Anti-Trump Screed on Syllabus of Ken Mayer, University of Wisconsin Professor

UW Madison Political Scientist Kenneth Mayer has been a tolerably reputable political scientist, but has lately gone off the deep end with Democratic partisanship.

First, there was a very badly conducted study of Wisconsin’s voter ID law, which claimed it has disenfranchised 2,400 voters in Milwaukee and Dane counties.

When subjected to scrutiny, it was torn apart.

And now we have an anti-Trump screed on Kenneth Mayer’s course syllabus on the presidency. See below.

Trump derangement syndrome has deeply corrupted the mainstream media. Is it now corrupting political science, which has traditionally been a bit more “professional” than disciplines like sociology, which tend to attract undisciplined leftists? It’s not that political scientists don’t have, on average, leftist biases. They do. But they also usually seek to keep their biases in check.

Is Kenneth Mayer a bellwether, merely the forerunner of an increasingly corrupted discipline, or an outlier?

The full syllabus is here.

A lot is conventional, but several random swipes at Trump are inserted. For example:

Can Trump pardon himself? Can a sitting president be indicted? Nobody knows, in part because the questions have never seriously arisen. But we may find out.

Trump is contemptuous of traditional governing practices and famously uninterested in policy details. From what we can observe, there are no policy processes in the White House and what emerges seems largely the result of presidential whims. Trump’s leadership of public opinion is a combination of tweets (many of which can, quite fairly, be characterized as unhinged) and campaign-like rallies in front of enthusiastic supporters. Is this the new standard?

And, finally, we must consider the question of how presidencies end (or are ended). Two presidents have been impeached but not convicted (Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton), and one forced from office (Richard Nixon). Impeachment is an extraordinary remedy. Are we in that territory?

Then there are readings such as:

“Hostile Sexism, Racism Denial, and the Historic Education Gap in Support for Trump.”

“How Rural Resentment Helps Explain the Surprising Victory of Donald Trump.”

“Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?”

“Russia Won”

“For Trump, ‘a War Every Day’,” Waged Increasingly Alone.”

And finally a single reading favorable to Trump:

“Breaking Norms Will Renew Democracy, Not Ruin It — Most of President Trump’s alleged transgressions offend against the etiquette of modern liberal governance, not the Constitution.”

Mayer, certainly, can structure his course as he wants. But other people can point out that he’s becoming unhinged about Donald Trump.

The Liberal Cocoon

From Michael Barone on Real Clear Politics:

It’s comfortable living in a cocoon — associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforces them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide.

Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972, the movie critic Pauline Kael said it was odd that Richard Nixon was winning the election, because everyone she knew was for George McGovern.

Kael wasn’t clueless about the rest of America. She was just observing that her own social circle was politically parochial.

The rest of us have increasingly sought out comfortable cocoons, too. Journalist Bill Bishop, who lives in an Austin, Texas, neighborhood whose politics resemble Kael’s, started looking at national data.

It inspired him to write his 2009 book “The Big Sort,” which describes how Americans since the 1970s have increasingly sorted themselves out, moving to places where almost everybody shares their cultural orientation and political preference — and the others keep quiet about theirs.

Thus professionals with a choice of where to make their livings head for the San Francisco Bay Area if they’re liberal and for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (they really do call it that) if they’re conservative. Over the years the Bay Area becomes more liberal and the Metroplex more conservative.

But cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.

They’re made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.

Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh.

The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely disposed to agree.

We have seen how this works on some issues this year.

Take the arguments developed by professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law that Obamacare’s mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. Some liberal scholars like Jack Balkin of Yale have addressed them with counterarguments of their own.

But liberal politicians and Eric Holder’s Justice Department remained clueless about them. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked whether Obamacare was unconstitutional, could only gasp: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

In March, after the Supreme Court heard extended oral argument on the case, CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin was clearly flabbergasted that a majority of justices seemed to take the case against Obamacare’s constitutionality very seriously indeed.

Liberals better informed about the other side’s case might have drafted the legislation in a way to avoid this controversy. But nothing they heard in their cocoon alerted them to the danger.

Another case in point is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s law restricting the bargaining powers of public employee unions. The unions and the crowds in Madison, which is both the state capital and a university town and which with surrounding Dane County voted 73 to 26 percent for Barack Obama, egged each other on with cries that this would destroy the working class. No one they knew found this implausible.

The unions had an economic motive to oppose the laws and seek to recall first Republican legislators and then Walker himself. The law ended the automatic checkoff of union dues, which operated as an involuntary transfer of money from taxpayers to union leaders.

But voters declined to recall enough Republicans to give Democrats a majority in the Senate, and Walker currently leads Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in polls on the June 5 recall election.

The Madison mob seemed unaware that there were attractive arguments on Walker’s side.

Why should public employee union members pay less for health insurance and get fatter pensions than the taxpayers who pay their salaries? Why is it a bad thing for property taxes to be held down and for school districts to cut perks for union members enough to hire more teachers?

Beyond the Madison cocoon, in Wisconsin’s other 71 counties, which voted 55 to 44 percent for Walker in 2010, such arguments are evidently proving persuasive. Maybe liberals should listen to Rush every so often.

This kind of liberal cocooning explains how a bunch of Marquette professors can sign a letter attacking Paul Ryan’s budget. The problem with the letter is not that they disagree with Ryan. It’s that they simply can’t argue the case. Their letter entirely refuses to discuss specifics, and assumes that the concept of “solidarity” requires one to believe in ever increasing government spending, ever more generous welfare programs, and ever increasing dependency on government. Views at odds with this simply aren’t heard, and therefore are never contemplated.

We’ve run across this kind of insularity among our own political science colleagues — and political scientists are very far from being the biggest yahoos in academia. Compared to psychology, sociology and the humanities, the discipline is a refuge of sanity.

But during the 2008 election season, we had a colleague going on about how Sarah Palin had supposedly labeled the Iraq War a “mission from God.” This was, he believed, a terrible thing to say, although we wonder why Julia Ward Howe is never condemned for writing a song declaring that another war in American history was a mission from God. Anyway, our colleague did not seem to know who Julia Ward Howe was.

Having seen this debunked on Fox News, we corrected him and send a YouTube link putting the Palin remark in context. He relented on this issue, and we advised him that he needed to look at a broader range of media. He was offended, and demanded an apology. We, of course, will never apologize for giving somebody good advice, and didn’t in this case.

We likewise have a colleague who apologized to a class of students for showing them an interview that was broadcast on Fox News. It was an interview with an important policy maker, and it actually mattered little what outlet broadcast it. But he felt he needed to be apologetic for showing an interview on a channel that liberal academics consider to be outside the pale.

If this sort of thing happens in political science, imagine how bad things are in the humanities. But actually, we don’t have to imagine. We have blogged on multiple cases.

Will the American Political Science Association Cave to Its Gay Lobby?

We wouldn’t belong to the American Political Science Association except for the fact that membership carries with it a big discount on the registration fee for the annual convention. But it does, so we belong and thus got this e-mail:

Dear Political Science Colleagues at Marquette University:

I write to request your support of a boycott of the American Political Science Association’s 2012 Annual Meeting, currently slated for New Orleans, Louisiana.

In 2004, 78 percent of Louisiana voters (including a majority in Orleans Parish) passed this amendment to their state constitution: “Marriage in the state of Louisiana shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman. No official or court of the state of Louisiana shall construe this constitution or any state law to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any member of a union other than the union of one man and one woman. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized.

No official or court of the state of Louisiana shall recognize any marriage contracted in any other jurisdiction which is not the union of one man and one woman.”

This language both limits marriage to different-sex couples and denies to same-sex pairs all “legal incidents” of marriage that arise from civil unions, domestic partnerships, and other familial arrangements. In other words, as a matter of state constitutional law, coupled lesbians and gay men can be nothing other than legal strangers to one another in Louisiana.

In 2005, the APSA’s Committee on the Status of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and the Transgendered in the Profession (on which I served from 2004 to 2007) adopted a resolution calling for the Association not to hold conventions in states with constitutional prohibitions of same-sex marriage. That year, the APSA Council forwarded the LGBT Status Committee’s siting resolution to the newly formed Annual Meeting Review Committee for consideration.

This year, the Annual Meeting Review Committee reported that any change in the Association’s conference-siting policy was a matter solely for the Council to determine.

On August 31st, the Council rejected the Status Committee’s resolution.

The APSA’s choice to hold annual meetings in states with constitutional provisions like that of Louisiana impedes the ability of LGBT political scientists to participate in the Association and to progress in the profession.

For instance, the domestic partners and children of LGBT members travel with them to conventions. Lee, my own partner of 12 years, has gone with me to meetings in Chicago and San Francisco. Were I to be hospitalized or otherwise incapacitated while visiting New Orleans in 2012, I would want Lee to make medical and other decisions on my behalf, and vice versa. However, under the Louisiana amendment, we couldn’t do that for each other.

This example isn’t hypothetical. Lee has Type 1 diabetes, and I’ve had to take him to hospital emergency rooms because of his disease. I wouldn’t want to face the question from medical staff in Louisiana, “Are you a member of his family?” In short, the Association’s rejection of the Status Committee’s siting policy makes only heterosexual families uniformly welcome at annual meetings.

The APSA’s posture hits LGBT graduate students and junior faculty with particular force. In 2012, they face the Hobson’s choice of, on the one hand, subjecting themselves and their families to an overtly hostile legal environment while in New Orleans or, on the other hand, not attending the conference and missing its opportunities to interview for jobs and to present papers in order to advance careers.

What is more, the Association established a relevant precedent in the 1970s and ‘80s when it refused to hold conventions in states that hadn’t ratified the federal Equal Rights Amendment. That policy precluded meetings in Chicago, because Illinois never approved the ERA.

Hence, while the APSA was fully prepared a generation ago to battle gender discrimination, the organization isn’t willing today to combat sexual-orientation discrimination with similar resolve. Instead, by selecting New Orleans for an annual meeting, the Association condones the condemnation of same-sex couples to the legal purgatory that Louisiana, and New Orleans itself, authorized in 2004.

In truth, the APSA would never consider New Orleans if the Louisiana Constitution discriminated on the basis of ethnicity, gender, race, or religion as blatantly as it does with regard to sexual orientation. Our national professional organization of political scientists, thus, reinforces the sad reality that explicit governmental discrimination against LGBT Americans remains politically and socially acceptable.

The Status Committee’s resolution eliminates just Atlanta and New Orleans from the cities with convention facilities that have been sufficient in the past to accommodate the Association’s annual gatherings. Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington are, and will remain, viable venues for conferences. Surely this list is adequate to suit the organization’s siting needs.

I have faith that the American Political Science Association has the capacity -- and can summon the compassion -- to ensure that all of its members are treated with dignity and respect at annual meetings. I hope that you share my belief. If so, please be kind enough to forward this message with your own statement (e.g., “I support the New Orleans boycott”) to the Association’s President and Executive Director:

Dianne Pinderhughes, Dianne.M.Pinderhughes.1@nd.edu
Michael Brintnall, brintnall@apsanet.org

Please “cc” me at dpinello@jjay.cuny.edu

In addition, if you know members of the APSA Council, please ask them to reconsider their rejection of the Status Committee’s siting resolution. Current Council members include:

Lisa Baldez, lisa.baldez@dartmouth.edu
Susan Burgess, burgess@ohio.edu
Dennis Chong, dchong@northwestern.edu
Michael Doyle, md2221@columbia.edu
Kerry Haynie, klhaynie@duke.edu
Arthur Lupia, lupia@umich.edu
Anna Sampaio, anna.sampaio@cudenver.edu
Melissa Williams, mwilliam@chass.utoronto.ca

Lastly, please let me know if you’re willing to assist in organizing the boycott.

With your help, we can persuade the Association to relocate the 2012 conference while there’s still time to do so.

Gratefully,
Dan

P.S. This message is being sent to political scientists at more than 200 colleges and universities across the United States.

Daniel R. Pinello
Professor of Government
John Jay College of Criminal Justice of
The City University of New York
dpinello@jjay.cuny.edu
www.danpinello.com


Author of:
Gay Rights and American Law
(Cambridge University Press, 2003)
and
America’s Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage
(Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Of course, the profession of Political Science has a strong liberal bias, so why wouldn’t the APSA boycott a state that has done something so politically incorrect as limit marriage to opposite sex couples?

Part of a possible answer rests in the APSA Constitution, which says:

1. It shall be the purpose of this association to encourage the study of Political Science, including Political Theory, Political Institutions, Politics, Public Law, Public Administration, and International Relations.

2. The Association as such is nonpartisan. It will not support political parties or candidates. It will not commit its members on questions of public policy nor take positions not immediately concerned with its direct purpose as stated above.

Of course, this language didn’t prevent the APSA from boycotting the State of Illinois when that state failed to embrace the Equal Rights Amendment.

So if the Association blew off its Constitution once to placate the feminists, why not blow it off again to placate the gay lobby?

This, of course, will be a test case to see whether a bunch of liberal academics can act in even a minimally principled way. They didn’t when the issue was the ERA. And they are the kinds of people who think the U.S. Constitution can mean whatever you want it to mean.

But if the APSA placates its internal gay lobby on this issue they will be sending a clear message. It’s well known that political science is a discipline with little intellectual diversity, and what there is is between (say) liberals and leftist radicals, or between old-time democratic socialists and cultural leftists.

But the profession has always maintained that, in spite of this lack of diversity, political scientists can be fair in dealing with contentious public issues, and fair in dealing with students.

But why should anybody believe that if the APSA won’t abide by its own rules?

Christopher Wolfe: Marquette Professor Off to Start New University

Our colleague Christopher Wolfe was the subject of a very flattering article in the Journal-Sentinel today.

Wolfe is going off to take on the stunningly ambitious task of starting a university. As the article explains:

Wolfe intends to work on establishing a university of his own, one inspired by the intellectual approach of St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher.

“Since the mid-1980s, I’ve been thinking I’d like to start a new university,” says Wolfe, 58, and the author of several books, including “The Rise of Modern Judicial Review” and “How to Read the Constitution.”

“To start an institution from scratch, to do it the right way - that’s a wonderful opportunity that I’d like to take a stab at.”

Since early 2005, Wolfe has been serving as co-director of the Ralph McInerny Center for Thomistic Studies, a non-profit center that promotes the accurate reading of Aquinas’ philosophy and theology and seeks to relate his thinking to the modern world. The center is based in Washington, D.C., but will move when the university’s location is decided.

Searching for truth

The university Wolfe envisions would stand in contrast to what he views as a “flabby relativism” in modern education, a belief that all ideas must be recognized and given similar weight.

“There is a truth,” he says. “It’s sometimes hard to see what that truth is, but we need to pursue it, and we can discover it to a great extent.”

Truth, as Wolfe sees it, is no mere “grab bag of facts” but requires a coherent order that ought to be reflected in education. Although the new university would be open to many intellectual sources, it would encourage an approach stressing unity and order in education and accepting the possibility that one can know God and the good life.

In reality, nothing about Wolfe’s ideal of a university is new or innovative. Traditionally liberal arts colleges, and indeed major universities, thought of themselves that way.

But that was before curriculum degenerated into a hodge-podge of whatever courses professors wanted to teach, whose content was whatever ideas were fashionable among professors.

Wolfe has taught a long series of outstanding students, and the Journal-Sentinel quoted two of them in the article.

Keith S. Alexander took Wolfe’s constitutional law course almost a decade ago and still recalls how it prepared him for law school at Notre Dame, Wolfe’s own alma mater.

“You learned a lot,” says Alexander, now a law clerk for U.S. District Judge Rudolph T. Randa. “It was very challenging. He was demanding, but also made us better. I felt I was a better thinker and a better reader.”

Tom Hrdlick, a partner in the law firm Foley & Lardner, called Wolfe “a decisive factor” in his going on to law school. “He said, ‘It will go by like that.’ He said, ‘You have the opportunity to do something significant with your life,’” Hrdlick remembers.

Notice to Students:

Wolfe is still teaching at Marquette on a part time basis. You can still take his courses during the 2007-2008 school year. He’ll be teaching POSC 133 (Constitutional Law) this fall, and POSC 134 (Civil Liberties) this spring. His 133 class is now full, but there are usually some students who drop, so you still have a shot at getting in.

(Going and begging, with a convincing story as to why you really, really need and want to take the class is worth trying too.)

The spring 134 class is, of course, still open.

Wolfe’s students always find the class hugely demanding. So skip it if you are looking for a gut course.

But students who tackle the demands and stand up to the challenge virtually always come away convinced that they have had a great experience.

Political Correctness in Political Science: Gay & Lesbian Issues

In general, the poisonous effects of political correctness have not yet fully penetrated into political science.

Yes, the vast majority of political scientists are liberals or (much less frequently) leftist radicals.

But in general, the kinds of biases one sees in political science are the traditional liberal biases, and not the more current variety of political correctness.

Some evidence of this is found in the case of the Group of 88 at Duke. In the wake of rape accusations made against several Duke Lacrosse players, the Group issued a statement that assumed the guilt of the lacrosse players. Why did they assume that? Because the accused were white males, and the accuser was a black woman.

Several departments and programs at Duke signed on to the statement. Political science was not among them. Among individual faculty, 88 signed on to the statement, including only three members of the political science department.

But political correctness has made inroads into political science, as shown by a request we got today (via a mass e-mail) from the American Political Science Association Committee on the Status of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and the Transgendered (LGBT) in the Profession. It’s interesting that they have to translate “LGBT.” If political science were really entirely onboard with political correctness, that would not have been necessary. Here is the text of the e-mail:

The American Political Science Association is studying the relationship between sexual orientation and professional life. We urge all APSA members -- regardless of their sexual orientation -- to complete this questionnaire, which should take no longer than 10-12 minutes. Anonymity and confidentiality will be completely protected.

Here is the survey.

Most of it is relatively innocuous, although there is a fairly clear agenda on some issues. The survey shows a lot of concern with including “LGBT” issues into regular political science courses (they wouldn’t want students to be able to avoid indoctrination by failing to take certain classes). They are also very interested in whether faculty are encouraged to do “LGBT” research or discouraged from doing so.

And clearly, some of the people on the Committee are wanting to start a journal on Sexuality and Politics.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with studying the gay lobby as another interest group, or studying gay identification as a politically relevant identity, or looking at public policy issues that relate to homosexuality.

The problem is that academic projects like this tend to produce little politically correct ghettos, where only certain political attitudes are allowed, where all research and teaching must support a political agenda, and where broader intellectual standards are considered irrelevant, if not downright oppressive.

Looking at departments of Women and Politics, or Black Politics or Chicano Politics tells the story.

Is the Phrase “Careers in Political Science” an Oxymoron?

According to Pi Sigma Alpha, the national Political Science honors society at Marquette, it’s not.

Tonight, 6:30-8:00 p.m., in Raynor Library Conference rooms B & C, they will be hosting a Career Panel.

Panelists will include a:

• Lawyer
• Business professional
• Foreign Service officer
• Non-profit sector professional
• Congressional staffer
• Lobbyist
• Graduate school representative

So yes, it is possible to convince your parents that the money they spent on your education actually got you some leverage in the job market.

And yes, you might have a shot at paying back your loans.

The most important thing about the proceedings: refreshments will be provided.