Can Civics Save America?

Culture war in education

A May 2021 article in the Atlantic, Can Civics Save America?, considers whether civics and history can be taught in public schools in a way that helps to restore some health to our seriously damaged American democracy. The alternative is that it will inflame partisan antagonisms if not done with extreme care and strict neutrality. The Atlantic writes:

Civic education sounds dull, dutiful, and antiquated, like paper drives or the Presidential Physical Fitness Test—but today it bears all the passion and distemper of our fraught politics. Last year, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz found that a majority of Americans of both parties rank civics as their top choice for how to “strengthen the American identity,” ahead of national service (preferred by Democrats) and religious activity (favored by Republicans). Civics, if left undefined, is the one solution for polarization that both sides support.

It’s also the most bitterly contested subject in education today. Civics is at the heart of the struggle to define the meaning of the American idea. Think of the battle lines as 1619 versus 1776—The New York Times Magazine’s project to reframe American history around slavery and its legacy, and the Trump administration’s counterstrike in the form of a thin report on patriotic education. Teaching civics could restore health to American democracy, or inflame our mutual antagonisms. Events are currently pushing in both directions.

Schools fail to give students not only a knowledge of basic facts and concepts, .... but also “the realization that free people will disagree about just about everything.” The art of self-government depends on a capacity for argument, persuasion, compromise, and tolerance of disagreement—civic virtues that need to be learned and practiced. .... If Americans of all stripes now hold righteously dogmatic views that we can neither ground in facts nor justify against counterarguments, one overlooked cause is the fading of civics from American education.

In 2019, a group of scholars and educators began an ambitious effort to lay out a vision for how American children in the 21st century should learn about their multi-everything, relentlessly divided democracy. .... Funding came from the U.S. Department of Education (then led by Betsy DeVos) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Around 300 people ultimately worked on the project, whose 33-page report, Educating for American Democracy, came out in March.

Rather than euphemizing hard truths and eliding divisive arguments, the report faces them in clear language. “In recent decades, we as a nation have failed to prepare young Americans for self-government, leaving the world’s oldest constitutional democracy in grave danger, afflicted by both cynicism and nostalgia, as it approaches its 250th anniversary,” the report announces at the top. Its solution is not a new nationwide curriculum (sure to self-immolate in partisan fights) but a “roadmap” of pedagogical guidelines, informed by broad themes such as “civic participation” and “institutional and social transformation,” and also by questions such as “How can we offer an account of U.S. constitutional democracy that is simultaneously honest about the past without falling into cynicism, and appreciative of the founding without tipping into adulation?”

The article goes on to point out that the Educating for American Democracy report intentionally does not choose sides in culture war. That would cause it to be rejected and attacked by one side or the other and then fade into irrelevance. To avoid that trap, the authors resort to reliance on evidence, inquiry and reason (like pragmatic rationalism). In particular, the report does not tell schools what to teach or students what to think. It just provides guidance on educating students about how to think, debate, disagree, and learn about the past in the context of the present. The goal is to balance American pluralism and diversity with a shared American narrative. 

Phrases like “reflective patriotism” and “civic friendship” were invented and used to try to limit the inherent tension. As one can imagine, this puts a significant, complicated burden on teachers. 

The author of the article understands that the Educating for American Democracy report could lay out good ideas but still die a quiet death, like many other reports and efforts that try to be helpful. One question asks what else can we try to do? The two sides are bitterly divided and that is not going to change. 

We oppose it!

A proposed bill in Congress, the Civics Secures Democracy Act, appropriates $1 billion to support civics and U.S. history teaching. As of last May, there was some bipartisan support, but it is tenuous. The Educating for American Democracy report and the Civics Secures Democracy Act both came  

under immediate attack from the right. A radical right pro-T**** source called American Greatness, referred to the report as “a Trojan horse for woke education.” The influential radical right National Review, Federalist Society, and Heritage Foundation all argued that the report and the proposed bill constituted a conspiracy to impose a national left-wing agenda and ideology on schoolchildren. A conservative group, the National Association of Scholars asked Republicans in congress to withdraw their sponsorship of the Civics Secures Democracy Act. 

Biden screws the pooch - he took a side in the culture war

In what appears to be a serious, probably lethal mistake for a civics and history teaching renewal, on April 19 the Biden administration proposed Education Department funding for two small teaching grants related to teaching civics and history. The grant rationale and requirements blundered by clearly taking the liberal side in the culture war. Information that accompanied the grants included these mistakes (i) citing “the New York Times’ landmark ‘1619 Project,’” (ii) emphasis on teaching “both the consequences of slavery, and the significant contributions of Black Americans to our society,” and (iii) stating that grant applicants must “take into account systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history,” “support the creation of learning environments that validate and reflect the diversity, identity, and experiences of all students,” and “contribute to inclusive, supportive, and identity-safe learning environments.” 

Both the Educating for American Democracy report and the Civics Secures Democracy Act were designed to not inflame partisan differences or take a side. Despite that, both elicited immediate, intense criticism from the radical right. The ghastly mistakes in the grant applications has given the radical right the excuse to say, we told you so, and more vehemently reject the report and the bill pending in congress. Radical right demagogues are reveling in a festival of disinformation using Biden’s mistake as fresh ammunition.

The article ends with this correct observation:

Unlike Educating for American Democracy, the Biden administration’s [grant application] rule, like its conservative critics, imposes a fixed view of civics and U.S. history in place of inquiry, debate, and disagreement. By intent or blunder, the left and right are colluding to undermine the noble, elusive goal of giving American children the ability to think and argue and act together as citizens.

Questions: 

1. Based on the information in this post, is it reasonable to think the right is mostly acting to sabotage by intent and the left mostly blundering, assuming that the left generally supports the Educating for American Democracy report and the Civics Secures Democracy Act, while the right attacks and opposes them?

2. Is it reasonable to see neutral but honest teaching of civics and history as inherently more at odds with the morals, ideology, beliefs and politics of the radical right than with those of the center or left, radical or not?

What is in the reconciliation or Build Back Better infrastructure bill?

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Bad infrastructure

A poor family carrying off food aid - 

they're not infrastructure

This bill is still being debated among Democrats, so the final terms could change or the bill might not ever reach a compromise. Two generally staunch conservative Democratic Senators, Manchin and Sinema, dislike spending on the American people. Both are corrupted by powerful special interests hell bent on protecting their power and profits regardless of negative impacts on the public interest, the environment and climate, or anything else. 

Manchin has been bought by coal and oil interests and is generally anti-environment. Sinema is bought by the pharmaceutical industry and she fights to keep drug prices for Americans bankruptingly sky high. No Republican in congress is likely to vote for the reconciliation bill because Republicans hate government and nearly all domestic spending. 

If Manchin and Sinema cannot be coaxed, bribed, bought off with earmarks or otherwise convinced to vote for this bill, it will fail and so will the first bipartisan infrastructure bill because House progressives will not vote for the first ~$1 trillion bill (discussed here yesterday) if Democrats cannot agree and pass the second bill, which focuses on "human infrastructure."

Investopedia summarizes key provisions of the reconciliation bill as of Oct. 28, currently negotiated at ~$1.85 trillion in spending, some of which is intended to occur over a period of 1-5 years. 

• On Oct. 28, Biden announced a scaled-down $1.85 trillion Build Back Better compromise, down from an original ~$3.5 trillion, hoping that would be enough to get progressives to vote for the bipartisan bill 
• $1.75 trillion of social infrastructure funding, and an additional $100 billion in immigration spending, contingent upon an affirmative ruling by the Senate parliamentarian
• $400 billion for childcare and universal preschool, which is projected to save most families more than half of their childcare spending by providing two years of free preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old in America and additional funding for childcare
• $150 billion for home care, which expands home care for seniors and the disabled
• $200 billion for Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Credit, including extending expanded Child Tax Credit for one year and additional funds to extend the expanded Earned Income Tax Credit
• $555 billion for clean energy and climate, including a proposal to cut greenhouse gas pollution by over a gigaton in 2030; other provisions include reducing consumer energy costs, helping to create more clean air and water, and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs
• $130 billion in Obamacare credits to expand subsidized healthcare coverage, reduce premiums for more than 9 million Americans, and deliver healthcare to uninsured people in states that are not enrolled in expanded Medicaid coverage
• $35 billion Medicare hearing coverage, but dental and vision coverage got removed by Manchin and Sinema, 
• $150 billion for housing affordable housing, including construction and rehabilitation of homes and payments for rental assistance and housing vouchers
• $40 billion for higher education and workforce, including increasing Pell grants and post-high school education opportunities including through apprenticeship programs in underserved communities
• $90 billion for equity and other investments, designed to achieve equity through investments in maternal health, community violence interventions, and nutrition 
• $100 billion for immigration if approved by the Senate parliamentarian; spending is to reform the immigration system, reduce backlogs, expand legal representation, and make border processing more efficient and humane.
• Partial funding by imposing a corporate alternative minimum tax of at least 15% on companies whose financial statements show at least $1 billion in profit (Manchin and/or Sinema are likely going to reject this based on some past comments they have made about funding sources → they oppose taxing rich people and wealthy corporations, but are OK with taxing the rest of us fools)

What has been cut out of the current proposal:

• Paid family leave. Democrats initially wanted 12 weeks of guaranteed paid family and medical leave, then scaled it back to four weeks. Ultimately no paid leave made it into the framework.
• Medicare dental and vision benefits.
• Medicare drug pricing. The ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies was also cut from the final framework.
• Free community college. Expansion of Pell grants and apprenticeship training remains, but free community college was taken out.
• Billionaires income tax. This funding plan, which would have taxed the unrealized gains of certain assets of around 700 of the richest taxpayers in the country and helped fund the legislation, was removed.

The purchasing power of pharmaceutical industry campaign contributions to Sinema is manifest in the Medicare drug pricing bullet point. She has been paid to protect that sector of the economy. Drug prices for Americans will continue to be generally unaffordable.

There is no mention of going after some of the ~$1.2 trillion in annual tax cheating that the FRP (fascist Republican Party) constantly defends in its ruthless quest to strangle and kill the federal government by depriving it of money. Honest taxpayers are, as usual, screwed because they won't or can't also join the perennial festival of tax cheating.

This reconciliation bill focuses on human infrastructure, but the FRP does not believe there is such a thing and it should not be funded. Other industrialized countries have been spending for decades on the things that are both still included in and cut from this bill. One major difference between the civilized industrialized countries and the US is that their governments generally put the public interest before special interests, while the US usually does the opposite.

Questions: 

1. Should the public support this bill? Or, is the FRP and its alarmist, hair-on-fire rhetoric, e.g., (i) there is no such thing as human infrastructure, (ii) climate change is a hoax, and (iii) controlling drug prices would be a gigantic catastrophe, basically correct and therefore this bill should be opposed? 

2. Comparing this reconciliation bill, including what is in and what is cut out, with the "bipartisan" bill discussed yesterday, is there meaningful bipartisanship left in the FRP, or does it now operate mostly in bad faith for special interests? Or, are the two parties mostly alike and their differences on infrastructure mostly or completely just posturing?  

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What is in the bipartisan infrastructure bill?

Some people heavily criticize the first, bipartisan infrastructure bill as a corporate giveaway and a nearly complete capitulation to the FRP (fascist Republican Party). That complaint, or close variants, has come from multiple sources, including some folks here. Democratic Party progressives in the house have complained bitterly about how crappy this bill is. The New York Times describes key provisions like this:

• $1 trillion spending is agreed to; Biden's original proposal was for $2.3 trillion
• about $550 billion in new federal money for public transit, roads, bridges, water and other physical projects over the next five years
• money would come from a range of measures, including “repurposing” stimulus funds already approved by Congress, selling public electromagnetic spectrum and recouping federal unemployment funds from states that ended more generous pandemic benefits early
• Biden claims that “neither side got everything they wanted,”  but new union jobs would be created and the spending constitutes significant investments in public transit
• $110 billion is new funding for roads, bridges and other major projects; the American Society of Civil Engineers says there is a a $786 billion backlog of needed repairs for roads and bridges
• highway and pedestrian safety programs get $11 billion 
• $1 billion is “reconnecting communities” by removing freeways or other past infrastructure projects that ran through Black neighborhoods and other communities of color, down from Biden's original $20 billion proposal 
• public buses, subways and trains get $39 billion in new funding to repair aging infrastructure and modernize and expand transit service across the country, down from the original $49 billion proposal; the American Society of Civil Engineers says that there is a $176 billion backlog for transit investments
• $66 billion spending rail to address Amtrak’s maintenance backlog, upgrades for the high-traffic Washington to Boston corridor, and some for expanding rail service outside the Northeast and mid-Atlantic
• $55 billion in clean drinking water to replace all of the nation’s lead pipes, which were banned ~30 years ago
• $7.5 billion to build electric vehicle charging stations nationwide and get rid of areas with no chargers; $2.5 billion for electric school buses
• Republicans successfully opposed Biden’s plan to raise taxes and empower the I.R.S. to help pay for the package by reducing the tax gap (the amount that tax cheats do pay, currently running at about $1.2 trillion/year)
• funding will come from (i) pay-fors that repurpose already-approved funds, (ii) accounting changes to raise funds and, (iii) assume the projects will ultimately pay for themselves
• the biggest funding source is $205 billion that will come from “repurposing of certain COVID relief dollars”
• $53 billion in funding is assumed to come from states that ended more generous federal unemployment benefits early 
• $28 billion comes from requiring more robust reporting around cryptocurrencies 
• $56 billion is presumed to come from economic growth “resulting from a 33 percent return on investment in these long-term infrastructure projects”

It does look like the FRP really got most of what it wanted. The funding sources are questionable and the amounts too small to meet needs. Once again, the FRP protected tax cheats, allowing the annual ~$1.2 trillion Thieves' Festival of Cheating to continue unscathed. 

After reading this, my support for this bill has gone from solidly positive to mildly negative, which is what the FRP wants to see from people. If the Dems cannot agree among themselves on the reconciliation bill, letting this bill fail would be just fine with me and the FRP, which loves tax cheats, but hates government generally and especially most government domestic spending.

I'll do a separate post on the reconciliation bill, which 100% of the FRP in congress opposes.

Question: 

1. Should the public support this bill? Does the existence or size of the reconciliation bill (~$3.5 trillion proposed, now down to ~$1.5 trillion thanks to the corrupt bought and paid for Senators Manchin and Sinema) make any difference (that assumes Democrats can agree on a bill, which is still a highly dubious proposition)? In other words, should the fairly crappy bipartisan bill be supported as better than nothing if the reconciliation bill is too small?

The business of business is profit, not defending democracy, truth or anything else

Facebook: Clean-up on Aisle 3!

In other words, “Houston, we're got a problem!”

The business model - mining for minds

A whistleblower at Facebook recently released the Facebook Papers.[1] Those internal company documents show that Facebook's algorithms were set to intentionally foment anger and discord before the 1/6 coup attempt because that was the most profitable thing to do. When a social media platform like Facebook has content that makes people angry or otherwise emotionally whipped up, they spend more time on the platform. That makes the people spending more time on the platform better products to sell to advertisers. That increases the platform's profits. 

Users of social media are the product the social media companies sell to advertisers. Specifically, their eyeballs on cell phone and computer screens is what is being sold. The longer and more eyeballs they can trap onto screens, the more money the company makes.[2] That is the business model and it is smashingly successful. So smashing that it arguably is a major factor helping to smash American democracy into some form of corrupt authoritarianism or fascism.

The New York Times writes:

Company documents show that the social network’s employees repeatedly raised red flags about the spread of misinformation and conspiracies before and after the contested November vote.

Sixteen months before last November’s presidential election, a researcher at Facebook described an alarming development. She was getting content about the conspiracy theory QAnon within a week of opening an experimental account, she wrote in an internal report.

On Nov. 5, two days after the election, another Facebook employee posted a message alerting colleagues that comments with “combustible election misinformation” were visible below many posts.

Four days after that, a company data scientist wrote in a note to his co-workers that 10 percent of all U.S. views of political material — a startlingly high figure — were of posts that alleged the vote was fraudulent.

In each case, Facebook’s employees sounded an alarm about misinformation and inflammatory content on the platform and urged action — but the company failed or struggled to address the issues. The internal dispatches were among a set of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times that give new insight into what happened inside the social network before and after the November election, when the company was caught flat-footed as users weaponized its platform to spread lies about the vote.

Facebook has publicly blamed the proliferation of election falsehoods on former President Donald J. Trump and other social platforms. In mid-January, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was “largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate. “Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, told lawmakers in March that the company “did our part to secure the integrity of our election.”

But the company documents show the degree to which Facebook knew of extremist movements and groups on its site that were trying to polarize American voters before the election. The documents also give new detail on how aware company researchers were after the election of the flow of misinformation that posited votes had been manipulated against Mr. Trump.

The NYT article goes on to point out that Facebook’s employees believed the social network could have done more. Enforcement of Facebook groups arguing that the 2020 election was stolen was not coordinated, but instead piecemeal. Those lies were not stopped. Regarding QAnon, Facebook employees warned for years about its potential to radicalize users, so Facebook cannot honestly argue it was unaware of what the radical right was doing. Facebook's algorithms sent a test account an employee set up to QAnon because the fake account indicated that the fake person, Carol Smith, calling herself a conservative mom who claimed to follow radical right propaganda and lies sources, Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting. 

That was an internal Facebook research project called “Carol’s Journey to QAnon.” A key QAnon crackpot conspiracy was that the ex-president was valiantly opposing a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles. According to a Facebook researcher, Carol Smith’s account feed devolved in three weeks into “a constant flow of misleading, polarizing and low-quality content.” The same thing happened with fake accounts set to look like liberals. Facebook algorithms were set to emotionally whip people up and polarize them to increase the time their minds stayed trapped in Facebook.  

 

Questions: 

1: Should Facebook sue the whistleblowers that have leaked internal company documents? 

2. From a free speech point of view, is one relatively non-toxic policy, assessing corporate taxes at least in part on higher taxes on revenues or profits that come in from or are associated with objectively false content? 

Footnotes: 

1. According to the AP, “the Facebook Papers represents a unique collaboration between 17 American news organizations, including The Associated Press.” AP writes: 

Facebook the company is losing control of Facebook the product — not to mention the last shreds of its carefully crafted, decade-old image as a benevolent company just wanting to connect the world.

Thousands of pages of internal documents provided to Congress by a former employee depict an internally conflicted company where data on the harms it causes is abundant, but solutions, much less the will to act on them, are halting at best.

The crisis exposed by the documents shows how Facebook, despite its regularly avowed good intentions, appears to have slow-walked or sidelined efforts to address real harms the social network has magnified and sometimes created. They reveal numerous instances where researchers and rank-and-file workers uncovered deep-seated problems that the company then overlooked or ignored.  

“At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false. Yes, we’re a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our own commercial interests lie,” Facebook said in a prepared statement Friday. “The truth is we’ve invested $13 billion and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”

Statements like these are the latest sign that Facebook has gotten into what Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook data scientist, described as a “siege mentality” at the company. Zhang last year accused the social network of ignoring fake accounts used to undermine foreign elections. With more whistleblowers — notably Haugen — coming forward, it’s only gotten worse.  

“Facebook has been going through a bit of an authoritarian narrative spiral, where it becomes less responsive to employee criticism, to internal dissent and in some cases cracks down upon it,” said Zhang, who was fired from Facebook in the fall of 2020. “And this leads to more internal dissent.”

No wonder Facebook is changing its name to Meta (what a 😜 stupid name). Companies in serious public relations trouble do that all the time. Cigarette companies, financial firms, and most everyone else in public relations hot water changes their name to hide their sleaze, corruption and/or crimes. It is an effective way of laundering bad corporate behavior, and personal and social damage in the public memory. 

2. That is like eyeballs on televisions screens or ears listening to radio. The more viewers or listeners a TV or radio broadcast has, the more money advertisers are willing to pay for their ads on those platforms. Advertisers want and pay for your valuable mental attention. Mental attention comes via eyeballs and ears. Another analogy is casinos. The longer the average person stays and plays, the more money they will lose. That fact is inherent in markets and it is augmented by casinos rigging their games to increase the odds of people losing. 

The point is simple: the average person's time and attention has commercial value. All advertisers want it and pay to get it -- that is the point of buying advertisements. Few advertisers ask or care about how those consumer minds get trapped or what political or social collateral damage that mining for minds might have done. It's just business. Morals, social conscience, democracy and truth are irrelevant.