Rod Dreher's Blog, page 666

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and several of his colleagues have published results a blockbuster four-year study of liberal bias within their own field, and how it hurts the quality of its science. One particularly notable thing about this report is neither Haidt nor any of his co-authors are conservative. Haidt, in fact, is a secular liberal. Here’s the introduction to what Haidt calls the “Cliffs Notes” version of the paper:

In the last few years, social psychology has faced a series of challenges to the validity of its research, including a few high-profile replication failures, a handful of fraud cases, and several articles on questionable research practices and inflated effect sizes… In this article, we suggest that one largely overlooked cause of failure is a lack of political diversity. We review evidence suggesting that political diversity and dissent would improve the reliability and validity of social psychological science…

We focus on conservatives as an underrepresented group because the data on the prevalence in psychology of different ideological groups is best for the liberal-conservative contrast – and the departure from the proportion of liberals and conservatives in the U.S. population is so dramatic. However, we argue that the field needs more non-liberals however they specifically self-identify (e.g., libertarian, moderate)…

The lack of political diversity is not a threat to the validity of specific studies in many and perhaps most areas of research in social psychology. The lack of diversity causes problems for the scientific process primarily in areas related to the political concerns of the Left – areas such as race, gender, stereotyping, environmentalism, power, and inequality – as well as in areas where conservatives themselves are studied, such as in moral and political psychology.

Even in this shortened version, the details are fascinating. The study’s authors produce data showing that the social psychology field is overwhelmingly liberal. They offer analysis and examples on how that fact can and does skew research, e.g., social scientists unwittingly embed liberal assumptions into their research, they suffer from confirmation bias, they focus on topics that validate the liberal progress narrative, and look away from scientifically valid topics that challenge it. For example:

Some group stereotypes are indeed hopelessly crude and untestable. But some may rest on valid empiricism—and represent subjective estimates of population characteristics (e.g. the proportion of people who drop out of high school, are victims of crime, or endorse policies that support women at work, see Jussim, 2012a, Ryan, 2002 for reviews). In this context, it is not surprising that the rigorous empirical study of the accuracy of factual stereotypes was initiated by one of the very few self-avowed conservatives in social psychology—Clark McCauley (McCauley & Stitt, 1978). Since then, dozens of studies by independent researchers have yielded evidence that stereotype accuracy (of all sorts of stereotypes) is one of the most robust effects in all of social psychology (Jussim, 2012a). Here is a clear example of the value of political diversity: a conservative social psychologist asked a question nobody else thought (or dared) to ask, and found results that continue to make many social psychologists uncomfortable. McCauley’s willingness to put the assumption of stereotype inaccuracy to an empirical test led to the correction of one of social psychology’s most longstanding errors.

Why are there so few conservatives in the field? Haidt et al. have discerned several reasons from their studies. Among them, outright discrimination against conservatives:

The literature on political prejudice demonstrates that strongly identified partisans show little compunction about expressing their overt hostility toward the other side (e.g., Chambers et al., 2013; Crawford & Pilanski, 2013; Haidt, 2012). Partisans routinely believe that their hostility towards opposing groups is justified because of the threat posed to their values by dissimilar others (see Brandt et al., 2014, for a review). Social psychologists are unlikely to be immune to such psychological processes. Indeed, ample evidence using multiple methods demonstrates that social psychologists do in fact act in discriminatory ways toward non-liberal colleagues and their research.

[Here we review experimental field research: if you change a research proposal so that its hypotheses sound conservative, but you leave the methods the same, then the manuscript is deemed less publishable, and is less likely to get IRB approval]

Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that most social psychologists who responded to their survey were willing to explicitly state that they would discriminate against conservatives. Their survey posed the question: “If two job candidates (with equal qualifications) were to apply for an opening in your department, and you knew that one was politically quite conservative, do you think you would be inclined to vote for the more liberal one?” Of the 237 liberals, only 42 (18%) chose the lowest scale point, “not at all.” In other words, 82% admitted that they would be at least a little bit prejudiced against a conservative candidate, and 43% chose the midpoint (“somewhat”) or above. In contrast, the majority of moderates (67%) and conservatives (83%) chose the lowest scale point (“not at all”)….

Conservative graduate students and assistant professors are behaving rationally when they keep their political identities hidden, and when they avoid voicing the dissenting opinions that could be of such great benefit to the field. Moderate and libertarian students may be suffering the same fate.

Read the whole summary. I have long said that “diversity” as it is practiced by many is not real diversity, and that in certain fields, like journalism, this really matters. The Haidt study is about how the lack of viewpoint diversity makes a big and meaningful difference in an entire scientific field. The same is true in journalism, of course. But in my experience, you will find very few leaders in the journalism field who see viewpoint diversity as important, and who care enough to make the effort to improve the newsroom numbers — even though viewpoint diversity would improve journalism for largely the same reasons Haidt et al. say it would improve social psychology.

Why the resistance? My theory is that many journalists, especially the Baby Boomers, got into the field because they believe its mission is, as the old chestnut says, “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” Well, no; the mission should be to tell the truth about the world as thoroughly as you can, but anyway, you can imagine how corrupting that principle can be when you consider how people define “the afflicted” and “the comfortable.” I suspect that the social psychology field is the same way: those within it see their work as missional.

I’ve often heard journalists in the past say quite sincerely that the pro-traditional marriage side in the gay marriage debate did not deserve to be treated fairly in news coverage, because they (we) are nothing but bigots. The issue was so clear to them that they didn’t think it was even up for debate — this, at a time when gay marriage was still only a minority cause. As I’ve said many times before, I have long believed that SSM was inevitable, but I have no doubt that its coming was accelerated by the propagandistic approach that the media took towards the issue.

Which is fine, I guess, if that’s how they want to roll. But let’s not pretend that objectivity is a meaningful value in the conduct of journalism. Similarly, from the Haidt report, it sounds like social science at times amounts to political activism of special pleading masquerading as objective science, and benefiting from the respect society gives to science, precisely because science is believed to be unbiased. If journalism had a few smart, principled liberals like Jon Haidt and his colleagues on the Heterodox Academy project, men and women who were willing to speak out against the biases in the field and how it damages the field, we would be much better off.

You know who esteems the Haidt et al. paper? This guy, who is not a conservative:

One of the most important papers in the recent history of the social sciences has just been published. http://t.co/aKXwJfu7rw

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) September 16, 2015

UPDATE: Reader “Charles” writes:

I am a social psychologist who is politically conservative. Worse, I am that creature that is most feared and despised in academia, a conservative Evangelical. In graduate school, in the eyes of my colleagues and professors I might as well have been a visitor from another planet, and I have long since resigned myself to the fact that, unless something truly bizarre happens, my academic career is restricted to teaching at Christian colleges. It has been made clear to me by my secular liberal colleagues, in ways that are both subtle and not so subtle, that I am unwelcome at “their” schools, simply because I am a member of Team Evil. At a Christian college I am paid half (if that) what I would be making elsewhere, in exchange for the ability to pursue my studies and publish scholarly works in which I try to develop my understanding of the human condition from a perspective that is informed by multiple disciplines, including theology. Given the current state of the academic job market, I consider myself blessed to be in any kind of faculty position, but the injustice of the situation is not lost on me.

The liberal bias in social psychology is entirely about the people themselves, though, not about the field. The more that I learn as a psychologist, the firmer my conservative convictions have become. I find that the the things that conservatives value and advocate are more than amply supported by psychological research. People flourish when they have robust and mature faith, strong families, active engagement in cohesive groups, freedom balanced with restraint and responsibility, the support and encouragement to cultivate the virtues, and a mindset that there are far more meaningful things in life than one’s own subjective gratifications. I am surprised that more psychologists are not conservatives. When Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson (both liberals) were writing Character Strengths and Virtues, a major reference volume in the positive psychology movement, they expressed concern that publishing what we know so far about the psychology of human flourishing was going to make them sound like evangelists or moralizers. But they struggled mightily and managed to maintain their liberalism even in the face of the empirical research literature. Jonathan Haidt (whom you correctly identified as a secular liberal) has faced fierce and vitriolic opposition for publicly telling people that his research shows conservatives (even religious conservatives) to not be stupid, crazy, or evil.

You are correct that many social psychologists see their jobs as “missional.” This is an attitude with deep roots, going back at least to Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech to the American Psychological Association, in which he called social scientists to take a prophetic stance, carrying out studies on racial and social issues and speaking out in the name of positive social change. I got into social psychology because I am fascinated by the study of human nature, and my ideas about “changing the world” have mostly focused on forming and informing my students, making a difference one on one instead of being a public voice.

Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.

— President Obama (@POTUS) September 16, 2015

I have been away from the keys most of the day, and am just now learning about what happened to that poor kid Ahmed Mohamed in Texas. From the NYT:

Ahmed Mohamed’s homemade alarm clock got him suspended from his suburban Dallas high school and detained and handcuffed by police officers on Monday after school officials accused him of making a fake bomb. By Wednesday, it had brought him an invitation to the White House, support from Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg, and a moment of head-spinning attention as questions arose whether he had been targeted because of his name and his religion.

As a result, a 14-year-old freshman at MacArthur High School in Irving, Tex., who is partial to tinkering, technology and NASA T-shirts and wants to go to M.I.T., found himself in a social media whirlwind that reflected the nation’s charged debates on Islam, immigration and ethnicity.

“Cool clock, Ahmed,” President Obama said on Twitter. “Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.” Mr. Obama’s staff invited Ahmed to the White House for Astronomy Night on Oct. 19, an event bringing together scientists, engineers, astronauts, teachers and students to spend a night stargazing from the South Lawn.

Good for Obama. What kind of dumbasses call the cops on a kid who built a freaking clock?! More:

Ahmed’s father, Mohamed El Hassan, 54, was at turns humble, emotional, grateful and patriotic, making it a point to mention they lived in their house for more than 30 years and that his son had fixed his car, his phone, his electricity and his computer and had built, in true all-American fashion, a go-kart. “That is not America,” he said of Ahmed’s detainment. “That is not us. That is not like us.”

The Irving police chief, Larry Boyd, said at a news conference on Wednesday that the officers were justified in detaining the teenager based on the information they had at the time, when initially it was “not immediately evident that” Ahmed’s clock was a class experiment. He added, however, that the police had “no evidence to support that there was an intention to create an alarm.” Asked whether the police would have reacted differently if Ahmed had been white, Chief Boyd said they would have followed the same procedures.

“You can’t take things like that to school,” he said.

You know, I can believe that. I mean, I am sure the kid’s being Muslim had something to do with it, but we are so insane about Zero Tolerance that it’s easy to imagine this happening to an ordinary white geek.

If some nervous nellie who had no idea what they were looking at came to look at our homeschooled son’s chemistry lab, or saw his electronics tinkering, they would probably soil their drawers and call Homeland Security.

They fingerprinted this Ahmed kid and took a mug shot! Where is the common sense?! Yep, #IStandWithAhmed too.

UPDATE: Alan Jacobs nails it:

There are many, many things that could be said about Ahmed Mohamed’s experience, but the most important one, I think, is this: the staff at his school continue to believe that the most reasonable and appropriate thing they could have done when they saw Ahmed’s clock is to call the police and have the boy taken away in handcuffs and interrogated. Not talk to Ahmed, or ask him serious questions about the device he made, or warn him that such a thing could easily be misinterpreted, or contact his parents and get them involved … nope. Call the cops, cuff him, interrogate him.

Greetings from Martin, Tenn. On the long trip up here, I walked behind this Social Justice Warrior in the DFW Airport. You might not be able to see clearly his backpack patches and pins. According to his backpack, he is against the Nazis (but might be supportive of Imperial Japan), he is a “Peacemonger” who believes we should “COEXIST.” And the little black and white button on the far right advises one to “SHUT THE F–K UP”.

SJWs, man.

Among the Christian Right SJWs, word comes to me that a radio-show-having Christ-follower in Iowa, a Mr. Steve Deace, has said that Your Working Boy will go to Hell for failing to defend Kim Davis. Here are some quotes from his interview with local GOP macher Bob Vander Plaats:

“Beware of those in a culture war who write, you know, really principled and highly intellectual thought pieces for conservative or Christian outlets, and then in a time of crisis and confrontation like this, they say, oh this is not the right hill to die on,” he fumed. “What they really mean, Bob, is there’s never a right time to stand for anything nor is there ever any hill to die on. And these are the people, they’re going to hold the jail cell open for us when the Marxists throw us inside too.”

He added that his only comfort was that those conservatives are on their way to Hell: “It reminds me of the famous quote from Dante, that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for these kind of cowardly quislings. And I’ll just flat-out say it on the radio, the mere thought of that comforts me. The mere thought of that statement being true comforts me, because it confirms that God is just and they have received their award in full.”

“And judgment is mine, declares the Lord,” Vander Plaats added. “And so therefore we’re glad we serve a just God.”

Can’t you feel the Christian love? I know I can! Man, I want some of what they have. It’s so inspiring. Maybe I should read some Dante, so I can know what I have coming to me. Oh, wait…

Did you see my post yesterday called Trailer Park Gothic, about the messed-up lives of the broken, nicotine-addled family that Charleston shooter Dylann Roof lived with before he committed his crime? This came in from a regular reader of this blog, who gave me permission to print the letter here:

It was quite a shock to open up (digitally) the Washington Post article from the other day about the Meek family, since I had one of those boys in my class for several years.  Having met Mrs. Konzny on a few occasions, it was also so sad to read about her in those pages.

That piece brought home something I’ve felt for a long time, which resonates with your call for a socially conservative Bernie Sanders.  Basically, it’s that one of the great, deep problems with our elites that is that none of them, left or right, know (or care to know) poor people.  Red Bank, SC, is half an hour from the nicest neighborhoods in Columbia, and 10 minutes from the nicest real estate in Lexington, and at first blush, it’s not too bad.  But then you start taking a look down the dirt roads and into the trailers, and you realize that just behind the surface in this country is an awful lot of poverty, poverty that’s sometimes (literally) invisible.

To conservative elites, poverty is something to be eradicated by free enterprise, by a hand up, not a handout.  There’s a vague whiff there that poor people are poor because they’re stupid, or lazy, or just people who the Market (blessed be its name) has decided in its wisdom not to favor.  Even when words of charity are mouthed, there’s a vague sense of blame, that somewhere, either this man or his father sinned, so to speak, to cause this to happen.  Never mind that if that poor person hustled his butt off 60 hours a week at minimum wage he would earn, at best, around $20,000 a year…look at your own household budget for that 20K and tell me you could blame a poor person who could maybe save $10 or 20 a month for buying a six-pack with it instead of faithfully saving it….when they could save a few hundred a year for two DECADES before scrounging together a decent down payment on a home, never mind the inevitable blown tires, medical bills, etc.

To liberal elites, poverty is what excuses tacky and common social views.  If only they weren’t poor, or had those good factory jobs, they’d stop clinging to guns and religion, says our president.  If only those idiot poor people had the good sense to see that Democrats promise them more money, says Thomas Franks in “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” then they’d vote the right way.  For liberal elites, poverty is what keeps the poor dears taking pride in the rebel flag, or in Jesus.

It reminds me of Ralph Ellison’s wonderful novel of Black identity, “Invisible Man.”  The protagonist starts out at a thinly allegorized Tuskegee, where he is held up as the model of the clean, socially acceptable White man’s negro.  Then, he ends up in New York, where he is held up as the iconic working Black man by 1930’s era communist organizers.  Finally, grotesquely, he is fetishized as the “savage Black lover” by the wife of one of the tony upper-middle class socialist gadflies.  In each case, he serves as a symbol of a cause, but no one actual cares about him as a person–just as a projection of their own ideologies about Blackness.

Similarly, right-wing neo-libertarian elites will look at the Meeks as we see them in the WaPo piece and say “serves them right.  Look at how lazy they are, playing video games all day, drinking, and smoking.”  What Mrs. Konzny really needs are privatized social security benefits!  Left-wing elites will look at the Meeks and say that we need more spending on social services, or better jobs, and while that may be true, is a check really going to change what’s fundamentally broken in this picture?

Think about it: If you’re an upper-middle class accountant, say, you work all day with other people of the same educational level, more or less.  Your clients are businesses or relatively wealthy individuals.  You go to a church full of middle class people, and you likely live around them too.  You spend your whole day without ever having a meaningful interaction with someone who makes less than $50,000 a year.  And that is going to shape your worldview, no matter how conscientious you are.  Before our culture can solve any of the problems afflicting the Meeks, we have to be willing to know them as people with agency made in the image of God.  All the money/ pro-market policies in the world won’t solve anything until that happens.

Readers, your thoughts?

I’m going to be in and out of pocket today. I’m traveling to Martin, Tenn., to give a talk on Dante tonight at the University of Tennessee’s campus there. It’s free and open to the public. Come on out and say hey. Thursday night, I’m at Union University in Jackson, talking Dante, and haranguing Hunter Baker until he buys me a beer. Details of that free-and-open-to-the-public talk here.

UPDATE: See this brief First Things meditation by theologian Chris Roberts, on contemporary Christianity and the poor.

Goodbye Aunt Ruthie (Summer 2011)

From this space, September 15, 2011:

I talked to her the other day, and knew from what my folks had been telling me that she was in steep decline. Losing weight, on oxygen again, in lots of pain. But if it hadn’t been for Mama and Daddy, who live next door to her, telling me these things, I would never have known. She never, ever complains. She mentioned to me that she had been dreaming lately of family members who had died. Our grandfather Dede. Our grandmother Mullay. Our Aunt Julia. She said they appeared to her in different dreams.

“Did they say anything to you?” I asked her.

“No, they just smiled,” she said.

“Do you think they were preparing you for something?”

“No, I didn’t get that sense.”

Of course she didn’t. Ruthie has so much hope for survival.

But she was wrong. They did come to prepare her. This morning Ruthie died at home.

Rest in peace.

Last night, there was a passionate parish council meeting here in West Feliciana. In 2012, our parish (that is, county) voted to do away with our traditional system of government, the “police jury” (don’t ask me to explain it), and replace it with a “home rule charter” system, which is much more like what others have. Under the old system, the parish was ruled by seven police jury members who had equal power. Under the new system, there will be a five-person parish council of four members elected from separate districts, and one at-large member. Plus, we have an executive branch headed by the parish president. The Home Rule Charter was voted in by a clear majority of the parish’s voters, in an election year that saw a whopping 77 percent turnout in West Feliciana.

Since then, however, the people opposed to the HRC have tried every move they possibly can to reverse the results. They’ve been shot down in court, and faced down in the council when they’ve tried to repeal it. For reasons too complicated to explain here, last night’s meeting was the last chance they had to get a repeal on this fall’s ballot. After this fall, the parish will exit the three-year transition stage of Home Rule, and fully implement the system.

At the meeting last night, there were a number of African-Americans who spoke out against Home Rule, and in favor of having a re-vote. Their view is that the 2012 election was invalid, because the black community was strongly united against Home Rule (89 percent of black voters were against it). And even though two of the four districts have been drawn to be predominantly black, they believe the new system dilutes the black vote.

A (white) pro-HRC council member pointed out that the demographics in our parish have changed a lot in the past generation. Now, only 33 percent of the parish’s residents are African-American. Yet under the new districting, they will have 42 percent of the power. They are actually getting more power than is their demographic due. I could tell from looking at the faces in the audience that this didn’t change their mind.

A white citizen who also wanted to see the HRC repeal on the ballot stood to say that she too thought the districting was unfair. She pointed to the numbers showing that some districts have many more voters than others, unfairly diluting the voting power of citizens living inside the more populous districts. Why should people who live in a district with over 2,500 people in it have to settle for equal representation with a district that has 800?

That is a good point. The answer is that given the population distribution throughout our small, rural parish — about 10,000 residents (not counting Angola inmates) in a space 13 times larger than Manhattan — had the districts been divided equally by number, each one would have been predominantly white. Given voting pattersn here, you would likely have had a parish with one-third African-Americans ruled by an all-white parish council. Given the history of white supremacy here, and of disfranchising the black electorate, that is politically untenable, to say the least. Plus, to have drawn the districts that way would have invited the Justice Department’s civil rights division to investigate us.

Look at this crazy map. Districts A and B are the predominantly black districts, C and D the predominantly white. Are these fairly drawn? No. But they are more fair than any realistic alternative. And so, in my view, they are about as just as we can hope for.

The point is that often, justice is approximate. I was thinking about last night’s meeting — the HRC repeal measure failed, by the way — when I read this apologia by Sherman Alexie, the editor of Best American Poetry 2015, explaining how he picked the poems he chose for the anthology. The interesting part is Alexie explaining how he dealt with discovering after the fact that an English language poem he chose written by a Chinese poet had actually been written by a white man under a Chinese pen name. Alexie writes, of the rules he imposed on himself at the beginning of his mission:

Rule #4: I will not choose any poem based on a poet’s career. Each poem will stand or fall on its own merits. There will be no Honorary Oscars.

Rule #5: I will pay close attention to the poets and poems that have been underrepresented in the past. So that means I will carefully look for great poems by women and people of color. And for great poems by younger, less established poets. And for great poems by older poets who haven’t been previously lauded. And for great poems that use rhyme, meter, and traditional forms.

OK, now wait. How can you let a poem stand on its own merits, but also weight it for reasons of color, sex, age, and relative fame — categories that have nothing to do with literary merit? This is exactly the kind of injustice that the fake Chinese poet was trying to counter. A poem by a white dude from the Midwest doesn’t make the cut, but the same poem by someone who is of Chinese ancestry does? Where is the justice there?

In a remarkable look inside his thought process, Alexie concedes that he did factor in the apparent Chinese-ness of the poem’s author in selecting it for the anthology:

I did exactly what that pseudonym-user feared other editors had done to him in the past: I paid more initial attention to his poem because of my perception and misperception of the poet’s identity. Bluntly stated, I was more amenable to the poem because I thought the author was Chinese American.

Alexie talks about how he went back and forth over whether to yank the poem from the anthology once poet Michael Derrick Hudson revealed his subterfuge, which Alexie denounces as “colonial theft.” Now that’s funny: Hudson caught Alexie out giving extra points to a poem because he thought the poet was a member of a minority group he favored, but the sin is actually Hudson’s, because Colonialism. Ah, the rules of the academy.

In the end, Alexie decided the poem had to stay:

But I had to keep that pseudonymous poem in the anthology because it would have been dishonest to do otherwise.

If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I gave the poem special attention because of the poet’s Chinese pseudonym.

If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I was consciously and deliberately seeking to address past racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic injustices in the poetry world.

And, yes, in keeping the poem, I am quite aware that I am also committing an injustice against poets of color, and against Chinese and Asian poets in particular.

But I believe I would have committed a larger injustice by dumping the poem. I think I would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity.

The word “only” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Anyway, I’m glad Alexie left the poem in the anthology. This embarrassing episode, though, reveals how corrupting the attempt to work social justice through redistributing merit can be. Michael Derrick Hudson will never know if his poem would have been selected on its own merits. And writers of color included in that Alexie-edited anthology will never be confident that their poems were good enough to be in the book, or if they made it in because Alexie put his SJW thumb on the scale, to compensate for pro-white racism (real and imagined) in past editions.

What does this have to do with the political redistricting in my parish? The two situations are different because one has to do with political power, and the other has only to do with aesthetic quality. In the political case, there is no conceivable division that could have been completely just, given that the first black people weren’t allowed to register to vote in West Feliciana until 1963. In this case, the discrimination of the past was well within living memory, and easy to document. The current redistricting is about as just as we can hope to get at this point in our history in this place. As a political matter, we can more easily bear the injustice of this current redistricting than we could any other permutation.

But Alexie and people like him redistricting (so to speak) art and literature based on perceived historic racial injustice? That’s a much murkier thing. I don’t think it’s right to say that personal characteristics of the poet should have nothing at all to do with the literary worth of a poem. A poem about the pain of exile written by a Syrian refugee may strike us with more force than a poem about exile written by an especially imaginative creative writing grad student of Scandinavian heritage. On the other hand, if the grad student conveys the agony of exile more vividly in her verse than an actual exile does, isn’t she the greater artist?

You see the problem with trying to determine artistic merit based on biography. I give Alexie credit for being so open about his reasoning here. Still, I cannot for the life of me see how either art or justice are served by trying to right (write) abstract wrongs by committing concrete acts of injustice to contemporary poets who, like poets of past eras, happen to be in a disfavored demographic. “Everybody did it, so why can’t I?” is not an acceptable response. Sherman Alexie would have been much less tortured, and certainly less embarrassed, had he just made up his mind to pick the best poems, period. Merit is an impossible to define standard, and subjective when it comes to something like a poem or another work of art. But as imperfect as it is, it seems to me to be better than the alternatives.

In his new memoir The Wind In the Reeds, Wendell Pierce tells the story of his father Amos, and the old man’s struggle for justice. Amos — forgive me, but having met him, I can only call him “Mr. Amos” — fought in the Battle of Saipan in World War II. When he was discharged through Fort Hood, his papers had not yet caught up with him. When Mr. Amos told the white WAC officer processing him that he had been awarded medals for his bravery, she refused to believe that a black man was capable of such valor, and sent him on his way without his due.

When the Defense Department caught its error and wrote to the veteran to ask him if he wanted his medals, Mr. Amos refused. And yet, he did not raise his sons to hate the country that treated him this way. Wendell remembers this event from his childhood, when his dad took him to a boxing match in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in the Black Power era:

That night at the Municipal Auditorium, the national anthem began to sound over the PA system, signaling that the fights would soon begin. Everyone stood, except some brothers sitting in the next row down from us. They looked up at my father and said, “Aw, Pops, sit down.”

“Don’t touch me, man,” growled my dad.

“Sit down! Sit down!” they kept on.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “I fought for that flag. You can sit down. I fought for you to have that right. But I fought for that flag too, and I’m going to stand.”

Then one of the brothers leveled his eyes at Daddy, and said, “No, you need to sit down.” He started pulling on my father’s pants leg.

That was it. “You touch me one more time,” my father roared, “and I’m going to kick you in your f—-ng teeth.”

The radical wiseass turned around and minded his own business. That was a demonstration of black power that the brother hadn’t expected.

Many years later, in 2009, Wendell learned of the medals his dad had been denied, and worked with a local TV reporter, and US Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office, to get his father his due. Army records showed that Amos Pierce had in fact been awarded six medals. He finally received his medals in a special ceremony in October, 2009, at the World War II Museum in New Orleans. You can read the story here, and see a photo of Mr. Amos, his (now deceased) wife Althea, and Wendell.

In The Wind in the Reeds, Wendell writes:

[Black veterans] loved the country that persecuted them, and treated them like the enemy. To me, that is a vision of supreme patriotism. It’s like my father always said to my brothers and me, every time we would see a triumph of American ideals: “See, that’s why I fought for that flag!”

Amos Pierce never stopped fighting for that flag, and never stopped loving it, either. On the day he finally received his medals, he said nothing at the formal ceremony, but in the gala afterward, he decided that he wanted to offer a few words to the crowd.

He hobbled over to the microphone, and despite his hearing loss, spoke with ringing clarity.

“I want you all to remember those who didn’t come back, I want to dedicate this night to them,” he said. “So many who fought didn’t even have a chance to live their lives. I was given that chance, as difficult as my life has been.”

Daddy thanked the audience for the honor, saying he was not bitter for having been denied the medals for so long. He was simply grateful to have them now.

“We’ve come so far as a country,” he continued. “I’ve realized now a lot of what we were fighting for.”

And then he paused. It took all of his strength to stand as erect as possible at the podium. He saluted crisply, and said, “God bless America.”

That’s when I lost it. For someone not to be debilitated by pain and anger and embarrassment after all he had been through; who fought for this country when this country didn’t love him and wouldn’t fight for him; to come back from war and still have to fight for the right to vote and the right to go into any establishment he wanted to – that made me think of the vow he made to me as a child: “No matter what, son, I will never abandon you.”

I have never known a greater man than that old soldier on the night he received his due.

I read that chapter aloud to my own father in the last weeks of his life. I couldn’t get through that passage without choking up, and then sobbing. When I looked up to apologize to my dad for not being able to continue, I saw that he too was crying.

It’s an amazing book, about a terrific family.

Not long ago, I was feeling very down and frustrated about our country, and doubting my own loyalty to it. Then I thought about what Amos Pierce had been through, and how he had suffered both in war, and then the humiliation of having his bravery denied, simply because of the color of his skin. Yet his faith in America did not waver.

And then I felt ashamed of myself.

The Washington Post‘s Stephanie McCrummen has written a powerful, even shocking, feature profiling the people with whom Emanuel AME mass killer Dylann Roof was living before he committed his crime. With a steady accumulation of details and dialogue, McCrummen paints a dark portrait of poor people who fell through the cracks, and who are going nowhere. They spend their broken lives in an anesthetic haze in a South Carolina trailer. These young men are useless. Won’t hit a lick at a snake, but sit around the trailer smoking and playing video games while their harried mother works as a Waffle House waitress. Excerpts:

A neighbor named Christon Scriven comes in and lays next to Justin. Christon, who is black, also knew Roof and says of him, “I still love him as a friend.” Then comes a friend they call J. Boogie, and a tattooed guy they call Gizmo, who sits on the carpet. A brown cigarette is rolled, lit and passed around.

“Joey!” Christon calls into the living room. “You’re stupid!”

Justin laughs and falls in and out of sleep. Gizmo stumbles to the mattress, drops and sleeps, and after a while, Christon says, “I have no sympathy for people. Nobody has any sympathy for me. I care for me and me only.”

He passes the cigarette to Justin, and Justin drops ashes in the bed, and in the chemical-smelling haze, Christon plays a country song on his phone. “Well I caught my wife with a young man and it cost me 99,” he and Justin sing.

He switches to Lil Wayne. “Family first, you get your family killed,” he and Justin rap, and the dogs start barking.

“The police here?” Christon says. Justin looks up. Joey comes in and looks through the blinds. Nothing. Christon aims a finger at him — “Bang,” he whispers — and Joey leaves.

“Joseph!” Christon yells after him.

“Hey!” Justin calls.

“Somebody! Anybody!” Christon yells, but nobody answers. Soon Justin is asleep again, and Christon is looking at him. He rubs the back of his hand on Justin’s cheek. He takes a lighter and flicks it at Justin’s hair.

Gizmo wakes up, goes to the kitchen, gets a bottle of syrup and squeezes it into his mouth.

It is nearly sundown when Kim comes home after being out all day.

“She’s here!” Jacob yells, and he gets up to make a frozen pizza.

Kim yanks up a crumpled hamburger wrapper off the floor. She grabs two plastic cups filled with cigarette butts and empties them into the garbage.

“Jacob!” she snaps when he drops the pizza carton on the floor. “Pick up that trash! Pick it up now!”

He picks it up.

“I’m so tired of these people over here, all day, every day,” Kim yells to no one. “I have no peace! I have no quiet!”

She goes into her bedroom on the other side of the trailer and shuts the door.

More, after Kim’s shift ends at the Waffle House:

After 2 a.m., it is quiet again, and she sits at the counter to eat a plate of scrambled eggs.

Two waiters, a young man and a young woman, are talking.

“I’m one drop away from killing everyone,” he says.

“My last day at McDonald’s I wanted to kill everyone,” she says.

“I can’t kill myself, because then I’d go to hell, so I’m stuck here,” he says, and fake punches her in the arm. She flinches.

“I’m very sensitive,” she says.

“I’m going to go home. Watch TV,” he says.

“No one cares,” she says. “I need a hug.”

He holds up a large steak knife and smiles. She winces and laughs weakly, and Kim finishes eating, drops the heavy plate in the sink and, three hours later, goes back to the trailer to see what is waiting for her there.

What is waiting is more of the same.

“You see that?” Lindsey says one day, looking through the blinds, the dogs barking. “They stopped in the driveway — a white Jeep,” she says, but the white Jeep leaves, and she goes back to scrolling on her cellphone.

Another day, Justin is playing Xbox, grenades exploding, bodies flying, and he says, “Mom, when did Shane die?”

“Why bring up that subject?” Jacob says, pacing, sleeves flopping. “Why?”

Another day, Kim goes into her bedroom, closes the door, smokes a cigarette and says, “It’s like we’re being punished for something, only I can’t figure out what.”

Read the whole thing. It’s important.

What stands out to me is that Kim and her sons had a normal middle-class life, until her second husband left, and sent her spiraling into poverty. Then one of the boys dropped out of high school, and the other started cutting himself. Notice, though, that she has no sense of agency, no sense that she has any control over her life. Neither, obviously, do her sons.

Second, the complete stasis of this life this motley band lead is alien to me. I guess that’s what it means to be culturally middle class: you believe that you are going somewhere, that you have a mission. Even if things blow up on you, you have faith that getting out of the ditch is possible, so you keep trying. This family has given up. Notice that I’m talking about a cultural mindset, not material conditions.

Does anybody really believe that there is a political solution to the problems that these people have? I’m not saying that government has the right to wash its hands of their fate, but I’m saying that there are no policies that can break the mental shackles that keep these people chained to that miserable trailer, smoking cigarettes and dope, playing XBox, and wasting their lives in dependence on the hard-working mother. You could write this family a check for a million dollars, and it wouldn’t fix what’s broken inside them, and in their community.

What could? Serious question.

What stands out to me is the barely-stifled rage of the Waffle House employees. What stands out to me is that Kim’s boys do not know how to be men.

UPDATE: I missed this Associated Press story from late July:

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to “rebuild ladders of opportunity” and reverse income inequality.

Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.”

“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend, but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

“If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work,” she said. Children, she said, have “nothing better to do than to get on drugs.”

And:

Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.

The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class: 49 percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of non-whites who consider themselves working class.

In November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since 1984.

Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential “decisive swing voter group” if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections.

“They don’t trust big government, but it doesn’t mean they want no government,” says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. “They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them.”

Trump voters, a lot of them.

UPDATE: Irenist writes:

What part of this story is “shocking”?

Other than the part about trailers (less common in the Northeast), this excerpt strikes me as tons of people I knew as a kid who were from my own welfare / living off of disability / minimum-wage-job demographic of lower class white people. I happen to have been blessed to be a bookish sort who was able to read my way out of that and into college and law school, but I still know plenty of guys from back home of the “smoke weed and play Xbox all day while living in squalor and living off your girlfriend’s money” approach to living, who seem to have no willpower or gumption at all. For example, when I was a little kid, our rental was next door to a white guy who spent his days messing around with his motorcycle and supported himself by pimping his wife out. Their kids (my age) used to walk around barefoot and shirtless in shorts, in the snow, because the adults in their life were all too high to notice. Maybe I’m just jaded, but, hasn’t lower class life for people of any color *always* been like this? What’s the shocking part here?

And the murderous rage of the guys at the mom’s job isn’t at all uncommon, either. I remember when I was in one of the poorer stretches of my young adulthood, I rented a room in a flea-ridden house from a rather unscrupulous live-in landlord. As I recall, on the first floor were a bunch of white people: there was a very irascible war vet who kept a lot of guns in his room, a mother (7-11 cashier) and her elementary-aged son sharing a bed in another, the landlord, and me). In the basement were a couple from Puerto Rico–a drug dealer and his wife the retired prostitute. In the closet next to the washer and dryer was a Puerto Rican-American paroled pedophile sleeping on a mattress that filled the closet from wall to wall.

As you can imagine, the mom was really angry when the pedophile moved in. But the landlord told her that he could rent her room easier than the closet, so if she didn’t like it she could leave. She didn’t have a car, and the house was in walking distance of the 7-11, so she stayed, and just forbade her son to leave their locked room unaccompanied anymore. (In retrospect, I should’ve called the police, perhaps. But I was too dumb at the time to know that.)

Anyhow, the pedophile walked home in the snow one night from his graveyard shift at McDonald’s to find that the drug dealer had been listening to the fancy stereo the pedophile kept at the foot of his mattress (he had told me when I gave him a ride to work one night that he was spending a big chunk of his wages on the rental for the speakers from a layaway place: they were his pride and joy). So of course, when he got home, he and the dealer had a knife fight about the dealer touching the stupid speakers, they both got a bit cut up, and they made up a few days later.

Not that long after, the irascible war vet brandished a gun at the mom: I think he was mad about her taking too long in the bathroom or something?

I got a better job and moved out shortly after that, but as I recall these folks fought like that all the time. So do lots of other working and welfare class people I’ve known. I once stopped one adult family member from stabbing another during a heated argument when I was a kid: that sort of thing happens not infrequently in those circles. It’s a hard life that makes people grumpy, a lot of them have poor impulse control, and fights break out.

But again, hasn’t lower class life always been lived on the edge of violence? Hogarth’s “Gin Lane,” the mob riots in Constantinople between blue and green supporters at the hippodrome, that sort of thing? Maybe I’m too low-class to notice, but what’s the shocking part here? Honestly asking.

@Charles Cosimano:

We allow them to live in a trailer instead of carving them up for transplant parts. For that small mercy let them be grateful.

Whaddaya mean “we,” Kemosabe? These are human beings we’re talking about here. No group, not even us white trash, deserves you making jokes like that. Your little ruthless evil guy act is cute, but you are, and not for the first time, crossing a line, IMHO. With respect, please knock it off. I can happily get through the day without imagining the likes of you cutting up my mom, sister, and me for transplant parts just because we were on welfare, thanks very much. You get upset when a remark seems to you to implicate your wife. So please understand that “at least ‘we’ don’t cut up your mom for her organs” does not strike me as acceptable commenter etiquette.

On his Facebook page, the conservative Christian blogger Matt Walsh transcribed the first three minutes of Donald Trump’s appearance in Dallas Monday night. Here it goes:

“Wow. Amazing. Amazing, thank you. So exciting. Do you notice what’s missing tonight? Teleprompters! [APPLAUSE] No teleprompters. We don’t want teleprompters. That would be so much easier: we read a speech for 45 minutes, everybody falls asleep listening to the same old stuff, the same old lies. So much easier. So, you know, I have a little debate coming up on Wednesday. [APPLAUSE] I hear my… let’s call them opponents. Can I call them opponents? We’re allowed to do that, right? You know, New York was very nice to you people last night, you know that, right? [LAUGHTER] Did they hand you that game? [APPLAUSE] They handed it! I said, I am going to have the friendliest audience — sit down — I am going to have the friendliest audience. So I wasn’t sure, was I happy or was I sad? But Jerry Jones is a great guy, and he deserves everything he gets, frankly. [APPLAUSE] And you know, another great guy is Mark Cuban. [APPLAUSE] And I think, you know, he’s been talking about maybe doing this himself. And I think he’d do a great job. We don’t have the exact same feelings about where we’re going, but that’s OK. But Mark was great. You know, he called me, like, literally a few days ago, and he said, “you know if you want to use the arena” — which by the way is a beautiful arena [APPLAUSE] this a great arena — and Dirk is a fantastic player [APPLAUSE] he’s just a wonderful player — and the Mavericks have been fantastic and it’s just a great team — but he said, “you know if you want to use the arena.” And I said, “Mark, when?” He said “how ’bout Monday night?” It’s like, that was like in four days. And you had a big holiday in between. And he said, “they really like you in Dallas, they really like you in Texas, maybe you can get a lot of people.” [APPLAUSE] Because we were coming here, and we thought maybe we’d get a thousand people, but we never get a thousand anymore, it’s always, like, the same thing. You know, we went to Alabama. We started off with a 500 person ballroom. And after about 2 minutes — look at all these guys — paparazzi, look at this [LAUGHTER] we’ve got everybody here. We started off, by the way, with a 500 person ballroom, and after about 2 minutes the hotel called up begging for mercy. “We can’t do it!” They were inundated, so we went to convention center, and that was 10,000 and that was wiped out in about an hour. So we went to a stadium, we had 31 thousand people, which is by far the largest, they say, like, ever, for an early primary, and that’s probably true.[APPLAUSE]”

Walsh adds:

Incoherent, rambling, pointless, self-aggrandizing, namedropping, utterly devoid of anything resembling a substantive thought. This is Donald Trump.

He might be the next president.

This is America.

Pray for our country tonight, everyone. Pray for our country.

Yeah, his speech in Mobile was the same kind of thing.

Look at the new ABCNews/Washington Post poll results. Story here, and graphic here. Among likely Republican voters, Trump is polling 33 percent, Ben Carson is at 20. More:

After Trump and Carson, there is a significant falloff in support for the other candidates. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who began the year as the nominal GOP front-runner, stands at 8 percent, his lowest ever in Post-ABC surveys of the 2016 field. Next, at 7 percent each, are Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. No one else registered above 5 percent.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie either tied or registered their lowest levels of support in Post-ABC polls of the 2016 race dating to the beginning of 2014.

Think of it: more than half of likely Republican presidential primary voters prefer two men who have never held political office in their lives to any of the veteran politicians. Senators, governors, or, in Jeb Bush’s case, a former governor — nothing. More:

The new poll found Trump to be the favorite of 33 percent of registered Republicans and ­Republican-leaning independents. That is a jump of nine percentage points since mid-July and a 29-point increase since late May, just before Trump announced his candidacy. He does well with most groups of GOP voters, but his strongest support comes from those who do not have a college degree and those with incomes below $50,000.

That, my dears, is what you call a populist. A billionaire populist.

Five months away from the New Hampshire primary, this is what the GOP field looks like. Fifteen thousand people showed up in Dallas to hear Trump speak. And all the other candidates (Ben Carson aside) couldn’t fill up the men’s rooms at the downtown arena.

We live in interesting times.

I have faith that Trump is going to melt down at some point. I’ve been telling myself that for a while, and it hasn’t happened yet, but I still believe it’s bound to. When that happens, though, how will Republicans find any enthusiasm for the crew they have left to choose from? Many political observers have said this is the best crop of Republican presidential hopefuls in many cycles, and I guess they’re right. But once the Donald has left the building, it’s still going to feel like Mom took all the Oreo DoubleStufs away, and all you have left are stale Hydrox.

UPDATE: Brand new CBS/NYT poll out this morning has Carson in a statistical tie with Trump. Not one of the other GOP candidates is remotely close to either man. This is remarkable, the deep rejection of the Republican establishment by their own voters. Can’t say it makes me unhappy, but who saw that coming this cycle?

This delights me too. From the WSJ:

Wall Street is growing increasingly terrified that Donald Trump — once viewed as an amusing summertime distraction — could actually win the Republican nomination for president.

The real estate billionaire, who took another populist shot on Sunday by ripping into lavish executive pay, continues to rise in the polls. Would-be Wall Street saviors like Jeb Bush are languishing in single digits. The belief that Trump’s candidacy would quickly fade is now evaporating in a wave of fear.

“I held four lunches for investors in August and at the first one everyone assumed Trump would implode,” said Byron Wien, vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Partners and a senior figure on Wall Street. “By the fourth one everyone was taking him very seriously. He taps into frustrations that are very real and he is a master manipulator of the media.”

The CEO of one large Wall Street firm, who declined to be identified by name criticizing the GOP front-runner, said the assumption in the financial industry remains that something will eventually knock Trump off and send voters toward a more establishment candidate. But that assumption is no longer held with strong conviction. And a dozen Wall Street executives interviewed for this article could not say what might dent Trump’s appeal or when it might happen.

More here. It delights me not because I support Trump — I emphatically do not — but because the Masters of the Universe ought to be made to worry. I believe, and I hope, that Trump will eventually flame out, but before he does, he will probably have pulled the GOP presidential field in a populist direction on Wall Street.

Good on Bernie Sanders for going to speak at Liberty University, and good on Liberty for inviting him. Here are excerpts from his speech. He started with this:

I believe in a woman’s rights….

And the right of a woman to control her own body.

I believe gay rights and gay marriage.

Those are my views, and it is no secret. But I came here today, because I believe from the bottom of my heart that it is vitally important for those of us who hold different views to be able to engage in a civil discourse.

Too often in our country — and I think both sides bear responsibility for us — there is too much shouting at each other. There is too much making fun of each other.

Boom, put it right out there. No veiling the obvious. He went on to say that even though he disagrees with conservative Christians on same-sex marriage and abortion, he respects that Liberty University is a place that takes morality and moral responsibility seriously. He said that there ought to be issues of common ground that secular leftists like him and conservative Christians like them could work together on. Here’s the heart of Bernie’s speech:

In the United States of America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant. We live, and I hope all of you know this, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world.

But most Americans don’t know that. Because almost all of that wealth and income is going to the top 1 percent.

You know, that is the truth. We are living in a time — and I warn all of you if you would, put this in the context of the Bible, not me, in the context of the Bible — we are living in a time where a handful of people have wealth beyond comprehension. And I’m talking about tens of billions of dollars, enough to support their families for thousands of years. With huge yachts, and jet planes and tens of billions. More money than they would ever know what to do with.

But at that very same moment, there are millions of people in our country, let alone the rest of the world, who are struggling to feed their families. They are struggling to put a roof over their heads, and some of them are sleeping out on the streets. They are struggling to find money in order to go to a doctor when they are sick.

Now, when we talk about morality, and when we talk about justice, we have to, in my view, understand that there is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little.

There is no justice, and I want you to hear this clearly, when the top one-tenth of 1 percent — not 1 percent, the top one-tenth of 1 percent — today in America owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And in your hearts, you will have to determine the morality of that, and the justice of that.

In my view, there is no justice, when here, in Virginia and Vermont and all over this country, millions of people are working long hours for abysmally low wages of $7.25 an hour, of $8 an hour, of $9 an hour, working hard, but unable to bring in enough money to adequately feed their kids.

And yet, at that same time, 58 percent of all new income generated is going to the top 1 percent. You have got to think about the morality of that, the justice of that, and whether or not that is what we want to see in our country.

Read the whole thing. It’s solid stuff.

Where is the conservative Christian Bernie Sanders? A guy who stands up for the poor and the working class, but also for the unborn? I’d vote for that man — or woman — in a heartbeat. Pat Buchanan was in that ballpark a generation or so ago. More recently, I thought Mike Huckabee was going to be that guy, but then he turned himself into a Foxbot.