Wednesday, January 9th, 2013 By Clifton Truman Daniel | 
This past August, my wife and two sons and I traveled to Japan for the annual ceremonies honoring those who died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We were the first members of the Truman family to do so. On our first full day in Tokyo, I sat down for an interview with Nana Yamada, the Nagasaki reporter for NHK, the country’s largest television network. Her third question was, “Are you here to apologize?” When I said no, she followed up with, “Then why are you here?”
Someone was going to ask that question – or something like it – but I had not expected it so soon or so bluntly. In the months leading up to the trip, my hosts, Masahiro Sasaki and his son, Yuji, reported that buzz in the Japanese media was overwhelmingly positive. In July, reporters from two Japanese papers interviewed me at home in Chicago and turned in upbeat stories. At one point, our friend, guide and interpreter, Kazuko Minamoto, even suggested that we hire bodyguards, not to protect us from angry mobs, but to keep us from being mobbed by all those who would want to get close enough for a look.
I explained to Ms. Yamada that this was a mission of reconciliation. I had come, I said, to honor those who died and hear the testimony of those who lived. That did not satisfy her. She rephrased her question several times, digging for a different answer. It got to the point that Kazuko was on the edge of her chair, ready to intervene.
All through the six-hour train ride to Hiroshima that afternoon I wondered how badly I had misread the Japanese view of my visit and whether or not the whole thing had been a colossal mistake. Out of respect for the survivors and their countrymen, I would not defend the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but neither could I apologize for my grandfather or my country. After all, I have shaken the hands of dozens of WWII veterans . . .
Read more: A Mission of Reconciliation: Honoring the Victims of the Atomic Bomb
Tuesday, January 8th, 2013 
Did they “2” it again? Only if they were Democrats.
As the 113th Congress was sworn in many were pleased about the increased numbers of women in both houses. This was also true for the state legislatures, though not for all of them. While more women are welcome, it’s important to understand that this progress is one-sided, or more accurately, one-partied. In the 2012 election, Democratic women got a big boost. Republican women didn’t.
In January of 2013, women were 29 percent of the Democrats and 9 percent of the Republicans in both houses of Congress. Whereas women increased their presence in the Democratic Caucus from last year, they decreased their presence in the Republican Conference in both numbers and percentages.
After the 2012 election, the number of women Republicans elected to Congress went down twenty percent, from 24 to 20 in the House and from 5 to 4 in the Senate. The number of women Democrats increased by ten and twenty percent respectively, from 53 to 58 in the House and 13 to 16 in the Senate.
Something similar happened in the state legislatures. Republican women decreased their presence by 7 to 8 percent and the Democratic women increased theirs by 3 to 10 percent. As of January, 2013, women are 37 percent of all Democratic state house members and 28 percent of Democratic state senators. They are only 18 and 13 percent, respectively, of their Republican counterparts.
Two factors account for this: Women candidates do well in election years that end in “2.” Women candidates win when the Democrats win. What’s magical about “2” years is that the first legislative contests after the decennial reapportionment are held in those years. New districts create new opportunities. More seats are open — i.e. have no incumbent — in “2” years than in others, and even incumbents must appeal to new constituents within their new district lines.
This has been a factor only since the 1960s when the Supreme Court ruled that legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population. Until . . .
Read more: The Election of Women: 2012
Monday, January 7th, 2013 
During my sabbatical, I have had the luxury of reading in a leisurely fashion, without courses and writing projects in mind, going where my interests take me. It has been a pleasure and, as it happens, a fruitful practice. Without intention, it has led me to a new project, as I have already reported: an exploration of the unresolvable dilemmas built into the social fabric, the study of the social condition. Today, another example, the tensions between religion and politics in modern society: I returned to this problem reading Nachman Ben Yehuda’s latest book, Theocratic Democracy: The Social Construction of Religious and Secular Extremism.
Ben Yehuda, my old friend and colleague, is studying in his book Jewish extremism in the Jewish state. He investigates deviance in the religious community as a way to analyze the conflict between the religious and secular in Israel. Central religious and political commitments in Israel as a matter of the identity of the national community pose serious problems. Not only has the recognition of Israel as a Jewish Democratic state become a key demand and obstacle in negotiations with the Palestinians: it has become a problematic challenge to the relationship among Israeli Jews. Nachman, an occasional Deliberately Considered contributor explores this. His central findings are presented in part 2 of Theocratic Democracy, on the deviance and the non-conformity of the ultra orthodox, and part 3 on cultural conflict in the media.
In part 2, a selection of “illustrative events and affairs” is presented, among many others: a 1958 affair surrounding the building of a swimming pool for mixed, male and female, bathing, in ultra-orthodox rendering the “abomination pool,” and the 1981 ultra-orthodox attack on an archaeological dig of the City of David, near the old city of Jerusalem, leading to a series of conflicts, ultimately resulting in the fine tuning of the law of archaeology. During 1985-6, there were Haredi attacks on advertising posters. Further, there were attacks on movie theaters open on the Saturday Sabbath, . . .
Read more: The Social Condition, Religion and Politics in Israel
Tuesday, January 1st, 2013 
Accused of being an optimist once again last year, I was sure that Barack Obama would be re-elected and that this potentially had great importance. As the election contest unfolded, it seemed to me that Romney and the other Republican candidates made little sense and that a broad part of the American electorate understood this. A major societal transformation was ongoing and Obama gave it political voice: on the role of government, American identity, immigration, social justice and a broad array of human rights issues. Thus, I think the re-election has broad and deep significance, and I conclude the year, therefore, thinking that we are seeing the end of the Reagan Revolution and the continuation of Obama’s.
But, of course, I realize that my reading is a specific one, and partisan at that. My friends on the left are not as sure as I am that Obama really presents an alternative. From their point of view, he just puts a pretty face on the domination of global capitalism and American hegemonic military power. I have to admit that I view such criticism with amusement. It takes two forms. The criticism is either so far a field, so marginal, that it is irrelevant, leftist sectarianism, which is cut off from the population at large, confined to small enclaves in lower Manhattan (where I work and have most of my intellectual discussions) and the upper west side, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Austin, Texas, Berkley, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Brooklyn and the like. Or there is the happy possibility that the critiques of Obama and the Democrats engage popular concerns and push responsible political leaders to be true to their professed ideals. I have seen signs of both of these tendencies, significantly in the Occupy movement. I hope the leftist critics of Obama pressure him to do the right thing. Marriage equality is an important case study.
I think the criticism of Obama from the right is much more threatening. If conservative critics of Obama don’t take seriously the significance of the election results, they are not only doomed . . .
Read more: Happy New Year: Hope Against Hopelessness for the New Year 2013
Thursday, December 27th, 2012 
I know from personal experience about the long-run suffering inflicted by gun deaths. I was not quite three years old when my father was killed, in November, 1945, by a fellow American soldier test firing a souvenir Lugar in the barracks. He had survived the war, but not the peace that followed. That shot has echoed down the decades in my family. I think I can still faintly hear it today, nearly 70 years later.
The cruelty of gun deaths comes partly from their absurd randomness. When I was a child, I imagined that my father was a war hero who had been killed in combat. (How else could he have died?) When I was an adolescent, I learned that the US Army reported that he was shot in a room where “men were working on guns.” Later still, due to my mother’s obsessive persistence, we learned the even more prosaic truth: he was seated, playing cards, when the unanticipated recoil of the Lugar directed a shot meant for the floorboards across the room and into his back.
Survivors of such capricious deaths cannot help being tormented by thoughts of alternative realities. In the case of my father: If only the shooter had aimed in a different direction or taken into account the powerful recoil. If only the shot had gone twelve inches to the left (or the right). If only my father had been demobilized earlier. If…if…if… Not far behind such thoughts lies the guilt felt by survivors. For my mother, there was guilt about my conception. If only I had been born earlier, my father might not have been drafted in the first place.
My mother was haunted all her life by this death. Never able to find relief, she eventually took her own life, stipulating that she was to be buried beside her first husband. Remarriage could not give the succor she needed: As a Catholic woman with a young child, she faced a limited field of choice in the immediate post-war years, since a shortage of marriageable men was the inevitable consequence of the . . .
Read more: Testimony of a Gun-Death Survivor
Monday, December 24th, 2012 
One of the truisms of the Internet Age is what has become known as Goodwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Let us turn to the Third Reich in Connecticut.
The reason that Americans permit the tragedy of Sandy Hook to occur year after doleful year has nothing to do with the fear of home invasion. It has nothing to do with cocaine-soaked gangs. It has nothing to do with the love of hiding in a duck blind. It has all to do with George III, Josef Stalin, and Adolf Hitler. This is the half-hidden secret behind the National Rifle Association’s passion and it needs to be judged in its own terms.
The justification for the Second Amendment and the justification for opposition to such real and apparently rational limits on semi-automatic weapons is to keep power in the hands of the people. The local community is a bulwark of democracy. Just as the rest of the libertarian-blessed Bill of Rights is concerned with constraining the heavy hand of state control, so is the Second Amendment. The fantasy is Red Dawn as Groundhog Day. A demand for personal liberty led Charlton Heston to be willing to fight until “they” pry the gun from his “cold, dead hands.”
In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, of Aurora, of Tucson, of Virginia Tech, of Columbine the issue is trust. Can we trust that our American regime (or invaders from Venezuela or Mars) can eschew the temptations of tyranny? Does power corrupt absolutely? Although the National Rifle Association is loath to admit it, gun control depends on political theory. The reason for heavy personal artillery is not to provoke one’s children against a break-in by Spike or José, but to kill Sergeant Spike or Colonel José. We need an arsenal not to hunt Bambi, but Senator Bambi. And if the National Rifle Association did not fear public revulsion, this is the argument that they would make.
In fact, the argument is not entirely crazed. Some seventy-five years . . .
Read more: Sandy Hook and Hitler
Friday, December 21st, 2012 
University of Illinois Chicago political scientist Kelly LeRoux (who got her PhD at Wayne State University here in the D) and co-author Anna Bernadska recently published a study, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, that shows a positive correlation between participation in the arts and engagement with civil society. They analyzed more than 2700 respondents to the 2002 General Social Survey, conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and generally considered one of the primary sources of data on American social trends. Their analysis found that people who have direct or indirect involvement with the arts are more likely to also have direct participation in three dimensions of civil society: engagement in civic activities, social tolerance, and other-regarding (i.e., altruistic) behavior. These results hold true even when factoring in demographic variables for age, race, and education.
Most studies on the social impact of the arts address economics and related externalities such as improved educational outcomes and general community well being. (See, for example, the work of Ann Markusen of the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at the University of Minnesota summarized in my blog post here.) The study by LeRoux and Bernadska is different in that it empiricially investigates ties between the arts and citizenship. Instead of seeking a market rationale for arts patronage, the authors stress the benefits for civic virtue. The study is also noteworthy because rather than looking at the direct impact of community and other arts projects, such as mural painting, theatrical productions, and the like, it takes an audience-studies approach more typically associated with media and communications analysis.
It’s important to note that the authors demonstrate correlation not causation. In statistics, correlation establishes the dependence of certain variables on one another, which is useful in predictive modeling. But the relationship, either positive (the more of one variable, the more of the other) or negative (the more of one variable, the less of the other), doesn’t necessarily mean that the one is specifically the cause of the . . .
Read more: The Aesthetics of Civil Society
Wednesday, December 19th, 2012 By Kenneth Mori McElwain | 
At the best of times, elections provide social catharsis. Voters are given the opportunity to replace an under performing government with one that promises a brighter future. In reality, though, elections are messy, relative contests. Voters are choosing not their ideal government, but rather the best of available options. In the recent House of Representatives elections (Dec 16, 2012), the Japanese electorate clearly demonstrated its disenchantment with the reigning Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), whose seat share collapsed from 48% to 12%. However, ex-DPJ supporters did not flock to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the eventual winner. Instead, they divided their ballots among a host of new or minor parties, or chose not to vote at all. As a result, the LDP dominated the election with 61% of the seats despite winning fewer absolute votes than they did in the last contest. The lopsided outcome was the product of voter disappointment with all parties, and the LDP won by default as the best of bad alternatives.
Explaining the Outcome: Disenchanted Voters
Voter disenchantment produced the LDP’s victory in two ways: declining partisanship and a collapse in voter turnout. While Japanese voters have traditionally been less partisan than in the United States or Western Europe, the ranks of “independents” have been growing since the mid-1990s. According to monthly opinion polls by the Jiji Tsushin, a Japanese wire service, close to 70% of the population declared no partisan affiliation leading up to the 2012 contest. This ratio has been increasing steadily since the last election in September 2009, suggesting that disaffection with the ruling DPJ was not translating into support for an LDP government. With so many undecided voters, twelve political parties and over 1500 candidates competed in the election. One prominent new entry was the Japan Restoration Party (JRP), led by Toru Hashimoto, the charismatic mayor of Osaka, and Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalistic governor of Tokyo. The JRP had formed in September 2012 under the banner of stronger regional governments and constitutional reform. Independent voters who rejected the status quo choice between the . . .
Read more: Japan’s Disappointment Election
Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 
While I take for granted that gun control is a proper response to the atrocity in Newtown, not all do. This is the second of a two part extended exchange (part 1, here ). My friend Thomas Cushman, who holds libertarian views, challenged me and proposed a different interpretation and a different course of action. I hope this will open a deeper deliberate discussion.
Tom: Jeff, I wonder if we as sociologists could bring some kind of understanding to this situation that does not sink down into the extreme positions on either side? Otherwise it’s just politics as usual. Consider, for instance, that Connecticut already has severe gun control measures. They did not stop the atrocity. Vermont is a state where any resident can buy as many guns, and as much ammunition as they want, carry concealed handguns, own assault rifles, and it has the lowest homicide rate in the country. I am not a fan of the gun culture by any stretch, but it seems shallow to imagine that some amorphous, state induced “gun control” is going to ever stop these kinds of things. As you know, the problem is cultural. We live in a degraded cultural environment full of simulated and prosthetic violence,. Our children, especially our boys, are immersed in violent culture produced by Hollywood. Why not start there?
Jeff: Agreed the problem at its base cultural. Gun culture, the culture of violence and its glorification. And yes, violence in popular culture is a problem. But why have so many guns? I would like to work on all fronts. I would start with a discussion about gun controls in the political arena. Certainly some weapons shouldn’t be in private hands. Certainly, also, we should have a discussion about depictions of violence in films and music. If you want to start there, . . .
Read more: After Newtown: A Discussion about Gun Controls and Popular Culture
Monday, December 17th, 2012 
As with many others, I have been consumed by the tragedy in Newtown Connecticut. I wrote a post on Saturday, something I try not to do. Signed a couple of petitions (see here and here). Watched the memorial service last night. Was moved and inspired by Obama’s speech.
It is at moments like this that I am relieved and proud that Barack Obama is president. He gave a powerful speech. He got to the heart of the matter. I am confident a real response to this tragedy will happen.
Moving from alarm, to depression to hope, I discussed with friends on Facebook the events as they have been unfolding. I think the discussions were informative and re-produce slightly edited versions here. The discussion crossed intellectual gated communities, an interesting exchange on my left was initiated by my Israeli friend, Orly Lubin, joined by American based friends Peter Manning, and Esther Kreider-Verhalle. In the second, from the more libertarian side of things, there was a civil exchange with my friend Tom Cushman, which I will post tomorrow. I hope we can continue these discussions at Deliberately Considered.
The discussion on the left was between those, including me, who saw a major change in Obama’s approach to leadership and gun policy, and those who see a pattern of compromise and ineffectiveness in domestic and foreign policy.
Orly: You Americans are the masters of understatements – Hannan and me were furious – between Jesus and god bless America, couldn’t hear the word “gun” nor the word “control” – but what do I know, don’t speak american, I guess.
Jeff: Yes, I think you don’t. Though I also don’t like certain religious aspects of American.
![]() After Newtown: A Dialogue on the Left
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