MACA: Make America Competent Again Part 2

 

By David K. Shipler

The second in an occasional series 

                A great American paradox is playing out dramatically on the Texas stage following the destructive winter storm: millions are unemployed, and millions of skilled jobs are vacant. Texans cannot find enough plumbers, electricians, and other hands-on specialists to restore life to decent levels of comfort and safety. The state—and the country at large—simply does not have enough men and women trained in the panoply of manual professions needed to keep an advanced society running.

There is a solution to this, and it’s recognized by labor unions, employers, and economists. It fits the general proposition, which I heard some twenty years ago from a leading economist, Robert Lerman: If a good idea exists, he said, you can be sure that it is being tried by somebody somewhere in the United States.

And for more than those twenty years, Lerman has been on a campaign to expand an idea already proven in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, and elsewhere. It is the ancient institution of apprenticeship—not in the medieval form but in a modern combination of in-class study and on-the-job learning that enhance practical skills for Americans who do not finish four years of college.

The hard fact is that if you don’t go to college or, once there, don’t get a degree, you’re in danger of falling through a hole in the economy. Unless you’re a whiz kid like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, you’re likely to be lacking the skills necessary to sell your labor competitively in a free economy. You could end up in dead-end, underpaid jobs that can consign you to a life near or below the poverty line.

And you will not be alone. Although 90 percent of Americans over age 24 have completed high school, only about two-thirds go immediately to college, and 40 percent of them drop out. Especially vulnerable are the first in their families to attend college. Their drop-out rate is 89 percent. Lerman reports that just 28 percent of all students and 17 percent of black students who began community college in 2016 graduated within three years, a slight increase over earlier years.

Rush Limbaugh and Encrypted Racism

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Rush Limbaugh, the witty, right-wing propagandist who died this week of lung cancer, gave his millions of listeners formulas for expressing anti-black bigotry without seeming to do so. Here is a description of his methods as directed against President Obama, in an excerpt from my book Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword:

                Given that blatant racial slurs are broadly unacceptable in twenty-first-century America, you could say that freedom of speech has its limits, restrained here not by law but by culture. And the punishments are inconsistent. People may lose jobs, promotions, reputations, and their chances for political office—or they may not. They can’t predict with confidence. Therefore, either instinctively or deliberately, people inclined to indulge in racial stereotyping find ways to disguise their messages in raceless terminology.

That leaves much room for disagreement over what is really being said. Is it encrypted prejudice or honest commentary? Which criticisms of Obama should be taken at face value, and which reverberate with echoes of age-old racial contempt? How can hidden implications be identified? Bias is agile and from time to time shifts into keys that sound race neutral to some Americans but are “dog whistles” audible to those who hear the notes of bigotry.

How to Love America

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Americans who want to love their country have to do it unconditionally, the way a parent loves a wayward child. Not to overlook flaws but to believe that correcting them is possible. Not to ignore the racial hatred, the murderous wars, and the impoverished children, but to cultivate the opposites that coexist with the injustices: the embrace of pluralism, the repugnance to violence, the passion for opportunity. This requires clear eyes to see what is and clear vision to see what can be.

                America needs a Carl Sandburg, who in the poem “Chicago” could honor struggle alongside raw virtue:

On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger 

. . . Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong  and cunning.

                America needs a Langston Hughes, who could embed within a verse both grievance and desire:

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be! . . .

We, the people must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

America needs a Martin Luther King, Jr., who could lament and challenge and believe within a single sentence: “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”

America does have Rep. Jamie Raskin, the lead House Manager prosecuting Donald Trump’s impeachment, who said this in his closing statement:

“In the history of humanity, democracy is an extremely rare and fragile and transitory thing. . . .  For most of history, the norm has been dictators, autocrats, bullies, despots, tyrants, cowards who take over our governments. For most of the history of the world, and that's why America is such a miracle.”

How do we love a miracle betrayed? How do we love a nation tarnished? This is now a task for all citizens from the left to the right, from the depths of deprivation to the heights of wealth, from sea to shining sea.

The acquittal of Trump does not teach us how to love a broken country. Nor would conviction have done so, no matter how warranted. Either path would have turned millions of Americans of one persuasion away from millions of others. Justice could not be done in the Senate chamber. Justice has to be done in the hearts of the people. Justice has to arise naturally from whatever inner values have been sown in every citizen, whatever affection we hold for the cacophony of democracy, whatever beauty we can see in the messy differences among us.

 Love of country is the energy of reform. The Republican Party has made sure that Trump will continue to use his perfect pitch for propaganda. He will fix his marksman’s eye on whites who are alienated and outraged and frightened—and violent. He will not be vanquished from America any more easily than Voldemort from the world of Harry Potter.

The remedy to Trump’s toxic spell is a disapproving, combative love for an America wounded but capable of recovery—in short, an unconditional love full of contradictions. It is a pragmatic, persistent idealism and realism. It is a love not for a leader, not for a party, not for one policy or another, but a love for that miracle of self-government that has been, as Raskin noted, such an aberration in the course of human history.

MACA: Make America Competent Again

 

By David K. Shipler 

The first in an occasional series 

                Perhaps the word “again” should be put in quotes or parentheses or followed by a question mark, because while the United States has done a lot of things very well through its history, incompetence has also plagued governmental behavior in areas ranging from foreign affairs to poverty. A frequent hallmark of failure has been the unwillingness to apply what we know to what we do. Expertise does not get translated into policy.

                The most obvious recent example is the Covid-19 pandemic, where the Trump administration’s floundering cost lives and worsened economic hardship. But the gap between knowledge and practice inhibits problem-solving in many fields. If you add up all of society’s accumulated understanding about the causes of poverty, for example, or about the sources of conflict in one or another region of the world, and then compare that knowledge with the actions being taken, it looks as if knowledge gets filtered out through a fine sieve before it gets to the policy level.

The Vietnam War was such a case. The US government saw North Vietnam as a Chinese and Soviet proxy in the vanguard of communism, and therefore a threat to American security. But historians knew that Vietnam had resisted China for centuries. And so could any American soldier or diplomat in Saigon who bothered to notice how many streets were named for Vietnamese heroes in the long campaigns against Chinese occupation. It should have been no mystery to American policymakers that the war, for Hanoi, was the continuation of a long anti-colonialist struggle, not one fought to spread global communism.

The dilution of expertise in making policy can be seen in the Middle East, Russia, China, and other parts of the world. The same is true at home. Much is known about how to treat prisoners to reduce recidivism rates, how to prevent police from extracting false confessions, how to provide good defense attorneys for indigent defendants, how to curtail global warming, how to clean up air and water, how to make workplaces safer, how to reduce suicides (gun control), how to treat mental illness, and on and on.

Accumulated knowledge about poverty is not put to good use. We know how to alleviate housing problems in America; it’s a matter of money. We know how to eliminate malnutrition—also a matter of money. We know how to raise workers’ skills and make work pay enough to sustain a family. We know how to provide decent medical care. We know how to improve education. True, some of our abilities diminish along the more difficult part of the spectrum—we are confounded by child abuse, drug abuse, gang violence, racism, white supremacy, and harmful parenting. But we know how to ease many other hardships.