Racial Profiling

I was going to write a response to Brad's comment on the 'Why Do They Hate Us?' post, but I decided that the topic was worth a post of its own. In that post, I wrote in passing that I hoped racial profiling wouldn't be necessary to stop terrorism. In his comment, Brad suggested that we should do racial profiling if it works. So, I wondered, does it?

To all outward appearances, it certainly seems as though it should. To take the reductio ad absurdum argument, let's say a flight has two passengers, and we're going to search one. One is Betty Lundgren, a 75-year-old grandmother of six from Indiana. The other is Abdul Mohammad Hussein, a 22-year-old student from Saudi Arabia. Hmmm, who should we search?

Part of the problem, of course, is that over 99.9% of all men with Abdul, Mohammad, or Hussein in their names are not terrorists, so to have a decent chance of catching those who are by racial/ethnic profiling, we'd have to search a very large percentage of them, which isn't practical. So, we can search Abdul, but we're very likely not to find anything. I do, absolutely, think it's stupid to search Betty. Doing that, I think, is pointlessly P.C., just to show that we're not profiling, we're searching everyone. Speaking as a man, I'm perfectly content if 95% of their random searches are performed on men.

After thinking about this question, it seems to me that there are two types of situations in which racial profiling might be used: to catch terrorists on international flights, and to catch criminals domestically. I find that domestically speaking, I'm absolutely opposed to it, even if it does catch more criminals than would be caught if it wasn't used. One reason is that profiling isn't going to catch violent criminals; if it catches anyone, it'll be drug users or dealers (since arrest-able evidence must be found on the suspect for profiling to work), and I don't view drug use as all that serious. The main reason I oppose it domestically is that the major 'suspect group' is young black men, followed by young Latino men. I belong to neither group, but I've talked to blacks who've been pulled over for DWB (Driving While Black), and I can imagine how it would affect them. Being searched just for belonging to a certain demographic group quickly creates resentment within the group searched, 95% of whom are perfectly innocent. I don't want any ethnic group feeling persecuted just for the sake of catching a few drug dealers.

Internationally, however, my feelings are less clear. I'll admit that I'm not as worried about making Arabs or Muslims feel less persecuted, as 1) terrorists tend to overwhelmingly be from their ethnic group, and 2) the crime, when it happens, can cause hundreds of deaths. Here, if profiling works, I'm all for it. The main question is, does it work? Not being an expert, I can't know. I believe that even the experts aren't in total agreement. My guess is that if you're going to search people, profiling works better than totally random searches, but statistically, the improvement in the success rate is going to be tiny. Millions of people travel by air each year, and on average, less than a dozen try to blow up a plane. To find one of those by a random search, even one assisted by profiling, would be a wild stroke of luck.

So, what to do? A few days ago, I was pointed by Andrew Sullivan's very good blog to an article about airport terror prevention that focused on how the Israelis do it. The Israelis, of course, have a large percentage of Arabs in their own population, and are the world's number one terrorism target. (Lest they seem too much like victims, let's remember that this is because they've been an occupying power against over a million Palestinians for the last four decades.) How do they handle it? The article explains it, and it's very interesting. You should read the article, but the very short answer is that they focus on looking into people's eyes rather than searching bags. Does it work? The record speaks for itself; Israel hasn't suffered from air terrorism for over three decades. Why don't we do this? I sure as hell don't know. I suppose the answer is that change is always difficult, that even for airport security, there's resistance to changing the way things are.

One of the important things I took away from that article was that we need to be flexible, to do what works rather than what we've always done. And most importantly, not to do stupid stuff just for the sake of appearing to be doing something. After the most recent terror attempt by this Nigerian guy Abdulmutallab, the airlines decreed that people wouldn't be allowed to walk around for the last hour of the flight. Oh, good idea! Now the terrorists will only be able to try to blow up the plane at 30,000 feet, rather than on approach! That'll help so much! I was stunned that this notion wasn't laughed out of whatever meeting it was brought up in. This kind of dumbass idea just shows that we're not serious about stopping terrorists. The Israelis are, so they do what works. Will we ever get serious about it? Hard to say. As I said, I don't know whether profiling works. If it does, let's use it, even if it's not P.C. If it doesn't, let's not use it just so we appear to be doing something. Ideology aside, let's do what works.

A New Decade

I begin to write this in the morning of January 1, 2010: the first day of a new year and a new decade. The media tends to ascribe great significance to this, largely because (I believe) they need things to write about. I view it as being not a whole lot different from a car's odometer changing from 99,999.9 to 100,000. The numbers line up and change at once, but that's about it. The significance is strictly numerical.

That may seem like a slightly cynical point of view ("hey, why not just get into the spirit of it?"), and it occurs to me that the tone of this blog itself might be seen as cynical. I try to analyze social and political problems, and more often than not I end up deciding that the ultimate blame/responsibility lies not with politicians or public officials, but with ordinary citizens, whose apathy, passivity, and ignorance enables those in high positions to act in their own interests rather than in ours. We are stirred only when the leaders' pursuit of personal goals and personal enrichment at the public's expense becomes too great to ignore.

I still believe this is true, but just for a change, I'll try to look at it from a different perspective. What positive things can I find from the collective actions and attitudes of ordinary people?

The first one was inspired by the first paragraph of this post. If I cannot find 1/1/10 a significant day, then what day would I find significant? November 4, 2008 was the one that leapt to mind: the day that 63 percent of American adults went to the polls and chose Barack Obama as president. I was proud and optimistic not just because America became the first democracy to elect as its leader someone belonging to a racial minority group, though that was very significant. It was more because we elected someone who speaks in complete sentences, in coherent, logical, well-thought-out responses to what are often vapid media questions. He speaks to us as if we are adults, as if we are not the idiots that most politicians speak to us as though we are. Is that the reason we voted for him? For the most part, probably not, I must concede. After eight years of Bush, people just wanted a change. I suspect that Hillary Clinton, who practiced a far more conventional and cynical brand of politics, would also have beaten McCain if she had faced him in the general election. Still, the fact that Obama's thoughtfulness didn't doom him is reason enough for optimism. (How's that for low expectations?)

Another collective action/attitude which causes optimism is the progress made for gay rights, particularly marriage, over the past twenty-five years. It was not all that long ago that homosexuality was widely reviled, its practitioners thought to be just one small step away from child abusers. That attitudes have changed as much as they have is due not to policies or court rulings, but rather, ordinary people, one by one, coming to the realization that while they themselves do not wish to be in love or have sex with someone of the same gender, it does not hurt them if someone else does, and in fact it is very important to that other person, an integral part of their identity.

I tend to see the gay rights struggles of the '90s and the '00s as similar to the civil rights struggles of the '50s and '60s. There are, of course, many differences. One is a matter of race; the other, orientation. One can be hidden; the other cannot. For many years, many people maintained that one was a choice, while the other was not. More and more people are realizing that being gay is not a choice, and that even if it was, there is nothing morally wrong with that choice. An important way in which civil rights for blacks and gay rights are similar is that attitudes change over time, demographically. Resistance to gay equality is strongest among the elderly, who were brought up to believe that gays are perverts. Today's youth, on the other hand, increasingly believe that being gay or straight is of no more consequence than being left-handed or right-handed. So, I am confident that the time will come in my lifetime (I'm 47) when people will say, "Did you know that back in 2010, gays couldn't even get married? I mean, can you believe that?", much as we might say the same thing with regard to the fact that the 1961 Hawaii marriage of Barack Obama's parents would have been illegal in the majority of American states at that time.

Another thing that causes me optimism is the extent to which the social safety net has become embedded in the political culture in many Western democracies. Most have socialized medicine, and many provide welfare in a way that attempts to guarantee that there will be no one without a roof over his head and without enough to eat. We have more than enough money to ensure this; it's just a matter of having the political will. America doesn't, but Europe does. Will America change? A health care bill that will greatly expand the poor's access to medical care seems to be on its way to passage. It's far from perfect, but it is progress. Too slow, but moving in the right direction. Enough, perhaps, for optimism.

Lastly, the march of progress of human civilization is heartening. If we look only at Western countries, we see that it wasn't so long ago in historical terms that there was slavery, indentured servitude, open genocide, medical care that did more harm than good, colonialism as a good thing ("the white man's burden"), royalty with real power, religion as a means of power and social control, monopolies and union-busting, women as second-class citizens, all manner of discrimination openly practiced, outlandish political corruption, and a host of other social ills that will go unmentioned here if only because I feel the list is long enough already to make my point. Things have been much worse, and in non-Western countries, in some ways still are. Is it only financial progress that brings social progress? I'm not sure. But however you want to measure it, things have improved, and one can hope they will continue to do so. So while I continue to criticize the people for what they don't do that I wish they would, I must note that there is, over the long term, reason for optimism.

Why do they hate us?

That was a question many Americans asked after 9/11, and I heard it more than once around that time. Some people around me, knowing that I'm the type that reads history and the international section of newspapers, asked me variations on the question. But as the memory of 9/11 recedes, fewer and fewer people are asking.

The previous post dealt with President Obama's decision about sending troops to Afghanistan, and the fact that it's hard for people to make military judgments but within their power to decide whether we should be there at all or not. I said that it's perfectly reasonable for people to want the troops home, but one then has to face the fact that since Bush didn't do the job he should have done, leaving now would mean that there would likely be Al-Qaeda training camps there in the not-too-distant future. Obama is trying to prevent that outcome while insuring that U.S. troops will not be there indefinitely.

In this post, I want to talk about what we would have to think about if Obama had brought the troops home and abandoned the mission. First of all, it's entirely possible that nothing at all would have happened. Terrorist plots at varying stages have been foiled in the past, and will probably continue to be in the future. It might take some luck for Western governments to foil every one, but it's not out of the question. And it's going to be much harder for Arab terrorists to do anything like another 9/11, since at this point anyone who looks somewhat Arabic in America is going to get looked at the same way as a gangsta-outfitted young black man in a jewelry store. Not that all Arabs are terrorists, but most terrorists do seem to be Arabs. Hopefully, of course, racial profiling won't be necessary to do good police work.

Secondly, and more controversially, we could always dry up the supply of terrorists by doing less to offend the Muslim world. That would have been much easier six years ago, but the abuses (torture, Abu Ghraib, indefinite detention of innocents) of the Bush government will be recruiting tools for Al-Qaeda for the next few decades. Still, the election of a black man in America has had some positive impact on America's image in the world, and a change in policies would help the situation greatly. I'm referring specifically to America's Israel policy, in which America funds and arms a country that dominates and rules a few million Arabs, and is methodically integrating (i.e. stealing) and populating land which according to every international treaty and map does not belong to them. But might makes right, the Palestinians cannot fight back in any effective way, and the U.S. has been Israel's unwavering patron and supporter. A Palestinian who lost his brother, whose uncle's family was pushed into another country, whose father is in an Israeli jail, or whose grandfather who tells over and over again the story of how in 1948 Jewish militants pointed rifles at him and his family and told him to get off this land... why should he not consider America his enemy?

What, you ask, does this have to do with Al-Qaeda? Nothing, directly. But indirectly, it does. Famous images aired at the time show Palestinians firing rifles into the air in celebration the day after 9/11. Not that many did, of course, but while most Arabs were not happy that three thousand innocent people had died, many at the same time were pleased that finally someone had given America a bloody nose. It's that feeling that Obama wants to change, and this is a part of his outreach to the Arab world (including bowing more than the Right would like to see him do). It's called draining the swamp. Osama bin Laden will plot as long as he has money and men. We could bite into his supply of both with a more even-handed Israel policy.

The Right won't hear of this, because the last thing they want to do is what terrorists want us to do. But the irony is that while Al-Qaeda says they want America to get out of the Middle East, they really don't. What they want is an escalation of the conflict, because extremists on both sides of any conflict want it escalated, not solved. Fighting America raises Al-Qaeda's stature, whereas fighting Middle Eastern governments would be physically and politically dangerous. Al-Qaeda wants the whole Middle East to be united under their extremist version of Islam. They claim to be acting for the benefit of the Palestinians, but they don't give a damn about them. They cynically use the suffering of the Palestinians as a way to sweep up the anger and resentment of the Arab world and use it for their own ends, trying to be seen as standing up for Muslims. If America improved its Israel policy, Al-Qaeda wouldn't stop its activities... but support for it in the Arab world would ebb, and that's the important thing. Obama understands this, and he's been trying to make Israel policy less one-sided, but he can't change the political climate by himself. Unfortunately (more on this in a future post), putting real pressure (i.e. threatening to withhold aid unless certain policy changes are undertaken) on Israel isn't a politically feasible option in the U.S. right now.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, they positioned troops to continue on into Saudi Arabia, but never did; this seems to have served as a near-death experience for the Saudis. Understandably nervous even after Kuwait was freed, the Saudis requested a U.S. troop presence. Al-Qaeda used this as a talking point, saying that infidel troops shouldn't be stationed on the holy soil that hosts Mecca and Medina. The troops stayed for over a decade, then finally left after the Iraq invasion in 2003, as Saudi Arabia no longer needed protection. Al-Qaeda, of course, did not give America any kind of credit for this, or ease up on their anti-American threats or activities. They threaten and attack America because it suits their political purposes. This wouldn't change if American was able to secure a just peace and independence for the Palestinians, but doing so would do much to ease the resentment from which Al-Qaeda derives its support.

In any case, just because Al-Qaeda wants us to do something doesn't mean that it's a bad idea to do it. This has been a real article of faith among the American Right: if Al-Qaeda wants us to do something, we must absolutely not do it, or we have surrendered to terrorists, or some such thing. This is as stupid as it is wrong, as it fails to consider that what Al-Qaeda says it wants and what it really wants may be different things. But those who use fear to support their policies have never been much for subtlety.

So, whether you favor or oppose Obama's Afghanistan policy, it's good to understand the background of the situation, and the consequences of your choice. There are alternatives to more troops; they're just more difficult, and require a bit more knowledge and thought. We just need to look at the situation from a point of view other than our own. That's never easy, but always useful, whether you're an individual or a country.

Obama's Afghanistan decision

Um, why are we in Afghanistan, again?

Oh, yeah! 9/11! I remember now.

I seem to recall that a month or so after 9/11, over 80% of the U.S. public was in favor sending troops to Afghanistan. I don't have current numbers on the plan Obama announced a few days ago, but judging from the political ambivalence, I'm pretty sure it's no higher that 50%. Democrats especially want us to get out. (Update: Gallup says that 51% approve of Obama's plan.)

The problem is that Bush attacked, helped the allied Afghans push the Taliban out of power, but wasn't able to get rid of them completely. They're in control of a few cities, and they're in the background, waiting for the right opportunity to gain ground again. It's not that if the U.S. left the Taliban would take right over, but there could be another period of civil war, given the lack of a strong central government with armed forces loyal only to the government. The Taliban could, eventually, take over again. Or, they could gain control of some territory, enough to let Al-Qaeda operate freely again, and then we're back where we were before 9/11. Distracted by the Iraq war, the Bush government never committed the resources necessary to build a new government and a safe society in Afghanistan (if that can even be done, which, to be fair, is far from certain).

So, did we go over there to deliver an ass-kicking, or to make sure the Taliban can never operate so openly as to host Al-Qaeda as they did before 9/11? If it's the former, mission accomplished, let's go home. But if it's the latter, that's not done yet. I think that if you disapprove of Obama's plan, if you want the troops to come home right now, you need to face up to the fact that the Taliban will be back, and will bring Al-Qaeda with them. We'll see pictures of Osama Bin Laden standing in a field, dozens of terrorists standing behind him, promising an even deadlier attack against America. If you think that's a price worth paying for bringing our troops home now, then fine, that's not a totally unreasonable point of view. Maybe we'll be more successful in stopping future 9/11's before they happen. But I think a lot of people have lost sight of why we went there in the first place, and the fact that the job isn't done is Bush's fault, not Obama's. If you approved of the attack against Afghanistan in 2001, you can be legitimately disgusted that Bush screwed it up, but you should give Obama a chance to do it right.

I believe the problem is that most people aren't looking at it in terms of a security problem to be dealt with, but in terms of how they feel about it emotionally. "Our troops have been overseas too long" or "Afghanistan isn't worth it." In some sense I can understand and agree with both thoughts, but I wouldn't want a President who made decisions based on such thoughts. I want a President who makes a clear-eyed decision that weighs national security, values, world opinion, geopolitical strategy, military capability, and morality. Of course, domestic opinion should be considered, but the simple fact is that most people can't be experts on this kind of topic, and can't evaluate whether Obama's plan will be successful or not. I was asked at my workplace what I thought of Obama's decision, and my answer was something along the lines of, "I can't know whether it'll succeed, but I do know that if we do nothing, the Taliban will be back. I know enough about Obama to know that he must have thought about this deeply, he took his time, he asked for a variety of opinions, and he wouldn't have done this if he didn't think it was the plan with the best chance to succeed. So, I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt."

I think that most citizens can't have an opinion on how to accomplish the military mission. I think that most citizens should have an opinion on whether the mission is worth doing, whether it's worth the human and financial cost, but I'd hope that people would have decent knowledge of the overall situation when making that decision. In this situation, I'm far from sure that that's the case.

Update (12/6): there's an excellent New York Times article outlining the arduous process that the Obama White House underwent to form and debate the policy that was eventually decided. If more people read articles like this, we would all be better off.

To Give or Not to Give

As I write this, I'm on a plane from San Francisco to Tokyo, having spent the last week and a half in the home where I grew up. When I was younger, my neighborhood was a middle-class one, trending later towards the upper middle-class. Now, thanks to Silicon Valley wealth, it's become distinctly upper-class.

There are three supermarkets, one of which caters to the wealthy: better service, more imported items, higher prices. It's changed a little, but there's one thing that's changed rather noticeably: at each of the two entrances, an older black man sits on an overturned milk crate, displaying a cardboard sign soliciting donations. One sign asserts that the man is a veteran, the other that the man lost his job in the recession.

Living in Japan, it had been a long time since I'd really thought about the question of the homeless and/or panhandlers. Should one give? Surely a down-on-his-luck veteran and a recession victim are very sympathetic characters; is that just a coincidence? (One certainly never sees such a sign that says, "Need help–lost money gambling.") Do they really need to be given money, or is this simply in preference to working at, say, a McDonald's? Is the money they get the only thing keeping them from living on the streets? (These men were not unkempt, unhygenic, or shabbily dressed.) I would definitely prefer to work at a fast-food place than to solicit money from strangers, but maybe that's not true for everyone. Are they being truthful? There's no way to know.

For me, though, the most difficult and interesting aspect of the situation is how it makes me feel. I feel uncomfortable passing them and not giving anything. (Which, clearly, is the idea.) My income puts me squarely in the middle class, maybe on the low side of the middle, so I'm far from rich. (The store in question sells the best donuts in town, so I indulged myself while I was there; what passes for a donut in Japan I consider barely worthy of the name.) But going into that store is a virtual announcement that you have so much extra money you can afford to buy overpriced food. So, how can you do that while ignoring the sympathetic figure to whom you could give that money and go shop at Safeway?

The problem, of course, is Kant's categorical imperative: what if everyone did the same thing? If more people gave, would more people solicit? People I know who've gone to India and seen its wretched poverty say that they were advised not to give to the highly sympathetic five-year-old beggars: if you do, they were told, you'll be surrounded in under a minute. But it seems counterintuitive to think that a large number of people in America would prefer to solicit than work. So, one could argue that the categorical imperative suggests that we should give them money: it would not likely cause large numbers of people to quit their jobs and become beggars, and the people who did so wouldn't need to do it for so long before they'd gather enough money to live. It could be seen as people doing individually what they should be doing collectively: make sure that no one lacks sufficient resources to live, especially in such a wealthy society.

Which brings me to one of my favorite themes: individual responsibility and collective responsibility. The store in question has a sign near the entrance that urges people to give to organizations that help such people, rather than give to them individually. But this is clearly self-interested; the store surely doesn't want such people near the entrance making customers feel uncomfortable (and would likely not have a sign urging such donations were it not for the people in front of the store). More importantly, the guy in front of the store is someone you can see, and identify with. Giving to a charity is an abstraction, one that's easy to avoid when nothing is staring you in the face. The guy in front of the store is forcing you to think about the issue. In a society with such a huge income gap, where conspicuous consumption is often celebrated, that may not be such a bad thing.

While I was there, I mostly ignored them. On the last day, as I left the store, I gave one of them a dollar. Why? I'm not sure. If I lived there full-time, would I give them money regularly? Give to a homeless/social welfare organization? Out of good citizenship, or wanting to be able to look such people in the eye? I'm not sure about that, either. But it's good to think about it.

How To Write A Biased Newspaper Article

While I was writing the previous post, I had to do a web search for the report I heavily referenced, having read it once but not bookmarked it. Another result of the search is the topic of this post: an article in the online version of the San Francisco Examiner about the report in question.

Writing a biased article is a lot like writing a political advertisement or attack editorial, except that because you're technically supposed to be neutral, you should try to be more subtle about it. The writer of this article, Byron York, doesn't try very hard. After reading this, just for the heck of it I read some of his opinion pieces to confirm my feeling that he's a strong conservative; it didn't take long. At least those pieces are labeled as 'opinion.' This one isn't, but should be.

Are you, by chance, a conservative? A Republican? Did you vote for John McCain last November, as well as the GOP candidate in your local congressional race?

If your answer to these question is yes, then you are very, very strange -- and perhaps not even fully American. At the very least, you're not one of the rest of us.

I'm pretty sure that the 'not even fully American' bit doesn't appear in the report; it's the writer's characterization of the report's thrust. That's the reason for the 'perhaps': it's a weasel word that gives the writer an out ("I didn't actually say that he said that").

Also, the first two paragraphs suggest that the report said that solely on the basis of being a conservative, a Republican, voting for McCain, or the GOP congressional candidate, then you're one of the 'strange' people the report refers to (except that the report didn't use the word 'strange' either). But this is simply not true.

A few paragraphs later, the article says:

Conservative Republicans, according to the Democracy Corps research, don't trust Barack Obama; are scared by the speed with which the president and Democrats in Congress are attempting to enact new programs; don't like government takeovers of business; and believe that many of their fellow Americans don't fully appreciate the threat posed by the Democratic agenda.

You might think those are entirely reasonable reactions to the Obama presidency, or are at least within the mainstream of American political debate. But Carville and Greenberg say those beliefs "are not part of the continuum leading to the center of the electorate." If you hold them, you "truly stand apart."

This is the sneaky part: yes, the Georgia conservatives did say those things. But those are not the beliefs that the report feels set the Georgians (and in general, Fox News watchers/believers) apart from most people who lean right politically.

Along the same lines, the article says:

...the people in Atlanta were something else entirely.

Why? Because the Atlanta conservatives said things about Obama like: "He scares me because of how smart and smooth he is. I think the package he presents, combined with the media running interference for him, he could do a lot of things fast, which he's trying to do, which worries me."

And: "I think the whole basis is, let's ram it through while we have the numbers, while we have the popularity and while maybe people don't know what's going on. ... Once it's through, it's awful hard to repeal."

York is cherry-picking the most unremarkable things said by the Georgia Fox-watchers, the things least likely to be considered controversial. He repeats these, compares them to the report's conclusion that the Georgians are out of step with most Americans, then concludes that it's obvious that the report is trying to fool you:

No, what bothers them about Obama is what he's actually trying to do. If having such concerns means they stand a world apart from the rest of America, then there are millions of Americans standing with them.

If you read the article without having read the report to which it refers, and mocks, you might think it was entirely reasonable, and that the report was foolish, or at least reached foolish conclusions. That's what York counts on. But the reason that the report concludes that the Georgians/Fox-watchers 'stand a world apart' from the rest of the country are not the ones York lists above. Rather, they are (quoting from the report):

• our groups showed that they explicitly believe he is purposely and ruthlessly executing a hidden agenda to weaken and ultimately destroy the foundations of our country.
• Closely related to this well-established notion of a secret agenda is a hidden set of liberal elites or power brokers who have guided and directed Obama as a puppet, helping him to reach the highest office in the land.
  
• They actively believe President Obama is purposely lying about his plans for the country and what his policies would do, and that he is exaggerating the threats America faces in order to create support for his policies.
• questions they believe have not been adequately answered or investigated about Obama’s background, including his place of birth, his education, the authorship of his books, the degree of his associations with controversial figures including William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright,
• They believe Obama is pushing his agenda at record pace because he does not want the American people to know what he is doing.
• they believe his policies are purposely designed to fail... and to strip away so many basic constitutional rights that we are too weak to fight back and have to accept whatever solution he proposes.

There were others, such as that the Georgians/Fox-watchers love Sarah Palin and adore Glenn Beck. But you get the idea. Everything in the bullet points above is a belief attributed by the report to the Georgia focus group, and all are views that are far out of the mainstream of American political thought. These are the reasons the report concludes that the hard-right conservatives 'stand a world apart' from most Americans, not the far more mild ideas listed by the writer of the Examiner article.

So, to write a biased article, you should treat your opponent's assertions as puzzle pieces, to be taken apart and rearranged as you see fit. Mischaracterize his assertions, omit his reasons that support them, and suggest that other tangentially related things he said were intended to support the assertions that they clearly don't. Then sadly shake your head to let your audience know what a fool this man is, and how lucky they are to have you to point this out to them.

To me, this demonstrates very well the importance of being well-informed. If we are, we can see through pieces of crap like this. As with anything, not being well-informed allows us to be taken advantage of. And that allows, for example, politicians to do things they pretend are in our best interests, but definitely are not. Some people, in response to this, are blindly cynical. "All media is biased, all politicians are crooks." In fact, they're not, but this attitude just attempts to abdicate our responsibility: to learn to tell which are and which aren't. If for no other reason than to serve our own interests, we should try harder.

FoxReality

If you watched Fox News, never having seen or heard of it before, it would not take you long to discern its strong right-wing bias. There are those who say that the bias is on the 'opinion' shows and not the 'news' shows, but the fact is that even on the news shows the story selection and the giving of credence to unproven assertions (reported as a 'controversy') that always favor the right rather than the left would be evidence enough that the bias affects everything shown by the channel. Another hint, however, would be that the channel was created by right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the man he hired as its president was Roger Ailes, a staunch Republican who worked on right-wing political campaigns and was well-known in the political world for ruthless attack ad tactics. From the beginning, Fox asserted that it was 'fair and balanced' as opposed to the other media, all of whom supposedly had a liberal bent. This assertion, ludicrous on its face, signaled what was to become more and more clear as time went on: by giving the news and opinion shows from a conservative point of view while insisting that it was not, Fox would function as a propagandist for the right, creating and broadcasting its own version of reality: the one in which conservative ideas are always correct and validated, while liberal ideas are wrong, and even dangerous to the country. Fox would be the channel of American flags, 'heartland values', 'real' Americans, churchgoers, and ordinary working people tired of 'big government'.

From its beginning in 1996 to the present, Fox has gradually increased its audience to the point where in sheer numbers, it has passed CNN and leads by a significant margin. Its audience, unsurprisingly, is overwhelmingly conservative. Being in Japan, I don't and can't watch it, but I can see numerous YouTube and other video clips of it, and it's quite amazing. It occurred to me recently that if you watched only that channel for news, and uncritically believed everything it said, you would have political 'knowledge' that differed substantially from what most of us would consider the facts. In fact, surveys have shown that people who get their news primarily from Fox do more poorly on tests of knowledge of political information than those who get it from most other sources, and are more likely to believe factually inaccurate points of view pushed by conservatives. In essence, Fox News creates its own reality, and offers it to those who feel comfortable basking in the knowledge that everything they believe is correct.

As is true on the other cable networks, the opinion shows are much more popular on Fox than the regular news, and therefore, more is offered. On CNN, opinion shows like Crossfire featured liberals and conservatives arguing with each other, spouting talking points. The more heated the debate, the higher ratings the shows got. On Fox, the opinion shows only featured conservatives, except for one show (now gone) called Hannity and Colmes, in which the milquetoast liberal Colmes performed for Hannity the same function that the Washington Generals did for the Harlem Globetrotters. The more conservative the show, the more the audience liked it. The more anti-liberal assertions the hosts made, the more the viewers ate it up. This created a vicious circle: the conservative viewpoint got more extreme, which excited the viewers more and gave them a more and more skewed version of reality. The increased ratings pushed Fox to put on more and more extreme voices, and for those voices to be more extreme, which got even higher ratings, and skewed the viewpoint of the audience even further, which made Fox go even further to the right... you get the idea. This explains most of the absurd anti-Obama charges that were made during the campaign: Obama was a Muslim, he was born in Kenya, he sympathized with terrorists ('palled around' with them, as Sarah Palin famously charged during the campaign), hated white people, and so forth. Dismissed by the general population as ridiculous–53% of Americans did end up voting for him, after all–these charges were widely believed by Fox News viewers.

So, for a while I've had a general sense of the dynamic of this, but I recently read a detailed analysis which puts the whole question into sharp and disturbing focus. A political consulting firm conducted detailed focus group interviews with two groups: one group of conservative Georgians who watch (and believe) Fox News, and a group of conservative-leaning indepenents from Cleveland who didn't, or did only occasionally. While the two groups had generally similar leanings, what they believed about politics was very different.

The Fox viewers (quoting from the report):

The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America, according to focus groups conducted by Democracy Corps. These base Republican voters dislike Barack Obama to be sure – which is not very surprising as base Democrats had few positive things to say about George Bush – but these voters identify themselves as part of a ‘mocked’ minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. While these voters are disdainful of a Republican Party they view to have failed in its mission, they overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country’s founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail.

The conservative-leaning independents:

For additional perspective, Democracy Corps conducted a parallel set of groups in suburban Cleveland. These groups, comprised of older, white, non-college independents and weak partisans, represent some of the most conservative swing voters in the electorate, and they demonstrated a wholly different worldview from Republican base voters by dismissing the fear of “socialism” and evaluating Obama in very different terms. Most importantly, regardless of their personal feelings toward Obama or how they voted in 2008, they very much want to see him succeed because they believe the country desperately needs the change he promised in his campaign. Though we kept discussion points constant between the two sets of groups, on virtually every point of discussion around President Obama and the major issues facing our country, these two audiences simply saw the world in fundamentally different ways – underscoring the extreme disconnect of the conservative Republican base voters.

I'll cut and paste a few of the more remarkable comments and conclusions of the report:

The notion that Obama’s health care reforms represent a government takeover of all aspects of health care is an article of faith; they reject as laughable the suggestion that it might not, pointing to his arguments to the contrary as further proof of his determination to lie and deceive to fulfill his ultimate agenda.

This is a good example of what happens when you believe an alternate reality: if someone tells you the truth, instead of considering the possibility that it might be true, you call them a liar, which to you is obvious because are clearly not telling the truth: because, after all, you know the truth.

A central part of the collective identity built by conservative Republicans in the current political environment is their belief that they possess knowledge and insight that the majority of Americans – whether too lazy or too misguided to find it for themselves – do not possess. A combination of conservative media outlets are the means by which they have gained this knowledge, led by FOX News (“the truth tellers“), and to a lesser degree conservative talk radio. Their antipathy and distrust toward the mainstream media could not be stronger, and they fiercely defend FOX as the only truly objective news outlet.

So, looking at the world through their eyes, the Obama presidency is a very scary time, and only they know the truth. No wonder they're frantically trying to stop everything he does.

One man in the conservative group said:

I don’t just watch FOX News. I’ll watch CNN, I’ll watch regular you know prime time news just to get the comparison of the story and kind of figure out where the truth lies and facts don’t lie, and I think FOX News is reporting the facts… The other news stations aren’t picking this up and running with it tells you that, you know, I mean it tells you something.

Again, if you start from the notion that only Fox is objective and correct, then one can see where this would be disturbing. It's quite remarkable: it's as if a small but significant portion of the country has bought into a giant conspiracy theory.

Building an Underground Movement

The final aspect of the collective identity shared by conservative Republicans is the call to action. The attacks they suffer for their values and the special knowledge they share as a result of their devotion to conservative media and active rejection of mainstream media are ultimately meaningless if it does not help defeat Obama and his hidden agenda. This is where the sense of collective purpose is greatest. They see a nascent movement building, still not fully realized or activated but with a growing number of people watching and listening, growing increasingly frustrated, and looking for ways to stop the growing threat they perceive.

I strongly urge anyone who has more than a passing interest in American politics to read the whole report. It's long–it probably takes 20-30 minutes to read–but it's extremely informative, and explains a great deal. Most importantly, it explains why the Republican Party is tilting so strongly to the right: its base supporters have become more and more extreme, to the point that they disdain any cooperation with Obama or the Democrats whatsoever. It also explains why the percentage of voters who identify themselves as Republicans–20%–is at an all-time low. Many people, like the ones in Cleveland, can't stomach what the party has become, typified by Sarah Palin, who the Fox News viewers love.

So exactly what percentage of U.S. citizens, and what percentage of conservatives, can be described as the report does? The report doesn't give a number, though I'm sure there are numbers out there that would give a good approximation. But I'm sure that there are enough to have a real impact on the Republican party. The most popular Fox News programs get 3 million viewers, which is about 1% of the U.S. population. But these are the ones who are active in politics, the ones who vote, the ones who send political e-mail to their friends. They have a disproportionate effect on the Republican party, which can be seen when one reads the political news every day.

For example, one of the many real-world effects of the disconnect of the Fox News viewers with reality occurred recently: the special congressional election in the 23rd district of New York state. The local Republican party chose as its candidate a moderate-to-liberal Republican. Informed of her pro-gay-marriage and pro-choice views, the right wing was outraged, and strongly supported a right-wing businessman who joined the race as a third-party candidate. He got a lot of out-of-state money, made ads, climbed in the polls, and finally eclipsed the Republican candidate, who quit the race in disgust and endorsed the Democrat, who won a district that had been in Republican hands for over a century. I think this is bound to have a strong impact on the 2010 congressional elections: moderate candidates will be discouraged from running, or may be defeated in the primaries, ensuring that in a moderate district, there may be a moderate Democrat against a conservative Republican. This situation, needless to say, favors Democrats, who will become the party of the left and the center; their challenge will be to balance the interests of both groups.

I'm sure the national Republican leadership knows this full well. What I'm not sure of is whether they can do anything about it. And as long as Fox News gets good ratings by ever-fervently preaching to the converted, it's hard to imagine how the situation will change.