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**APRIL 3, 2023**
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Is There Democratic Life After Tribalism?
If everything breaks just right, democracy will still take a long time
to heal.
My former neighbor Margot Stern Strom died last week
<[link removed]>. In
the 1970s, starting in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she was teaching
in my kids' grade school, Margot created a high school curriculum
called Facing History and Ourselves.
Facing History began with the Holocaust, and soon branched out into
slavery, the extermination of native peoples, the Armenian genocide, and
apartheid. It asked students to place themselves in the role of ordinary
people who lived in those times and places-and faced ethical dilemmas
of whether to resist or just go along. Or to place themselves in the
shoes of the victims.
At Passover seders later this week, Jewish families will do that,
paradoxically, when they are reminded to express compassion even for the
Egyptians who suffered plagues as punishment for trying to destroy the
Jews (Bibi, pay attention).
The Facing History curriculum won awards. It eventually trained over
100,000 educators worldwide and has been used in thousands of middle and
high schools, even in what were not yet called red states.
But lately, Facing History and far tamer curricula have been banished in
large chunks of the country that do not want to face history. On the
contrary, they explicitly want to deny history.
Florida, at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis, passed a law that prohibits
trainings that cause someone to feel guilty or ashamed
<[link removed]>
about the past collective actions of their race or sex.
Wholly accurate books and movies of historical fiction such as a 1998
Disney movie on six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who integrated a New Orleans
public school in 1960, have been banned
<[link removed]>
on the ground that they make white people feel bad.
Facing History was created in a more innocent time, when the shame of
the Holocaust was still fresh in living memory, when government and the
courts and public opinion were all still on the side of advancing civil
rights, and the country had not yet descended into tribalism. In the
1970s, the imperative of facing history was a widely shared goal.
Today, the approved curriculum in much of the white South might be
called Denying History. The excesses of "wokeism," some real, some
invented, become the perfect pretext for pretending that slavery, Jim
Crow, segregation, lynchings, and their more recent counterparts were
something other than what they plainly were.
Today, you can hear serious people on both sides of the tribal divide
talking about civil war or secession. It's not just the far right that
raises secession. I've heard liberals say, if only Lincoln had let the
South go. Then the rest of us could have a normal social democratic
country.
If you find that fantasy tempting, consider what happened after World
War I. "Nationalities" at last got their own countries. But Europe was
too much of an ethnic quilt. There were Romanians in Hungary, Greeks in
Turkey, Germans in Czechoslovakia; and a stew of rival ethnic groups
living cheek by jowl in Yugoslavia.
People with tribal identities found themselves behind enemy lines, as it
were, just like Americans living in blue cities in red states, or vice
versa.
There are only two cures for this kind of ever-deepening tribalism.
Either it ends in ethnic cleansing-the literal sort, or the figurative
cleansing of denying history-or we slowly and painfully find our way
back to post-tribal democracy, and recover our collective memory.
For that to happen, DeSantis and his grand strategy has to fail; Trump,
who now leads all Republicans in polls of likely primary voters, has to
be renominated-as the Republican most likely to implode and easiest
for Biden to beat. Biden has to win in 2024 and take both houses of
Congress with him. And right-wing tribalism has to suffer defeat after
defeat at the polls, and slowly lose its appeal.
In a fascinating extended interview that
**New Yorker** editor David Remnick conducted with Jon Meacham,
Biden's favorite historian
<[link removed]>,
Meacham said this:
"The fever only breaks if they lose. Let's be very clear here.
You're never getting rid of Trumpism, right? ... But it can be
contained. My view is it is only contained if they keep losing."
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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Hidden in Plain Sight
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The distorting power of macroeconomic policy models BY RAKEEN MABUD &
DAVID DAYEN
How Models Get the Economy Wrong
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Seemingly complex and sophisticated econometric modeling often fails to
take into account common sense and observable reality. BY JOSEPH E.
STIGLITZ
Chicago's Latino Community Is Up for Grabs
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The Windy City's second-largest racial group will prove decisive in
tomorrow's election. BY LUKE GOLDSTEIN & JAROD FACUNDO
The Chickenshit Club, Climate Edition
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Government lawyers would rather approve 30 years of Arctic drilling than
lose in court. BY HANNAH STORY BROWN
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