Undercounting Who We Are

Undercounting Who We Are

The Founding Fathers Weren't So Democratic

The Founders Didn’t Want Trump to Happen

How ironic that the structure of the electoral college, which the founders placed in the Constitution to assure that elites would control presidential elections resulted in the mob rule they were trying to prevent.

Were presidents selected through the popular vote rather than the electoral college, Hillary Clinton would be president today.  The electoral college is in the Constitution for two main reasons.  The first was to assure that interests of the smaller of the original 13 states were not trampled by those of the bigger states.  By assigning one electoral vote in the presidential election for each representative and senator, they were assured of somewhat disproportionate influence in the election as even the smallest states, Delaware, Rhode Island and New Hampshire had at 3 electoral votes.

The second reason was that for all of our praise of the United States in leading the way both now and historically as the nation’s leading democracy, the founding fathers did not trust democracy and structured the constitution, state constitutions, state laws, and election law in particular to minimize the political power of most people.  In 1791, when the Constitution was adopted, most of the 50% of the population that was female could not vote, slaves – who were most black people in the new country – could not vote, most Native Americans residing within the 13 states could not vote. States had broad latitude to exclude persons from voting on the basis of non-land ownership and later literacy requirements and poll taxes.  In summary, in the beginning almost all voters were land-owning white males.

But for the drafters of the Constitution, even that was not sufficient control of elections to national office.  Voters in presidential elections were not voting directly for their preferred candidate; rather for an “elector” pledged to vote for the candidate they supported in the “electoral college” convened following the election.  Until 1913, U.S. Senators were elected by state legislatures rather than by the voting public.   While not a constitutional matter, only recently were presidential primaries influential in the selection of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates.  As recently as 1960, when the parties nominated John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, there were only 15 primaries and the vast majority of delegates to conventions were party leaders and leaders selected in state party conventions, not by popular vote.

The United States government of the 1780s was more “democratic” than any other nation in the world, but the notion of democracy was quite severely limited by today’s standards.  While the new United States did not suffer from the hereditary roots of European nations, its leaders nevertheless had a distinct sense of the righteousness of their own privilege, owing to their notions of power, civilization, religiosity, land ownership and right to own slaves, and they assured to not risk surrendering leadership to anyone not of that community whom they did not trust. 

The Constitution’s authors were well aware that the popular interest could easily diverge from their propertied interest and were not prepared to chance that popular interest having much influence on government.  They feared that the “democracy” was given to emotional actions, lacked proper education and reflection, and was an unruly rabble given to violence that might not be controlled.  True, they had conducted a revolution against the British colonial administrations, landowners and merchants who reported to England and ostensibly governed the colonies.  But having had their revolution, they did not want another one.  Because most blacks and women could not vote, the electoral college was created to assure that unruly white men would not undermine the plans of the more educated and moneyed white male establishment.

How ironic, then, that a Donald Trump, championed by many of the least educated, least cosmopolitan, and most short-sighted citizens of the nation should win the election because of the very electoral college put in place to prevent exactly that kind of emotion-driven politics.

The Erosion of Shared Values in Government

Why do you stop at stop signs or not plow through a red light when you can see that there are no police around, or cars or pedestrians in the way?  Why don’t we take something that isn’t ours even though no one would know we took it?

The reality is that we could get away with a lot if we wished to.  In fact, most of us follow “the law” not because we fear arrest or punishment, but because of our shared understanding and values of reciprocity that allow us to live together in relative peace.

The United States Constitution is notable for the checks and balances that in theory prevent the administration, Congress and judiciary each from overstepping its authority and asserting undue, or imprudent, influence on the laws and direction of our nation.  Many think of the United States as an overly litigious nation because of the extensive civil and criminal codes and highly developed judicial systems.  But even so many laws have their limits.  We would never want to live in a country that had enough police to prevent every conceivable theft, ticket every rolling stop at a stop sign, investigate every office-holder for every possible bribe, or otherwise utilize law enforcement to prevent every possible wrong.

Our society only works because at the highest levels of government those shared understandings of reciprocity and civility work as effectively as our willingness not to run a stop sign or red light just because law enforcement isn’t looking.  The conduct of American politics, driven by a combination of hyper-partisanship in Washington and a president-elect with little knowledge of, nor respect for, process in politics and public decision-making, is moving quickly toward the abrogation of those shared understandings.

We have been moving in this direction for some time and it is hard to know when to anchor the beginning of the trend.   Was a turning point reached when right-wing advocates tried to deny President Obama his office arguing that he wasn’t a U.S. citizen.  Was it threatening to shut down the entire federal government through refusal to routinely extend the debt floor ceiling in order to win a small political objective?   More troubling even was the refusal by Senate Republicans to even consider a moderate center-left Supreme Court nominee, arguing fatuously that we were close enough to the next election to let the voters decide.   In theory, we could end up with no Supreme Court at all had Hillary Clinton won the election and continued to face a Republican senate that refused to consider any of her Court nominations.  

Finally, the Republican Congress is in the process of waiving important ethics guidelines that require a five-year waiting period for a former soldier to take a Cabinet position.  Just as the Senate is within the law to refuse to consider a nominee, Congress is within the law to waive the waiting period, but it shouldn’t.   Among the important principles on which our nation was founded, was the idea that the military should, to the degree possible, be under civilian control.   Hence the elected “commander and chief”, the lack of a standing army in the early days, and reliance on local militia.  No matter the qualifications of this particular nominee, and there is no evidence that they are so remarkable as to make him literally indispensible, that principle is more important.

Republicans, and the new president, will make a tragic mistake if they go down the path of operating unilaterally and without regard for political process that protects the productive workings of democracy, just because they now can.   Democrats in Congress wisely helped Republicans thwart Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to work-around a conservative Supreme Court majority by adding additional justices he imagined would favor his New Deal agenda.  Likewise, Republican congressmen helped Democrats launch the impeachment process that eventually resulted in Richard Nixon’s resignation.  Leaders in both parties can respect process, even when in the short run it may not favor a particular policy or partisan-supported outcome.   And they should, so that we can all continue living together.

A step toward reducing Chicago homicides

As Chicago’s homicide rate soared to over 700 during 2016, returning to a level unseen in the past two decades, police, politicians, social service providers, and local residents search for ways reduce it.  Not so long ago, the battle was being won.  After peaking in the 900s per year in the 1970s, the number of homicides had fallen to between 400 and 450 per year recently.

The reasons for the long-term decline, which was shared with most other large American cities beginning in the 1990s, are complex.  No doubt the reason for the recent resurgence of violence is too.   But we do know a few things.

The vast majority of homicides are committed in only a few neighborhoods:  Austin, Garfield Park, Englewood, Lawndale, New City, and other south west side neighborhoods.  We don’t know as much as we should about the shooters because as of 2016, the “clearance” rate on homicide, the percentage of these crimes that have been solved, had fallen to only 20%.   However, earlier data developed when the clearance rate was higher indicated that approximately 70% of the shooters had had previous contact with the criminal justice system, as had a like percentage of their victims.  The age of shooters typically ranged from the teens, to the mid-thirties.  Recent research by professors at Stanford and Yale universities suggests that most homicide offenders and victims come from common communities of people where people know one another, and in many cases have already offended.  So while it is impossible to know who will eventually pull a trigger, and who will one day be hit, we have an idea of the wider pool from which those people will likely emerge.

The vast majority of anti-violence programming is aimed at the youngest corner of the offender pool and focuses on youth who are either in school, or recently dropped out.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of offenders and victims are older than that and are not attached to schools.  Programs like the highly acclaimed Becoming a Man program operated by Youth Guidance and evaluated by scholars at the University of Chicago reduce incidence of violence among their participants, but the problem is that it works with kids who are in school.  This is true of most restorative justice programs, and any number of other out-of-school time programs that provide alternatives to gang-related activities and other dysfunctional occupations.

The challenge for reducing most homicidal offending is to reach young adults who are no longer attached to school communities, and in many cases any institutional community at all.  The closest thing to an institution that many future offenders are connected to is their parole officer, but for the most part, parole officers are not well-equipped or have the time to provide the intensive contact needed to turn around the lives of people who have already gotten into trouble.  Organizations like the Safer Foundation, North Lawndale Employment Network and others focus on helping ex-offenders find employment, reducing the likelihood of future offending but they lack the capacity to by themselves reach sufficient persons to turn the tide.

As a senior grant-maker in this field at the Chicago Community Trust, I had the opportunity to see many of Chicago’s anti-violence programs up-close and evaluate their performances.   They youth programs aimed at preventing violence hold promise for changing crime trends in the future but are not the solution for reducing homicide in the present.  The most promising strategy is the Chicago CeaseFire program operated by the national anti-violence organization, Cure Violence.  Unlike most other programs, CeaseFire focuses on working directly with individuals known in communities to be most at-risk of committing deadly crimes, and maintains a cadre of street workers, many of whom, regrettably, have committed crimes themselves and therefore have the local credibility and knowledge to intervene in potentially escalating conflicts so as to deflect participants from deadly violence.  The strategy doesn’t always work, but there is significant evidence from studies conducted by scholars at Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins and University of Illinois at Chicago that CeaseFire’s street-level interventions reduce homicides in neighborhoods where it operates.

Whether it is CeaseFire or other organizations, the challenge is to reach the people who are most likely to become perpetrators and, sadly, most are not to be found in schools.  Massive infusions of policing and aggressive stop-and-frisk policies can make a difference, but at the cost of police-resident tension and sometimes civil rights violations.  An alternative that could be effective would be to ramp-up numbers of CeaseFire style street workers and deflect potential offenders from decisions that irrevocably alter their lives, and end the lives of others.

One Reason Race Still Matters

Memories don’t just vanish overnight.

Slavery effectively ended in 1865 with the close of the Civil War and constitutional amendment, but state governments in the South, and many local governments in the north, perpetuated a lesser form of segregation and discrimination through so-called Jim Crow laws and other ostensibly “legal” strategies and practices.  That regime persisted for nearly another century until a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s and the 1964 Civil Rights Act (employment, schools and public facilities), 1965 Voting Rights Act and 1968 Fair Housing Act finally put the basic legal protections in place that should have been enacted 100 years earlier.  While incrementalimprovements in racial equality and access had occurred during the preceding century – for instance desegregation of the armed forces, black players in Benny Goodman’s jazz orchestra, Jackie Robinson in baseball– it was the 1960s legislation that propelled the most thoroughgoing changes.  But even these legal protections didn’t change practices and opinions immediately.  Despite some improvement, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee and other cities remain about as segregated as before, income and educational gaps remain, and legal enforcement of rights remains necessary.

1964, 1965 and 1968 weren’t so long ago.  I was born in 1956 and have personal memories and experiences of the segregated south.  Anyone over 50 lived before most of those legal protections were operative, and the following generation was raised by people who had had that experience.  And children do learn from their parents and their memories.  Across the world events are shaped by historical memory -  Israel and Palestine, Armenians and Turks, Northern Ireland, Russian suspicion of the West.  Korea and Japan.   A quick look at a flag pole tells you Alabama and Mississippi aren’t forgetting the Civil War just yet.

Baltimore, Ferguson, Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Cincinnati.   100 years from now historians should write that in the early 2000s, the racial history of the United States remained a raw sore and the nation was not long removed from 400 years of racial oppression.  In 2015 many people weren’t sure those 400 years were quite over. You didn’t have to look far to find the evidence.  Most of the time people got along peacefully but, beneath that surface, much work remained to do and the memories still had power.