Groupthink on the Political Right; Or, What Brings All These Wackos to SouthWest Florida?

In 2019, after 30 years living in Chicago, where the Democrats have an iron grip on the electorate, I moved to SouthWest Florida, where MAGA runs wild and the Democrats can't even field a real Democrat to run against Ron DeSantis for governor (cf. Charlie Crist). 

This shift in my immediate political environment has been jarring, honestly, and I'm actually surprised I'm still here despite strong instincts to head back North. (That's another story for another time.)

But moving here has had the unintended (and initially unwelcome) effect of exposing me to the overwhelmingly White, and overwhelmingly Male, base of the GOP, and this exposure has allowed me to get a much better sense of what motivates these people to villify Democrats and to actually venerate a convicted cretin like Donald Trump.

One of the things I do pretty often here in Sarasota is I have become a regular at a couple downtown bars' Happy Hours. Fortunately, I can walk downtown, where there's a quite respectable group of restaurants and bars--much better than you'd expect from a small city like Sarasota, which has not only an interesting, financially successful citizenry (mostly from away, as they say in Maine), but also a lot of passers-through.

So I get to meet these financially successful citizens and their passing-through ilk regularly. And even though almost every bartender has banned political conversations at their bars, you can get a pretty good sense of someone's beliefs and values from a more general chat about life, work, and aspirations in general. 

And what I've learned is quite interesting, especially in light of the current political environment in the US and in Florida. 

Almost without exception, the White Males I chat with in Sarasota *hate* Democrats, *despise* the Democratically-led cities and states of the North, and *love* DeSantis and this income-tax-free "paradise." These strong beliefs motivate many of these men to move here from wherever they are from, bringing with them their hard-earned wealth and their extremely dystopian ideas about the "Hell Holes" up North like Chicago.

When I tell them I miss Chicago, I get the most interesting and vehement reactions, such as the nearly universal view that Chicago is (still!) the murder capital of the world and that the Democratic Machine is absolutely evil and completely un-democratic.

Facts be damned in these conversations: the beliefs I encounter are totally baked in, even--especially!-among people who actually lived at one time in Chicago or in similar cities North and West of the Mason-Dixon line. These beliefs provide almost certain proof that most of these men are consumers/products of FoxNews and are not-so-secret believers in tired old racial and gender stereotypes, not to mention Trump's "American Carnage" storyline.

What I hear from these men about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Gavin Newsom, Chuck Schumer, and many others, is a true caricature: a classic projection of every fear and every disgust that they were raised on, or acquired sometime during their mostly very financially-successful lives.

A sample: Joe Biden is the worst form of "bought-and-paid-for politician" in the history of the world. Kamala Harris got where she is by sleeping with every powerful man she could, and can't utter a coherent thought. Immigrants are mostly criminals and terrorists, or are lazy shifters in search of government handouts. People like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are communists or fascists (or both?) who hate America and want to create a nanny state that eliminates free enterprise and independent thought. Northern governors like J.B. Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer want legalized marijuana so their states' populations become addicted and easily manipulated. Academics are all elitist Marxists who think their book learning trumps common sense and everyday experience. (Okay, maybe that last one has some truth to it.)

While many of the men I talk to are truly experts in their respective occupations and seem to truly love their families, the analytical or empathetic approach they take to their work or personal lives seems to go out the window once the conversation edges toward the political. 

What's going on?

I really don't know the answer. I'm baffled by all of this. Is it the fluorine in the water? Is it COVID vaccines? Is it the result of Bill Gates' devious design of Microsoft Windows? Is it the work of the Trilateral Commission or the attendees at Davos? Is it creeping federal control of schooling in the U.S.?

Seriously, what explains the apparent takeover of (a large sector of) the political world by right-wing groupthink?

I welcome your thoughts.

Israel's Right to Exist and to Use Public Schooling to Maintain Separate Cultural Identies for Jews and Israeli Arabs: Does This Argument Justify Similar School Segregation in the United States?

I looked for this article to better understand why many reasonable people have reacted with horror to the student positions at American universities regarding Israel's right to exist and whether the frame of "colonialism" is a justified view of the current conflict between Israel and Palestinians. 

It's worth a close read.

One aspect of it gives me some pause: the justification it tries to give for ongoing segregation of Jews and Israeli Arabs in the public schools. This segregation is necessary, the author says, to preserve both groups' right to maintain their respective cultural identities.

If someone tried to justify ongoing segregation of American public schooling according to religion or race, I believe most Americans who believe in democracy would strongly resist that. (Such resistance wouldn't, of course, remove the obvious fact that such segregation is, in fact, becoming more widespread in the U.S.)

I realize that the Jewish/Arab cultural divide in Israel is historically very different than that between, say, Blacks and Whites, or Christian Nationalists and secularists in the U.S. But I wonder if this author's justification of ongoing segregation in Israeli public schooling could be applied to the issue of segregation of American public schools. Certainly the White, Christian Nationalist perspective in the U.S. is that the argument clearly applies to current conditions in the U.S.

Can a clear position be laid out that accepts this author's argument for the ongoing segregation of Israeli public schooling while also firmly rejecting the efforts of American Christian Nationalists to further segregate (or to allow the ongoing further segregation of) American public schools? I'm not sure.

https://tikvahfund.org/uncategorized/the-jews-right-to-statehood/ 

(One of) COVID's effects on schooling

One central result of the pandemic was a huge increase in both teacher and student abilities in educational technology. In a way, COVID was the killer app for EdTech.

But COVID, of course, did a lot more than get a whole bunch of people used to using Zoom. One of the most important thing that happened was that parents, all of a sudden, were able to see into the teaching/learning process going on in their public schools. For some parents, this might have been happy-making. What great teachers!!! What a great curriculum!!! What a great school system!!!

Yeah. But.

For some OTHER parents, what they saw on Zoom was not only NOT inspiring (I mean, a lot of teachers and students really had no idea what they were doing at first), but truly troubling. 

There are a WHOLE lot of reasons for this. First: teachers aren't perfect. They're human; they make mistakes; and (let's be honest) some of them aren't really very good at what they do.

Second: "curriculum" is one of those things (like colonoscopy?!) that most people really know little about and really DON'T want to know much about. COVID allowed (forced?) parents to see the curriculum in action, or at least see something that gave them clues about what the curriculum is in a given school. (Curriculum and instruction are very different things, as you know. But parents didn't always make this distinction.)

Third: take two people (say a random teacher and a random parent) and they will have a different set of skills, experiences, and values.  Now add a third person: a young person, a child, a student. The parent is watching the teacher (try to) teach their kid. While some parents were like "yeah, it's not great, but during the pandemic this is better than nothing" and some others were like "I LOVE my child's teacher" while a few others were really outraged like "This teacher thinks transgenderism (or the idea of structural racism or whatever) is OKAY/True/Age Appropriate?!?!?"

The combination of these three situations lead SOME parents to start to get more involved. Many talked to their friends (through masks at the local park, maybe) and realized that parental dissatisfaction wasn't just something THEY felt. Indeed, in some places it wasn't rare, but it was shared (sometimes widely among certain parent groups). This realization of shared grievance (sound familiar?) has resulted in all KINDS of parent groups and parent action and even some major political action (Glenn Youngkin, Ron DeSantis?). 

One example here in Florida is the turning over of the Sarasota School Board to a group of people who were allegedly non-partisan but were funded by Moms for Liberty and Ron DeSantis. The three had a somewhat vague agenda (Students First! Transparency! Facts, not belief!) that kind of hid a fairly radical (right-wing?) view about the relationship between schools and society.  (In Sarasota, the county is the school district. The city itself is lovely and pretty liberal. The county is...different.) Once elected in 2020, the board has done a whole lot of things, including firing the superintendent, banning certain books, and in general raising the idea among many Sarasotans that the schools they THOUGHT were really pretty good were, rather, being run by a bunch of radical left-wing cultural marxists. The rest, some day, will be history.

I could say more, but I might stick my foot (further) in my mouth.

Low-quality schools perpetuate poverty? Poverty perpetuates low-quality schools.

 

The question of whether poverty *causes* the problem of low-quality schools in the US or low-quality schools *cause* (or perpetuate) poverty is certainly relevant to the connection between economic inequality in the US and the huge disparity in the quality of public schools.

A new essay in the New York Times Magazine looks at why poverty in the US persists despite ongoing spending on anti-poverty programs at the federal level. The essay barely mentions schooling (and, I think, therefore ignores one of the causal factors relevant to the discussion), but because of that it offers an interesting context for the discussions we've been having (and will continue to have) about the relationship between US public schools and other aspects of our political economy.

The essay points the finger at "exploitation" of the poor by landlords, vendors, employers, and pretty much everyone in the US. Not only do many "anti-poverty" programs end up supplementing the revenue taken in by providers of services to the poor, but it also subsidizes the costs of some services (such as banking) for the rest of society. This emphasizes that MANY people in our society actually *benefit* from the persistence of poverty, and, because of this, the political will to *change* the system in ways that could decrease economic inequality is absent in national and many state policy environments. 

Middle-class people, for example, are able to get "free checking" accounts and to take out short-term loans (including from their credit cards) at affordable interest rates because poor people are paying exorbitant bank fees and "payday loan" interest rates that are more than 300% per *week*. (To add to this, middle and upper class parents believe that the schools that their children attend are of good quality, while believing that the *overall* quality of US schools is low, and yet rarely want to pay extra taxes so that the poor people in their states can have better schools.)

In a system where those with political power (and there's no question that wealthier people in the US have more political power) don't have an incentive to make the system more fair and equitable, the system will continue to be UNfair and UNequitable, and those who are victimized ("exploited" according the the essay) will continue to be victimized/exploited in the future.

Some other countries in the world have been able to keep their own economic inequality well below that of the US, although typically Americans believe that these countries have fallen into "socialism" and therefore have less "freedom," "rights," and "choice" than do people in the US.

(This directly relates to the surge "right to work" rules in many American states, which reduces the influence of labor unions, which have historically helped lower-income people by increasing their wages. Certainly some middle-class people, like public school teachers, benefit very much from having strong labor unions, but so do workers at places like McDonald's and Amazon. Who LOSES money when unions are strong? Corporations and the people who invest in them.)

Why Poverty Persists in America https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/magazine/poverty-by-america-matthew-desmond.html?unlocked_article_code=TgTi2FUIdlesoZ3PfhF3FlpYZ9BVgrqix3AzZ5KykWHKxq1eIt9wx2tGIlXTTZ34vhV8ov0LRm4Q8GAWjBpyHBHANYxVd-4oSdkwkrkALHxQNkg2pUoF0aMsQlBz9-fUHzgFCqprDjyQPai6ZxWrGo-QwC6QE1m0GYxVMmJaZ16IwCqx9PeIHsz3h9JKlH22mfdl1a6aGishw2MyIU6oqlGHE6Sr62GYMWIzzqIHq7NZCAYHrL-Z_YLlIanewOSBQLF0ffF3EzZR2SEeFLEHdSnu6wYBubkAk8UuWvGnJdGZJpVT7J-rE-2QhDxRKu5z4n9Xd9vBeHUS5ioi13y9IehwRdWIj5JhO2hTr3I

Proposed voucher program for Florida schools may increase school segregation and decrease public school quality

 

If legislators in the State of Florida have their way, many families in the US will be able to redirect educational dollars away from the public schools to a variety of private schools, including religious schools.

The problems with the legislation, according to critics, are:

1. The vouchers are not enough to pay for most Florida private schools. So very low income parents won't have the resources to take advantage of the vouchers, meaning that their children will remain in the public schools.

2. Private schools in Florida are not required to reveal certain information that might be helpful to parents in choosing high-quality private schools. Private schools don't have to disclose things such as how many of their teachers are certified, what percentage of students graduate, what extra costs there are for extracurricular programs, or what programs and resources are available for children with special needs.

3. Lower-income parents are less likely to KNOW about alternative schooling for their children, and therefore less likely to participate or benefit from school choice programs.

4. Companion legislation aims to REDUCE the number of state mandates for public schools, supposedly so that public schools are "more free" to do what is necessary to compete with private schools. It's important to look carefully at WHICH state mandates will be eliminated. Will those be mandates that often benefit lower income families or people in marginalized groups?

See:

https://www.news-press.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/08/florida-lawmakers-tee-up-universal-school-voucher-plans-amid-cost-concerns/69984609007/