Friday, July 26, 2013

Scott Lemieux on Posners New Republic article:

The eminent legal scholar and federal judge Richard Posner has a self-described "revisionist" piece on litigation and same-sex marriage in The New Republic. Since it is partly a review of Michael Klarman's From the Closet to the Altar, much of what I have to say about Posner's piece is contained in my review of the Klarman book, and I won't repeat all of those arguments in the same detail here. But Posner's piece is instructive because it embodies some fallacious assumptions about institutional change in American politics that cause many scholars to misundertand the role litigation can play in social reform.

What's most telling in Posner's review for me is this:

The books are scholarly and well written, but deficient in payoff. They are basically just narratives of the history of homosexual marriage in the United States.

I don't think this is right. The argument in Klarman's book is subtle—in part because he started off, like Posner, believing in the conventional backlash thesis, but unlike Posner rejected it because the evidence stopped supporting it—but it's there. Ultimately, Klarman argues that litigation played an important role in advancing same-sex marriage rights, and finds that the evidence does not support the most common reasons cited for not using it. Posner, conversely, still explicitly relies on Gerald Rosenberg's landmark The Hollow Hope, and his argument has many of the same strengths and weaknesses. I'm not sure if Posner has read the second edition of The Hollow Hope, but he seems to endorse Rosenberg's application of his basic argument to same-sex marriage. Which is rather problematic given that Rosenberg's argument that using litigation to advance same-sex marriage was foolish and counterproductive has been disproven about as thoroughly as such a counterfactual can be.

Essentially, Posner's strategy is to use a now-banal (not really "revisionist") causal argument to obscure the more interesting questions about legal reform and LBGT rights. Posner—and Rosenberg—are 100 percent right that the courts generally cannot independently produce social reform. Judicial decisions are almost certainly not why same-sex marriage has become more popular, and a wave judicial decisions protecting same-sex marriage rights would have been inconceivable without the successes of the gay and lesbian rights movememnt. And in the context of civil rights, this insight (which was very controversial within the civil rights movement in the 60s—Thurgood Marhsall thought direct action was essentially a waste of time) retains considerable power. Because intergrating schools requires the ongoing collaboration of a large number of state and local officials, judicial decrees mean almost nothing without substantial support from other political actors, which is why there was virtually no desegregation outside of the border states before the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Brown v. Board mattered, but only indirectly, by setting in motion the chain of events that would increase support for federal protection of civil rights.

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Same-sex marriage, though (like abortion) is different; it doesn't require the same level of collaboration and is an area where the courts have much greater capacity. Which brings us to the more interesting question—not whether the courts, entirely by themselves without any additional public or political support, can create social change, but whether within a context of increasing public support litigation can provide rights that would otherwise not have been recognized. Posner makes no serious attempt to engage with this question. Here's the core of his argument about why litigation has had only a trivial effect:

If one turns from narrative to statistics, the significance of judicial decisions (and for that matter backlash) to homosexual marriage, seemingly slight, recedes further. The earliest public-opinion polling on attitudes toward homosexual marriage was in 1988. In that year roughly 11 percent of Americans favored allowing such marriage and 68 percent opposed it. (All these percentages are approximate, because no two public-opinion polls agree exactly.) Presumably the 11 percent included most homosexuals. Nobody knows the exact percentage of homosexuals in the American population, but the current estimate is that it is between 3 and 4 percent. Assuming that most of them support homosexual marriage, in 1988 fewer than 8 percent of heterosexuals thought that homosexual marriage should be authorized. By 1996 the figure had risen to 24 percent (I am subtracting 3 percent from the poll), with 68 percent opposed (so the percentage with no opinion was also dropping). By 2003, the year of Lawrence, the figures were 28 and 65 percent. The approval rate continued to rise, and by May of this year, the month before the Supreme Court’s two homosexual-marriage decisions, about 50 percent of poll respondents approved of homosexual marriage and slightly more than 40 percent disapproved. The increase in approval in the decade since Lawrence has been astonishing. And the approval rate is likely to continue rising, because it is already 67 percent for persons under 30, dropping to 38 percent for persons 65 and older. The difference is almost certainly generational, as there is no reason to think that aging affects one’s thinking about homosexuality.

While he doesn't emphasize the point, Posner does at least concede that the core of the countermobilization argument made by Rosenberg and others—that judicial victories are likely to be counterproductive because they create a backlash that undermines public support—has been quite conclusively been proven wrong. The fact that most major victories for gay and lesbian rights have been accomplished through the courts has not stopped the support for gay and lesbian rights from continuing to increase.

But by focusing solely on public opinion, Posner sidesteps the crucial "compared to what?" question. Posner seems to be making the erroneous assumption that changes in public opinion are inevitably manifested in public policy. But of course American political institutions aren't "majoritarian" in either theory or practice, and the Madisonian institutional structures common to the federal government and every state with the half-exception of Nebraska guarantee a powerful status quo bias. Increasing public support for LBGT rights made judicial decisions more likely, but it is simply wrong to assume that absent judicial action legislatures would have granted the same rights, and it is certain that they would not have done so on the same time frame. It's not a coincidence that most advancements for same-sex marriage rights have been judicial, not legislative. (In the next paragraph, Posner blandly notes the states that have "authorized" same-sex marriage without detailing which institution was responsible for these authorizations in most states, which would fatally wound his own argument.) Windsor is an additional case in point—DOMA no longer has very deep political support and nobody seems to be claiming that Windsor created any appreciable backlash, but nonetheless DOMA would not have been repealed while the contemporary Republican party controls any federal veto point. Since this is likely to be the case for at least several more election cycles, this isn't a trivial distinction. Even the enormously unpopular ban on gays and lesbians in the military was barely repealed a lame duck Congress that with large Democratic majorities in both houses that are rare in the current political context.

Posner's key mistake is to assume that gays and lesbians are merely seeking public acceptance. But while public acceptance may be necessary for the advancement of fundamental rights it's not sufficient; gays and lesbians actually also want their legal rights protected. Litigation may not have much to do with the former but it has been very important to the latter.
How Gay Marriage Became Legitimate
A revisionist history of a social revolution
BY RICHARD A. POSNER
Read Later
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In 1991 the political scientist Gerald Rosenberg published a book called The Hollow Hope in which he argued that the Supreme Court, and courts more generally, have much less influence on policy than is generally believed. Even such notable decisions as Brown v. Board of Education, which forbade racial segregation of public schools, had little effect, he argued, in integrating public schools in the states that had segregated their public schools for many years—little effect in part because of the backlash that the decision engendered in the South. The argument struck many readers as myopic. Even though Rosenberg was correct that the South resisted public-school integration successfully for many years after Brown, the decision stimulated the civil-rights movement that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and in other notable civil-rights measures that have contributed to the decline of bigotry, not only racial, in the United States.

Now two books on homosexual marriage, one by a law professor who is also a historian, Michael Klarman, and the other by a political scientist, Jason Pierceson, analyze the applicability of Rosenberg’s skepticism about courts as agents of social change to homosexual marriage. Pierceson believes that the courts have played an important positive role in the growing acceptance of such marriage. Klarman thinks that they have played a positive role on balance, but a modest one; he emphasizes the backlash that litigation over homosexual rights has produced. Pierceson recognizes that it has produced such a backlash, but he thinks that it has produced less than Klarman believes.


These books are timely, published as they were on the eve of the Supreme Court’s two recent decisions involving homosexual marriage. One decision, Windsor v. United States, invalidated the provision of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) that denied federal marital benefits to homosexual couples even if their marriage was valid under applicable state law. The other decision, Hollingsworth v. Perry, invalidated (though on technical procedural grounds) a referendum in California rejecting a law passed by the California legislature authorizing homosexual marriage; the effect of the Court’s decision was thus to reinstate the law.

The books are scholarly and well written, but deficient in payoff. They are basically just narratives of the history of homosexual marriage in the United States. They are competent narratives, but all that they are able to establish is that some judicial decisions regarding homosexual rights may have contributed to the growth in public approval of homosexual marriage, while others may have retarded that growth by creating a backlash, and some may have had both effects. Historical causality is often difficult, even impossible, to establish. Klarman and Pierceson should not be criticized for their inability to establish the causal effect of judicial decisions on homosexual marriage. But their books would be more interesting if they acknowledged this inability and tried to explain it. My own view is that what can be said about the causal role of the courts in this area is no better than guesswork, can be stated briefly, and would be unlikely to be amplified constructively by book-length treatment.

In the 1950s, when I was growing up, homosexuality was anathematized, including by most people who were otherwise quite liberal. Homosexuals had, as homosexuals, no rights; they were deemed sexual perverts; homosexual sex was illegal (though rarely prosecuted); homosexuals were formally banned from the armed forces and many other types of government work (though again enforcement was sporadic); and there were no laws prohibiting employment discrimination against homosexuals. Since homosexuality is much more concealable than race, homosexuals did not experience the same economic and educational discrimination, and public humiliations, that blacks experienced. But to avoid discrimination and ostracism, they had to conceal their identities and so were reluctant to participate openly in homosexual relationships or to reveal their homosexuality to the heterosexuals with whom they associated. Most of them stayed “in the closet.” Homosexual marriage was out of the question, even though interracial marriage was legal in most states. But not in all: Southern and border states continued to forbid such marriage without generating significant opposition elsewhere.

THE “STONEWALL RIOTS” OF 1969, WHICH KICKED OFF THE MOVEMENT FOR HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS, OWED NOTHING TO THE COURTS.
By today’s standards, certainly, but even by the standards of the next decade, the 1950s were a prudish period. Divorce and premarital sex were widely reprobated, female virginity was prized, movies were censored, pornography was illegal. But then came the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The causality is uncertain, but it must have had something to do with improvements in contraception and with growing prosperity, which tends to create a demand for greater freedom, including freedom from religion, family authority, and convention.

Decisions by the Supreme Court in the 1960s establishing a constitutional right to use contraceptives both in and outside marriage, and in 1973, which established the abortion right recognized in Roe v. Wade, played a part in the sexual revolution, but probably a small one. The “Stonewall Riots” of 1969, which kicked off the movement for homosexual rights, owed nothing to the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, invalidating laws against racial intermarriage, could have been, but was not, thought to have implications for homosexual rights. But the wide acceptance of sex outside marriage, and of oral and anal sex marital or otherwise, contributed to a growing acceptance of homosexual sex, which was traditionally non-marital as well as non-vaginal. With the decline of prudery, sexual practices formerly deemed “deviant” created less revulsion in the straight population. Developments in society and culture mattered a great deal more than developments in jurisprudence.

Most important was the gay-rights movement itself, which with growing success encouraged homosexuals to acknowledge their homosexuality publicly. It would never have occurred to me as a college student in the 1950s that I had ever met a homosexual (though I later realized that some of the students I had known, and one of my favorite professors, were homosexual); I did not fear or hate them, but I thought of them as alien beings. As they started to “come out” and were seen to be little different from heterosexuals other than in sexual preference (one might have begun to say about them what people used to say about Jews: they are just like everybody else, only more so), heterosexuals became more accepting of them. That in turn encouraged still more homosexuals to come out. A cycle of growing acceptance was created.


It became increasingly apparent, moreover, that homosexual preference is innate—a biological rather than a social phenomenon. (Homosexuality used to be thought the “selfish choice,” because it promised promiscuity with no risk of pregnancy.) Efforts by psychologists to “cure” it have been flops despite the disadvantages even in a tolerant society of being homosexual. Most parents of heterosexual children now realize that they don’t have to fear that their children will be recruited into homosexuality if homosexuals are allowed in public, as it were, rather than remaining closeted. Moreover, the homosexual population is small and is generally law-abiding and productively employed; and having a below-normal fertility rate, it does not impose the same costs on the education and welfare systems as the heterosexual population does. For all these reasons, it is hard to make a case for discriminating against them, apart from a religious case based largely on Roman Catholic doctrine (invoked in Justice Alito’s dissent in Windsor, quoting the official Roman Catholic line on homosexual marriage from the recent book What Is Marriage?, co-authored by Robert P. George), which is part of the larger mystery of why sex has come to play such a large role in some monotheistic faiths.

Litigation had little or nothing to do with the movement for homosexual rights until 2003, when Lawrence v. Texas overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, which had been decided in 1986, and invalidated laws criminalizing homosexual sex among consenting adults. Although the declaration of a constitutional right to engage in an activity should not be treated as a Good Housekeeping seal of approval of the activity, many people do treat it that way. Lawrence had potential significance for homosexual marriage, as was recognized by Justice Scalia in an angry dissent, though when it was decided, no state had yet legalized such marriage.

It was not that Lawrence intimated a constitutional right to homosexual marriage. Government can express its disapproval of what it regards as an immoral activity by withholding a subsidy (the material and psychological advantages of marriage over co-habitation can be viewed in that light) even when it is not permitted to do so by criminal punishment. The significance of the case was that, in creating a right to homosexual sex, it got people to thinking: if homosexuals have a right to have sex with each other, why shouldn’t they be allowed to marry? One might even have expected social conservatives, who disapprove of extramarital sex, to want to channel homosexual sex into marriage now that they could no longer forbid such sex, thus making homosexuality at least a little more “normal.” With the American marriage rate dropping fast—with marriage seeming to give way to co-habitation, as in Sweden, home of libertine socialism—mightn’t homosexual marriage even be thought a support for marriage generally?

After Lawrence, homosexuals could live together openly as couples anywhere in the United States without fear of prosecution. And if they had a right to co-habit, why not to marry? It began to seem arbitrary to deny them such a right, especially as some states—Vermont was the first, in 2000—were allowing homosexuals to form “civil unions” with all the rights of married couples except the right to call their relationship “marriage.” The denial of that right was equivalent to a state telling blacks that they could co-habit with whites and enjoy all the same rights as racially unmixed couples except the right to call their relationship “marriage.” That would be the purest, though not the most harmful, form of bigotry.

If there was a backlash to Lawrence, it was slight, because Lawrence wasn’t that big of a deal. For by 2003, there was virtually no enforcement of laws against homosexual sex, just as there was virtually no enforcement of the criminal laws, which are still on the books in many states, against adultery and fornication. Homosexual couples were living openly before Lawrence. States such as Texas, in which such laws were at least sporadically enforced, have still not authorized homosexual marriage, even though laws against homosexual marriage can no longer be enforced at all. The question I said that Lawrence had raised—if they can co-habit, why can’t they marry?—was already in the air, because so many homosexuals were co-habiting openly by 2003.


Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images News/Getty Images
MOVEMENT FOR CHANGE
Californians run to celebrate the Supreme Court's ruling in Hollingsworth v. Perry.
If one turns from narrative to statistics, the significance of judicial decisions (and for that matter backlash) to homosexual marriage, seemingly slight, recedes further. The earliest public-opinion polling on attitudes toward homosexual marriage was in 1988. In that year roughly 11 percent of Americans favored allowing such marriage and 68 percent opposed it. (All these percentages are approximate, because no two public-opinion polls agree exactly.) Presumably the 11 percent included most homosexuals. Nobody knows the exact percentage of homosexuals in the American population, but the current estimate is that it is between 3 and 4 percent. Assuming that most of them support homosexual marriage, in 1988 fewer than 8 percent of heterosexuals thought that homosexual marriage should be authorized. By 1996 the figure had risen to 24 percent (I am subtracting 3 percent from the poll), with 68 percent opposed (so the percentage with no opinion was also dropping). By 2003, the year of Lawrence, the figures were 28 and 65 percent. The approval rate continued to rise, and by May of this year, the month before the Supreme Court’s two homosexual-marriage decisions, about 50 percent of poll respondents approved of homosexual marriage and slightly more than 40 percent disapproved. The increase in approval in the decade since Lawrence has been astonishing. And the approval rate is likely to continue rising, because it is already 67 percent for persons under 30, dropping to 38 percent for persons 65 and older. The difference is almost certainly generational, as there is no reason to think that aging affects one’s thinking about homosexuality.


ALL IN ALL, THE JUDICIAL ROLE IN THE RISE OF HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN QUITE MODEST.
Thirteen states now authorize gay marriage, as do fifteen foreign countries. The first state to do so was Massachusetts, in 2004. Next were California and Connecticut in 2008. Six of the thirteen have authorized it within the last twelve months. Republicans remain strongly opposed, and the Supreme Court is unlikely for some time to force homosexual marriage on states by declaring it a constitutional right. That would be one bombshell too many. The most the Court is likely to do (how likely I don’t know) is to force states that do not allow homosexual marriage nevertheless to recognize such marriages made in states that do allow it. Most states recognize marriages made in another state as valid under that state’s law even if not valid in the state asked to recognize those marriages. (Maybe the other state authorizes first cousins, or thirteen-year-olds, to marry and the state asked to recognize the marriage does not allow its own citizens to make such marriages.) The Supreme Court may decide not to allow the state to make an exception for homosexual marriages.

By invalidating the denial of federal marital benefits to homosexual marriages, the Windsor decision has increased the value of marriage to homosexuals: that is probably the biggest impact on the homosexual-marriage movement that the Supreme Court has had. Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the decision by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in 2003 that created a right to homosexual marriage (effective the following year) as a matter of Massachusetts constitutional law, may have had a greater impact on the homosexual-marriage movement than any U. S. Supreme Court decision, including Lawrence, although as Klarman explains, Goodridge provoked a backlash. It is too soon to tell whether Windsor will.

All in all, the judicial role in the rise of homosexual marriage seems to have been quite modest. Probably the courts have done little either to accelerate the trend in acceptance of such marriage or, through backlash, to retard the trend. In retrospect, the growing acceptance of homosexual marriage seems a natural consequence of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s rather than an effect, even to a small degree, of litigation. That should come as no surprise when one thinks of another significant social and cultural development in America in the same era: the virtual disappearance of discrimination against Jews, Catholics, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and Asian Americans, which also owed very little to litigation.

Richard A. Posner is a judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Issue #29, Summer 2013

The True Origins of Prosperity

To read the other essays in “The Middle-Out Moment” symposium, click here.
Once upon a time, in the middle of the last century, America had a thriving economy in which the middle class was at the center and everyone—poor and rich alike—did better. But then, starting in the late 1970s, a group of self-serving rich people began to sell a promise that if we took better care of them, their wealth would trickle down, and that would help everyone else prosper. The country bought that line. And for three decades both parties yielded to it. The results were great for the very rich—and disastrous for everyone else. Wages stagnated. Inequality became extreme. Mobility slowed. By 2008, things were so upside down and we had so lost our way that the economy collapsed. Out of that ruin, many began to remember the old ways: the truth that lasting growth and shared prosperity come from the middle out and not the top down. Now we are joined in a battle of ideas to see whether middle-out economics can dethrone trickle-down.
This is the contest we are engaged in today. When President Obama frames the issue in this way, as he did down the homestretch of the 2012 campaign, progressives advance and his popularity soars. When he drifts from this narrative, as he has in the sequestration and debt debates of 2013, he gives ground unnecessarily. But make no mistake: The central debate in this country will continue to be about this choice and the true origins of prosperity.
In this symposium, others propose important policy ideas for this economic debate. We do not add to that good work. We offer instead a way to reset foundational assumptions about how the economy works and what prosperity is. And we assert that only by resetting these assumptions can progressives prevail in the coming debate. It is time to kill the myth of trickle-down economics—and to replace it with the true story of middle-outeconomics.
Middle-out economics argues that national prosperity does not trickle down from wealthy businesspeople or corporations; rather, it flows in a virtuous cycle that starts with a thriving middle class. Middle-out economics demands a systemic policy focus on the skills, capacities, and income of the middle class.
Economic policy choices may seem complex but they boil down to a simple question: whether what’s best for a capitalist economy is an ever-increasing concentration of wealth at the top or a thriving and growing middle class. That’s why arguments about the debt, sequestration, trade policy, tax reform, and fiscal stimulus must all be reframed relentlessly as arguments about whether and how best to grow from the middle out. To take each of those issues on its own technical terms is to ignore, and even concede defeat on, this larger frame. An argument over whether to have deficits is hard for our side to win. An argument over whether the middle class is the true origin of prosperity in a capitalist economy is hard to lose.
Why the Picture in Your Head Matters
The picture you have in your head about how the world works absolutely determines what you think is possible or beneficial.
For example, people equally committed to getting from Earth to Mars will have paralyzing differences about how to get there if one group believes the sun and Mars orbit the Earth while the other group believes that the Earth and Mars orbit the sun. People are entitled to differences of opinion. But only one cosmology gets you to Mars. And crucially, splitting the difference won’t get you there either.
Progressives are litigating the issues of the day as if Americans disagreed on where to go. It’s not true. All Americans want a prosperous and fair country and a better future for their children. The question is, what policies will get us there? That answer is different depending on the economic “cosmology” you accept.
Conservatives have a clear and simple explanatory cosmology called “trickle-down economics” in which the economy revolves around a small number of wealthy people who create jobs and are owed deference in tax and fiscal policy. It holds that if the rich get richer and businesses make more money, America will by definition prosper. That trickle-down cosmology dominates our politics and culture. The problem is that it is as mistaken as holding that the sun orbits the Earth. And it has been leading us as far astray as an astronomy based on this belief once did.
For decades, intellectuals on the left have contested trickle-down economics. Unfortunately, their ideas have not gained political purchase. That’s because almost all progressives of the political class have accepted and even internalized the right’s economic explanation. We have not contested its basic premises or even the core assertion that it works. We sometimes criticize the right’s explanation intensely, even stridently, but we fail repeatedly to provide a clear and compelling alternative picture of how America can prosper. We merely tout other soft priorities that never quite win the day. And then we are surprised when the right’s weak cosmology keeps winning hearts and minds.
In today’s economic debate, conservatives make practical-sounding arguments about promoting prosperity, while progressives answer with social-justice claims. They say the rich are job creators who should pay lower taxes than the middle class. We say that would be unfair. They say social programs destroy the economy. We call them “safety nets.” They want to promote business. We want to help the poor.
Voters do care about fairness. Many are compassionate too. But if the economic cosmology most Americans accept holds that fairness and prosperity are in zero-sum conflict, then progressive polices are intuitively and inherently unfriendly to economic growth. When they say prosperity and we say fairness, we are arguing from a position of weakness.
To be sure, progressives can take intellectual comfort that there is not a shred of factual evidence for the proposition that a program of enriching the wealthy and deregulating the economy ever brings general prosperity. But facts are secondary to intuitions—to the picture in people’s heads. And we are losing the intuition game.
It is impossible to effectively contest trickle-down economics and the tax policies it implies while simultaneously accepting its foundational premise—that rich businesspeople are the sole job creators in a capitalist economy. This is because if they are the job creators, then trickle-down economics isnecessarily true. But if middle-class consumption is what creates jobs, then trickle-down economics is necessarily false.
What Progressives Need to Push
In order to go from defense to offense, we must offer a new explanation of where prosperity comes from called middle-out economics. A twenty-first century understanding of economics leads to the conclusion that prosperity in capitalist societies is a consequence of a “circle of life”-like feedback loop between consumers and businesses. Middle-out economics aims to supercharge this feedback loop by creating conditions that allow both middle-class consumers and the businesses that depend on them to thrive in a virtuous cycle of increasing prosperity for all.
This means that a prosperous economy revolves not around a tiny number of the very rich but around a great and growing number of middle-class consumers and small businesspeople. Middle-out economics is not just a catchy rhythmic contrast to trickle-down; it’s a strategy based on a set of facts about how the economy really works.
Here are the premises derived from those facts:
  • Demand from the middle class—not tax cuts for the wealthy—is what drives a virtuous cycle of job growth and prosperity.
  • Rich businesspeople are not the primary job creators; middle-class customers are. The more the middle class can buy, the more jobs we’ll create.
  • America has the right and the responsibility to decide where the jobs created by our middle class will be located—here or in China.
  • Trickle-down has given us deficits and a decimated middle class.
  • Middle-out economics means investing in the health, education, infrastructure, and purchasing power of the middle class.
  • Middle-out economics marks the difference between what is good for capitalism broadly versus what protects the vested interests of a select group of capitalists narrowly—and it invests in the former.
And here is the policy framework these premises demand:
  • Create a truly progressive tax system. The richest citizens and the largest corporations pay a little more so that middle-class citizens and small businesses get the support they need to thrive. Loopholes are closed so wealthy individuals and the most profitable corporations actually pay more.
  • Invest in the skills and health of the middle class. Continue investments in programs that help the middle class succeed, and convert poor families into middle-class families that can purchase goods from our nation’s businesses and drive our economy.
  • Fight for American businesses and jobs. Pursue balanced trade and economic development policies that encourage companies to make things in America and discourage foreign companies from competing unfairly with American workers and businesses.
  • Help workers help business. Push for a fairer and more equitable split between workers and owners of the value created by enterprises. This does not punish capitalists or ask for their charity: Higher wages for workers means more business for American companies. It’s Henry Ford’s long view.
  • Make strategic investments in the next middle-class industries. Invest strategically in the industries of the future. Make big investments in R&D, and offer tax incentives for consumers as well as for companies and investors to use the power of the market to foster innovation.
  • Emphasize entrepreneurship and innovation. Provide smart regulations and incentives to enable ever more Americans to start businesses and generate the economic activity that will sustain us in the future. This is rooted in the recognition that the way to help businesses, small and large, isn’t less regulation but more thriving customers.
Middle-out economics has several important advantages over trickle-down. One is reality: This is how complex, adaptive systems like economies in fact thrive. A second is politics: Middle-class voters will naturally prefer a story that puts them in the center as the prime actors, rather than at the margins as bit players. And the third is cultural intuition: We know in our gut that we’re all better off when we’re all better off. That was George Bailey’s message in It’s a Wonderful Life.
Middle-out also lays bare the two key assumptions Republicans make about economics that drives policy choices like Paul Ryan’s budget. First, that because prosperity trickles down from the top it’s the people at the top who matter. And second (and perhaps more importantly) because the people at the top matter, the people in the middle and bottom don’t matter. Which is why Republican policy always seeks to cut at the middle and the bottom rather than at the top. The Ryan budget is emblematic of this approach.
Framing Middle-Out vs. Trickle-Down as a Choice
With the election behind us, progressives must now reshape people’s deep intuitions about where prosperity originates. This means we have to frame the choice between trickle-down and middle-out as a choice. Perhaps this sounds obvious. And yet we progressives haven’t ever prosecuted the full case.
Here’s what we mean: Most progressive leaders, elected and otherwise, routinely excoriate trickle-down economics. Good. They reflexively say they are for “saving the middle class.” Okay. Some have even started talking about growing the economy “from the middle out.” Wonderful. In our view, however, this is just not enough.
It is also not enough to think that just saying “middle class” repeatedly drives home the point. It does not. Conventional progressive talk of “saving” the middle class puts it on par with saving baby seals. It expresses a sentiment but not an argument or a competing explanation of where prosperity originates. Simply saying the words “middle class” over and over again is not enough. That’s because no amount of “sentiment” will win the day. We need to convert our authentic desire to put ordinary people first into an argument and an explanation about why the middle class is where prosperity originates in capitalist economies. Contrasting the trickle-down explanation with the middle-out explanation clearly, sharply, and repeatedly moves us from defense to offense.
At the same time, too many progressives are reflexively hostile to capitalism itself. That is misguided and even dangerous. The strongest case for middle-out economics and for an economic agenda that deconcentrates wealth and unearned privilege is that such an agenda is great for business. We progressives need to remember and to believe that capitalism is the best social technology ever invented for creating widely shared opportunity and prosperity.
While capitalists cannot take sole credit for creating jobs, they can take credit for creating the ideas that solve many of society’s problems. Our country’s wealth is best measured by the rate at which we create ideas and solve problems. We need more Americans to have the wherewithal—purchasing power, education, health security, access to capital—to participate in economic life, whether as consumers or as idea creators (that is, small businesspeople). The more that happens, the better America does. Middle-out economics, in short, allows capitalism to operate at full capacity and full potential with our talent maximally deployed. Middle-out economics promotes the participation of everyone in a market economy rather than protecting only a privileged few.
That means, as Eric Beinhocker argues in this symposium, that middle-out economics is a truer form of capitalism: more competitive and dynamic by being fairer, and fairer by allowing more true competition. Trickle-down economics, properly understood, is socialism for a select group of capitalists. Middle-out economics isn’t an attack on capitalism; it is simply a more effective form of capitalism than the faux free-market ideology we currently embrace. Perhaps this is why a growing number of thinkers on the right are also coming to see the wisdom of this approach.
To be clear, this is not an argument to be joined and resolved over the coming weeks or months. We have 30 years of terrible policy to undo, and only by reframing the public’s understanding of the true source of shared prosperity in a capitalist economy can we do this. It will take patience and persistence—and a strategic sensibility.
How to Make Middle-Out Economics a Reality
For progressives to transform middle-out economics from an idea into a reality, we urge five approaches.
First, relentlessly frame the choice as a choice. It’s trickle-down and middle-out economics. Not “top-down.” Not “the old ways that got us into this mess.” Trickle-down vs. middle-out. If we don’t have the courage to name our alternative, and repeat it relentlessly, we haven’t given people a clear choice. We will never displace trickle-down ideas if we don’t provide a clear, concise, and compelling alternative. Neither term has inherent force; it’s only in the contrast that we win.
Second, propagate the one pivotal meme at the heart of this entire effort: that rich businesspeople don’t create jobs; middle-class customers do. To put it another way, the right’s claim that rich businesspeople are job creators is the critical vulnerability deep in the heart of the Death Star; if we can target our ammunition to obliterate that single claim, the entire Death Star of right-wing ideology will implode and disintegrate. Why? Because without that claim, there is no way for the trickle-down camp to justify the absurd preferential treatment in the tax code and the regulatory regime for the rich and for large corporations. Without that claim, trickle-down economics reduces nakedly to a rent-seeking, self-serving agenda by the very rich to extract wealth from the poor and middle class. In short, we need to pick a fight with the right about the origins of prosperity in a capitalist society. Middle-out economics will prevail.
Third, make every economic issue an example of middle-out economics. The Ryan budget fails not because it is unfair or heartless or draconian. It fails because it perpetuates trickle-down thinking and cripples the ability of the middle class to generate national prosperity. Entitlement reform is not about the virtue or vice of running deficits. It is about whether we create enough security for middle-class consumers and workers to participate in the economy. The Affordable Care Act is not about the byzantine bureaucracy of health-care delivery. It’s about whether the middle class can dedicate its purchasing power to productive economic activity instead. And so on with sequestration, fiscal stimulus, and tax reform.
Fourth, recommit to capitalism—in a truer and more effective form. Middle-out economic policies aren’t just good because they benefit the middle class or the poor in the near term. They are great for the United States as a whole in the long term because they drive prosperity for all, including the rich. Our agenda is to make capitalism be all it can be for all of us.
Fifth, take this case to the people in the form of story. The argument we make here is a conceptual one. But the delivery device for that argument has to be narrative. Perhaps unfortunately, the last 30 years provide a very simple narrative arc—the tale we told at the very start of this article. That kind of storytelling must become second nature to progressives. Indeed, on all these fronts, progressives need dozens of complementary and simultaneous efforts to turn middle-out economics and the job-creator meme into products—media stories, policies, bumper stickers, viral videos, school curricula.
If middle-class people do not begin to think of themselves as job creators, then they will never intuitively embrace the policy ideas that we support. Only when middle-class voters begin to see themselves as the center of the economic universe will they begin to mobilize against the various elements of trickle-down policy that dominate this country’s political and policy agendas. It’s time to activate that awareness and the agenda that flows from it by framing the choice between trickle-down and middle-out economics as a choice. It’s time to seize the middle-out moment.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Veteran Jesuit explains choice to return to lay life


In a lengthy, moving letter to friends and colleagues, veteran Jesuit priest Bert Thelen explains his reasons for leaving the order and the priesthood and returning to the lay state. Thelen, who is almost 80 years old, has served as parish priest, provincial staff member and provincial during his 45 years of service.
Thelen credits the example of Christian living he has experienced during the last 14 years working at Creighton University and St. John's Parish for his decision. "It is you," he says, "who have freed, inspired, and encouraged me to the New Life to which I am now saying a strong and joyful 'Yes.' You have done this by challenging me to be my best self as a disciple of Jesus, to proclaim boldly His Gospel of Love, and to widen the horizons of my heart to embrace the One New World we are called to serve in partnership with each other and our Triune God ...
"Why does this 'YES' to embrace the call of our cosmic inter-connectedness mean saying 'NO' to ordained ministry? My answer is simple but true. All mystical traditions, as well as modern science, teach us that we humans cannot be fully ourselves without being in communion with all that exists. Lasting justice for Earth and all her inhabitants is only possible within this sacred communion of being. We need conversion -- conversion from the prevailing consciousness that views reality in terms of separateness, dualism, and even hierarchy, to a new awareness of ourselves as inter-dependent partners , sharing in one Earth-Human community. 
"In plainer words, we need to end the world view that structures reality into higher and lower, superior and inferior, dominant and subordinate, which puts God over Humanity, humans over the rest of the world, men over women, the ordained over the laity. As Jesus commanded so succinctly, 'Don't Lord it over anyone ... serve one another in love.' As an institution, the Church is not even close to that idea; its leadership works through domination, control, and punishment. So, following my call to serve this One World requires me to stop benefiting from the privilege, security, and prestige ordination has given me. I am doing this primarily out of the necessity and consequence of my new call, but, secondarily, as a protest against the social injustices and sinful exclusions perpetrated by a patriarchal church that refuses to consider ordination for women and marriage for same- sex couples ..."
Nor does he spare the Jesuit order in his critique. "Make no mistake about it: the Society of Jesus shares in and benefits from this patriarchal and clerical way of proceeding. We still regard ourselves as the shepherds and those to whom and with whom we minister as sheep. I discovered this painfully when the Society of Jesus decided against having Associate members. We are not prepared for co-membership or even, it seems at times, for collaboration, though we pay lip service to it. 'Father knows best' remains the hallmark of our way of proceeding. I can no longer, in conscience, do that. But I still honor and love my fellow Jesuits who work from that model of power over."
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Thelen declares that the church needs to focus its energies on environmental challenges today. "It is time to abandon our refusal to see that our very environment is central to the survival and well being of ALL earthlings. It is time for the Church to turn her attention from saving face to saving the earth, from saving souls to saving the planet. It is time to focus on the sacred bond that exists between us and the earth. It is time to join the Cosmic Christ in the Great Work of mending, repairing, nurturing, and protecting our evolving creation. It is time for a new vision of a universal Church whose all-inclusive justice and unconditional love, an expression of Christ consciousness and the work of the Holy Spirit, empowers ALL and can lead to a future that preserves the true right to life of all of God's creatures."
He ends by thanking all who "have followed me in the journey ... and I am sorry for whatever sadness, disappointment or hurt this may have caused you. But what I have written here is my truth, and I can't not do it."
Here's the whole letter:
May the Grace of Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the Peace of the Holy Spirit be with you! I am writing to tell you about what may be the most important decision of my life since entering the Jesuits. With God's help, at the behest of my religious superiors and the patient support and wise encouragement of my CLC group and closest friends, I have decided to leave ordained Jesuit ministry and return to the lay state, the priesthood of the faithful bestowed on me by my Baptism nearly 80 years ago. I do this with confidence and humility, clarity and wonder, gratitude and hope, joy and sorrow. No bitterness, no recrimination, no guilt, no regrets.
It has been a wonderful journey, a surprising adventure, an exploration into the God Who dwells mysteriously in all of our hearts. I will always be deeply grateful to the Society of Jesus for the formation, education, companionship, and ministry it has provided, and to my family for their constant support. I can never thank God enough for the loving and loyal presence in my life of each and every one of you.
 Why am I doing this? How did I reach this decision? I will try to tell you now. That is the purpose of this letter. For about 15 years now, as many of you have noticed, I have had a "Lover's Quarrel" with the Catholic Church. I am a cradle Catholic and grew up as Catholic as anyone can, with Priests and even Bishops in our household, and 17 years of Catholic education at St. Monica's Grade School, Milwaukee Messmer High School, and Marquette University. I took First Vows at Oshkosh in the Society of Jesus at age 25 and was ordained at Gesu Church to the priesthood ten years later in 1968. I have served the Church as a Jesuit priest in Milwaukee, Omaha, and Pine Ridge for 45 years, including 18 years on the Province Staff culminating in my being the Wisconsin Provincial for six years and attending the 34th General Congregation in Rome.
My last 14 years at Creighton and St. John's have been the best years of my life. I have truly enjoyed and flourished serving as pastor of St. John's. I cannot even put into words how graced and loved and supported I have been by the parishioners, parish staff, campus ministry, Ignatian Associates, and CLC members! It is you who have freed, inspired, and encouraged me to the New Life to which I am now saying a strong and joyful "Yes." You have done this by challenging me to be my best self as a disciple of Jesus, to proclaim boldly His Gospel of Love, and to widen the horizons of my heart to embrace the One New World we are called to serve in partnership with each other and our Triune God. It is the Risen Christ Who beckons me now toward a more universal connection with the Cosmos, the infinitely large eco-system we are all part of, the abundance and vastness of what Jesus called "the Reign of God."
Why does this "YES" to embrace the call of our cosmic inter-connectedness mean saying "NO" to ordained ministry? My answer is simple but true. All mystical traditions, as well as modern science, teach us that we humans cannot be fully ourselves without being in communion with all that exists. Lasting justice for Earth and all her inhabitants is only possible within this sacred communion of being. We need conversion – conversion from the prevailing consciousness that views reality in terms of separateness, dualism, and even hierarchy, to a new awareness of ourselves as inter-dependent partners , sharing in one Earth-Human community. In plainer words, we need to end the world view that structures reality into higher and lower, superior and inferior, dominant and subordinate, which puts God over Humanity, humans over the rest of the world, men over women, the ordained over the laity. As Jesus commanded so succinctly, "Don't Lord it over anyone … serve one another in love." As an institution, the Church is not even close to that idea; its leadership works through domination, control, and punishment. So, following my call to serve this One World requires me to stop benefiting from the privilege, security, and prestige ordination has given me. I am doing this primarily out of the necessity and consequence of my new call, but, secondarily, as a protest against the social injustices and sinful exclusions perpetrated by a patriarchal church that refuses to consider ordination for women and marriage for same- sex couples.
I have become convinced that the Catholic Church will never give up its clerical privilege until and unless we priests (and bishops) willingly step down from our pedestals. Doing this would also put me in solidarity with my friend, Roy Bourgeois, my fellow Jesuit, Fr. Bill Brennan, the late Bernard Cooke, and many other men who have been "de-frocked" by the reigning hierarchy. It will also support the religious and lay women, former Catholics, and gay and lesbian couples marginalized by our church. I want to stand with and for them. I am, if you will, choosing to de-frock myself in order to serve God more faithfully, truly, and universally.
But why leave the Jesuits? Make no mistake about it: the Society of Jesus shares in and benefits from this patriarchal and clerical way of proceeding. We still regard ourselves as the shepherds and those to whom and with whom we minister as sheep. I discovered this painfully when the Society of Jesus decided against having Associate members. We are not prepared for co-membership or even, it seems at times, for collaboration, though we pay lip service to it. "Father knows best" remains the hallmark of our way of proceeding. I can no longer, in conscience, do that. But I still honor and love my fellow Jesuits who work from that model of power over. It is still where we all are as a company, a Society, a community of vowed religious in the Roman Catholic church. Leaving behind that companionship is not easy for me, but it is the right thing for me to do at this time in my life. When I went through a formal discernment process with my CLC group, one member whose brilliance and integrity I have always admired and whose love and loyalty to the Jesuits is beyond question, said of my decision, "You cannot NOT do this!" He had recognized God's call in me.
 A few other considerations may help clarify my path. The Church is in transition – actually in exile. In the Biblical tradition, the Egyptian, Assyrian and Babylonian captivities led to great religious reforms and the creation of renewed covenants. Think of Moses, Jeremiah, and Isaiah. I think a similar reform is happening in our Catholic faith (as well as other traditions). We have come through far-reaching, earth-shaking evolutionary changes, and a new (Universal) Church as well as a new (One) World is emerging. My decision is a baby step in that Great Emergence, a step God is asking me to take.
Consider this. Being a Lay Catholic has sometimes been caricatured as "Pray, pay, and obey." Of course, that is a caricature, an exaggeration, a jibe. But it does point to a real problem. Recently, the hierarchical church mandated the so-called revision of the Roman Missal without consulting the People of God. It was both a foolish and a self-serving effort to increase the authority of Ordained men, damaging and even in some ways taking away the "Pray" part of "Pray, pay, and obey." No wonder more and more Catholics are worshipping elsewhere, and some enlightened priests feel compromised in their roles. I, for one, feel that this so-called renewal , though licit, is not valid. It is not pleasing to God, and I feel compromised in trying to do it.
Now, consider this. All of this liturgical, ecclesial, and religious change is located in and strongly influenced by what both science and spirituality have revealed as happening to our world, our planet, our universe. The very earth we are rooted and grounded in, as well as the air we breathe and the water we drink, are being damaged and destroyed even beyond (some say) our capacity to survive. And, as Fr. John Surette, S.J., has so wisely observed, "Injustice for the human and destruction of Earth's ecosystem are not two separate injustices. They are one." Biocide is even more devastating than genocide, because it also kills future inhabitants of our precious Earth.
It is time. It is time to abandon our refusal to see that our very environment is central to the survival and well being of ALL earthlings. It is time for the Church to turn her attention from saving face to saving the earth, from saving souls to saving the planet. It is time to focus on the sacred bond that exists between us and the earth. It is time to join the Cosmic Christ in the Great Work of mending, repairing, nurturing, and protecting our evolving creation. It is time for a new vision of a universal Church whose all-inclusive justice and unconditional love, an expression of Christ consciousness and the work of the Holy Spirit, empowers ALL and can lead to a future that preserves the true right to life of all of God's creatures. This includes future generations who will bless us for allowing them to live, evolve, and flourish. Can't you hear them crying out, "I want to live, I want to grow, I want to be, I want to know?"
In light of all this, how can I not respond to the call both Isaiah and Jesus heard, the call of our Baptism? "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me and sent me to bring Good News to the oppressed." All creation will be freed, and all people will know the freedom and glory of the Children of God. Yes, Lord, I will go. Please send me.
And that is why I am leaving Jesuit priesthood. Since first vows I have always thought and hoped and prayed that I would live and die in this least Society of Jesus. But now, something unexpected! A real surprise! I HAVE lived and died in the Society of Jesus, but, now, nearly 80, I have been raised to new life. I am born again – into a much larger world, a much newer creation. I have greatly benefited from the spiritual freedom given in and by the Society of Jesus. I feel no longer chained, limited, bound, by the shackles of a judicial, institutional, clerical, hierarchical system. As St. Paul once reminded the early Christians, "It is for freedom that you have been set free." And as St. Peter, the first Pope, learned when he said to Jesus, "You know that I love you," love is all about surrender and servanthood.
Thank you for your attention to this self presentation. I am grateful that you have followed me in the journey described here, and I am sorry for whatever sadness, disappointment, or hurt this may have caused you. But what I have written here is my truth, and I can't not do it! If you want to discuss this with me, ask questions, or give me feedback, I welcome your response, either by letter, e-mail or phone. Please pray for me, as I do for all of you, the beloved of my heart and soul.
Yours in the Risen Christ, Bert Thelen

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Trying to be Human?

I was recently browsing the forewords/introductions of a number of books written by some Christian theologians /social ethicists, (Tillich, Schweiker, Wink) and I come across a curious connection. In all of these books, there is a common belief that the quest of social ethics is to "become Human". I find this irritating. Theologians/ethicists of such renown as these can't possibly be allowing themselves to fall for the great desire on the part of many to whitewash human character?

     The goal of ethics is NOT simply to be truly or authentically human. Stalin was as authentically human as Schweitzer. Martin Luther King Jr. as authentically as Genghis Khan. Hitler as surely as Helen Keller . Human beings are good and evil personified. All that is glorious and all that is truly nauseating in this universe is reflected and revealed in man. And every human being is capable of  the most unspeakable vileness in thought if not in deed. As Arendt might put it, the banality of evil is everywhere demonstrated.
 
So, what is our goal? To be relational, i.e. loving, human beings. As far as I can perceive, all social ethics, regardless of source and origin, is trying to either instill in humans the capacity /desire for Universal love, or conceding the impossibility of Universal human love, trying to ameliorate the effects of living in a world  where humans will never be able or willing to love everyone by instilling rules of  good conduct and behavior. 

Monday, July 15, 2013

Quote

Freedom is doing what you want, and the time and opportunity to change your mind about that.

- Daniel Francis

Friday, July 12, 2013

  • Only at quite rare moments have I felt really glad to be alive. I could not but feel with a sympathy full of regret all the pain that I saw around me, not only that of men but that of the whole creation. From this community of suffering I have never tried to withdraw myself. It seemed to me a matter of course that we should all take our share of the burden of pain which lies upon the world.
                                                                                       - Albert Schweitzer

These are Albert Schwetizer's words, but they are my words as well.

Quote from Albert Schweitzer.

  • Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it. A strength which becomes clearer and stronger through its experience of such obstacles is the only strength that can conquer them. Resistance is only a waste of strength.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Cleveland - We're Not Detroit

On the ENder's Game film

I'm not planning to go to this movie. However, I was initially opposed to this boycotting thing. It makes me a bit uncomfortable to see any group, including the gay community, get so heated in their opposition against someone that they would deliberately try to hurt them financially.

But then I read what Orson Scott Card has been saying about Gay people and their families, what we are, where we come from, and how we should be viewed and treated. And I became supportive of the justness and rightness of this boycott.

There are those who wonder why a man saying negative things about gay people should be boycotted? The reason is that he and the organization that he is a board member of (National Organization for Marriage), act on their rhetoric. According to Card, he has been saying this kind of stuff since 1984. Has anything negative happened to gay people since that time? 40 state bans on gay marriage, including 30 that deny any recognition of gay couples at all. Gay people fired from jobs for being gay, and denied housing for being gay, a thing that is still legal in 27 states. DOMA. Don't ask Don't Tell. A ban on gay people being allowed to say anything positive publicly about themselves in Colorado. Untold numbers of gay people who committed suicide because of the constant repetition of the kind of rhetoric Orson used. Untold others permanently damaged. 40 percent of the homeless kid population is now LGBT because of the kind of rhetoric Orson Scott Card uses being taken to heart by millions of American parents.

The greatest lie any human ever told is that words will never hurt you. Gay people know that isn't true. And Orson Scott Card and people like him have helped us gain that bitter knowledge.

Gay people have every right not to finance those who would give us desolation.