E-Pluribus | March 27, 2024
Common ground fighting poverty; civilizational rot in higher education; and what about jawboning?
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Josh Bandoch: When It Comes To Fighting Poverty, We Actually Agree On A Lot
The government’s role in reducing poverty has been fiercely debated for decades, but Josh Bandoch at Discourse Magazine argues there’s more agreement than we might realize. Not all solutions involve the government, and even those that do can include government using its power to remove obstacles to prosperity, not simply handing out money. Bandoch looks at work, education and housing, among other things, and how our society can better provide opportunities to access these keys to a more secure way of life.
For far too long – since at least the 1960s, when the War on Poverty’s expansive and expensive social welfare policies really hit their stride – we’ve mistakenly thought the answer to poverty was to spend more money. Since then, we have spent more than $12 trillion to help the poor by establishing and expanding programs like Medicaid and food stamps to help the truly needy. And yet poverty rates have stubbornly remained between 11% and 15%. Chicago’s poverty rate of 17.2% today is significantly higher than the city’s 12% rate was in 1960.
Worse still, the War on Poverty has become a war on dignity. Policies intended to alleviate poverty have stripped millions of Americans of purpose by disincentivizing work.
[. . .]
From left-of-center think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, Urban Institute and Progressive Policy Institute, to right-of-center public policy groups such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Alliance for Opportunity, there exists remarkable consensus on how to empower individuals to rise out of poverty and into prosperity.
This consensus centers on seven “macro” solutions to poverty:
1) Empower people through the dignity of work.
2) Prepare individuals for the future of work through education and workforce development. (This issue is widely overlooked in the research on poverty.)
3) Remove barriers to work, especially occupational licensing and burdensome regulations.
4) Ensure the educational system prepares students for careers, particularly in industries that need more workers, through effective workforce development programs such as apprenticeships.
5) Restructure safety net programs to empower people to rise out of poverty, including through rigorous program evaluation.
6) Promote affordable housing, including through zoning reform.
7) Promote family formation and stability, including by making it easier for people to follow the “success sequence” of education, job, marriage and then children.
While there are certainly disagreements about how to execute these solutions, this is greatly overshadowed by the overlap in approaches and the notable consensus that exists around the solutions themselves.
[. . .]
Intuitively, we know that if you work hard and earn a living, you probably won’t be poor, especially once you establish yourself in the workforce.
[. . .]
But we need to do more than just encourage people to work or even provide good jobs. That’s because the nature of work is constantly changing due to innovation, technology, economic shifts and other developments. Given this constant churn, it is vital that workers be prepared to meet these changes so we don’t “solve” poverty today, only to see it reemerge later because workers’ skills cannot sustain their careers throughout an ever-evolving economy.
[. . .]
Education is also key. With an excellent education, students get the tools they need for empowerment and a pathway to prosperity. But we need an educational system that puts careers and skills, not degrees, first. That requires both better schools and a new policy direction. Sadly, public schools are failing poor students all over the country, including in my hometown of Chicago.
[. . .]
The poor and disadvantaged also need to be able to put a good roof over their heads. That is why ensuring affordable housing is another key to defeating poverty. Unaffordable housing is due in large part to bad housing policies. Fortunately, there is agreement across the ideological spectrum about one particularly bad policy that needs reform: zoning and local land use laws.
Read the whole thing.
Tal Fortgang & Jonathan Deluty: Academia Versus Civilization
The response of some academics to the Israel-Hamas War has created a moment of clarity. At Quillette, Tal Fortgang and Jonathan Deluty write that those who wish to undermine Western civilization have exposed themselves in obvious if unintentional ways.
[A] focus on the American university is warranted, because what happens on campus shapes our nation’s character and ethical instincts in sustained ways. For years, conventional wisdom held the opposite: young people always go through radical phases; they eventually grow out of it or leave it behind when they graduate; serious people could never take these ideas seriously enough for them to take hold. Both latter dismissals of the campus problem are wrong. They fail to account for the anti-civilizational turn campus radicalism has taken, and how liberals in the West are defenseless against its calls for “liberation” and “justice.”
[. . .]
The mistaken belief that recent graduates are passionate advocates for civil rights and tolerance rather than adherents to a foreign and incompatible morality has allowed the gatekeepers to be bamboozled and bullied into handing over the keys, almost without resistance. Young ideologues now wear hollowed-out institutions—for-profit, non-profit, and government—as skinsuits. What happens on campus does not stay on campus, because universities currently function as seminaries of an aggressively proselytizing theology, the onward march of which is not easily resisted by complacent liberals and quickly becomes orthodoxy wherever it takes root.
[. . .]
[W]hile civilized people around the world consider eliminating Israel’s sovereignty over its territory a non-starter because, in practice, it would mean the death and exile of millions of Jews, adherents to decolonialist radicalism are encouraged by that fact. In the meantime, they will continue to support, as a central part of their worldview, fanatical efforts to make Israel’s continued existence as painful as possible. While civilization depends on categorically rejecting lawless violence, decolonialism lionizes it with the claim that obedience to unjust laws allows the powerful to perpetuate their oppression of the powerless.
The activists may have trained their eyes on Israel for now, but in no way is this view limited to that conflict. To the contrary, anti-Israel activists frequently call for revolution in the West. Chants and activist materials call on the faithful to “globalize the intifada” and weave strings-on-corkboard conspiracy theories about the connections between capitalism, political liberalism, and Zionism. Witness, for example, a student at Columbia’s School of Social Work admiringly quoting Mao at a Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine event after October 7: “[Hamas] showed us that with creativity, determination, and combined strength, the masses can accomplish great feats, a fact we have seen in every heroic struggle for liberation from Vietnam to Afghanistan. As Mao says, ‘Dare to struggle, dare to win.’”
Read it all.
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression: What is jawboning? And does it violate the First Amendment?
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) exists to help secure, not surprisingly, individual rights and expression. The Founders of this country made it clear that the government can be a threat to freedom by making the First Amendment a bulwark against that power. While outright censorship is often obvious, other forms can be more subtle, and FIRE addresses one such method: jawboning.
One of the most pernicious methods [of censorship] is for the government to attack or pressure not the speaker of disfavored ideas, but those who give the speaker an audience and a platform. If the government limits or even eliminates your ability to publicly voice a message, then you’re effectively being silenced even if no one is putting their hands over your mouth.
This form of indirect censorship is called jawboning, and it’s a serious threat to free speech — particularly when it’s directed at expression on social media, where much of our discourse now occurs.
As Will Duffield wrote in a paper for the Cato Institute, “jawboning is the use of official speech to inappropriately compel private action.”
Think of a grocery store owner who is visited by two large, intimidating men wearing suits.
“Nice store you’ve got here,” the men tell the owner. “It’d be a shame if something happened to it. For a small fee, we can make sure your store stays safe.”
[. . .]
Today, jawboning usually refers to the government using its power — or the threat of it — to bully individuals, institutions, or organizations into doing its censorship bidding when it’s legally prohibited from directly compelling them to do so.
Imagine the president of the United States demanding that social media companies — private entities with their own First Amendment protections — begin monitoring their platforms for “misinformation” and “disinformation,” and removing the accounts of those responsible for disseminating it. And imagine this president’s administration intimating in private and flat-out announcing in public that, given the pervasive and harmful nature of this mis- and disinformation, they are considering making changes to Section 230 — a law that protects publishers from liability for what users say on their platforms.
The threat is palpable, and the social media companies are all but compelled to oblige.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
This tweet from Benjamin Weingarten introduces a much longer thread analyzing a 60 Minutes (CBS) segment on X (Twitter) and “misinformation.” Click for the whole thing.
Via Steve McGuire, Harvard versus Vanderbilt handling student protestors occupying school buildings:
And finally, from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who would make a good Censor-in-Chief? (click for video)