Month: November 2011

Stupid Parasites are eating your children’s brains

by digby

Teachers are so dumb and lazy they should be paying parents for the privilege of teaching American children:

Jason Richwine and Andrew Biggs, researchers at the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, two leading conservative think tanks, argue in a new report that the country’s 3.2 million teachers may be overpaid by over 50 percent or more, given their salary, benefits, job security, and intellectual ability.

This isn’t the first study to take on the politically sizzling issue of how much we pay the molders of our nation’s young. And shockingly, the results fall pretty cleanly along ideological lines.

According to Census data, Richwine and Biggs admit that teachers do look underpaid; they receive a 20 percent lower salary than private-sector workers with the same level of education, and have benefits approximately the same.

These numbers are flawed, however, according to Richwine and Biggs. They show that the typical worker who moves from the private sector into teaching receives a salary increase of 8.8 percent, and the typical teacher who enters the private sector receives a pay cut of 3.1 percent. If teachers were underpaid, they write, “this is the opposite of what one would expect.”

Whoa. I think we’re dealing with some very complicated analysis here.

They also admit, however, that given the small sample size of workers who switch between teaching and non-teaching, “these data should not be considered precise.” It is also probable that a private sector worker who would receive a significant pay cut from becoming a teacher is less likely to fulfill that mid-career calling.

Oh heck.

But let’s not forget the laziness factor:

The report further claims that the truncated work year of the average teacher skews the numbers. Teachers receive their salary for an average of nine months of work, which means their average workweek salary is higher than that of private employees, whose salary is for a full-year of labor.

This argument rehashes a 2007 report by The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, another conservative think tank. That research looked at hourly wages. In weeks teachers worked, they labored apparently for 36.5 hours, and took home $34.06 for each of those hours, more than architects, psychologists, chemists, mechanical engineers, economists, and reporters. There’s just one minor hole in this analysis: Teachers work 36.5 hours a week?

Teachers alleged higher salaries are cushioned by higher job security. The average unemployment rate for public school teachers between 2005 and 2010 was 2.1 percent, the report states, compared to an average of 3.8 percent for workers in similarly skilled occupations. That means less time, on average, job hunting without pay.

How come all the teachers I know are always grading papers and doing art projects and running after school programs on their own time? Just dumb, I guess, with a bunch of really dumb degrees:

The level of education measure obscures some important facts, according to Richwine and Biggs. While a large proportion of teachers have bachelor’s or master’s degrees, over two thirds have their highest degree in education, which they claim is not a particularly rigorous path of study. You don’t have to work as hard and it’s easier to score an A in education, supposedly, than in the sciences, social sciences or humanities.

While teachers score above average on national intelligence tests, they allegedly fare worse than other college graduates. Richwine and Biggs therefore conclude that teachers are overpaid, given their average raw intelligence. They get more bucks per IQ point (with IQ determined by the perhaps dubious measure of standardized tests).
But this also suggests that the teaching profession fails to attract and retain the highest skilled college students. So examined through a reverse lens, this could be an argument for even higher salaries.

(Should salaries be determined by IQ score? Probably not a very good idea. I’m not sure it would help the right wing ball team.)

All in all, I just have to be very, very glad that so many right wing fundamentalists are homeschooling their kids and keeping them away from these lazy, stupid parasites who call themselves “teachers.” I don’t know how I got out alive, honestly.

Update: Also too, they’re greedy:

The report also argues that teachers’ benefits are more generous than private employees’. On the surface, both teachers and private sector workers receive benefits at about 41 percent of their salaries.

Pensions, however, are financed differently in the public and private sector. The public sector, the researchers claim, invests in risky assets with an approximately 8 percent rate of return. If the investments fall in value, the “public employers — meaning, ultimately, taxpayers — must increase their contributions to the pension funds.”

If teachers and private employees contribute the same percent of their salaries to their pension funds, teachers will receive retirement benefits 4.5 times higher, according the report, because teachers have a guaranteed higher rate of return.

The bastards. They actually believe that getting a college degree and teaching children is something that should allow a middle class life and decent retirement in the wealthiest nation on earth. Talk about dumb. Only jaaahb creators have any value in our society. I thought everybody knew that.

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Swiftboats are a comin’

by digby

Looks like somebody’s getting into the swiftboat business:

In the official photograph, he looked every inch the commander in chief.
Strain etched on his face, Barack Obama watched as the raid to kill Osama bin Laden played out on a television in front of him.

According to a new book, however, the President was not nearly that engaged – and was actually playing golf until 20 minutes before the operation began in earnest. Only then did he down his clubs and return to the White House to watch what he later trumpeted as a great success of his presidency…

Mr Pfarrer says the President’s role was largely inflated and suggests he stayed out on the golf course for so long so he could distance himself in case it went wrong. Mr Pfarrer writes: ‘If this had completely gone south, he was in a position to disavow.’
[…]
The SEALS have decided to speak out after being enraged by the image that was being painted of them as cold-blooded murderers on a ‘kill mission’.

Pfarrer said: ‘I’ve been a SEAL for 30 years and I never heard the words ”kill mission”.

The soldiers were also said to be disappointed that Obama announced Bin Laden’s death on TV a few hours later, making their intelligence-gathering futile.

Mr Pfarrer also said the President’s announcement of the ‘intentional’ killing was understandable but nonetheless disappointing.

Mr Pfarrer told the Sunday Times: ‘There isn’t a politician in the world who could resist trying to take credit for getting Bin Laden but it devalued the ”intel” and gave time for every other Al-Qaeda leader to scurry to another bolthole.

‘The men who did this and their valorous act deserve better. It’s a pretty shabby way to treat these guys.’

I recall hearing throughout my childhood in wingnutville that Jack Kennedy should have actually been court martialed for his heroic PT-109 actions. This is how they roll. Who knows if this particular charge will have any legs, but you can be sure that the right wing is not going to allow Barack Obama to enjoy his status as brave and tough Commander in Chief uncontested. It would destroy the very firmament of their belief system.

(Disclaimer: I happen to think the whole super-CIC thing’s a crock too, although not for the same reasons. I have every reason to believe that the President is a very diligent and engaged Commander in Chief, preferring that work to any other aspect of his job. But ordering the killing of terrorists, alleged and proven, doesn’t strike me as being indicative of any unusual courage. In fact, in our system it would be courageous not to.)

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Culture war battle lines

by digby

It doesn’t get any starker than this:

It looks like the race to watch in Mississippi on Tuesday night will be the state’s proposed ‘Personhood Amendment,’ which would make the state’s laws regarding abortion and birth control the strictest of any state in the country. Right now it looks like it could go either way, with 45% of voters supporting the amendment and 44% opposed.

Men (48-42), whites (54-37), and Republicans (65-28) support the proposal. But women (42-46), African Americans (26-59), Democrats (23-61), and independents (35-51) oppose it. The good news for those opposed to the amendment is that 11% of voters are undecided and their demographics are 58% women, 54% Democratic, and 42% black- those still on the fence disproportionately belong to voter groups that oppose the amendment. That suggests when those folks make up their minds the proposal could be narrowly defeated.

Let’s hope so.

That breakdown is a pretty clear illustration of who the friends of women really are, isn’t it?

I’ve been hearing quite a bit of liberal chatter lately in which these issues are characterized as a cheap partisan trick that only serve the oligarchy. (I think the idea is that if we could just stop talking about these culture war issues we could all join hands and get down to fighting the class war properly.) But this really is a big deal that goes to the very heart and soul of our social and economic compact.

My friend Debcoop said it best in this email response to that argument:

NO NO NO

For women ALL Roads to freedom and equality – economic equality and most particularly the ability to avoid poverty START with control of their bodies. If they can’t control how they get pregnant and when they will have a child then poverty is the result.

There is theory about something called the Prime Mover – the first action or the first cause. Well for women it IS reproductive rights. It precedes everything. It really is simple. Without the abilty to control your own body then you are a slave to everything else.

Frankly sexism, the need to control women’s lives by controlling their bodies and the things that arise from it, are endemic to any social structure. It is ever enduring and even when it seems to be quashed it returns in another form. That is the story in the modern era of women’s rights. One step forward after a long struggle – suffrage and then a step back. (And no way do I say that women are not complicit in their own subjugation. We are.)

I am reading The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin. In the epilogue he makes a point of saying that the loss of power and control is what the elite and the reactionary fear the most. More than a specific loss itself the fear the rising volcano of submerged anger and power. And for them it is most acutely felt compulsion for control in the “intimate” arena. That is the most vexing and disturbing of all.

It is why they want to control women. And controlling their reproductive lives is the surefire way to control them.

It is why abortion rights are absolutely central to every other kind of freedom.

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A message for Mississippi voters
by David Atkins

Though it shouldn’t require saying, here’s a brief message for Mississippi voters:

is not

just as

is not

That is all. Bless your hearts, and y’all have a nice day now.

(creative commons photos courtesy joshme17, munstisue, wellcomeimages, and soupboy)

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Compass point

by digby

I don’t know how many of you have ever taken this little online test called the Political Compass. I took it back in 2004 or something and found that I was close to the lower left quadrant. I took it again just now and many of the questions have changed and I ended up in the same place. Huzzah for consistency if nothing else.

The reason I bring this up is because a readers sent me this page from the 2008 election, which I hadn’t seen before.

When examining the chart it’s important to note that although most of the candidates seem quite different, in substance they occupy a relatively restricted area within the universal political spectrum. Democracies with a system of proportional representation give expression to a wider range of political views. While Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader are depicted on the extreme left in an American context, they would simply be mainstream social democrats within the wider political landscape of Europe. Similarly, Obama is popularly perceived as a leftist in the United States while elsewhere in the west his record is that of a moderate conservative. For example, in the case of the death penalty he is not an uncompromising abolitionist, while mainstream conservatives in all other western democracies are deeply opposed to capital punishment. The Democratic party’s presidential candidate also reneged on his commitment to oppose the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He sided with the ultra conservative bloc in the Supreme Court against the Washington DC handgun ban and for capital punishment in child rape cases. He supports President Bush’s faith-based initiatives and is reported in Fortune to have said that NAFTA isn’t so bad. Despite all this, some angry emailers tell us that Obama is a dangerous socialist who belongs on the extreme left of our chart.

Interesting, no?

This little test is basically a parlor game, so it’s a mistake to treat it as more than that. But still, it’s an interesting blast to the past which shows that nobody should have been surprised at the allegedly liberal constitutional scholar turning out to be pretty authoritarian. Of course, they pretty much all were. Which says it all.

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In a nutshell

by digby

Reader Gerald with a history lesson:

From FDR to Reagan–We hire you, you work hard, we prosper, you prosper.

From Reagan to present–we hire you, you work hard, we prosper.

That’s about it.

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Washington Post Actually Worth Reading Today
by David Atkins

I normally cringe when I make my way to the Washington Post website. Of the major papers, the Post is usually the worst offender for faux objectivity, pandering to Beltway conventional wisdom, and “he said-she said” stenography disguised as journalism.

But there are a couple of excellent pieces at WaPo yesterday and today well worth reading. The first is a superb op-ed by Barry Ritholz:

I have a fairly simple approach to investing: Start with data and objective evidence to determine the dominant elements driving the market action right now. Figure out what objective reality is beneath all of the noise. Use that information to try to make intelligent investing decisions.

But then, I’m an investor focused on preserving capital and managing risk. I’m not out to win the next election or drive the debate. For those who are, facts and data matter much less than a narrative that supports their interests.
One group has been especially vocal about shaping a new narrative of the credit crisis and economic collapse: those whose bad judgment and failed philosophy helped cause the crisis.

Rather than admit the error of their ways — Repent! — these people are engaged in an active campaign to rewrite history. They are not, of course, exonerated in doing so. And beyond that, they damage the process of repairing what was broken. They muddy the waters when it comes to holding guilty parties responsible. They prevent measures from being put into place to prevent another crisis.

Here is the surprising takeaway: They are winning. Thanks to the endless repetition of the Big Lie.

A Big Lie is so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. There are many examples: Claims that Earth is not warming, or that evolution is not the best thesis we have for how humans developed. Those opposed to stimulus spending have gone so far as to claim that the infrastructure of the United States is just fine, Grade A (not D, as the we discussed last month), and needs little repair.

Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault.

Indeed, the arguments these folks make fail to withstand even casual scrutiny. But that has not stopped people who should know better from repeating them.

The Big Lie made a surprise appearance Tuesday when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, responding to a question about Occupy Wall Street, stunned observers by exonerating Wall Street: “It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.”

As much traction as the 99% have gained in focusing the bright light of scrutiny on Wall Street, there are a huge number of people in this country who believe this zombie lie. They believe that government forced big banks to lend to poor minorities as a welfare program, and that the big banks would have lent responsibly but for Big Government’s interference. No matter how many times Krugman, Taibbi, Michael Lewis, Ritholz and others disprove the lie, it never dies. In fact, it keeps growing stronger.

It does so because facts don’t matter to conservatives. Emotional “truths” that they can feel in their gut do. Conservatives just “know” that the free market “works,” and that left to their own devices without interference, the great institutions of capitalism would never make gigantic reckless bets that crash the entire system in the pursuit of greed. They also “know” that everything wrong with America is attributable to do-gooder bleeding heart liberals taking (white) producers’ hard-earned tax money and giving it (brown) lazy people without the smarts or work ethic to have earned it. Therefore, if the financial system crashed, it must have been due to government forcing the great John Galts of finance to lend to the parasites, rather than due to an over-financialized system run by greedheads in pursuit of an American Versailles.

And no matter what, no bank bailouts would have been necessary because “free markets” don’t fail; they can only be failed. Mass bank failures would simply be creative destruction, rather than catastrophic, Great Depression inducing events.

For about 30-35% of the American electorate defined as the conservative base, facts are irrelevant. Emotional truths rule. The Big Lie is easy to tell, because it’s easy to swallow. These people aren’t about to join the 99% protesting Wall Street, because they see Wall Street as the victim of Barack Obama’s Socialist Commie Nazi policies.

Which, of course, is really ironic considering the second article worth a read in today’s Post:

President Obama calls people who work on Wall Street “fat cat bankers” and his reelection campaign will try to harness public frustration with Wall Street. Financial executives, for their part, say the president’s pursuit of new financial regulations are punitive and “holding us back.”

But both sides face an inconvenient fact. During Obama’s tenure, Wall Street has roared back even as the larger economy has struggled.

The largest banks are larger today than when Obama took office and are returning to the level of profits they were making before the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, according to government data.

Wall Street firms — either independent companies or the high-flying trading arms of banks — are doing even better. They’ve made more profit in the first 21 / 2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the entire Bush administration, industry data show.

Behind this turnaround are government policies that saved the financial sector from collapse and then gave banks and other financial firms huge advantages on the path to recovery. For example, the federal government invested hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in banks, money that the firms used for risky investments on which they made huge profits.

Reviving the financial system was necessary for preventing an even deeper economic recession. But the Bush administration, which first moved to bail out Wall Street, and the Obama administration, which ultimately stabilized it, took a far more tepid approach to helping ordinary Americans, critics say.

“There’s a very popular conception out there that the bailout was done with a tremendous amount of firepower and focus on saving the largest Wall Street institutions but with very little regard for Main Street,” said Neil Barofsky, the former federal watchdog for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the $700 billion fund used to bail out banks. “That’s actually a very accurate description of what happened.”

This is ultimately American politics in a nutshell. Republicans do Wall Street’s bidding, telling lies about the entire economic system and blaming the unfortunate and the middle-class alike for their troubles. Democrats do slightly less of what Wall Street wants while using the occasional populist rhetoric, but Wall Street still gets most of what it wants. For their trouble, Democrats get portrayed as Communists. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the country fights endless culture wars–wars with consequences, mind, but wars that don’t impact the precious, precious market indices.

About 25% of the country thinks that Dems are right, or that Dems are too conservative and beholden to Wall Street. About 35% of the country “knows” in their gut that conservative “truths” are right, no mater how much actual evidence runs to the contrary. Evidence doesn’t matter to them. A bunch of people with mixed views in the “middle” vote social issues and / or their frustrations, and / or whichever person they’d rather have a beer with. And the rest vote the way their nice neighbor or pastor told them to.

And yet, for all its flaws, this is still the only system we have that allows us to create change. That may be the scariest reality of all.

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Regardless of how you might feel about Bill Maher, what he says here is absolutely correct:

This is Bill Maher, on “Why Alan Grayson Should Be in Congress.”

Because we lost him once, and we can’t afford to lose him again.

We lost Anthony Weiner — but not for the same reason. I’d like to make that point again.

But Weiner was the only other Democrat who really said those kinds of things that make us liberals stand up and cheer.

And Grayson’s got BIG ONES, which is what we need.

We need someone to yank the debate back to what the center should be.

And that is Mr. Alan Grayson.

So please, Mr. Alan Grayson, run for Congress.

Run for the House.

Run for the Senate.

Someday, run for the White House. In my fantasies.

Sincerely,

Bill Maher

Here’s what he’s talking about:

Who pays for austerity?

by digby

This analyses of our current economic battle by Thomas Edsall gets to the heart of the issue:

The economic collapse of 2008 transformed American politics. In place of shared abundance, battles at every level of government now focus on picking the losers who will bear the costs of deficit reduction and austerity.

Fights in Washington are over inflicting pain on antagonists either through spending cuts or tax increases, a struggle over who will get a smaller piece of a shrinking pie. This hostile climate stands in sharp contrast to the post-World-War II history of economic growth. Worse, current income and employment trends suggest that this is not a temporary shift.

[…]

The new embattled partisan environment allows conservatives to pit taxpayers against tax consumers, those dependent on safety-net programs against those who see such programs as eating away at their personal income and assets.

In a nuanced study, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” the sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol and her colleagues at Harvard found that opposition to government spending was concentrated on resentment of federal government “handouts.” Tea Party activists, they wrote, “define themselves as workers, in opposition to categories of nonworkers they perceive as undeserving of government assistance.”

In a March 15 declaration calling for defunding of most social programs, the New Boston Tea Party was blunt: “The locusts are eating, or should we say devouring, the productive output of the hard working taxpayer.”

The conservative agenda, in a climate of scarcity, racializes policy making, calling for deep cuts in programs for the poor. The beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately black and Hispanic. In 2009, according to census data, 50.9 percent of black households, 53.3 percent of Hispanic households and 20.5 percent of white households received some form of means-tested government assistance, including food stamps, Medicaid and public housing.

Less obviously, but just as racially charged, is the assault on public employees. “We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” declared Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin.

For black Americans, government employment is a crucial means of upward mobility. The federal work force is 18.6 percent African-American, compared with 10.9 percent in the private sector. The percentages of African-Americans are highest in just those agencies that are most actively targeted for cuts by Republicans: the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 38.3 percent; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 42.4 percent; and the Education Department, 36.6 percent.

The politics of austerity are inherently favorable to conservatives and inhospitable to liberals. Congressional trench warfare rewards those most willing to risk all. Republicans demonstrated this in last summer’s debt ceiling fight, deploying the threat of a default on Treasury obligations to force spending cuts.

Conservatives are more willing to inflict harm on adversaries and more readily see conflicts in zero-sum terms — the basic framework of the contemporary debate. Once austerity dominates the agenda, the only question is where the ax falls.

From Greg Sargent, Exhibit A:

In a recent interview, a top Ohio Republican defended this in a curiously belligerent way, one that may reverberate in the race’s final days: He claimed lawmakers don’t need to take a pay cut in the spirit of shared sacrifice, because “I earn my pay,” adding: “Republicans earn their money.”

GOP state Rep. Lou Blessing — a prominent Republican voice in this fight, as the Speaker Pro Tempore of the Ohio House of Representatives — made the claim during an interview with Ohio public radio, audio of which is right here. Pressed on why he and some other GOPers wouldn’t agree to labor’s insistence that legislators also accept a pay cut, he said:

“Because it’s not merited. I earn my pay. I think that was just political baloney. So they can say in an ad, `Gee , you know, they didn’t support a pay cut.’ Well, no, I don’t support a pay cut. Republicans earn their money. Apparently Democrats don’t. They feel they should be paid less. That may be true. Maybe we’ll just cut the Democrats’ pay.”

Hmmm. What’s he going on about?

Here’s an excerpt from one of my stale old posts of yesteryear which has new relevance today:

In this paper Sociologist Nathan Glazer of Harvard answers a related question — “Why Americans don’t care about income inequality” which may give us some clues. Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, “Why Doesn’t the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?” (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001) he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy goes back to the beginning of the republic. But what is interesting is that both he and the economists offer some pretty conclusive evidence that the main reason for American “exceptionalism” in this case is, quite simply, racism.

The AGS [Alesina, Glazear and Sacerdote] report, using the World Values Survey, that “opinions and beliefs about the poor differ sharply between the United States and Europe. In Europe the poor are generally thought to be unfortunate, but not personally responsible for their own condition. For example, according to the World Values Survey, whereas 70 % of West Germans express the belief that people are poor because of imperfections in society, not their own laziness, 70 % of Americans hold the opposite view…. 71 % of Americans but only 40% of Europeans said …poor people could work their way out of poverty.”

[…]

“Racial fragmentation and the disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities among the poor played a major role in limiting redistribution…. Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution. In fact the political system is likely to be endogenous to these basic American beliefs.”(p. 61)

“Endogenous” is economics-ese for saying we have the political system we do because we prefer the results it gives, such as limiting redistribution to the blacks. Thus the racial factor as well as a wider net of social beliefs play a key role in why Americans don’t care about income inequality, and why, not caring, they have no great interest in expanding the welfare state.

Glazer goes on to point out how these attitudes may have come to pass historically by discussing the roles that the various immigrant support systems and the variety of religious institutions provided for the poor:

But initial uniformities were succeeded by a diversity which overwhelmed and replaced state functions by nonstate organizations, and it was within these that many of the services that are the mark of a fully developed welfare state were provided. Where do the blacks fit in? The situation of the blacks was indeed different. No religious or ethnic group had to face anything like the conditions of slavery or the fierce subsequent prejudice and segregation to which they were subjected. But the pre-existing conditions of fractionated social services affected them too. Like other groups, they established their own churches, which provided within the limits set by the prevailing poverty and absence of resources some services. Like other groups, too, they were dependant on pre-existing systems of social service that had been set up by religious and ethnic groups, primarily to serve their own, some of which reached out to serve blacks, as is the case with the religiously based (and now publicly funded) social service agencies of New York City. They were much more dependant, owing to their economic condition, on the poorly developed primitive public services, and they became in time the special ward of the expanded American welfare state’s social services. Having become, to a greater extent than other groups, the clients of public services, they also affected, owing to the prevailing racism, the public image of these services.

Glazer notes that there are other factors involved in our attitudes about inequality having to do with our British heritage, religious backround etc, that also play into our attitudes. But, he and the three economists have put their finger on the problem Democrats have with white Southern voters who “vote against their economic self-interest,” and may just explain why populism is so often coupled with nativism and racism — perhaps it’s always been impossible to make a populist pitch that includes blacks or immigrants without alienating whites.

I think the most important insight Edsall has in the first piece excerpted above is that a whole lot of public employees have been racial minorities (because private firms simply didn’t make the effort the government did to seek them out.) This led, of course, to a huge and impressive leap into the middle class for many African Americans and lately, Hispanics. And that, again, is the essence of the problem.

Sure, it’s more complicated than that and the whole issue has morphed into an ideological set point fairly divorced from any direct relationship to racism or xenophobia. But if people want to know how America developed the fault lines that are always playing themselves out in one way or another, this is fundamental to understanding it.

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