On Trumpists And Zeal: A Minor Musing

Last summer events conspired to cause me to realize that I needed to settle myself down a bit, so I began reading entries from A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals every morning and entries from A Year with G. K. Chesterton: 365 Days of Wisdom, Wit, and Wonder every evening. 

I picked the Chesterton book because I like Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries and the title seemed timely. If the Trump era has revealed anything about America, it's illustrated that Americans as a whole exhibit a profound lack of both wisdom and wit. That lack likely exists because of a collective inability to experience or express wonder in either its common or spiritual definition.

I'm not but sure why I picked the Merton book, but I have found many of the entries beneficial. It is the December 22 entry of the Merton devotional, however, that expresses the root of the problem and the error of believers who have sold their political soul to Trumpism:

Yesterday, day of recollection, realized again above all my need for profound and total humility--especially in any work I may do for peace. Humility is more important than zeal. Descent into nothingness and dependence on God. Otherwise I am just fighting the world with its own weapons and there the world is unbeatable. Indeed it does not even have to fight back, for I will exhaust myself and that will be the end of my stupid efforts. [Emphasis mine]

I am more than willing to accept that many of the country's current problems began because wealthy, well-educated elites developed a sense of hubris that rivals that of every tragic hero in literature. Answering that hubris with the populist zeal that Trump fans possess will correct none of those errors. It will, as Merton correctly observes, burn itself out and accomplish nothing permanent.

I suspect that the populists who use Christianity to further their efforts to avenge perceived slights from those they view as out-of-touch elites will not take advice from a Trappist monk or a British Catholic, so they will continue to privilege zeal over humility and the exhaust themselves and the rest of us in the process.

 

The Year In Review: Adolescent Literature 226 Edition

On January 1, 2019, I resolved to start a commonplace book wherein I would write quotations from my reading. These quotations must meet the simple criterion of striking my fancy at the moment I am reading them. They need not be inspirational, profound, or examples of great writing.

Shortly, thereafter people who should know better asked me to teach an adolescent literature course. Were I a person who followed through on my resolutions, I would have filled two or three notebooks with quotations from the books I used in class or the supplemental materials I read to prepare to teach, but I frequently fail at following through on my New Year's resolutions.

Looking through the quotations I copied in the commonplace book, three stick out as valuable reminders for the last days of 2019.

First, Wendell Berry's essay "In Defense of Literacy" contains a line that needs no context or explanation. Berry reminds readers, "Short-term practicality is long-term idiocy." This fact is ignored constantly, most dangerously by our political and corporate leaders.

The other two quotations require a bit of context. The first comes from Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first book in his Chaos Walking trilogy. A central conceit of the series is that men and animals project their thoughts audibly for all to hear; women do not. The book was first published in 2008, so Ness must be given credit for presciently creating an extended metaphor to illustrate the effects of 24/7 news cycles and social media. The fact that he calls phenomenon "Noise" throughout the series earns him extra prescience points.

Early in The Knife of Never Letting Go, Todd Hewitt, the novel's protagonist and narrator, says, "Noise ain't truth. Noise is what men want to be true, and there's a difference 'twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if don't watch out." Listening to and reading about the impeachment debate makes it clear that "Noise ain't truth" and individual Americans are hearing what they want to be true based on the "Noise" that reaches them but there's a wide, dangerous divide between what people want to be true and the truth.

Finally, news that a United States government website listed the fictional nation of Wakanda as a free- trade partner brings to mind a statement made by Changamire, who in the first four issues of the "A Nation Under Our Feet" arc is a scholar guilty of little more than a few radical ideas about the proper role of government. When he speaks to Wakanda's Queen Mother, Changamire says, "Wakanda is science and wonder, all of it achieved by ensuring your subjects do not ask too many questions. Wakanda has all the intelligence any advanced society would want and none of the wisdom any free society needs."

In 2019, political leaders in South Dakota and the nation as a whole doubled down on their emphasis on short-term practicality, amplified their idiocy through the Noise of social media echo chambers, worked diligently to prevent citizens from asking hard questions, and, thereby, ensured that country will continue to lack wisdom free societies need.

Huether Press Conference Tomorrow: Is Political Theater Afoot?

This tweet came across my Twitter feed a few minutes ago.

Former Sioux Falls mayor (and Yankton native) Mike Huether has announced he is holding a press conference Wednesday afternoon. The subject of the conference is unknown at this time.

— Kelly Hertz (@kelly_hertz) September 3, 2019

I honestly don't remember if Huether held a press conference to announce his little road show, so I am going to go with some insight provided when he announced he was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent:

The mayor announced his decision to switch from Democrat to independent at a Monday news conference. He did not address his political future, but Northern State University political scientist Jon Schaff told the Argus Leader that people who don’t have political ambitions don’t call public press conferences.

If it is indeed "political ambitions," that would indicate a run against either Representative Dusty Johnson or Senator Mike Rounds in 2020.  When he announced his party switch, Huether "compar[ed] his own business-centric approach to running City Hall with Trump’s methodology."

Mike Rounds votes with Trump 92.1% of the time, and Dusty Johnson votes with Trump 88.4% of the time. That leaves Huether the option of running as Trump-lite or going full anti-Trump. Given the South Dakota electorate neither option seems to open a road to victory.

UPDATE: Guess I was wrong; people do hold press conferences for next to nothing, in this case a self-published book.

The Summer Of 1957 Wrecked Castles: What I Learned On My Summer Vacation.

I have spent good portions of the summer making eight hour car trips and reading books and articles written by people smarter than I am. The latter activity caused me to play too many hours of Castle Wreck on my phone as I tried to think through some subtle points. Here's what I concluded.

Conclusion 1: Populists may be correct that the educated elites who have run the nation's public and private institutions have failed. HOWEVER, the fact that intelligent educated folk have failed does create the corollary that poorly educated folks who dislike thinking or who are unable to think will succeed.

Conclusion 2: Fear dominates the national zeitgeist.

Conclusion 3: In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck writes that there's fine line between fear and anger. The current era points to a fine line between fear and languor.

Conclusion 4: Public debate was formerly dominated by disputing the implication of facts; it's now dangerously dominated by disputation of what constitutes a fact.

Conclusion 5: Personal stories still retain power, but shortened attention spans and listeners' desire to have personal biases confirmed makes people less likely to share their stories honestly.

Conclusion 6: The weaponizing of Christianity in the service to Trump has less to do with glorifying God than it does in justifying the practitioners' preferred sins.

Conclusion 7: Too many now view politics as a religion or power as a god. Those that have those attitudes increasingly view people outside of their circle as threats or evil. I doubt any democratic republic can survive once a plurality holds those views.

Conclusion 8: If being created in the image of God or endowed with inalienable rights means anything, humans should not be treated as pawns by employers or governments.

Conclusion 9: I have never been to Mt. Sinai, so I don't need ten conclusions.

By the way, Castle Wreck drains phone batteries quickly. 

A Minor Musing About Libertarians In The Age Of Trump

This Dakota Free Press post about Bob Newland's speech to the 2019 Libertarian Party Convention caused a few ideas to gel for me. (As a quick aside, I believe I have met Mr. Newland only once and he struck me as an affable gentleman.)

First, it's refreshing to see a Libertarian discuss a role for government in infrastructure. I would like to hear Libertarians also espouse Hayek's view of social insurance:

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained , the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom. . . .there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. . . . 

Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.

Hayek goes on to say, ". . . there is no incompatibility in principle between the state's providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom."

Libertarians' unwillingness to support a social safety net might have something to do with their view of socialism, a political theory Newland took time to attack. In 2019, however, the biggest threat to classic liberalism is not socialism but the new toxic mix of nationalism, populism, and Trumpism. 

Earlier this summer members of the conservative intelligentsia engaged in a rather heated argument about liberalism. Writing in First Things, Sohrab Ahmari attacked Never-Trumper David French because French, a cultural conservative,  "has individual autonomy [as] his lodestar: He sees 'protecting individual liberty' as the main, if not sole, purpose of government." In short, Ahmari is attacking French for being too Libertarian.

More importantly, Ahmari uses Trump, a man whose only political philosophy is an "I alone can fix it" narcissism as a blank slate. According to Ahmari,

[Trump's] instinct has been to shift the cultural and political mix, ever so slightly, away from autonomy-above-all toward order, continuity, and social cohesion. He believes that the political community—and not just the church, family, and individual—has its own legitimate scope for action. He believes it can help protect the citizen from transnational forces beyond his control.

Trump's recent "go back" to "crime infested places from which they came" tweets put the lie to any claims that he seeks "social cohesion." However, it seems clear that Ahmari wants to use Trump's followers to impose a form of "order" that will, unironically, attempt to force people to be autonomous and virtuous in ways that bend the terms "autonomy" and "virtue" beyond recognition. In short, government will exist to force citizens to relinquish rights to achieve the nationalists' or Trumpists' order.

Finally, the Ahmari article coincides with Newland's apprehension about what he calls an "insidious threat," "squincthy-eyed evangelicals" who attempt to impose "their version of God's will" on others. Ahmari is not an evangelical. He will, however, give intellectual heft to some social conservatives' desires to quell their inchoate fears with government imposed puritanical security. That threat should have all of us keeping one foot in the Libertarian camp.

MAGAs Revive "Love It Or Leave It," A Minor Musing About A Logical Fallacy

I was young when I first heard "America, love it or leave it." If I were to venture a guess, I probably first heard a Vietnam War supporter utter the phrase on radio or television when I was 9 or 10 years old.

During the past week, Trumpists of all ages and stations in life have trotted out the trite phrase as if were something original, witty, logical, or patriotic.

The phrase, is of course, a logical fallacy which can be succinctly defined:

When only two choices are presented yet more exist, or a spectrum of possible choices exists between two extremes.  False dilemmas are usually characterized by “either this or that” language, but can also be characterized by omissions of choices.

This afternoon, I was reminded of how everyone should know how unpatriotic that phrase is when this tweet came across my twitter feed.

I spent today with a man whose mom saved the July 21, 1969 Chicago Daily News for the moon landing coverage. (Column coming tomorrow.) It also contained this op-ed. 50 years ago. Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/iwH5KC5xKI

— Heidi Stevens (@HeidiStevens13) July 19, 2019

Because I don't trust Blogger to allow the picture in the tweet to be enlarged, I am uploading a copy as well.

The second column of this 50 year old editorial has two important paragraphs. Sydney J. Harris writes,

Those who want to leave have a right to, but those who want to stay and work for what they consider a better society must be protected in that right--for without it, our nation would sink into stagnation and the process of change would harden into repression by those who benefit by keeping things just as they are. . . . 

Somebody who truly didn't like what America stands for ought to be invited to leave; but there is a vast difference between such a person and those who dislike what we have allowed ourselves to become, through greed and prejudice and provincial indifference to the great problems we now face. No community can afford to lose these good "agitators."

Most recent political and policy discussions have devolved into each side calling the other names bereft of context that provides meaning: fascists, socialists, racist, anti-Semitic. Nearly every devolves into whataboutism and dueling charges of hypocrisy.

Since the nation seems to have lost all of its adults, can we perhaps listen to one from 50 years ago and develop new ways to facilitate the process of change which has stagnated and hardened into repression.

Certainly, we can all be better "agitators" and refrain from the illogical and unpatriotic "love it or leave it" fallacy.

South Dakota Democrats And Evangelicals Should Drink More Whisky And Listen To Mayor Pete

It's Mother's Day, so the best thing one should do is discuss whisky, politics, and religion. What bad can happen?

This morning, I watched two YouTube videos that I would urge every South Dakota Democrat and evangelical to watch.

One was Mayor Pete Buttigieg's speech at the Las Vegas Human Rights Campaign Dinner. It was an excellent speech. He discussed what he calls "a crisis of belonging." He alluded to the fact that many of the nation's excluded citizens are being divided by metaphoric walls that allow them to "get divided and carved up." In order to prevent divisions from continuing, Buttigieg asked the audience to be willing "to stand hand in hand with people just like you and people not at all like you." In short Buttigieg reminded people to tell person stories that welcomed rather than excluded.

Buttigieg enunciated a simple truth; politics is personal and people want their stories heard. Serendipitously, the second YouTube video I watched feature two Whisky YouTubers, Erik Wait and Daniel Whittington, who discussed "Telling the Story of Whisky." Throughout their entertaining conversation about the need for story, Whittington made two important points. First, "story doesn't eliminate information; story gives information context." A little later Whittington said directly what Buttigieg alluded to: "No one cares about your story. They care about how you become part of their story." In short, tell stories that help people belong.

During this century, I recall only a handful of South Dakota Democratic candidates who were decent story tellers  There have been some good policy wonks who had a great command of the facts and some good policy positions. There were a few entertainers who could cleverly turn a phrase,  but storytellers have been rare. Meanwhile, Kristi Noem et al. were going full Horatio Alger. Maybe it's because Democrats apparently prefer clear spirits, but if they want to reverse their fortunes in the state, they need to start telling better stories that gives information context.

It is a Sunday, and and any discussion of story makes me think of two old hymns: "Tell Me the Story of Jesus" and "I Love to Tell the Story." I do wish the evangelical folk who used to sing those songs regularly would get back to telling the story of Jesus and recognizing that Trump's lies are not coherent stories. I also wish they's recognize that every time they tell the story of Trump, people who seek to be part of Christ's story are driven away from grace.

Everybody else who is sick of politics and religion, go watch this video of the greatest whisky speech ever.

South Dakota At Risk For Severe Job Losses

On Wednesday, Governor Noem tweeted,

Did You Know… South Dakota has been consistently ranked as a top state to do business, largely due to our favorable tax environment and limited regulatory system. #SmallBusinessWeek

— Governor Kristi Noem (@govkristinoem) May 8, 2019

The cynical among us might wonder why scores of businesses offering high paying jobs are not racing to the state, but it's #SmallBusinessWeek, so criticizing Governor Noem for celebrating a meaningless statistic seems to be bad form.

Today, Axios points out that automation will likely wreck havoc on jobs in the Midwest.

• A quarter of all jobs across the U.S. have high chance of being wiped out by automation.

• The five states with the highest share of at-risk jobs are Indiana (29%), Kentucky (29%), South Dakota (28%), Arkansas (28%), and Iowa (28%) — all of which went for President Trump in 2016.

• Compare that to the bottom five: New York (20%), Maryland (20%), Massachusetts (21%), Connecticut (22%) and New Mexico (22%), all of which went for Hillary Clinton.

But the extent of the hit to middle America is even clearer when zooming in to the county level.

• For example, in Jerauld County, South Dakota, 53% of jobs are hanging in the balance.

• 48% of jobs are vulnerable in Scott County, Miss.; 48% in Dakota County, Neb.; and 46% in Colfax County, Neb.[emphasis mine]

Axios concludes, "To absorb the coming disruption, the government and corporations will have to take charge of reskilling and upskilling huge swaths of displaced workers."

There's little hope that corporations concerned about only the bottom line will bring jobs to a state that needs a quarter of its workforce retrained unless the state is willing to help shoulder the cost of retraining.  Over the past few sessions, the South Dakota legislature spent more time arguing about useless resolutions, placing the national motto in schools, civics classes, guns, and chislec than it has about funding K-12 education. There's less hope that legislators or Governor Noem will suddenly decide to fund the retraining of workers.

A Minor Musing About South Dakota's Brain Drain

A few weeks back, the Constant Commoner posted about a United States Congress's Joint Economic Committee  study on the "brain drains" in the United States. South Dakota, contrary to popular belief, is not 49th in everything. In 2017, the state had the second highest gross and third highest net departure of highly educated or highly skilled residents.

The problem starts at the top. Former Governor Daugaard routinely mocked those pursuing degrees in philosophy. In her 2012 congressional race, Governor Noem implied winning "the South Dakota Young Leader Award from the South Dakota Soybean Association" was a superior achievement to earning a Masters degree from Cambridge. If one values the life of the mind or a world class education, the message that one should leave is crystal clear.

While there may not be a trickle down effect in economics, there is one in culture. Thirty years in the classroom has taught me that intelligent kids are the ones who stretch the boundaries and the rules to the breaking point. As a rural state South Dakota creates many spaces for functionaries to develop "big fish in a small pond" syndrome. Whether it be overly uptight county commissioners, school administrators, mayors, sheriffs, or Speaker Haugaards, many of these wannabes will decry Nicholas Maduro's socialism but covet his power to squelch dissent. They have one response to everyone who questions their policies or offers suggestions for improvement: "if you don't like, leave."

In his Constant Commoner post, John Tristan made the economic point, so I won't repeat that here. The brain drain hurts South Dakota, but it will continue because the state's leadership want it to.

A Minor Musing About Trump And Tech Giants With A Dash Of Orwell

I don't know if it's the fact that I'm getting older or the fact that we're cursed to live in interesting times, but I seem to re-read and cogitate over things more than I used to.

One such piece is this Rod Dreher post on The American Conservative site. Dreher wonders at conservative's gleeful reaction to the Mueller Report. He favorably quotes a David Brooks column wherein Brooks opines,

And today, across society, two things are happening: Referees are being undermined, and many are abandoning their own impartiality. (Think of the Wall Street regulators, the Supreme Court, the Senate committee chairmen, even many of us in the blessed media.) Things begin to topple. 

… Trump doesn’t seem to have any notion of loyalty to an office. All power in his eye is personal power, and the government is there to serve his Sun God self. He’ll continue to trample the proper systems of government. 

It’s easy to recognize when you are attacked head-on. But the U.S. is being attacked from below, at the level of the foundations we take for granted.

Dreher also writes,

The center is not holding, and technological changes (as well as cultural evolution) are rendering us unable to recreate a sustainable center.  Whether he leaves the White House in 2021, or 2025, after Trump, I believe that the US will be more or less in a Spain 1931 situation. Trump has done nothing to prevent that, and much to hasten its arrival.

Although Dreher writes, "I fully endorse David Brooks’s take on the corruption of the system, and his judgment on Donald Trump as a moral catastrophe," he does not proclaim himself a #NeverTrump club member. Instead, Dreher concludes,

. . . if you want to talk about the foundations of society being attacked, believe me, we should all worry about Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Silicon Valley on the whole a lot more than we worry about our buffoonish president. What the surveillance capitalists have done, and are doing, matters far more to the future of our democracy and its legitimacy than does Trump.

In fact, he doubles down on this conclusion:

I just know that I’m a lot more worried about Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg, and the class that they embody, than I am of a crooked real estate magnate from New York who is the weakest and least effective president since Jimmy Carter.

Dreher butters his bread by thinking and writing. Although he calls himself a "Bible-thumping troglodyte," Dreher thinks deeply, comes at the world from an Orthodox perspective, and talks about good food and drink frequentl, so he likely makes many conservative evangelical folk uncomfortable. 

I share Dreher's fears about Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. The tech giants threaten Americans' privacy and possess a near totalitarian power to control public opinion.They cannot, however, send a person to Guantanamo or launch nuclear weapons. Further, I cannot share Dreher's confidence that Trump "stands, however uncertainly, in the way of the Controllers." Trump's admiration of despots indicates that he would give Bezos et al. free rein were they to offer him just a little flattery. In short, I remain a firm member of the #NeverTrump club.

That said, I worry that Dreher and I are both wrong. Americans seem to possess a certain optimism. The current crop of religious populists claim to be on God's side and view Trump as a savior from the evil liberals. Progressives proclaim that they are on the right side of history's long march toward justice for all. It is, however, likely that such optimism is misplaced and America has reached an Orwellian moment. Not the moment when we all loudly admit to loving big brother, although that moment is certainly possible; rather, we have come to the Animal Farm climax when conservatives, liberals, and displaced folks like myself stand outside the window and look "from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but [find it] impossible to say which was which. "

Intellectual Diversity, Fox News, Aexandria Ocasio-Cortez, And The Pygmalion Myth: A Minor Musing

Governor Kristi Noem has signed a bill that purports to promote intellectual diversity. Being the good conservative intellectual that she is, Noem surely will work hard to include expansion of a classic curriculum in addition to decrying the corrosive effects of Foucault's and Derrida's postmodern sophistry. (Were she writing this post, the Governor would surely take a moment to point out that sophistry, as is used here, is not merely pretty talk with no substance but a reference to the ancient Sophists who believed that truth was unknowable.)

One of the benefits of a classic education would be knowledge of the Pygmalion myth. Pygmalion feared women, so he created an ivory statute shaped as his version of the perfect woman. He then asked the goddess Aphrodite to make the statue a real woman. Aphrodite granted his request.

I was most recently reminded of the Galatea myth this morning when my Twitter feed featured this aclip of Fox News coverage of Aexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). The fearful folk at Fox are not content to brand AOC as a liberal. She immediately became a poster child for socialism. That's an old tactic, but a Democrat who is merely a liberal or a socialist is not a Fox News commentator's or a former Republican presidential candidate's idea of a perfect Democratic woman.

This morning Mike Huckabee and Fox and Friends completed their transformation of a freshman congresswoman who frightens them merely because she knows how to use social media. She is their perfect Democrat, a liberal, socialist Manchurian Candidate. Clearly, AOC is an empty suit who is being fed the questions she asks at hearings.

Just a normal Fox & Friends segment on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Kilmeade: Somebody's writing her questions [at hearings]... there are some forces behind her.

Mike Huckabee: There have been some allegations she was almost like the Manchurian Candidate, recruited, prepared. pic.twitter.com/00S4sasRmj

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 21, 2019

For Noem and her Trumpist ilk this unsubstantiated, fear-based rumor and others like it will pass for intellectual diversity. Explanations that put the rumor in the context of a long trend of trying to create a perfect woman who doesn't cause men to fear her will be called liberal bias.

A Minor Musing On Justice And Power And Implied Threats Of Violence

I was fortunate to coach some excellent Lincoln-Douglas debaters. (Whether they succeeded with my coaching or in spite of my coaching is an open question.) Lincoln-Douglas debaters debate propositions of value and frequently open their cases with the phrase "I will be upholding the value of justice. . . " The young'uns I coached and those they debated against would frequently argue whether justice meant rendering each their due or a more Rawlsian concept which aregued justice as fairness

Donald Trump swore to uphold a Constitutions designed to "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. . . " Trump, however, doesn't see justice as rendering each his or her due or fairness. Instead, he relies on a Sophist argument: "Justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger." Earlier this week, he told Breitbart News:

. . . I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad....

These words are a not-so-veiled threat premised on the idea that might makes right. It's unlikely that those who drafted the Constitution understood justice in those terms nor is it clear how the threat of violence promotes the general welfare or insures domestic tranquility. (If I may be forgiven a bit of snark, one wonders if those words constitute "riot boosting" in South Dakota under the recently passed SB 189 and 190.)

This recent rhetoric is just another example of Trump attempting to obliterate political norms. This particular violation moves politics one step further from debate and one step closer to angry confrontation and reveals Trump once again to be a weak man posing as a strong one. More importantly, it confuses the debate about what justice is or should be and returns the debate to what do the strongest and richest want it to be.

For those interested, John Tristan posts what may be a more coherent take.

One Question For The South Dakota Democratic Party Chair Candidates

At Dakota Free Press, Cory has a couple of posts up about the candidates for South Dakota Democratic Party Chairperson. One updates the lunchroom saga. The other presents candidate Cunningham's plan for the Democratic Party. (If I may be permitted a moment of snark, Cunningham was running for the position in early January; the plan is not so deep and detailed that it could not have been ready for the Yankton forum on March 2.)

I don't have a vote or a favorite candidate, but I always have questions. In this case, however, I'll ask only one.

Your friends and neighbors may like you, but when they hear the word Democrat, they don't see you; they see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC). Even though she's a rookie congresswoman, they immediately start worrying that someone is going to take their guns and their cars. Some who listen to too much Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham, Hewitt along with the crazier folk on talk radio or YouTube likely worry they'll be forced to eat jicama gruel through a metal straw at least four days a week. What can you do to change that perception? (In fairness, some of you mentioned this problem in Yankton, but no one really discussed how to deal with it.)

Senate Bill 140: A Minor Musing

There were a couple of comments on this partisan divides post that got me thinking. The big question became: is it really possible that South Dakota or the entire United States can devolve into the Northern Ireland of the Troubles and is there an ounce of prevention available in South Dakota? 

Over the weekend, I read this David Brooks column wherein he announces his support for reparations for the decedents of slaves. He also alludes to Native Americans:

From these thoughts we can appreciate the truth that while there have been many types of discrimination in our history, the African-American (and the Native American) experiences are unique and different. Theirs are not immigrant experiences but involve a moral injury that simply isn’t there for other groups. 

Slavery and the continuing pattern of discrimination aren’t only an attempt to steal labor; they are an attempt to cover over a person’s soul, a whole people’s soul.

Let's be clear, these words were written by David Brooks, a writer who espouses radical ideas with the same frequency that Sanka causes caffeine jitters. If Brooks recognizes that Native Americans have suffered "a moral injury that simply isn't there for other groups," then surely South Dakota legislators should recognize the harm that has been done to Native Americans within the state.

No one should be naive enough to expect that the South Dakota legislature will seriously take up the topic of reparations for Native Americans. They should, however, be able to unanimously pass some small measures to help. Senate Bill 140 is indeed a small measure:

The Board of Regents is hereby authorized to develop programs to increase enrollment and improve retention and student supports for any student who is a member of one of the nine federally recognized tribes in South Dakota at state institutions, including exploration of tuition assistance or waiver programs.

The Board of Regents shall report to the Legislature by July first of each year on the activities and progress made in regard to this Act, beginning July 1, 2020.

The bill appropriates no money. The Board of Regents is not authorized to grant "tuition assistance or waiver programs." It is merely authorized to explore such programs. If any piece of legislation can be called anodyne, SB 140 should be the top example.

And yet, Representatives Beal, Dennert, Frye-Mueller, Gosch, Lana Greenfield, Hammock, Howard, Karr, Mulally, Pischke, Post, and Weiss could not bring themselves to allow someone to make it a little easier for Native Americans to attend state colleges and universities.

David Brooks has come out in support of reparations, but these 12 South Dakota legislators cannot support efforts "to increase enrollment and improve retention and student supports" for Native Americans in South Dakota. It does make one wonder if South Africa may be a better analogy than Northern Ireland.

What's The Difference Between South Dakota's Political Leaders And A Junior High Student Council?

Sadly, the answer appears to be nothing.

Bob Mercer reports that legislators, like the young'uns, are leaving their homework until the last minute.

Then appropriators left a long list of agencies hanging Thursday because of a scheduling quirk that senators needed to be at their desks by mid-morning to start casting votes.
The panel isn't scheduled to official return to work until Tuesday, facing an agenda that has 16 big areas of spending, including state government’s largest departments such as social services, education, corrections, the state universities and the court system.

To make the analogy more cringeworthy, Mercer reports that Governor Noem is using candy as a thank you for votes. The treats apparently also served as a message to let everyone know who is and is not her friend.

14 senators who voted against industrial hemp last week found on their desks Thursday boxes of Dots candy and thank-you notes from Noem for sticking with her. 

The small treats strengthened the feeling among legislators and lobbyists that the governor indeed might veto the hemp bill, especially after two Senate votes went 21-14 in a chamber where a veto override requires at least 24.

Democrats then decided to squander their chance to look like adults by resorting to juvenile behavior of their own. Dakota Free Press reports that Ann Tornberg, the current party chair, and Larry Lucas her running mate as vice-chair candidate offered to buy voting delegates lunch when the South Dakota Democratic Party Executive Board and State Central Committee Members meet later this month. Commenters on the DFP post claim that the email did not go out to all members of the party's Central Committee. They implied that those who were not voting for Tornberg did not get the email invitation. Like the the young'uns, the Democrats' apparently have a tribal lunch room. 

The farm economy is hurting; nursing homes are closing, and schools are not being fully funded. Meanwhile, leaders in government and members of the loyal opposition are passing notes asking "Will you be my friend? Circle yes or no."

How Much Partisan Prejudice Do South Dakotans Exhibit?

This afternoon, I spent a little too much time clicking on South Dakota counties in the maps that accompanied this Atlantic article "The Geography of Partisan Prejudice."

First a caveat, I'm not vouching for the methodology behind the ratings.

To do this assessment, PredictWise first partnered with Pollfish to run a nationwide poll of 2,000 adults to capture people’s feelings about the other party. The survey asked how people would feel if a close family member married a Republican or a Democrat; how well they think the terms selfish, compassionate, or patriotic describe Democrats versus Republicans; and other questions designed to capture sentiments about political differences. 

Based on the survey results, Tobias Konitzer, the co-founder of PredictWise, investigated which demographic characteristics seemed to correlate with partisan prejudice. He found, for example, that age, race, urbanicity, partisan loyalty, and education did coincide with more prejudice (but gender did not). In this way, he created a kind of profile of contemporary partisan prejudice. 

Next, Konitzer projected this profile onto the broader American population, under the assumption that people with similar demographics and levels of partisan loyalty, living in neighborhoods with comparable amounts of political diversity, tend to hold similar attitudes about political difference. He did this using voter files acquired by PredictWise from TargetSmart, a commercial vendor. Voter files are essentially data snapshots about all American adults, based on publicly available records of voter registration and turnout from past elections, along with data about neighborhood variables and demographic traits. In this way, PredictWise was able to rank all 3,000 counties in the country based on the estimated level of partisan prejudice in each place. “What I find most striking is that we find a good degree of variation,” Konitzer says. Some states, like Texas, show a real mix of prejudiced and nonprejudiced counties; whereas Florida is very consistent—and fairly prejudiced—from place to place.

South Dakota, like Texas, has a mix of counties. According to the survey, Faulk County is in the 1st percentile which means that "99 out of every 100 counties are more prejudiced against the political 'other.'" On the other hand, Sully, Stanley, and Haakon counties are all in the 100th percentile which means no other counties are statistically likely to be more prejudiced against the other party.

If one looks at the home counties of a few random bloggers, Yankton is in the 56th percentile, Brookings is in the 85th percentile, and Brown is in the 96th percentile. As for South Dakota's county, Minnehaha is in the 93rd percentile.

Besides using a complicated methodology, a few reasons exist to doubt profile. When one clicks on Pennington, stats are presented for Perkins, and Potter seems to have moved next to Harding. (As an aside, the counties that I cited stats for all seem to be in the right spot.)

That caveat aside, the article cites a couple of other studies with some disturbing conclusions: 

In general, Republicans seem to dislike Democrats more than Democrats dislike Republicans, PredictWise found. We don’t know why this is, but this is not the only study to have detected an imbalance. For example, in a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center, half of consistently conservative respondents said it was important for them to live in a place where most people share their political views—compared with just 35 percent of consistent liberals. But a more recent survey, conducted in December by The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute, found that Democrats were the ones showing more ill will—with 45 percent saying they’d be unhappy if their child married a Republican (versus 35 percent of Republicans saying they’d be unhappy if their child married a Democrat). So it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, but what’s clear is that both sides are becoming more hostile toward one another.

It also points out how the polarization can lead to deeper problems:

We are now judging one another’s fundamental decency based on whether we eat at Chipotle or Chick-fil-A. This may seem silly—harmless, even. But it is uncomfortably reminiscent of stories from conflict zones abroad. In Northern Ireland, for example, an outsider visiting during the Troubles had no way to tell unionists and nationalists apart. They were pretty much all white Christians, after all. But the locals themselves routinely guessed one another’s identity based on their names, the spacing of their eyes, their sports jerseys, the color of their hair, their neighborhood, or even how much jewelry they wore­. This process came to be known as “telling.” If a reliable cue didn’t exist, people would make one up. It was a way to move about in the world in a time of profound tribalism, during which 3,600 people were killed.

If anybody is wondering, I prefer to eat at Arby's and get my coffee at Caribou whenever I have the option.

Let's Talk About Talk

Pat Powers continues to bang the drum for House Bill 1087, legislation that purports to ensure South Dakota's public colleges and universities protect free speech on campus. In the past 24 hours, he has devoted 3 posts to the subject.

I've opined that HB 1087 will not change anyone's mind. In fact, I believe it will do little except increase paperwork.

I consider myself as close a free speech absolutist as possible. I'll accept the fact one should not yell fire in crowded theater if there's no fire, but young'uns should be able to wear their black armbands in school; folks can wear MAGA hats or Trump is the Devil t-shirts to their hearts' content, and people I disagree with should be able to march for causes they believe in.

I'll even stipulate that no one has the right to not be offended, although a democratic republic works far better when people avoid deliberately offending others. I believe that violence that surrounded Charles Murray's speech at Middlebury to be reprehensible .

That said, the biggest problem with HB 1087 is that it begins with the premise that colleges are awash with liberal thought and that all conservative intellectuals are denied access to the ivory tower. Therefore, the power of the state must be brought to bear because no other venues exist for conservative speech in any other part of the public square.

Republicans used to be wary about state intrusion into these issues because they understood the state to be a leviathan. They would have opposed legislation like this if it had been proposed by progressives. In that case, Republicans would argue that state power is a cudgel that that will be used to destroy free speech or promote liberal speech at the expense of conservative speech.

Powers points to the USD Student Bar Association Hawaiian Day party being changed to Beach Day as proof that HB 1087 is necessary. Yet, that situation was taken care of without the legislation. Further, it's not clear what was "intellectual" about that debacle.

In addition, I keep wondering what views cannot be expressed. I'm all for bringing Noam Chomsky and Charles Murray to campus on the same night and letting them argue. I don't see anything in HB 1087 that encourages this sort of academic debate.

HB 1087 seems to go beyond debate or intellectual argument. Instead it seems to weigh all ideas as intellectually equal. As such, it prompts questions: Should a geology professor allow a young earth creationist to hold forth for a whole class period or two class periods in order to insure intellectual diversity has been developed or preserved . Should an African American history class give time to someone to espouse the virtues of blackface as an art form? If a professor contends that FDR acted properly at Yalta, does the University have to give equal time to someone who believes Yalta was an act of treason?

Powers also rejoices that the President has announced an executive order about speech on college campuses. Although the text of the order is not available, I doubt that anything in the executive order will protect someone on a college campus who contends that Trump's is likely to use his MAGA hats like Gessler used his hat in the William Tell tale. In fact, given Trump's desire to weaken libel laws, that speech might get the person sued.

For years, the argument has been that the best cure for bad free speech is more good free speech. HB 1087 doesn't seem as if it will promote an free speech.

Yankton County Democratic Party Chair Candidate Forum

About 25 Democrats gathered to hear four candidates for the South Dakota Democratic Party's chair: John Cunningham, Tom Cool, Paula Hawks, and John Claussen. Larry Lucas, a candidate for vice chair participated as a representative for current chair Ann Tornberg.

John Cunningham was given the first opportunity to speak. He claimed that the Democrats need a plan and promised to have one ready by the end of the month. He touted an Ethics in Government essay program that he funded to give high school students a chance to write about ethics in government and claimed that Democrats should have more primaries so that candidates can begin to gain name recognition in March.

During the question and answer period, Cunningham said that the party needs to spend money wisely and questioned having a staff person dedicated to working on South Dakota's reservations. He also said that former candidates who have viewed the outline of this plan have told him that party needs to enunciate values not just issues.

Next up, Tom Cool touted his experience on several statewide boards. He asserted that the Democrats need to work on branding and getting more people involved. He pointed out that several counties have no county chairperson and advocated a series of regional meetings instead of only one annual state meeting to increase involvement. Cool also said that the party needs to work with statewide candidates to have a unified campaign and a unified message. According to Cool, in 2018 the individual candidates did some unified events on their own but there was no state party effort to coordinate that cooperation.

Cool, during the Q&A session, said that Democrats need to reach out to the 20 and 30 somethings who, according to Cool, believe they are above politics. He also asserted that the Republicans are the party of small ideas.

Paula Hawks asserted that the party needs to give members something to believe in rather than just issues to fight against. She also said that party lacks a central message and has not done a good job of showing what it means to be a Democrat. She also claimed that the party needs to do more fundraising including building up the Founders Club. Finally, she claimed that the state party needs to do more with both social media and mainstream media to get the message out. She pointed out that many young voters have moved away from Facebook and rely on Snapchat or Instagram and asserted that the party needs to fashion a message to fit those platforms. 

Hawks used the Q&A session to reiterate that Republicans have used verbiage to define Democrats into a corner. Using the example of "snowflake," Hawks pointed out that snowflakes are unique and represent a beautiful part of nature not just something that melts easily. She also asserted that the national party wants to see that candidates and state parties can fundraise before the national party will provide aid.

Speaking on behalf of incumbent chair Ann Tornberg, Larry Lucas touted the Founders Club, Tornberg's efforts to increase the staff, and the fact that the party is not in debt. He said that the party has allowed Republicans at the national level to label Democrats, especially on social issues.

In response to questions, Lucas suggested that South Dakota Democrats avail themselves of opportunities to meet with national figures as they campaign in Iowa and Nebraska. He pointed out that South Dakota Democrats need Native American support because the state has the nation's third largest Native American population, trailing only Alaska and Oklahoma. Finally, he claimed that some of the loss in Democratic party registration can be blamed on dysfunction in DC.

Finally, John Claussen began by discussing what he called the three eras of modern South Dakota Democratic Party history: the McGovern Era, the Daschle and Johnson Era, and the current era of malaise. He said that the earlier eras lasted 20 to 30 years each and that the party cannot avoid to have the current situation to last that long. He then  touted his plan as presented on Dakota Free Press. He specifically mentioned the need to "[d]eputize a 100 Democrats throughout the state with a goal of registering 50,000 new Democrats in South Dakota by 2024, and the need to "[t]arget races in a proactive manner and not rely merely upon a matching funds program. Claussen also claimed that Democrats have become too sanitized and too cautious and that the party should stop trying to be Republican Lite.

During the Q&A, Claussen stayed on message, repeating the need to target winnable races, build the base, and proudly proclaim Democratic Party values.

The meeting concluded with a meet and greet session, As is my wont, I sat in the back corner talking with a half dozen friends and neighbors about important things like new grandchildren and upcoming nuptials. Only Cool and Claussen made it to the back to introduce themselves. In fairness, the meet and greet became a human maze.

I've tried to be as objective and accurate as possible with he preceding paragraphs. I have, however, spent a good portion of my time during the last 25 years judging speakers, so I can't help myself.  In that room, Hawks and Claussen were more polished speakers and best able to convey ideas concisely. When they spoke, I did not have to strain to hear or struggle to follow trains of thought. Lucas advocated for Tornberg effectively, but he's not the candidate.

If people expected fireworks, they left disappointed. There was more bluster outside when I left the event than there was during the forum.

Governor Kristi Noem After 47 Days: A Minor Musing

I proudly voted against Kristi Noem twice in 2019. I had numerous reasons, but one of the largest was the nagging question of how a Governor Noem would handle the South Dakota Republican Party's far right fringe.

During the campaign, Noem indicated she would sign a permitless carry bill, something of a grail for that fringe. She kept her promise, signing the bill with more than a little pageantry in the capitol rotunda.

A week later, Noem called legislative leaders to what was allegedly a come-to-Jesus meeting:

By all accounts, Noem was sick of the weird stuff coming from the Legislature, in particular the House, when she summoned legislative leaders to her second-floor offices last week. Her message was simple: Cut it out. 

There was the issue with the prudish dress code drawn up by House leadership, the one that several Republican women objected to. There was the spat between House Speaker Steve Haugaard and longtime lobbyist Yvonne Taylor, where Haugaard banned her from the House floor because she wrote something in May that he didn’t like. 

Noem was also upset that House leaders were trying to submarine her budget, demanding a 3 percent cut. And she wanted to know why there were more than 40 bills that had been introduced without meaningful content. These bills – vehicle bills or hoghouse bills – are used by lawmakers to spring surprise legislation late in the session before anyone has had time to review them. They are the antitheses of open government.

From a distance it's unclear if Noem's scolding ending the "weird stuff" or if the legislative calendar forced a halt to the surreal proposals. 

For his part, Speaker Haugaard led efforts to defeat House Bill 1175 which would have established an Early Learning Advisory Council because such a council would be  "a transformational approach to instilling a—more of a socialist agenda into the system.” The Early Learning Advisory Council would have consisted of parents, representatives of various state agencies, and educators. Haugaard's weirdness seems to be continuing apace.

On the less weird end of legislature, Noem's signature civics education proposal has become a 10 question trivia game and the legislature may well pass an industrial hemp despite her opposition.

Today, Noem suffered another setback; this loss coming at the hands of Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 5-2 to send the cornerstone of Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg’s legislative agenda to the floor. The move comes a day after Republican Gov. Kristi Noem said she’s asking that lawmakers hold off on reversing the policy, citing the cost.

That cost is $53 million.

I hope Noem wins the presumptive probation fight. I was pleasantly surprised the took on the legislature over some of the nonsense resolutions and hoghouse bills. I hope the legislature passes industrial hemp legislation this session.

All of these struggles, however, indicate that Noem gave the Republican fringe a golden calf they had been pining for, but they seem unwilling to respond in kind. 

What Are South Dakota Republicans In The Legislature Afraid Of?

The 2019 legislative session prompts me to return to a theme that I have blogged about before: fear, especially Republican fear.

South Dakota Republicans seem to operate under the following principles:

1. Evil exists in the world. In fact, it might be rampant in the world
2. Virtuous folk must be vigilant and fight evil at every opportunity.
3. Eternal verities exist and nations and individuals violate them at their peril. (The exact nature and source of these verities seem to differ based on the Republican speaking.)
4. Virtuous folk must be vigilante and fight to preserve these eternal verities from any alteration or amendment.

The permitless carry, ideological diversity, and petition regulation bills all illustrate these principles.  More importantly, these efforts illustrate needless fear and what happens when fear drives people to take the principles to the extreme.

Evil people may be lurking around the corner, so people need to carry concealed guns. This notion persists despite the fact that South Dakota's violent crime rate remains low.

Some professor apparently has given a lecture that questions some commonly held belief, so something must be done to prevent that those words from being heard by innocents without at least 1000 bits of correction. Once again, this fear seems to defy facts. Republicans, purportedly the conservative party, are gaining members whereas the allegedly liberal Democrats are losing members.

Clearly, the people can't be trusted to use the petition process properly when they have the temerity to disagree with the legislature.

At the state level, South Dakota has been a de facto single party state for decades, yet Republicans are proposing legislation that makes one believe they are scared of every new idea, the present, the future, and their own shadows.

(I suppose I should have linked to some of the bills, but visiting the SDLRC website is getting a bit depressing.

Senate Bill 68: Parts is Parts?

It's cold and windy and I am feeling nostalgic for my youth when I was young and foolish enough to enjoy cold and wind. I have no other excuse for wondering if the following language from Senate Bill 68 was inspired by an old Wendy's advertisement.

For the purposes of this title, the term, poultry, includes anything containing meat intended for or capable of use for human consumption, that is derived, in whole or in part, from any domesticated bird intended for human consumption.

Apparently, South Dakota will now codify the fact that big parts can be cut up into little parts and then fused into a big part because "parts is parts."

HJR 1005: The Article V Convention Silliness Returns

I've previously mused about the dangers of an Article V convention and predicted that the South Dakota Legislature would take up the proposal during the 2019 session.

House Joint Resolution 1005  calls for a convention of the states to "to impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, to limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and to limit the terms of office for federal official and members of Congress."

HJR 1005 will be heard by the House State Affairs Committee on February 6. The committee meeting begins at 7:45 am. There's no drama about whether the resolution will emerge with a do pass. Representatives Anderson, Beal, Hansen, Haugaard,, Kevin Jensen, Kent Peterson and Qualm are all sponsors of the legislation and they constitute a majority of committee.

HJR 1005 offers no specifics. It does not define "fiscal restraints" nor does it state what federal government powers it seeks to limit or the degree to which federal government's jurisdiction shall be limited. Finally, it does not list the federal officials that its backers believe must be subject to term limits.

In my previous post, I mentioned the threat of a runaway convention. In order to assuage concerns, the sponsors offer this language:

This application is made with the express understanding that an amendment that in any way seeks to amend, modify, or repeal any provision of the Bill of Rights is not authorized for consideration at any stage. This application is void ab initio if ever used at any stage to consider any change to any provision of the Bill of Rights;

I am glad that Congress shall still be prevented from making laws limiting the freedom of the press, assembly, and one's ability to worship freely. I am overjoyed that the troops Donald Trump is sending to the Mexican border will not be "quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner." And although the courts have stripped away many of the protections that should be inherent in the term "unreasonable searches and seizures," I appreciate that convention will not remove what remains of that right. 

Preventing the convention from targeting the Bill of Rights does not prevent it from altering other amendments. The convention can target the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. Given that one of HJR 1005's goals is to limit the federal government, it's almost a certainty that a convention called under these vague limits will attempt to remove the equal protection clause. Further nothing in HJR 1005 prohibits the convention from repealing the Nineteenth Amendment that ensures women are allowed to vote.

I hope the following example is not under consideration, but one can "limit the terms of office for federal officials" by inserting the clause "With the exception of Donald Trump the 45th President of the United States and his heirs," to the beginning of Twenty-Second Amendment. Every President who is not Donald Trump or an heir is limited.  

The sponsors fancy themselves "guardians of liberty." This inflated opinion of their importance indicates that these legislators have forgotten that the Constitution is tool to protect "We the people" and that the Tenth Amendment reserves rights not only to the states but also to the people: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Nothing in HJR 1005 allows one to believe that citizens will be more free after the convention that the resolution calls for. Its loose language and lack of definitions make a runaway convention a certainty.

Besides Paperwork, What Does HB 1087 Hope To Accomplish With Its Demand For Ideological Diversity

A few decades back, a good friend told me that my job as a teacher was to "comfort the troubled and trouble the comfortable." If one Googles that phrase, one will frequently find it attributed to theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In all likelihood, the statement paraphrases a statement made by the fictional Mr. Dooley, a character created by Finely Peter Dunne.

That phrase popped into my head when I read the text of House Bill 1087, "An Act to promote intellectual diversity at certain institutions of higher education." Encountering intellectual ideas that differ from one's own is indeed uncomfortable. In fact, as this Scientific American article points out,

To avoid coming to undesirable conclusions, people can fly from the facts and use other tools in their deep, belief-protecting toolbox.

This New Yorker article points out that emotional appeals may be a bit more effective, but emotions are not scientific :

Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science.

One should add that emotional appeals are rarely intellectual.

This is not new science. As this Atlantic article points out,

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter wrote in When Prophecy Fails, their 1957 book about this study. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point … Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.” 

This doubling down in the face of conflicting evidence is a way of reducing the discomfort of dissonance, and is part of a set of behaviors known in the psychology literature as “motivated reasoning.” Motivated reasoning is how people convince themselves or remain convinced of what they want to believe—they seek out agreeable information and learn it more easily; and they avoid, ignore, devalue, forget, or argue against information that contradicts their beliefs.

One should be wary of assuming facts not in evidence, but one would hope that Representatives Sue Peterson  Haugaard, and Qualm and Senators Stalzer, Brock Greenfield , Langer, and Maher, the legislation's prime sponsors would be aware of these studies.

One would also hope that they, conservatives in good standing, would not be proposing this legislation merely to cause liberals discomfort. If so, they might be creating more committed liberals. The research indicates that people of all stripes will not change their minds merely because they are confronted by different ideas.

This desire to confirm one's beliefs despite evidence cuts both ways. Conservatives, trained from youth in the way they should go, will double down on their beliefs despite facts or theories to the contrary. The alleged liberal dominance of South Dakota Universities should not have an adverse effect on young conservatives' ideological certainty.

One wonders what the sponsors of the legislation hope to accomplish as they demand public universities expose students to a "variety of ideological and political perspectives." (As a side note, "ideological" and "political" are not necessarily synonyms for "intellectual.") Perhaps the sponsors merely want to comfort themselves as they cause discomfort for university officials who have to do the reams of paperwork this legislation necessitates.