I'm Sick of Smug-Takes on Berkeley Offering "Counseling"

Former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro is coming to campus this week. Shapiro will be followed this month by Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon, and Milo Yiannopoulos, as part of a Berkeley "free speech week".

In a long email outlining the various campus policies that would be in place to facilitate all these speeches (and as I've consistently argued, having been invited by authorized community members they do have a right to speak free of censorship or material disruption, though of course not from non-intrusive protest or criticism), Executive Vice Chancellor Paul Alivisatos mentioned that, among other things, counseling services were available for any students who felt "threatened or harassed simply because of who they are or for what they believe."

And the internet went wild.

I don't need to collect links -- here's an example, but they're not hard to find. Across the entire political spectrum of the mainstream media -- you know, center-left to hard-right -- there was near-uniform glee in dumping on coddling Berkeley administrators and infantile Berkeley students who need counseling just because they're hearing "ideas they disagree with."

I cannot tell you how sick I am of hearing this. It's lazy, it's a cheap shot, it's intellectually incoherent, and above all it's mean-spirited. Berkeley isn't wrong here. And it's detractors are showing more about what's missing in their character than the most stereotypical Golden Bear hipster.

For starters, Berkeley is a big place. Its total enrollment is over 40,000 students. These young people come from a range of backgrounds, and at any given time across that 40,000 there will be persons who are struggling, or experiencing crises, or feeling threatened, or any other permutation of personal circumstance and emotional troubles you can imagine. I've already written recently about how all of us -- self-satisfied declarations notwithstanding -- intuitively understand how certain speech can truly wound deeply, in a manner which we can all empathize with. That doesn't mean we ban it (and offering counseling doesn't "ban" anything), but it does mean that there's a genuine phenomena that we can and should attempt to address

So let's be empathic. Let's imagine, amongst Berkeley's 40,000 students, that there is a student who is struggling. Maybe he's away from home for the first time and having difficulty adjusting. Maybe she feels in over her head in classes, finding that work that got her an A in high school is barely scraping a C at Berkeley. And then let's add more to it -- maybe he's just found out that he's now at imminent risk of deportation from the only country he's ever truly known. Maybe she's found out that, though she proudly served her country and is a veteran of the American armed forces, the President of the United States publicly declared her to be a burden on the US military who should never have been allowed to wear the uniform.

Now let's remember who Ben Shapiro is.

Ben Shapiro thinks that trans individuals suffer from a "mental illness" and gratuitously misgenders them for the primary purpose of causing offense. He refers to DACA as President Obama's "executive amnesty". Pretty much the only reason he isn't an avowed member of the alt-right is that they happen to hate him too. He's not an intellectual. He's not one the great thinkers of the right. His oeuvre, his raison d'etre, is to be a hurtful provocateur. That's what he brings to the table.

And let's be clear: this, the above, was why Ben Shapiro was invited to Berkeley. It wasn't because he offered "a different view." And it certainly wasn't because of the intellectual candlepower he has on offer. The people who invited Ben Shapiro to UC-Berkeley did so because of, not in spite of, the hurt he will dish out to already-vulnerable members of the community.

The students I outlined above -- already struggling, buffeted by political dynamics which very much are designed to dehumanize them -- now have to reckon with the reality that a non-negligible chunk of their colleagues are glad they're feeling that way. They actively want to accelerate the process. They'll go out of their way to invite speakers to reiterate and emphasize the point.

Honestly, I don't blame them if they could use a venue to talk out their feelings a bit. It strikes me as spectacularly uncharitable, a colossal failure of basic empathy, to think otherwise. Then again, what is our polity going through now but a colossal failure of basic empathy?

After the election, I made a similar comment (which I cannot find) when people again made fun of college kids who expressed deep hurt and fear upon the election of Donald Trump. This, too, was attributed to fragile millennial snowflakes who don't know how to tolerate hardship. And I remarked that the man now faced with being expelled from the country is not scared because he's frail, and the woman who was the victim of a sexual assault is not despondent because she's weak-willed. We've seemingly moved past "don't punch people who think you're subhuman" (okay) to "don't be sad that people think you're subhuman" (really?).

Some are arguing that the real problem with offering counseling is that it doesn't teach the kids "resilience". First of all, I wonder what they think goes on in counseling sessions -- my strong suspicion is that they are precisely about fostering resiliency so that students are better able to cope with such annoying trivialities like "I may be torn from the only home I've ever known at any moment and a sizeable portion of what I thought was my community will cheer as they drag me off." The objection here isn't so much to lack of resilience as to the university having the temerity to try and teach it -- like objecting to wilderness training because shouldn't real men already know how to survive outdoors?

Second, it is hard not to hear in this objection a deep resentment at the fact that today, even now, some people still do proactively care about the feelings of others. The argument seems to be that "fifty years ago if someone felt marginalized on a college campus nobody gave a shit. Today, some people -- including a few holding administrative positions -- do care, and for some reason that's a step backwards for society." One can hear more than a little of the typical mockery associated with using therapy of any sort -- though I admit I hadn't heard it manifest this overtly in some time -- which suggests that only persons of pathologically fragile mental composition could ever need something as lily-livered as counseling. Again, I find this argument hard to relate to, seeing as its genealogy is so thoroughly bound up in nothing more complicated than pure cruelty. Shorn of the feelings of superiority it generates, can anyone actually defend this?

Others complain that students shouldn't be going to therapy in response to such speech, they should be responding in other ways -- debate, protest, donations, activism, any thing else. Of all the objections, this is the one that is the most difficult to credit. Does anyone think that the only way Berkeley students will respond to Ben Shapiro's speech is by going to counseling sessions? That Friday morning, all 40,000 of us will march into whatever center houses our mental health professionals and demand to be soothed? Of course not. Of course there will be debate, and protest, and donations, and activism. And you can bet that however such actions manifest, people will still find a way to denounce the entire response tout court -- unjustified actions like violence, yes, but also silent protest, but also waving signs, but also pure condemnatory speech (especially if that speech dares use the dreaded -ism or -phobic suffixes).

Finally, let's dispense with the notion that this is all being triggered by students who can't tolerate "ideas they disagree with." For starters, it's notable that while Alivisatos' email does not in fact refer to any speakers in particular, everybody simultaneously assumed they were talking about Ben Shapiro while at the same time being aghast at how anyone could possibly need counseling after hearing Ben Shapiro. Me thinks they protest too much. But more to the point: Berkeley regularly hosts speakers who will present ideas many on campus will disagree with. This week, David Hirsh is giving a talk on "Contemporary Left Antisemitism" -- surely, many on campus would resist his conclusions. Later this term, National Review editor Reihan Salam will be speaking on immigration policy -- with no known objections or protests planned.

So the problem isn't ideas people disagree with. The problem is Ben Shapiro, and Ann Coulter, and Milo Yiannopoulos. One doesn't invite them to campus because they're presenting important ideas which need to be reckoned with. There are plenty of conservatives who fit the bill, and when those conservatives show up they are typically met with little fanfare. But if you're inviting this contingent, you're doing it because you like hurting people. That's their comparative advantage, that's the thing they can offer over and above all of their competitors.

It neither bothers me, nor surprises me, nor offends me, that this offends certain students. If some portion of those students are in an emotional place right now where they feel like they need counseling, I encourage them to get it. If others want to protest the speech, I support their right to do so within the parameters of the law. If still others want to attend the speech, or subject Shapiro to harsh questioning, or pen scathing op-eds in the Daily Cal, I applaud them all for it. And each of these options got pride of place in Alivistos' email.

All of these are valid responses. None of them are worthy of scorn, none of them signal any deficiency in our student body. What is far more worrisome is the reaction of the so-called "adults" in the media, who have grown so fond of bashing kids-these-days that they've seemingly forgotten the need to reason, much less to empathize.

Supporting David Friedman Sells Out Young Zionist Jews

Berkeley is not the easiest place to be a Zionist Jew. To be sure, it is not the cataclysmic warzone it's sometimes portrayed as. Still, it's not exactly home turf. Being referred to as a Nazi due to one's position on Israel is not an everyday occurrence, but it's not a hypothetical concern either. A two-state solution respecting both Jewish and Palestinian self-determination rights is probably the median position, but it is not one you can take for granted.

Jews at Berkeley, and at other campuses around the country, have listened to many exhortations by our communal leaders about our need to stand strong in such climates. And we have, under difficult circumstances. Anyone paying attention to campus politics now knows the awkward position Jewish students are in, how concerns about Israel are often wedges that freeze Jews out of our own academic communities, how standing firm on principle regarding anti-Semitism puts us at odds with otherwise allied groups.

While we acted, our communal representatives promised that they had our backs. Referring to a Jew as a Nazi is intolerable anti-Semitism -- there can be little more horrifying, for a Jew, than being compared to a Nazi or Nazi collaborator. The two-state solution is a boundary that demarcates friend from foe. It may be hard, it may be awkward, but we were told that these were lines that could not be crossed. Ultimately, they expected us to police those lines. And we did our part, to the best of our ability.

And then David Friedman was nominated as Ambassador to Israel.

David Friedman, an avowed opponent of a two-state solution. David Friedman, who referred to large swath of American Jewry as "far worse than Kapos". David Friedman, who called the oldest American Jewish civil rights organization "morons" for standing up to clear anti-Semitic rhetoric in the presidential campaign. David Friedman, who enlisted the Holocaust to deflect attention from boasts of sexual assault. David Friedman, who -- in word and in deed -- seems to detest most of the Jews in his own country -- especially the young liberal Jews who inhabit our college campuses.

Now it was time for those communal representatives to have our backs. Now it was time for them to enforce those lines on our behalf. Now it was time for them to show courage in perilous waters, and say that this is the line, and David Friedman crossed it.

And suddenly, these representative groups clammed up.

Well, not all of them. Aside from the usual right-wing suspects, the World Jewish Congress endorsed Friedman today. The WJC's motto is "All Jews are responsible for one another." We now know the seriousness with which it takes that commitment. The bare minimum of being responsible for other Jews is to have their back when they're condemned as Nazi collaborators. If the WJC isn't willing to do that, it can forget about any talk about "responsibility".

As for other mainstream organizations, so far many of the main players have maintained, at best, a studious silence. AIPAC hasn't said a word. The AJC's statement was mush. The ADL has nothing on its page (Jonathan Greenblatt was on MSNBC tonight to talk on the nomination, but it doesn't look like he came out against).

I've talked a bit with folks on the inside of these organizations. They're not happy. But they stress the difficult position these organizations are in. Donor pressure. A need to appear even-handed. The importance of working with the new administration.

I get it. It's hard. But it was hard for us too, and we held the line. Because, we were told, this was the line the Jewish community had drawn.

And today, when adhering to those lines gets difficult for Jewish organizations, they had the opportunity to stand strong too.

When they fail to do so, it's worse than a disgrace to their stated principles. It's worse than a failure of political courage. It sells out the Jewish community they claim to protect. It abdicates their responsibility to the Jewish community to be our ally and shield regardless of political creed or partisan ideology. Millions of Jews now know that if they are tarred as Kapos or worse, the WJC will not have their backs. Indeed, it might proudly join hands with their slanderer. We are left wondering where the AJC or the ADL will be. Until proven otherwise, we cannot count on them anymore.

This is betrayal. And it is those of us in places like Berkeley, who have bravely fought on behalf of a Jewish and democratic Israel in an inhospitable climate, that will suffer the most from this act of deep, profound cowardice. The principles we fought for -- which we , relying on the representations of these communal bodies, declared were representative of American Jewry -- have been pulled out from under us. And for what? For access? For donor satisfaction? It is disgraceful.

I honestly don't know if these groups realize the peril they are in. They hear about angry Jewish millennials and think of the IfNotNow sorts, the JVP types, and conclude it's all a loud fringe. I am not IfNotNow and I'm certainly not JVP. I'm a committed Zionist in my politics and deeply institutionalist in my orientation. But in talking to other Jews like me -- proudly Zionist, proudly pro-Israel, connected to the inside baseball of Jewish life and aware of the realities of political machination -- there is a growing sense of rage at their supposed representatives that is on the cusp of bubbling over. They see that political capital is never spent on our behalf, that principles we're expected to cleave to on pain of exile are waived without hesitation when the right flouts them.

This cannot stand forever. It cannot indefinitely be the case that Jewish communal policy is set by a quarter of the Jewish community which openly holds two-thirds of us in contempt. And it cannot indefinitely be the case that Jewish communal representatives refrain from backing the American Jewish majority for fear of alienating that right-wing fringe. David Friedman puts that in stark relief -- backing him means selling us out. Policy disagreement can be mended, but this sort of betrayal -- finding out that it's actually a-okay to call us Nazi collaborators -- will not heal easily.

David Friedman does not represent a hard case. David Friedman represents the straightforward application of the principles mainline Jewish groups have long espoused, now to a right-wing provocateur. Simple as that.

For those groups which fail to rise to the challenge, it isn't going to matter at the end of the day whether they were lying about their professed principles or were simply too fearful to enforce them. We need Jewish organizations that are representative of American Jews. If the old guard can't do it, then the old guard will cease being relevant.

UPDATE: Here's the link to Greenblatt's segment on Friedman last night. It's, if anything, worse than I anticipated.

The GOP's Helpy Selfie

My old debate friend turned Republican pollster rising star Kristen Soltis Anderson has a new book out: The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up). Soltis' speciality as a pollster is trying to connect the GOP with younger voters (Soltis is only a few years older than me), and this looks to be her book-length manifesto on the subject. I haven't read it, but according to her Facebook I can get a decent idea of her proposals from this review. And if that's anything to judge by (and of course, the standard disclaimer here is that some or all of these objections may be addressed in the book itself), the GOP may have problems in the coming years.

It would be unfair to Kristen to say that her proposals for attracting millennial votes is for the GOP to become more liberal. Most of the issues she identifies have unclear or mixed ideological valences (gay marriage is the notable and conceded exception). The problem, though, is that in many of the cases Anderson identifies it is far from certain that Republicans will be more likely to jump aboard her policy prescriptions than Democrats. Many of them, as the reviewer notes, "feel like sensible ideas that many politicians, not just Republicans, can get behind." That's a problem, since presumably to win over currently left-leaning voters they need to differentiate themselves from Democrats. For example, Soltis cites pervasive overregulation as an area where Republicans can win the allegiance of urban voters. A good example might be the recent Texas bill which removes licensing requirements for traditional African hairbraiders. That law was shepherded through the legislature by a Republican and signed by a Republican Governor. But it also passed the Texas House unanimously -- it doesn't differentiate Republicans and Democrats. Matt Yglesias, for example, has long made the progressive case for reducing licensing requirements as an anti-poverty measure. There's a perfectly cohesive conservative rationale for adopting Soltis' proposal here, but then, that's a perfectly cohesive liberal one too.

The other problem I see relates to the cultural bonds that, under my understanding of political psychology, do far more to channel our policy opinions than does any sort of comprehensive abstract political theory. Far more than any unified worldview, being liberal or conservative is often about liking certain types of people (and favoring laws which aid them) and disliking other types of people (and trying to contain or suppress them). For example, conservatives like farmers ("backbone of America"), rural and white suburban/exurban residents ("real Americans"), gun owners ("patriots"), and business owners ("captains of industry"). They dislike racial minorities ("the real racists"), immigrants ("taking our jobs!"), urban dwellers ("latte-sipping elitists"), and the poor ("takers"). Liberals run close to the reverse: they like racial minorities ("heirs to MLK"), immigrants ("pursuing the American dream"), urban dwellers ("urbane, sophisticated"), and the poor ("hard-working Americans"). They dislike rural folk ("hicks"), gun owners ("NRA nuts"), and big business owners ("robber barons"). If we take a topic like "deregulation", it isn't really the case that Republicans favor it and Democrats oppose it. Republicans are happy to regulate the hell out of food stamps, for example. Democrats favor other sorts of regulations (those which fall primarily on the heads of big businesses or gun owners). Ditto government intervention in the economy - conservatives are perfectly happy to do so to give preference to income earned through capital gains versus that earned through labor, or to subsidize corporations that they have favorable feelings towards.

The problem for Kristen's analysis is that these cultural affinities (or disaffinities) seem to run in the wrong direction for many of her proposals. I think Republicans can absolutely get behind Uber, but what are their feelings towards increased mass transit? There's a visceral aversion there, that really isn't accounted for based on policy. Likewise for going "soft on crime", particularly when tho community in question consists of poorer African-Americans. It's not that they can't adopt these positions, it just will require a lot more cognitive effort than I think it would take for liberals (who are more predisposed to favor these policies).

Basically, if I were a liberal strategist seeking to counter Kristen's book, my advice would be simple: don't be an idiot. You can try to regulate Uber's employment practices (urban folk like Subway and Target too, but we like them to pay their workers respectable wages), but don't ban it outright. Be attentive to the changing tides on crime and be willing to decriminalize low-level drug offenses and reduce overpolicing and "war on the poor" policies. Invest in walkable urban areas and mass transit options. These are all doable objectives; there is no reason why Democrats should ever find themselves out-flanked by Republicans on these issues.

Now to be sure, I hope that Republicans take Kristen's advice -- not because it is bad advice, but because most of her ideas sound like good ideas that will make America better, and I'd rather more people support them rather than fewer. But as a strategy for winning over millennials, I'm not convinced -- not because they're bad ideas, but because they're ideas that won't make the GOP a distinctively better choice than the Democratic party.

Another Kid is Alright

This is a killer letter in the Baltimore Jewish Times by Amna Farooqi, talking about Jewish organizations' attempts to connect to millenials without respecting millenials.

One of the more engaging programs at the GA was a plenary panel featuring journalists I admire: Jeffrey Goldberg, Aluf Benn, Steven Linde and Linda Scherzer. As the conversation drifted from the media’s coverage of the war this summer to support for Israel, Benn pointed out that American liberals, especially young people, still traditionally support Israel but are growing more critical of the occupation.

Scherzer responded with: “Do you think young people just don’t get it?” With its deep condescension toward me and my peers, that moment revealed a major flaw in the American Jewish community’s approach to young people. The JFNA, like the rest of the community, knows that it has a problem engaging with us. It was frequently discussed at the GA. But the nature of those conversations actually epitomized the problems they purported to solve.

The panel “Doing Jewish in College and Beyond: Effective Ways to Engage Young Jews” had not a single student or young person on the panel. In fact, several of the students who asked questions were told that their views were “parochial” and only representative of a tiny, insignificant minority.

The program “Generation #Hashtag” highlighted statistics about the rise of anti-Semitism on campuses, even as the students on the panel itself insisted that they didn’t feel unsafe or insecure as Jews.

The fact is, millennials are not staying away because their local federation’s Facebook page is not attractive enough; they are staying away because when they want to talk about their beliefs and goals, they are often condescended to or ignored. Assuming that by understanding Facebook and Twitter they can understand how millennials think, the organizers of the conference displayed how out of touch they really are with young people. I attended the GA because I feel a personal investment in Israel, Zionism and the American Jewish community. I’m a Pakistani-American Muslim, so I’ll forgive you if you find that confusing.

Needless to say, I disagree with the anti-Semitism stuff (I'm a millenial and I do feel these concerns quite acutely). But Farooqi is absolutely right that the first step in engaging with a group is taking the group seriously. A Jewish community which doesn't respect its younger generation can't be surprised if the younger generation doesn't respect it back.

Generation Grift

Jill and I blundered into a fair today while walking to the Post Office (side note: Jill and I have wandered into many fairs in our day, and I don't think we've ever done so intentionally). It was fun -- there was a chili cook off and we registered to vote. And as we were walking, we saw a booth for an outfit called "Generation Opportunity." It rang a very faint bell, but it sounded like one of those neat non-profits that helps empower underprivileged high school students, so we decided to check it out.

They described their mission as surveying young people to find out what their priorities were, then advocating for those values. They gave an example of a proposed sales tax which I didn't know much about, then suggested we fill out one of their surveys. Jill, good quantitative researcher that she is, immediately asked what methods they had for ensuring that their surveys were actually representative of our generation by including low-income young people and people of color. The mumbled response about how there were other people who did that might have served as a red flag.

But then we took the survey, and it took one question for me to say "This is a push poll!" ("uhh ... yeah, the questions are worded terribly, I've talked to them about that."). "Do you think jobs are created by lowered taxes or bigger government?" "Do you think we should improve the economy and lower the debt by increasing government spending or decreasing it?" "Do you want to exercise your right to opt out of Obamacare?"

That last one was a subject near and dear to the staffer's heart -- he was very keen on informing us that we could decide not to participate in the Affordable Care Act. "I thought if I didn't participate Obama would, like, throw me in jail, but it's really just a fee you pay." I wanted to ask him if, given that his old sources were so terrible he thought he'd be imprisoned if he didn't get health insurance, if maybe he had thought about turning elsewhere for information on Obamacare, but I didn't. After turning down the offer of various swag emblazened with "opt out" (surely, a slogan our generation will get behind), I walked away.

Jill was actually a pretty happy camper -- she says she enjoys push polls because you know exactly what answers will piss the pollsters off ("why yes, I think larger government is the key to a healthy economy"). But I found myself very annoyed. These guys were basically grifters. The "opt out" movement is terrible -- it encourages people to go without health insurance to prove a political point, but you can bet dollars to donuts that if any of these kids actually get sick their erstwhile allies will do nothing but encourage them to die quickly. And even if they stay healthy, the goal of the program -- to deprive the health insurance market of healthy people to make it unaffordable for sick people -- is unspeakably evil. Frankly, I found it quite disgusting.

What Christianity Means To Young Americans Today

This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of White culture.

-- W.E.B. Du Bois

The above quote comes from Du Bois' 1920 work Darkwater. Anyone who has read Du Bois' more famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, would recognize a distinct shift in tone. n Souls, Du Bois was always very careful to not register condemnations of Whites or White society as a whole. Racism was a problem of a few bad, backwards persons; most people of goodwill were earnestly trying to achieve justice. Twenty years of failure later, and Du Bois was writing this instead -- in his experience and for what he had seen, the true face of White culture was lynchings, Jim Crow, colonialism, and oppression. The chapter, appropriately enough, was titled The Souls of White Folk

Whether Du Bois is being fair or not, the point is that from the outside looking in this is what Whiteness meant to someone like Du Bois. Its defining characteristic was as a tool of oppression. And I thought of that when I read this post detailing what young Americans think when they think about Christianity today:

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)

Is this all that Christianity is? No. But in politics, in the public sphere, it is this issue that seems to animate self-declared "Christian" political action. It defines Christianity in the eyes of the public. To assert oneself to be "a Christian" is to identify oneself with the foremost social movement backing up the oppression of gays and lesbians in America today, through unequal laws, through bullying and harassment, through constant degradation. That's true even of the many Christians who really don't care about the issue, not to mention the many Christians for whom Christianity ought actually be about promoting the equal human dignity and human rights of all.

I'm not a Christian, so I can't tell Christians what their faith is or isn't, or does or doesn't require. All I can say is that when I hear a candidate for political office loudly assert he is a Christian, I wince. Not because I think there is anything inherently wrong with being a Christian, or any religious outlook, but because the social meaning of asserting oneself to be Christian in the American political context has become almost completely absorbed by "anti-gay".

That's what it means. And if the Christian faith wants to retain any purchase on the people of my generation (and maybe it doesn't), it is an issue they're going to have to deal with. Because I find this very sad, and very tragic.

This is My Generation

I hate to humiliate a friend, but this tweet personifies my peer group:

[W]e prepared for #snowpocalypse by getting dvds, food, alcohol, and hot cocoa. we did not get candles or flashlights. #snowfail

That is exactly what I would have done, too.

Your Plan is Losing

Right now, the prevailing thrust of the Republican plan to rescue itself from irrelevancy is that they need to become even more purer. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) expressed the agenda in particularly inane fashion by saying "our plan is freedom" (after declaring he'd prefer 30 Senators "with principles" than 60 "who had none"), and declaring that "The federal government is too big, takes too much of our money, and makes too many of our decisions." Though objectively speaking neither DeMint nor other orthodox Republicans have the slightest interest in reducing government (ask your local woman or gay person for their thoughts on the matter), even interpreting it charitably -- that is, a strategy centered around less government spending, a reduced safety net, and economic intervention, it looks like -- surprise -- it's still a loser.

That's the response rate for the under-30 crowd -- the very demographic group that will rule American politics in the future, as well as the one voted "most likely to hate the GOP with the fury of a thousands suns". As Yglesias notes, typically the emergent Republican problem with younger voters is cast in terms of social differences (they loathe gay people, we don't). But it seems to be that the chasm is much broader than that, and represents a wholesale repudiation of Republican ideology up and down the political map.

The Fruits of Their Labor

In general, academic performance has a negative correlation with juvenile delinquency. Which makes sense -- we assume that academic excellence both shows a commitment by kids to work towards socially sanctioned goals, and that the pay-offs of excelling in school make criminal activity less attractive.

However, new research by University of Washington Professor Robert Cruchfield indicates that for kids in highly disadvantaged neighborhoods, this relationship is reversed: GPA actually has a positive correlation with delinquency.

This was an unexpected and obviously distressing finding, and folks are still trying to figure out potential causes. Several hypothesis were forwarded:

1) Kids with good grades in bad neighborhoods feel the need to "represent", countering the bad reputation they might get for being a nerd.

2) Kids with good grades feel like they have no potential for being rewarded for their accomplishments, and seek out the status that criminal activity brings.

3) Kids with good grades are more valuable to criminal organizations such as gangs, who value their intelligence and skill sets more than another dime-a-dozen brawler.

4) Having good grades acts as a "get out of jail free" card, causing authority figures to look the other way and making delinquent activity less costly.

All of these are worth considering, but I think #2 rings truest for me. One knock on the first explanation is, as one respondent noted, that it would seem simpler for smart kids to avoid the dilemma all together by underperforming in class. The fourth explanation I think would work better in high-income neighborhoods (where I definitely observe a "get out of jail free" effect). It's at best non-unqiue, at worst less effective, in poorer locales.

The third explanation seems slightly incongruous, but I think may be onto something insofar as we remember that modern gangs are rather sophisticated organizations which make rational "business" decisions. Still, the second example strikes me as the strongest. Kids who are high performers expect that they will see tangible rewards for their effort. Insofar as they don't see those rewards coming, either because they don't believe their work will pay off (i.e., even if they do well in school, they won't be able to afford college or can't imagine a good college will accept them), or because they don't believe they'll be around to see the benefits (i.e., they are fatalistic about street violence, or just assume they'll be taken in by the police on trumped up charges), the temptation to take immediately presented benefits rises dramatically.

Smart kids respond to rational incentives. The extent that criminal activity is the rational choice in many poorer neighborhoods worries me. A good anti-crime policy (indeed, a profoundly conservative one insofar as it deals with incentive structures) should be working holistically to make sure that other options are more fruitful than crime for disadvantaged youth.

Civil Rights Roundup: 07/25/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

Congress is questioning the use of expedited trial procedures against suspected illegal immigrants picked up in an Iowa raid on a meat processing plant.

E.J. Dionne asks: Is this the year the youth vote finally arrives?

Rep. Mark Souder wants to control DC's gun laws. Mark Souder is from Indiana, which, thanks to the District's disenfranchisement, still gives him more power over Washingtonians than their elected officials have.

In an Atlantic City sex scandal, some claim that an implicated White councilman are being treated more leniently than his Black peer.

The Houston Chronicle (a bit belatedly, to my ears) remarks on the wild popularity of Vogue's all-Black issue. Though the white-hot sales hopefully will explode the myth that Black models don't sell, some feminist writers are worried that the "all-Black" edition reinforces White normalcy and won't lead to long-term diversity in the modeling industry.

The CIA's "good faith" torture defense is a doozy.

Girls and boys are equally good at math. I wonder I much I weigh down the average of my gender?

Voting rights groups are accusing three states -- Michigan, Kansas, and Louisiana -- of illegally purging their voter rolls.

A Latino immigrant in Pennsylvania was beaten to death while attackers yelled racial slurs. Nonetheless, police say the attack was not racially motivated.

Citing data that Black motorists are disproportionately targeted, Illinois civil rights groups are asking that the state ban consent searches during vehicle stops.

A South Carolina state trooper is being brought up on civil rights charges after ramming a fleeing suspect with his patrol car. Apparently, this has become a trend among the state's police officers, who also use racial epithets while doing it.

New Jersey officials failed in their bid to have a lawsuit filed by state prisoners thrown out. A judge ruled that if the inmates allegations were true, their confinement conditions constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Violence between Latinos and Blacks in LA is driving area hate-crime stats through the roof.

A transgender Georgia state employee is suing, claiming she was fired once she announced she'd be transitioning from male-to-female.

A top corporate executive, who is Black, still thinks his peers must be "twice as good" in order to make it in corporate America.

Backlash Hypothesis

Kevin Drum flags some dangers ahead for Democrats if the refuse to nominate Obama...and Hillary.

In the former case, Jerome Karabel notes that political loyalties are solidified in one's 20s. Coincidentally, that age group represents Barack Obama's base. If they feel spurned at the end of the primary process, they not only could sit out the election, their view of the Democratic Party could be jaundiced for the rest of their lives.

In the latter case, Amanda Fortini says women are beginning to get restless -- not that Clinton is losing, but that people are denying the role sexism is playing in the campaign. The Clinton campaign awoke "sexism in America, long lying dormant, like some feral, tranquilized animal," but too many (in the immortal phrase of Ann Bartow) supposedly liberal doods shout down any woman who dares bring it up (see also, Ampersand). If their frustration boils over, they could stay home election night.

Drum thinks that ultimately, neither will play a big role in the general, as the prospect of a McCain Presidency draws everyone back to the polls. Color me unconvinced. The politically engaged always over-estimate how much "the other guy is scary as hell" serves as a motivator. I will say that I'm more worried short-term about women staying home or crossing over than I am about the youth vote (not because I don't think nominating Clinton would have an effect, but because I think that Obama has pushed their engagement to such heights that at worst they'd "recede" back to normal figures). But of course, I think that if Clinton gets the nod after coming in behind in the pledged delegates, Democrats will also watch the Black vote disintegrate before their very eyes, which probably would be even worse. And the long-term harms of passing over Obama that Karabel notes are a unique danger that I hadn't thought of before.

An Inconvenient Truth

The FRC, looking at new polling data on the political affiliations of young White evangelicals, notes that while this generation of evangelicals is less likely to identify as Republican, they are in some ways more conservative than their older peers (I imagine they are less so in other ways--the war in Iraq, I suspect, has soured a great many on the GOP foreign policy ideology). But the FRC seems peeved about the way one question on abortion was phrased:

For example, 70% of young evangelicals favor "making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion" (by the way, this is a particularly noxious phrasing of the issue as it frames a pro-life position as creating difficulty for women), whereas only 55% of older white evangelicals have the same view.

Umm...the "pro-life" position does create a "difficulty for women" -- it makes it more difficult for them to get abortions. To be sure, this is a burden that the FRC wants to impose on women, but that doesn't make it any less accurate. There is simply no way to characterize this phraseology as "noxious" without a hyper-developed victim complex (which, to be fair, is something we already knew the FRC possessed in abundance).