An American Jew to the People of Israel: An Open Letter

I was born an American. My Mother was Jewish; by Jewish law, so am I. So was my father. My family never considered ourselves anything but Jewish, though neither parent went to temple.

I was not brought up Jewish. My family celebrated Christmas. I was never Bar Mitzvah. I can’t recall ever going to temple as a child.

I came to “my people” only well into adulthood, purely of my own free choice. I began to attend temple and learned to read (but little to understand) Hebrew because my fiancée at the time so admired Judaism that she wanted to convert from Christianity. I “converted” with her.

But there was more. I “converted” also because I had long admired and respected our Jewish culture and, most of all, our love of learning and practical achievement. It was for those things—education, learning, hard work, egalitarianism, and, yes, a relentless quest for wisdom—that I came to embrace Judaism fully.

In these respects I think I’m like many American Jews, perhaps a majority. Wherever our ancestors came from—whether we are Ashkenazi or Sephardic—we are unwitting products of the Western Enlightenment. We see modern Judaism, especially Reform Judaism, as reflecting Enlightenment values.

So our basic life’s beliefs push us toward belonging to our “tribal” community. Imagine, then, how we feel when we see the State of Israel and its people seeming to abandon all that we hold dear.

Let’s start with a characteristic of Americans so deeply engrained that it has become a cliché: rooting for the underdog.

I was born three years before Israel became a nation. Long before I “converted” to my inherited religion, I admired the settlers and sabras who had built Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust. When I read Leon Uris’ Exodus, my heart filled with pride and my eyes with tears. It was as if the ancient Greek Phoenix had come to life and blessed my people.

Most, if not all, American Jews share similar stories of rising from ashes. During the pandemic, a group of my and my wife’s Jewish friends met on Zoom regularly for discussions. While discussing Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, I once asked how many discussants had ancestors who had fled pogroms there. Astonishingly, over half raised their hands.

These were Jews from all over America, who had eventually settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. And many of them were there because their ancestors had fled anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. How do you think they feel on seeing Jewish West-Bank settlers perpetrating pogroms against Israeli Arabs?

Next, let’s look at equality. If there’s any “prime directive” in America, it’s not profit (although today that comes close). It’s not even the First Amendment, whose anti-establishment clause lets Jews live here in peace among Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and others. It’s Jefferson’s credo that “all . . . are created equal.”

I know, I know. Jefferson was a world-class hypocrite who kept slaves and lived so lavishly above his means that they had to be sold to pay his debts after he died. Yet his words have long outlived him and his hypocrisy. They helped motivate our greatest war—the one against ourselves. Still they drive our long, slow, arduous trek toward a goal that no human society has fully achieved: the demise of tribalism.

When I think of that arduous journey, of MLK’s as-yet-unrealized Dream, of how hard we Americans are working to bring it closer and closer, my eyes fill with the same kind of tears that they shed on reading Exodus. How do you think I and my fellow American Jews feel when we see Israel abandoning that dream for an Apartheid society with Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens?

There’s yet another prime directive for Americans, which gets less press than equality. It’s hard work.

Except for Native Americans, slaves and their descendants, we Americans descended from immigrants. We or our ancestors had to work hard and struggle to survive, assimilate, become educated and achieve whatever measures of wealth or comfort in this country we have attained. How do you think we American Jews react when we see Israeli Haredim subsidized by their government and freed from obligations to work or to protect their nation, so they can spend their days poring over ancient scriptures that have been studied for millennia?

It’s hard for me to imagine greater apostasy against faith in the value of hard work. And the apostasy grows with every new concession and subsidy to the Haredim.

As for law, we can’t forget that the United States is founded on the “rule of law, not men.” That’s a key tenet of the Western Enlightenment. It’s why we Americans have a written Constitution and a Supreme Court to tell us what it means.

There are many paths to the rule of law. The Brits don’t have a written Constitution, but they are doing just fine. Their democracy may no longer be the mightiest, but it’s undoubtedly the longest-lived in human history. From Magna Carta in 1215 to today, it has lasted over eight centuries. Its secret elixir of longevity is deep faith in the rule of law.

Until days ago, the Israelis had their own path toward the rule of law. Their Supreme Court could countermand acts of the Israeli executive that it decided were not “reasonable.” That’s a pretty broad standard, but its breadth doesn’t really matter. What matters is that wise and learned men and women, trained in law and legal order, have some way to curb the worst excesses of unrestrained power on the part of demagogues like Netanyahu.

How do you think we American Jews view Bibi as he throws out that healthy restraint? Do you think it makes us admire Israel more, when the prosecutorial departments of our federal and several state governments have been working overtime for two years to see that nothing similar happens here?

Finally, there’s the canard that might makes right. All over Arlington and Normandy lie the graves of Americans who fought the consequences of that canard. In two of them lie my uncle and aunt—head-to-head in Arlington Cemetery. How do you think I, and millions of American Jews like me, view Israeli Jews attacking Palestinian communities and encroaching step-by-step on lands internationally recognized as Arabs’, just because they can? Where has the inveterate Jewish quest for justice and legitimacy gone?

As I’ve written elsewhere, I believe that South Africa’s once-ruling white minority made the right decision to abandon its quest (jointly with Israel!) for nuclear weapons. Instead, it opted for democracy and equality. The reasons were practical, not religious or theoretical. The white minority could never have used those weapons against the Black majority without poisoning its own land and destroying all that it had built. So it had no rational choice but to dump nukes and permit, encourage and even nurture democracy and equality.

Israel’s religious extremists may think that Israel has a choice. But does it really? It’s a tiny nation surrounded by enemies far and near: Russia, Iran, Assad’s brutal Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, the warring Libyan tribes, and hundreds of millions of Arabs balanced on a knife edge between sympathy for Palestinians and lust for Israel’s wealth and technology. (I won’t even mention the ever-ambivalent Turks.) Can Israel really buy and/or scare them all off forever? Wouldn’t it be better to build durable cooperation on a solid foundation of justice and law?

If this is what one American Jew thinks, you can bet that there are millions more like me. And you can bet that there are tens of millions of Americans who, having no connection with Israel or Judaism, think far worse of Israel and its current degeneration into theocracy.

The Old Testament depicts a lot of “smiting.” Yet Bibi and the extremists he coddles speak of the West Bank today as being part of “Judea and Samaria,” as if nothing had changed in more than two millennia.

Unfortunately, things have changed. While all that smiting was going on, our species was in its infancy. The loss of one tribe, or even its utter extinction, would have been unlikely to have affected our species.

Not so today. We have nuclear weapons and a dramatically changing global climate, possibly tipping in a self-sustaining and irreversible way. So we have the power to extinguish ourselves as a species, both in anger and by negligence. By backing itself into a corner where it sees only a nuclear way out, Israel could strike a spark that destroys our entire species. At very least, a conflict-beset Israel would devote less of its wealth and high technology to the existential threat of global warming. Therefore every human, let alone every American Jew, has a stake in Israel coming to its senses.

That’s why my heart and mind are entirely with the Israelis protesting Bibi’s power grab. That’s why I hope protestors in the Israeli military will do what they have to do to drive their good points home. That’s why I hope that Bibi Netanyahu and Itamar ben Gvir end up in an Israeli prison, where they belong, much as our own traitorous Demagogue merits imprisonment here.

This is crunch time for democracy and for our human species. A corrupt and brutal theocracy is not the answer, whether in Israel or in America. If one of our oldest cultures cannot govern all its people wisely and humanely after pursuing wisdom for 5783 years, what chances of long-term survival does our species have?

Endnote on Haredim. Haredim (singular, Haredi) are members “of any of various Orthodox Jewish sects characterized by strict adherence to the traditional form of Jewish law and rejection of modern secular culture, many of whom do not recognize the modern state of Israel as a spiritual authority.” Male Haredim often spend entire days in religious study and observance. Many have large families, which the State of Israel subsidizes as part of its devotion to Judaism.


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Vivek Ramaswamy and Ross Perot

Remember Ross Perot? He ran for president as a third-party candidate in 1992. He won almost 19% of the national popular vote, taking most of his votes away from Bush the Elder, the late George Herbert Walker Bush. As a result, Bill Clinton, a previously unknown governor of Arkansas, became president.

I will go to my grave believing that Ralph Nader did much the same thing to Al Gore in 2000. Jill Stein may have done the same to Hillary Clinton in 2016, opening the door to the worst president in our history.

I’ve seen credible quantitative arguments that neither Nader’s nor Stein’s third-party candidacy actually made the difference. But there are no such arguments for Ross Perot. His near-19% following, drawn mostly from Republican voters, was far too big to admit any doubt.

So imagine my glee on watching this PBS News Hour segment, reporting that Vivek Ramaswamy is surging in polls of Republicans, sometimes surpassing Ron DeSantis. Of course polls are notoriously unreliable, let alone this early in the campaign cycle. But Republicans are self-evidently searching for anyone other than the Demagogue and DeSantis to attract voters not trapped in an anti-woke cult.

And that’s not all. Unlike Ron DeSantis and the Demagogue himself, Vivek Ramaswamy is actually smart. He sounds smart. He speaks in complete, articulate sentences. He has a positive message, though so far indistinct and abstract. He doesn’t base his candidacy on negativity, scorn, hate and prejudice.

And unlike the Demagogue, Ramaswamy is a self-made oligarch. He didn’t start with a silver spoon, and he didn’t get wealthy by screwing the little guy. Instead, he started successful biotech and other modern firms. You don’t have to listen to him for more than five minutes to know that he won’t have to hide his college grades and test scores.

What about political substance? There, we’ll have to wait and see. In his PBS interview, Ramaswamy basically promised to follow much the same policies as the Demagogue (without specifying which). He also promised to be smarter, nicer, less nasty, less-divisive and more optimistic—promises that should not be hard to keep. But he also intends to pardon the Demagogue, at least for some of his crimes.

Ross Perot was smart, too. Like Ramaswamy, he was a highly successful entrepreneur. He had made a bundle from the transition of routine business records to computer automation. But more to the point, Ross Perot was a political savant. He identified and emphasized the overweening economic/political issue of our time: the disastrous effect of globalization on America’s factories and manufacturing workers.

Perot started in late 1992, over thirty years ago. He predicted that Americans would hear a “giant sucking sound” as American jobs flowed to Mexico and Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), then in the process of being ratified and implemented.

Never has a third-party candidate been so right about the wrongness of conventional wisdom. Never has conventional wisdom been so wrong. Global free trade does not make everybody better off. It has demonstrably hollowed out the manufacturing strength and resilience of the US and other developed nations, to the benefit of developing nations like China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India and Mexico. It has caused some 60,000 US factories to be idled or literally shipped abroad. It has let longstanding factory towns dry up and blow away. And it has led to an epidemic of “deaths of despair” among people who once did well-paid, skilled work with their hands. It jump-started the Demagogue’s proto-fascist movement.

It exaggerates little to say that American pols’ wholesale and thoughtless adoption of the simplistic economic cant of globalized free trade had much the same effect on American workers as did the Weimar inflation and Allies-forced German reparations on German workers after World War I. Just as economic deprivation caused by poor and vindictive Allied economic policies led to the rise of Adolf Hitler, so did a bum’s rush toward globalization in manufacturing, heedless of its effect on workers and nations, lead to the rise of our own Demagogue, as well as others in Europe.

Ross Perot will go down as the Cassandra of American economic history. Clearly and starkly, he identified the single biggest conceptual problem of American and Republican economic policy. But nobody listened except a few voters. Bill Clinton jumped on the globalization and deregulatory bandwagon with both feet, thereby insuring (among other big problems) that the Democratic party would ultimately have trouble keeping its traditionally working-class base. Only today are political thinkers beginning to understand how globalization nearly cost us not just our industrial might and innovative leadership, but our democracy, which is still at risk.

To my knowledge, Ross Perot offered no specific solution for the disastrous effects of globalized free trade on our skilled workers and our industrial base. It took the next thirty years just to assess the extent of the damage.

Perot’s failure to offer solutions was hardly surprising. The big winners from globalized trade have always been the oligarchs who sold our plants abroad. They became GOP mega-donors. In naming the terrible consequences of globalization so starkly, Perot was challenging the Republican party’s own economic engine. So his campaign was doomed from the start.

It’s hard to see how any candidate who challenges GOP economic orthodoxy so strongly can avoid a similar fate. The oligarchs who now fund and control the Republican Party will never support a challenger to the wrongheaded policies that made them rich and, at the same time, maimed our skilled workers and hollowed out our nation’s industrial base.

So, as smart as he appears to be, Vivek Ramaswamy’s political ambitions seem to be doomed to failure, like Perot’s. He can be a spoiler, nothing more.

Yet in spoiling the Demagogue’s push to subvert our democracy and bring Mussolini-style fascism to America, Ramaswamy can perform an even greater service to America and humanity than did Perot. Every small-d democrat and patriot in America should give serious thought to voting for him in the Republican primaries. Capital-D Democrats should even consider switching their party registration to vote for him in Republican primaries. They also serve who only thwart would-be tyrants.


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What Writers and Actors Want: “A Piece of the Action”

As the son of a long-deceased Hollywood screenwriter, I have to comment on the joint labor strike of writers and actors now making headlines.

To me, the mainstream reporters covering the strike seem ignorant of the basic economics of “show business.” Perhaps their ignorance arises from deliberate obfuscation by the B-school grads who, as executives, control the “industry.” But whatever the reason, I have yet to see in the mainstream press a single glimmer of understanding of the business’ uniqueness or how it has rewarded its participants for ages. So, if interested, read on.

Show business is a boom-and-bust business like no other. The best analogy in “real” industry might be drilling “wildcat” oil wells. You might strike a “gusher” on your first hole. Or you might drill a mighty field all summer and come up “dry.”

The same is true of shows. Everyone knows what the words “hit” and “flop” mean. But few think of the consequences to the people who work on them. A “hit” means a better reputation, more future work, more pride in self, a higher future salary, and—if our profit-grubbing business world were just and fair—more money. A “flop” means none of the above. This simple picture applies to writers and actors, and to the studios and (now) software firms that make the shows.

It’s hard for workers in other industries to appreciate how fickle and random the public’s favor can seem. Reviewers may laud a new show as a modern marvel, a “must see,” even better than Shakespeare, but the public may shun it. The eighteenth sequel of “Spiderman,” a previously reliable franchise, may flop because: (1) the public has tired of the franchise, (2) the latest sequel is not up to par, (3) a rival blockbuster captures the public’s imagination, or (4) changes in the public mood, or even in the news, tarnish the franchise or make it redundant or unpopular.

At the end of the day, the only reliable measure of the value of a show is how many people actually watch it. In the old days, that meant sales of physical tickets, books or magazines. Today, it may mean sales of streaming or copies sent over the air or over the Internet.

But the essence is always the same: how many individuals in the possible “audience” actually enjoy the show? The more do, the more the show’s actual human and economic value, and the bigger the pot of money (in theory) that writers and actors might share.

Despite the increasingly rapid twists and turns of technology, none of this is new. The first copyright law was the old English Statute of Anne, enacted in 1710. By giving writers the exclusive right to publish their works, it enabled them to charge for the enjoyment and enlightenment their works brought, the more for each patron. The custom of booksellers paying authors “royalties,” i.e., a portion of the price of each book sold, arose quickly thereafter.

So the fundamental economic concept in the creative industries is sharing in the value that a show brings to its audience. That’s what writers, actors and producers mean when they talk of “a piece of the action.” They mean a piece of the economic pie created by a new work of human imagination and creativity that never existed before. If the work is a hit, the pie can be rich. If it’s a flop, it can be shriveled or non-existent. And no one can tell in advance which is which; the reliability of predictions is worse in show business than in election polling.

The workers whose labor most contributes to a show’s success are its writers and actors, and, in the case of animated movies, its animators. The writers’ imagination brings the work to life out of nothing. The actors (or animators) make the imaginary characters and plots real. Without either, there is no show. Yet in the three centuries since authors first started earning royalties on books, securing a “piece of the action” has been a hard slog for both.

The modern struggle began as early as movies. In the early days, a studio would hire my Dad to write a screenplay, sometimes from another author’s novel or story. He’d worked for a flat fee, like a laborer, and get no “piece of the action,” no matter how popular the movie turned out to be. As for actors, they seldom earned a piece of the action; the more famous ones just got paid higher salaries, sometimes even exorbitant ones.

If memory serves, this was my Dad’s situation after working on the screenplay for the noted film noir “Laura.” It was a big hit, and I believe it’s still running on streaming services today, after nearly eighty years. Yet, as far as I’m aware, neither my Dad nor his family collected a share of the ongoing revenue from this classic film. Fortunately, his best friend was a lawyer. After my Dad’s reputation grew, he was able to negotiate a “piece of the action” from some of his later films. And his Guild helped him later secure residuals (essentially, royalties for later TV showings) for some of the TV shows he wrote.

And so it has gone with every new generation of technology after movies. The engineers find new ways for audiences to enjoy creative products, and the studio executives grab for exclusive rights to the revenue that comes from the new technologies.

The money pot is ever up for grabs. The executives, who run the show, have the first grab. They want the writers and actors, like all their employees, to be hired hands, content with wages and not much else. (Writers and actors work mostly on projects, aka “shows”—sometimes on a seasonal basis—so they don’t usually get vacations, sick days, and other benefits like the rest of us.)

So what’s wrong with treating writers and actors as hired hands? I can think of three things. First, in these professions there’s not just a right way and a wrong way to do the job, but an infinite number of different ways. Along that vast continuation lies the difference between a flop, a hit, and a smash hit. When a writer or an actor helps make a smash hit, she or he should be rewarded appropriately, the more so because it doesn’t happen very often.

Second, writing and acting are not just matters of basic skill. They’re matters of imagination and finesse, in which details make all the difference. In contrast, in wildcat drilling, the management and petroleum geologists decide where to drill. And if the previous several wells were “gushers,” the next one nearby is likely to be, too. There’s no analogue in oil drilling to an audience’s discernment or fickleness.

Third, a noted writer or actor—a “star”—can draw an audience all on his or her own, just on a name. What wildcat driller can draw oil out of the ground simply with his or her reputation?

Three centuries ago, English society and Parliament decided that creative people deserve to have a “piece of the action” for their creative work, and not just be treated like hired hands. It started with royalties for books. And for each new generation of creative minds and each new kind of technology, creative people had to fight this battle anew.

This is what the writers’ and actors’ strike is all about. This is why the writers and actors are striking together: their complaints are similar, and they are age old.

Of course there are lines to be drawn. Not every jump-in writer who repairs a single awkward scene deserves a screen credit or a piece of the action. Not every bit actor does, who flits across the screen for a minute or two. That’s what guild negotiations are for.

As for risk taking, it’s true that writers and actors don’t give their salaries back if the show flops. But shouldn’t the balance between risk-taking and certainty, i.e., the balance of risk, be up to them? Some may want the security of a fixed salary, while others may prefer to reach for the upside. No one is demanding that the writers and actors collectively grab all of the upside; what they want is just a fair “piece” of the action.

Today writers and actors provide the same ineffable creativity that they did three centuries ago. The give audiences the same thrills and food for thought and introspection. For centuries the business world has found ways to compensate them proportionately to the joy, insight and value they give their audiences. Their just compensation is proportional to the audiences they serve.

And for much of those three centuries, the business people who arrange their opportunities have sought to keep the big pie, and the unlimited upside, entirely to themselves. Technology doesn’t change the picture, except perhaps for the possibility of AI taking an actor’s image, voice and likeness and propagating them electonically in new ways. Then, pray tell, who is the “creator”: the actor, the writer, or the computer programmer who makes it happen?

This, to me, is the sole “new” question that current technology poses. The rest is just the age-old effort of people who control the money to more completely exploit those without. You don’t have to be the son of a screenwriter—or an inveterate union man or woman—to know which side to be on.


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Hope Means Calling Out Bigotry

[NOTE TO READERS: I first wrote the following essay in October 2017, in the ninth month of the Demagogue’s presidency. But apparently I never published it. Another essay entirely now appears under the same title I then gave this one, namely, “Why this White Geezer is Looking for Black and Brown Pols to Support.”

I don’t remember why I chose to rewrite this one almost completely. But on rereading it, I now see some ideas that are even more relevant now than then. So I’m publishing it here, with a few minor revisions, mostly to reflect the passage of time. It suggests that Republicans are not the only ones who lack courage in calling out evil.]

One big theory tries to explain why Donald Trump became president. It holds that America’s middle class, consisting largely of white skilled workers, had been left behind by automation, “corporate governance,” and globalization.

The good jobs and comfortable, secure lives that members of this class once enjoyed had evaporated, along with many of their factories and factory towns. Their disappointment and distress turned to reckless anger, which fueled Trump’s rise to power. At the same time, their despair led to our national opioid epidemic. The two phenomena—reckless anger and self-destructive despair—were effects of a single cause: economic isolation and ruin.

I call this view the “economic resentment” theory of Trump’s rise. I’ve endorsed it on this blog in several essays (See 1, 2 and 3), including one (the third) that tries to explain Brexit similarly. This theory supports an analogy—albeit still a weak one—to the anger of German workers, crushed by the Weimar Hyperinflation and post-World-War-I collective punishment of Germany, who fueled Adolf Hitler’s rise.

Unfortunately, this theory has some holes. The most glaring and obvious is that little Trump did while in office—and only one thing he had ever promised—had any rational hope of alleviating the economic causes of our middle class’ anger. Depriving millions of affordable health insurance, cutting taxes on the rich, deporting undocumented, largely Hispanic workers and building a Wall to keep more from coming in—none of these would bring lost jobs back. Nor would stemming the flow of legal immigrants, the “brain drain” in our nation’s favor that gave us or raised men who founded or fueled Amazon, Apple, Google and Tesla.

The single thing that Trump even promised that might actually have mitigated our skilled workers’ pain was a massive and much-needed program to rebuild and improve our nation’s infrastructure. But Trump put that program on the back burner. He even seemed to favor selling our infrastructure to the rich, which would further isolate and impoverish our once-middle class. Yet as these facts became clearer and clearer, and as the good jobs that massive infrastructure repair could bring became more and more illusory, Trump’s consistent support by a fraction of our voters held firm.

So the economic resentment theory is, at best, only partially true. America’s workers have had their delusions and false enthusiasms from time to time, often sparked by demagogues like Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Rush Limbaugh and Fox. But they aren’t stupid. Trump’s hard-core support failed to falter as his incompetence, ineffectiveness and utter neglect of workers’ real interests became crystal clear.

So what accounts for the hardness of Trump’s core support, even as realistic hope of his bringing good jobs back faded to black? We need another, better theory.

Ta-Nehisi Coates gave us one. He’s a brilliant thinker and writer—the most recent addition to our nation’s fast-waning group of public intellectuals. In a must-read article in The Atlantic magazine, he tried to explain the inexplicable.

The title of Coates’ article hints at his theory: “The First White President.” Coates wrote that Trump’s presidency is, in large part, a product of the perception of loss of privilege, power and position among our white middle class. Its members see people of other races, nationalities and creeds as rising while they fall. The result is a tribal anger that can’t be assuaged by economic promises or programs alone. Trump rose, Coates reasoned, in large measure on the back of white tribal resentment.

Coates’ theory proved hard to accept for many. But facts are stubborn things. We had a president who is all emotion and little Reason. He rarely gave reasons, let alone convincing ones, for anything he did. He changed his capricious mind often.

In his single term in office, he did little with the faintest rational probability of alleviating the economic misery of those who voted for him. On the contrary, he did a lot that had a realistic prospect of increasing their misery, by enriching the already rich and failing to reduce globalization. So something other than economic rationalism on the part of skilled workers hurt by automation, “corporate governance,” and globalization must have been responsible for the hardness of his core support.

In 2017, Richard H. Thaler won the Nobel Prize in economics for founding the field of behavioral economics. He theorized that we can explain much of the bizarre and previously inexplicable in modern economics just by dropping the chief assumption of classical economics: that people are rational economic actors.

Even when handling our own money, we humans are psychological, not logical. That’s why financial markets endure bubbles and stampedes. If that’s true when handling one’s own money, how much more true is it when handling our votes? And how much more likely is it when demagogues and propaganda organs as skilled as Trump and Fox seek, every day, to magnify the irrational in our thinking?

Coates’ proffered reason may not be the dominant reason for the otherwise inexplicable durability of Trump’s support, but it seems to be an important one. Nevertheless, I don’t think Coates’ hypothesis alone adequately explains the political whiplash of the Obama-Trump years.

Eight years before, the same nation that put Trump in the White House had put Barack Obama there. We had put him there not just by a fluke of the Electoral College, but by clear and uncontested majorities in both the Electoral College and the national popular vote. We did so again in 2012.

So what happened in the interim? Did millions of white skilled workers suddenly wake up and grab their white privilege as if grabbing their wallets? Did Rush’s and Fox’ vile propaganda, which had been running for well over a generation, suddenly reach critical mass? Coates’ theory seems to suggest that the presidency of a half-Black man and the GOP’s incessant opposition and demagoguery did cause it to reach critical mass.

That’s certainly possible. But we are analyzing small effects here. We are talking about shifts of 2% or so in the national electorate and somewhat larger shifts—maybe 4%—in the so-called battleground states. When analyzing such subtle shifts, we must probe every corner, including the less explored ones.

One such corner, I think, has been badly neglected in our political analysis. This is the motivation of minority voters. We are a generation and a half away from a majority-minority electorate. Yet many pols and their analysts still act as if the only things that matter in elections are the white Christian majority and its factions, including its fringe groups.

Let’s be honest. I was as surprised and pleased by Barack Obama’s election in 2007 as most. I have written an essay describing my emotional reaction as I sat on the couch with my now-ex wife and watched his electoral votes go over the top. If an old white guy like me felt unbridled joy and vindication so strongly, I can only imagine how strongly every African-American felt, after four centuries of disrespect and oppression.

What made that stunning victory possible was hope. The hope was not confined to African-Americans. It spread, by analogy, to the Latino-American community, to the then-barely-recognized Muslim-American community, and to every traditional American who roots for the underdog. That hope drew minority voters to the polls who had never voted before. It turned several red states blue.

Many, if not most, of the new minority voters recognized the significance of white voters’ support, in numbers high enough to elect America’s first minority president. That gave them unprecedented hope and brought them to the polls in unprecedented numbers. This phenomenon was particularly evident in 2017, as Obama won primary after primary, letting skepticism give way to hope.

That, I think, is the winning combination for progressives for the immediate future, until 2043. We must form a grand coalition of progressive, egalitarian whites and similarly-minded minorities: African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims and Jews. We must stick together for the greater good.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. I don’t for a moment believe that either Bill or Hillary is a racist. But both played the race card in political campaigns—Bill with Sister Souljah, and Hillary in several ways that I have described in two essays (See 1 and 2). It goes without saying that their opponents did, too. Bush Senior had his racist Willie Horton ad. McCain’s campaign against Obama was so outrageous that McCain (an ever-honorable man) apologized after Obama’s election. Romney had his talk about “takers,” which, as I have noted, he got exactly backwards.

For people living in a cocoon of white privilege, all this was no big deal. It was just a few more bits of dirty, disgusting political sleaze in a cynical age. It was yet more evidence that nothing in our celebrity-obsessed society is sacred—not even our most basic credo of human equality.

But for minorities considering whether to bother to register and vote for the first (or an occasional) time, it may have been a big turn-off. If we white progressives want their votes, we are going to have to learn both to walk the walk and talk the talk, and to do so consistently.

Unfortunately, we haven’t done so. We’ve allowed the Black Lives Matter movement to become a political football, grossly mischaracterized in the press. We’ve allowed Mexican and Islamic immigrants to be vilified relentlessly as dangerous criminals or terrorists. Instead, we should have declared, loudly, clearly and repeatedly, that Black Lives Matter is a courageous quest for reform of a violent, bigoted, out-of-control policing system, and that the vast majority of Mexican and Muslim immigrants are peaceful and productive. And we should have kept shouting these truths from the rooftops until we got hoarse.

None of the candidates we considered to face Trump did this. Not Hillary, not Bernie, not Elizabeth, and not even Cory, who is Black himself. None gave the Black Lives Matter movement the public respect it deserves, or expressed a fraction of the outrage at Trump’s bigotry that it deserves.

In the Democrats’s 2016 National Convention, Cory Booker, who once ran into a burning building to save a woman’s life, blew his big speech with a lifeless, abstract delivery that resembled a college term paper. The only one who dared to give a punchy, moving speech was Michelle, who wasn’t running for anything. This is courage? This is leadership?

So what can we white progressives do? We have, it seems, a bunch of candidates without spines on issues of equality, bigotry and racial justice. Unless they catch the wave and change, they will fail to inspire the hope among minorities that we progressives need to flip key states from red to blue.

One response to this dilemma, I think, is to nurture, support and vote for progressive minority candidates. It’s a sad fact of life, but it’s true: they may not have to talk the talk because they carry their credentials in their identity. (Just so did Barack Obama motivate many minority voters with his unusual name and background, although he was as cautious in speaking about race as almost any progressive white pol.)

What true progressives want is candidates who make things work, respect science, are suspicious of Wall Street, want our immigration doors to remain open and the global “brain drain” to continue in our favor, believe in giving those who are down a helping hand, and will be ever-faithful to our national credo that all are created equal. Perhaps minority candidates meeting this description have the best chance of being elected, especially in areas of strong minority presence, because they foster hope among the previously hopeless. And hope is our most powerful emotion, surpassed only by fear and love.

One last point. The GOP and Trump are brilliant at only a few things. Among them are distraction and misdirection. Like teenage boys in a macho club or proto-gang, they deride the things they most fear. Dubya and McConnell derided the community organizing skill that gave President Obama his start in politics. Sarah Palin derided “that hopey, changey thing” that put him in the White House.

As for hope and change, won’t the one lead to the other? Give our oppressed minorities hope, by nominating candidates that look like them, and they and we progressive whites can form a winning coalition that can persist until majority-minority demographics make it permanent around 2043.

Similar reasoning applies to the NFL players’ “take a knee” protests, made while our national anthem played before football games. Those protests were among the most quiet, respectful and dignified that I have ever seen. What could be more moving than Black and white players silently kneeling together, while our national anthem plays, and then dutifully going to work?

Those protests didn’t delay the games or harm anyone. They offended no one but bigots and the duped. But they gave people like me, who have little or no interest in professional sports, hope that some day we will cure the evils that the players were respectfully protesting. How much greater was the hope they gave the victims of those evils?

That’s why such peaceful, dignified protests should continue and expand. That’s why Colin Kaepernick is a national hero who someday, like Rosa Parks, will be recognized as such. The hope that peaceful and dignified protests inspire is what scares the bigots and the bosses by urging the victims of bigotry to act. That’s why demagogues work so hard to mischaracterize peaceful protests as crime.

The owners couldn’t fire all the NFL players, or there would have been no more games. So the more the players stuck together, the more influence their “taking a knee” had. Their kneeling sent a gentle signal suggesting a grand coalition of white and minority progressives that could change this nation forever.

Today progressives have a short history of heady victories. With minority support fueled by hope, we put a half-Black progressive in the White House for eight years. In my view he was our most inspiring president since JFK, maybe since FDR.

With that hope, we can do something similar again. And again. We can turn the solid “red” South blue and, by so doing, take back our Congress. Then we can change this nation and the world forever.

White progressives can help form this dominant political coalition. All we need do is to ignore our white privilege, put it on the shelf, and support the most skilled and progressive minority candidates. That coalition can last until the deluded and distracted among us whites wake up, along with the less hopeful among minorities, to a better, richer, more equal nation in a new world. We can make this new coalition last until majority-minority demographics, estimated for 2043, finally make bigotry politically ineffective.

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Thinking like Engineers about College Admissions

Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film “The Fablemans” has a good scene about engineering. While still a child, Spielberg tries to make a cowboy film, using fake guns that don’t even shoot blanks. He runs the film and sees how lame it looks. So he takes the spool of film—yes, a narrow strip of real film in those days—and pokes holes in it right in the barrels of the shooting guns. The projector’s bright light, briefly shining through, makes the fake guns look like real firearms flashing.

His father, a brilliant but phlegmatic computer engineer, approves. “Now you’re thinking like an engineer!” he says.

What do engineers do? They use the matter of our physical world, the laws of science, and their ingenuity and common sense to build things that make life better and easier. They solve problems with their minds and hands, using real, tangible stuff, not vague abstractions. They both invent and make old things work better. When things don’t work, or don’t work well enough, they fix them. They don’t waste time or effort on blame. (For a brief look at what a breath of fresh air an engineering approach can add to our political dystopia, watch this clip of a grid engineer discussing the power grid’s discontents and future in Texas.)

Engineers built this nation. From the canals and locks in the Northeast, through the railroads, interstate highways, jet planes and airports, to space travel, television, the cable network, and now the Internet, engineers have made our nation strong, prosperous and great. And American engineers made, perfected or best exploited the vast majority of the Twentieth Century’s great inventions.

As I’ve outlined once before, our Founders were unabashed social engineers. They weren’t mere rebels who wanted independence from England just so they could do their own thing. They dreamed of building a better society out of the ruins of history. They studied the democracies of ancient Greece and Rome. They poured over the then-recent history of monarchies, the rise of parliaments, and the Enlightenment. They absorbed the findings of nascent science in Europe.

With all this knowledge, they sought to build a society that had never existed before. Well aware of human failings and their dismal historical impact, they sought to “fix” them with checks and balances. They sought to build institutions that could weather, if not overcome, them.

What they built is far from perfect. But they tried to improve the human condition, to make modern democracies more durable than the long-vanished ones in ancient Greece and Rome. They recognized the imperfection of their own work in the preamble to our Constitution, making “a more perfect Union” their very first goal. They knew that everything our species does can be improved.

But one thing they got right from the start. In our Declaration of Independence, they wrote that “all . . . are created equal.”

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that, it was more a wish than a fact. By keeping slaves, he and many other Founders observed it in the breach. It took our bloodiest war ever, and over a century thereafter, to begin to set things right.

But now we know that Jefferson and the rest got it right, despite their hypocrisy. We know with the certainty of Nobel-Prize-winning science that all human DNA is 99.9% identical. Our small differences in skin color, facial features, hair and other bits of outward appearance reflect no predictable difference in character or intelligence. What matters is how people are raised and educated, how they are treated, and how their physical and economic circumstances affect them while growing up. We now know how much “human capital” requires nurturing.

We also know that early-childhood education—so-called “pre-K”—is the most important single social determinant of a child’s future. And at least one governor, Wes Moore of Maryland, has begun to put that knowledge into effect, with the help of a compliant legislature. That, dear readers, is social engineering worthy of our flawed but innovative Founders.

And so we come to affirmative action and the Supreme Court’s recent-decisions in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina. There the court stuck down race-based preferences in college admissions. Since then, a whole lot of good people have worried that we’re going to forfeit diversity in higher education, especially in the Ivy League schools that punch way above their weight in national influence. But are we really?

I think not. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

If the truth be told, we are in this fix because those who decide on college admissions got lazy. Over decades, they relied on standardized multiple-choice tests as a basis for vital “gateway” decisions.

No, they didn’t make final admissions decisions entirely on the basis of test results. But they used them for screening. It often worked like this: (a) higher scorers fell into an “automatic admit” category; (b) low scorers were “automatic rejects”; and (c) the rest got a more complete review. (I know because I once served on an admissions committee at the law school where I taught.)

It’s now well known that students from marginalized communities do worse than others on standardized tests for a variety of reasons. The reasons include: poor parenting, poor early-childhood education, poor grammar schools, poor junior-high schools, poor high schools, poor nutrition, crime, poverty, neighborhood pollution, poor health care, and the inability to afford the training and “coaching” for standardized tests that middle-class and wealthy parents can give their kids.

But cause and effect just start there. With all these causes and their obvious effects, it was inevitable, from the very start, that kids from marginalized minority communities would do worse “on the numbers” than white kids. It followed that affirmative action would let some white kids—and some Asians—who got higher scores be excluded.

That, in essence, is the basis for all the lawsuits and all the sturm und drang about affirmative action since it started. The excluded white and Asian kids’ parents went all tribal, with predictably dismal social and political results. All this was hardly unforeseeable.

But what was the fundamental cause of this debacle? Admissions deans and committees hadn’t been doing their jobs. At least they hadn’t been doing them well.

Sixty years ago, MLK dreamed of Black people being judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” How in hell do standardized college-entrance tests assess character?

During my young and single days, I began to feel that I wasn’t meeting smart enough women. So I joined the high-IQ group Mensa. It was easy for me: as a pack rat, I had kept all my standardized test results from grammar-school on. I sent them in and, bingo, became a Mensa member.

But the Mensa social events I began to attend were disappointing. I soon concluded that most Mensa members had one predominant thing in common: high test scores. Many made those scores the focus of their personal pride and self-image. More than a few had little else to show for themselves. Many had poor social skills.

After repeated sad events, I abandoned Mensa. Yet the very same thing—standardized test scores—have been the focus of college admissions for two generations, albeit now in decline.

So how would engineers fix college admissions and maintain diversity? First, they would make character a key factor in admissions, as important as, or more important than, high grades and test scores. Second, they would pick admission deans who are committed to assess every applicant as a whole person. Third, they would totally revamp how admissions committees work.

In many institutions of higher learning, serving on an admissions committee is a thankless chore. Often it’s left to untenured and low-publishing professors who are not doing more “important” work. Is it any wonder that unseasoned and less productive people given a thankless chore have turned to standardized test scores as an excuse to avoid the hard work of effective and fair selection? If the truth be told, the entire field of college admissions could use a revamp. Higher education, both public and private, is a priceless societal resource. Its entrants ultimately determine not just the reputation and ultimately the wealth of the colleges and universities that they attend, but the progress of the society that they serve.

In our generational competition with China, one of the most important factors will be the number and quality of our graduates from college and graduate school. So why should we force reluctant recruits with no experience and little or no interest to pick students for our schools? our best schools?

As a one-time engineer, I would replace this reluctant, half-hearted, inexperienced crew with trained professional staff who make picking winners their whole careers. Ideally, they would be well paid or otherwise rewarded. Together, they would build a whole minor profession, meeting annually in professional conferences to discuss their methods, successes and failures. Colleges would bid competitively for them in the same way they now bid for athletes.

A proper admission process would also exploit current technology that lets every applicant have a full virtual “interview,” at length. Imagine two half-hour interviews by a whole panel of seasoned assessors of character, each followed by full discussion among them. “Inefficient,” you say? But how much more inefficient is mis-spending an “elite” college education, which now costs upwards of a quarter million dollars just for fees and maintenance, on the wrong person?

Would an emphasis on character and the whole person help continue our quest for diversity in higher education? I think so. After all, the progeny of rich, powerful and entitled people are not generally known for their kindness, generosity, or empathy, or for their perseverance and determination against hardship, which many have never known. Wealth, luxury, ease and privilege are not generally known for spurring ingenuity and inventiveness, let alone enlightenment. In general, comfort and wealth provide little incentive for improving the state of things, which is what engineers do.

As for so-called “legacy” admissions, they can never achieve “justice” or diversity in selection, let alone promote the excellence of an educational institution. A story from my first week as a student at Harvard Law School is indicative.

A refugee from poorly funded science (with a Ph.D.), I found my new law-school colleagues extremely bright and articulate. But there was one notable exception. As I talked with one white student for about five minutes, my mind began screaming silently, “How did he get in here!!??” I must have found some more diplomatic way to pose the question, for he told me his dad had endowed a building.

There are at least three things wrong with this picture. First, quite likely (I didn’t follow him), this fellow would have flunked out. If he graduated, he would have had trouble finding a good job, except perhaps in his dad’s business. In either case, he would have deprived a more deserving student of a place, perhaps even a hard-scrabble marginalized one. And his flunking out or graduating would have done nothing for the school, its prestige, or its societal impact. Surely a law school with a multibillion-dollar endowment need not resort to this sort of counterproductive donor coddling and, in the process, help entrench an anti-meritocratic aristocracy.

So our Supreme Court’s legal prohibition of admissions based on standardized test scores and race is an invitation. It invites our institutions of higher education and our government to cooperate in improving a currently abysmal process. It beckons assessment of applicants based not just on their superficial characteristics and their ability to do well on standardized tests, but on their whole character, lifetime history, accomplishments, and especially their ability to succeed in adversity. It bids us to improve a process that has mostly been an afterthought in college administration, which now lacks professionalism, depth and sensible standards consistent with current research.

At the end of the day, lifetime promise in student applicants is a bit like pornography, as described by the late Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. You “know it when you see it,” but only when you take the trouble to know the whole person. Practice, personal growth of the assessors and professionalism can help. So can judicious application of statistics, but only if repeatedly verified, as all good science requires.

If the Supreme Court’s decision can help us build systems to keep from turning out more graduates like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Goetz, Jim Jordan and Ron DeSantis, it will have served its purpose well. Though a graduate of Harvard Law School, DeSantis seems unaware that our First Amendment prohibits government from telling people what to read, teach and think. A person deserving of that kind of education ought to learn better, and the admissions process ought to weed those who can’t out. At least it ought to weed out those prone to ignore or subvert fundamental principles of our society in their lust for fame and power.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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