Category Archives: Liberal

So here come the fights between left and center about Joe Bidens cabinet picks. Some of these fights will be worth having. Rahm Emanuel for transportation secretary? Seriously? After all the controversies that took place during his mayoralty, and all his denunciations of libtards when he worked for Obama? I suppose he cant do much harm at the Department of Transportation, but: why? There must be a dozen people who are better suited to the job and wouldnt needlessly provoke progressives ire.

Also: Deval Patrick at the Justice Department? Again, why? Patrick showily floated himself as a moderate, anti-Elizabeth Warren Massachusetts presidential contender last year before deciding not to run. Sally Yates and Doug Jones are both obviously superior, baggage-free choices (baggage-free from a Democratic point of view, that is; how Republicans may feel about them is a different matter). Its one thing to choose people the base isnt crazy about, because thats life; you win some, you lose some. But its entirely another to go out of your way to antagonize the base, which choosing Emanuel and Patrick would do. If Patricks plus column includes his race, hes hardly the only qualified Black contender.

But for my money, if youre a liberal who cares first and foremost about economic policy, there are three big positions to watch: head of the National Economic Council (NEC); chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA); and head of the antitrust division in the Justice Department. Who Biden chooses for these three postsand his reported pick for CEA is promisingwill tell us a lot about how aggressive hes going to be on matters like reducing inequality, promoting public investment, and breaking up monopoly power that define an administrations core economic philosophy.

Whats the difference between the NEC and the CEA? Its explained well here. The CEA is the older entity, started under Harry Truman. Its essentially what its title saysa group of economists who give the president economic advice. The NEC, started by Bill Clinton, takes that advice and formulates policy. So the NEC is more powerful, generally speaking. The famous story from the Obama era is that during the transition, Christine Romer, whom Obama picked to chair the CEA, wrote a paper for internal consumption arguing that the stimulus package should be as big as $1.8 trillion. Larry Summers, whod been tagged to head the NEC, nixed it (and a lower $1.2 trillion figure) as having no chance of passing Congress. Even before they took office, in other words, the NEC director had the power to take information from the CEA chair and decide what the president would or would not see.

So the NEC director is the more important position, but both are really crucial to establishing any administrations economic thrust and identity. And of course the most important of all is treasury secretary, where Bidens choice of Janet Yellen is terrific.

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Biden intends to name Cecilia Rouse to head the CEA. Rouse is from Princeton and would be the first Black woman to head the CEA. Larry Mishel, a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute, described her to me Sunday evening as a solid choicelike him, shes a labor economist, which means by definition that her academic interests centered around wages and poverty and education.

In addition, the Journal reported that Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey will sit on the council, and theyre both solid progressives. Finally, Neera Tanden will be the first woman of color to head the Office of Management and Budget. These are all people who believe in government intervention in the economy and arent going to be howling at the president about deficit reduction. So this is all good news. The priorities of this group will tend much more toward full employment than austerity. Theres going to be more emphasis on workers under Biden than any president in my lifetime, Mishel says.

Adds Jesse Rothstein, an economist at Cal-Berkeley: All three CEA nominees have worked extensively on issues that will be of direct relevanceRouse on community colleges and on student loans (in a paper I coauthored with her); Boushey on paid leave and automatic stabilizers; Bernstein on deficits and full employment. Thats not what youd see in a normal CEA, where people are plucked out of academia for short stints in Washington.

Then, late Sunday, after this column was written, news broke that Biden was leaning toward Brian Deese to head the NEC. I dont know a lot about him. He works at BlackRock, which isnt great on paper, although his position there involves sustainable investing. He played a central role on the Paris climate accord, and he was a key player in the auto bailout. And he worked for Gene Sperling, who was among the more liberal of Obamas economic advisers. Well see what happens, but the good news is that if all these conjectures are correct, Biden has named an economic team that includes some progressives and has no domineering centrist banker to push the liberals around.

Nowantitrust. The monopoly power of the big tech companies is only the most visible manifestation of a disease that has taken over so many sectors of the economy, from hospitals to telecommunications to food systems tomy favorite micro-example, as noted by Sarah Miller in Democracy journal, which I editcheerleading equipment and uniforms, which are controlled by Varsity Brands, which in turn is owned by Bain Capital, the private equity company whose founders included Mitt Romney and whose employees included Deval Patrick.

Monopolies dont just increase prices, although they certainly do that. They make inequality worse because they drive down wages, since theres less competition among employers for workers. Miller cited a study that found that an individual workers average wages would be $10,000 higher today if the government had ensured markets were as competitive as theyd been in 1980.

Finally, monopolies are bad for democracy. You dont have to look any farther than the pernicious role Facebook plays in our elections to see that.

So in some ways Im more interested in who heads the DoJs antitrust division than who heads the department itself. If the Republicans keep the Senate, were going to be putting more and more hope in things that can be done administratively. Aggressive antitrust policy is one of those things in a major way.

There are other important positions. U.S. Trade Representative and the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau come to mind. Its unrealistic to think liberals are going to fill every position. But Biden should definitely be bolder than Obama was.

Liberals today are critical of Obama and Clinton for being too neoliberal in their economic philosophies. Its a confusing word in this context, because it really means free-market conservative for various historical reasons that are too complicated to go into. But that was then. The economics profession is changing, and inequality is much more central to economic discussions than it used to be.

And one of the many lessons these election results taught us is that a lot of voters dont get the Democrats economic message and dont trust them to be good economic stewards, even though history says otherwise. Biden says, and I think he means it, that hes on the side of the middle and working classes. He needs to hire an economic team that will prove it, and so far, hes on his way.

Link:

The Three Biden Administration Posts That Liberals Should Really Care About - The Daily Beast

For most of the year, Australian teachers have worked harder than ever before, scrambling to adapt lesson resources for online learning, checking in daily with stressed-out students, and fighting for basic PPE such as hand sanitizer.

At the same time, representatives of big business,including the Liberal Party and the New South Wales (NSW) Productivity Commission, have seen an opportunity to reduce costs and ramp up productivity. As the commission makes clear, students are human capital and the goal is to further impose a competitive corporate culture within schools, in order to extract as much added value from teachers as possible.

They are proposing, for example, to give supervisors more power over lesson observations and to use test results and student surveys to assess individual teachers, as a stepping-stone toward performance-based pay. Its the latest development in a decades-long effort to impose a market-based logic on Australian schools.

In 1988, the NSW Liberal government introduced corporate management principles into the NSW public service, hoping to find cost efficiencies to help reduce its $46 billion debt. For then-minister for education, Terry Metherell, one solution was to sack 2,300 teachers, alongside thousands of administrative support staff. For teachers who kept their jobs, it meant bigger class sizes, bigger piles of paperwork, and less time to spend with individual students.

Metherell also pioneered a long-term attempt to force public schools to compete with private schools. He relaxed restrictions requiring students to attend a local school claiming that it would give parents more choice in effect providing schools with an added incentive to promote their unique brand, compete for customers, and exclude students based on their performance. At the same time, the government began to create specialist schools, catering to high academic achievers or students with talents in technology, sports, languages, or the creative and performing arts.

Previously, public schools had been forced to compete with private schools. But these moves introduced market competition into the public school system, over time exacerbating existing educational inequalities. Better-off parents were now able to shop around for the best schools, while students with poor academic records or behavioral problems, often from the most disadvantaged parts of Sydney, were concentrated together, effectively creating a two-tier public education system.

In the words of one teacher:

Sometimes well now have three or four or even five students in a classroom that are emotionally disturbed children or have special needs it affects what you can actually do in the class; you have to curtail a lot of your curriculum to cater for these children.

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has proven to be just as enthusiastic about the marketization of education as the Liberals. In 2008, thenprime minister Kevin Rudd introduced standardized testing known as the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) exam. Shortly after, in 2010, Julia Gillard launched the My School website, which uses NAPLAN results to allow parents and the media to compare schools.

NAPLAN was criticized by principals at the time, who argued that comparing schools has led to a stifling of creative and effective teaching [and] a narrowing of the curriculum. Meanwhile, sales of exam coaching and sample tests doubledfrom 2012 to 2013.

Unsurprisingly, academic studies have found that NAPLAN rewards students for writing that is predictable, unnecessarily complex, and lacking in logical reasoning. And most concerning of all, as the Australian Primary Principals Association has argued, NAPLAN creates anxiety and fear in primary children. Subsequent studies have found that the tests have induced vomiting, sleeplessness, [and] migraines. In one tragic case, the pressure led one year-five student to attempt suicide.

Despite the evidence of such harmful side effects, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has followed other OECD countries in arguing that standardized testing ensures quality of education and economic competitiveness. More simply put, the point of NAPLAN was to create a blunt, quantitative measure of school performance. The goal was to run schools like education factories, and NAPLAN became the standard measure of the human capital they produce.

In 2012, Barry OFarrells Liberal NSW government transformed schools into self-managing units, under the slogan Local Schools, Local Decisions (LSLD). Principals were redefined as business managers and given increased control over budgets and staffing.

In the private sector, rhetoric about flexibility disguises insecure, casualized work. Similarly, under the cover of empowering parents, LSLD has undermined conditions and made teaching more precarious by accelerating the spread of temporary teaching contracts. Anxious to secure long-term employment, temp teachers invariably end up serving on more school teams and projects and working for longer hours. The threat of not having their contract renewed also coerces temp teachers into situations that contradict their legal rights for example, when they are required to attend meetings during non-teaching hours.

The corporate drive to maximize value-added teacher quality and school productivity has not spared permanent staff members, either. Today, NSW teachers work an average of fifty-five hours per week, while over 60 percent report suffering unacceptable levels of workplace stress.

By forcing individual schools to pursue growth and demonstrate excellence, LSLD has achieved the opposite result, burdening teachers with mountains of paperwork replete with meaningless buzzwords, to demonstrate compliance, professional development, and evidence of learning. As one teacher put it:

With so much more time spent on tasks unrelated to programming and lesson preparation for the children . . . it feels like work and tasks related to the classroom and preparing quality lessons for the students in your class is only 50 percent of the job.

Teaching programs themselves are increasingly subject to corporate-style audits. As a result, teachers are required to write extensive commentaries explaining exactly what is being taught, when, and how.

As these commentaries must refer to individual students, teachers are forced to spend evenings and weekends reporting absurdities such as provided 1:1 literacy support by sitting next to [student] and showing them how to write a persuasive paragraph. The irony, of course, is that this leaves teachers with far less time to think about and plan lessons.

The situation was already bad before COVID-19. Now, by further applying performance-management principles to individual teachers, the NSW Productivity Commission hopes to turbocharge economic productivity. If adopted, its recommendations will disadvantage teachers and students even further.

Take, for example, the Commissions proposal to evaluate teachers individual performance using value-added measures. These are purported to estimate teachers contributions to students progress over time, adjusting for their initial performance and characteristics, and identify the teachers who make larger-than-average contributions to learning growth.

Putting aside the dehumanizing language for a moment, this begs the question: what value is being added, and how is learning defined? The NSW Productivity Commissions green paper gives a hint. It praises the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS), Tennessees statistical growth model, which was upgraded to a higher-stakes evaluation system that, while controversial at the time, led to gains on national tests that earned Tennessee the title of Americas fastest-improving state in math and reading in 2013.

Which is to say, under TVAAS learning growth simply means higher scores on standardized exams. The green paper confirmed that this is what the Commission has in mind for NSW by praising Reddam House, an elite Sydney private school that subjects students above year three to weekly fifty-minute cycle tests effectively drilling them to boost the statistics.

Instead of benefitting students and society by enriching the curriculum, the focus on adding value has incentivized teaching to the test. Worse, the Commission is also proposing to penalize experienced teachers whose students do not score highly by abolishing salary progression based on years of service, and instead tying pay raises to productivity outcomes (read: wringing higher test scores out of students.) True to the customer service model imported from the private sector, the Commission is also recommending that pay raises be tied to positive outcomes on student satisfaction surveys.

Finally, the Commission is also proposing to tie remuneration to lesson observations. Lesson observations have already become a tool of compliance, in some cases leading to bullying as unscrupulous supervisors are given additional control over their colleagues. But as it stands, at least teachers have some say over lesson observations they are hypothetically permitted to choose a colleague and negotiate the time and class. And for the time being, observations have no bearing on pay rises.

The Commission has declared that this is at odds with modern standards of management and accountability, and has argued that supervisors should have the absolute right to enter a teachers classroom whenever they choose.

These moves are also designed to pit teachers against each other. No doubt a minority who most effectively game the system will be rewarded. However, with the NSW State Government already cutting public sector wages, the net result will, by necessity, save money by lowering salaries for the majority of teachers, especially impacting those who work at disadvantaged schools.

Far-right politicians like Labor renegade and One-Nation bigot Mark Latham have endorsed the Commissions recommendations, while arguing that the government should go even further by placing principals on temporary contracts with higher salaries and tying additional funding to improved NAPLAN scores. This threatens to transform principals into the key agents of corporatization within schools, while accelerating the spread of temporary teaching contracts for classroom teachers.

And lastly, this agenda creates a long-term danger that underperforming schools will be singled out, shut down, and transformed into privately run charter schools, as has been the case in the United States. How long before an under-performing schools teachers are fired en masse, and forced to reapply for their jobs? And faced with this kind of pressure, how long before standardized test cheating scandals erupt here, as they have in the United States?

For industry and establishment politicians, education is not a public good with intrinsic value to society. Its key mission is not to promote difficult-to-measure intangibles like empathy, critical thinking, and democratic citizenship. From the business point of view, schools are primarily an economic resource.

Unless teachers, parents, and students want to import the dystopian American education system into Australia, they must reject further corporate reforms of their schools.

Originally posted here:

The Liberals Are Ramping Up the Marketization of Australia's Public Schools - Jacobin magazine

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

Published in September 2020

Where you stand on Daniel Yergins The New Map will likely depend on where you sit on climate change.

Suppose you believe that global warming is an existential crisis, one that warrants coordinated actions to lower carbon emissions even at the price of slowing economic growth. In that case, you will read The New Map as tepid and underargued. Conversely, if you view climate change as a manageable (rather than existential) crisis, then you will appreciate Yergins even-handed approach to the shifting global energy economy.

Since The Prize, Daniel Yergins books have been the ones by which I measure all other energy nonfiction. The New Map may not be as original as The Prize. Still, it is useful in that the book synthesizes the complex story of our 21st-century global energy transition within a fast-moving 512-page narrative.

The overall story of global energy can be summarized in three trends: 1) fracking changed the energy game, as now the U.S. is the worlds largest oil and natural gas producer; 2) electricity is fast emerging as an essential type of energy (think electric cars), and natural gas and renewables are quickly replacing coal in producing electricity; 3) while renewable technology is improving quickly, wind and solar and hydro still only account for roughly 20percent of global energy production.

Yergin believes that the transition to renewables is inevitable but will come more slowly than progressives would like. Declining demand for oil makes it cheaper, which reduces incentives to switch from gas to batteries. (Or home heating oil to solar.) The New Map provides an excellent primer on the relationship between energy production and international political relations, with Russia (an enormous producer) and China (the worlds biggest energy consumer) at the center of this story.

Ive long thought that the study of energy and society should be included as an essential element of a liberal arts education. Whether you believe that climate change is an existential or manageable crisis, there is little doubt that global warming will be the defining challenge of this century.

The New Map should be on the syllabus of any course on energy and society.

What are you reading?

Original post:

'The New Map' and the New Liberal Arts | Learning Innovation - Inside Higher Ed

The spectacular, but not totally unexpected, electoral success of Asaduddin Owaisis party, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), in Bihar has been linked directly to the erosion of tolerance and pluralism under the Modi regime. The sense of unease in left-liberal circles over the rise of AIMIM is best reflected by the label Muslim BJP. The phrase is for most parts intended to warn fellow travellers against the pitfalls of rooting for a for, by and of Muslims party a mirror image of the Hindu BJP.

But thats not the only reason for hyphenating AIMIM with BJP. The moniker is a dog whistle aimed at elevating anxieties about minority alienation arising from BJPs perceived majoritarianism. It is as if to suggest that if it were not for BJP and its emphasis on a muscular Hindu majoritarianism Muslims would not have been persuaded to vote for AIMIM.

But is this a reasonable inference? Has Indias tolerant pluralism not been challenged in the past by Sikh, Kashmiri, Tamil, Maratha and Naga chauvinism? Didnt each of these sub-nationalisms spawn political parties whose appeal for votes would subvert laws discouraging sectarianism? These movements, after all, preceded what historian Romila Thapar has called the syndicated Hinduism under BJP. Indeed, are the authors of the Hindu BJP appellation in a position to say with certitude that a BJP-Mukt Bharat would be any closer to becoming a model inclusive democracy than it is today?

It would be an omission not to concede that power has had a tempering influence upon BJP. As things stand today none of NDAs policy decisions have been struck down as discriminatory by the courts. The decision to nullify the special status given to Jammu & Kashmir under Article 370, linked to RSSs divisive Hindutva project, does quite the opposite. It arguably strikes at the very root of sabka saath annulling discrimination in the Kashmir Valley. Even the notification of the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Act, widely described by BJPs ideological opponents as an anti-Muslim legislation, has precedent in similar laws in some of the worlds most established democracies.

NDAs approach to governance since 1998 has shown us that, just like the Christian Democratic parties in Europe that won power, BJP too has moderated its ideology. Today, the party is not just more palatable to voters beyond its upper caste constituency but also open to them.

Some would counter that the party doesnt hand out tickets to Muslims in adequate numbers. However, it was Mohammad Karim Chagla, the first chief justice of the Bombay high court, who remarked, If it is communalism to pass over and ignore a man with merit simply because he happens to be a Muslim or a Christian or a Parsi, it is also communalism to appoint a person merely because he happens to be a Muslim.

In sharp contrast, the inclusivist Congress party has seen its vote bank shrink. Today, as the Bihar elections have demonstrated, even Muslims have begun to break away from Congress, despite its leadership championing secularism and tolerance. For sure, secular parties like Congress have unlocked the key to power for Muslims and other marginalised groups, but have they empowered them?

Sadly, under Congress secularism has become a means to an end: a carrot to dangle in the hope of capturing a vote bank. And from 2004 for ten years UPA dangled many of its own carrots. Harking back to its electorally finessed identity-centric approach to governance UPA contemplated several morally elastic schemes: from batting for minority quotas to exempting minority educational institutions from a mandate to reserve seats for lower castes. There were also attempts at cringe-worthy sentimentalism: one UPA minister went as far as to claim that Congress president Sonia Gandhi reportedly wept bitterly on seeing images of the Batla House encounter site in Delhi where security forces took out alleged Islamist terrorists.

Even the Sachar Committee, set up by UPA Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, concluded that beyond mawkish tokenism very few policies pursued by Congress improved the lives of minorities in India.

It hasnt taken long for Muslims or voters of other denominations to reject the counterfeit liberalism of Congress and some of its ideological bedfellows. AIMIM is but the latest alternative for Muslims to try out. However, as history has taught us, sectarian alternatives often turn out to be insidious and those who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

Originally posted here:

Understanding AIMIMs rise: Muslim voters have rejected the counterfeit liberalism of secular parties - Economic Times

Portsmouth Herald

Dec. 2 -- To the Editor:

Not unexpectedly, the first published letter in response to Ken McCords most recent column appealing for compromise among the groups comprising the center of the political spectrum in light of a supposed Biden electoral victory took him to task for not being kinder to those opposed to Trump. But, for many of us, the election was stolen in broad daylight.

The Trump administration and their legal team are right to obstruct any attempt to prematurely legitimize the pretender. There are myriad examples of election tampering, fraud, and organized mischief. An extraordinary percentage of the American peopleRepublican and Democrat alikebelieve the election was not fairly conducted, that the reporting was censored and biased, and that the depth of deep state corruption has permeated to even local levels.

Trump was originally elected because his message of American exceptionalism resonated with voters who (correctly) thought their votes had been wasted on weakspined collaboratorsso-called conservativeswho favored compromise with the liberal Democrats. As Mr. McCord characterized it, the sanctimonious moral pulpit from which they judge millions of fellow citizens they have never met became repugnant to decent, hardworking Americans. In my memory, the only outcome of such compromise efforts has been the loss of liberty and diminished allegiance to the Constitution, morality and ethics. Winston Churchill may have said it bestAn appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. Thats the essence of compromise with todays brand of sanctimonious liberalsthe only compromise ever accepted by liberals completely erodes the fundamental principles of the constitutional republic. Ken McCord was too kind to Bidens supporters. To capitulate now is to accept that the cannibals have eaten the last missionary...it may have happened, but we should not willingly play nicely with the cannibals.

Terry Allen

Portsmouth

Read more:

Opinion/Letter: There's no compromising with sanctimonious liberals - Seacoastonline.com

Romanias governing Liberals hope to retain power in parliamentary elections on Sunday, despite seeing their popularity dwindle in recent months as coronavirus took a heavy toll on the nation and battered its economy.

Surveys suggest the National Liberal Party (PNL) of prime minister Ludovic Orban will attract about 30 per cent of votes, ahead of the opposition Social Democrats (PSD) with about 25 per cent and the progressive USR-Plus party on about 17 per cent.

If victorious, Mr Orban is likely to seek a coalition with USR-Plus, which is popular among younger urban voters. He may also approach Romanias ethnic Hungarian party or the party of former Romanian president Traian Basescu, if they gain the 5 per cent needed to enter parliament.

The PNL was eager for snap elections before Covid-19 struck, but the impact of the pandemic has soured sentiment towards the government and eroded its lead over the PSD.

The Liberals took power in October 2019 when a PSD government was ousted in a no-confidence vote, following three years of turbulent rule in which the party sought to weaken anti-corruption legislation to the benefit of some of its most prominent members and backers, including its then leader Liviu Dragnea.

The PSDs bid to blunt anti-graft laws and extend government influence over the judiciary sparked Romanias biggest protests since its 1989 anti-communist revolution and strained ties with the European Union.

Ultimately, the PSDs efforts failed, Mr Dragnea was jailed on graft charges and the party was forced to go into opposition.

Yet recent months have shifted Romanians focus away from corruption to coronavirus, which has infected 500,273 people in the country of 19 million and claimed 12,052 lives.

The PSD accuses the government of mishandling all aspects of the crisis, from harming the economy by closing shops and markets, to failing to improve Romanias ailing health system and allowing millions of defective face masks onto the market.

They closed your kids school. They closed your market where you bought Romanian products. They destroyed your business . . . They didnt test you, they made you buy non-compliant masks and told you its your fault for getting infected, PSD leader Marcel Ciolacu wrote on Facebook on Friday. Vote to take your life back!

Mr Orban says Romania cannot afford the PSDs populist promises, such as a 40 per cent increase to pensions next year.

He has pledged to keep fighting corruption and modernise Romanias infrastructure, including its ageing hospitals, after 10 coronavirus patients died in a fire at a clinic in the city of Piatra Neamt last month.

Romanian president Klaus Iohannis who strongly supports the PNL has said that with a new majority in parliament, that is responsible and fully committed to the good of Romanians he and the next government will rebuild the entire health system from the ground up.

Read the original here:

Covid-19 clouds election prospects of Romania's ruling Liberals - The Irish Times

When it comes to making news about protests and action for liberal causes, schools in New England seem to dominate the news. Weve seen violence and protests surrounding visits from Charles Murray and Ryszard Legutko at Middlebury College. Brown University spent hundreds of millions of dollars in response to student protests related to questions of diversity and inclusion. Yale has seen numerous protests and student arrests and students there attacked and harassed a faculty couple who headed a residential college in 2015 claiming that they felt unsafe because of an email message about Halloween costumes.

While protests in other parts of the country do make news, such as the recent troubles relating to the police at Northwestern, it appears that students in New England are far more likely to engage in such actions.

Thanks to new data behind the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings from RealClearEducation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and survey firm College Pulse representing the largest study of student attitudes toward speech to date we know that students enrolled in the higher education institutions in New England are appreciably more liberal and open to shutting down speech and expression than the overwhelming majority of college students.

With almost 20,000 students in FIRE survey sample, it is possible to break the national sample down into regional groups and the data makes it abundantly clear that those enrolled in New England are notably different.

The General Social Survey shows that political ideology in the United States has been remarkably consistent since the 1970s and that liberals are not dominant. In the most recent sample, the survey found that 28% of Americans identify as liberal, 31% as conservative, and the balance of 37% are in the middle as moderates. In contrast, 50% of college students are liberal, 26% are conservative and the minority 23% are moderates. College students demonstrate a significant liberal lean.

But this lean is not uniform. In New England, the data reveal that college students live in a huge bubble where there are 5 liberals for every 1 conservative. 71% of New England college students identify as liberal and just 15% conservative and 14% moderate. This is by far the most lopsided region in the nation.

The most similar regions to New England, ideologically, are the West Coast and Mid-Atlantic regions. 59% of students in both regions identify as liberal with just a fifth of their students holding conservative views, meaning there are three liberal undergraduates for every conservative student in those regions. This breakdown is far off the national average.

Looking at other regions in the United States, liberal student dominance disappears. Take the Mountain region 8 states that are mixed ideologically with rural areas and big and growing cities such as Denver and Phoenix and the ideological balance is far less extreme. Here about a quarter of students are moderate and in the middle with a little more than a third identifying as conservative and 41% stating that they are liberal. In fact, if one excludes the three extreme liberal regions, the remaining 6 divisions are far more diverse with 46% of students being liberal, a quarter moderate, and about a third (30%) conservative.

The differences between some schools are striking. At the University of Arizona in Tempe there are 1.5 liberals for every conservative. But Brown in Rhode Island has 12 liberal students for every conservative.

Ideological imbalance is problematic in and of itself if you value viewpoint diversity in the classroom, but it is also the case that students in New England are far more likely to believe that actions to shut down speech are acceptable.

When asked whether it is ever appropriate to shout down or try to prevent someone from speaking on campus, 61% of students found that this was acceptable, nationally. But in New England 70% of students thought preventing a speaker was talking was justified in at least some circumstances. This is in stark comparison to regions like East South Central, home to the Universities of Tennessee and Alabama, where just half of the students found such behavior acceptable.

Similarly, when asked about the acceptability of blocking other students from entering a campus event, almost half (48%) of New England students thought this tactic would be an acceptable way to protest a campus speaker. About 30% of students in the East South Central, the Mountain, West North Central, and West South Central a nearly 20-point difference felt that blocking an entrance was acceptable.

Put somewhat differently, 51% of Yale students would approve of tactics which would prevent students from hearing an opinion on their campus, but just 35% at the Universities of Missouri which itself made national attention when a faculty member and students tried to forcibly block the press from covering a demonstration would be willing to block others from attending an event.

New England schools are collectively an outlier in terms of both student liberalism and their willingness to shut down speech. And the perception that protests against speakers are more common in New England is born out in the data. This lopsided liberal trend matches earlier work, which revealed a similar imbalance, where liberal professors outnumber conservative professors 28 to 1 for New England colleges and universities. And while finding a conservative professor in New England is exceedingly rare and far out of step with the national ratio of 6 to 1, many regions in the country are not as homogenous.

Ideological imbalance among students is a problem, especially in New England. It is crucial that students of all ideological backgrounds encounter a multitude of ideas in college.

But its important to note that the student imbalance in New England is far less one-sided than the faculty imbalance there. And faculty imbalance may be a far more pressing problem if one values viewpoint diversity. Its more readily fixable too, if schools would only prioritize the hiring of a more ideologically diverse faculty and work to ensure that all faculty strive to present a multitude of views and intellectual traditions in their classrooms.

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This article is part of a series of opinion essays on the topic of free speech on campus, coinciding with the launch of the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings. It was first published on Real Clear Education.

More here:

Are students liberal? Yes but not everywhere - MassLive.com

In his bid against President Donald Trump, President-elect Joe Biden had argued for a liberal internationalist foreign policy to once more place America at the head of the table. In contrast to Trumps America First conduct, Biden wants the US to re-assume its leadership of global governance issues, embrace advocacy of democratic values and human rights, and sustain its network of security partnerships. Towards such a restorationist agenda to rescue US foreign policy, Biden recently announced nominations to key foreign policy and national security posts, with most being veterans of the Barack Obama administration. However, Bidens decision to nominate former colleagues (and some close confidants) also reflects careful deliberation.

Not just Obama 3.0

Bidens cabinet is a departure from the experience of the Trump cabinet. The latter often oversaw intense factional conflicts, with an odd combination of supposed adults in the room (like Jim Mattis, H R McMaster), neoconservatives (like John Bolton), political acolytes (like Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley), and ideologues as advisers (like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller). Bidens team is less of an odd mix of rivals, and more like a reunion of former colleagues. However, each pick also reflects Bidens foreign policy priorities.

Read:Democracy, economy key to India-US ties

As US ambassador to the UN, Biden has tapped career-diplomat Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who will be the second African American woman to represent the US at the global high-table. In contrast to the Trump years, which saw US withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council and UNESCO, Bidens prioritisation of the organisation is reflected in his plan to reinstate the US ambassador to the UN to cabinet rank. Moreover, at a time when China has sought to expand its influence at the UN (particularly among African member-states), Thomas-Greenfields experience as Obamas Assistant Secretary of State for Africa would be central to Americas counter efforts. Similarly, in once again rallying the world after Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, the decision to tap former Secretary of State John Kerry (who helped negotiate the agreement under Obama) as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change is significant.

In addition, on Bidens agenda to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and possibly even coax an expansion of the deals scope with follow-on negotiations, Biden has picked Jake Sullivan as his National Security Adviser. During the Obama years, apart from serving as National Security Adviser to then-Vice President Biden, Sullivan was a key player in the secret negotiations that led to the deal with Iran. Furthermore, Sullivans nomination also reflects Bidens intent to convey continuity in US policy towards Asia. As the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sullivan notably worked on Clintons flagship Pivot to Asia policy which, in hindsight, was a critical precursor to the Indo-Pacific strategy.

The clear-eyed internationalist

The most significant nomination was that of Antony Blinken for US Secretary of State. With some in Democratic national security circles also viewing him as Bidens alter ego, Blinken most recently served as National Security Adviser (2009-13) to Vice President Biden, Deputy National Security Adviser (2013-15) to Obama, and Deputy Secretary of State (2015-17).

With this extensive experience, Blinkens nomination as Bidens top diplomat chiefly pertains to rekindling US ties with its prime allies across the Atlantic. After four years of Trump deriding Europe as Americas foe and claiming that the European allies had ripped off Washington on collective security, they will now have a Secretary of State to deal with who is a fluent French speaker and who considers them as partners of first resort, not last resort.

Moreover, at a time when there is dwindling appetite for US internationalism across the political spectrum, picking Blinken offers a centrist proposition. He is known to be uncompromising in his support for American advocacy of democratic values and human rights, albeit in recognition of the limits of US power. In the Obama administrations deliberations on supporting the democratic uprising in Egypt, Blinken was part of a majority of officials who called on Obama to be on the right side of history, while his boss (Biden) was part of a minority who counselled caution against abandoning the pro-US Hosni Mubarak regime. However, on Afghanistan, Blinken and Biden together convinced Obama to adopt a limited counterterrorism-focused strategy, over a military-led counterinsurgency mission.

Known for his prudent understanding of the limits of American power, Blinken was notably also one of the prominent Obama administration officials who expressed doubt on the proposition of arming Ukrainians against Russia. In the past, such a worldview has also often informed Blinkens position against overstating the centrality of America in other nations strategic considerations. For instance, in pushing back against Republican insinuations on Russian aggression against Ukraine being a result of Obamas inaction in Syria, Blinken notably said in an interview: This is not about what we do or we say in the first instance, its about Russia and its perceived interests.

Pragmatism on India

Blinkens nomination will also bear on Bidens continuity on US-India ties, since he has had first-hand experience of the cultivation of Americas ties with India. In the early years of Washingtons courtship of New Delhi, Blinken served as staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when as its chairman then-Senator Biden oversaw the passage of the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement.

Moreover, Blinkens prudent nature has been apparent in the context of US-India ties as well. For instance, during the campaign, Blinken often touted two key developments of the Obama-Biden years for US-India ties. They were, the designation of India as a Major Defence Partner and the announcement of the US-India Defence Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI). Since then, Trump has only further built on these Obama-era developments by classifying India under the Strategic Trade Authorisation-1 category and finalising the Industrial Security Annex for the actualisation of DTTI. Given Trumps continuity, Blinken hence seemed to limit criticism of Trumps record on India to the futility of photo-ops and a transactional approach to trade issues.

However, there would be one critical avenue where Blinkens approach to India would surely depart from the Trump precedent. Given his record as a supporter of US advocacy of democratic values, Blinken would certainly raise American apprehensions over some of Indias domestic policies. Blinken has already alluded to there being real concerns over India cracking down on freedom of movement and freedom of speech in Kashmir, [and] some of the laws on citizenship. However, he has pragmatically called for working on those differences, even as the two nations continue to build greater cooperation and strengthen the relationship.

Blinkens rhetoric on China suggests a recalibration of US-China ties along ideological lines. Case in-point, in construing the US-China rivalry as a contest of two distinct governance and development models, Blinken has identified Trumps apparent signals of impunity on Beijings human rights record as a major reason behind Washington suffering a strategic deficit. Certainly, one way to look at this criticism is to also consider it as a course-correction of the Obama years folly of over-prioritising cooperation with China, at the cost of ignoring its transgressions at times. However, regardless of the motivation to assume a firm stance this time, in Blinkens plan to now have America remerge in a position of strength from which to engage China, he has invoked Trumps Indo-Pacific strategy and notably called on India to be a key partner in that effort.

Hence, with greater attention to the China challenge, Bidens team of Obama-era liberal internationalists could adopt a degree of pragmatism on American apprehensions over Indias domestic policies.

(The writer is a Research Fellow at Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Mumbai)

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Return of the liberal internationalists - Deccan Herald

"Rahm Emanuel covered up the murder of a Black teenager, Laquan McDonald, while he was Mayor of Chicago," tweeted New York Rep.-elect Mondaire Jones. "That he's being considered for a cabinet position is completely outrageous and, honestly, very hurtful."

But that didn't help matters.

"What is so hard to understand about this? Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership. This is not about the 'visibility' of a post. It is shameful and concerning that he is even being considered....It is also a truly embarrassing indictment of what's considered 'center' politics in the US that objecting to the appointment of an official who helped cover up the murder of a Black child is deemed the 'progressive, far left' position."

While the McDonald shooting has become the flashpoint for liberal ire directed toward Emanuel, the ill will directed at the former mayor long predates that incident.

"I told him many times (about) the political cost of doing this," Emanuel said. "And thank God for the country, he didn't listen to me."

"So much of the legend of Rahm Emanuel's brilliant career makes little sense. The bigger question, perhaps, is what this says about a political party and the political press that bought the legend in the first place."

"The left didn't just get here -- it has been around for decades. In fact, it was progressives who controlled the Democratic Party's agenda for the quarter-century before Clinton's victory in 1992. That's one of the reasons we lost every presidential election held between 1968 and 1988 except the post-Watergate win by Jimmy Carter. History has proved there aren't enough voters on the far left, on their own, to elect and reelect a president or maintain a majority in Congress."

Putting Emanuel into a prominent role in his administration would be something different by Biden, however. It would be regarded by liberals as an open provocation -- whether or not Biden meant it that way. And it's not clear if the President-elect is willing to go that far down the road of antagonizing liberals before he is even the president.

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The Democrat liberals love to hate - CNN

It has become common in recent weeks to say that the Conservatives face a clear, unavoidable choice: the red wall versus Notting Hill, north versus south, the just about managing versus affluent Britain. They can be the party for blue-collar, working-class voters in the north, or the party for dinner-party liberals in the south.

The problem is, this choice is out of date. Though the Conservatives are ascendent in the red wall, some of those liberal-leaning seats have been out of reach for the party since 2017. Formerly Tory seats such as Brighton Kemptown, Cardiff North or Battersea now have Labour majorities of more than 5,000. In the south, Labour holds three-quarters of the seats it won from the Conservatives in 2017, and there were swings towards Labour in most of them in 2019, despite the partys unpopularity nationwide. Kensington is just about a Conservative seat, but it is an outlier: the Tories hold no other seat in the country like it, and their vote share has declined there in the past two elections.

The real seats that matter in the south, the real electoral landscape facing the Conservatives, are different: affluent and middle class, but less diverse, less liberal, and older. These are the battlegrounds where Labour could make headway at the next election: Swindon, Southampton Itchen, Milton Keynes, Reading West. It is this balance between holding on to places such as Swindon and Southampton on the one hand, and retaining the red wall on the other, which is now key for the Conservatives.

Rachel Wolf has written that the party must make a choice between the two. But this is precisely the opposite of what the Conservatives did in 2019, their biggest election win since 1987. Instead they carried both groups, with a focus on public services, Jeremy Corbyn and a Brexit message that appealed more to peoples boredom with the process than a values battle between leave and remain. The path to power is to win both, just as the Conservatives did then, and as Blair did three times.

Now as then, it is possible to bridge the two. Voters might speak differently, or take different cues from different leaders, but they have much in common. On crime, there is a shared desire for a tough approach. There is consensus on immigration: polling by my firm, JL Partners, shows 61% of swing Conservative voters in the south want immigration to be reduced, not at all far off the 68% of defectors to the Conservatives in the red wall. The prime ministers stated aim to level up feels relevant in both parts of the country, too. And a focus on improving public services the NHS, schools, and social care resonates strongly.

In a recent piece on this subject, Nick Timothy said some Conservative MPs wanted to pander to prosperous and liberal voters motivated by issues like international aid. That description of voters might be true in seats such as Battersea and Brighton Kemptown, but not in the southern seats that matter to the Conservatives. Among swing Tory voters in the south and defectors in the north, more than 80% agree that the government should always put the needs of the British people ahead of others.

Voters in the red wall are not horrified by pro-environment policies such as those outlined by the prime minister last week, but support them. The link to high-quality jobs is understood, and even the ban on diesel and petrol car sales prompts nods rather than anger: such a sweeping policy that applies to everyone is interpreted by voters as fair.

There are other misunderstandings. As I have written before, the culture war approach does not grip the red wall in the way many commentators make out. Both the northern and southern demographics want their leaders to be patriotic, but do not care for fights over statues, the BBC or gender pronouns. A recent call by a group of Tory MPs to speak out against elite bourgeois liberals would be one of the worst ways to attract these voters; this is not the US, and people would much rather politicians focus on the things that matter to them.

For the Conservatives, winning both of these two groups, rather than one or the other, is not only possible, but necessary. Some will argue that their majority provides room to lose seats such as Swindon and Southampton Itchen. Such logic is extremely dangerous, and rarely wins elections. First, it is hard to see how some seats in the red wall will not return to Labour they are the most marginal seats now, and the voters who are last in are usually the first out.

Second, the red wall is not a homogenous block of solely working-class voters. It is entirely plausible that Labour could close the gap in the most marginal red wall seats by winning back Liberal Democrat voters and making inroads with more affluent voters. Those who defected to the Conservatives in these seats in 2019 are also a little less working class than many suppose. The British Election Study shows that more than a third of them are university graduates, and only four in 10 are blue-collar workers. Any strategy that only appeals to the middle classes or only appeals to the working classes is flawed from the get-go.

The noises out of No 10 since Dominic Cummings departure suggest bold environmental policies rather than culture wars. Alongside a message that focuses on immigration and crime, as well as investment in public services and competent management of the economy, this puts No 10 on the verge of the best electoral offering it has had in the past 12 months.

It makes little sense to see British politics in the 2020s as a zero-sum game, a trade-off between two opposing blocs of voters. Reality is more complicated than that. The southern seats that matter to the Conservatives are not the likes of Battersea and Brighton Kemptown, but Swindon and Southampton Itchen. Both they and the red wall can be won together, not through culture war but by being gritty as well as green, by being patriotic as well as prudent. And not only is bridging the two groups possible, it is essential if the Conservatives want to keep winning.

James Johnson is a former Downing Street pollster who worked under Theresa May and now runs JL Partners

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For Tories, the choice between votes in the 'red wall' and 'liberal south' is an illusion - The Guardian