Month: May 2013

A reader created the above chart:

Last night I decided to fact-check Sean Trende’s argument, namely that:

the white South began breaking away from the Democrats in the 1920s, as population centers began to develop in what was being called the “New South”… . In the 1930s and 1940s, FDR performed worse in the South in every election following his 1932 election. By the mid-1940s, the GOP was winning about a quarter of the Southern vote in presidential elections

The evidence simply does not tell this story.  I examined and charted nine southern states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas  (the Confederacy minus Florida and Texas) to see how the Republican presidential candidates performed relative to the nation as whole from 1916 to 1972. There was no improvement by Republican presidential candidates in the south in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s.  In 1916, the GOP ran 18.9% points lower in these nine southern states than the country as a whole.  By 1948, the GOP was running exactly … 18.9% points lower.   Republicans had a relatively good year in the South in 1928, when Democrats nominated Al Smith, a New York Catholic.  Otherwise, GOP presidential candidates traded in a fairly narrow range in the South during these three decades.

Trende says that FDR’s winning margins declined in the South with each election.  This ignores that fact that FDR winning margins declined nationwide with each election.

When you adjust for that fact, you can see that Republicans underperformance in the South stayed about the same through four FDR elections with no obvious trend:  – 19.4% in 1932, -16.1% in 1936, -23.0% in 1940 and -18.7 in 1944.

Trende says that “by the mid-40’s the GOP was winning about 25% of the Southern vote in presidential elections”.  Yes.  But in these combined nine Southern states, the GOP had already captured 27.2% of the vote in 1916, 38.2% in 1920, 30.97% in 1924 and 45.16% in 1928.  Breaking 25% in the late ’40s was not something impressive or new for the GOP in the South.

Moreover, Trend’s thesis – that affluence spurred by the growth of cities and towns is what drew Southerners to the GOP – is completed belied by the data.   The two states with the biggest swings – from monolithically Democratic in 1920s to gaga for Goldwater in 1964 – were Mississippi and South Carolina, two states know more for their deep plantation roots than for bourgeoning metropolises.

Trende is right that a big breakthrough for the GOP in the south came in 1952 (well before the Civil Right Act of 1964).   He suggests that this attraction can’t have be driven by racial hostility since Eisenhower was sympathetic to civil rights.  However, this totally ignores what was happening on the Democratic side.   Southern delegates walked out of the Democratic convention in 1948 when Humphrey called for an end to Jim Crow and formed their own protest party (the Dixiecrats) whose chief objective was to uphold segregation.  Shortly thereafter Truman de-segregated the military.

While Democrats still had a large bloc of Southern representatives and would be less supportive of civil rights legislation in ’50s and ’60s because of it, by 1948 the Democratic leadership was signaling that is was no longer going to uphold the Southern segregation.  This encouraged many white southerners to abandon the national Democratic party (if not their own local Democratic party just yet) and to view the two parties through the prism of other issues.  That is what allowed the GOP to start making big gains in the ’50s and ’60s.

Another reader:

Geez, Trende has discovered something that students of Southern politics have known for a long time: that Republicanism was gaining in the postwar South, at least in the “Rim South.”  But he seems unaware of why.  Yes, Eisenhower sent the 101st into Little Rock, but he was constitutionally required to uphold federal authority. It was well known that Eisenhower was at best a reluctant supporter of Brown and federal civil rights legislation.

More to the point, the big story in Southern politics after 1948 was the widening gulf between Southern Democrats and the National Party.  Not only did you have the short-lived Dixiecrat movement in 1948, but its successors increasingly played footsie with the Republicans without formally leaving the party.   Increasingly homeless and unable to make the traditional case that voting Democratic was the best means of maintaining white supremacy, it’s hardly surprising that Southern conservatives who had never especially liked the New Deal would move toward the Republicans.  To be sure, Republicans for a long time drew their votes from the urban and suburban middle class; working-class whites remained Democrats, often out of gratitude for the New Deal (I remember sitting in a barber shop in Upstate SC around 1970 hearing an old white guy say, “Don’t tell me about the Republicans; I lived through the Hoover time!”), partly out of hostility to the “country club” set, but in any case because they didn’t have to choose between local Democrats and Republicans on race.

But as long as I’ve been politically aware (and I’m 65, and a lifelong South-watcher), Republicans were openly competing in the South for the anti-civil rights vote, arguing that the real threat to the “Southern way of life” were those traitorous Yankee New Dealers.  The first serious statewide run by a Republican in South Carolina was W. D. Workman’s Senate bid in 1962; Workman was a journalist best known for being the author of a segregationist screed titled The Case for the South.  This was the face of Republicanism in my home state.

But, again, there was no real difference on race between them and the Democratic establishment in the South until after 1965, when the Democrats executed one of the great pivots in American political history and reinvented themselves as a biracial party.  It still took the Republicans some time to supplant the Democrats as the “white” party, though, because of that lingering “country club” stigma; they did so by increasingly openly identifying with white southern culture – Confederacy, NASCAR, Southern Baptist religiosity, the “culture wars” generally.

Yes, it’s a complicated story; but Southern Republicans have exploited, if not racism per se, opposition to government solutions to racial discrimination, for as long as I’ve been alive.

Zombie thought experiments are effective teaching tools:

When you’re the last survivors of the human race, there are some very pertinent questions you must ask:

“How would you protect yourself if infection was spread through the air versus only spread by biting?”

“How well would isolation of infected people work if the incubation period is very long versus very short?”

“Why might you want to thoroughly wash your zombie-killing arrows before using them to kill squirrels, which you will then eat?”

In infectious disease terms, these are referring to the 1) vector of transmission (how does the virus travel), 2) length of incubation (how long does it take before you start passing on the disease and 3) cross-contamination (disease moving from one object to another). But this is much more interesting than talking about “why should you wash your hands before eating dinner,” especially when talking to kids.

This weekend on the Dish, Andrew addressed Niall Ferguson’s offensive comments about John Maynard Keynes’ homosexuality, following-up by musing on quotes from both Burke and Keynes on capitalism.

We also provided our usual eclectic mix religious, books, and cultural coverage. In matters of faith, doubt, and philosophy, Simon Willis argued particularism was the best philosophy, Molly Crockett debated the ethics of a “morality pill,” and Tim Kreider embraced doubt. Damon Linker found Christ in Malick’s To the Wonder, David Sessions grappled with losing his religion, and Jonathan Fitzgerald excoriated a Christianity Today piece on hip-hop. Roger Tagholm pondered the effects of holy books going digital, Russell D. Moore eulogized country singer George Jones, and Frans de Waal challenged Christian assumptions about animals. Patrick Kurp outgrew his resistance to talking about his heroes, Claire Messud pondered our contradictory natures, and John Berryman reflected on the connection between suffering and creativity.

In literary and arts coverage, Olive Senior thought literature couldn’t help but be political, Mason Currey chronicled the chemical lives of great writers, and Tony Woodlief defended the democratization of art. D.G. Myers observed a paradox in understanding literature, Nathaniel Rich considered the despair he found in the novel Miss Lonelyhearts, and Andrew O’Hagan contemplated writers whose work was informed by another medium. Thom Yorke divulged his ideal of beauty, the pacifist author of Winnie the Pooh struggled with his wartime conscription, and Maria Bustillos penned a love letter to her favorite highway. Read Saturday’s poem here and Sunday’s here.

In assorted news and views, Brian Eno expounded on his vintage pornography collection, Helen Lewis visited a collection of harvested tattoos, and Jonathan Harris described the moments of unexpected intimacy caught on film between pornstars. Maria Popova pointed to a great list from Susan Sontag, Miles Raymer assessed the unlikely success of the band Neutral Milk Hotel, and a member of Alcoholic Anonymous developed a strange alternative therapy for the disease. Robert W. Gehl wondered if there is any hope for haters, the Internet proved to be for marriage, and a profile of an electronic cigarette revealed how advertisers try to brand what’s bad for you. Malkin Award nominee here, MHBs here and here, FOTDs here and here, VFYWs here and here, and the latest window contest here.

– M.S.

(Photo: “Oxalis debilis Kunth varietas corymbosa (DC.) Lourteig, 1981″ via Wikipedia)

Contribute your two cents to the growing thread:

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A reader writes:

Is it that Polikoff and Gladstone are under the impression that teaching children to write in cursive somehow takes up too much time? Or that children are vessels into which we can only fit so much, and therefore we should not try to teach them anything “unnecessary”? Pure hogwash on both counts. Learning to write legibly and speedily by hand is, in my own humble experience, invaluable. Any endeavor that requires note-taking in any real degree, especially in real time, becomes immensely more easy and pleasurable if one writes well in cursive, and it’s much faster than “print” letters.

And think about the utilitarian logic of not teaching “unnecessary” things to children. Should we not teach them music, drawing, singing, dancing, sports or any other of the manifold pursuits that give life depth and richness but do not technically serve any real economic purpose? Preposterous.

Furthermore, writing well and attractively by hand deepens our engagement with our language, instills respect for the written word, and frankly just looks better, in my opinion. It also isn’t really very hard. Like most worthwhile things, it just takes practice. And I reject this silly sophistry that says making things beautiful, and teaching kids to do simple, humble things like writing nicely is something we don’t have the resources or time to give them. Instilling in them a deep sense of craft, and of craftsmanship, is in fact of the highest importance.

Another reader who defends cursive:

The greatest lesson I ever learned came from an idealistic young woman who spent a year in the late sixties teaching sixth grade at the American Community School in Hampstead between gigs with the Peace Corps.  When asked by a fellow student why we were studying a seemingly insignificant thing, she replied, “You’re not here to learn stuff.  You’re here to practice how to learn stuff, because no matter how old you get, you will always need to learn.”

Another:

Cursive, as it’s taught in schools now, was actually not intended to be for handwriting.  “Looped cursive,” with its letters that look nothing like print, originally comes from letterforms inscribed by copperplate engravers.  Credit for this knowledge goes to Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay, calligraphers who for years have had a side gig running handwriting improvement workshops for doctors!  They also take issue with the “ball and stick” method of teaching print handwriting, as each letter often requires two or more strokes, and advocate instead for italic-style handwriting, which is much more natural (I’ve attached the best comparison I can find).  As an added bonus, italic handwriting easily transitions into cursive.

Who knows if any of this will be relevant in the digital age, but apparently the difficulty of writing in cursive also assists memory.

https://twitter.com/Bitchuation/status/328651669543976961

The following passage is from a speech that director Steven Soderbergh recently gave at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival:

Given all the incredible suffering in the world I wonder, what is art for, really? If the collected works of Shakespeare can’t prevent genocide then really, what is it for? Shouldn’t we be spending the time and resources alleviating suffering and helping other people instead of going to the movies and plays and art installations? When we did Ocean’s Thirteen the casino set used $60,000 of electricity every week. How do you justify that? Do you justify that by saying, the people who could’ve had that electricity are going to watch the movie for two hours and be entertained – except they probably can’t, because they don’t have any electricity, because we used it. Then I think, what about all the resources spent on all the pieces of entertainment? What about the carbon footprint of getting me here? Then I think, why are you even thinking that way and worrying about how many miles per gallon my car gets, when we have NASCAR, and monster truck pulls on TV? So what I finally decided was, art is simply inevitable.

It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it’s because we are a species that’s driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes when you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that’s impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being – literally seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good piece of art and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is transformative and in the minute you’re experiencing that piece of art, you’re not alone.

Though Soderbergh has retired from filmmaking, his artistic energy is being used to tweet a novella from an account called Bitchuation: 

Written in second-person, “Glue” follows a yet-unnamed protagonist (“you”) to the underworld of Amsterdam and Paris, where the mysterious substance “#&%#” is coveted “because everyone wanted it and nobody had it.” Uniquely, Soderbergh also works in visual elements to his pulp fiction narrative. Photos accompany some of the tweets; establishing shots, per se, that also serve to set the mood. Crooked photos of buildings. Smudgy faces glimpsed from the corner of an intoxicated eye.

[W]hat makes “Glue” utterly brilliant is its parodying of the tradition of hardboiled pulp fiction. Using the clipped sentences and the weighty delivery one instantly associates with Raymond Chandler, “Glue” can at once seem satirical, gimmicky or earnest, playing with a tradition so overwrought with material that its almost unrecognizable in its plainest form to a modern reader.

Primatologist Frans de Waal, writing in the newly launched Nautilus magazine, challenges Christian assumptions about animals:

It’s an old Christian idea that humans have souls and animals don’t. I sometimes think it’s because our religions arose in a desert environment in which there were no primates, so you have people who lived with camels, goats, snakes, and scorpions. Of course, you then conclude that we are totally different from the rest of the animal kingdom because we don’t have primates with whom to compare ourselves. When the first great apes arrived in Western Europe—to the zoos in London and Paris—people were absolutely flabbergasted. Queen Victoria even expressed her disgust at seeing these animals. Why would an ape be disgusting unless you feel a threat from it? You would never call a giraffe disgusting, but she was disgusted by chimpanzees and orangutans because people had no concept that there could be animals so similar to us in every possible way. We come from a religion that’s not used to that kind of comparison.

His new book The Bonobo and the Atheist tackles religion more broadly:

I don’t think primates have religions, but they may have certain superstitions. For example, if a thunderstorm comes through with an enormous amount of noise and rain, male chimpanzees will put their hands up and start walking around bipedally, in a dancing sort of fashion. It’s called a rain dance and it has been observed with chimpanzees approaching a waterfall. We really don’t know why they do it. Are they impressed by what happens? Do they think they can stop it? Of course, that would be superstition. Are they somehow in awe of nature?

Previous Dish on de Waal here.

“I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business. Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s deafness, Milton’s blindness, that kind of thing. And I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, “Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm,” but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point, I’m out, but short of that, I don’t know. I hope to be nearly crucified,” – John Berryman.

“I’ve spent the past week—as I’ve spent much of the past few years—wanting only for the world to go away, for all engagements to be canceled, and to have more time with my family. It’s almost as if the desire for community is a nostalgic one; and the reality, with time’s winged chariot hurrying near, is that one longs increasingly for simple affections, for space, and calm, and time to work. What contradictory beings humans are,” – Claire Messud.