr. Limbaugh teaches “about some of the most exceptional Americans.” Or consider Twitter, where debates over history regularly erupt — and just as regularly devolve into name-calling. If professional historians become a thing of the past, there will be no one able to temper these types of arguments with coolheaded analysis and bring a seriousness of purpose, depth and thoughtful consideration to discussions of who Americans are and who we want to be as a nation.
Americans must do everything in their power to avert the end of history. If we don’t, exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies will dominate our historical imagination and make it impossible to understand, and learn from, the past.
Daniel Bessner is an associate professor of international studies in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and a co-host of the foreign affairs podcast “American Prestige.”
@canonizer This is yet another symptom of the dysfunctional nature of wages in today’s USA (and plenty of other places, too). Value to society != value to shareholders, and I’d argue society is more important than shareholders.
Zero Growth Economy:
As a normal American consumer, that concept struck me as, well, “unAmerican”.
However, there seem to be some thinkers who are considering the possibility, and it might just be the solution to many of the world’s problems.
There are books by the likes of Tim Jackson, which I haven’t read yet. But, for a starter, here’s a short article in the New Yorker.
@FritzCat I’ve seen that idea kicking around for a few years now. The expected infinite growth of the economy is simply not sustainable if we want to have a planet to live on, so other solutions are welcome. I think most of them include done form of internalizing what are now external costs, like the millions of tonnes of microplastic now out in the ocean, in our food, and in the air that we breathe.
i’m so gd sick of the debt limit standoffs.
@canonizer I am as well, but this seems to be a function of big spending and tax cut bills being passed only when one party controls both legislatures, with no support from the other party. On one hand, I can understand (although don’t agree with it) Republicans trying to use any leverage they have since Democrats passed most of the recent spending bills without any Republican support. If Democrats had a similar mechanism to dispute tax cuts, I’m sure they’d try to use it as leverage as well.
At the same time, I don’t recall these same Republicans requiring spending cuts before passing the Trump tax cuts. The theory that tax cuts pay for themselves through increased growth rarely happens, and didn’t happen with the latest tax cuts. If these Republicans truly cared about fiscal responsibility, they would come to the table with a plan addressing both sides of the equation, not just spending cuts.
@canonizer @dirtdoctor
I like the approach of the executive claiming that the 14th amendment prohibits the country from defaulting on its debt and letting the Congress sue if they disagree. That’d end the stalemate.
I agree with pretty much everything else you said. I’d just add that the Republicans don’t really seem like they care about balancing the budget. Trickle down economics has been shown to not work. Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. So let’s see what, if anything, the house majority can come up with on policy. I would like to see what a serious Republican fiscal policy would look like under this leadership.
@dirtdoctor @klezman agree with both of you. Both sides have contributed to the growing debt. The Republicans use as a leverage tool is horrible. The party doesn’t seem to understand that upsetting the dollar so reserve currency is bad.
https://www.science.org/content/article/want-avoid-heated-argument-trick-could-help
Interesting article discussing a recent study of how intellectual humility can facilitate debate rather than argument.
@klezman I’m struggling to find a political application of this in a world where argument, not debate, is a fundraising staple.
@davirom I think that’s kind of the point. But I agree the way that one induces additional intellectual humility would be hard to deploy at scale.
@klezman Yes, my use of “political application” was vague.