Most Republicans Own Guns

Most Republicans own guns.  Most Democrats do not.  Most independents do not.

This is a real difference - gun ownership is one of the strongest predictors of Republican affiliation.

There are Republican majorities in all age groups and both sexes.

The more education Americans have, the less likely they are to own a gun.

The biggest gap:

High-school educated Republicans: 59%
Post-graduate educated Democrats: 22%

Hurrah! Normal Politics Resumes

The decline of the Tea Party, as I have been arguing, allows Republicans to resume the normal politics of compromise.

I am very hopeful that the Republican and Democratic leadership will reach a deal to raise taxes on the rich and cut government spending, especially on defense contractor entitlements.

I am also hopeful that the Republican and Democratic leadership will reach a deal on controlling assault weapons and other mass-murder tools.

I am hopeful that Grover Norquist will fade into the sunset, now that Republicans are ready to break their foolish pledge never to raise taxes, no matter how much it hurt the country.

I am less hopeful that the gun lobby will fade away, but at least some conservatives are willing to break with them when little white children get massacred.

Is the Casual Sex of Today Like the Smoking of Yesterday?

Today we look back on the indifference to the effects of smoking in the '60s with amazement. Now we know better, mostly due to science.

I think future ages will look at us the same way when they think about the emotional effects of casual sex. And this change will also mostly be due to science.

Why I Don't Like to Travel, Dressed Up in Sociologese.

I don't really like to travel, though I do a fair amount.

I have been thinking about why, exactly, I do not. 

I do like to learn about other people and places; that is one of the reasons I am a sociologist. 

I do not much need to feel the aura of special places, to have an authentic experience of "being there."  On the other hand, I always notice things about the juxtaposition of places and cultures that I would not have seen from just reading about other places. 

Still, I would rather be in my house or campus or coffee house, talking to people and working.

I think this is the main reason I do not like to travel:

When I am home, I feel that I am building social capital.
When I travel, I am spending it.
Each trip, therefore, had better be worth the social expense.

A Hopeful Sign: Egyptian President Gives Up Dictatorial Powers.

The Arab Spring is one of the most hopeful movements for a peaceful world.

The Islamic world has been so resistant to democracy that some have seen democratic government as un-Islamic.  This charge has not only come from opponents of Islamic nations, but from some Islamist theorists.  Many regimes, from merely authoritarian to brutally fascist, have been protected by the anti-democratic united front of Islamic states.

The Arab Spring looks like it will break that anti-democratic tradition.  If a group of stable democracies were established in the heart of the Islamic world, then the pressure for better government would ripple out all the way to Morocco and to Indonesia.  The "bloody borders" of the Islamic world that Samuel Huntington famously noted would turn to normal, peaceful, compromising, nation-upbuilding politics.

The most important nation trying to establish Islamic democracy is Egypt.  When an Islamist, Mohammed Morsi, was elected president after the overthrow of the dictator, many were worried. That he represents the Muslim Brotherhood, which had assassinated the previous president for making peace with Israel, was even scarier. However, I remain hopeful that having political responsibility will make the Muslim Brotherhood a more responsible and normal political party.

I was very distressed, therefore, when President Morsi proclaimed dictatorial powers.  The oppressed imitate their oppressors.

However, there was broad and sustained resistance in Egypt to Morsi's dictatorship.

Today, responding to the protests, Morsi annulled the decree giving him dictatorial power.

The conflict is far from over in Egypt, but this is a hopeful sign for a happier world.

Another Improvement in Congress

I have been arguing for some time that the Tea Party has been the major obstacle to competent politics, and that this election cycle was their last hurrah.

Yesterday came a further sign that the prospects are improving for compromise and progress in Congress.  Senator Jim DeMint, the Tea Party leader, resigned his Senate seat to become head of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation.

DeMint's resignation in the middle of his term of actual power is reminiscent of Governor Sarah Palin's resignation in the middle of her term of actual power.

These resignations make sense: it is hard for people with an anti-government ideology to serve in government.  It is hard for people with an anti-compromise ideology to serve in a legislature.

I look forward to better normal government in the coming year.

Gratitude: The Most Powerful Happiness Tool

This week we finished the first iteration of my "Happy Society" course.

As I reflect on what we have learned this term about what works to make people feel happier, I think reminding ourselves of how much we have to be grateful for is among the most powerful.   

With privileged people, I believe gratitude is the single most powerful tool we have.

A Nation That Runs on Immigrants Can't Afford to Run Short

American fertility has been at or a little below the replacement rate for a generation.  Our rate is the highest in the developed world, and our demographic future is generally bright.

Immigrants are the main reason that our fertility rate is near replacement.  Immigrants have a somewhat higher fertility rate than the native born.  This bump seems to last only one generation, though, so we benefit from continued immigration.

In the recent recession, immigrant fertility fell, and fell even more than native-born fertility. Fertility normally falls during a recession, and bounces back as people become more optimistic about the future. Immigration also fell during the recession, and indeed there seems to have been more return migration to Mexico (at least) than in-migration during that period.

All of which argues to me that the U.S. has a strong interest now in making immigration easy.  Likewise, we have a strong interest in making it easier to normalize the condition of migrants already in the country illegally.  Moreover, we have an even stronger interest in encouraging the permanent immigration of families, with their higher fertility rates, to insure that we have a sufficient nation - of citizens, as well as merely of workers - in the future.

Our Happy Prospects of Legislative Compromise

A happy society benefits from a competent government, most especially from a competent legislature.  The legislature, by its nature, will have representatives of conflicting interests.  It will naturally be full of conflicts much more often than it starts with broad agreement on major issues.  Thus, a competent government requires a willingness to compromise and work together for the good of the country.

Lately, our government, especially our legislature, has been polarized by a faction, the Tea Party, that rejects compromise on principle.  Moreover, the federal legislature has been hamstrung by a pledge that many members of one party, the Republican Party, made to never raise taxes, no matter what effect that has on the country.

There are happy signs that the logjam in the legislature is breaking up.  The uncompromising faction lost more than it gained in the recent election.  This frees the establishment of their host party, the Republicans, to make deals in the usual way, to move the government forward.

Recently, there has been another happy trend: many Republican leaders who signed the "never raise taxes" pledge are expressing a willingness to shrug off that straightjacket.

I am very hopeful that the lame duck session, and the new Congress to follow, will be very productive in solving a number of problems facing the federal government.

Do Some Feel That Organ Donation is Polluting?

My "Happy Society" class has conducted a project to sign up the entire Centre College community as organ donors.  We have had excellent success with the faculty, pretty good success with students, but only so-so with the blue-collar staff.

A couple of the latter said they would not sign up as organ donors because they "came in with all their organs, and they plan to go out with them."

I have a hypothesis about why this is so, which I don't have enough data to test.  Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, argues that all kinds of people tend to have immediate emotional reactions to moral questions.  Educated people, though, have trained themselves to only accept judgments that serve to prevent harm and advance care, or prevent inequality and advance fairness.  But most people also have an emotional commitment to liberty, sanctity, loyalty, and purity.  If they are not trained in Enlightenment theories, most people will go with their first emotional reactions.

My hypothesis is that when some people imagine their organs going in to other people react with disgust at the impurity of it, the pollution of their identity that would result.

The Tea Party Has Shot Its Bolt

This was the last Tea Party election. Like most uncompromising "know-nothing" movements, they fade away after about three elections because they don't get everything they want, and don't understand that all of politics requires compromise. 

To be sure, some politicians elected by the Tea Party will remain in office, such as my own junior senator Rand Paul.  But now the Republican establishment will be able to free itself from this threat from the right, and begin to make deals in the normal way.  And I hope we can also dispense with Grover Norquist and his foolish "don't raise taxes" straightjacket, too. My own senior senator, Mitch McConnell, is already talking about raising taxes.

One part of the Tea Party is burning itself out in petitions to secede from the United States.  This is open treason, and might be cause for serious criticism by regular, patriotic Republicans if the movement weren't so laughable.

Another part of the Tea Party will go back to grumbling political inactivity, along with the would-be socialists and anarchists.

A third part will become regular members of the Republican Party, arguing for their positions, but working to make deals that move the country forward.  I hope that my junior senator evolves in that direction. Likewise, I hope that my senior senator helps him by working with the Democratic Party to actually govern.

An Unexpected Benefit of the Election: Mormons are Normalized for Evangelicals

Evangelical Protestants have been suspicious of the Latter-Day Saints since the church began.  Until recently, even well-known ministries described Mormonism as a cult.

However, evangelical Protestants are also the core constituency of the Republican Party today.  So, when the G.O.P. nominated a Mormon for president, some thought evangelicals would be cool to Mitt Romney, a Mormon bishop and very active church leader.

Instead, evangelical Protestants dropped their opposition to Mormonism.

Though Mitt Romney did not win, I think his candidacy normalized Mormonism in American politics as much as John F. Kennedy's candidacy normalized Roman Catholicism in American politics.

What I Like About Obama: The Personal Reason

I believe that Barack Obama is the person most like me who will ever be president of the United States.  And the Obama family is the most like my family that will ever occupy the White House.

Barack Obama is a year younger than me.  I am conscious of being right on the cusp between the Baby Boomer generation and Generation X.  As I get older, I side more and more with the younger generation, the Xers.  Barack Obama is clearly a Gen Xer - a pragmatist who rebuilds basic institutions, willing to compromise to get practical reforms moving.  That is my attitude toward politics, large and small, as well.

Barack and Michelle Obama are meritocrats from financially modest backgrounds who made their way by academic success.  They finished their schooling at Harvard, which my wife and I, who did our graduate work at Yale, do not hold against them.

The Obamas are long and solidly married, and devoted parents. The Gruntleds married younger, so our kids are older, but I predict that Malia and Sasha Obama will likewise be successful students.  When Malia is ready for college in a couple of years, I imagine there will be stiff competition, especially between Columbia and Princeton, her parents' alma maters.

The Obamas are mainline Christians from a Reformed tradition of stewardship for society. Their faith informs their politics - including a firm sense that church and state should be separated for the good of each.

The Obamas were raised with the Civil Rights movement as the living chapter of the long sacred history of America, a heroic fulfillment of the long-denied promise of our nation's birth.  The Gruntleds see American history the same way. We have a triptych over our fireplace, surrounding the many family pictures: Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and above all, Jesus, in Rembrandt's rendition.

I feel a personal connection to Barack Obama that I am not likely to feel for any other president. I happily voted for him before, and again today.

What I Like About Obama: The Joshua Generation

One of the greatest achievements of President Barack Obama is how little we talk about him now as the first black president.

Four years ago, candidate Obama was very much seen as the great hope of the Joshua generation of black leaders to complete the civil rights revolution wrought by the Moses generation of Martin Luther King and his contemporaries.  Obama himself honored his elders, and sought to carry forward the mantle honorably.

It is a huge measure of his success that now his supporters, like me, point to his solid record of practical achievements in righting the ship of state from the disaster of the previous administration, and making dozens of improvements in how government functions.  Likewise, Obama's opponents attack him for many things, but only rarely for his blackness.

To be sure, Barack Obama's election to the presidency brought the racists out of the woodwork of American politics.  And some of his most vociferous and poisonous opponents are motivated by racism, which they sometimes foreground in their attacks.
NOTE: I am not saying that all opponents of Pres. Obama are racists.  Most of just Republicans, opposing the Democrat, in the most ordinary of ways.

I think that anti-black racism is the original sin of America.  I therefore believed four years ago that in electing a black president, American had taken a giant step forward.  And in electing a hugely accomplished meritocrat, married to another hugely accomplished meritocrat, who were devoted parents, committed church members, patriotic citizens - in short, just what we usually want our First Family to be - the Obamas made it clear that there were plenty of African-Americans ready and able to take their place in the leading classes of ordinary, bourgeois America.

Barack Obama was elected as, among other things, the first black president, and that mattered a great deal.  But he will be re-elected (I believe) as just the president, and that matters more.

What I Like About Obama: His Long List of Practical Improvements

I have been wrestling with this post for some days because the list of Pres. Obama's practical achievements is so long, I have not known just which ones to lift up in a short post.  Here is one fairly current list, of many.

And the list itself is only half the story. Obama has succeeded as a practical reformer.  He is not the radical that either extreme paints him to be - and never was. 

He campaigned and government as a practical reformer. And in his first term, especially in his first two-year Congress, he had a list of achievements that only Roosevelt and Johnson can compare to in the past century. In his second two-year Congress he has continued to achieve practical good, especially in foreign affairs, despite an opposition party that is publicly committed to opposing him no matter what effect that has on the country.

Jonathan Chait makes the practical, moderate case for Obama very well.  I particularly like this summary:

"Obama can boast a record of accomplishment that bests any president since Roosevelt, and has fewer demerits on his record than any of them, including Roosevelt."

What I Like About Obama: Everyone is Better Off Than They Were Four Years Ago - Except bin Laden

The world economic system was collapsing in 2008, as the Bush administration waited to expire. They bailed out the mortgage banks, but not the mortgage holders.  They were ready to let the auto industry die, as Gov. Romney explicitly argued at the time.

The Obama administration acted quickly to save the banking system. They saved the auto industry. They stimulated the economy, as much as the intransigent Republican leaders would allow. They could have created jobs, which would have done the most to stimulate the economy, but the Republicans chose to cut jobs instead.

Four years later, the economy is steadily recovering. The auto industry is thriving. The banking industry is thriving.  Even housing is starting to come back.

Everyone benefits from this recovery.

Thanks to President Obama, GM is alive, and bin Laden is dead.

What I Like About Obama: The Long Game

There are many particular achievements of Pres. Obama that I applaud.  I will get to some of them in the next few posts.  But I want to note, first, that I believe the president has had a clear, politically realistic vision from the outset, which he has been amazingly successful at achieving.

I believe the big goal that Barack Obama set for himself from the beginning of his campaign for president was to finally, finally, achieve universal health insurance.  This has been the dream of the whole middle and left of the political spectrum since the New Deal.  Many presidents, Republicans and Democrats, have failed in this great attempt, sunk by insurance and drug companies.  The Clinton administration, under what should have been ideal conditions, failed spectacularly.

When Obama set out on this great quest for universal health insurance, he knew it would take all of his political capital. He knew he would have to make big compromises, in his own party as much as with the opposition. And on top of the huge task passing universal health insurance, he had to save the entire economy.

The biggest constraint the Pres. Obama administration faced was that they only had two years to do nearly every important thing on their agenda.  When Democrats won big in the 2008 election it was clear to me that they would lose the lose big in the 2010 midterms.  This usually happens to the incumbent party, even in the best of times.  Add a massive recession and the most intransigent opposition since the Wilson administration, and the midterms would probably stop nearly all progress.

In fact, the Obama administration, working with Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, managed the most successful Hundred Days since FDR. And that made possible the great push for the health care bill. Obamacare - a term that began as an insult, but will, I think, become one of the greatest terms of praise of the president - is a huge step forward.  I don't like all the compromises that had to be made to pass it, but I appreciate that it was necessary for the president to make compromises.  Barack Obama is a masterful politician - I trust his judgment about which rat parts needed to go into the sausage.

Pres. Obama knew that he had until the end of the 111th Congress to pass most of what he would be able to pass in his first term. And he did, right up to the budget compromise at the end.

Barack Obama is a great player of the long chess game of governance.

Obama: What I Don't Like

The rest of my posts from now to the election will be what I do like about Pres. Obama.

Today I want to start with what I don't like.

He didn't close Guantanamo Bay prison.

He assassinates American citizens with a thin veneer of due process.

He spies on American citizens with a slightly thicker veneer of due process.

He has not prosecuted the Wall Street barons who created the financial crises quickly enough.

He has too many Wall Street veterans in charge of economic policy.

There are also some compromises he made that I am uneasy with, though they may have been necessary to get the deal done.  This is especially true for the health care bill and the budget compromise.

Re-Elect President Obama

I think Barack Obama has been a very good president.  I enthusiastically support his re-election.

Each day until the election I will give a reason why I support President Obama. 

I welcome your comments.

An Appreciation of George McGovern

The first election I paid attention to was the 1972 Nixon-McGovern debacle.  I don't think Sen. McGovern could have beaten Pres. Nixon even if he had run an excellent campaign.  Turns out, though, that Nixon would eventually do it for him.

I give Sen. McGovern full credit, though, for opposing the Vietnam War. That war was wrong in so many ways, and as it headed toward its third decade, it needed killing.  Having the standard bearer a major party - the historic war party - oppose that war help speed its end.

McGovern stood for good causes all of his public life, in office and out. He did not cash in in retirement; in fact, he didn't really even retire.

By opposing the Vietnam War, though, the Democratic Party did acquire a reputation for softness.  This was mostly undeserved, but not wholly.

It is fitting, therefore, that the end of George McGovern's honorable life should come during the term of a Democratic president who is clearly not soft.  An era has ended; another has begun.

The Interests of Romney and Obama Followers

A fascinating graphic from iProspect about the election compares the Facebook followers of Gov. Romney and Pres. Obama.  This suggests, in tantalizing outline, a social portrait of the two groups.

Gov. Romney has 1.5 million followers on Facebook.  Pres. Obama has 20.9 million.

The top activities listed by Gov. Romney's followers:

• Basketball
• Guns
• Gardening
• Football
• Church
• Quilting

The top activities listed by Pres. Obama's followers:

• Camping
• Meditation
• Stand-up Comedy
• Power Walking 
• Playing Computer Games
• Jigsaw Puzzles

I wish they broke this down by the standard sociological categories of race, class, and gender, as well as age, but it does create a picture in the mind of the different "ideal type" voters for each candidate.

The European Union's Well-Deserved Nobel Peace Prize

The European Union was the surprise winner of the Nobel Peace Prize this week.  Yet, as I pondered this choice, I chided myself for not having thought of it before.  The Long Peace of Europe since the Second World War is so much a part of our taken-for-granted world that we have already forgotten what an achievement that peace is. 

The massive decline in violence in the world in the past two generations is due primarily to the strong system of inter-connected and law-abiding states. And the core of the system of peaceful states is a stable Europe and a stable North America.

Good job, Nobel committee.  The prize is long overdue.  I hope it helps the EU overcome its current financial difficulties.

Creating, Versus Consuming, Love on the Internet Dating Market

I am working through the new book of that fine sociologist, Arlie Hochschild. In The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times she looks at the many ways we have turned to the market for aspects of personal life that we used to rely on "the village" for.

In the chapter on internet dating that opens the book, she makes this helpful observation: internet dating clients had such trouble finding a mate because "they were preparing to be consumers, not creators, of love."

One fruitful insight of our "Happy Society" class is that the simple act of performing acts of kindness for others makes one feel happier.  And we notice that our friends, seeing our example, are more likely to do the same.

I find that students have another, even more unexpected insight.  They have clear feelings about whether society is happy and kind, or unhappy and cold.  But until doing this class exercise, they had just never thought about themselves as the creators of the moral tone of society.

Creating love, like creating kindness, is hard and risky.  But it is also empowering.  And, of course, good.

Protestants Fall to Less Than Half: Nones Rise to a Fifth

The Pew Research Center has released a new report, The Rise of the Nones, on the changing shape of American religion.

Protestants are down by 5% to 48% total.

Religiously unaffiliated (nones) are up 5% to 20%.

Catholics are down 1% to 22%

Other religions are up 2% to 6%.

The main thing that seems to have happened is that lightly affiliated Protestants of five years ago now no longer call themselves religious at all.