November 2004

As I’ve noted before on this blog, I’m a big sucker for well supported challenges to conventional wisdom. This article from the Boston Globe certainly does not disappoint (copied here in its entirety in case it disappears):

PRESIDENT Bush and Vice President Cheney make reference to “Massachusetts liberals” as if they were referring to people with some kind of disease. I decided it was time to do some research on these people, and here is what I found.
The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1.
But don’t take the US government’s word for it. Take a look at the findings from the George Barna Research Group. George Barna, a born-again Christian whose company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 states. More disturbing was the finding that born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates.
The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that “the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people.” The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
How to explain these differences? The following factors provide a partial answer:

• More couples in the South enter their first marriage at a younger age.
• Average household incomes are lower in the South.
• Southern states have a lower percentage of Roman Catholics, “a denomination that does not recognize divorce.” Barna’s study showed that 21 percent of Catholics had been divorced, compared with 29 percent of Baptists.
• Education. Massachusetts has about the highest rate of education in the country, with 85 percent completing high school. For Texas the rate is 76 percent. One third of Massachusetts residents have completed college, compared with 23 percent of Texans, and the other Northeast states are right behind Massachusetts.

The liberals from Massachusetts have long prided themselves on their emphasis on education, and it has paid off: People who stay in school longer get married at a later age, when they are more mature, are more likely to secure a better job, and job income increases with each level of formal education. As a result, Massachusetts also leads in per capita and family income while births by teenagers, as a percent of total births, was 7.4 for Massachusetts and 16.1 for Texas.
The Northeast corridor, with Massachusetts as the hub, does have one of the highest levels of Catholics per state total. And it is also the case that these are among the states most strongly supportive of the Catholic Church’s teaching on social justice issues such as minimum and living wages and universal healthcare.
For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry’s home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values. Indeed, it is the “blue” states, led led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to invest more money over time to foster the reality of what it means to leave no children behind. And they have been among the nation’s leaders in promoting a living wage as their goal in public employment. The money they have invested in their future is known more popularly as taxes; these so-called liberal people see that money is their investment to help insure a compassionate, humane society. Family values are much more likely to be found in the states mistakenly called out-of-the-mainstream liberal. By their behavior you can know them as the true conservatives. They are showing how to conserve family life through the way they live their family values. William V. D’Antonio is professor emeritus at University of Connecticut and a visiting research professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

Greg Knauss has one explanation for the politics of hatred that I wrote about yesterday:

There is a divide in this country today, miles wide and fathoms deep. It has cleaved our great nation, and has only grown — and will only continue to grow. But it’s not a left/right split, or Democrat/Republican one. It’s lunatic/non-lunatic.
Our culture has been swept along in a tide of emotionally-resonant, steadfastly anti-rational entertainment, and politics is at the head of the wave. The course of our country, the future of our people, is being determined by lizard-brain responses to images designed to trigger sub-rational responses.
Michael Moore and Ann Coulter aren’t opposed to each other, they are each other: determined propagandists, using the language and mediums best suited to strike at the emotional core of their audiences. They do not work from a common set of facts, and would ignore them even if they existed. When they speak well, they’re Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day. When they speak poorly, they’re a spittle-flecked wacko with an “End of the World is Nigh” sign. But that’s just a matter of presentation: they’re all lunatics, asking us to stop thinking and start feeling. And to start feeling what they want us to feel.
This determined emotionalism — which is another way of saying anti-rationalism — is what drives us today. You can find it distasteful, you can find it depressing, but it’s most important impact is that we have turned over the direction of the country — our future — to the part of our psyche that doesn’t want to think.
It’s not about smarts. The lunatics aren’t stupid — just the opposite. It’s about the willingness to abandon the deductive process in favor of epiphany. It’s about the abandonment of the brain in favor of the gut.
Jon Stewart has said all this, of course, and said it better. But it hit home, hard, because I recently discovered — realized — that I am not immune. I edged up against the lunatic side of the divide the past few weeks. I went — close, anyway — mad. I was angry, irrationally furious, to the point of raging at the world — appallingly, my children included — that things were going they way they were. I stared into the abyss, from the wrong side, and it scared me.
A potential reason for my brush has to do with how I spend my time: on the Internet. The Web is a festering cesspool of lunacy and emotion: Free Republic, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Atrios, Instapundit, on and on and on. Facts only enter the picture when they’re favorable. Emotion rules. There is no common ground, nor a desire for any.
That’s a problem.
Left or right, Democrat or Republican, these labels don’t mean much in the face of the looming (or nearly complete) lunatic take-over. Dispassion and reason are qualities that need to be nurtured and promoted from every political viewpoint, even — or especially — in the face of spittle-flecked wackos.
The question is, where do we start?

I choose to remain on the side of carefully reasoned political opinions. If that marginalizes me in the current political wars, so be it. It saddens me greatly to know that the ‘mainstream’ has become so irrational, but I refuse to take part.

During the Clinton administration, many Americans united in their hatred of the president. In the process, they built a powerfully effective political machine. But the hatred always bugged me. The George W. Bush presidency has had a similar effect on a different group of Americans–among which I count myself. But again, I have instinctively shied away from the hateful ‘ABB – Anyone But Bush’ mentality.
In the last four years, the Democratic party has put together a political machine to rival that of the Republican machine (though not quite good enough based on Kerry’s narrow loss yesterday). Today, the expressions of hatred are especially strong from the left. In some cases, they are the very same words the other side repeated during the Clinton administration. “Not My President” reads the bumper sticker.
I have been thinking over this post for several days, but not found a way to express exactly what bothers me about the politics of hatred. Do we really want our political process reduced to this?

What Would a Dumbass Republican Do?
“WWADRD?
Dear Friends:
If the shoe was on the other foot, What Would a Dumbass Republican Do?
Get depressed?
Get down?
Feel defeated?
Go away?
Refrain from being an obnoxious pain in the ass, 24/7?
Temper his sense of righteous entitlement?
Mute his howls of indignation?
Question his convictions?
Hell, no!
Here’s what a Dumbass Republican would do:
Act like a winner in a world full of deluded losers.
Refuse to let the “facts on the ground” deter his belief in what he’s got coming.
Drown out polite civil discourse by braying his unshaken beliefs like a stuck pig.
Refuse to shut the fuck up.
Refuse to go away.
Wrap himself in the flag and impugn the patriotism of any who would question his moral superiority.
Wear a big shit-eating grin that gives the other side just a moment of pause as they lay their heads on their pillows at night.
Have a glint in his eye that says, “I may have a shit-eating grin on my face, but I’m just waiting for an opportunity to slip this knife in.”
See this not as a defeat, but as an inconvenient mistake.
Friends, join me.
Do not accept.
Do not waver.
Do not shut up.
Do not give comfort with your distress.
Be an unrelenting irritant.
Be a dumbass.
Right now, attitude is everything.
Together, we can help each other bear the present while shortening the time – and it will come – when we prevail.”