11/25/17

Leonard’s Losers

Back when I was in graduate school, one of my favorite radio shows was Leonard’s Losers.

Leonard Postero treated his fans each week to his prediction of the outcomes of college football games coming up that Saturday.  However, unlike other sports pundits, Leonard picked the losers, not the winners.  This had resonance to me because I was constantly losing in the football pools that circulated around the psych department each week. Sadly, Leonard was broadcast on Saturday mornings, days after the pools closed.  I still enjoyed it though.  Here’s a taste of his down home prognostications:

In honor of Leonard, who died in 2001, I want to write about my prediction for the Alabama special election coming up next month.  Here’s what I think is at play:

Need for Cognition

Need for cognition is the notion that some of us like to give our brains a workout every now and then.  It means we’re willing to put some effort into thinking.

Typically, we don’t do this all the time. Too much work.  That means the need to engage our brains is balanced against a reluctance to waste brain power, a reluctance called the Cognitive Miser. How much effort, after all, do you want to spend on deciding on the old reliable Oscar Mayer bacon or the supermarket brand selling for 25 cents less? The Cognitive Miser would say, “Not much effort. Pick something and move on.”

The Alabama special election presents a special case. Ordinarily, voters in this deep red state would automatically pick the Republican candidate.  Job done; get back to the bacon.  But this time, things are different.  The Republican, Roy Moore, appears to be deeply flawed.  However, his opponent, Doug Jones, is a Democrat, and unacceptable by definition. Will the voters tell the Cognitive Miser to back off while they give some real thought to the election?  I think not, because when it comes to politics, conservatives are more likely to engage in that short term, intuitive thinking (“Pick the Republican already.”) than liberals are.

Loyalty

Conservatives are much more loyal to their tribe or group than liberals are. According to political psychologist Chris Mooney,

“Belonging to a group provides epistemic closure—a much desired sense of certainty, because you adopt that group’s views and membership in it provides you with a sense of stability and belonging.”             Psychology Today 

Here, their group is the GOP, which also suggests that Alabamans will cast their ballots for the Republican

So my fearless prognostication is that voters in the Heart of Dixie will hold their noses and send Judge Roy Moore to the US Senate. 

Leonard's Losers?  The American people.

Edited to add:  Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore by about 22,000 votes - around 1.5%. Obviously, my ability to predict the voting behavior of Alabamans is just about as good as my ability to predict the outcome of football games!

9/1/17

Reclaiming patriot

Last week we were privileged to visit Mt. Rushmore.  I expected this to be a little bit hokey; I was very, very wrong. Just the scope of the work itself is stunning.  But what was even more stunning was the speech given that evening at the lighting ceremony by a park ranger.  She spoke of the Constitution and the tapestry it wove throughout American history. A tapestry that first included only white male land owners, and then white men, and then black men, and then all male citizens, and then women and Asians and Hispanics and Africans and Native Americans and so on until today, when our American tapestry is richer and more textured than the founding fathers could ever have imagined.

I listened to that wonderfully subversive speech and thought about the beautiful country I had been touring and about the special area designated at Mt. Rushmore for the exercise of free speech, and realized that I was a raging patriot.  Me, a liberal.

And that brings me to the point I want to make today. 

When did “patriot” somehow become the property of the militant right?  Don’t believe me?  Google “patriot”. Once you get past New England football and various films and TV shows, you wind up at the Southern Poverty Law Center and their list of active patriot groups. These ultra-right wing conservatives are mostly militias or believers in wacko conspiracy theories and are virulently anti-government. 

They are definitely not me.  Yet I’m a patriot, too. I love my country.  Always have, even when its actions disappointed me or angered me or shamed me.  I always felt we could do better because we were aiming so high. 

So I’m reclaiming patriot. The wingnuts can’t have it.  It’s mine.  You’ll find my house by the big American flag I’m going to hang from the front porch.  And the red, white and blue I’ll wear whenever I can.  And by the bitching and moaning and sweating I’ll be doing while working to make us all achieve the dreams of America. 

These words by Teddy Roosevelt hang on the wall at Mt. Rushmore and say it all for me:

8/15/17

Black Lives Matter -White Lives Matter:
Not the same thing at all.

Being upfront: I think most law enforcement folks are great.  I have friends who are police officers.  Heck, I have KIN who are police officers.  They have my upmost respect and support.

However…

One of my political psychology professors at UCLA back in the 1990s was a guy named Jim Sidanius.  He was a proponent of what’s called social dominance theory. SDT postulates that human societies are stratified with a superior class, the hegemony, and at least one subordinate class. The hegemony then reaps the benefits of the resulting unequal distribution of wealth, status, education and so on.

If you’re part of the hegemony here in the U.S., for example if you're a middle class white guy, most of this may be invisible to you. That bears repeating:  If you’re part of the power structure, you may not be aware of it.  You may think that everyone in the country has equal access to education, good jobs, upward mobility and so on.  All they have to do is exercise some gumption.  If they don't, that's on them. However, if you’re part of the underclass, like many women or people of color, you live in a very different world.

The institutions of society – education, justice, religion, etc. – have many functions, but they also act in part to preserve the power of the hegemony. Law enforcement, as one of these institutions, provides for the safety of the citizens and retribution for criminal behavior.  However, they may also act as agents of the overclass. Nowhere is this more clear than in the stunning differences we have begun to see on a regular basis between a police report of the shooting of a person of color and the video that shows what happened.  A clear example is the shooting of Chicagoan Laquan McDonald in 2014.  The police report said that he lunged at officers with a knife.  Yet the dash-cam video, which the city sat on for a year, shows McDonald walking away from officers when he was shot in the back multiple times. 

Is this an isolated incident? I can’t be the only person who wonders now how many other shootings of the underclass have been filed away as justified when video footage might have revealed something quite different.

And then Black Lives Matter became a movement.

But wait: Don’t white lives matter too?  Of course they do.  All lives matter.  But when you capitalize it as a movement, it’s something else entirely.  Thus, when a white person states that White Lives Matter, it's about stating membership in and supporting the hegemony and the unequal distribution of the benefits of our society. Blue Lives Matter is about respecting people who do a difficult and sometimes deadly job. And Black Lives Matter is about justice.