Democracy in America: Civil Society, Academic department meetings, and Insurgent political campaigns

With apologies to U Chicago Press, whose image I am using.

So, after a long series of over-loaded trips for two aging Japanese stalwarts (a '97 Toyota Camry, to be rewarded with some expensive exhaust work; and an '03 Honda CRV), Jasmine & I arrived at our cabin, on the outskirts of Charlottesville over a week ago.  Since Virginia isn't into profusions of municipal governing bodies (the opposite of New York!), we live in no town or city, but Albemarle County is our only governing entity under the level of the Commonwealth of Virginia.  I'll have to rhapsodize about the idylls of county living in another post, though (as well as tell other news): this one is about organizing for Bernie.

So I was involved in CNY for Bernie, based in Hamilton, in the couple of months before leaving, although peripherally, since I knew I was leaving.  I was also in touch with a group in Baldwinsville, NY, and like to think I helped inspire them to get their group off the ground.  

Volunteering for Bernie, it turns out, is do-it-yourself, at least at this point in the campaign.  Nobody from the campaign (still thinly staffed outside IA & NH) will tell you what to do, organize events, or lead.  You have to be the change you've been waiting for, and lead yourself.

Arriving in CVA (as I've gathered the Charlottesville region is known), Jasmine & I attended our first Bernie event just three days later, a Happy Hour at the local bar Firefly.  We met a number of enthusiastic Bernie supporters, including some students half our (my) age or younger, and a number of other enthusiasts from local activists to entrepreneurial pet-sitters to old-hands of VA politics known to chew the fat with the likes of Bob Goodlatte.

One fascinating dynamic, though, common to both groups, is how hard it is to run a meeting.  In fact, as an outsider trying to participate without elbowing my way in, it was clear that these group, full of goodwill and energy, and a lot of fellow-feeling, have as many impediments to administrative accomplishment & efficiency as any department or program at Colgate University!

Having cogitated at length upon (not to mention contributed to) the function & dysfunction of multiple such committees at Colgate, I often thought to myself, "Well, this must be so dysfunctional because we're a bunch of professors; how can we hope to achieve administrative functionality and positive group dynamics when they are the very things that are dis-incentivized by academia."  But if this is true, then a sample of academics should perform much worse administratively than any randomly-met group of individuals.  But two such (in CNY & CVA) randomly drawn groups (selected purely on being pro-Bernie) seem to evince the same difficulties, of getting hung-up on the short term, or even terminologies, sidetracked by emotional commitments, failure to listen to each other, tendency to speak out of a feeling of needing to speak, rather than to move the group towards a goal, and oversensitivitiy to "authoritarian" leadership tendencies in running a meeting, among others.

This presents a dangerous power imbalance in society: if groups of citizens met for bringing change to a politics that serves the status quo; groups of academics who devote themselves to wisdom & expertise in fields that could serve society; or other collections of individuals not already part of the power-structure of the managerial class (which extends from government through private business, higher education, and even established NGOs and non-profits) cannot get their act together and organize themselves, then the organizations of that power-structure will never face the kind of challenge that can hold them accountable.

This is true of university administrations vis-à-vis faculties, workers vis-à-vis employers, union members vis-à-vis union leaders, HOA or Condo Association members vis-à-vis their boards, and of course, citizens vis-à-vis their governments, not to mention a plethora of other cases where the advantages of the already-empowered are amplified by their fewness in number and honed administrative experience.  

But in the words of E. E. Schattschneider, "The only defense against organization is counterorganization" (Party Government, 1942; p. 44).  In truth, this is no more or less than a call for Americans (or anybody) dissatisfied with a status quo that seems not serve the common good to return to the roots that Tocqueville found when criss-crossing this country in the early 19th century:

Tocqueville found that everywhere in America, groups of citizens were always organizing and learning how to run a meeting, how to work together in a group over time, how to act collectively.  Even the most Rugged Individualists in what were then the "western" states would get together and discuss, work in groups, solve problems, and advance collective goals.  The only cure for not knowing how to run a meeting is to keep holding meetings and try to learn how to run them better--or identify someone with the knack for it, and help them learn.

Unfortunately for Democracy in America, today in this country so many of us are so busy with our own individual or family demands, desires, and responsibilities, that hardly anybody wants to join groups that hold regular meetings anymore.  We're happy to send checks (or simply donate online) to the social causes or political campaigns we support, but this does not teach us the skills to actually enact democracy--it is not participation.

Tocqueville worried that democracy in any country might lead to tyranny and violence, as it had in Revolutionary France.  The rare genius of America that he found was that so many citizens were involved in enacting democracy, practicing citizenship, so that those who made it to the top could be restrained by masses of educated, activist, and administratively well-versed citizens who themselves committed to holding the powerful accountable.  These were not the masses of Europe who transformed into mobs bringing a bloody dictator like Napoleon Bonaparte to power (Vladimir Lenin?  Mao Zedong?).

Today, we have dissatisfaction with leadership in both our political parties, and in other spheres of the society, as well.  But how much of it inspires the patience and self-sacrifice of . . . going to meetings?  It seems all too little--much more goes into the shouting, posturing, and anger that could bring an American Napoleon to power--perhaps Donald Trump?

Is It a State's Right Whether I Get Pregnant?

In truth, the title of this post should be, Is It a State's Right to Decide How and How Much it Costs for Me to Not Get Pregnant? A good subtitle might be: Make BCP OTC. Something I didn't know about Medicaid until I was on it for a second year is that because it is administered by states, a person's Medicaid benefits are only good in the state in which they applied for and were awarded them. That means that, because I recently moved from New York to Virginia, I am unable to use my health insurance to pay for my birth control pill prescription, which runs $35-50 retail, if I fill the prescription outside of New York State. And because we did not have the foresight to apply for insurance through the VA exchange earlier (we would have had to do it by Sept. 15th, 30 days before moving, in order for me to be covered in VA now) I will have no usable insurance (EMT driver, can you get on 81 N?) until December 1st.

To ice them cookies, pharmacies are not allowed to mail prescriptions being paid for with Medicaid out-of -state, presumably to prevent fraudulent purchases of the birth control pill by Virginians, Marylanders, Blue Hens, etc. from the good pharmacies of New York. The choice I have, then, is to pester people I'm not that close to in New York to pick up and mail me my prescription, pay retail in VA (have I mentioned we're on a budget?), or use condoms, which are not that cheap, and certainly not that fun, but they are over-the-counter. All those other miracle drugs for not getting pregnant, such as the patch, the injection, the implants, are all prescription-only. Short of that it's rhythm method and rubbers.

We've discussed the moral double-standards that exist in this country for poor people, and to be on Medicaid, you have to be poor. I have qualified for it for the last year and a half, during which I was adjuncting at Colgate and thus poor. As a nation, we do seem to be comfortable with the government adjudicating how women go about not getting pregnant: anyone (who has the money) can use condoms, and anyone who has access to a doctor to give a prescription can use the pill and other hormonal birth control options that are more desirable, practical, and far more effective than condoms for a number of reasons you have probably already worked out yourself. 

Since the Affordable Care Act passed, a person on Medicaid can get a doctor’s appointment, prescription for BCP and have it filled with no out of pocket expenses--but with considerable bureaucratic and practical hoops to jump through. And even those of us on Medicaid who are most adept at navigating those hoops can get caught in a predicament that amounts to embarrassing yourself just to rely upon the kindness of acquaintances, paying more money than you can afford, or going without. This can happen because we allow these programs, deemed constitutional and essential by three branches of the federal government, to be administered by states as a prerequisite to states accepting them, and the result is that a person availing themselves of a federal program is extremely limited in care not only by what providers will see them (another horror story for another post) or how long they have to wait for that care, but by where they find themselves when that care is required.

All of this leads to a default conservative outcome, and as ultra-conservative as can be: the only way to have sex for free is to have it unprotected. Every other way you need a dollar in your pocket and/or a primary care physician. The implication of such a state of affairs is that those with more access to money and resources deserve more choice in their reproductive health than those who have less. Dan, who already buys his health insurance through the NY State exchange, was able to get a free flu shot while we were at Walgreens figuring out another thing we're going to have to make lemonade out of for the next three months, but as a Medicaid patient I would have had to pay for that too. And as we know, as a man Dan cannot get the pill; it's all on me, as it is for many women when they so understandably fail, even once, to make sure they are medically infertile when they end up having sex under any circumstances and find themselves where so many politicians seem to believe, if you follow the logical outcomes of the policies they support, is where they belong: pregnant and taking responsibility.

Birth Control Pill Over-the-Counter and federally-administered Medicaid are women's rights and social justice issues. The cheaper, preferably free, and easier to obtain reproductive health needs are, the better for some of our most vulnerable populations.

Living in Virginia: Our Nature Walk to Target

One thing that Google can ruin for you is the mystery of the woods. How, for example, would the Blair Witch Project have worked if the characters had had iPhones? As my Dad pointed out, since it took place in Maryland, they could have just walked ten miles in one direction and exhausted the hypotenuse of any wooded area in that state, but an instant birds-eye image plus satellite-sourced globally-positioned directions for how to get out? We don't have iPhones, but after three days and a lengthy Sunday visit from a Comcast guy, we did manage to get wifi in our new house.

Dan and I just moved to a cabin about eight miles north of Charlottesville, VA, near the virtual and physical "community" of Forest Lakes. Mainly, this seems to be a housing development and a Nextdoor website, but that's what often stands in for the more ineffable forms of community these days, particularly for the affluent. We are living in the same cabin I lived in my third year in grad school, and one thing I valued about it, besides its seclusion in the woods despite proximity to town, was the trails in the woods right behind the house for convenient, idyllic (light) exercise. I knew there was a housing development not far beyond the woods on my landlords' property, but in my year of living here I never went there, partly because why go there? and mainly because I wanted to feel that the woods were vaster, denser, and even more dangerous than they were, that getting lost was possible. Dan did not seem to have that orientation, because the first thing he did was to Google Map the trails behind the cabin and create a route by which we walked through them to cross a small stream to the housing complex, walk through it to a shopping center, cross 29 and end up at Target.

So we did it, equipped with backpacks to carry the cat food, kitty litter and groceries we planned to buy at Target, and not wearing the stylish workout clothes that we quickly realized are the uniform of people off in the day in and around Forest Lakes. The part of the trip that went through the woods was mercilessly short. Before ten minutes were out, we were climbing up a little hill to the housing complex and passing through its maze of streets named nonsense combinations of real but unrelated nouns like "Waterhill" and "Valleycross" and lined with pumpkin lanterns to indicate who would be offering candy on Halloween (most of them...second trip?). Pacing the housing complex was the longest and weirdest part of the to and fro journeys, and several women we passed (though for as many houses as we walked by we saw very few, perhaps five, people total) were inspired to say hello to us in a high, paranoid tone that seemed to indicate surveillance and (passive) aggression. Wearing our sweats, crappy sneakers, and backpacks, we must have looked like the contemporary suburban answer to the hobo.

After passing the swim and tennis club, two fast food restaurants, a bank and the entrance to a Food Lion, we got to 29, a divided highway (General Lee Highway) that's pretty busy as the main route into and out of Charlottesville. Here's where Dan lost his nerve, suggesting that we cross at a light where there would be no crosswalk anyway because people don't walk here. You're immediately suspicious to everyone if you do, so you might was well lean into it. What would Lee have done? The right move seemed to be to "dash" across 29, which was pretty easy, and then to climb up Target's landscaping to the back of the store, which conspicuously does not have an entrance. In fact it has several doors warning "no entrance." Once we were on the sidewalk again, I found out that we were not alone: three men with sacks and old sneakers were climbing up too, and I wondered, did these men also dash across 29? Are they also modern-day vagrants?

Actually they were Target's landscapers, but they seemed mildly inspired by our presence in Target's hindquarters, even if they had not figured out the details of how we came to be there, which would be a hard thing to guess. I've personally never met anyone with ideas like Dan's, so how could they guess his reasoning? I can barely figure it out even now. Inside, we cut about the most eccentric figures probably ever seen in the Hollymead Target at an hour on Monday indisputably owned by the affluent white stay-at-home mother. Buying 31 pounds of cat supplies did not seem to diminish this impression.

After that long walk with the strange interactions, the dashing across a highway, and the heavy backpacks, it was nice to have wild-caught tuna sandwiches with arugula and white wine and watch Columbo streaming before our first Charlottesville Bernie meeting that afternoon. The woods were emptied of a great deal of their mystery, but that was a tenuous mystery from the beginning, and the mysteries of suburbia are robust and I think only on the ascent.

We are Delivered: Reflections on the Food Stamp Challenge (post written by Dan)

Dan enjoying a dinner Republicans would be irate about (if paid for with SNAP benefits)
Steak, potatoes, green beans, and of course, alcohol!

It's now been a while since the end of our Foodstamp Challenge, and you see here the celebratory mood that attended our first meal "off of Foodstamps".  I'd like to say that the reason we haven't been heard from for days was the alcohol- and red meat-fueled three-day bender that we went on once we were released (and we did feel like it was a release!), but that's not exactly accurate (though after our martinis & a bottle of wine, we did forget to feed the cat his wet food before we went to bed.

Gorky is not amused.

The truth is we've been packing up for our move.  We leave town in just two days, and have been hemming and hawing over what books we should put in storage, and which ones to bring to Charlottesville (will I really get around to going all the way through The Brothers Karamazov in Virginia?  Or am I just kidding myself?).

I want to reflect on our experience of the Foostamp challenge, but it will probably take a few posts to really think seriously about it.

The one thing I'll say now is that being on Foodstamps, that is limiting all of our consumption the way we did, really did feel like a kind of culinary imprisonment.  Now, we could have drunk wine or beer, and had a cocktail or two throughout the Foodstamp challenge; there is no regulation or oversight of SNAP that actually prohibits these or any other kinds of treats while on Foodstamps, if you have some cash to pay for them, not just your EBT card.

But a lot of voices on the right exhort the moral wrongness of anybody on SNAP affording themselves any physical or emotional comforts beyond the basic needs of human survival.  There are arguments about using "taxpayer dollars" to pay not just for the virtuous consumption of the four foodgroups, but the unvirtuous consumption that extends beyond them.  Some forms of consumption are moral, and others deserve opprobrium.

Of course, there is little complaint from the right when the wealthy buy alcohol, tattoos, cigarettes, or other morally problematic products (and indeed, there's even a double-standard for the poor & the rich on illegal drugs).  But somehow, wealthy people's consumption decisions are morally unassailable.  Personal freedom of choice somehow entitles people to any choices they want--if they are wealthy.

An argument for the justification of policing poor people's consumption choices goes like this: "it's not their money; it's taxpayer money!  So we should get to exert control over, or at least pass moral judgment on what people on Foodstamps buy."

But poor people pay taxes, too!  15.2% payroll taxes from the first dollar of employment, plus income taxes, plus sales taxes that often add up to far higher percentages of their income than the wealthy investor classes (they mostly get to pay just 15% on investment income, even if it runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or 20% once it gets to half a million or more).  So that "taxpayer money" is poor people's money, too!

Moreover, where is the outrage at other morally problematic expenditures, of far larger amounts of "taxpayer money"?  Somehow it cannot be found--at least not on the right.  There exists a great desire in certain halls of conservatism to morally judge and control poor people's behavior--and that desire has found increasing expression in American government policy for a long time in a way that privileged people like me & Jasmine rarely feel.

Well, we got a feel for it while we did the Foodstamp challenge, and it feels terrible.  It does not feel like freedom; it does not feel like opportunity; it does not feel like America.  The minuscule taste we got showed me that to be poor in this country is to be unfree, to be watched, judged, controlled, and bereft of true choice in one's life, much as life is for people who live under totalitarian or theocratic dictatorships.

We're glad to be done with the Foodstamp challenge.  It feels like we live back in America again.

Evidence of how our Jasmine makes our home excellent, every day

Unpaid Household Labor, of which I (Dan) am the great (and grateful) beneficiary (= "taker"):

Note the third (and most important) member of our household, or at least his grandest appendage.  According to Mitt Romney, he's actually a maker.

I wonder how many Republican politicians are actually "takers" of their spouses unpaid household labor in the same way I am?

How to Make Sardine Pasta

                                                        How to make Sardine Pasta:

I made this in its simplest iteration last night, our final dinner of the Foodstamp Challenge, with four ingredients: sardines (with their oil/liquid), pasta, onion and dill.

Step 1)

Brown as many onions as you have in the oil and liquid from a can (or 2) of sardines packed in olive oil. I used 1/2 lb pasta to 2 cans. You can alter the proportions as you like. Add salt, pepper and red pepper flakes. Other nice, but unnecessary additions: fennel seed, fennel bulb, garlic.

Step 1-1/2)

No, brown them.

Step 2)

Add partly-cooked pasta while it's pretty stiff and a cup or so of pasta water. Scrape the bottom of the pan, soften the pasta, and cook until the liquid's gooey and almost gone.

Step 3)

Toss in sardines and any green herbs (we like dill best) at the last minute.

Step 4)

Enjoy with a big glass of water and copious self-congratulation on your personal virtue.

Unrelated, but to come back to an earlier comment:

Dan, who tightened his belt (literally!) on butter intake, showing he managed to leave a little bit left after the last breakfast of the week.

Bernie turning a corner? Young voter turnout Oct '15 => Nov '16

Since last week's release of fundraising numbers, and Bernie's huge rallies in Massachusetts, I think perceptions of his campaign are starting to take an important turn, with some who've dismissed him, even to the degree they are positively exploring how Bernie might change the terms of political expectations for Democrats in unlikely places.  This extends beyond potential cheerleaders or the putatively neutral to the likes of ultra-conservative Howard Kurtz, whose newfound engagement could be some kind of strategic bomb-throwing, or an attempt to be the right's canary in the coal mine.

An additional early (and potentially faulty) sign of a change in momentum is the first "defection" of a member of the Democratic establishment, AZ Congressman Raúl Grijalva (though, as head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, on the fringe of establishment) who's become the first federally elected official to endorse Bernie for president (if NYC mayor Bill de Blasio follows through on rumors, this would be an even bigger indicator of establishment "melt" from Hillary)

Interestingly, this (perceived-by-me) shift in tone in the media has come at a time when poll numbers among the Democratic primary contenders have not budged nationally, or in early primary states (and in fact, while IA or NH have not budged, and a slew of more newly-polled states (links as of 10/8/2015) show Hillary with a commanding lead, and Bernie often in third place.  Why the change, then?

One answer explains why pundits are changing their tunes: Bernie is now polling better than Hillary in head-to-head match-ups with potential Republican nominees in the two swing states he's been most active.  Also, as Philip Bump of the Fix has shown cleverly, Hillary's flood of campaign-funds may well run dry before the year is out, while Bernie can go back to the well with his large number of small donors--650,000 at last count.  The Clinton campaign "did not disclose" (doesn't that phrase just sound like it was invented for Hillary?) its total number of donors.  And finally, Hillary's persistently negative net favorability ratings increasingly render her claim to better to being more electable than Bernie Sanders increasingly dubious.

But beyond the kind of short-term factoids like these which pundits attend to, there's a greater reason why they (and everybody!) should recognize the realistic chances of Bernie winning the nomination--and the general election (and hoping he does, unless you'd rather see a Republican).

It's buried inside the first national poll that shows Bernie in the lead over Hillary.  Now, before those in favor of Bernie get too excited about this poll, conducted for the Independent Journal (which seems to be a kind of conservative outlet), it should be noted that you won't see this on any poll-average aggregator, because it's an internet poll.

Why look askance at an internet poll?  The answer to this question is actually the reason why Bernie is the future Democrats should look to.  Traditionally, many internet polls depend on who shows up at a certain web-site, and as a result, their results are highly biased because liberals go to certain web-sites, conservatives go to others, etc.  However, examining the methods of Google, which carried out the poll, it looks like their Consumer Surveys division may have really solved this--and indeed with a sample of over 1000 likely Democratic voters (screened according plans to watch the debate next week), more than double that of any of the RCP-averaged polls, this looks like a very unbiased measure of likely-to-vote Democrats' preferences for Bernie vs Hillary . . . as long as they use the internet, that is.

And here is the bias that necessitates throwing this poll out of the averages: the population of the country that surfs the internet in this country is probably skewed in many ways, and definitely skewed young.  Thus, in a poll where Bernie beats Hillary 60%-28% among 18-24 yo, and 48%-32% among 25-34 yo, it's no surprise that we get a hugely different result from  most national polls, most of which still put Hillary out in front by 20%.

Indeed, the sample for this poll bears little resemblance to the electorate, in terms of age: estimating categories (Google breaks them up a little differently), see the skew in this poll compared to the Exit Polls from the 2014 Election:

Age Group	18-29	30-44	45-65	65
Google Poll	23%	27%	34%	17%
2014 Exit Poll	13%	22%	43%	22%

Clearly, this national survey of Democrats that would give Bernie a slight edge in October of 2015 looks nothing like the electorate that showed up to the polls at the last federal election.  That electorate, where Hillary runs well ahead in the last two age-groups, would give Hillary the win over Bernie easily.

But here is the key question: what do Democrats want the age-profile of the electorate on November 8, 2016 to look like?  If we want (and work) to make it look like one that would give Hillary the win over Bernie, then we will get an electorate that will likely give them the same result as the 2014 midterm elections.  

This is perhaps the strongest point in favor of Bernie's electability: a Bernie campaign and a Bernie nomination would be far more likely to give an age profile that looks like the bottom row here:

Age Group	18-29	30-44	45-65	65
Google Poll	23%	27%	34%	17%
2014 Exit Poll	13%	22%	43%	22%
2008 Exit Poll	18%	29%	37%	16%

That gave Democrats the best presidential election result since 1964.  

If we want something like that again, then we should look to and work for a similar electorate, for the good of our country.  We should not cling out of fear to the kind of presidential campaign (from the perspective of electoral age-profile) that must be at the heart of Hillary Clinton's campaign strategy. That is a recipe for de-mobilization, apathy, and disenchantment of the very youth voters Democrats need to win.

Even if you don't mind Hillary Clinton's policy stances, Democrats should back Bernie, because "We can win" beats "We're afraid to lose".