Uncomfortable Questions about Germany for Americans

I am not a history expert, but I proffer several questions historians ought to ask about Nazi Germany: 

1.  When Adolf Hitler was appointed or elected, who were the alternatives? Were they more distasteful than Hitler in some way? 

2. It seems clear the first way to isolate a minority is through laws. (Violence is too obvious and its showcasing results in weakening the image of law and order.) 

What were the first laws that targeted minorities? What did the enforcement of those laws look like? How did the national government incentivize local police to turn against their own residents or at least to look the other way? 

3. What were immigration patterns from 1919 to 1937? Which types of persons moved away Which types of persons stayed? (Government employees? Recent immigrants? Affluent and/or educated residents?)

4.  Obviously, propaganda existed, but how was it made pervasive? For example, did the government arrest certain people and highlight their situations extensively? Did they use coercion to silence or blacklist persons who questioned the status quo? What specific methods did they use to dissuade behavior they deemed unacceptable? 

5.  What were marriage, divorce, and childbirth rates in Germany from 1900 to 1945? Can we break down statistics by each year to see useful patterns?

6.  What were immigration patterns--both legal and unauthorized--into Germany from 1900 to 1945? (Germany had to have been at least moderately diverse to generate backlash against "outsiders.") 

As an American citizen but a minority, I've left the United States. Whether my absence is temporary remains to be seen. Obviously, I have to return before April of each year to pay taxes, but the more I travel, the more I see other areas of the world that feel like America, pre-9/11. Part of the reason I've left is because I see history repeating itself. 

America elected someone who wasn't presidential but who was still better than the alternative. Vested interests within the opposition/losing political party elevated someone they favored rather than someone more electable, angering their base. 

Economic gains were not distributed to all corners of society, rendering some people vulnerable to propaganda, especially against minorities, tearing apart any common social fabric. Inflation in essential items increased, but without wage increases.

Being part of a group, in and of itself, became worthy of respect and heroism. For instance, merely being part of the military or police entitled someone to automatic respect--regardless of the presence or absence of specific actions. 

This patina of heroism translated into less accountability for certain groups, leading to a "uniform culture" that allowed consolidation of power--and government funding--for special interests, especially the military. 

Economic gains continued not to be diversified, with old and now new special interests caring less and less about results and accountability. All sides in power begin realizing problems involve fundamental issues that cannot be solved unilaterally or that require sacrifices they were elected to avoid implementing. Rhetoric such as "Drain the swamp" becomes muted as the new political establishment resorts to extreme signaling or headlines to avoid losing power or legitimacy. 

Political discourse becomes progressively more toxic, throwing people into two or three camps: 1) yelling to become heard, i.e., the rise of the outrageous as the new normal; 2) taking no substantive positions but remaining agreeable, losing the support of anyone with principles (Note: appeasement comes in many forms, including economic appeasement); or 3) advocating solutions that cannot be implemented without massive changes (i.e., politically impossible solutions that require a dictatorial approach advocates would say they despise). 

In many cases, outliers are highlighted by both sides to justify their political positions or at least to blunt criticism of the status quo. As outliers become used more commonly, the media loses its ability to rally the public to act as a check and balance against government overreach or against the government's honest mistakes. 

Such political toxicity permeates the culture, causing children to grow up in a desensitized as well as unstable environment. For children growing up during a toxic time, the abnormal becomes normal. The children, unlike adults, don't have an earlier time to which they can compare their current lives. The shift from normal to abnormal occurs without any obvious outward signal because the new generation is mimicking the only behavior they know.

Reasonable, empathetic adults see what is going on and leave or self-segregate. They reject such an environment in which to raise or have children or self-segregrate in ways that may require ever-escalating costs to maintain their positions. Many people within this camp will be among the most successful members of society or its most principled--exactly the kind of people who would otherwise stand up effectively for minority rights. Without them present or fully integrated in their communities, little resistance exists against actors wanting to remake society in their own image. 

The lowered number of sensitive, empathetic, principled, or quietly diligent people--whose absence occurs gradually and is therefore difficult to register in any official capacity--causes a collective shift to a new, desensitized normal. At some point, even the less sensitive and empathetic residents realize something is wrong and they, too, leave, self-segregate, or disconnect psychologically from broader society. Yet another barrier of resistance to conformity is removed, leaving strongmen, radicals, and fools to dominate the culture. 

The children in this society grow up to become the new SS. Threats not otherwise perceived by any reasonable person in the previous generation are suddenly seen where few to no new substantive threats actually exist. (e.g., the North Korean nuclear threat is not new; however, NK's increased ability to survive without any need to be connected to countries other than China renders conventional solutions more impotent with each passing year.) This distortion leaves less time--and taxpayer funding--to deal with real problems, the causes of which become less obvious as more time passes. 

Society decays inexorably as more people hold onto power by any means necessary, whether through propaganda (fake news), new laws (CBAs, etc.), or brute force. The inability to resolve fundamental problems means fewer resources to be divided, leaving charity--both psychological and financial--less viable ("compassion fatigue").  Segregation becomes the new normal as fewer people care about others, especially persons who do not look or act like them. 

Segregation is crucial to understanding how a society changes its character because as more and more groups segregate themselves from each other, the information they receive is different. For example, despite living just 15 to 100+ miles away from each other, Community 1 may believe in a totally different reality than Community 2. In addition to making communication and therefore collaboration more difficult, segregation also allows Community 1 to hide its activities from outsiders. To take an extreme example, Community 1 may be brutalizing a minority group, but Community 2 has no realistic way of discovering such activity if the media no longer captivates the general public's attention or continues to lose readers/viewers and therefore status, revenue, income, access, and jobs. In the alternative, a "Neil Postman scenario" may result where excessive information functions the same as deliberate misinformation, leaving too few persons able to ascertain reliable facts, making broad or nationwide cooperation extremely difficult. 

In this future, everyone wonders how such normal, nice people changed in just a few decades. Most people are convinced by academics and media that some unique phenomenon occurred in the past. Some historians highlight positive outliers to provide people with hope when they ought to be warning that atrophy has occurred in every society and could occur again, right here. Otherwise reasonable people have left or spend their time battling misinformation, leaving them exhausted or with less time to contemplate solutions to fundamental problems--the same ones that continue unabated as distractions and noise increase. 

More people leave or self-segregate through laws, legal agreements, harsher police enforcement, and/or physical barriers. Society's only hope is to allow more immigrants who still believe in the country's advertised principles, which are no longer actually true. Whether the government and existing residents allow new immigrants or some other source of fresh idealism to save their country dictates the direction of the society's future. Many countries, after a certain point in this cycle, choose war. 

From Bremmer's Superpower

The key is the youth. Do they choose the old ways, or do they forge a new path? 

Wash, rinse, repeat. 

Bonus: when my family came to America, I remember being assisted by multiple native-born Americans who took pride in assisting my conservative and socially awkward father. (Like father, like son.) I remember this kindness vividly, even though I did not communicate verbally with any of the persons I saw. I was too young and, as noted, socially awkward. 

Yet, I still remember minute details: the family from Davenport who took the time to guide my family around unfamiliar territory, but who became separated at a highway offramp, leaving us to attempt to re-connect unsuccessfully in an era without cell phones or GPS. Being separated from this family distressed me greatly, even though I was not close with them. Why? I knew these people had made sacrifices to assist us, even if just losing time, and their sacrifice meant something. It meant I felt I was welcome in their community, and if I followed the rules, one day, it could be my community. Do recent immigrants to America have similar assistance and feelings that come with such generous assistance?  If not, how do they forge a bond, if any, with their communities?

Bonus II: my comment above regarding segregation is a precursor and base requirement to Kwame Anthony Appiah's worldview, in which he believes change and tolerance come from getting used to each other, not logic or arguments:

"I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement but because it will help us get used to one another--something we have a powerful need to do in this globalized era. If that is the aim, then the fact that we have all these opportunities for disagreement about values need not put us off. Understanding one another may be hard; it can certainly be interesting. But it doesn't require that we come to agreement." 

Just Sayin'

People intuitively understand segregation is immoral and counterproductive.

Then they drive to their private schools, past the security gate with a guard who can reject anyone for any reason, onto a campus charging 40K+ annually for tuition, and say hello to a professor with legal protections under an MOU unavailable to 85% of the general public.

My former law school, Santa Clara University, is asking for donations. I don't see anywhere that SCU plans to forgive the student loans of graduates who are unemployed; who make under a certain income after five years; or who don't have affluent parents who can help pay off the loans.  Must be an oversight.

I wonder what all the pro-regulation professors would think about a law mandating colleges, as 3rd party beneficiaries, to absorb some percentage of a grad's student loan after 5 years if the student makes less than x dollars (with x dollars tied to tuition cost). This paradigm might cause different tuition rates for different majors, but funding discrimination against liberal arts departments is occurring anyway with students bearing all the risks.

Seattle Desegregation?

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down the decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 yesterday. In what will be quoted forevermore, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Justice Breyer called the opinion simplistic. Justice Stevens, as the most tenured judge on the Court, stated that the Court is radically changing precedent because the Supreme Court justices in the past would have disagreed with the Seattle decision ("It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.").

When reading the majority opinion, I was struck by how much enmity Justice Roberts has created between the justices despite his pledge to unite the Court and create more civility. After writing for the majority, Roberts then blazed through Justice Breyer's dissent and dissected it like a law clerk attacking another lawyer's brief--or, to be more colorful, Sherman going through Atlanta. In contrast, Justice Kennedy, as the fifth vote necessary to have a majority, appeared to distance himself from Roberts in various sections in a separate concurrence. Justice Thomas also seemed to go out of his way to be respectful to Justice Breyer, saying that while he has no doubt Breyer's intentions are good, the law must remain as immutable as possible rather than being contingent on a particular judge applying the law.

In short, Roberts stated that there had to be a compelling reason to use race. For law students, this is Con Law 101, i.e. the strict scrutiny test. Kennedy appeared to try to compromise by saying that diversity was a compelling goal, and other methods could be used to create diversity, such as locating new schools in neighborhoods that would naturally draw upon different races (although one wonders how this would be accomplished if some neighborhoods are already segregated--I predict a future opinion echoing O'Connor's disdain for gerrymandering, where she famously called some of the Congressional districts similar to a Rorschach test or a "bug splattered on a windshield.") Breyer essentially stated that the Court is betraying precedent and twisting the intent and spirit of Brown v. Board of Education.

The opinion is most intelligent when differentiating between de jure segregation and de facto segregation. The conservatives seem to say that de facto segregation is permissible. The paragraph that seems to lay the best rationale for the decision is directly below:

"The Court’s emphasis on‘benign racial classifications’ suggests confidence in its ability to distinguish good from harmful governmental uses of racial criteria. History should teach greater humility. . . . ‘[B]enign’ carries with it no independent meaning, but reflects only acceptance of the current generation’s conclusion that a politically acceptable burden, imposed on particular citizens on the basis of race, is reasonable.” Metro Broadcasting, 497 U. S., at 609–610 (O’Connor, J., dissenting). See also Adarand, supra, at 226 (“‘[I]t may not always be clear that a so-called preference is in fact benign’” (quoting Bakke, supra, at 298 (opinion of Powell, J.))). Accepting JUSTICE BREYER’s approach would “do no more than move us from ‘separate but equal’ to ‘unequal but benign.’” Metro Broadcasting, supra, at 638 (KENNEDY, J., dissenting)."

One interesting point made in the dissent is that the school plans in question here are voluntarily attempting to desegregate. Breyer indicates that voluntary plans to achieve desegregation should be viewed with a different lens than laws involuntarily ordering segregation, as was the issue in Brown v. Board.

(Ironically, this same month, the U.S. Mint produced one of the most beautiful coins ever made. It is a silver coin depicting the Little Rock Central High School Desegregation. See here.)

My take on the situation is that the conservative justices have no patience for dividing Americans by race. In their minds, they are attempting to prevent America from becoming Yugoslavia 100 years from now. One of Justice Alito's quotes from a different case could summarize the majority's feelings: "It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” The majority opinion forcefully points out that under the Seattle program, if a school was 30% Asian, 30% Hispanic, 10% African-American, and 30% Caucasian, this breakdown would not be sufficiently diverse. Justice Roberts' example implies that this is a different world than 1975.

The liberal justices, on the other hand, believe that in much of America, we are still segregated by race. A cursory glance at any BLS or Census statistics will show lower rates of net worth and home ownership in the African-American community than in any other community. Although not stated in the opinion, the liberal justices seem to imply that the only reason for such modern disparity is the legacy of slavery and unequal access to education. It is not mentioned in the opinion that most of the conservative justices worked or are from large cities that are more integrated than smaller cities in the South. In much of America, it is indeed true that not much has changed since 1975. On the other hand, Justice Thomas's opinion seems to carry more weight because he actually integrated schools, sometimes against the wishes of classmates and parents of other students. An unsung hero, Rev. John Brooks, was instrumental in Thomas's education, and an interview given to BusinessWeek provides the most insight I have seen about Thomas and his background. See here (3/12/07, interview & Rev. John E. Brooks).

While it may seem counterintuitive that Justice Thomas would side with Justice Roberts here, Thomas may believe that his personal experience actually supports the majority's arguments because there was no de jure segregation at the time, and as a result he was able to attend majority-white schools and receive a top-notch education. Thus, Thomas may view Seattle through the prism that he is not dealing with any law forcing segregation, and any rule classifying anyone based on race could very easily turn against him or another race in the future. Jim Crow, after all, was not that long ago.

Perhaps an economic analysis would be helpful in understanding the majority opinion. Schools receive much of their funding from local property taxes. Housing values closely correlate with local school quality, as parents are willing to spend more money to buy into a better school district. See The New Economics of the Middle Class: Why Making Ends Meet Has Gotten Harder, by Elizabeth Warren and Leo Gottlieb:

Failing public schools have an impact on the children trapped in them, but they also impose a terrible burden on the families struggling to escape them. Failing public schools translate directly into higher housing costs for middle class families as they try to escape those schools. Home prices have grown across the board (particularly in larger urban areas), but the brunt of the price increases has fallen on families with children. The home value for the average childless couple increased by 58 percent between 1984 and 2004—an impressive rise in less just twenty years. (Again, these and all other figures are adjusted for inflation.) For married couples with children, however, housing prices shot up 145 percent during this period—nearly three times faster.

The Seattle parents were paying lots of money in mortgage payments and local taxes and were being told that some of their kids would have to go to an inferior quality school as part of a greater good. The students benefiting from the Seattle program would be students who, but for the program, would have to go to poorly funded schools. The students from poorer school districts would probably come from families that did not pay as much money in taxes or who lived in apartments (thereby not paying property taxes). Thus, the Seattle program indirectly charged parents who paid more in taxes more money for an inferior product while gifting parents who paid fewer taxes with a better product. In California, we had a lawsuit that argued that property taxes should go to the state rather than the county and then distributed among school districts in amounts to prevent inequality. I am unclear how Washington or Kentucky, the other state affected by the opinion, distributes its property taxes. The opinion did not discuss anything about vouchers, either. It remains to be seen what impact the opinion will have on voucher advocacy movements.

For now, in a time in America when we have ample resources and the economic "pie" is large, the Seattle decision will not create massive problems in the near term. The question is how we will view the decision if a sustained recession occurs, bringing to light the economic inequality in America that oftentimes can be categorized by race. A middle ground post-Seattle might be to balance schools by income, thereby avoiding any legal review or analysis. Federal courts do not usually get involved in a state's local affairs absent some illegal activity or protected class, and rich/poor is a category that is not illegal nor protected. America spends 400 billion dollars a year on schools, according to Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin Toffler. With that much money, perhaps the "pie" is still big enough to focus on economic rather than judicial solutions to improve school quality.