Culture War Update

 

Not for much longer: Photo by Jae C. Hong/AP, July 2016, via WBUR radio Boston.

Just as we were getting into the subject, some new research showed up in a report on NPR: 

Two dramatic trends that for years have defined the shifting landscape of religion in America — a shrinking white Christian majority, alongside the rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans — have stabilized, according to a new, massive survey of American religious practice.

What was once a supermajority of white Christians — more than 80% of Americans identified as such in 1976, and two-thirds in 1996 — has now plateaued at about 44%, according to the new survey, which was conducted by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. That number first dipped below 50% in 2012.

The feared white Evangelical Protestants, around 19% in the Pew survey of 2015, have stabilized at just 14% of the population, which leaves them for the first time in donkeys' years behind the white members of respectable mainline churches at 16%, while white Catholics constitute 12%.

Meanwhile the number of "nones", people of all racial groups who claim no religious affiliation at all, having more than tripled since their expansion began in 1990s, has plateaued at 23% (it was around 26% in 2016). 

David Brooks Columns I Never Finished Reading

Maybe that's what it's about. Via Kevin A.Thompson.

I started in the middle of the Brooks of the Week ("The Politics of Exhaustion"), where this stood out on purely methodological grounds:

People in the exhausted camp are tired of having politics thrust in their face every hour. As Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute has found, young people who are “lonely at least once in a while” are more than seven times more likely to be active in politics than those who are socially active. Those who are exhausted have other things to do. They want to restore politics to its rightful place, and find meaning, attachment, entertainment and morality in something else besides Twitter wars and election campaigns.

People who are "lonely at least once in a while" are the opposite of those who are socially active? And those who are socially active are too exhausted to be active in politics and need to limit themselves to more morally significant activities, while loners are full of political energy and having a great time on Twitter? Reader, no. Brooks doesn't link the study, but it's not hard to find a reference to it, and that is not what it says:

Brooks sights the rare White Democrat

Opinion

How White Opinion Columnists Moved Centerwards

Racial equity has become the defining issue of the moment.

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

• July 25, 2019

People are always changing their minds, day to day. But over the past 20-odd years one group has shifted to an astounding degree: highly educated white opinion columnists. I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation, but it has, and the effects are reshaping our politics.

The easiest way to describe the shift is to say that educated opinion columnists have moved steadily to the center. In 1994, only about a sixth of pundits who had gone to graduate school said they were neither liberal nor conservative but really appreciated the ideas on both sides and wished everybody would be more civil. In 2015, more than 50 percent did. In 1994, only 12 percent of pundits with college degrees said they were consistently neutral. Eleven years later, 47 percent did, according to the Pew Research Center.

For the Record: The Self-Denominated Far Left

Drawing by Matthew Diffey, New Yorker via.

So young Master Walker Bragman, the limousine leftist who seems to be aiming at being the HA GOODMAN of the 2018 campaign, took umbrage at a tweet from neoliberal shill Dr. Krugman:

Hey, Roseanne Barr is only worth $80 million, and was being paid only 250K per episode. So her tweets were clearly driven by economic anxiety https://t.co/2SBgBJge0z

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) May 29, 2018

Promise, what follows is NOT ABOUT ROSEANNE. It's about that zombie "economic anxiety" theory of the Trump vote, which keeps coming back, and bad faith argumentation:

Trump voters aren't suffering from economic anxiety (median income $75K compared to $50K for Clinton, not to mention Roseanne). Poor people and low-wage workers are suffering from it and unfortunately fewer vote than other income groups.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2018

Trail of human wreckage

David F. Brooks looking for something cutting-edge to condemn that has nothing to do with sexual assault, tax cuts for the rich, or Russia, asks "How Evil is Tech?"

He's not talking about 3D printing, gene therapy, or cancer vaccines, of course, but the Internet of Kids, who are spending too much time on their damn phones, making them sad and suicidal:

Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.

Surely the people in tech — who generally want to make the world a better place — don’t want to go down this road.

Who are "some"? And don't call me Surely. But that sounds pretty scary: how many kids are dying, on average, from their habitual phone use?

Brooks columns we never finished reading

From Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)

Back in 1985, David Brooks ("Intimacy for the Avoidant") used to have friends, apparently:

Over the past generation there seems to have been a decline in the number of high-quality friendships.

In 1985, most Americans told pollsters that they had about three confidants, people with whom they could share everything. Today, the majority of people say they have about two. 

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that most Americans in 1985 told pollsters that they had about three confidants, whereas they now say they have about two?

The least racist person

How is it that when somebody says, "I am the least racist person that you've ever encountered," you know that person is a racist?

There's a fairly straightforward but interesting psychological answer, which I'll get to eventually, but first I want to get together a clear picture of the whole thing about the boxing promoter Don King, and the political endorsement, since Trump issued that Tweet on Friday morning:

The great boxing promoter, Don King, just endorsed me. Nice!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 10, 2016

The 84-year-old King promptly denied it, in an interview in Louisville with the Daily News Friday afternoon:

“No,” King told the Daily News at the funeral for Muhammad Ali. “I’m endorsing the people. I’m not a Republican or a Democrat, I’m a Republicrat, and I go with the will of the people. The only reason Trump exists is because of the will of the people.”

But on Saturday afternoon he explained to USA Today that the News had misinterpreted him, and that he had in fact endorsed Trump, leading Sam Levine at the Huffington Post to suspect some skullduggery on the order of

Abortion exceptionalism

The Norse goddess Freyja in her cat-drawn chariot, by Nils Blommér, with angels, not babies, 1851. Via Wiktionary.

Of course I've believed for a long time that most Americans think abortion is a bad thing that should probably be illegal or severely restricted with certain key exceptions, such as in the event of a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest or one that endangers the pregnant woman's life or health or if the pregnant person is the respondent or the respondent's girlfriend, or wife, or daughter, in which case they obviously wouldn't want to have an abortion unless they had a pretty good reason, would they? I mean it's not like when one of those sluts wants one, is it?

Annals of Derp: The Fatuous Party

Gary Cooper and Mary Brian in Victor Fleming's The Virginian (1929).

So, what with David Brooks being on vacation, the Times is having trouble making its August silliness quota, and normally dignified persons like economics writer David Leonhardt have to pitch in—here's Leonhardt giving some publicity to W. Bradford Wilcox, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the director of the Home Economics Project of AEI and the Institute for Family Studies, trying to scare up some evidence against the well-known finding of Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, in their 2010 study Red Families V. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, that (in Leonhardt's words)

Liberal attitudes toward gender equality, sexual orientation and education all seem to foster stronger, more stable family lives.

How can that be? cry the conservatives, in some panic. Don't we have all the family values? And they rush out foraging for data.

Chutes 'n' Ladders of Understanding; or, Which Way is Up?

Ani's a Spaceman (or is Spacewoman used?) by Scott Altmann, via How to Carve Roast Unicorn.

This is your intergalactic correspondent David Brooks reporting from a little-known corner near the Andromeda Cluster where he's been trying to get the skinny on the inhabitants of this curious little blue planet, but it hasn't been easy.

Let’s say you wanted to move from a dry, statistical understanding of a problem to a rich, humane one. How would you do it? What steps would you take on your climb toward understanding?

I think I'd ask why I was starting with a dry, statistical understanding in the first place. I'd want to start someplace at least moderately humane so I'd have a clue what the data were about, you know what I'm saying?

Well, obviously, first you’d start with the data.

No, I really wouldn't. I'd—

The Self-Confidence Man

David Brooks writes:

There's an astonishing article in the current issue of The Atlantic summarizing a new book by Catty Kay and Claire Shipman, The Confidence Code.* Social science reveals, it turns out, that women suffer from a lack of self-confidence!

Harold Lloyd in Movie Crazy (1932), via The Man on the Flying Trapeze.

No, for reals, with empirical evidence. They consistently underestimate the value of things they've done, like their results on a test, or what they will do in the future, like the size of their paychecks five years from now.** [jump]

Confirmation bias has a conservative bias

Via.

Yuval Levin on the hot topic of confirmation bias at the National Review:

Without (it seems) a hint of irony, Paul Krugman argued on Monday that everyone is subject to confirmation bias except for people who agree with him. He was responding to this essay Ezra Klein wrote for his newly launched site, Vox.com, which took up the question of confirmation bias and the challenges it poses to democratic politics. Krugman acknowledged the research that Klein cites but then insisted that his own experience suggests it is actually mostly people he disagrees with who tend to ignore evidence and research that contradicts what they want to believe, while people who share his own views are more open-minded, skeptical, and evidence driven. I don’t know when I’ve seen a neater real-world example of an argument that disproves itself.

With the implication that I'm rubber, you're glue, and neener neener neener. Or as Jennifer Rubin calls it,